Keywords

1 Introduction

One of the objectives of the European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC) is to achieve gender balance in all areas and at all hierarchical levels of national scientific and research activities and institutions in the EU (vertical and horizontal segregation). This equality-related goal was briefly summarised as ‘fix the numbers’. It mainly refers to eliminating the underrepresentation of persons or groups of persons in certain fields. For a long time the main aim was to reduce the underrepresentation of women through measures to promote women. In the meantime, an expansion has taken place as part of the development of gender mainstreaming and diversity management: on the one hand, more emphasis is being placed on equal opportunities for everyone, while on the other hand, some of the responsibility for achieving gender balance has been transferred to (institutional) communities (cf. Cordes 2010, 924–932). Apart from that, it is legitimate to ask why the ‘numbers’ are a central aspect in this context and why statistical data are of such great importance. First, empirical data and statistical reports can make the underrepresentation of women and minorities highly visible. Second, they suggest the importance of determining the reasons for this underrepresentation. Third, they can inspire initiatives and measures to change the data. Such measures include quotas or parity arrangements, but they are not uncontroversial (cf. Cordes 1996). Figuring out the reasons for certain numerical ratios and then changing their origins is a far more complex and difficult matter. This also involves not only focussing on the ‘numbers’ but also bringing about a cultural change within institutions (‘fix the institutions’) as well as increasing and strengthening general gender knowledge and intersectional gender competencies in different areas (“fix the knowledge”). Only in the complex interplay of these three factors is it possible to formulate a meaningful equality policy that includes gender but also other diversity categories, such as religion, ethnic origin, social status, age, sexual orientation, and world view.

Thus, the thematisation of gender in very different contexts usually not only addresses concerns of society as a whole but also almost always touches on very personal areas, often provoking defensive attitudes. In addition, to this day feminism holds critical potential as a starting point for the thematisation of gender that has not completely disappeared even in the post-feminist age—although it has changed and been partly relativised.

It is now also accepted that feminism itself is characterized by diversity, fragmentation, and a series of internal contestations. […] However, as a methodological strategy, starting from women’s experience is consistent with understanding how gender identities and relations are being remade within the contradictory dynamics that constitute the post-feminist gender order (Budgeon 2011, 1, 189).Footnote 1

This still includes criticising dominant cultures, denouncing and combating different forms of discrimination (of women), and advocating for equal rights (of women). It is important in this context to recall the importance of figures and statistics: they highlight systematic discrimination and institutional power structures as well as inequalities and disadvantageous differences.

In 2016, for example, the presentation of statistics from the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music by composer Ashley Fure gave a clear picture of the exclusion of women until the 1980s. Hardly any works by female composers were played, and for a long time no women were invited as lecturers (GRiD 2016). The reasons for this are certainly to be found on the one hand in the male-dominated decision-making structures but on the other hand also in the lack of dissenting voices or in the lack of awareness that there was a considerable imbalance in this regard. The dominance of male representatives was not seen as dominance but as normality, which is known as ‘phallocentrism’.

Phallocentrism is a specifically discursive series of procedures, a strategy for collapsing representations of the two sexes into a single model, called ‘human’ or ‘man,’ but which is in fact congruent only with the masculine, as if these were genuinely representative of both sexes. The masculinity of the ‘human’ goes unrecognised. In other words, phallocentrism effaces the autonomous representation of femininity […] Within phallocentrism paradigms femininity can only be represented in some necessary relation to masculinity (Crosz 1990, 150).

The thematisation of gender (under feminist auspices) thus contains a critique of this phallocentric ‘normality’. In the following remarks, I will discuss the extent to which a critical attitude towards the existing circumstances is generally linked to the discussion of gender. Why is the addressing and thematisation of gender relations and sex/gender topics always associated with conflicts and debates? Why do gender equality policy and increasing gender competencies in institutions simultaneously mean a critique of institutions? Why is the music sector usually very resistant to these critical approaches? Why are traditional patterns of canon formation and outdated gender discourses also reproduced in the field of contemporary music? To what extent does it make sense to classify related changes in the context of neoliberalism in terms of education and science policy? What counterarguments are to be expected? These and other related questions will be the focus of the following discussion. My perspective results from my work in the field of women’s and gender studies as well as in university gender equality policy. Therefore, my own personal experiences will also be included.

