Writers and scholars define the period of first-wave feminism in the Western world in various ways. For some the first ‘wave’ grew out of the demands for equality from women during the French Revolution, for others it had its roots in the Women’s Rights Convention in New York, United States, in 1848. However, it is generally agreed that the period 1880–1920 saw the height of feminist activity from a wide variety of women in Britain, Europe, and the United States.¹

Women organized together to demand rights to employment and education, and most agreed that the right to suffrage, being able to vote and take part in political power, was fundamentally important. By 1920, certain women in Canada, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the United States, had been granted the right to vote. But full suffrage was not granted to women in the UK until 1928, in France not until 1944, and Italy not until 1945, for example.²

This was a time that saw the appearance of the ‘new woman’ in much Western discourse. Commentators and writers, both male and female, approved or disapproved of this independent, radicalized, disruptive woman and persistently argued about what became known as the ‘woman question’.³ For some, the ‘new woman’ upset the commonly perceived attributes of the accommodating, subdued woman of the time. For others, she presented an exciting freedom and sense of opportunity.

Many of the women involved in the worlds of music drew inspiration from the political and social battles raging around them, and chose to fight against the barriers they faced in gaining access to equality of opportunity, whether as instrumentalists, singers, teachers, scholars, composers, or embracing any mixture of the above, especially if they wished to be regarded as professionals.⁴ As far as composers are concerned, many fought for a comprehensive music education and embraced large-scale, complex genres to be heard in the public sphere. Others remained within their accepted sphere of the private performance space and the small-scale genre such as the song or piano piece, although often pushing the boundaries of these expectations.

While some women fought solitary battles, others grouped together to find strength in numbers and comradeship. An interesting example is the Society of Women Musicians in the UK.⁵ This organization was formed in 1911 by the singer Gertrude Eaton (1861–1939) and the composer and musicologist Marion Scott (1877–1953).⁶ The establishment of such a society was doubtless influenced by other contemporary women’s organizations, although the composer and activist Katharine Eggar (1874–1961), chair of the inaugural meeting, trod careful ground in her opening speech, distancing the organization from those fighting for the vote:

As well as Eaton, Eggar, and Scott, the women at this first meeting were a mixture of composers and performers and of amateur and professional musicians from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, including the composers Ethel Barns (1874–1948), Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979), Cécile Hartog (1857–1940), and Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), who became the society’s first president. Other early composer members included Florence Marshall (1843–1922), Ethel Smyth (1857–1944), and Maude Valérie White (1855–1937). Exploration of some of these women’s careers and music, and of their European and North American contemporaries, demonstrates the diversity and power of women composers’ work at this time. Much of this music is largely unheard in the early twenty-first century, regardless of its popularity, acclaim, and success during the composer’s lifetime.

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)

Ethel Smyth was to become the best-known British female composer of her generation. In fact, in the later twentieth century, for a while she was regarded as the only British woman composer of her generation. Smyth came from a well-to-do upper-middle-class military family and undertook most of her musical education in Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century, despite opposition from her family. Suffering from growing hearing loss from the second decade of the twentieth century, she started publishing her memoirs, writing for journals and newspapers as well as broadcasting, and fighting for equal opportunities for women orchestral instrumentalists. Her memoirs tell the story of her own career and her battles to obtain a hearing for her music, particularly her six operas, which she regarded as the core of her output. Smyth’s writings tend to reinforce the misleading idea that she was, as a woman, a lone, exceptional figure fighting against the patriarchal musical establishment.⁸

Certainly Smyth, both in her determined self-belief and in the sheer power and assurance of her musical voice, was a uniquely memorable, disruptive, and inspirational figure. She was also one of the most politically engaged women composers of her generation. After meeting (and falling in love with) Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Smyth dedicated two years of her remarkable energy to the cause of the suffragettes, as they came to be known. As well as civil disobedience (in her case throwing stones through a cabinet minister’s windows) and experiencing subsequent brief imprisonment, she also produced music for the movement, most notably Songs of Sunrise for chorus and optional orchestra (1911), which used her stirring suffragette anthem, The March of the Women, as a final movement.

Smyth’s music is often characterized by a propulsive energy and exuberance, but her involvement with Pankhurst and the WSPU also produced her poignant, reflective, and strangely restless love song, ‘Possession’ (Ethel Carnie), dedicated to Pankhurst, the second of her Three Songs (1913) for mezzo or baritone and piano. The last of this collection, ‘On the Road’ (Carnie), a more overtly militant song, was dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst’s radical daughter Christabel and also briefly quotes from The March of the Women. Smyth was always drawn to the human voice, whether in her robust, early Mass in D major (1891), the inventive and elegant Songs (Henri de Régnier, and anon.) for mezzo or baritone, violin, viola, cello, flute, harp, and percussion (1908), or her intense and momentous late orchestral and vocal work The Prison (1929–30), a setting of a philosophical text by her frequent collaborator and only male lover, Henry Brewster.

Brewster was also the librettist for the work which can be regarded as one of her crowning achievements, the three-act grand opera The Wreckers (1902–4) or, as it was originally conceived, Les Naufrageurs.⁹ This is a mighty and unjustly overlooked work, which had a troubled performance history. Following a premiere in Leipzig in 1906 (where it was given in German translation as Der Strandrecht) and production at Prague later that year, it was not performed in Britain until 1909. During Smyth’s lifetime it was performed again in Britain the following year (1910) and then not until 1931 at the Royal Opera House and finally in 1939 at Sadler’s Wells.

For many years after Smyth’s death The Wreckers was largely forgotten. In 1994 it received a concert performance at the BBC Promenade Concerts in London.¹⁰ More recently the work has received fully staged productions at Bard Summerscape in the United States (2015)¹¹ and at the Glyndebourne Festival in the UK (2022). In 1906 the British critic J. A. Fuller-Maitland travelled to Leipzig to hear The Wreckers. More than twenty years later, in his memoirs, he wrote:

The Wreckers was Smyth’s third opera. (Smyth’s two earlier operas were Fantasio (1892–4) and Der Wald (1899–1901), both premiered in Germany.) The Wreckers exudes confidence, and compositional authority, gripping the audience from the outset with its dramatically tempestuous overture, which was widely performed as a concert piece. The story is as dramatic as Smyth’s music. Set in an eighteenth-century Cornish fishing community, it centres around the impoverished villagers luring ships onto the rocks to plunder cargoes. Set against this morally ambiguous and intensely religious community are the lovers, Thirza and Mark. Thirza is married to the village headman, but it is for the lovers’ act of lighting warning beacons to save ships that approach the coast, that she and Mark are judged by their community, with tragic results. Their second-act love duet is as thrilling, involved, and intense as Fuller-Maitland remembered.¹³

Liza Lehmann (1862–1918)

Smyth had had to fight hard for her operas, and indeed her other works, to be heard, battles compellingly recounted in her memoirs. Her contemporaries Maude Valérie White and Liza Lehmann published equally captivating memoirs. Lehmann’s were published posthumously in 1919, while White’s appeared in two volumes in 1914 and 1932.¹⁴ Lehmann presents herself as a fiercely professional musician and composer, while also taking pains to focus on her roles as wife and mother. White’s memoirs, rather like her music, are full of passion, exuberance, and her enduring love of travel and new experiences.

Both Lehmann and White achieved resounding success as songwriters. White was at the height of her acclaim in the 1880s and 1890s, while Lehmann, who turned to composition after retiring as a concert singer, achieved her most popular success, the song cycle In a Persian Garden, at the turn of the twentieth century. In her essays, Smyth is disparaging about women songwriters, writing of ‘the few women composers who have contrived to get their songs printed’.¹⁵ This does not reflect the experience of many of her contemporaries whose songs were not only published but also far more widely distributed and heard than Smyth’s own music. Lehmann’s In a Persian Garden, for example, was issued in numerous editions and arrangements and was being heard in concert and on the radio well into the twentieth century.

In a Persian Garden, written for four voices and piano accompaniment, set Lehmann’s own selection of passages from the Rubáiyát of the twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám, in the translation by Edward FitzGerald which was so popular at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Lehmann produced a large-scale, continuous song cycle that falls into clearly defined sections linked by recurring themes. Most sections use the singers as soloists, but there are also a duet and four quartets. The solo vocal writing moves between recitative-like declamation and more lyrical song, accompanied by rich chromatic harmonies and expansive piano writing. Contemporary commentators were struck by what they saw as the modernity of Lehmann’s harmonic language. Edward Dickinson wrote that she ‘often exhibits a startling boldness in the use of dissonant harmonies’; he considered that ‘occasionally she almost exceeds the bounds of the permissible’.¹⁷ The musical language and unusual musical forces made it initially difficult for Lehmann to publish this work. But her friend Angelina Goetz, a musical salon hostess and herself a composer, arranged a performance which was favourably reviewed by Hermann Klein, music critic for the Sunday Times. The work was quickly taken up by musicians and by the publisher Metzler, rapidly reaching appreciative audiences throughout Britain and the United States. The critic Edwin Evans, writing seven years after the first performances, felt that ‘its phenomenal success places it almost beyond the sphere of ordinary discussion’.¹⁸

Lehmann went on to create further successful song cycles as well as being commissioned by Frank Curzon to produce the score for a ‘musical farce’, Sergeant Brue, with a libretto by Owen Hall (pseudonym of James Davis) and lyrics by J. Hickory Wood. This was an undoubted success, playing in London for 290 performances between 1904 and 1905.¹⁹ Her opera Everyman was staged at the Shaftesbury Theatre in December 1915 by the Beecham Opera Company in a double bill with Debussy’s Enfant Prodigue.²⁰ By this time, Lehmann had fallen out of critical favour and one reviewer of the work dismissed its creator as a composer of ‘songs and quartets touched with a pretty feminine grace, a charming sentiment, and a sense, if not of humour, at least of coquettish fun’.²¹ Everyman is an austere and intense work which is long overdue a revival.

Maude Valérie White (1855–1937)

The composer Maude Valérie White also continued to create compelling music for several decades after the height of her success at the end of the nineteenth century, despite falling out of critical favour in the earlier twentieth century. White’s song writing is notable for her ability to capture and distil the emotion she found in a wide variety of texts, in many different languages. But, as with her friend Lehmann, White’s focus on song has ensured her absence from serious consideration (with a few exceptions).²²

White did in fact compose music in genres other than song, including some incidental music, a ballet The Enchanted Heart (1912–13) and an unfinished opera. In 1898 she was commissioned by Henry Irving to write the incidental music for The Medicine Man, a ‘melodramatic comedy’ by White’s close friend Robert Hichens and the journalist H. D. Traill, which received twenty-seven performances that year.²³ White did not enjoy the experience of composing for the stage:

In their memoirs both Lehmann and Hichens remembered White at work on her opera, Smaranda. With typical self-deprecation, White recalled apropos the work’s genesis:

White spent many years working on the opera, and surviving manuscripts show not only that it has much to offer but that she came very close to finishing it.²⁶

However, undoubtedly White was drawn almost exclusively to creating the single song, sometimes with several published together in groups, but never as song cycles. One of her most perfectly judged songs is her setting of Byron’s lyric ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’, published by Chappell in 1888. This song has a typically ambiguous harmonic structure, a haunting melody built with characteristic simplicity around the interval of a minor third, and a compelling rhythmic impulse. Passages of full chordal piano accompaniment, the use of decoration in the vocal line, rich harmonies using added sixths and sevenths or diminished sevenths, dramatic crescendos which suddenly cut down to piano, all add to the fervour that White poured into her work, creating a beautifully crafted and much-loved song.

While ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’ has found its way into the repertoire of a few late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century singers,²⁷ other songs by White remain unheard, for example her stark and absorbing Four Songs from Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1885), or her sultry and seductive D’Annunzio setting, ‘Isaotta Blanzesmano’ (1904). When the publisher Tito Ricordi heard this song, he described it as like an opium dream.²⁸ The languid, almost impressionistic quality of ‘Isaotta Blanzesmano’ was a departure for White, one which can be heard in later songs such as her setting of Verlaine’s ‘Le Foyer’ (1924).²⁹ Stephen Banfield described this song as ‘one of the few Debussy-like songs by an English composer’.³⁰

White’s songs were frequently heard in musical salons such as those hosted by patrons like the Speyers or Frank Leo Schuster. Some of Smyth’s chamber works were also occasionally heard at these kinds of venues, although she does not seem to have appreciated the opportunities such occasions offered her.³¹ However, for White and many other composers – women and men – these semi-private spaces offered vibrant and welcome opportunities for the performance of music that was not embraced by the musical mainstream.

White also frequently organized public concerts of her own music. In 1905, for example, she put on a concert of her songs at London’s Bechstein Hall. The performers who took part in this event reflect the esteem in which White was held by important figures in the British musical world; they included Percy Grainger and Roger Quilter as pianists, and the singers Gervase Elwes, Harry Plunket Greene, Robert Kennerley Rumford, Elsie Swinton, and Maude Warrender.³² In her memoirs White noted that ‘from a financial point of view it was one of the most successful concerts I ever gave in London’.³³ The reviewer for the Times summarized White’s achievement as a composer:

Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944)

A composer whose music was also frequently heard at musical salons and in private homes, as well as being cultivated in numerous American music clubs, was the Frenchwoman Cécile Chaminade, who was president of the British Society of Women Composers in 1914. Best known for her piano music, Chaminade was herself a pianist much in demand, performing her own works as part of her extensive concert tours. Like both Lehmann and White, Chaminade wrote music in genres other than songs and piano pieces. Her early output includes several orchestral works, such as her Suite d’orchestre, Op. 20 (1881), the symphonic ballet Callirhoë, Op. 37 (1888), the Concertstück, Op. 40 for piano and orchestra (1888), or the dramatic symphony Les amazones (1888).

Marcia J. Citron, largely through her analysis of gendered readings of Chaminade’s choice of genre in her Piano Sonata, Op. 21 (1895), has clearly demonstrated the care and skill with which Chaminade crafted her music.³⁵ But despite (or maybe because of) her popularity, during her lifetime there were conflicting assessments of Chaminade’s work, particularly in relation to the fact that she was a woman, and what was therefore expected of her music. For example, in 1901 the American critic Henry T. Finck wrote: ‘Mlle Chaminade’s face is said to have “a boyish look”, and there is no specific feminine tenderness in her songs.’³⁶ Yet just over a decade later, the Canadian writer Florence Withrow described Chaminade as

Such assessments show just how deeply embedded physical appraisal of a woman’s appearance was (and indeed, it still is) in assessment of her musical work.

There is no doubt that, as a talented and engaging pianist, Chaminade was able to take every opportunity to programme and showcase her own music. In a similar way, White would accompany her songs, often improvising a much more complex and involved piano part. Lehmann, until she retired, would frequently sing her own songs, and after her retirement she would accompany other singers in her work.

Augusta Holmès (1847–1903)

Although she is now best remembered for her compositions in large-scale genres, Augusta Holmès was well known by her contemporaries for her participation as pianist and singer in musical salons in Paris. This is not surprising, as it was (and largely still is) for canonical genres such as opera, cantatas, or orchestral music that composers were judged as successful and indeed professional. As with Chaminade, commentators – both her contemporaries and those writing later in the twentieth century – focused on Holmès’s appearance, often linking this to her music. Ethel Smyth, writing about Holmès nearly twenty years after her death, remembered that she had originally dismissed Holmès as a woman whose reputation was mainly based on ‘songs and seduction’. On hearing her songs, Smyth changed her mind about the quality of Holmès’s music, describing her as ‘this girl’ (Holmès was nearly ten years older than Smyth) ‘who, electing to live the life of a Bohemian, was at the same time a poetess, a superb musician, a classical scholar, a patriot of the orthodox Irish type, and an all-round revolutionary’.³⁸ But even Smyth played into the obsession with Holmès’s appearance, writing that she was ‘physically entrancing … golden hair, dazzlingly fair skin, and beautiful grey eyes’. Holmès once said, ‘I have the soul of a man in the body of a woman’, an assessment that may have reassured critics who applauded what they saw as the ‘virility’ of her music, something they did not expect in music created by a woman.³⁹

After her death in 1903 at the age of fifty-six, Holmès, like Smyth, became better known as an unconventional personality rather than for her music, which still remains little known or heard (although Holmès and her music have featured more than once in Radio 3’s Composers of the Week, most recently alongside Henri Duparc).⁴⁰ Of Irish descent, she grew up in and near Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1871. Like most women from the middle and upper classes, she had been discouraged (in her case by her mother) from training as a musician, but studied privately; her composition tutors included César Franck. She was at the height of her success during the 1880s and 1890s, when she had numerous high-profile and well-reviewed performances of her orchestral and choral music in Paris and elsewhere in France.⁴¹ These works included Les argonautes, for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra (1881); the symphonic poem Irelande (1885); and Ludus pro patria, a ‘symphonic ode’ for chorus and orchestra (1888). Holmès’s fourth opera La montagne noir, written in 1884, was finally performed at the Paris Opera over a decade later, in 1895.

As Jann Pasler has shown, Holmès can justifiably be – and frequently was – regarded as a fiercely independent ‘new woman’. Like Smyth, she did not marry her male lover (the writer Catulle Mendès). Unlike Smyth, however, she lived with her lover; and she had five children by him. Holmès and Mendès split in 1885 and it appears that he (and his sister) took care of the children and that he supported Holmès financially.⁴²

Holmès’s music is strongly narrative, often relating to fervent ideas about nationalism and patriotism. She wrote many of her own texts and libretti, setting them to robust and resolute music, often in large-scale, ambitious genres. Among her most ambitious large-scale works was her Ode Triomphale, written for the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris (marking the centenary of the French Revolution). This required 1,200 performers and lasted 90 minutes. Holmès not only wrote both words and music but also designed the sets and costumes. The work was a success, with the composer Camille Saint-Saëns writing: ‘We needed more than a man to celebrate the Centenary; in the absence of a god impossible to encounter, the French Republic has found what it needed: a Muse!’⁴³

Holmès’s La montagne noire was her only opera to reach the stage and it did not receive the critics’ approval in the same way as her orchestral and choral music. In her thought-provoking article about the work, examining ways of exploring female authorship, Karen Henson suggests that contemporary commentators were uneasy with the addition of exoticism to the nationalism for which Holmès had been previously praised.⁴⁴

After Holmès’s early death, the unsigned correspondent for the British newspaper, the Globe, recognized the acclaim with which she was held, while still regarding her music as unusual among the work of women composers for its strength and grandeur:

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)

The critical reception of the younger French composer Marie-Juliette (known as Lili) Boulanger and her music was, like that of Holmès, closely bound up with her physical presence; but in Boulanger’s case it was and is seen through the lens of her tragic life story.⁴⁶ Boulanger was a musically talented child, born into a family of musicians. Despite extensive ill health, she worked hard to develop her strikingly individual musical voice, and in 1913 became the first woman to win the prestigious first prize in musical composition, the Prix de Rome.⁴⁷ The Prix de Rome, a scholarship for arts students, offered the winner the funding to stay and work in Rome for a period of three to five years. Boulanger also received the welcome offer of a publishing contract with Ricordi and the consequent regular income it provided.⁴⁸

In their article on Boulanger published in 1930, Paul Landormy and Frederick Martens display a typical interpretation of Boulanger’s work aesthetic, informed by their knowledge of her early death at the age of twenty-four: ‘Her sojourn in Rome was a time of intensive production, and, incidentally, from that time until her last day she never ceased to produce with febrile haste, as though she feared that she would be unable to disclose all that her heart contained.’⁴⁹ In her diaries, as Caroline Potter has shown, while Boulanger frequently writes about her ill health, she also writes about her enjoyment of balls and parties.⁵⁰

In her short life, Boulanger created a considerable number of memorable and striking musical works, such as the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel (Francis Jammes) for tenor or soprano and piano (1914), which has entered the repertoire in performance, or the heartfelt and inventive song ‘Dans la immense tristesse’ (Bertha Galeon de Calone) for alto and piano (1916). Potter suggests that this song ‘has few parallels in the solo vocal literature as a study of despair’.⁵¹ The voice (or voices) have a central role in Boulanger’s output. She wrote numerous works on a more complex and larger scale than the song or song cycle, including her Prix de Rome winning cantata Faust et Hélène (Eugène Adenis) for mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, and orchestra (1913), or her lost opera La princesse Maleine (Maurice Maeterlinck).

Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979)

Seven years older than Boulanger, the British composer and viola player Rebecca Clarke had a very different (as well as much longer) life.⁵² Clarke’s father was American and she eventually settled in the United States, living long enough to see a renewed interest in her compositional work during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.

Her compositional output is not large, and she composed almost nothing after the early 1940s, with most of her output appearing, whether published or not, in the 1920s. She produced no orchestral or large-scale choral or operatic works. However, her instrumental chamber works include several in mainstream genres, such as the sonata. This is doubtless one of the reasons, in addition to their sheer power and assurance, why music such as her Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921) have become established items, frequently recorded and heard on the concert platform.⁵³

Clarke studied violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1903 to 1905, followed by composition at the Royal College of Music, where she was Charles Stanford’s first woman student.⁵⁴ Both periods of study were cut short by her autocratic father, who eventually threw her out of the family home. Clarke became a self-sufficient professional viola player. She was one of the first women string players to be taken into Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall orchestra in 1912, and also worked extensively as a chamber music performer, often appearing with the cellist May Mukle (1880–1963).

Clarke’s Viola Sonata and Piano Trio were both runners up in the American Berkshire Musical Festival of Chamber Music, sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.⁵⁵ In 1919, the panel judging had resulted in a draw between Clarke’s Viola Sonata and Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola and Piano. Bloch’s Suite was deemed the winner. But, as Coolidge later told Clarke about her work, ‘You should have seen the faces of the jury when it was revealed the composer was a woman.’⁵⁶

Clarke’s intimate knowledge of the viola’s capabilities and possibilities is one of the factors making her Viola Sonata such an important part of the instrument’s repertoire. From the dramatic, passionate, pentatonic opening, this is an assured and rewarding work. Despite Coolidge’s interest,⁵⁷ Clarke received little support or encouragement for her compositions. Many of these are inventive songs, some of which have also found their way into the vocal repertoire. An example that has recently attracted analytical and critical attention is her haunting and evocative setting of ‘The Seal Man’ (Masefield, 1922).⁵⁸

Amy Beach (1867–1944)

The American composer Amy Beach, like Clarke, Chaminade, and Lehmann, started her professional musical career as a performer, in her case as a pianist. She initially learned the piano from her mother, a gifted amateur pianist. Beach gave a few recitals at the age of seven, although her middle-class parents were not prepared to allow their daughter to continue this public exposure at such a young age or to train as a musician in Europe.⁵⁹ Instead, Beach took private lessons from teachers in Boston, where the family lived. As well as playing the piano she had started to compose and took some private lessons in harmony. In 1883, at the age of sixteen, Beach was allowed to make her public debut, an event that was followed by two more years of performing before her marriage to Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a doctor and amateur singer, more than twenty years older than his wife.

