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Gender and Social Relations in New Music - Tackling The Octopus - SEISMOGRAF

In 2016, composer Ashley Fure and anthropologist / cultural theorist Georgina Born let an octopus out of the bag at Darmstadt, which immediately raised the temperature under the seats of individuals and organisations alike, and spawned both debate and activity on gender and other social relations in contemporary music. A year later, Juliana Hodkinson interviewed Georgina Born, to hear where the initiative is heading, and how it ties in with the music scene in Denmark.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
85 views15 pages

Gender and Social Relations in New Music - Tackling The Octopus - SEISMOGRAF

In 2016, composer Ashley Fure and anthropologist / cultural theorist Georgina Born let an octopus out of the bag at Darmstadt, which immediately raised the temperature under the seats of individuals and organisations alike, and spawned both debate and activity on gender and other social relations in contemporary music. A year later, Juliana Hodkinson interviewed Georgina Born, to hear where the initiative is heading, and how it ties in with the music scene in Denmark.

Uploaded by

cocovein
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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9/28/2017 Gender and social relations in New Music: Tackling the octopus | SEISMOGRAF

IN ENGLISH PLEASE! (/EN/FRONT)

IMOGRAF(http://eimograf.org/)

FORID(/N) FOKU(/N/FOKU) PR(/N/NOD/5439) PODCAT(/N/NOD/8549) ARKIVT(/N/ARKIVT)

KALNDR(/N/KALNDR) OM(/N/NOD/2763)

GENDER AND SOCIAL RELATIONS IN NEW 27.09.17


MUSIC: TACKLING THE OCTOPUS
Juliana Hodkinson interviews anthropologist / cultural
27.09.17 theorist Georgina Born on gender and other social
relations in contemporary music.
(/en/gender-and-social-relations-in-new-music-
tackling-the-octopus)

KN OG SOCIALE RELATIONER I 26.09.17


SAMTIDSMUSIK: HVORDAN MAN
TACKLER BLKSPRUTTEN
Juliana Hodkinson interviewer antropolog /
kulturteoretiker Georgina Born omkring kn og andre
sociale relationer i samtidsmusikken.
(/en/node/9590)

HOFFNUNG 3000 EXPERIMENTING WITH 20.09.17


(http://seismograf.org/sites/default/les/article_images/header2.jpg) AN ANONYMOUS COMMUNITY
Shanti Suki Osman visited the festival Honung 3000,
which took place in Berlin on 24th-26th August.

GENDER AND
(/en/artikel/honung-3000-experimenting-with-an-
anonymous-community)

SOCIAL SOUND AND VISION (AND SPACE) 18.09.17


Copenhagen Art Weeks tema var i r 'Sound and vision'.

RELATIONS IN
Seismograf anmelder tre af festivalens vrker af
henholdsvis Tobias Kirstein, Ursula Nistrup og Jacob
Kirkegaard/Niels Lyhne Lkkegaard.
(/en/artikel/sound-and-vision-and-space)

NEW MUSIC: OPERA SOM SYMFONISK DIGT? 13.09.17

TACKLING THE
FORMENTLIG RETS STORE
OPERAOPLEVELSE
Andreas Engstrm anmelder Sarah Nemtovs opera
'Sacrice', der havde premiere 5. marts p Halle i

OCTOPUS
Sachsen-Anhalt.
(/en/artikel/opera-som-symfonisk-digt-formentlig-
aarets-store-operaoplevelse)

Interview with cultural theorist Georgina Born


ALL THE IN-BETWEEN SPACES 03.09.17
Maya Shenfeld reports from this year's documenta 14.
In 2016, composer Ashley Fure and anthropologist / cultural theorist Georgina
(/en/english/reportage/all-the-in-between-spaces)
Born let an octopus out of the bag at Darmstadt, which immediately raised
the temperature under the seats of individuals and organisations alike, and
SOM BRDRE VI DELE 01.09.17
spawned both debate and activity on gender and other social relations in Lea Maria Lucas Wierd Borcak anmelder og reekterer
contemporary music. A year later, Juliana Hodkinson interviewed Georgina over adaptionen af Susanne Biers bermte lm 'Brdre'
til operaformatet. 'Brdre' spillede i Musikhuset Aarhus
Born, to hear where the initiative is heading, and how it ties in with the music fra 16.-22. august.
scene in Denmark. (/en/artikel/som-broedre-vi-dele)

af Juliana Hodkinson (/en/node/229) Like 4 RUM/KLANG ET ANARKISTISK 30.08.17


LYDKUNSTGALLERI
Jakob Gustav Winckler taler med Adam Veng fra
English version / Ls dansk oversttelse her Rum/Klang lydkunstgalleriet i Jyderup.
(http://seismograf.org/en/node/9590) (/en/artikel/rumklang-et-anarkistisk-lydkunstgalleri)

Starting up a network for gender relations HEROINES OF SOUND 17.08.17


Juliana Hodkinson: With Ashley Fure, you have been stimulating a wide Maya Shenfeld reports from debates and concerts at this
years Heroines of Sound, 7th-9th July, Radialsystem V,
debate on gender in contemporary music, rst at Darmstadt 2016 and then Berlin.
at MaerzMusik 2017, with the working group Gender Relations in (/en/reportage/english/heroines-of-sound)
Darmstadt/New Music (GRID 1 (#footnote1_5ztifxi) /GRINM 2 (#footnote2_u5el5k3) ). The
sessions of the group are available online as vimeos, notes, a manifesto, and REPARATREN FORTLLER 14.08.17
MASKINMUSIKKENS HISTORIE
various other resources, and GRINM has spawned some coverage on the
Tobias Linnemann Ew anmelder bogen 'Machine Music
BBC and elsewhere. Have there already been any breakthroughs? Im sure A Media Archaeological Excavation' fra Aarhus
University Press, skrevet af Post. Doc. Morten Riis.
theres been plenty of provocation and challenge. Have there been any clear
(/en/artikel/reparatoeren-fortaeller-
and uncomplicated steps forward, where somebody has pledged to create
maskinmusikkens-historie)
concrete change in a way that makes one think: success!

