Though he’s spent years performing music from the Baroque era, Matthew Shepard — the conductor and artistic director of the choral music group Te Deum — realized recently that he knew almost nothing about an important choral tradition: convent music from the cloisters of 17th Century Italy.  

“It’s not that [these musicians] were completely unknown,” Shepard says, “but they are certainly not part of today’s standard repertoire.” In fact, many of these musicians were famous in their time. So why aren’t they better-represented in the canon? Simple: They were women.