Like Lehmann, Beach halted her performing career after her marriage, only giving occasional recitals for charity. Nonetheless, her husband encouraged her compositional work and she appeared in print as Mrs H. H. A. Beach. After Henry Beach’s death in 1910, she resumed a public career as a pianist.

Meanwhile, however, Beach had established a considerable career and reputation as a composer. Her first work to appear in print had been a song, ‘The Rainy Day’ (Longfellow) that she had written as a teenager in 1880, and which was published by Oliver Ditson in 1883 under her maiden name of Amy Marcy Cheney. Her first work to be given an opus number was her collection of Four Songs, Op. 1, the first of which, ‘With Violets’ (Kate Vannah) was issued by Arthur P. Schmidt in 1885. This was the start of what was to become a valuable exclusive publishing relationship with Schmidt.

Beach’s success and esteem as a composer grew following the premiere of her Gaelic Symphony in 1896 at Boston’s Music Hall. After this event one of the leading American composers, also a Bostonian, George Chadwick, wrote to her:

As well as music in canonical genres, including her Mass for four voices and orchestra, Op. 5 (1890), the Violin Sonata, Op. 34 (1896), the Piano Concerto, Op. 45, and her Piano Quintet, Op. 67 (1907), Beach composed numerous successful and popular songs and piano pieces. Songs such as ‘Ecstasy’ (to her own words) from Three Songs, Op. 19 (1893), or ‘The Year’s at the Spring’, from Three Browning Songs, Op. 44 (1900), sold very well. As Adrienne Fried Block put it, ‘Song is at the core of her style.’⁶¹

Beach also wrote several character pieces, such as the complex and demanding Romance for violin and piano, Op. 23 (1893), dedicated to the American violinist Maud Powell. This work was premiered by Powell and Beach in 1893 at the Women’s Musical Congress, which formed part of the grand World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Several other works by Beach were heard at the Congress, and one reviewer (writing in the Boston Post) fell into the familiar trope of surprise at her appearance: ‘The composer … instead of being imposing and antique, was just a fresh-faced, pretty young woman, in a stylish gown, who didn’t look a bit like the regulation genius!’⁶²

Beach had also been commissioned to write an ode, initially for the dedication of the Woman’s Building at the Exposition, but eventually not heard until the opening day concert at the Woman’s Building in May 1893.⁶³ Beach’s ode for chorus and orchestra, Festival Jubilate (Psalm 100), Op. 17, was programmed in that concert alongside the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Marsch (1871) by the German composer Ingeborg von Bronsart (1840–1913), and the Dramatic Overture (first performed in 1886) by the British composer Rosalind Ellicott (1857–1924).⁶⁴

In this age of the ‘new woman’, with challenges to accepted barriers, and celebration of women’s achievements, concerts of music composed by women were a means of demonstrating the breadth of women’s musical work. Another concert where music by Beach was performed, and at which all the works programmed were written by women, was the ‘Woman in Music Grand Concert’ given by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1901. Beach’s works in that programme were her Eilende Wolken (Schiller) for alto and orchestra, Op. 18 (1892), and the ‘Graduale’ (tenor solo) from her Mass, Op. 5 (1890). Other works heard at the concert included an orchestral Ballade in D minor, Op. 35 (1901), by the American composer Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867–1972); Chaminade’s Concertstück for piano and orchestra, Op. 40 (c. 1893), and her Suite de Ballet; and Lehmann’s In a Persian Garden.⁶⁵

Such considered promotion of music by women composers was not very common in this period. Among early British examples were the two concerts of piano pieces by women given by Jane Roeckel (who composed under the pseudonym Jules de Sivrai) in 1885, in connection with the Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries. The programmes, described by The Monthly Musical Record as ‘full of interest’, included music by Jules Brissac (pseudonym of Emma Macfarren), Fanny Hensel, Kate Loder, Elizabeth Philp, Clara Schumann, Alice Mary Smith, and Agnes Zimmermann.⁶⁶ In Britain after 1911 the Society of Women Musicians gave regular concerts of music composed by its members. The first such concert, in 1912, included songs by Lucie Johnstone (c. 1860–1925), who wrote as ‘Lewis Carey’, Marion Scott, and Maude Valérie White; a vocal trio with piano quartet, Autumn Leaves (1909) by Katherine Eggar; the first two movements of Ethel Smyth’s string quartet (1902–12); the Phantasy Trio, Op. 26, for two violins and piano (1911) by Ethel Barns (1874–1948);⁶⁷ and a vocal intermezzo, In Sherwood Forest, by Lehmann.⁶⁸

Writing in the first decades of the twenty-first century, it is heartening to see that the work of so many women who were creating music in the period between 1880 and 1920 is starting to be heard again, although much still remains unheard. The music and the women who created it have begun to be given scholarly consideration, and much of the music is being both recorded and performed on the concert platform or in the opera house. However, notably, it is composers such as Beach, Boulanger, Clarke, Holmès, or Smyth, who, while they were drawn to the human voice and song, or the short piano piece, also created works in canonical genres that were heard in public spaces and that most clearly enabled their creators to be seen as professional composers worthy of a place in the mainstream, who have most readily been remembered, heard, and investigated. These composers had battles to fight in order to gain a hearing for their work, and they had to contend with being seen on the one hand as ‘one of the boys’, or on the other hand simply as never able to be as good as any of the boys.

It seems harder to find a place, whether in scholarship or in performance, for composers such as Chaminade, Lehmann, or White, who achieved resounding success, both critical and financial, and were extremely popular for much of their careers, while concentrating on smaller genres such as the solo song or short piano piece, often working within the liminal but significant performance space of the musical salon.

Influence on other composers is another marker of the accepted, mainstream composer, and most women composers of these generations are seen as working in a vacuum. Yet in many cases there are connections that can be acknowledged. The influence of White’s music can be heard in the work of many later British songwriters, such as Roger Quilter or Ralph Vaughan Williams, an area of research which still awaits detailed study. Scott Goddard ventured a remark in this direction: ‘From Maude Valérie White to Roger Quilter the line of influence stretches, thin but taut’; and Trevor Hold pointed to the admiration of both those composers for White’s songs.⁶⁹ Lehmann was one of the few women to acknowledge the inspiration she felt from the example of other women composers, writing in her memoirs:

Speaking at the start of Sisters with Transistors (2020), Lisa Rovner’s documentary film on women working in electronic music, the New York-based composer and software engineer Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945) identifies, not, as we might expect, the power of a tape machine to rework, with radical and infinite possibility, the sound palette available to the composer, but rather its promise to change the social and economic structure of music, to break apart gender differentials, and to explode power structures. This, first and foremost, is the emancipatory promise of machines that make music.

Spiegel’s musical education encompassed elements of a conventional compositional training followed by an early, and lengthy, immersion in the New York electronic studios created by Morton Subotnick in the late 1960s, and then at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, nearby in New Jersey, where she developed software for computer graphics.² Spiegel is also an artist whose music is situated at the interface with software design in creating the methods for her own compositions. She draws as much from cybernetic systems theory as she does from more formal systems of music. In the 1970s, Spiegel was an early adopter of a series of sound synthesizing systems, from the Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer – also known among the technologists there as the Alles Machine or ‘Alice’ – to the GROOVE hybrid synthesizer.³ Spiegel has used her own Music Mouse: An Intelligent Instrument (1986) compositional program – engineered for Mac, Amiga, and Atari platforms – for a number of her works, and she continued to update the software until approximately 2012. To say that Spiegel’s work has gone far is no rhetorical overstatement: Harmonices Mundi, her realization of orbital calculations made by the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, was included on a Golden Record, a copy of which is attached to two spaceships, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which are currently travelling through interstellar space.⁴ And yet she speaks of the need for liberation. Why is this?

When Spiegel identifies the capacity of technology to circumnavigate existing power structures and systems of distribution and patronage she is making a generalized statement. However, in linking this liberation to the work of women, she highlights that it is women, because they are women, who need to find new tracks to power, because their work is not served by pre-existing structures. Admittedly all composers, of whatever sex and gender, using electro-acoustic and computer technology as a compositional tool are liberated from the often huge costs of orchestras and of venue hire. However, it is important to stress that though technology itself may be neutral, its applications are not.⁵ In turning to technology-based composition, women may be able to sidestep some obstacles, but they are still operating under the weight of a doubly gendered system: firstly, the structure of social relations and institutions, as a general point; and secondly as artists working with a technology gendered as male. Music historiography contains many instances of the anxiety engendered by the collision between women and technology. Often, these examples evoke a kind of slippage in which the woman concerned becomes a little more cyborg, a little more male, than she otherwise is. One astonishing example is the description of Suzanne Ciani (b. 1946) – who uses Buchla and Moog synthesizers for much of her compositional work – as inhabiting ‘an identity that crossed boundaries, [one] that was hard to categorize, a perfect identity for a woman in a man’s world who wanted to have it all’.⁶ Kyle Gann, though an enthusiastic promoter of Pauline Oliveros, who was one of the primary members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and a hugely influential figure in electro-acoustic work and the development of social scores based upon listening, nonetheless refers to ‘the avant-garde’s premier female artist’ as a homologue – a ‘female counterpart’ to John Cage. In Gann’s essentializing appraisal, Oliveros has ‘molded her work to the supremely feminine archetype of receptivity, specifically a radical receptivity to sound’.⁷ Similarly, the later nicknaming of the Alles Machine with (what sounds like) a feminine first name (‘Alice’) invites analysis in terms of the uses of anthropomorphism in gender control. Taken together, these examples are linked by ambivalence about the presence of women around technology. They are, to adopt a phrase from the anthropologist Mary Douglas concerning purity and pollution, ‘matter out of place’.⁸

Gender and Technology

The reasons why women are drawn to electronic music remain moot. Spiegel offers a pragmatic explanation, but other composers and critics propose an affinity between female sex and the process of composing for electronic media. Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001), the British composer who sprang to fame for her work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, has suggested that women have innate qualities that suit them to both the abstract thinking and the crafty meticulousness that tape splicing, and similar actions, require. As Derbyshire told the researcher Jo Hutton:

Spiegel is right to home in on the need for new routes into music as well as the precarity of women’s status in this field. As Sherry Turkle observed, ‘the computer has no inherent gender. But computer culture is not equally neutral’.¹⁰ Oliveros provides a telling example of bias in action. ‘I had no training in electronics, mathematics or physics’, she recalled of those early Tape Center days:

Oliveros, who would go on to develop a body of electro-acoustic work that demonstrated compositional as well as technical dexterity, nevertheless had to teach herself in a process of painstaking trial and error.¹² She would work in the studio through the night, that way gaining the space to make the creative mistakes so necessary for learning. Some of her early titles reflect these creative wrong turns: The Day I Disconnected the Erase Head and Forgot to Reconnect It (1966) or A Little Noise in the System (1967–70) are two of them.

