Sally Macarthur

The Woman Composer, New Music and Neoliberalism

This article focuses on the discrimination against women composers in the concert programming of Australian new music. The paper argues that the emphasis given to the individual, coupled with such technologies of neoliberalism as gender mainstreaming, exacerbates the problem. The New Music Network (NMN), comprising several government-funded new music performance groups, is discussed. The NMN is shown to perform more music by men in a situation that is worse in 2013 than it was in the 1990s. The article suggests that the neoliberal instruments of gender mainstreaming and the ‘exceptional woman composer’ syndrome neutralize music and strengthen the hegemony of music by male composers. Focusing on the example of the Restrung New Music Festival in Brisbane, 2012, the article questions whether positive discrimination is an effective way to improve the representation of womens music in the concert venue, concluding that it does not have long-term benefits. From this analysis, the article suggests that neoliberalism is hostile to visible forms of prejudice and discrimination. The article signals that the way forward is to work with the imagination rather than attempting to find concrete solutions. Activating imaginative thought processes is enabled by the concepts of ‘nomad’ and ‘becoming-woman’, and ‘intra-action’ and ‘gender-and-music-in-the-making’. These processes have the potential to subvert the practices rooted in neoliberal ideologies. This is argued to be a move towards an account of feminist subjectivity that is politically empowering.

The Rise and Fall, and the Rise (Again) of Feminist Research in Music: ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’

This article reports from a two-phase study that involved an analysis of the extant literature followed by a three-part survey answered by seventy-one women composers. Through these theoretical and empirical data, the authors explore the relationship between gender and music’s symbolic and cultural capital. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is employed to understand the gendered experiences of the female composers who participated in the survey. The article suggests that these female composers have different investments in gender but that, overall, they reinforce the male habitus given that the female habitus occupies a subordinate position in relation to that of the male. The findings of the study also suggest a connection between contemporary feminism and the attitudes towards gender held by the participants. The article concludes that female composers classify themselves, and others, according to gendered norms and that these perpetuate the social order in music in which the male norm dominates.

A thousand dissonances : music research and the nomadic female composer

In her appraisal of the biologically essentialist, economically rationalist cultural climate ‘at the end of postmodernism’, Rosi Braidotti announces that ‘new master narratives have taken over’ which are driven by the imperatives of money markets or by genetic science (2005, 169). Accordingly, these new narratives are marked by different forms of determinism but their joint impact has been both to inflate and reify ‘difference’. In Braidotti’s view, the neo-liberal brand of these narratives espouses a ‘differential ideology’ that celebrates rather than denies difference but at the same time defines it in a very deterministic manner. She suggests that differences are indexed on a hierarchy of mutually exclusive binary oppositions: ‘‘‘us and them’’ on a micro as well as macro scale’ (2005, 169). In this paper, I will suggest that the ideology of the hierarchy remains firmly entrenched in music research. The reassertion of master narratives has given rise to a new form of positivism. Paradoxically, the majority of those working in musicology would not attribute this phenomenon to postmodernism having reached a saturation point. Unlike most other disciplines, musicology has remained relatively immune to postmodernism and its embrace of marginal groups, with the exception of the ‘new’ musicology (North America) and the ‘critical’ musicology (United Kingdom). The swing back to a neo-conservative way of thinking for the majority in musicology is licence to do business as usual. The impact of neo-liberalism on the ‘new’ or ‘critical’ musicology, however, is more unsettling, for it would seem that with the splintering of subjectivity into myriad parts*in which multiple differences such as ethnicity, sexuality, class and religion are mapped onto the category ‘woman’*researchers have begun to abandon the study of women’s classical music in favour of research on other types of music for fear of being branded ‘essentialist’. Thousands of dissonances seem to have ricocheted off musicological walls over the past decade. With the hindsight of postmodernism, I ask whether it is possible to resurrect the female composer of late twentiethand early twenty-first-century classical music as an important topic to study without re-invoking the ideology of essentialism. How do the conservative neo-liberalist discourses described by Braidotti (and others) play a part in shaping gender differences through music? Is it possible to theorise difference without succumbing to the hierarchical imperatives of neo-liberalism? Is it possible to talk about the category ‘female composer’*which remains a marginal group*without reducing it to the ideology of ‘sameness’? I will begin this paper by sketching the ways in which the larger framing paradigms have impacted on our thinking in music research. For all the perceived negative impact that poststructuralism may have had on the category ‘woman’, my critique of the ‘woman composer’ debate will demonstrate the importance, nonetheless, of operating within a

Transposing Musicology: An Essay in Honour of Elizabeth Wood

Elizabeth Wood at the Women’s March on Washington, 21 January 2017Elizabeth Wood (nee Cranwell) is a native of Australia and an independent scholar who has resided in New York since the late 1970s....