Georgina Born: What I say will have to be tentative: we are in the early days of
cultivating relationships with ve European new music festivals, the directors 3

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(#footnote3_seqez9l) of which have all
committed to taking forward some
kind of progressive programme to do
with enhancing diversity and related achofthee

issues, with gender very central to


fetivaldirectorito
these developments. That seems to
me extraordinary that each of these
omedegree
festival directors is to some degree
committed to reconsidering their committedto

future practice on these matters. But


in terms of concrete steps forward, reconideringtheir

apart from the dialogue, I would say:


futurepracticeon
not quite yet. What happened is that
at Darmstadt last August, Ashley and gender
I presented some research material
and conceptual ideas on gender. On
the basis of access to the Darmstadt
archives, shed made an analysis of the historical statistics about womens
presence and contributions, invitations and commissions at Darmstadt; she
had a research assistant run all those numbers, and then she presented an
analysis of this material. Wed been in dialogue a few months previously,
trying to think of a format that would be effective, and Id been invited to give
a lecture. So I made part of my lecture address questions of gender, while
making a broader statement about the need for a post-Adornian sociology of
music, which I think is deeply overdue, particularly in Germany and the
German-inuenced countries. Thats something Ive been working on
throughout my career really, since my rst book, Rationalizing Culture, and
perhaps with more obvious focus in the last twelve years since my 2005
article, On musical mediation 4 (#footnote4_9702q35) . In a sense, the whole of my
career has been building up this kind of framework, which I know has been
met ambivalently by colleagues. I included this dimension on gender, and Id
be interested to tell you more about that framework.

And then we went straight into a panel of eight people from different areas of
activity in new music Sam Salem, director of an ensemble, the producer
Arnbjrg Danielsen, the critic, curator and journalist Anne-Hilde Neset,
Thomas Schfer, Darmstadts director, as well as the composer Jennifer
Walshe, the electronic music activist Susanne Kirchmayr from
Female:Pressure, and the composer Neele Hlcker, who read out perhaps
the most powerful statement. That statement began: Talking about diversity
and inequality of representation, in 2016, requires that transgender and
intersex identities would be included as a part of our group as composers,
musicians, thinkers and artists. In this way Neele and her co-authors put
issues of sexual identity fully on the agenda for GRID, and I admit that for me
this aspect was a learning experience. Each participant added a vital
perspective on the gender issue, and it worked extremely well: the room was
full, the audience was attentive and enthusiastic, and it seemed to really take
off as an energizing event. Theres this Open Space format at Darmstadt in
recent years, a less centrally organised space for discussions, workshops,
gatherings, less determined from the top, and daily meetings began mobilised
by Ashley in which a group of students and interested people met to
workshop the gender issue. I wasnt really aware this was happening, that
Ashley was doing this, for a few days, and then I heard about it and began to
go along and put my spade in too, and it became a very interesting and
important moment. What was lovely was that there were a lot of young and
older men there, who were just as passionate and committed as the women
and trans participants.

The other fascinating thing was that


this was a mobile group, so some
people came and others went, and it
ApotAdornian was productively in ux. One day an
elderly guy turned up and sat there
ociologofmuici
rather quietly and towards the end
came up and talked. It turned out
deeploverdue,
that he was a performance teacher at
particularlin Darmstadt, in his mid 50s, and he
was as passionately committed to the
German need to move towards and achieve
greater equality and diversity on

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gender as anyone else. So it became
very obvious to us that this was taking-off, and we had very interesting
political discussions about how to do this. Im glad I was there, because as
an older person who was involved in a wave of activism on music and politics
much earlier in my career, Ive done a lot of thinking about this, and my sense
is that there are certain styles of activism that arent very effective. So we
determined as a group to be cooperative in our approach, to try to engender
a collaboration with Thomas Schfer, and we eventually invited him to talk to
us on day 9. He came along and had obviously been thinking himself, and he
said: well, what shall we do, how can we take this forward?. Thomas had
been talking to three other festival directors, from Donaueschingen, Ultima
and MaerzMusik, and reported to us that they were all interested too in
bringing about changes in some way. And so this began to roll.

Ashley and I were invited to compose a document, a kind of statement, for


the think-tank or post mortem that Darmstadt holds a few weeks after the
end of the festival in order to take stock and begin planning for the next
festival, which will be in 2018. Drawing on the discussions we had as GRID in
the Open Space meetings, we rapidly wrote together what I see as a very
strong and important statement of basic principles, at that time addressed
directly to Darmstadt, with both very practical and very high-level ideas in it. I
call it a manifesto, although Ashley is not sure that is the right term for it. That
has germinated quite a lot of discussion. And so it rolled along. Since then,
the four festival directors have approached the German public funding
agency, the Kulturstiftung, for their own joint project, called Defragmentation,
in which the gender and diversity commitments are one core element, and we
are waiting to hear the outcome. We believe that funding will be forthcoming
to support their plans to effect change in their future editions. But its all
uncertain and unconrmed at present and the response hasnt yet been
received. And as you can see, while they have slotted gender and diversity
issues into their joint project, they have not made this the only theme, and
quite what they intend to do practically is as yet unclear. Certainly, they have
our think tank manifesto from which to draw concrete ideas, but as yet it
seems unclear quite what change strategies they will pursue. So much is still
to play for.

Portrait of Georgina Born

(http://seismograf.org/sites/default/les/article_images/born_ottawa_cropped_portrait_0.png)

Defragmentation: a concrete initiative with festivals


In particular, quite what will be the relationship, if any, between GRID and
Defragmentation is unclear. Meanwhile, I have been in dialogue with Thomas
Schafer and he asked me early this year to become an advisor to his own
planning for Darmstadts future, in which he sees changes on gender and
diversity to be absolutely central. I suggested we also bring in the
distinguished African-American composer George Lewis as another advisor,
who is head of the composition department at Columbia University, and
George joined us in March with enthusiasm and conviction. So Darmstadts
commitment is real and we are currently discussing ideas for the 2018
programme.

We had a meeting of the Defragmentation project just before MaerzMusik in


mid-March this year, at which we all came together for the rst time, with

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myself and George Lewis present. I guess this means that George and I have
a kind of go-between role between the movement and the festivals initiative;
as well as George and I, there were some other advisers too, and we were
sitting with the four directors for our rst three or four hours of discussion on
the issues. I would say that at present this is all in process, but halting.