2 Gender Issues as Criticism in Society and Institutions

Why is the thematisation of gender linked to social criticism and criticism of institutions? Why is the addressing and discussion of gender relations and sex/gender topics almost always associated with disputes? Why is “feminism that has become academic” usually regarded as “critical”, “dissident”, or “resistant”? (Hark 2005, 10–11).

Answers to these questions are manifold. Thus, the discussion of gender still contains a critique of primary and secondary patriarchal relations (see Beer 2010, 59–64) and of male hegemony, although this thrust is often downplayed today because it all too easily suggests a perpetrator/victim dichotomy. From the male side, the clichéd role of perpetrator has long been rejected; conversely, women no longer want to be automatically interpreted as victims.Footnote 2 However, this leads to a decline in attention to the ‘boy groups’. Women are also recommended to found their own networks in order to empower themselves and pool their efforts, which often leads to a cliché image: Women are the better networkers and team players anyway, because they have traditionally practiced this role in the family. But is this possibly a reason why female leaders are lacking (because women prefer the role of networkers to that of leaders)?

The last question was of course meant ironically, but these and similar circular trains of thought constantly accompany the thematisation of gender. However, this suppresses criticism of the existing circumstances. Instead, it appeals to the dominant groups (males) to turn against themselves, so to speak, in order to show solidarity with the non-dominant groups and to rehabilitate or strengthen them. This is not really visible to many people. It remains in many respects idealistic wishful thinking, because it ultimately threatens to limit or minimise one’s own (male) personal privileges.

However, it may be assumed that the discussion and reflection of gender is usually associated with a critique of power structures or a critical penetration of power fields. Power should be understood as “power relations in which only one stronger side asserts itself” and as “influence that individuals—based on their disposal of resources or their abilities—achieve in social relationships” (Lenz 2010, 31, 32).Footnote 3 Gender-specific power structures and fields of power affect gender polarity as well as relationships between men and men or women and women. In addition, the ratio of minorities to majorities also plays a role. In the European-influenced social structure, it can still be assumed that the heterosexual matrix and the sovereignty of action and discourse of male hegemony (cf. Connell 1987; Meuser 2010) have prevailed, both of which—albeit only slowly and not without resistance and setbacks—have come under discussion in recent years precisely through the thematisation of sex/gender issues.

The critique of power structures and the critical reflection of fields of power often have societal relations as reference points, which are contrasted with and supplemented by private and personal reference points. Thus, the thematisation of gender usually also means a critique of fixed general, religious, and other group-specific opinions and principles as well as very personal, experience-based individual ones.

“Feminist theory is therefore basically only conceivable as a project of the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge” and as a “challenge of thinking differently” (Hark 2005, 395).Footnote 4 This includes not only a reflection on the social constitution of gender but also a deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge about physical conditionalities and sexual orientations. The latter are often regarded as private matters that you do not talk about (publicly) and do not want to be addressed (publicly) about. However, it is a real challenge to start at exactly this point, because changes in society as a whole can hardly be achieved without a change in private, individual attitudes. An example of this are manifold discussions about the supposedly unambiguous, ‘natural’ gender dichotomy or gender dualism, which begin with the rejection of or insight into the social constitution of gender and continue with the negation or recognition of scientific findings on (for example, endocrinologicalFootnote 5) gender diversity or with discrimination or tolerance of people who cannot or do not want to meet certain gender norms, either physically or socially. As these discussions have long since reached the public and politics, they should no longer be regarded as private matters (with positive and negative consequences).

