Bodies - Concepts - Constructions

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'Sex' and 'Gender' in New Music Discourse from the Present to the 1950s. International symposium, July 6 to 8, 2018

The study published by the German Cultural Council in 2016 made official the long visible gender imbalance in the cultural and media sector, which also affects the new music scene in particular. For decades, women hardly played a significant role here - or primarily as practicing artists and performers, but not as composers. Triggered by the study or coincidentally at the same time, various initiatives have since taken place to address sexism in New Music; the group "Gender Relations in Darmstadt" (GRID, later also "Gender Relations in New Music, GRINM), founded at the Darmstadt Summer Course 2016 at the suggestion of composer Ashley Fure, should be mentioned here in particular, which presented a statistical evaluation of the (consistently low) female participation in the Darmstadt Summer Course since 1946 in the same year. During the Donaueschingen Music Days in 2017, the discussion was continued in a panel discussion broadcast by Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk, among others.the Berlin Heroines of Sound festival has been held regularly since 2014; in February 2018, the magazine positionen devoted an entire issue to the topic.

A fundamental and comprehensive academic examination of the topic, which, among other things, investigates subliminally effective discourses, (performance) traditions and corresponding aesthetic principles (such as the preference of the mind over the body, the written work over the performance, structurally complex, autonomous music over experimental or conceptual music) anchored in the tradition of New Music, but also Performance Art in the broader sense, has so far been a desideratum - even if there are already some important initiatives and impulses in this direction. This is particularly true in view of the fact that 'new music' has often understood and staged itself since the 1950s (in some cases to this day) as emphatically objective and dispassionate, i.e. without a body or gender. We need to ask about mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, which, in addition to sex and gender, also encompass, from an intersectional perspective, the question of social class and class affiliation, ethnicity or age. At the same time, it is important to differentiate between places, regions and nations. One focus of the conference will be the musical discourse of the immediate present.
The conference languages are German and English.

The symposium is sponsored by the Mariann Steegmann Foundation, the Conference of Gender Equality Officers at the University of Music and Drama Hamburg and the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Paderborn.

The program:

Friday, July 6, 2018
14:00 Vera Grund (Detmold) and Nina Noeske (Hamburg): Welcome and introduction
14:15 Georgina Born (Oxford): On Gender, Electronic and Digital Music, and Sound Art Today: Lessons from the UK
15:10 Coffee break
15:30 Dörte Schmidt (Berlin): Is the masculine the universal? Musicians between abstraction and concretion in the Cologne/Darmstadt avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s
16:10 Gesa Finke (Hanover): Multiple times between the stools. Canonization problems of female composers in New Music using the example of Tona Scherchen
16:50 Imke Misch (Hanover): Between stage and backstage. Female musicians in the cultural web of the post-war years: Yvette Grimaud, Marcelle Mercenier, Yvonne Loriod
17:30 Coffee break
17:50 Christa Brüstle (Graz): Minimal music and masculinity - discourses and their (re)effects
18:30 Vera Grund (Detmold): "...a certain mental regression...": the discourses around sound compositions as a body-mind conflict
afterwards (approx. 19:30) dinner together

Saturday, July 7, 2018
10:00 Bastian Zimmermann (Berlin): Masculinity performances in the visual arts and music of the 80s/90s and today
10:40 Anne Kohl (Bayreuth): A tool is a tool is a tool. Or is it? Some thoughts on the significance of stereotypes and role models in New Music
11:20 Coffee break
11:40 Elisabeth Treydte (Hamburg): "...that arouses suspicion" - Gender-specific reflections on contemporary composers from a praxeological perspective
12:20 Tatjana Böhme-Mehner (Luxembourg): The pianist's dress and the composer's sweater. Gender in the cultural context and subtext of the aesthetic discourse on new music
13:00 Lunch break
15:00 Katarzyna Grebosz-Haring (Salzburg) and Simone Heilgendorff (Salzburg/Berlin): Between podium and audience: gender proportions in contemporary (art) music using the example of an audience study at the Festival d'Automne, Warszawska Jesień and Wien Modern 2014
16:00 Svenja Reiner (Osnabrück): Adorno says No. New music, fans and gender
16:40 Coffee break
17:00 Janina Klassen (Freiburg i. Br.): Microphones for Sirens. On the audibility and visibility of female electronic music artists
17:40 Monika Pasiecznik (Warsaw): New Music and Sensual Pleasure in Neo Hülcker's ASMR Series
20:00 Concert (until approx. 21:30)
Frauke Aulbert: Utopia Macramé. Interactive performance-lecture | Neo Hülcker: Neo Hülcker's breaking of the voice - Konzert für Stimme im Stimmbruch | Julia Mihály: La Rinascità di Marlene

Sunday, July 8, 2018
9:30 Ute Henseler (Berlin): Solo for Émilie. Kaija Saariaho's latest opera on the test bench
10:10 Beatrix Borchard (Hamburg): "I try the impossible and that gives me strength." Adriana Hölszky - not a woman who composes: Reflecting on self-definitions, patterns of perception and market mechanisms
10:50 Stefan Drees (Berlin): "...absolute freedom, complete autonomy for my art...": Olga Neuwirth's examination of the social role of the artist and art
11:30 Coffee break
12:00 Andreas Holzer (Vienna), Gordon Kampe (Hamburg), Julia Mihály (Frankfurt a. M.), Bettina Wackernagel (Berlin):

Gender Technologies in New Music (panel)

Moderation: Elisabeth Treydte

Music: Chunyu Wu: Panic (2018) | Catalina Rueda: da-sein-fluch(t) (2018)
13:40 Closing remarks
14:00 End of the symposium