Meanwhile, I was in Poland last September at a meeting of jazz festival


directors, to give a talk. Graham MacKenzie from Hudderseld happened to
be there and he heard my lecture, and that was a good thing and opened an
important dialogue between us. Id been doing eldwork at Hudderseld in
recent years for my current research, and once I was surreptitiously recording
a concert, and Graham tapped me on the shoulder and wasnt very happy!
But now weve developed a very good relationship, and he is asking me to
help him in his own project of making Hudderseld more responsive to issues
of gender and diversity, to make a real transition, starting now. In fact we met
just last week, and Graham is developing some strong goals. It seems likely
he will develop this independently of the other festivals, although of course
they are in touch.

So these are some of the developments since last August. I have been
involved, as you see, and of course I have an interest in the activist core; but
in the end I am an older person, I am not a composer or active as a musician
these days. I think my role as an academic/theorist is nevertheless important,
and also my capacity to advise and reect on political strategies. But I am
also constantly learning. My son is involved in housing politics in Britain and is
writing a PhD on precarious and informal housing. He is involved in a
grassroots movement to create a renters union, and they are having to invent
the nature and form of their politics, their interventions. And the same is true
for GRID/GRINM. So theres a lot of new thinking, of political experimentation,
to be done.

It was at MaerzMusik in March this year that, thanks to the invitation of Berno
Polzer, GRID met again for a workshop, which brought together about thirty
people, many of them new, including Ashley and I and a group of interesting
composers, curators, musicians and educators. By this point it became
obvious that this should be a wider movement than addressed solely to
Darmstadt. So we renamed it GRINM: Gender Relations in New Music. The
workshop was productive, and a number of strategies were thought up and
logged for taking the movement forward. But I have to say it has been a
challenge to build on that momentum.

Keeping research independent


JH: Im pleased to hear all of that,
because one of my questions is: how
do we avoid the movers and shakers Howwereconcile

just exhibiting a form of tokenism,


engagingincultural
nodding to various debates that only
take place off-stage within festivals?
politic,ontheone
What you say here sounds like a
much bigger commitment, it sounds hand,withattempting

like a pledge, which is what is really


needed. So youve joined the toachieverigorouand

mission, to some extent, and to


reaonal
another extent you have your
autonomy as someone outside independent
concert life. Is it OK for a sociologist
to be on a mission and to get her reearch?
hands dirty in this way, to be allied
with one side or the other of a
contentious issue? How does that
work?

GB: A good question, but yes, I think it is OK, if done with care. If you read
the body of my work its always been traversing this challenge to some
extent: the question of how we reconcile engaging in cultural politics, on the
one hand, with attempting to achieve rigorous and reasonably independent
research, on the other hand. This is a core question in my work. And in fact,
the two sometimes go hand in hand. For example, Ive championed the view
that diversity in the production community, diversity among those making
culture, whether its in television or new media or music, does have effects,

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and benecial effects, on the diversity of the work that we see, and on the
degree of invention and experimentation in that work. At the same time, Ive
always wanted to demur from any crude determinism: theres no simple
relationship there. But when we look historically, at particular periods, we can
see that the entry of non-standard folk into what is usually a tremendously
restricted and closed-down community of producers whether in music or
television can have very interesting effects and can be allied with new,
sometimes experimental aesthetic directions. To take an example from my
work on television, in the decade from the mid 1990s through to the mid
2000s, notably my book on the BBC 5 (#footnote5_fr60goi) : theres a central
chapter on labour and employment at the BBC, and I hope with humour,
but also with edge it charts what a soon-to-be Director General, Greg Dyke,
called the hideously white nature of the BBCs workforce and culture. So
through my empirical work I document not only what in Britain we call
institutional racism in the BBC, but also a lot of institutionalised sexism. OK,
the structural sexism at the BBC has been mitigated by the fact that they
have had policies for decades to promote women in all areas, and thats been
reasonably successful. Yet just recently, the radically unequal salaries being
paid to the corporations top men and women was made public, somewhat
tarnishing that image. So here is a good example of empirical ndings in my
ethnography of the BBC that had direct political implications: the two are
inseparable. And although I did little political work on the BBC, since my
sense was mid-career (rightly or wrongly) that it was more effective for me to
be seen as an authoritative Cambridge academic who had come up with this
irrefutable analysis, I did do some policy-oriented and political work, and I
tried to do more but those efforts were blocked by the leading New Labour
think tanks, IPPR and Demos, who, when I approached them, wanted me to
present different ndings and tried to control my work! Amazing: gender
dynamics again, but here in the guise of supposedly left-leaning policy think
tanks not allowing me to publish what I wanted to publish.

If we return to diversity and its positive effects in cultural production: the best
example is Channel Four Television, which is our second public broadcaster
in Britain. Channel Four was created in 1982 on a remit to boost the diversity
of people going into production, as well as to promote innovation in the form
and content of programming. This was designed as a reaction and an
alternative to what had become by the 1970s the excessively middle-brow,
centre-ground nature of the BBC and British commercial television. Channel
Four was cleverly designed to exploit loopholes in union agreements in the
lm and TV industries so as to allow the creation of training workshops of
various kinds aimed at under-represented groups: in the north of England, to
train northern working-class communities; to train young black people, to
train women. The result of the workshop movement was to feed a whole
wave of new formats and genres and experimental lm into Channel Four
throughout the 1980s. The effect was astonishing, if much debated. This
lasted until the Channel took a more commercial direction, which it did
already by the late 80s. I and many others have written about this period of
C4 and how incredibly signicant it was, not least because to employ a
standard measure it develooped individual talents like Isaac Julien, now a
tremendously important lm-maker and video artist, as well a leading queer
black voice in cultural theory and cultural politics.

ThroughmempiricalworkIdocumentnotonlwhat

inritainwecallintitutionalracim,utaloalotof

intitutionaliedexim

So this whole question of the diversity of the production community having


potentially powerful benecial effects on what is made, and the aesthetic
diversity that we hear and see, seems to me unequivocal; its an argument
Ive always made because of the evidence. But to return to your good
question is it OK for a sociologist to get her hands dirty by not only doing
independent research but also taking a stand on some aspect of it: its
certainly tricky, and to be honest Ive never before done the kind of thing Im
in process of discussing with the festival directors, so its new ground for me.
What we are thinking about (I havent yet committed to taking it forward) is to

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try and raise a major grant to enable me to study the festivals as they are in
process of transformation. And the directors appear keen, they say they want
me to do that. Weve now had direct exchanges about the fact that if I do this
research project, on the one hand I would have a position as an advisor or
interlocutor, and on the other hand I would have to be there as a disinterested
observer. This is helped by the fact that I am not involved at all in the new
music scene. Ive reminded them, moreover, that Id have to be free to write
as I see it, critically if necessary. And thus far, the directors have signed up to
this, although who knows how it will work in practice. At another level, I have
to say this is new to me and it disturbs me that our own Arts and Humanities
Research Council (I dont know about the Danish equivalent) is now requiring
us, when we apply for research grants, to do it in partnership with arts
organisations. In other words, theyre enjoining us to do this kind of applied,
impactful research which is all very well, and Im delighted to work with the
festivals, but I insist also on the signicance of my independence and my right
to write autonomously, as I see it. So were in a very strange period for
independent academic research on the arts, a transition to this partnership or
collaboration model which has both obvious strengths but also potential
pitfalls, of the kind youre raising. And whether its possible in practice to be
so close to ones research subjects the festival directors and others involved
and to retain the necessary autonomy to do critical work, we will have to
see.