Institutions and institutionalised organisations should be regarded as intermediate instances located between society as a whole and the individual, as “intermediate levels of social organization” (Connell 1987, 119) in which human relationships are pronounced and controlled but also negotiated. In them, gender relations are also created and reproduced, discussed, and transformed: “the state of play in gender relations in a given institution is its ‘gender regime’” (Connell 1987, 120).Footnote 6 The thematisation of gender and the associated criticism within an institution or organisation then means dealing with this ‘gender regime’, that is, also with the gender-specific power relations and fields of power as well as the interests of an institution or organisation and its members, groups, and networks. Since an institution or organisation usually seeks stability, such an intervention is only effectively possible if it does not fear destabilisation and, as a result, the intervention can even be considered a gain.

The arts and art sciences as institutions are open to this in different ways (Brüggmann 2020). While in the visual arts the discussion of gender belongs to institutionalised art criticism and self-reflection as well as theory formation of art history, meaning the topic of gender therefore seems to have already been exhausted, the music sector is less committed and more immobile overall. The critical potential of thematising and reflecting on gender hardly plays a role in music practice. While it is discussed in musicology and music theory, it is only seldom used for self-reflection and theory formation in the subject. Impulses for this have been provided especially since the 1990s in the USA, for example, with Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991) and other appeals for a ‘feminist music criticism’ (see McClary 1993; McClary 1994). In German-language musicology, the most important impulse is still the book by Eva Rieger, Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft. Zum Ausschluss der Frau aus der deutschen Musikpädagogik, Musikwissenschaft und Musikausübung, published in 1981.

The spectrum of approaches in art and art studies for thematising gender thus ranges from criticism of the exclusion of women from history and historiography to criticism of the dominance of certain discourses, such as the concept of genius or the idea of objective art and art analysis without consideration of the subject and sociocultural context. A special aspect, however, arises from the combination of the assumption and expectation that art itself (immanently and always) practices social and institutional critique with the thematisation and discussion of gender as a critical approach. The artistic means, forms, concepts, and ideas are thus linked to gender issues, such as gender stereotypes, corporeality, sexuality, or the performance of gender. This leads not only to the creation of art about gender or on gender topics but also to the creation of art that views the foundations, materials, and media of art itself through the lens of gender theory or reflects on their gender-specific manifestations.

However, the presentation and exclusive deconstructivist self-reflection of material and media is already outdated. Instead, playful, subversive, and hybrid approaches overlay reconstructivist approaches that do not exclude (humourous) criticism.

A good example of this is the sculptures and installations of the British artist Sarah Lucas, for example, Au naturel (1994), in which male and female body parts evoke the heterosexual matrix, confirm their cliché images, and at the same time undermine them, because they consist, for example, of melons, cucumbers, oranges, and a bucket draped over an old mattress (Malik 2009).

3 Gender Issues as Institutional Critique in the Field of Music

Educational institutions, such as music academies and colleges, are institutionalised social organisations that mainly teach music practice and music knowledge or discourses. Why does the discussion of gender in this area at the same time mean a critique of institutions? Why are music education institutions sometimes very resistant to gender equality policy on the one hand and to efforts to increase gender competencies and knowledge on the other? Why are gender-theoretical approaches in music theory and musicology still received with scepticism or ignored?

Practical music training in European-influenced music education institutions is largely based on the reproduction of structures that originated in concert and opera culture and conform to the bourgeois music cultures that have been firmly established since the nineteenth century as well as the associated music market (cf. Weber 1975). This includes not only the performance, interpretation, and presentation of composed and notated works but also certain forms of staging the presentation of music in the concert hall or in the opera house. Improvisation or the performance of music outdoors, for example, are marginal phenomena in classical music education, although they have not always been marginal in the history of music performance. In conventional music practice, therefore, there are some clear hierarchical structures that prescribe, for example, that musicians understand the score as a reference medium or that the audience cannot actively play along at a concert (cf. Heister 1983). In addition, there are other rules in music education that are taken for granted, such as learning in individual lessons with a teacher and in so-called ‘master classes’ or the imprinting of stereotypical personalities in instrumental and vocal classes (cf. Busch-Salmen and Rieger 2000; Scharff 2017; Bull 2019).

