Elizabeth C.D. Brown to highlight music by and for women guitarists and lutenists at Friends of the Guitar Hour concert

When selecting musicians for the Friends of the Guitar Hour Concert Series, classical guitarist and “Guitar Hour” radio host Leon Atkinson tries to meet a number of criteria.

He tries to bring in international artists, highlight local musicians and, feeling like the classical guitar world is dominated by men, include a female guitarist in the concert series.

Guitarist and lutenist Elizabeth C.D. Brown was happy to fill that spot in this year’s series after Atkinson approached her during MusicFest Northwest, where Brown was an adjudicator.

“There’s not an even spread, to put it mildly…,” she said with a laugh. “Are we going to lose the girls as it goes up the ranks? Because I’ve got a number of young girl students but I don’t have a lot of college students who are female. Or is it going to be a drastic turnaround in 15 years or so?”

The head of the guitar and lute program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and owner of a private studio, Brown will perform at the Holy Names Music Center on Friday.

At her Friends of the Guitar Hour concert, Brown will perform both on lute and guitar.

She plans to open the concert with a few lute pieces by English Renaissance composer John Dowland and will also perform pieces by a number of female composers.

The second half of the performance will feature three pieces, two of which were written by women and have what Brown calls international flair.

One of those pieces is Dutch classical guitarist and composer Annette Kruisbank’s “Raganana,” which was composed for an Indian student for hers.

“I’m not going to say that it’s Indian music because it’s not but it really captures, from the lens of a classical guitar piece, many of the aspects of that music,” Brown said.

The other piece, which was written for Brown by a friend of hers, was influenced by the music of Chad and takes listeners through a typical day in the country. Snippets of the call to prayer, for example, appear in the piece five times.

Brown chose her Friends of the Guitar Hour concert program, in part, because it aligns with a project she’s working on, the second of two CDs of music by or written for women on the guitar and lute.

The first CD, “In Her Honor,” was released in 2016 and features music from the Princess Elisabeth of Hesse Lutebook, from Queen Anne’s Guitarbook and by French harpsichordist Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre that Brown arranged for Baroque guitar.

She was inspired to begin this project after giving a presentation about modern guitar and modern guitar extended techniques.

After she played a few pieces, a female student asked Brown if she had any pieces by female composers to perform.

“It’s the only time in my life I was completely speechless for a historical question,” Brown said.

She spent the rest of the day trying to think of female guitarists who also composed or women composers who had written for the guitar, eventually coming up with one female guitarist who had also composed.

“I thought ‘That can’t be right,’ ” she said. “If I, the guitar history nerd, can’t come up with anything, then that means there’s work to be done.”

She still has about a third of the album to record, but she hopes to finish recording this summer and release the album in the fall.

“I really understand why there are whole concert series and festivals on women composers because when something’s underrepresented, you have to make a point of going out and finding it,” she said. “However what I’m doing in this program and what I’d like to see as the ideal one day is a program has women composers and it’s normal. You don’t have to call it a theme.”