Audiences and marketing


JH: Im thinking, as Im listening to
you, that no matter whether these
Weareeing festival directors individually are new
in their jobs or have sat in the same
enjoinedtodoapplied,
jobs for a long time, each of those
festivals that you name bears a large
impactfulreearch
responsibility for their own gender
utIinitaloonthe imbalance of course. Its an incredible
step to have the heads of those
ignificanceofm festivals moving forward and saying
they now accept responsibility for
independenceandm
creating change. You describe a
righttowrite
paradigm in which arts and the media
are closely linked, and indeed each of
autonomoul these festivals is more or less linked
to one or another broadcasting
organisation. Each of these public
service bodies, in turn, is coming
under more and more pressure to serve a mainstream populations tastes
rather than driving cultural development, and so the idea of being
experimental or diverse in that context is an exhausting thought. Ive been
taking part in a working group at the Danish Radio ostensibly seeking ways to
rejuvenate the coverage of contemporary music and the sonic arts in public-
service broadcasting, and trying to nd a space or a format that could do
that. Similar to other institutions you described in your Darmstadt lecture, DR
suffers critically from having come under the sway of neoliberalism and its
attendant legitimising concepts, such that its task to create public-service
value for the population stands in a circular relation to the populations
political opinions, as reected in the government of the day, with which DR
negotiates its public-service contract. The extent to which DR producers feel
obliged to provide statistical evidence that the music they broadcast is proven
to appeal to a large number of people - in the case of new commissions,
before its even been written - is a perverse situation. So Im thinking that this
ingrained erosion of everything that could create new experimental work
whether by women or men, but in any case under a banner of diversity and
new impulses seems so irreversible. With public broadcasting in such a
tight place, how do you imagine that, internally or externally, we can have a
diversifying inuence there?

GB: Thats a very important question. But lets separate out two issues. First,
very crudely, women can be as populist as men in their music! Any why not?
Quite frankly, why should only male composers garner big audiences and
easy commissions? Who are we to stand against women who choose to
work in larger, established or commercial markets for music? Why shouldnt
some women benet from these same structures of opportunity as men? So
in this sense, questions of equality in employment, commissioning and pay

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are to some extent separate from the question of what is made, it seems to
me.

The second question, which is the problem of the marketisation of culture, of


the increasing tyranny of market research and of the notion of what
audiences want in broadcasting institutions: well, take a look at Chapter 7 of
my BBC book, called Knowing the audience 6 (#footnote6_mcq88ui) . This chapter
is all about the rise of new kinds of intensive market research in the BBC in
the 90s and 2000s. But the book as a whole charts the effects of the
marketisation of the BBC and how this impacts on the nature of commissions
and programming. The book has been there now for over ten years. I started
looking at this in the mid 90s through the inuential example of the BBC
which, as you probably know, is always a model for DR and this is still the
landscape were in. To use a metaphor: Im climbing up a steep mountain or
a cliff, and lots of rocks and stones keep falling down; the rocks and stones
falling down are all the concessions constantly being made to the neoliberal
market mindset. And the concessions to the market mindset continue in art-
music programming on the BBC, as no doubt you know. To be honest, after
the mid 2000s I had to step out of this area of work to keep sane, because
basically its a full-time profession keeping up with whats happening in
broadcasting and, like the think tanks, they dont see academics as
important interlocutors, as offering anything they can learn from, compared to
the big commercial consultancies. In fact it took ten years for my book to be
read by a very senior BBC executive, a former Labour government minister of
culture, who wrote to me in 2015 saying how important my book was and
began a dialogue with me.

Whhouldntomewomenenefitfromtheeame

tructureofopportunitamen?

Nonetheless we have something in Europe, it seems to me thankfully I can


still speak of Europe for a couple of years which still understands something
about the basic structure of how the arts proceed or even progress. And
thats what I think is the inhibiting factor. There seems to be, even amongst
senior executives of the broadcasting and the arts world, an awareness that
you need some experimental spaceship out there doing stuff that might
eventually hit good ground and, in this way, feed back into the whole universe
of contemporary music. In other words, there is a commitment to the
principle that we have to cultivate and support that space of experimentation
in music, the arts, culture and media. And by using that term I dont mean to
invoke any particular understanding of experimental aesthetics. That is why
on the BBC we still do have, late night or in the middle of the night, and on
the edges of the Proms, on the edges of programming but increasingly not
so much at the edges too we have a commitment to areas of new music
that remain reasonably healthy. If we had Graham Mackenzie here, no doubt
hed be telling you about the major cuts to his budget from the Arts Council,
and I do understand that there is a tipping point, that we may genuinely be
tipping into a situation in which the funding is just not there any more.
Certainly I dont get that feeling yet.

In other words, I dont think the war is


completely lost yet; and what I hope
is that its not any longer solely
through a belief in the sanctity of the Youneedome

Second Viennese School and the


experimental
great tradition of German music in the
20th century, but out of a different
pacehipoutthere
understanding of how culture
proceeds and evolves. That argument doingtuffthatmight

is very simple (and Ive made it many


times in my work): it is that, contrary eventuallhitgood

to the neoliberal metaphysics of


groundand,inthi
infallible audiences, production and
the imaginative interventions and wa,feedackintothe
commitments of artists, musicians,
producers comes before audiences.