This results in a number of fields of practice in which gender and the gender category play a major role. For example, the authority of the score is combined with the fact that the persons represented are predominantly composers, particularly male creators of works. In this context, the ideal of a male genius and canon formation has been decisive since the nineteenth century. “Canons embody the value systems of a dominant cultural group that is creating or perpetuating the repertoire, although it may be encoding values from some larger, more powerful group” (Citron 2000, 20).Footnote 7

In the concert hall or in the opera, the works are predominantly performed by conductors, who also embody authority and power in their role as creators and enjoy the highest reputation. Only in recent years have women who can acquire this role become known at the conductor’s podium (possibly transforming it).

The question of gender in the classroom—who teaches whom and how or who is taught by whom—is another area that affects not only the consideration of personal differences and diversity but also includes aspects such as sexual attraction to harassment and coercion. The handling of power is decisive in this context too, because power does not automatically and exclusively mean domination over people but also represents a form of motivation, support, and enablement (Klinger 2004). It is therefore a conscious decision on how to use power, leave it unused, or abuse it. In addition, it is important to perceive, comment, and if necessary discontinue or punish the exercise of power or the use of power, in particular the abuse of power.

In addition to instrumental or vocal virtuosity, music education also promotes certain personality profiles that are linked to clichéd gender performances, be it the blonde, especially female soprano or the extroverted, self-confident trumpeter. Here, a gender-specific choice of instrument sometimes overlaps with gender connotations (harp is still considered a female instrument, brass instruments and drums are considered male instruments) (cf. Abeles and Yank Porter 1978; Hoffmann 1991; Abeles 2009).

In singing, high male voices or low female voices are considered rather androgynous, so they do not fit into the traditional separation of high female (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto) and deep male voices (tenor, baritone, bass), although there are flowing transitions. Only the rediscovery of baroque operas in the twentieth century created a greater understanding of this, which, however, is taken into account almost exclusively in vocal training in special areas of early music. In classical vocal training for choir, oratorio, opera, and song, lessons based on vocal specialisations as well as traditional women’s and men’s voices predominate.

Efforts to raise awareness of such conditions are often seen as unnecessary interference, because they could obstruct routines and customary rights, but also any training premises deemed necessary. However, what the prevention and elimination of negative consequences of these premises and significant changes in traditional conditions require above all is a clear awareness of the connections of musical cultures with the category of gender (and other diversity categories) or increased gender competencies and extended gender knowledge. Actual changes in music institutions or in the Western European musical culture they are derived from would therefore result in complex and far-reaching cultural change. The thematisation of gender in terms of expanding social and pedagogical gender competencies and gender knowledge therefore also holds critical potential because it attacks existing hierarchies and conventions.

The discussion of gender in the fields of musicology, music biography, music analysis, and critical studies of music proves to be mainly a discourse critique. What this involves primarily with reference to the classical music canon is establishing a connection between music and gender in the first place, so that music is not understood as an absolute or autonomous art. Then it is a matter of incorporating certain aspects into music analysis and music criticism, such as the effects of gender polarity in music or the importance of different sexual orientations for the composition, thus ensuring that they are no longer concealed or declared irrelevant (cf. McClary 1991).

In principle, this encompasses the whole field and all connections between music and sexuality. It may be called prudery that this field has been little touched on in music theory and in musicology, but in reality there is more to it. On the one hand, the inclusion of comprehensive biographical contexts and the assertion that social conditions, including gender and family relations, dealings with women or partners, and desire and sexuality have an influence on music biography and music interpretation, including the history of its origin and impact, could or cannot only mean a de-idealisation of composers but also a ‘devaluation’ of their music.