These early works also brought a defining interest in a musicological feminism to her tape compositions. Bye-Bye Butterfly (1965) is a two-channel deconstruction of an aria from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. For Oliveros, it was a way of pulling the curtain down on nineteenth-century operatic tropes of female passivity and, in its loops, a way of ‘rescuing’ the heroine from her fate. Later works, most significantly To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (1970) and the text score sound exercises collected as the Sonic Meditations (1974), are explicitly feminist strategies for tackling the silence of women in musical and public life. Oliveros wrote prolifically; her 1970 article for the New York Times, ‘And Don’t Call Them “Lady Composers”’, was an important broadside against the belittlement of women in the musical field.¹³ Read in tandem with the art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Oliveros’s text is a defining moment for a refocusing on the systemic effects of sexism.¹⁴

Although, from the mid-1970s onwards, Oliveros’s work was to turn away from a purely studio-based composition, she remained an enthusiast throughout her life. The Expanded Instrument System – a set-up of tape delays and pedals that she used in tandem with her accordion – allowed her to adjust sonic temporalities to recreate spatializing effects of architectural reverberation. Deep Listening, the practice that she defined ‘as listening to all things, all the time’, grew out of listening to sound in space: famously, Deep Listening began for her in an improvisation session conducted underground in a huge disused cistern at Fort Worden, Washington State.¹⁵ The practices that Deep Listening represents are many, but they also have clear social and societal applications; for Oliveros, one of them pertained to social justice in terms of recognizing that no sound – for this, read person – should be privileged over another. She is clear that Subotnick and Ramon Sender, the two founders of the Tape Center in 1962, were not acting with any animus against her; it is simply that she did not fit into what she has called the ‘boys’ world’ and that they – men – were bound up in systemic sexism not through choice but by acculturation.¹⁶ These memories of exclusion were, no doubt, behind some of her own feminist activities: in later life, she used her professional networks to encourage more women into learning about studio-based composition. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner details how Oliveros tried to short-circuit a female reticence to enter the technological field by circulating details of Mills College’s electronic music programme to feminist listservs.¹⁷ This situation sits parallel to the gender biases of classical music’s performance and historiography, as documented so clearly by Susan McClary, Marcia Citron, and others.¹⁸ This issue is larger than the interface of music with technology; it concerns wider cultural transmission of gender, and related issues of opportunity.

Composition, Technology, and Beyond

This chapter considers the compositional output of an indicative selection of female composers using a variety of technologies within a time frame that, loosely, stretches from post-1945 musique concrète to 1980. This period saw work created by such sound sources as early synthesizers, computers, and the studio itself (as witnessed in the work coming from worldwide experimental and radiophonic studios), as well as by composers taking existing acoustic technologies and radically reusing them in ways that owe much to the liberatory strategies coming out of experimental composition, fine art practice, and performance art. It was an era that saw technologically based composition move out of the studios of elite, hierarchical institutions, to smaller studios with more collaborative and rhizomatic patterns of working. In this period, we also see the changing nature of technology, from the large and unwieldy tape machines, oscillators, and mainframes of musique concrète and computer music, to the more portable digital units. It is also, significantly, a period in which compositional methods are increasingly informed by practices that originate outside music and musicology: we can look to the influence of fine art, performance, and live art on compositional techniques and performativity, as well as the stimulus provided by feminism and other liberatory social movements.

The years between 1945 and 1980 see experimentalism in composition throwing a trajectory outward from old technologies to new territories. In the latter category we might trace the career of Annea Lockwood (b. 1939), a composer who signalled her break from more conventional electro-acoustic music most radically through her series of Piano Transplants (1969–2005). The four Transplants – the title is informed by the pioneering heart transplant surgery first performed in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard – are, like the medical procedure that Lockwood references, about the translation of energy; they should be understood as composition based upon decomposition, the transmogrification of one energetic state to another. By burning, drowning, and planting broken pianos, Lockwood repurposed the instrument of her early training in a creative process of (de-)composition that values the aleatoric sonics produced by the action of fire, water, and decay.¹⁹ To hear and witness Piano Burning, for example, is to hear the lap of flames, the ping of breaking strings, the sigh of the instrument’s metal harp as it heats up and then cools down. Like all time-based art, the piece is durational, but it is also performative in its reflexivity. Lockwood invited her early listeners to consider new worlds of sound – indeed, she continues to do so, whether through the flowing currents of sound of the Danube or the Housatonic rivers in her Sound Map installations, or the imperceptible sounds of the natural world – bat squeaks, pulsars, underwater geysers that are sonified into frequencies compatible with human hearing.²⁰ She widens the performative frame that John Cage first provided in 4’33” (1952) to something huge yet simultaneously intimate. For the Transplants, Lockwood’s compositional tools were necessarily dramatic. Since then, her methods have been varied: she uses conventional instrumentation as well as sonic data sourced from the natural world to create a body of work that plays with the tension between what can be recorded or fixed, and what is transitory.²¹ Flowing water – especially in the polyrhythms of great bodies of water – has always inspired Lockwood. Her River Archive works are as much about process as the geographic sounding of place and the vertiginous aeons of time. These compositions, in essence, recognize that their material (and materiality) is bigger and longer-lived than any of their listeners.

The years since 1945 are rich in the production of female-authored experimental music of many types. Thom Holmes, in his comprehensive survey of electronic and experimental music technology, rightly notes both that ‘women have always played a key role in the development of electronic music’ and that their work has not received the attention that it deserves.²² Among the names Holmes cites are Daphne Oram and Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in London; in Colombia, Jacqueline Nova; Teresa Rampazzi in Italy; and in the United States, Lily Greenham, Oliveros, Lockwood, Maggi Payne, Yoko Ono, Wendy Carlos, and Alice Shields. This is by no means an exhaustive list. We could add so many more: in Denmark, Else Marie Pade; in the United States, Ruth Anderson and Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Pamela Z, Suzanne Ciani, Joan La Barbara, and Meredith Monk; in Brazil, Jocy de Oliveira; in France, Éliane Radigue and Beatriz Ferreyra; and in Germany, Christina Kubisch. Laurie Anderson, a multimedia artist from a predominantly fine art background, whose United States I–IV project began at the end of our period (its first part was staged at the Kitchen, in New York, in 1979), has long used the technology of music to make larger points about gender, authority, and, above all, political activity and warfare.²³ Taken as a group, these artists represent a wide palette of approaches. They have all been required to create their work outside old hierarchies (indeed, where hierarchies have impinged, the composers have left, as Oram and Derbyshire did the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 and 1973 respectively); many have embraced a multi-disciplinarity that blurs the lines between fine art, music and sound arts, and all have, by necessity, created new facilitating networks open to decentred collaboration and experimentation. The literary theorist Eve Sedgwick asks us what effect a homosocial society – here, the patriarchal networks that privilege male composers, doubly so within technological music – has upon the women that stand outside it.²⁴ The answer lies in these new networks, a manner of working, and of creating the conditions necessary for work, that Lisa Tillmann-Healy calls ‘friendship as method’.²⁵

Female composers working in experimental music (whether with technology or not) are a group that is marginalized within an already marginalized area of post-1945 composition. When Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) speaks of not daring, as a young woman, to imagine herself as a composer, she is referring not only to the first, tentative steps of her compositional life but also to the interlinked actions of the patriarchal and economic milieu within which she existed:

Her awakening to the extended properties of sound occurred around 1951, a period when she was taking harp classes at the local conservatoire in Nice and studying ragas, serialism, and other musical forms. The harmonic possibilities suggested by the sounds of engine drones from a nearby airfield captured her imagination, but it was only after hearing a broadcast of the Étude aux chemins de fer (1948), an early concrète work by Pierre Schaeffer, that Radigue realized how music might be extended into a different register of sonics.²⁷ The Étude was, Radigue says, her road to Damascus, her ‘eureka moment’.²⁸ The chance introduction to Schaeffer led to her being invited, in 1955, to work – as an unpaid stagiaire (intern) – at his Studio d’Essai in Paris, and it was here that she made her first tape compositions. These propositions sonores, as she titled them (only one now exists), were sketches of how she might be a composer: the reticence to become one was rooted in how a young mother could survive as one. She had sound reasons for wondering so. In terms of opportunities, commissions, and income – the gender-sensitive infrastructure that Spiegel refers to – it has been, historically speaking, harder for women to enter the field of work. Radigue, by the late 1960s, divorced and the mother of three children, was able to work as an unpaid assistant to Pierre Henry on his L’apocalypse de Jean because he had tape machines and other equipment installed in her Paris flat, thereby enabling her to combine her technical work with that of motherhood.²⁹ When we see a successful composer, we discern behind them the existence of barely visible networks and support structures; when we see a successful female composer, we need to search – actively – for different networks and structures, often ones working horizontally, rather than vertically, through friends and word-of-mouth, rather than the vertical hierarchies of organizations. To these conditions of work, we must add factors that go beyond sex alone: composers of colour (men and women) and so many other groups subject to intersectional aggressions are woefully underrepresented in new music.

This was recognized by the composer Oliveros and Fluxus artist Alison Knowles (b. 1933) in their short, but pointed, set of five images issued as the Postcard Theater (c. 1974). The postcards had titles such as Beethoven Was a Lesbian, Mozart Was a Black Irish Washerwoman and Brahms was a Two-Penny Harlot: the images showed, respectively, Oliveros reading a book while a papier-mâché bust of Beethoven glowers over her shoulder; Oliveros riding an elephant at a zoo; and details of pictures of both postcard artists as unlovely infants. This feminist consciousness-raising exercise poked fun at a very white male (and heterosexual) musical establishment.³⁰ The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974) makes a similar point in her Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde project (2015), a collection of compositions and documentation that imagines the work and practices of a wide range of Irish experimental musicians and sound artists. That none of the artists in the Historical Documents ever existed beyond Walshe’s magna opera is the crux. The project offers a bundle of simultaneous realities: it is a series of musical imaginings; it is a revisionist history, created in a humour that honours the spirit of the Irish author Brian O’Nolan (who wrote as both Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), in which Dada and drone music spring first from Irish roots; it is a documentary spoof (as opposed to a spoof documentary), a series of fictions and sleight of hands that imagine a parallel history for Ireland, one that listens – to revisit the words of the historian Lucien Febvre – to its voices from below.³¹ Or it would listen had those voices – lost not only to history but lost, too, to the possibility of history – ever been able to imagine the possibility of creativity.

Communicating and Securing New Territories

Prior to 1945, compositional training was the preserve of conservatories and of private study, with individual teachers taking on virtuoso students. Certainly, this system continued after this date –for example, in the case of Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), to whose Paris flat came a formidable list of budding composers, among them Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ruth Anderson, Philip Glass, and, for a short period, Beatriz Ferreyra. This select, individuated manner of transmission could continue (and still does) while the instruments producing the sounds remained unchanged. But with the advent of electronic music, an alternative approach to pedagogy was required. Writing in 1955, Herbert Eimert, one of the founders of the Cologne-based Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks (Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio), acknowledged that new sounds required new methods of teaching. So critical was this need, he stated it firmly on the first page of the first issue of Die Reihe, the hugely influential contemporary music journal that he edited with Karlheinz Stockhausen:

Because of the expense of studio equipment, the early radiophonic and electronic music studios in the years immediately after 1945 were usually attached to state radio stations, universities, technology companies, or, in the case of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, galleries.³³ They were, thus, elitist institutions with all the issues of access attendant on that restricted status.³⁴ Certainly, teaching occurred in these settings and others. The biennial Darmstadt summer courses, which began in 1946, for many years represented the high church of serialism and reinelektronische Musik, and as such wielded a persuasive influence over post-war composition. Pierre Boulez, who, in 1977, decried a ‘conservative historicity’ which ‘impoverishes musical invention’, saw the IRCAM project as an antidote.³⁵ One way that IRCAM’s influence is seen now is by its capacity to help composers realize technological aspects of their music with the provision of programmers and other technologists. However, as technology gradually became less costly, it has also become more accessible. Adapting a phrase used by Francesco Giomi in his history of Italian electronic music, Laura Zattra traces the development of a series of ‘second-generation’ studios in Italy from the mid-1960s, thereby illuminating new working practices that revolve around friendship and informality.