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Production precedes consumption,
wholeunivereof
and what is made also creates the
conditions for consumption. Which is contemporarmuic
to say, audiences can only engage
with what theyre given, put very
crudely. Its a complete mistake to
think and I personally nd in my research that most CEOs and managing
directors of arts organizations and broadcasters understand this point that
audiences come with fully formed, ready-made tastes. Those tastes are
constantly being formed and evolved through the process of what audiences
receive and what they are enjoined to engage with. And that is the role of the
big mediators like the broadcasting and arts organisations: as long as they
understand that we have to have new stuff coming in and to liberate the
composers, musicians, artists that produce that vital material, and that
audience tastes are ckle and parasitic and are bound to evolve, then that is a
generative self-understanding.

But at the moment, to put it bluntly, in British new music we dont yet have
the next big thing, we dont know it will be! Indeed, Im in process of
nishing the book coming out of my research project on digital music, from
the last six years, in which Im going to suggest that what were seeing in
Britain now is a huge pluralisation of what counts as new music.And that is
long overdue, and welcome; its about a silent or not-so-silent toppling of the
20th-century understanding of the great German or European tradition, and
an opening out that will eventually yield some important new musical
directions. I cant adjudicate between them now, I cant tell you what they are;
but the fact of the eclipse of the hegemony of a certain understanding is in
itself signicant. So I think, yes, were certainly witnessing the tyranny of this
audience-driven marketisation in public service broadcasting and in music
and the arts, but were also seeing a great wave of opening up, at the level of
what is made and what counts in new music festivals, and this is very
hopeful. And its something eventually that the A&R 7 (#footnote7_27bjaro) people,
the taste monitors from the BBC or DR cant ignore; they're going out to
these places, theyre listening to what gets musicians and others excited.

Resistance to change
JH: This sounds very much more optimistic than Ive heard anyone say in a
long time. There just seems to be a huge time-lag on this toppling that you
describe, but I hear you say its on its way, hopefully.

GB: With one caveat. Theres a generation of musicologists who are


committed to shoring up that edice, that conception of 20th century music.
Its a problem, because these people are teaching the musicians, curators,
BBC and DR executives and critics of today and tomorrow. These are
European musicologists of a certain generation and in some cases their
whole careers are bound up in the defence of well-known canonic gures.
And for them this defence is experienced wrongly as a defence of culture
itself, in that old culture versus barbarism mentality. These people tend to
denounce me as a populist, an anti-elitist; they mistakenly accuse me of
being sociologically reductive, when the core of my work has always been the
challenge of analysing the links between musical or aesthetic and social
developments one could say, of improving on this aspect of Adorno. If they
think I am anti-modernist, they should listen to the music I played
professionally and read more of my work!

JH: So its not pure paranoia and conspiracy theory if one feels that there is a
huge resistance to change? Things wont just improve over time, of
themselves?

GB: No. Because the current state of


historical musicology is generally
divorced from present day
Ye,werewitneing developments, and how this
necessitates a re-assessment of the
thetrannofthi
last century, and this affects music
criticism they are sometimes the
audiencedriven
same people. However, there is a
marketiationinpulic group of younger musicologists,

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mainly Americans but some Brits and
erviceroadcating
Europeans too, for example some
andinmuicandthe
close colleagues from Aarhus, who
are revisiting the 1960s, 70s and 80s,
art,utwerealo and beginning to reassess and alter
our understanding of this crucial
eeingagreatwaveof
period of history, the post-War
decades 8 (#footnote8_zp1ym1p) . This work
opening
will fuel our changing understanding
of what counts today, and where
fresh currents are coming from.

Four predicates on quality vs. equality


JH: So, in order to dismantle this hegemony from the mid- and late-20th
century, its not enough just to progress into the future; we have to continue
to understand and critique how that came to be. A few minutes ago on your
way to talking about producers and their responsibilities, you grouped
together commissioning and equality in employment. I often meet the
resistance that commissioning has to do with quality; that its got nothing to
do with equality. So its nothing to do with equal opportunities for
employment. Commissioning has to do with presenting the best. So weve
got quality and equality cancelling each other out. How can one place
equality in employment at the heart of commissioning as a responsibility and
also as an opportunity, as a quality in itself that might in turn produce
interesting work even the best, maybe?

GB: I think I discussed this in an earlier answer, saying two things. One, that
equality and diversity are increasingly recognised in themselves in the public
sphere, including in the public service broadcasting debate, as highly
signicant, and as aspirations with real potential for nding new talent, even if
as yet little realised. A number of major institutions have made commitments
to these principles and it seems to be accelerating. Of course, we know from
the decades gap between gender equality legislation and real change that
such commitments cannot be assumed to bring about change by
themselves, which is why GRINM and similar pressure movements remain
necessary. And two, and to your main point: the quality argument is of course
a way of nessing these commitments. Theres no easy answer to the
perceived quality versus equality impasse, and the answer that Ive been
developing is not a half sentence or a one-liner. It goes like this, in four
stages: Predicate 1: there is actually a surfeit of talent out there much more
than has ever been recognized by the standard channels of commissioning,
performances and so on. Predicate 2: at the same time, we see a large
amount of relatively unsuccessful work (often composed by men, given
gender imbalances) being awarded commissions and performances.
Predicate 3: ergo, any claim that theres a perfect match between current
commissioning strategies and quality is itself problematic and unscrutinised.
Predicate 4: so if its the case that theres always a surfeit of talent, of those
whose work is promising and who merit, on quality grounds, commissions
and performances, then its in the ne tuning of judgements of who will be
given those opportunities that arguments for equality and diversity can come
in. I dont think I can put it any clearer than that.

Judgments of talent
JH: So when we think of talent, we
think of a pyramid structure with lots
of raw, untapped potential among Thereiactualla

many people (possibly younger) at


urfeitoftalentout
the bottom, before differences in
training and background begin to
theremuchmore
bite, and then they get ltered away
as we get to just a few geniuses at thanhaevereen

the top, with experience, knowledge


and exposure. How can we turn that recognizedthe

around and direct attention to the


tandardchannelof
bottom of the pyramid, to how talent
is developed, furthered and commiioningand
encouraged, in a different way, and
affecting also with what spectacles performance
commisioning people use to look for
talent?

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GB: For a start, I dont think its so much about a pyramid with top and
bottom, but more about the muddy middle. When I started to talk about
these issues with my colleague and friend George Lewis, who is Chair of the
composition department of Columbia University, New York, and one of the
very few Black American musicians and composers to have broken through
the many barriers to the recognition of his musical and intellectual
achievements, George insisted on the need to start working on these
problems at the level of training. He was talking about the fact that for
decades at Columbia, there was an exclusively white male intake into their
composition program, and that its only with a great deal of work and care
that he and others have been able to curate the entry into that program so as
to make it much more diverse, with many more young women, more African-
Americans and other ethnic minorities entering the program and being trained
as composers. So what weve been talking about is the signicance of the
whole recruitment process into inuential composition Masters and PhD
programs, and how that inuences who gets out into the key networks.