On the other hand, the inclusion of gender aspects in the interpretation of music constitutes a critique of the idea and ideology of absolute or autonomous music, a critique of the idea of music that is determined solely in rational terms and guarantees the highest quality and aesthetic value through its technique, compositional form, and structure. This idea has a masculine connotation and is also supported by a correspondingly abstract, formally or compositionally oriented music-analytical language (see Maus 1993). The inclusion of gender aspects in the interpretation of music therefore also means criticising this one-sidedness and pointing out that musical factors with female connotations, such as emotionality and physicality, must be taken into account on an equal footing.

Apart from the fact that gender-connoted fields of meaning can be observed in the interpretation of music, however, their emphasis or negation should not be regarded as a neutral process. It makes a difference whether one emphasises the rational and technical ability or the emotionality and physicality of a male or female composer’s music, because a male composer genius is in principle granted both levels (Battersby 1989). A female composer, on the other hand, was for a long time not trusted or regarded as possessing rationality and masterful musical technique. What including gender aspects in music institutions and in music education, music theory, and musicology therefore means not least is acknowledging that there is a complex interrelationship between the two sexes—however justified and defined—and gender as a social category and performance as well as historically based gender connotations of language and knowledge and gender metaphors, and that this interrelationship pervades the music field in many ways.

4 Gender Issues as Institutional and Discourse Critique—Contemporary Music

In the field of new and contemporary music in the twentieth century, traditional patterns of canon formation and conventional gender discourses were initially reproduced, although changes gradually took place at various levels. It is clear that canon formation remained oriented towards male composers, be it Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartok, Milhaud, and Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, and Cage, or Feldman and Ives. There were no female composers in these series who were visible in this context. They came into focus only gradually since the 1980s, when the women’s movement as a whole began paying more attention to female artists. Meanwhile, female composers such as Younghi Pagh-Paan, Adriana Hölszky, or Kaija Saariaho and Chaya Czernowin are among the best-known names, at least in the European context, but can they also be described as part of the canon? And do internationally famous artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, or Laurie Anderson also belong in this series?

According to Marcia Citron, the series are related to repertorial and disciplinary canons, meaning that they are linked to performance and critical areas, so in fact, the question is:

But who decides what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in canons – or more colloquially, what is in and what is out? This suggests the pivotal issue of the participation of interests in canonicity. Canon formation is not controlled by any one individual or organization, nor does it take place at any one historical moment. Rather, the process of the formation of a canon, whether a repertoire or a disciplinary paradigm, involves a lengthy historical process that engages many cultural variables (Citron 2000, 19).

We might ask here which cultural variables have been important in the realm of contemporary music in the last decades. One of them is surely the fact that contemporary music discourses were mostly named and described by male writers. Other variables are, for example, cultural approaches towards experiments in the arts, including experiments with musical instruments, the body, and the voice.

However, it is not only a matter of the gender disparity in canon formation but also of what composers produce and how and of how certain compositional directions and genres are connected. Gender connotations become important again in this connection, specifically the relation between ways of thinking and working with categories such as masculinity, femininity, or androgyny and with whether they are regarded as predominant, hegemonic, subordinate, deviant, integrated, or excluded. A key point in this regard are the cultural and artistic contexts in which gender connotations and their evaluations take place.

