Zoe Zeniodi is a conductor from Athens, Greece. She has enjoyed a long and successful career in the world of music, initially as a pianist, but mainly as an acclaimed conductor. She has worked with many collectives such as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Santa Fe Opera, the Queensland Opera, the New Zealand Opera, and many more. Her fantastic work has earned her the titles “the Ingenious Greek Maestra” and “Ms Dynamite”. Finally, she was one of the women featured in the critically acclaimed documentary film “Maestra”, which showcased the lives and careers of five women that are pushing boundaries and breaking glass ceilings in the traditionally male-dominated world of orchestral conducting.
Seeing Zoe on stage is truly a sight to behold. Through precise and determined yet gentle movements, she exudes an inspiring, dynamic, and fiery energy that catches the eye (and the ear). She is a master of her craft with decades of experience, but her stage presence reveals a passion and excitement seen in eager beginners. She wears a genuine, loving smile, making it plain as day that it is not just technique and experience, but her heart, her active presence in the musical moment, that guides her every movement.
Recently, Zoe was appointed artistic director of El Sistema Greece, a community music program that provides free access to quality music education to children and young people in Greece. El Sistema Greece aims at building an inclusive music community that celebrates diversity and empowers students by developing their music skills and stimulating their independent thinking and agency. Its origins go decades back and continents away – all the way to Venezuela, where the first installment of El Sistema was founded by Maestro José Antonio Abreu, who envisioned intensive and joyful music making as a vehicle for social development.
We at Katoikos.world recently had the pleasure and the privilege of featuring Zoe as a guest on the Global Citizen podcast. In our conversation, we started by talking about what it’s like to be a woman in the world of conducting, but our main focus was El Sistema Greece, and Zoe’s role as artistic director of the organization. It was a wonderful chat, highly engaging and informative, but intimate and rich in emotion at the same time. Below you will find some highlights from our conversation.
J: What is it like to be a woman in the world of conducting?
Z: Being a conductor is hard enough by itself and being a female conductor is definitely many layers over that. […] I do feel the responsibility […] of opening up the field to other female conductors. The truth is that when I was younger, before starting, when I was a pianist, I did know one female conductor. In my whole life I had met only one female conductor and actually I had seen how difficult it had been for her to get into this job. We’re talking about, like, around the year 2000. So I knew that it’s a very difficult thing – and myself, I never thought I would be a conductor because I was a pianist, I was very happy with my career then and what I was doing with my piano playing and all the concerts and the recitals I was giving, so I had really not thought about it.
One of the main reasons [that] made me go into the conducting field actually was the meeting I had totally by chance [with] my then conducting professor and mentor Thomas Slipper in the University of Miami where I had gone to do my doctorate studies in piano. […] he said to me, “you have to become a conductor” and I said to him (and this is 2005, so it’s not even 20 years ago) – I turned and I said to him “I cannot become a conductor, I am a woman”. So I myself said that almost 20 years ago, and that made him utterly furious. So he just went straight on to change my mind on this. And then as soon as I saw his support, I was like, OK, then I can maybe do it. So when I started, everything was [still] very closed to us [women].
Things have properly started opening up in 2015. I’m saying that because I know the whole date and the whole story and how this kind of started, but at the time we know of Marin Alsop, the very, very famous female conductor, that she has been for years working for all of us to be able to open up and she was the only one. She just kept going alone because others wouldn’t follow or it would be too difficult for others.
So I know the changes that have happened in the past 20 years from the moment I started to the point I am now. And I can say that right now things are much better. And I do believe that in probably 10 years we will not even be talking about gender anymore, which is exactly where we should be. And we haven’t been yet, but we will go there.
I know how the path is, and I know where I concentrate on and why I’m doing my job and why I’ve chosen to [follow] this career path. So I am very happy where I am, but I do know that others haven’t been happy and it is a responsibility of all of us and the work that we all have to do in order to open up the path for everyone to be able to be included.
J: What are the origins of El Sistema Greece, and El Sistema in general?
So, the El Sistema Greece started between around 2016-2017. What I wanted to say just for people that might not know, the El Sistema, the general, the big El Sistema, which is very famous worldwide, is a music organization that was there for inclusion of kids and to actually teach music to thousands of kids – it started in Venezuela in 1975, where a wealthy man called José Antonio Abreu decided to start this music education system, group teaching and orchestras all over Venezuela, in order to help kids that were very poor, they couldn’t have music education, and he did really believe that music can change their lives and it did. So they started that huge organization that has filled up the world with musicians from Venezuela, and the most famous case is Gustavo Dudamel, who was a Sistema kid and he is right now the conductor of the New York Philharmonic starting next year. So it’s a huge step from El Sistema in Venezuela arriving to New York Phil. So he is actually the top example that someone can have on what El Sistema can do.
In our case, the Greek El Sistema, we were very lucky because there is this man, Anis Barnat, who had worked with the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, part of El Sistema of Venezuela for years. And he actually came to help in the immigrant crisis we had in 2016 in Lesbos [Greece].
So when he saw the situation there, he did realize that we need inclusion through music because that was actually what he very strongly felt [was] correct to do. So very, very slowly and with great modesty from the beginning [he] started slowly to form the grounds for an organization based on El Sistema of Venezuela.
Along came Elisa Soloni who is […] part of our board. And actually Anis and Elisa are the two main, let’s say, founders and fundraisers that managed to support El Sistema Greece. So they had this big dream and this big vision for Greece and for the way that actually Greece can be helped to include all the immigrants and refugees, [so] that they can also find […] a place in Greek society. So we started offering free music lessons in various places. This started in 2017, we’re now seven years down the road and we do offer free music education to approximately 500 children per year.
J: Can you give me an example of how El Sistema Greece’s work is changing children’s lives through its activities?
We had a case of a child that was – I think it was eight years ago, so the child was 10 years old back then when she came through Greece from Syria, with the whole crisis, and she took part in the lessons of El Sistema Greece. So after that she was moved, she went on to Germany and very recently she found us, and she wrote an email to our board and she sent photographs of her and she thanked El Sistema Greece for the fact that it was the strongest point and anchor in her life at [that] time of difficulty. So she managed to move on to Germany, she keeps playing music, she’s now gonna study medicine and […] her dream, she said, is to come back to Greece, and to be able to visit El Sistema Greece and play with our kids now and do concerts with us again because these were the moments of her life that really made her believe that there is a future, and there is hope, and gave her everything for her to be able to go on. We’re talking about a 10 year old child that was going through Greece alone, not knowing what’s happening.
So we have seen many of these stories and we have seen also we have children that started with us eight years ago and they’re still there. Like they don’t leave. They kind of come daily through the offices. There are really children that come daily through the offices just to say hello. […] you could see directly the fact that they are […] a family. And they need that. They need that support.
You can listen to the rest of the interview on your podcast platform of choice, by following this link. To learn more about El Sistema Greece and to support its activities, you can visit their website at elsistema.gr. Finally, we once again want to extend our heartfelt thanks to Zoe for joining us on the Global Citizen podcast and sharing her wonderful stories with us and our audience.
Jason Kyriakos is a political scientist focused on international and environmental politics, currently based in Brussels, Belgium. His education includes a bachelor’s degree in political science and public administration and a master’s degree in international and European governance and politics from the University of Athens. He has participated in various projects, including a university research group on oral history and a non-formal education and volunteering exchange program focused on working with refugees. He is currently working as an intern for FOGGS, the Foundation on Global Governance and Politics. Besides his love for politics and social sciences, he’s a musician and audio engineer, working in the world of podcast production and editing for over 3 years.