But another angle on this comes from one theme of the research program
Ive been directing for the last six years 9 (#footnote9_5rk0af9) , which arose in the
studies we undertook on electronic and computer music trainings in the
universities today in the UK and Montreal. Bringing my research together with
other existing studies that looked at every stage of education, you see a
systematic drop-off of girls and young womens engagement with electronic
and computer music. In these particular music elds, the gendering is
compounded of course by the strong technological element 10
(#footnote10_hugtyyr) .

Yet even in acoustic composition,


something is going on, judgements of
relative talent are being made, with
Thereiactualla the effect that theres a continual
drop-off of young womens capacity
urfeitoftalentout
to move through the training process.
So what Im saying is: theres no
theremuchmore
simple answer, once again, and in
thanhaevereen fact among the four festival directors
and in GRINM we have begun to
recognizedthe think, with some dismay, that the task
is like an octopus: it moves in all
tandardchannelof
directions at once. Its necessary to
commiioningand
concern ourselves with entry into,
and the substance of, composition
performance programs in the universities and the
big music schools, at Masters and
PhD level; with composition teachers
and musicologists ideologies of
talent; of course, its also necessary to concern oneself with the faculty make-
up of composition departments. I wont name names, but I am aware of
composition departments in Scandinavia and elsewhere that are almost
entirely, if not entirely, male. What message does that send out to women
composers and aspiring composers? How can it be justied, especially in
Scandinavia with its avowed commitment to advancing gender equality?

JH: I dont think theres ever been any teacher of composition regularly
employed on a xed contract in Denmark that was a woman.

GB: Thats deeply disturbing, isnt it? In our work in Canada, my colleague
and researcher Patrick Valiquet did excellent research on the history and
current state of electroacoustic music in Montreal which is of course a
tremendously prominent and important school of electroacoustic
composition 11 (#footnote11_uj2mf3x) . Patrick found that some inuential women
composers who founded the key studios and trained the next generation
have largely been written out of the histories of the Montreal school 12
(#footnote12_gkb723u) !

Anclaimthatthereaperfectmatchetween

currentcommiioningtrategieandqualitiitelf

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prolematicanduncrutinied

So we have to work on multiple levels, and one reason I was proud of the
initial brainstorm that Ashley Fure and I had in the GRID think-tank document
is because we said to the festival director Thomas Schfer: this work has to
occur on several levels at once. It has to do with the faculty being employed
to teach composition; it has to do with the make-up of the student body; it
has to do with diversity in the ensembles and performing groups that are
hired, and with their commitment to selecting women composers to perform;
and it has to do with revising what has become an established, canonic
history of Darmstadt, with looking back and revising that history, addressing
its exclusions as well as inclusions. One of our projects is to seek to create
interest among a new generation of musicologists to write their Masters and
PhD theses on women composers whove been lost from the Darmstadt
history, to go back and look without prejudice. Some of these people may not
be particularly interesting, but some may be very interesting. So working on a
number of fronts at once has to be the way that a gender politics of
composition must proceed. Revising history, revising who teaches, revising
the repertoire thats taught, revising the student body. But back to your
question: I was very struck by George Lewis saying that one of the key places
we have to begin is with the judgements of talent that are made at the very
point of entry into PhD programs for composers.

The bigger picture


JH: That would be a huge step forward, this octopus approach. Moving on
all fronts at the same time seems crucial to me also because it eliminates the
possibility of people in one chair saying the problem is over in another room. It
says that everyone has to take responsibility for the chair theyre sitting on,
together with the others. Then what I hear you say concerns the work of
revising canons: not only the idea of a canon but also its contents; proposing
alternative candidates to go into the canon, or into an enlarged canon, is also
key. I wonder if you could imagine all these initiatives advancing to a level
where they would become a paradigm, in a climate where there are so many
cuts in education, the arts and public service? All the avenues that people
have for personal development and for entering into degrees, so long as they
still exist, are now under pressure.

GB: Absolutely, I hear you, the stakes


are very high. On the other hand, we
have to struggle with whatever we
have, whichever further education or Ithatodowith

arts funding or public service


reviingwhatha
broadcasting system survives. Thats
an obvious point, and particularly if
ecomeanetalihed,
we think globally, things can look
grim. The giant strides being made by canonichitor,with

a misogynist, patriarchal so-called


populism, whether in the States just lookingackand

last night we heard of the resignation


reviingthathitor,
of the right-wing pundit, Bill OReilly,
from Fox News, who has had to pay addreingit
out USD13 million in compensation
for sexual harassment cases. I mean, excluionawella

what more do we need to know


about the forces currently at stake incluion
and the wars being waged for and
against patriarchy? I have to say that
one of the most depressing things for me, as an ageing woman, is to see
whats at stake for my own daughter, for her generation and your generation.
When I was 14 or 15, and at a great all-girls school, I thought I could see an
open vista of progress. Because luckily I was given that sense of condence
about my own right to exist, to grow, to develop my talent and my intellect, to
intervene, to take up positions. Actually, it was powerfully thwarted within
academia in mid career, but thats another story. So thats what I thought
when I was young. Then I met a generation of students around the late
1990s, when I was teaching sociology and anthropology at Cambridge

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University, who didnt recognize or had contempt for the very term feminism.
What do you do with that? Then you come to a new generation, now, who
are interested in something they call feminism, but of course it occupies a
different terrain to the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s that I
grew up with. Thats ne. But the point is that for those of us interested in the
progress of women and other genders, we cant ever assume that things
arent reversible, because they always are. Thats the depressing truth. Thats
why, whatever we have to work with, we have to work with: it can get better,
but it also shows signs of potentially getting worse. Even if the
neoliberalisation of education proceeds apace, as it does in the UK, with ever-
increasing student fees, ever-increasing student debts, its terrible, it demands
a ght; but people are still going to university, people are still learning music
and becoming composers, and we have to work with that, with whatever we
have. In fact, the ght for greater equality also among academic faculty is
almost more important under these conditions to register these wider
politics within the academy, within the university. So thats why I answer: we
still have to work with this.