Recent decades have been characterised by a great pluralism of styles and international growth in contemporary music, but until the 1970s, more polarising directions were developed in music and strengthened above all by musical aesthetics and music historiography. In addition, there was a broad orientation towards developments mainly in Europe and the USA. The implementation of certain directions and discourse formations derived from them were the focus of many efforts by composers, musicologists, and critics, be it the implementation of atonal, serial, experimental, complex, or post-serial music. Theodor W. Adorno, for example, was heavily involved in the musical discussions in the German-speaking world after his return to Frankfurt, even if his statements hardly did justice to the current compositions of the 1950 and 1960s, because he based his arguments on the compositional developments of the 1920s (cf. Adorno 1949; Borio and Danuser 1997). In France, it was René Leibowitz and Olivier Messiaen who initiated innovation spurts as composers and teachers (see Kovács 2004). Boulez and Stockhausen followed as leading composers of a new musical constructivism, the basic lines of which corresponded to a rationally ordered music and material mastery—a compositional and work aesthetic that may be characterised as quite masculine. This was opposed by composers espousing experimental working attitudes and improvisational, intuitive approaches that ideally granted openness and freedom to both sound events and interpretive processes and changed the role of the compositional subject. If this is associated with more feminine connotations, it is probably significant that it was precisely in this environment that female artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, or Annea Lockwood first became known and that for a long time no serious interest was shown to them (Brüstle 2013). The fact that some of these female composers are lesbians and have linked their music to their sexual orientation has certainly contributed to their marginalisation (Mockus 2007). The situation was different for homosexual composers, who, for historical reasons, excluded or chose not to address their sexual orientation (such as Pierre Boulez and John Cage), not least because it was illegal. Sylvano Bussotti was an exception in this respect in the 1960s and also caused a certain (albeit quite calculatedly scandalous) opening in the context of contemporary music (Attinello et al. 2007). At the same time, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett became the most important composers of the mid-twentieth century in Great Britain, and they could not really reveal their homosexuality at first either (Brüstle 2010). Privately practiced homosexuality among adults has been legalised in much of the UK since 1967 (Sexual Offences Act, extended 1980/82) (see Cook 2007).

In any case, nothing changed in the canon formation of these male composers, even if they later revealed their partnerships. Heterosexual composers, on the other hand, were able to live out their sexual orientation. Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, staged private matters publicly and demonstrated his promiscuous potency by showing his family and partners (Stockhausen 1963–2014; Bauermeister 2013). His turn to open or variable forms or to intuitive music—that is, to areas with female connotations—has in principle only underlined his role as a male genius in the spirit of the nineteenth century.

In recent years, Georg Friedrich Haas has acted in a similar way, openly coupling his compositional production and his artistic success with the fulfilment of his male sadistic needs, in which he also integrates the relationship with performers and audiences (Woolfe 2016).Footnote 8

However, sexuality and classical as well as contemporary music are by no means topics that have been discussed generally and comprehensively in recent years (cf. Sofer 2020, 2022). They may still be too close to scandals and at the same time to abysses that have become apparent in cases of abuse recently brought to light, especially in the music sector. Feminist-underpinned gender discussions have not least also led to the initiation of the #MeToo debates, in some cases revealing years of abuse of power. This was also perceived in the context of contemporary music but was for a very long time ‘overlooked’ or glossed over and concealed (see Knobbe and Möller 2018).

In any case, the thematisation of gender implies different critiques of power relations and discrimination in the context of contemporary music as well. This is also evident if one takes into account music-theoretical and musicological discourses and contemporary music creation itself, which I will now discuss in more detail.

In music theory, dealing with gender means moving ‘outside the canon’. Although this is something that is increasingly being done, Ellie Hisama still had to state the following in 2000:

Not only is there still a pressing need in the new millennium for our music theory societies to diversify their membership with regard to gender and race, but music theory journals [including, e.g., Perspectives of New Music] also need to publish scholarship on music by women, popular music and jazz, American music, and non-Western music on a much larger scale. I am not suggesting that research on canonical composers should be dispensed with; I am saying that music theory journals need to become more diverse (Hisama 2000).

However, canon criticism is only one aspect of this demand. Also criticised are conventional music-theoretical methods of analysis focussing on objectivity and traditional quality criteria such as high complexity or a sophisticated compositional structure. It should be recalled here that the preoccupation with these complicated areas often falls back on the analysts in a quasi-ennoblable way.

The question arises, for example, what is excluded or brought to the fore by the inclusion of gender issues within musical analyses. In any case, it is not only composing women but also the subjective position and performance of the analyst (cf. Cook 1999). This would imply that the rational, analytical penetration of a piece of music would be supplemented by reflection on its phenomenological, physical-sensual, and emotional effect (on the interpreters, analysts, listeners, users), its perception and re-actions, because it is precisely physicality, sensuality, perception, and listening positions that have often been excluded. Although these aspects have increasingly been taken up in music theory and musicology in recent years, their connection to gender theories and gender issues is often left aside.