There was, by necessity, much in-situ learning. Pierre Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai and its successor studios were the training ground not only for Radigue but also Beatriz Ferreyra (b. 1937).³⁶ The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the closest the UK has come to the radio-centred experimental studios of Europe, was founded in 1958 by the composer Daphne Oram (1925–2003) and studio manager Desmond Briscoe, initially to provide ‘special sound’ – somewhere between a sound effect and music – for radio programmes. The workshop, which closed in 1998, has featured heavily in the historiography of electronic music, with much of the focus being on Oram and Derbyshire to the exclusion of others, including Jenyth Worsley (who was at the workshop between 1961 and 1962), Maddalena Fagandini (who joined in 1962), Elizabeth Parker (who joined in 1977), and Glynis Jones (who joined in 1973).³⁷ The workshop had no mission to be a pure research unit, nor to provide an educational institution for the training of musicians in new techniques. Oram, in fact, did not stay long at her own creation: she left to pursue her own work, which included the invention and utilization of her Oramics machine, an optical sound invention in which sound waves and shapes were painted on 35 mm film which was then scanned and turned into sound. Derbyshire, a Cambridge mathematics and music graduate, joined the workshop in 1962 after being rejected from a job at the studios of Decca Records, where she had been told that they ‘did not employ women in the recording studios’.³⁸ Within a year, she had created what subsequently became one of the world’s most recognizable and enduring pieces of electronic music, the theme tune to Doctor Who, which was an extended, virtuoso realization of a hastily sketched tune by Ron Grainer. The swooshing arpeggios of Derbyshire’s Doctor Who theme, created with a white noise generator, sine waves and a square-wave oscillator, were first aired on BBC TV on 23 November 1963. Paired with a bassline provided originally by a long string and subsequently transformed by tape technology, the tune’s effect was electrifying. Derbyshire’s music, never credited to her partly because the workshop took joint authorship of its works, is one of the most recognizable pieces of electronic music in the world.

Operating under more permissive conditions, the new studios in the United States were not reined in by hierarchical authority. In 1962, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender established the San Francisco Tape Music Center, building on the artistic foundations of Sender’s original music studio which was housed in one of the attics at the San Francisco Conservatory as well as the excitement that had formed around a number of programmes in the city.³⁹ These included Robert Erickson’s Composers’ Workshop at the Conservatory, where Sonics, a series of new music concerts was initiated. These events featured works by Subotnick, Oliveros, and Sender, as well as older, established European composers, including Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. Additional influences were regular concerts organized by La Monte Young and others at the University of California, Berkeley’s department of music as part of its Student Composers’ Symposium, and the radio station KPFA 94.1, for which Oliveros, with Terry Riley and Loren Rush, recorded improvisations. Finally, the growing reputation of Mills College, Berkeley, as a focal point for radical composition cannot be overstated. Although the educational establishments provided homes for these programmes, the music’s impact was felt beyond the academic audiences due to the layering of multiple artistic networks that cut across institutional boundaries. In this way, the content of these composers’ programmes seeped into the city’s considerable counterculture.

These were new ways of working, which Subotnick would soon after import to his own electronic studio in downtown New York. In both civic location and attitude, this studio was very different to the uptown Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, which had been founded in 1959 by composers attached to both universities. Although for its early years, Subotnick’s studio had a low-key affiliation with New York University, this ‘highly non-institutional studio’, with all its informality, was open to divergent currents in music in a way that the older studio was not, and its users remember Subotnick’s encouragement of their work.⁴⁰ Maryanne Amacher, and (especially) Radigue and Spiegel, are the women most closely associated with it. Meeting Rhys Chatham there – then in his late teens – provided Radigue with the contact to stage some of her early works at The Kitchen, where Chatham was to run a new music programme. These are examples of horizontal, rhizomatic networks, rather than the top-down formalities of patronage.

While the invention of tape and new studio techniques did much to revolutionize sounds available for composition, these new technologies also required teachers capable of recognizing the potential for these new soundworlds. At the heart of any pedagogy is the need or desire to pass on and share one’s own world in order to enable the practice and scholarship of others. For many such musician-teachers, this was an explicitly feminist practice. The flautist and electro-acoustic composer Ruth Anderson (1928–2019), one of the first four women to be allowed onto Princeton’s postgraduate composition programme (this was in 1962), also trained at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Pril Smiley, the latter being one of the centre’s four instructors.⁴¹ After compositional studies in Paris with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger, Anderson returned to the United States. Having joined the faculty of Hunter College, the City University of New York (CUNY), in 1966 she founded an electronic music studio there, serving as its director between 1969 and 1979. It was one of the first such studios in the public university system and the first one set up by a woman. It was, she wrote in a 1973 letter to her partner, Annea Lockwood, not only a studio or academic course but also ‘a safe space to be’.⁴² Put in the context of Oliveros’s sense of dislocation in the San Francisco studio, the safety Anderson mentions is important. Anderson was a professor of composition and music theory, but her real interest was sound, as her Points (1973–4) demonstrates. A little over five minutes in length, Points is built around clusters of sine waves, formed into shifting shapes over its duration. For Anderson this was a way of using pure sound to restate fundamental tenets of music – of rhythm, space, amplitude – and, in doing so, to draw our listening attention to the paradox of an immaterial play of fluid sonic material.

Radigue shares Anderson’s preoccupation with the nature of sound. Her early works were, as we have seen, made with tape and feedback. In 1970, she discovered synthesizers – first the Buchla, then the analogue ARP 2500 – during a residency at New York University. It was at Subotnick’s studio that she met not only Spiegel, but also the major figures in the city’s downtown music scene. Radigue’s tape experiments had allowed her to experiment with harmonics and synchronization; the synthesizers allowed her to go much further. Between 7th Birth (1971) and L’île re-sonante (2000), Radigue worked exclusively on her own ARP 2500, which she used without its keyboard, in her Paris apartment (The one deviation was 1973’s Arthesis, for which Radigue used a Moog synthesizer.). This refusal of a keyboard enabled her to float free of anchoring octaves to concentrate, instead, on the electronic shape and frequency of the sounds that she was working on. Radigue’s music from this period – for example, the Adnos trilogy (1974–82) – is characterized by slowly moving, richly timbral drones, the harmonics of which she accentuated by carefully shaving off frequencies during her editing process. While she does not see her music as in any way sacred, the slow processes of sonic transition and transformation are linked to her practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Since 2000, Radigue has been working with acoustic instruments, composing in a process of co-creation with chosen musicians in a manner that recalls the oral transmissions of ancient teachings.⁴³ In this chapter, we have considered female composers working with technology: Radigue is an example of a composer who has worked through technology, to develop an acoustic compositional interface that interrogates the sonic properties of sound in a way that is related to her electronic work. Her most recent works, for the acoustic Occam Ocean series, fit into this pattern.

In the summer of 1980, as part of the New Music America festival – based that year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis – Ellen Fullman (b. 1957), then a young artist starting out, took her Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture onto the streets of the city’s red-light district to perform her new work, Streetwalker (1980). Fullman, who had recently graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute where she had majored in sculpture, was looking at ways to create soundtracks to her performance art; she made this wearable sculpture during her final year at the institute. The skirt comprised metal panels attached to a waistband, while its hem was threaded with guitar strings; these in turn were attached to the platform shoes that completed the costume. Rudimentary amplification – a contact microphone was attached to the skirt – was supplied by a small Pignose amplifier that Fullman carried over her shoulder, rather like a handbag.⁴⁴ As the guitar strings were alternately pulled and released by the action of walking, raucous glissandi were produced; these were accompanied by the clanking rhythms of the skirt’s metal twirling panels. (A grainy video excerpt of Streetwalker, available on Vimeo, portrays something of the edgy, clangourous nature of Fullman’s performance.)⁴⁵ Streetwalker was – and remains – a performance that is as much about female audibility as about female visibility; it is an explicitly feminist riposte to the display and commodification of bodies that characterize any public space where sex is sold and bought.

While Streetwalker bears no resemblance to Fullman’s subsequent work – the invention and continuous refinement of her Long String Instrument – it nevertheless exemplifies much of what this chapter has considered: the creation and accessibility of new technologies, of female audibility and visibility, and of intersecting artistic practices. Indeed, Fullman herself – an artist who travelled from fine art to sound sculptures to composition – is a musician/composer who, with the creation of her own instrument, typifies the techne, the craft, of experimental music. The Long String Instrument, the origins of which arose from self-initiated experiments with the sonic properties of horizontal wires rather than a familiarity with the history of long-string harmonics, injects a quantum of sonic and concrete materiality that is often missing in experimental music-making.

Streetwalker was made possible not only by the availability of the technology required (in this case, a simple portable amplification unit) but also by developments in both musical composition and fine art method that had, since 1945, been redrawing the definitions of what constituted composition, music, and performance. As a young artist applying a knowledge of sculptural techniques to sound and wearable sculpture, Fullman was entering into a compositional arena that took inspiration from the innovating synergies created by the clash of formerly monolithic disciplines. She was able to do this because of the work of others. Certainly, Cage was an axial figure, one who linked musicians, composers, visual artists, and, via his ‘(Experimental) Composition’ classes at the New School in New York between 1950 and 1960, the American Fluxus artists. But there were other key players whose existence, perhaps, the young Fullman was unaware of then. These include Charlotte Moorman with the Avant-Garde Festival in New York (1963–80) and her collaborations with the installation artist Nam June Paik; the happenings staged in 1950s Japan by the Gutai group, and in particular, Atsuko Tanaka’s own wearable electric sculptures which, in addressing consumerist spectacle, prefigure the raw feminist performativity of Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964). Streetwalker’s crossover of fine art-based practices of performance into a sonic medium problematizes how a woman might move through architectural, social, and gendered spaces, even as it heralds the multi-disciplinarity that has characterized much subsequent new music. In this way, the young Fullman sounds out the alarm for a very real problem of audibility of women in the arts, music, and technology.

On the Controls, in Control

Earlier in this chapter I noted that technologically generated sound opens up new vistas for composition, of ‘sonic possible worlds’, to borrow a phrase from the sound artist and theorist Salomé Voegelin.⁴⁶ However, to assume that studio technology comes into the world unencumbered with a background that reproduces historical and systemic bias would be wrong. Such historical biases exist, and they have, until comparatively recently, been reinforced through a lack of critical thinking by musicians, educators, and technicians. There are honourable exceptions among educators: counted among these are Ruth Anderson at Hunter College, CUNY; Pauline Oliveros at University of California San Diego and elsewhere; Maggi Payne at Mills College; and in the UK, artist-practitioners and academics such as Katherine Norman at Goldsmiths, and, at the Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) research centre at the University of the Arts London, Cathy Lane, as well as staff at City University, Brighton University, and at Huddersfield. Nevertheless, it would be remiss to conclude that studio technology has achieved the full liberatory potential that Laurie Spiegel speaks of. That is yet to happen; gender-based biases continue to be a long-term problem, and, in music technology and electronic-based music, the problem is acute. Numerous recent scholars have pinpointed how the gendering of music technology puts off young women from entering the field.⁴⁷ Lucy Green and Frances Morgan have highlighted how women operating in composition and studio-based music respectively have received the dubious accolades of ‘honorary’ men and pioneering exceptions.⁴⁸ That the entry of women into this gendered space has provoked cultural anxiety is indicated by how often the iconography around women in technological music has focused on typically ‘feminine’ signifiers. Besides the feminizing anthropomorphism of the Alles/‘Alice’ machine, we could also mention the familiar images of Radigue where we see the famous photographs of her manicured hands poised on the knobs of her ARP 2500 synthesizer, of her hair,⁴⁹ and of her listening to a conch shell.⁵⁰

In a spirit of detournement, the artist-film-maker Aura Satz has reclaimed images and gestures of several female electronic composers, in a way that stresses their agency and feminist innovation. The drawings presented in Satz’s She Recalibrates (2018) series focus on the hands of Radigue, Spiegel, Daphne Oram, and others as they turn dials and adjust controls. The hands here are strong, literally ‘on’ the controls, metaphorically ‘in’ control. Satz reiterates this point In Making a Diagonal with Music/Hacer una Diagonal con la Musica (2019), her short, lyrical film detailing Beatriz Ferreyra’s sonic investigations.⁵¹ We see Ferreyra ‘sound-hunting’ – manipulating the creak of a door, tapping objects to examine their timbres and allure, and vocalizing non-syntactic sounds. Her gestures are agile and graceful as she responds to what she is gathering and composing. Ferreya here is the controller of her own universe, the creator of sounds and their manipulator. If ever Spiegel’s words, quoted at the start of this chapter, were in need of their own image, of a composer working and moving through her own work, we see it in the figure of Ferreya.