Renovating Music Analysis

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, women composers have continued to be sidelined, with some of the research suggesting an inbuilt culture of sexism and bias against their music.1 Against this backdrop, these three recently published books potentially counter this negativity. Each shines a radiant light on the rich and diverse contribution to music by women, showing how they are changing the fields of composition, music analysis and musicology. Two of the books, Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music by Judy Lochhead and Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft, engage close readings of music, locating themselves in the field of music theory/music analysis. Both deal with twentieth-century and twenty-first-century female composers in the western classical tradition. The third book, Gender, Age and Musical Creativity edited by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton, covers a range of historical periods, genres and musical styles. This book overlaps the body of work in critical musicology as well as more broadly reaching out to gender, queer and cultural studies. It makes a unique contribution by extending the categories routinely used to study music—gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality—to include the rarely addressed category of age. It questions the

The Ubiquitous Century: Music and the Digital Arts

In the contemporary tertiary music institution, scholarship is conducted as a knowledgemaking enterprise, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the categories it generates. In Samson’s view, ‘categories are selective, and their boundaries, like all boundaries, exclude as they select’. However, these categories are also porous. In what might be described as the ubiquitous twenty-first century, in which we barely notice the oversaturation of technologies and musics in our world, these boundaries are increasingly—and continuously—open to the forces of change which make them ‘vulnerable, and also contingent’. In the manner of a Deleuzian machinic assemblage, such categories are dynamic and emergent. According to Hope and Ryan, there is no longer a sharply delineated separation between the physical and virtual worlds, or between the sign and its referent. In accordance with the category of ‘ubiquitous computing’, such divisions are challenged: the ordinariness of computing in the day-to-day world is a sign ‘of the fuller integration of society with technology’. Similarly, as Kassabian argues, the ubiquity of listening changes the very nature of listening. It produces a distributed subjectivity that takes place across a network of relations and music media, and music is as much an active agent in this network as is the human subject. The authors of Digital Arts write about the ways in which the rapidly changing world of art has been, and continues to be, completely transformed by digitality. The author of Ubiquitous Listening suggests that the changing nature of listening is brought about by the ubiquitous world of music that fills our daily

Dialoguing with the Divided Self as the Outline of a Becoming-Woman in Music

Abstract For more than 30 years, I have been researching contemporary womens classical music and have concluded that in the current time, it is difficult to believe in the utopian world for women in music that had once been imagined in the decade of the 1990s. According to Roffe, however, in Deleuzian thought utopia is not really about hope or an ideal society, but about who we are, and what we are capable of, here and now. In this paper, through a dialogue with the divided self, or what Deleuze refers to as the ‘dividual’, I will generate some thoughts about the kinds of actions that a dividual is able to produce at different stages of her work as a musician and an activist feminist. Specifically, the paper will aim to develop a new conception of subjectivity in order to sow the seeds for new ways of thinking about women in music. It will ask two questions: who acts, and who is the subject of that action?; and, how do new ways of thinking transform real world situations? The first question leads to the theme in Deleuze and Guattaris work of ‘a people to come’ or ‘becoming-woman’, the latter a concept that disrupts the male form of subjectivity, challenging the emphasis on ‘man’ as the standard by which all beings and things are measured. The paper will map the question leads to a demonstration of how the self, conceived as a dividual, is able to make an intervention into the nature of subjectivity while at the same time gesturing towards the ways in which the practices of musicology and feminist studies might be transformed.

THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND INTRA-ACTION IN THE MUSIC OF ANNE BOYD

Abstract Anne Boyd (b. 1946) is recognised in the public domain as one of Australias distinguished composers. Her work belongs in the Western art music tradition and emerges out of her entanglements with the Australian landscape and the music of South-East Asia. This article considers what some of these entanglements have produced and, in so doing, shifts the emphasis from questions of reflection and representation—in which Boyds music might be understood to reflect in a representationalist mode those aspects of her identity that are bound with the Australian landscape—to exploring in a performative manner how her music offers glimpses into different aspects of the creative process in action. I consider Boyds selected musical works and critique various biographical writings on Boyd, drawing on the work of Deleuze which I entangle with Barads concept of intra-action. My aim is to offer a different model for thinking about the network of mutual engagements that are coimplicated in the musics becoming. I view Boyds music as a becoming-woman, an animate flow and a dynamic process of intra-activity.

Music and Violence

The subject matter of Suzanne Cusick’s three articles and the book by Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan is about violence and its connection with music. In some of its most disturbing moments this recent research asks us to imagine what it would be like to be tortured by music, to be outfitted with a blindfold, sound-suppressing earmuffs and an anal plug, shackled, and flown to ‘a ‘‘dark prison’’ filled with deafening western music’. Cusick’s research describes in chilling detail the US government’s use of sound and music as a battlefield weapon and as a form of coercion in the interrogation of detainees in the Global War on Terror. She asks provocative questions about the nature of music when it is made to behave ‘as an acoustical medium of evil’. She wonders whether musicologists are sufficiently equipped to analyse music that functions as sheer (unrelenting and deafening) sound, and whether its use as a tool of torture transforms it from music to not-music that,

Composing the ‘Woman’ Composer

There was a time, not so long ago, when the names of women composers were virtually unknown. Second-wave feminism in the 1970s marks a dynamic moment when this begins to change. A women’s music history is gradually assembled and establishes the fact that music composition is not solely a male domain. It shows that women are not only present but are worthy of celebration in that domain. Pendle’s annotated bibliography on women’s music, compiled in the first decade of the twenty-first century, attests to this fact. Its verdict is that women’s music has blossomed into a thriving field of knowledge. Earlier than Pendle, Wood observes that women composers ‘have become more visible, more accomplished, and more numerous’. But, as some researchers are also warning, it is still too early to be complacent: women’s music destined for the concert hall struggles to be heard. Musicological work on women’s music therefore remains an ongoing necessity: it