Aesthetics and anthropology


JH: That sums it up in a nutshell, both for the pessimists and the optimists! I
have one nal question, which might be a throwaway question which you
answer with a no, or you might have something to say about it. For me,
trying to work up a feminist aesthetics, and realizing that you cant do that
without politics and other subjects the number of subjects in which Im not
competent grow, but they all have to be taken in somehow Ive been very
inspired by Erin Mannings Politics of Touch, Elisabeth Grosz on vibration, and
other writers. I wonder if were just concentrating on feminism whether
you have any recommendations for the contemporary music milieu that we
could be inspired by? You mentioned Tia DeNora in Darmstadt. I wonder if
theres anyone youre reading at the moment that you think is relevant for this
situation, or whether you nd theres an absolute dearth of writing that could
ever have to do with feminism and the sonic arts today?

GB: Well, I myself have a suspicion of


attempts to develop a universal
feminist philosophy, including a
vertimeweliten feminist aesthetics. Thats natural for
an anthropologist, because social
tomuicormake
and cultural differences are always
important for anthropologists! When I
muic,weareatthe
meet younger colleagues who want
ametimecreating to say, lets talk about the body, lets
talk about the senses, its ne with
ocialrelationor me, though there are other ways to
think about a feminist aesthetics. So
ocialitie Im interested in affect theory, indeed
Ive written a bit about it 13
(#footnote13_era9ak9) ; Im also following
the turn to the senses itself inuenced by sensory anthropology and who
could be against the concern with the body and embodied experience? Im
certainly interested in Erin Mannings work, and in particular I very much like
her recent book with Brian Massumi, where theyre arguing for an intimate
relationship between the development of philosophical ideas and embodied
experimentation in the arts 14 (#footnote14_aq8hbe3) . Thats very interesting,
because its an attempt to show the very grounds of the production of
philosophical knowledge in a way that is exciting, lurching away from both
individualistic and Cartesian mentalist models of how philosophy develops.
So thats great. My big beef with the whole wave of work on the body, the
senses and affect which Im very happy to acknowledge the interest of is
that it doesnt tend to concern itself with social or collective processes in
interesting ways. There are important exceptions, and here my key reference
would be the book Collective Imaginings by Moira Gatens and Genevieve
Lloyd, an extraordinary work of neo-Spinozean feminist philosophy that
beautifully charts the signicance of the movement between individuation and
collectivity, posing this as an inescapable facet of human experience 15
(#footnote15_14klcby) . I see this as potentially central to both feminist politics and

feminist aesthetics. Here, let me give you a characteristic powerful passage:


For Spinoza, there are collective dimensions to individual selfhood. For him
there is no possibility of selfhood in isolation. To be an individuala
determinate selfat all is to be embedded in wider social wholes in which the

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power of bodies is strengthened or impeded. To be an individual self is to be
inserted into economies of affect and imagination which bind us to others in
relations of joy and sadness, love and hate, co-operation and antagonism 16
(#footnote16_i5kpfmm) .

Check out GRID: Gender Relations in Darmstadt:


https://griddarmstadt.wordpress.com/

(http://seismograf.org/sites/default/les/article_images/header_8.jpg)

Music and social processes


I think music is enmeshed in various ways in social processes and social
practices, and of course Im not alone in thinking this; but thats where my
work tries to come in and offer a new, I hope refreshing set of ideas. On the
one hand, one can recognise the ways in which music is conditioned by
social institutions and organisations: the BBC, DR, IRCAM, Bell Labs,
Darmstadt, concert organisations, the Proms, not to mention record labels,
publishing houses and so on Ive written quite a lot about this, as you know.
On the other hand, and equally, Ive pointed out that every time we listen to
music or make music, we are at the same time creating social relations or
socialities among the members of the performing or improvising ensemble,
through the relationships between performers and audiences in live
performance, and relationships among audience members in the same
situations. I have a wonderful PhD student, Christabel Stirling, who is
currently studying audiences in just these terms, especially their social
dynamics across three or four different genres, and the affective dimensions
of those social dynamics 17 (#footnote17_8e8bx9a) . So we have these immediate,
face-to-face musical microsocialities although increasingly, through the net,
they can be technologically-mediated microsocialities.

Whatwouldmuicmakinglookandoundlikeif

theundercurrentocialrealitiewereorganied

differentl?

We also have musically-imagined communities, collectivities brought together


solely by their common passion for music, in this way creating what might be
called musical publics. These are both types of sociality that are animated
purely by music. But in addition, two further kinds of social relations
immanent in music have to be recognised and considered; in both cases they
amount to pre-existing, wider, non-musical formations that get into music
in other words, that mediate and are mediated by music. On the one hand,
the existence of gender relations and relations of class, ethnicity, religious
difference and other markers of social identity that get into music in numerous
ways. This has been the core of our discussion today, and its the meat of
GRID/GRINM: how wider social relations of gender, and the inequalities and
injustices they entail, get played out in music through gendered music
education, gendered ideologies of talent, the institutionalisation of
composition in the academy and conservatoire, the way canons form and

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consolidate through their constitutive exclusions of women and other Others,
and so on.

On the other hand, and nally, all those macro-social institutions mentioned
before powerfully condition and inuence what is composed and performed,
as well as what gets recorded and published: the specialist music research
centres, universities, public and commercial broadcasters, labels, publishers
indeed, late capitalism itself gets into music, as well as itself being
transformed by music, as is dramatically clear in the crisis of copyright
capitalism in which music has played such a leading role. So there are at least
these four distinctive dimensions of how music is social, each of them to
some degree autonomous, each of them highly signicant for how we
experience music 18 (#footnote18_xj0y176) . And if they are inuential in how we
experience music, then it follows that they participate in what we call the
aesthetic.

There are, then, at least these four dimensions in the way that music enlivens
social processes or is itself conditioned by social processes. And my
suggestion is that we and especially all of you as composers, practitioners,
performers, curators should become more conscious of them. This would
enable you to be more reexive about these social dimensions of music, and
thereby to take greater reexive control over them and to work imaginatively
with, and indeed to compose, these social dimensions of music in
performance or rehearsal, in the way that members of a music ensemble act
in relation to themselves or an audience, or in the relationship with
commissioning bodies and other such institutions. Just one of the things this
makes possible is to bring gender, race, class and other aspects into the
foreground of our consciousness about how music proceeds, and in this way
it also makes it possible to experiment with and potentially to transform the
ways in which music is social including the ways in which differences of
class, ethnicity, race and gender are played out in music. The challenge
posed is to take responsibility for these undercurrent realities, that are so
rarely acknowledged: what would music-making concert life, performance,
the inuential canons look and sound like if they were organised differently
in these regards?