From 31 October to 12 December 2015, Rumpsti Pumsti, a record store in Berlin devoted to experimental music and sound art, hosted an exhibition of early works by the German artist Christina Kubisch (b. 1948), one of the world’s foremost sound artists. The Vibrations exhibition focused on a series of works titled Dirty Electronics that Kubisch created between 1975 and 1980 in which she paired orchestral instruments with vibrators. On the floor were four wooden boxes each holding one flute and one vibrator, creating a jittery, buzzing flute quartet. Mounted on one wall was a photograph of a cello with a vibrator held to its strings. On another were technical diagrams. Kubisch, best known for her works with electronics, had produced intricately detailed diagrams of how to construct and use vibrators in various musical settings.

On the surface, the works on display in Vibrations recalled the wit and irreverence of Kubisch’s earlier conceptual works, including Emergency Solos (1974–75), a series of recitals in which Kubisch played the flute with various implements including boxing gloves and a gas mask. In retrospect they signalled a more profound shift. By pairing symbols of the male-dominated Western art music world with symbols of women’s sexual liberation, Kubisch gave form to the idea that women could no longer be excluded from the elite ranks of Western art music, and indeed might represent its undoing.

The vibrations of Kubisch’s ‘dirty electronics’ embodied the metaphorical noise of women’s growing presence in what had overwhelmingly been the domain of white male elites, subverting that elitism with humour and wit. Vibrations winked at symphonic music, minimalist sculpture, 1960s drone music, electroacoustic composition, and other traditions excluding women in part through long-held ideas about who, and what, should be taken seriously.

Vibrations was notable for other reasons. Of the fifty events and exhibitions held at Rumpsti Pumsti as of October 2020, only ten per cent were by female artists. This is not to impugn the enterprise. Rumpsti Pumsti has brought attention to the work of female sound artists and composers through its outstanding collections. Rather, this figure is representative of wider trends in the sound art world, wherein female artists have been persistently and grossly underrepresented for over half a century, and where it is still common to find major festivals, group exhibitions, compilation albums, edited volumes, magazines, and anthologies in which women and their work barely register.

In this chapter I explore the contributions of female sound artists and composers during the final two decades of the last century, with a view to examining the larger vibrations – the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical disturbances – of their work. The curator Barbara London wrote in her definition of sound art from 1979: ‘Sound art pieces are more closely allied to art than to music, and are usually presented in the museum, gallery, or alternative space.’² This definition appeared in a press release for the 1979 exhibition Sound Art curated by London at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which notably only included works by female artists: Laurie Anderson, Maggie Payne, and Julia Heyward. In ‘The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition’ the sound artist Judy Dunaway (b. 1964) remarks that this was the first time the hybrid term ‘sound art’ was used in the title of an exhibit at a major museum – a seemingly important fact that is conspicuously absent from existing histories of sound art. Dunaway asks whether definitions of sound art were constructed in such a way as to exclude key female figures who did not easily fit within certain definitions or categories, like Laurie Anderson or Yoko Ono, who in some canonical writings on sound art were deemed ‘crossover artists’ or ‘too pop’. She wonders:

Following from London’s definition and building on Dunaway and other feminist scholars’ work, in this chapter I consider the contributions of female artists whose work is principally aligned with visual arts traditions including sculpture, installation art, conceptual art, and performance art. I explore their innovations in space and environment, new technologies, voice and vocality, and conceptualism in sound art. I revisit the work of artists including Laurie Anderson, Maryanne Amacher, Genevieve Cadieux, Annea Lockwood, Alison Knowles, Miya Masaoka, Yoko Ono, Liz Phillips, Laetitia Sonami, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Pamela Z, asking how their sonic practices and listening practices challenged social, cultural, and aesthetic norms. I take seriously Pauline Oliveros’s powerful claim that not only were female composers (here extended to ‘sound artists’) directly stymied in their efforts to gain entrée and recognition by their male counterparts but also these exclusions occurred in subtle and insidious ways. My aim, again, is not to impugn, but rather to examine the mechanisms of exclusion that have produced a marked and seemingly intractable gender imbalance in sound art – one that persists despite the remarkable inventiveness of female sound artists and the efforts of feminist scholars to recover their work and to reorientate sound art canons.

Sound Art, Space, and Environment

The year 1980 marked a watershed phase in the career of Maryanne Amacher (1938–2000), an iconoclastic American composer and sound artist who pioneered aspects of sound installation art, site-specific sound art, and psychoacoustic composition. In June 1980, Amacher, who had been exploring the relationship of sound to space since the mid-1960s, staged her first architecturally scaled work, Living Sound (Patent Pending). This multimedia installation, which included textual, sonic, and visual elements, spanned the entirety of a vacant mansion in St Paul, Minnesota, where it was presented as part of the New Music America festival.⁴ Amacher, who made the conceptual leap of distinguishing between ‘air-borne’ and ‘structure-borne’ sound transmission as compositional parameters, used architectural structures and materials to both transmit and modify sound. In Living Sound (Patent Pending) she staged each room individually and in connection to a larger suite of interconnected rooms, putting into practice her concept of ‘audjoined rooms’. This work also put into action her uniquely forceful sonic aesthetics. She wrote:

Amacher’s approach was visceral and charged, finely attuned to sound’s physical and material properties and its energetic potency. Her aesthetics broke with tradition in embracing dramatic expression and narrative form. Whereas sound installation art of the period was characterized by minimalist abstraction, Amacher created intensely vivid, dramatic scenes that audiences could inhabit, an experience she likened to ‘walking into a cinematic closeup’.⁶ This aesthetics underpinned her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980) series, where she used architectural structures to create ‘intensely dramatic sound experiences’, which, she wrote, ‘cannot be created any other way: a form of sound art that uses the architecture of rooms, specifically, TO MAGNIFY THE EXPRESSIVE DIMENSIONS OF THE MUSIC’.⁷

Amacher not only staged sound works across entire buildings; she also created works that connected multiple spaces and places through sound. She developed the concept of ‘sonic telepresence’, producing works in which multiple, often distant sites were connected using what she called ‘real-time telelinks’: microphones transmitting sound continuously from one location to another. These sonic transmissions helped to establish what she called ‘tone of place’.⁸ Amacher worked at the scale of the architectural, the telematic/virtual, the urban, and even the inter-urban. With City-Links (1967–88), a series of sonic telepresence works that took shape in twenty-one parts over a period of twenty-one years, she placed microphones in remote locations, ‘sometimes between cities and even countries’, in one case continuously transmitting sound from a dedicated channel in the Boston Harbor to her own studio for a period of three years.⁹

Amacher equally worked at the level of the human body and sensory perception, developing novel modes of psychoacoustic composition: works that explicitly engaged with the physics of sound and the psychology of hearing. She pioneered techniques in the realm of auditory distortion products, creating music from otoacoustic emissions or what she called ‘ear tones’, that seemed to emanate from listeners’ ears themselves.¹⁰ Her forays into such uncharted territory were notable for their inventiveness, their rigorous testing of psychological and acoustic phenomena, and the striking ways in which they reconceptualized relationships between sound, place, space, and architecture.

The German-born Canadian composer, radio artist, and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946) shared Amacher’s interest in exploring the ‘tone of place’, albeit in the very different context of soundscape composition. Westerkamp was a core member of the World Soundscape Project (WSP), a research group founded by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the late 1960s. With the WSP, Westerkamp developed the key concept of ‘soundwalking’, which she described as ‘any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment’.¹¹ Soundwalking has since become widely used in soundscape studies and sound art, underpinning countless research projects and artworks. Westerkamp developed a distinctly inclusive approach to soundwalking, conceiving of the ‘participatory soundwalk’ as an activity that might be done by anyone, whether alone or as part of a group. Her inclusive ethos was apparent in the soundwalking exercises she presented in her influential article ‘Soundwalking’ (1974), where she suggested that soundwalking was something anyone might do in order to develop their sense of ‘aural awareness’, to become more attuned to their relationship with their everyday sonic environments, or simply for ‘fun’.¹² Westerkamp’s use of non-specialist language and her inviting, friendly approach demystified what in other hands might have become overly theoretical and specialized. While her own soundscape compositions – including, notably, from this period, Cricket Voice (1987), Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), and Beneath the Forest Floor (1992) – were widely influential, Westerkamp did not seek to elevate the status of composer over that of the listener or participant. Rather, she understood the relationship between composer and listener in fundamentally dialogical terms.¹³ In similar vein, she developed a conception of soundscape composition as a dialogue between composers and sonic environments, one in which compositions ‘emerged’ from sonic materials instead of resulting strictly from composers’ intent.

Westerkamp’s inclusive approach shaped soundscape composition and acoustic ecology in important ways. The Canadian theorist and sound artist Andra McCartney (1955–2019), who made early feminist interventions into the field of sound studies and wrote extensively on Westerkamp’s work, remarked that some soundwalks ‘shift power relationships between artists and audiences, acknowledging the varied listening experiences and knowledge of audience members’.¹⁴ McCartney noted that soundwalking excursions at new music festivals and conferences were marked by an unusual ‘openness’; people who did not necessarily feel comfortable participating in discussions about avant-garde music due to lack of musical training were more likely to engage in ‘wide-ranging discussions’ in connection to soundwalks.¹⁵ McCartney likewise drew attention to the unusual gender balance of soundwalking communities, noting that ‘many of the major figures in the field of soundwalking are women, unlike with many other areas of electroacoustic sound art’ – a gender balance that arguably owes a debt to the inclusive tone set by Westerkamp in the early days of the tradition.¹⁶

The New Zealand-born, US-based composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) has been lauded for her conceptual sound art practice as well as for her compositions and installations derived from environmental sound sources. From the early 1980s, Lockwood created a series of ‘sound maps’ that acoustically charted, in striking detail, rivers including the Hudson (1981–82), the Danube (2001–5), and the Housatonic (2009–10). Lockwood’s vibrant sound maps support her claim that she treats ‘each sound as though it were a piece of music in itself’.¹⁷ She has said, ‘For me, every sound has its own minute form – is comprised of small flashing rhythms, shifting tones, has momentum, comes, vanishes, lives out its own structure.’¹⁸ Lockwood’s idea of treating individual sounds as ‘music in themselves’ is evident in Sound Map of the River Danube, in which the undulating melodies, shifting textures, and dynamic and complex rhythmic patterns of river sounds emerge as profoundly musical. In preparing this sound map, Lockwood studied local and state maps of the Danube, interviewing locals whose lives were intertwined with the river’s. Their voices are imbued with a deep musicality, with their shifting tonality and affect combining with environmental sounds to create rich soundscape portraits that traverse environmental, social, historical, and political registers.

Lockwood’s compositional process is rooted in meditative, focused listening. Thus, although she recorded the Danube for a period of months, she did not record continuously or in a haphazard way. Rather, she gathered material slowly and deliberately, aiming to reveal the rich variety of soundworlds comprising the river and its attendant communities. She says:

Sound Art and New Technologies

Female composers and sound artists made key interventions in the realm of new technologies during 1980–2000, whether in instrument and interface design, with the creation of technologically mediated sound art works, or in cultivating a feminist approach to sound technologies.

