The Woman Composer, New Music and Neoliberalism

Abstract

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

Notes

¹ According to Gilbert, the term ‘neoliberalism’ originated in the 1930s with the work of Arthur Rüstow. While its existence is denied by some commentators, Gilbert argues that, while difficult to define, it is a tangible phenomenon that has deleterious effects (2013, 8).

² In the early part of the twentieth century, it was deemed that women were incapable of composing ‘great’ music. The reasons given were many and varied but tended to be based in biological deterministic arguments (Seashore 1947; Rubin-Rabson 1973). From the 1970s, feminist musicology, drawing on feminist theory more broadly, countered these arguments, suggesting that the reasons for women's lack of profile in musical composition were more to do with their social situations and social conditioning. An unprecedented explosion erupted with the publication of Susan McClary's (1991) Feminine Endings, which demonstrated that all music could be read as a product of its social situation, including works in the canon that were considered to be untouchable, and above such considerations. It would be true to say that McClary's feminist and cultural critique pressed a number of buttons, polarizing the discipline and leading to a vicious debate (Van den Toorn 1995, 257–99; Higgins 1993, 174–92; Morse 2010).

³ The evidentiary basis for these claims, while not conclusive, suggests that in comparison with the 1990s the percentage of represented women composers at the Australian Music Centre since the mid-1980s shows that the number of women composers in Australia has steadily increased. In the late 1980s, they constituted approximately eight per cent of the composer population; in the 1990s, this increased to approximately fifteen per cent. Currently they represent approximately twenty-five per cent. These data have been reported in a number of publications by Macarthur (1997, 2002, 2010, 2012). Lisa Hirsch argues that in the year of her survey (2008) approximately 30% of students of musical composition in North American tertiary institutions were women (Hirsch 2008). There are no data available about the number of women student composers in Australian tertiary music institutions.

⁴ There have been four new composing women's festivals in Australia: Adelaide, 1991; Melbourne, 1993; Sydney, 1997; and Canberra, 1999.

⁵ Notable examples from the 1990s are the Sydney Alpha Ensemble and the Sydney Spring Festival of Contemporary Music (both now defunct); and one from 2012, the Restrung New Music Festival (Brisbane), which I will discuss in this article.

⁶ Following Rosen, Goldmann implies that the phenomenon of the superstar is heightened by neoliberalism's privileging of elite individuals. Composers, such as the North American John Adams (b. 1947) and the Australians Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1929) and Ross Edwards (b. 1943), arguably epitomize this phenomenon in the world of musical composition.

⁷ Feminist musicologists have addressed the arguments from researchers, such as Seashore (c. 1947) and Rubin-Rabson (1973), who have claimed that women are incapable of composing masterworks. This biologically deterministic argument positions women's music as inferior to men's music. Its traction over a long time (from the nineteenth century to well into the second half of the twentieth century) makes it difficult to shift the perception that women's music is inferior despite the many examples that have been posited to demonstrate the opposite is true. This makes the category of women's music vulnerable in the discourse of aesthetics.

⁸ In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, a machine is never a closed system that works in isolation from other systems. Nor is a machine, as Barbour writes, ‘an efficiently functioning automaton, working entirely on its own power to achieve a predetermined end’ (2012, 20). For Deleuze, a machine is an instrument of possibility that arises from the way it articulates or makes connections with other machines. A marketing machine, then, articulates or connects with music to convert it into an income-generating machine.

⁹ The second Restrung New Music Festival included an expert advisory panel—Professor Jennie Shaw (University of New England), Dr. Jenny Game-Lopata (University of New England), Dr. Sally Macarthur (University of Western Sydney), and Dr. Linda Kouvaras (The University of Melbourne)—which encouraged Bentley to discriminate positively for women composers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally Macarthur

Sally Macarthur (PhD, University of Sydney) is Senior Lecturer in Musicology and Director of Academic Program, Music, at the University of Western Sydney. Her book, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (Ashgate, 2010), draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to open up new ways of thinking about the absence of women's music. Other books include Feminist Aesthetics in Music (Greenwood Press, 2002), with co-editors, Bruce Crossman and Ronaldo Morelos, Intercultural Music: Creation and Interpretation (AMC, 2006) and, with Cate Poynton, Musics and Feminisms (AMC, 1999). She is currently co-editing the book, Music's Immanent Future: Beyond Past and Present, with Judy Lochhead (Stony Brook) and Jennifer Shaw (Adelaide). Email: [email protected]