Thank you so much to Kirsty MacLeod for inviting me to be a guest on the W.E.E. podcast, for a great discussion about interdisciplinary science-art research and creation with Beth Reinke and Amy Cheu. You can hear this episode (as well as lots of other interesting discussions) here.
I’m pleased to share my most recent article for New Music Box, on why “but surely you don’t want your music performed just because you’re a woman, surely you want it performed because it’s good” is not the devastating critique that those who resist gender balanced programming think it is!
I’ve long had a hunch that even small differentials in the likelihood of having pieces performed between women and men composers can have a huge cumulative effect over the long-term. My partner Neil Banas is a computer modeller, and he made me an interactive model for this article (published on New Music Box), which indeed bears out my theory. Drag the blue sliders to see how gender (or other) inequality may affect composers over the course of their careers.
I have no great attachment to the Pulitzer Prize being for “classical music,” so if Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN is a great album, then fantastic that it won! I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m looking forward to listening! The thing I wrestle with is that so often becoming more inclusive gets equated with including new genres — while still leaving out the women, people of colour, and other marginalized people whose works have been overlooked in the original genre. Eg. I’m sure there are many black “classical” composers whose work continues to get overlooked by the Pulitzer and similar awards. I can’t speak to how black “classical” composers are feeling about the Pulitzer (and if you know of any commentaries, please point me in their direction), but I can speak to how I feel in a parallel situation. I’ve always hated how when classical music anthologies and form and analysis texts decide to add some women composers for their second (or 25th) edition, they usually just add a couple of popular songs. I mean yes, song-writing is great, and it’s a genre in which women have often had more opportunity to succeed than, say, Romantic opera — but it’s still overlooking all the “classical” women composers. I feel like just adding a couple contemporary women song-writers and no-one else to a text/anthology that is clearly mainly about “classical” music actually serves to reinforce the idea that women can’t or don’t write “classical” music even more than leaving out women entirely! At least the text or anthology with no women can’t pretend it’s trying to be egalitarian, while the text with two women popular song writers and 102 male “classical” composers will claim that it is being inclusive! Of course I’m in favour of including new genres in things too — just tired of the way “inclusion” and “new genres” get equated, and many people still get left out!