A composition such as ?Corporel (1985) for a drummer on his body by Vinko Globokar, for example, clearly places the male interpreter with a naked upper body in the centre. This excludes female drummers from the outset or at least restricts them in their execution of the piece. The composer seems to have little understanding for this. Percussionist Kira Dralle reports: “When I asked him if he thought that a performance was any less aurally authentic to his composition if a woman would perform with a shirt, he merely replied, ‘I don’t know, how attractive is she?’ This was devastating” (Dralle 2013). Nevertheless, this fact is hardly touched on in analyses, as the author has to admit from her own experience. Instead, the male body is described as a neutral, human body, and the focus is on the analysis of the score, on the description of the structure of the piece, and on the interpretation of the composer’s intentions (cf. Zenck et al. 2001; Beck 2004; Brüstle 2013a, b, 228–233; Balkenborg 2013; Schmitt-Weidmann 2021).

The relationship between music and audience or listener has also been increasingly addressed in recent years. Here, the integration of gender discourses leads to a questioning of the active and passive roles. Is music a masculine power due to its penetration of the auditory organs, especially if it is overwhelming in expression and emotionally intrusive? Is the listener always passive and therefore ‘receiving’ connoted with the female? If this is not the case, is there (always) a homoerotic relationship between music and listeners (regardless of their biological sex) (cf. Brett et al. 2011)? Central discourses of contemporary music must be linked to these questions, because it was precisely the parameters of expression and emotion (together with the factors of enjoyment and pleasure) that were rejected and suppressed as a weakness or constriction of music at least in the middle of the twentieth century. With this, however, the modernist, avant-garde, artificial music lost part of its masculine power and a large part of its audience. However, it has been reassessed on the one hand precisely due to its exclusivity and rational foundations and on the other hand due to its idealisation of naturalness and liberation, presence of sound, noise, and silence. For gender connotations and associated evaluations, this resulted in other reference points: rationality and construction for masculinity, naturalness, and liberation for (male) femininity.Footnote 9

The dichotomy of male/female attempted here is clearly outdated, but it should and can contribute to clarifying the developments. After all, the renaissance of expression and emotion in contemporary music since the 1970s gave rise to another change. It raised the question as to which compositional means should be used to combine expression and emotion: Was it the ingenious expressiveness of Wolfgang Rihm, the minimalist repetitions of Philip Glass, or the neo-romantic tonality of Judith Weir? Has music regained its masculine power as a result? However, the broad international audience was recaptured above all in minimal music. It may be assumed that people feel emotionally addressed by this music on the one hand and associate pleasure with it on the other. Both of these categories were located under other aspects in postmodernism (cf. Lochhead and Auner 2002). But let us ask again: Has the masculine-connoted power of music towards the listener been reconstituted by expression, emotion, pleasure, tonality? Will listeners be overwhelmed (again), perhaps even against their will? Or has an interaction based on mutual consent not perhaps become possible again?

However, it should be borne in mind that the audience or listeners cannot be seen as a uniform mass but as a completely heterogeneous unit. This aspect is central to the field of contemporary music, as it has produced its own audiences, including analysts and interpreters, ranging from those who know and enjoy serial music (cf. Ashby 2004) to those who prefer improvisation and instant composition or enjoy minimalist music. What I am getting at is that a listener and lover of serial music may not spend an enjoyable evening with music by Philip Glass.

The different receptions of contemporary music are charged with evaluations, some of which are still very much determined by Adorno’s arguments in favour of a socially resistant music that negates the commodity character, as he wrote about art:

What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. […] Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity (Adorno 1997, 227).Footnote 10

Hence a discourse of ‘authentic’ new music that still endures despite all the diversity of contemporary music. Although the younger generations of composers have probably read Adorno little, they are still measured (or they measure themselves) by this discourse by teachers or in reviews, for example, at least in large parts of contemporary music in the European context.