In 1991 the American sound artist and composer Laetitia Sonami (b. 1957) gave her first performance with the ‘Lady’s Glove’, a glove-like controller outfitted with numerous sensors including accelerometers, transducers, ultrasonic transmitters, pressure pads, and a microphone. These sensors tracked the minutiae of hand movements, enabling Sonami to control sound through movement and gesture. Sonami explained that the system was designed ‘to allow for multiple, simultaneous controls. The sounds are now “embodied”, the controls intuitive, and the performance fluid.’²⁰ While the system is technologically robust and complex, Sonami also created the ‘Lady’s Glove’ to trump expectations in masculinist computer music and electronic music communities, saying that she initially originally conceived of it as ‘somewhat of a joke, a response to the heavy masculine apparel used in virtual reality systems’.²¹ Her ‘ladylike’ evening glove controller mocked the too-serious, exclusionary nature of certain male-dominated music scenes, creating a cognitive dissonance through the design of a wearable technology that was equally coded ‘feminine’ and ‘high tech’, and in which musical gestures and electrical signals were performed by, and filtered through, a female body.

A feminist approach to sound technology can be traced in the work of the Japanese American sound artist, composer, and improviser Miya Masaoka (b. 1958), whose wide-ranging practice includes instrument and interface design, wearable technologies, and sonifying the behaviour of non-human lifeforms including plants and insects. In the 1990s Masaoka developed the laser koto, extending the traditional Japanese koto by adding four laser beams, light sensors, and infrared sensors, which enabled her to trigger pre-recorded koto samples by plucking beams of light. In another early project with lasers, Ritual with Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches (1995), she lay naked on a massage table while thirteen giant cockroaches crawled on her body, across which stretched an array of laser beams. The cockroaches’ movements triggered pre-recorded samples of their own hissing sounds, with increased roach activity mapped onto an increasingly dense soundscape.

Masaoka’s work has been concerned with confronting constructions of gender and race in Asian American communities. In What Is the Sound of Naked Asian Men (2001), for example, she invited eight Asian men – who, she noted, are not often portrayed naked in public – to lie naked while wearing physiological sensors that tracked their heart rate and brainwave activity; she created music from these biosignals. Crucially, Masaoka does not conceive of such works as merely ‘sonifying biodata’; rather she connects them to deeper spiritual and political philosophies. She has described her works that translate the behaviour of plants and insects into sound as ‘almost like Shinto animism revealed sonically by technological means. Plants and insects become animated and exhibit deeper parts of themselves, their spirit – a kind of consciousness. We are part of our environment; our music is part of the environment. Everything is interconnected, everything is alive.’²²

A feminist and inclusive approach to technological design has informed the work of the American sound artist Liz Phillips (b. 1951). Phillips created a distinct body of interactive sound works spanning a period of more than four decades. In 1981 she was hailed in the New York Times as ‘rapidly emerging as one of the best-known practitioners’ of interactive ‘environmental sound installation’.²³ Her sound installations were particularly distinguished in mapping people’s movements onto the processing of sound materials. In City Flow (1977), Phillips translated the movements of human foot traffic inside a pedestrian mall in Manhattan – and vehicle traffic outside the building – into an electronic soundscape that the New Yorker described as ‘caus[ing] the imagination to run free’.²⁴ In the interactive sound and light installation Echo Evolution (1999) she used ultrasonic range fingers to detect audience position and movement, mapping those parameters onto the colour and flow of light in neon tubes as well as the processing of sound. The critic Paula Rabinowitz has suggested that Phillips’s audience ‘cannot simply look at or listen to her work; people’s tangible engagement with it … makes the work’.²⁵ Rabinowitz emphasizes the social dimension of Phillips’s sound art practice, singling out its ‘resolute sociality’ and ‘joyful accessibility’ – characteristics not typically associated with experimental sound art.²⁶ The accessibility of Phillips’s work is especially noteworthy given that many of her installations rely on complex technological apparatus. However, rather than fetishizing the technological dimension of her work, Phillips demystifies it, going so far as to hide the electronic circuitry in installations so that audiences do not feel alienated or intimidated by it.

Like many female sound artists who work with new technologies, Phillips has experienced various forms of gender-based discrimination. Curators, presenters, and audiences alike have assumed that men who happened to be in the same room as her designed the electronics in her works, and, as she says in an interview with Charles Eppley, some even questioned whether she possessed a basic knowledge of electronics.²⁷ Such experiences of discrimination and exclusion have been even more extreme for female sound artists of colour working with new technologies. The African American vocalist, composer, and sound artist Pamela Z (b. 1956), who has developed a distinguished body of works for voice and electronics, has said,

Z speaks to the idea that women have been triply excluded from worlds that span composition, new technologies, and the avant-garde: domains that have historically been gendered male and racially coded white.

Voice and Vocality

Female sound artists and composers have radically transformed conceptions of voice and vocality, whether through developing innovative vocal techniques, recuperating orality and storytelling in genres where these were diminished, or exploring the material, affective, and cultural dimensions of the voice in novel ways.

Pamela Z, whose vocal training was in classical song and opera, expanded the expressive possibilities of vocal performance by setting the voice in myriad multimedia contexts and through her seemingly exhaustive examination of the socio-politics of voice. Among Z’s large-scale performance works, Voci (2003), an 80-minute suite, comprising numerous segments, approaches voice, she writes, ‘as anatomy, as character, as identifier, and communicator’.²⁹ In Voci Z explores how vocal characteristics like timbre, tonality, and accents are used to mark social difference and maintain social hierarchies around race, class, and gender, as in the racialized vocal profiling that has underpinned housing discrimination in the United States. She further explores the ways in which different ‘types’ of voices (such as ‘politician’s voice’, and ‘radio voice’) are socially and culturally constructed – and how different musical traditions reflect deeper ideas of what is considered beautiful or desirable in a voice. Like many of Z’s works, Voci is humorous, audience interactive, and inventive in its approach to new technologies. Z not only uses a wide range of software and hardware (including body-worn BodySynth sensors, MIDI controllers enabling her to modify her voice using physical movements) but also critically examines vocal technologies, including voice synthesis software, and asks how the voice itself is a technology for social control.

George E. Lewis sees Pamela Z as ‘part of a generation of women sound artists … who reassert the human need for exchanging stories in a logocentric culture that has privileged written over oral modes of discourse’.³⁰ Indeed, novel constructions of voice and storytelling are at the heart of several female sound artists’ work. Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) created experimental narrative forms at the intersection of storytelling, vocal performance, and new technologies; Hildegard Westerkamp incorporated her own voice into her soundscape compositions, a genre in which the sound recordist’s body is typically hidden; and Janet Cardiff’s (b. 1957) binaural audio walks invited listeners to follow the sound of her close-miked voice, and inhabit stories in which real and fictional worlds intersect uncannily.

The voices of female sound artists have been distinguished in directly embodying a transgressive sonic aesthetics and politics. One might think of Yoko Ono’s screams, characterized by Shelina Brown as ‘politically charged instances of abject sonic art’;³¹ or of Laurie Anderson’s use of vocal disguise in her performances with the vocoder (voice synthesizer);³² or Janet Cardiff’s whispering voice, recorded and reproduced, in many of her works, in such a way as to seem to occupy a place inside listeners’ heads. It is not only the sonic or material qualities of these voices that distinguish them, however, but also the ways in which they reveal and resist social, cultural, and aesthetic norms. Laurie Anderson’s vocal personae, for example, often perform a gender-bending role. As Lucie Vágnerová wrote, in Anderson’s ‘Voice of Authority’ the artist transposes her voice down two octaves, performing a kind of ‘audio drag’ that plays on ideas of gender, voice, and power.³³ Anderson has said, ‘I loved to use the lowest setting on the Harmonizer, a digital processor that lowered my voice, to sound like a man … When I spoke as a woman, [people] listened indulgently; but when I spoke as a man, and especially as a bossy man, they listened with interest and respect.’³⁴ By contrast, Yoko Ono’s screams can be read as feminist protest. In the context of white, male-dominated avant-garde scenes Shelina Brown hears Ono’s voice as ‘unleashing a subversive vocality that threatens to destabilize … the gendered and racialized sonic codes that delineate acceptable modes of vocal musical expression’.³⁵

Many female sound artists have explored the material and affective dimensions of the voice in ways that challenged aesthetic norms. The sound installation Broken Memory (1995) by the Canadian artist Genevieve Cadieux (b. 1955) featured a disembodied female voice heard in various states of anguish and despair from inside a trapezoidal glass structure. Cadieux conceived of this glass structure as a ‘body’ for the voice, thinking of glass as ‘skin, the frontier between the exterior and the interior’.³⁶ When the installation was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London in 1995, several reviewers were highly critical if not outright dismissive. The Independent’s Iain Gale wrote, ‘The woman is clearly very unhappy … she’s been crying non-stop. It’s a terrible sobbing from the gut that rises in a hysterical crescendo [and] make[s] you want to shout “stop.”’³⁷ Gale described this cri de coeur as ‘played interminably’, versus the more neutral ‘repeated continuously’ associated with the numerous works by male artists that are celebrated for the simple use of repetition or looping. Mistakenly attributing the voice in Broken Memory to Cadieux herself, Gale accused the artist of fakery, suggesting that she ‘[made] herself cry’, and asserting, ‘this, surely, is not real anguish’ and claiming that this (perceived) inauthenticity inspired in him ‘a very unpleasant feeling’.³⁸ Writing about the same work for Art Monthly, the critic Mark Sladen took issue with the idea that the voice in Broken Memory was supplied by an actor, not by Cadieux herself. Ironically, the charge Sladen levied against Cadieux was also one of inauthenticity. He wrote, ‘Who owns this pain? We all do, baby. I find this kind of thing both manipulative and unconstructive’.³⁹ Sladen further compared Cadieux’s installation unfavourably to the work of a male contemporary (Damien Hirst), and concluded, ‘I find Hirst’s work more effective’.⁴⁰

In revisiting these criticisms, I do not wish to imply that sound art by women should not be subjected to the same kinds of critical scrutiny as that created by men. Rather, I seek to highlight the gendered nature of the criticism, whether in terms of the gendered language (‘hysterical’, ‘manipulative’); the punishing tone (‘played interminably’); dismissive commentary (‘This, surely, is not real anguish’); condescension (‘Who owns this pain? We all do baby’); or the unfavourable comparison to male artists, sadly a common trope. These are merely a few of the ways in which the guise of criticism has been used to maintain a status quo, rather than engage in any deep or meaningful way with women’s art on its own terms. With respect to Broken Memory, I suggest that it was not a sense of ‘inauthenticity’ that inspired unpleasant feelings in Gale, but rather the combination of a flagrant display of female emotion in an avant-garde context wherein a cool, dispassionate aesthetics dominated, and the fact that this emotion was embodied in a female voice, marked as ‘Other’ in the context of modernist and avant-garde art. As Yoko Ono said, ‘The avant-garde guys didn’t use the voice. They were all just so cool, right? And there was also this very asexual kind of atmosphere in the music. And I wanted to throw blood.’⁴¹

Conceptualism

The rise of conceptualism in sound art owes much to the work of female sound artists and composers, although this connection has not been made in existing histories of experimental music and sound art. While still a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono (b. 1933) created minimalist, conceptual instruction scores that comprised instructions for actions that could be performed by anyone. Her first such score, Lighting Piece from 1955, read, ‘Light a match and watch till it goes out.’ Ono published over 150 instruction scores in the collection Grapefruit (1964), including 60 under the heading ‘Music’. They included Overtone Piece (1964), which instructed ‘Make music only with overtones’; and Voice Piece for Soprano (1961), which read:

In the 1960s such scores came to be understood as ‘Event scores’, a term proposed by the Fluxus artist George Brecht to describe scores that, as Alison Knowles has written, ‘involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontexualized as performance … texts that can be seen as proposal pieces or instructions for actions’.⁴³

Ono’s best-known work in this genre was Cut Piece, which she performed in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York City, and London in 1964–1966. In those performances, Ono sat motionless next to a pair of scissors and invited members of the audience to cut a small piece of her clothing and take it with them. Cut Piece has since become one of the most widely discussed works of 1960s conceptual art, and is considered a work of proto-feminist performance art par excellence.⁴⁴ It has been analysed through a myriad of lenses: in connection to Buddhist philosophies of enlightenment-through-selflessness;⁴⁵ as an act of hospitality that can be interpreted through the lens of Asian American womanhood;⁴⁶ as violent confrontation; as striptease; and more. While all these interpretations may be valid, however, none of the scholarly accounts I have seen consider Cut Piece in connection to the larger collection of instruction scores that Ono produced between 1955 and 1970. If we refer to that larger output, we find many other works that provide important context for Cut Piece, including Painting Until It Becomes Marble from 1961, which instructed:

There is a different score in Ono’s Grapefruit collection that shares the title Cut Piece and that appears in the section ‘Painting’. It instructs: ‘Throw it off a building’, the ‘it’ ostensibly referring to a painting.