Thats my contribution to a new kind of aesthetics. And in fact Ive just co-
edited a book called Improvisation and Social Aesthetics 19 (#footnote19_3bys595)
in which were trying to say that we should increasingly think of the aesthetic
as something that is itself immanently social a stance that has for centuries
been unthinkable in philosophical aesthetics. There are a number of ways to
do this, as we show in the book: we should be pluralistic when rethinking
how the aesthetic is entangled in social processes. At the same time, let me
afrm that the contributions of major women thinkers of our time Judith
Butler, Donna Haraway, Chantal Mouffe, Marilyn Strathern, Anna Tsing, Jane
Bennett, Erin Manning, to name a few are also very precious, and we must
use their work. Im sure they bear on what you do as a composer; I know
they inform what Ashley does as a composer. Thats also tremendously
important.

JH: Thats a good summary of the homework that we all have to do and its
instantly usable!

This text is the edited transcript of a conversation by Skype on 20th


April 2017 between Georgina Born in Cambridge, and Juliana
Hodkinson in Berlin.

1. https://griddarmstadt.wordpress.com (https://griddarmstadt.wordpress.com)
2. https://voicerepublic.com/talks/gender-relations-in-new-music-workshop-
(#footnoteref1_5ztifxi)

presentation (https://voicerepublic.com/talks/gender-relations-in-new-music-workshop-
(#footnoteref2_u5el5k3)

presentation)

https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/maerzmusik/programm_mm/mm17_programm_gesamt/mm17_veranstaltungsdetail_195989.php
3. Thomas Schfer (Darmstdter Ferienkurse), Bjrn Gottstein (Donaueschingen Musiktage),
Lars Petter Hagen (outgoing director of Ultima, Oslo), Berno Odo Polzer (MaerzMusik,
(#footnoteref3_seqez9l)

Berlin), and Graham Mackenzie (hcmf, UK).


4. Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-
Garde (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995); Born, On musical
(#footnoteref4_9702q35)

mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity, twentieth century music, 2, 1 (2005).

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5. Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke, and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005).
6. Born, Uncertain Vision.
(#footnoteref5_fr60goi)

7. A&R: Artists and Repertoire.


(#footnoteref6_mcq88ui)

8. See the work of, inter alia, Amy Beal, Gasia Ouzounian, Beate Kutschke, Amy Cimini, Amy
(#footnoteref7_27bjaro)

Bauer, Robert Adlington, Ben Piekut, Eric Drott, Sumanth Gopinath and Martin Scherzinger.
(#footnoteref8_zp1ym1p)

9. See the European Research Council funded research program Music, Digitisation,
Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies: http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk
(#footnoteref9_5rk0af9)

(http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk).

10. See Georgina Born and Kyle Devine, Music technology, gender and class: Digitization,
educational and social change in Britain, twentieth century music, 12, 2 (2015): 135-172;
(#footnoteref10_hugtyyr)

and for wider discussion of the gendering of electronic music, see the special issue of the
Contemporary Music Review, 35, 1 (2016) entitled Gender, Creativity and Education in
Digital Musics and Sound Art, eds. Georgina Born and Kyle Devine.
11. See http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/ethnographies/montreal/
(http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/ethnographies/montreal/). See also Patrick Valiquet,
(#footnoteref11_uj2mf3x)

Technologies of genre: Digital distinctions in Montreal, in S. Emmerson (ed.), The Ashgate


Research Companion to Electronic Music (London: Routledge, forthcoming); Valiquet, Le
numrique est partout: Locating the digital in Montreal's contemporary music and sound art
scenes (2015): public report for the research program, Music, Digitisation, Mediation:
Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies. http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/Valiquet-Montreal-report-AS-WEBSITE-150515.pdf
(http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Valiquet-Montreal-report-AS-

WEBSITE-150515.pdf).

12. Valiquet argues that several women composers and educators appear to have been
sidelined in the received history of electroacoustic music in Montreal. The most prominent is
(#footnoteref12_gkb723u)

Marcelle Deschnes who, after training at the University of Montreal and then with Francois
Bayle, Guy Reibel and others from the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris, returned to
take up a research position at Laval University in Quebec City, and then became the rst
professor of electroacoustic composition at the University of Montreal. When Deschnes
was in Paris in 1968-69 she studied alongside Micheline Coulombe-Saint-Marcoux, who
went on to establish electroacoustic teaching at the Montreal Conservatoire, but died
prematurely in 1985. A 1991 survey by former UdeM musicology professor Marie-Thrse
Lefebvre includes entries on several other women of this generation, and demonstrates that
when electroacoustic technology was rst taken up by composers in Quebec it was
understood by many as an inherently feminine medium. See Patrick Valiquet, Animating the
object: Marcelle Deschnes and acousmatic education in Quebec, Organised Sound, 22, 3
(forthcoming); Marie-Thrse Lefebvre, La Cration musicale des femmes au Qubec
(Montreal: Les ditions du remue-mnage, 1991): 76-88.
13. Georgina Born, Music and the materialization of identities, Jnl of Material Culture, 16, 4
(2011): 1-13.
(#footnoteref13_era9ak9)

14. Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014).
(#footnoteref14_aq8hbe3)

15. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
(London: Routledge, 1999).
(#footnoteref15_14klcby)

16. Gatens and Lloyd op cit., p. 73.


17. See Christabel Stirling, Sound art / street life: Tracing the social and political effects of
(#footnoteref16_i5kpfmm)

sound installations in London, Jnl of Sonic Studies, 11 (2015); Beyond the dance oor?
(#footnoteref17_8e8bx9a)

Gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music, Contemporary Music
Review, 35, 1 (2016): 130-149.
18. On this framework see Born, Music and the materialization of identities; Born, Music and
the social, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert & R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music (2nd
(#footnoteref18_xj0y176)

ed.) (London: Routledge, 2012): 261-274; and Born, After relational aesthetics: Improvised
music, the social, and (re)theorising the aesthetic, in Born, E. Lewis & W. Straw (eds.),
Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 32-58.
19. Born, Lewis and Straw (eds.), Improvisation and Social Aesthetics.
(#footnoteref19_3bys595)

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