My aim here is not to ‘set the record straight’ on Cut Piece; that record is living and evolving. Rather, I suggest that Cut Piece should be examined in connection to Ono’s larger compositional and artistic output, as is regularly done with works by prominent male composers and artists, but has not, to my knowledge, been done in relation to Ono’s score, despite its iconic status and despite such clear and easily discoverable links. Cut Piece shares characteristics with Event scores by male artists, including George Brecht, La Monte Young, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik – scores first discussed in connection to experimental music traditions by Michael Nyman, in his influential book Experimental Music: John Cage and Beyond. Yet Ono’s score does not feature in Nyman’s book, nor in several of the key texts on experimental music and sound art that followed. Ono performed Cut Piece in 1965 in the context of a legendary recital at Carnegie Hall; and she herself has drawn attention to the musical aspects of the work.⁴⁸ Further, Ono was one of the first artists to exhibit instruction scores, and given that she is a household name it is unthinkable that her work would not have been known to Nyman.

Taking Cut Piece as a starting point, we might reconsider historical accounts that trace conceptualism and experimentalism in sound art and music only or primarily to John Cage. While Cage was undoubtedly an influential figure in many circles, including a direct influence for many Fluxus artists, Ono was also an originator of many ideas that held sway in Fluxus. In addition to pioneering the genre of instruction scores, from 1960 to 1961 she hosted – and with La Monte Young co-organized – the Chambers Street Loft Series at her own loft. This concert series at 112 Chambers Street was an important if not foundational forum for experimental music scenes in the United States. Ono was creating conceptual music nearly a decade before meeting Cage, Young, or any Fluxus artists. In 1950 she composed a work (originally in Japanese) titled The Soundless Music, the following excerpt of which appeared (in English) in Grapefruit:

Ono specified that her inspiration for such works was rooted in her childhood music studies in Japan, 1937–1940: ‘We received homework in which you were supposed to listen to the sound of the day, and translate each sound into musical notes. This made me into a person who constantly translated the sounds around her into musical notes as a habit.’⁵⁰ Ono’s attention to environmental and incidental sounds was therefore not a Cagean gesture. Rather, these proclivities stemmed from her formative experiences and early music education.

The Fluxus artist Alison Knowles (b. 1933) produced a number of widely performed Event scores in the 1960s, including, most famously, Proposition (October 1962), which read only: ‘Make a salad.’⁵¹ Some of Knowles’s instructional scores contained musical instructions. Piece for Any Number of Vocalists (December, 1962), instructed: ‘Each thinks beforehand of a song, and, on signal from the conductor, sings it through.’⁵² Even those scores that did not explicitly refer to musical or sonic events often emerged as musical in performance. Cecilia Novero has written of the premiere of Proposition (October 1962) that Knowles ‘drew attention away from the performance’s more obvious visual aspects by highlighting the sounds of … slicing, chopping, and cutting’; she suggested that many of Knowles’s performances heightened the sense of hearing ‘in those experiences that are usually already claimed by other senses’.⁵³

With John Cage, Knowles co-edited Notations (1969), an important anthology of score excerpts by 269 composers. She also designed the book. In the book itself, however, only Cage is credited as ‘author’. In his preface Cage acknowledges that there were two editors, ‘John Cage and Alison Knowles’, and writes that ‘the composition of the pages is the work of Alison Knowles’.⁵⁴ Knowles may not have been credited as co-editor in the front matter because it was seen as a project conceived by Cage and mostly derived using Cagean chance procedures. Knowles’s contribution may also have been seen as a professional service provided by Something Else Press, which was founded and managed by her husband Dick Higgins.⁵⁵ Still, while the intention may not have been to downplay her role in the project, the fact that Knowles does not have a single credit line in the manuscript effectively diminishes her contribution. Scholarly sources routinely refer to Notations only in connection to Cage.

Seeking to re-centre women’s work in conceptual art and performance art, in 1975 and 1978 Knowles and Annea Lockwood co-edited Womens Work [sic], a two-part collection of instructional scores by twenty-five female artists. It featured numerous musical/sonic instruction scores, including the Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi’s (b. 1938) Spatial Poem No. 7 (sound event), which invited people around the world to create a ‘global symphony’ by sending her 300-word reports of the sounds they heard at a specified time on a specified date. A photo documented Christina Kubisch’s Emergency Solos series – a recital in which Kubisch played the flute while wearing thimbles on all her fingers. Lockwood contributed three scores that are now considered cornerstones of conceptual sound art: Piano Burning, Piano Drowning, and Piano Garden. One of the two scores Pauline Oliveros contributed instructed the performer to create a ‘sound map’ of a university campus, as well as an untitled, handwritten score that read:

KEEP THE NEXT SOUND YOU HEAR

in MiND

FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT HALF HOUR

The curator Irene Revell regards the Womens Work collection as offering ‘an invaluable counterpoint to the male avant-garde canon’, yet it ‘has been rarely referenced and never considered in its own right’.⁵⁶

Women’s Inaudibility and Invisibility

Taken as a whole, the contributions by women to sound art explored here not only represent a striking body of works deserving much more scholarly attention but also constitute an important counter-aesthetics to male-dominated sound art traditions. Female sound artists invented novel sonic concepts that remain under-theorized: air-borne and structure-borne sounds; sonic telepresence; audjoined rooms; tone of place; and ear tones – to cite only from a single under-theorized artist’s work (Maryanne Amacher). Women pioneered new forms and genres: architecturally scaled sound installations, instructional scores, participatory soundwalks, sound maps, binaural audio walks. And they created works that specifically subverted masculinist sound art traditions and challenged aesthetic norms: dialogical forms of soundscape composition, feminist sound technologies, works exploring the socio-politics of sound and voice, inclusive approaches to interaction and interface design, and an embrace of narrative dramatic expression and affect in the context of avant-garde and experimental sound art.

Despite such important and wide-ranging contributions, there remains a persistent gender imbalance in sound art worlds. It stems partly from a reluctance among critics and curators to embrace or even acknowledge the contributions of women to the field. In Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music, originally published in 1974, and featuring the work of over fifty composers and sound artists in the mid-twentieth century, almost all of them European American or white English men, only one woman is mentioned: Charlotte Moorman, and then principally in the context of her collaborations with Nam June Paik. For the second edition, published in 1999, Nyman failed to update the text, only adding a preface and a discography by Robert Worby which includes several hundred recordings, none of them by female composers. Nyman did imagine what an updated version of the text could look like, which he tellingly called ‘Son of Experimental Music’.⁵⁷ Aware of the limited geographical scope of his original study, he suggested that an updated book ‘would have to be less ethnocentric’.⁵⁸ Yet he reasserted the centrality of (Euro)American and English composers, writing: ‘This book is firmly positioned on a US/UK axis since the “tradition” started in the US and transplanted itself into England.’⁵⁹

In the final paragraph of that preface, Nyman acknowledges that female composers may have existed at the time of the original publication: ‘Some composers – for instance, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, James Jenney [sic] and Charlemagne Palestine – were invisible and inaudible to a writer/performer whose take on his subject was completely London-based.’⁶⁰ But rather than concede that female composers like Monk and Oliveros should have been included, he clings to his original choices: ‘Strangely enough, were I writing Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond today, I would not do it any differently … Thank goodness I wrote it when I did.’⁶¹ Composers like Monk and Oliveros were invisible and inaudible to Nyman because they simply did not register with him. Along with other critics and scholars whose work has produced a significant male-dominated bias in sound art canons, he was insensitive to female artists’ work.

Several recent projects have sought to recover contributions by female-identifying sound artists that would otherwise be lost to history. In 2019, Irene Revell and James Hoff re-issued the Womens Work collection, and Revell is undertaking a major study of the volume.⁶² Maryanne Amacher’s once-obscure writings have recently been published in a volume co-edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz.⁶³ A 2016 issue of Contemporary Music Review co-edited by Georgina Born and Kyle Devine is devoted to the theme of gender and education in sound art and digital musics.⁶⁴ The London-based artist Aura Satz has brought attention to the work of early women in electronic music and sound art through videos, films, drawings, installations, and other original artworks that give new life to their work.⁶⁵

These add to a growing plethora of projects that have increased the visibility of female sound artists and developed feminist perspectives in sound art. They include Tara Rodgers’s foundational Pink Noises book and online forum; the exhibitions Her Noise and Sounds Like Her, the event series Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism; the online archives Ekho: Women in Sonic Art and Re.Act.Feminism; the directory Audible Women; the feminist collectives bunker, Fair Plé, and studio xx; the research project Sonic Cyberfeminisms; the platform New Emergences; the blog Sounding Out!; the community project Re#sister; the podcast Girls Twiddling Knobs; the radio series Women in Electronic Music 1938–1928; professional networks Sonora, Yorkshire Sound Women Network, and Women in Sound/Women on Sound; educational initiatives Women’s Audio Mission and the DIY Female Musician; and writings and projects by a wide range of feminist scholars, artists, curators, and presenters.⁶⁶

Feminist interventions serve to rebalance sound art discourses and practices and reorientate male-dominated sound art canons and histories; and they transform the wider cultural and social ecologies in which sound art develops. If we take seriously the idea that perception is ecological – that there is a dialogical relationship between perceivers and their environments – then we could say that, by bringing attention to female sound artists’ work, such interventions also increase sensitivity towards that work, increasing the possibility that it will register in the future. Taking our cue from Annea Lockwood, we might identify such a feminist practice as re-hearing and re-composition of sound art canons – a practice rooted in listening, attention, and sensitization. As Lockwood says, ‘the longer I listen in one place, the more I hear, as we all do’.

Here we provide space for three living composers to reflect on their careers, and on their works. Together they form an indicator of the ways in which women composers have gained increasing recognition in contemporary culture. Among other distinctions, Nicola LeFanu was featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 to mark her seventieth birthday, while both Roxanna Panufnik and Shirley J. Thompson were among those commissioned to produce new compositions for the coronation of King Charles III (6 May 2023).

A Composer’s View

Happy Juggle between Work and Home

Transforming Compositional Structures and Leading Cultural Activism