If this discourse is still effective and thus connected with the idea of a primacy within contemporary music that is more or less strongly associated with construction, rationality, and self-reflection, one could assume that this discourse is male-dominated, even if expression and emotion are no longer suppressed. Fred Maus has suggested a way out of this dilemma by proposing to understand the non-tonal music of this direction as ‘queer’:

Perhaps it is already easy to see that non-tonal compositions are queers in the concert hall, without any special arguments on my part. To many listeners and performers, they are marginals, oddballs, outsiders, often tolerated rather than loved, sometimes not tolerated at all, products of the degeneration of tonal order, needing a special etiology to explain why they are so peculiar (Maus 2004, 159).

Fred Maus’s proposal is charming and worth considering, but it implies the danger of attributing the role of a ‘queer’ victim to elitist and discourse-demanding thinking and composing within contemporary music. This only works against the background of the general concert hall audience; not against the background of the discourses of contemporary music. In this context, the music of Philip Glass or Judith Weir is despised and rejected, or at best just tolerated.

5 Conclusion

The integration of gender in the field of music implies much-discussed aspects and measures of institutional gender equality policy as well as fundamental perspectives critical of music discourse, music theory, and musicology, and thus also institutionally critical perspectives. The entire field of music is permeated by practices and theories that create, confirm, and—far too rarely—reflect on unspoken and pronounced gender relations and connotations. In addition, there is a continuous interplay between numerically identifiable gender relations, (powerful) institutional gender strategies, and the state of gender knowledge or gender competencies, whether within a music education institution, in the concert business, or in the circles of composers and interpreters, including analysts of contemporary music. In this respect, the three lines ‘fix the numbers’, ‘fix the institution’, ‘fix the knowledge’ form a mutually dependent unit. In addition, it is clear that gender aspects must be extended intersectionally by further diversity categories, such as age, religion, class, race, religion, and sexual orientation, in order to achieve a deepening of this unity that at least comes close to real constellations (cf. Andresen et al. 2009).

In closing, I would like to deepen these aspects once again using the example of two artists and their compositional projects. In contemporary music—except operas, in which sex/gender-related subjects still matter—few artists explicitly refer to gender aspects in the sense that they reflect masculinity, femininity, or sexuality in their music, criticise power relations, or question conventional gender norms. As one can assume, music or sound composition itself will not be able to make certain statements, but messages in music can result from ethical or political attitudes of the producers and from musical contexts or from the material of the music, its use, and its effect in the comparison of different pieces or compositions (cf. Dibben 1999).

However, those who integrate gender aspects into their work are not in the mainstream of the music being composed today but more or less successfully occupy niches, such as the Austrian composer Pia Palme, or work across genres and engage in activism, like the Japan-based American artist and DJ Terre Thaemlitz. In both cases, the self-reflexive, partly autobiographical preoccupation with gender issues also means a critique of hegemonic discourses of contemporary music. How does this manifest itself?

Pia Palme already dealt with the question of possibilities of interweaving composition, interpretation, improvisation, listening positions, and feminism in her 2017 dissertation in composition under Liza Lim at the University of Huddersfield, entitled The noise of mind: A feminist practice in composition, Palme describes “feminist practice in composition” as “a compositional practice that is grounded in feminism, meaning that feminism underpins how and what kind of decisions are made during the compositional process and around it. This practice does not seek to produce ‘feminist’ works. The feminist practice in composition is essentially personal and individual” (Palme 2017, 14–15). This addresses a specific compositional style that is characterised by great flexibility and openness to collaboration, and by a refusal to define a (compositional) artistic identity. One might speak of the manifestation of a ‘nomadic subject’ who seeks to discover and pursue an ‘écriture feminine’ (Kogler 2017). Similar to Pauline Oliveros, Pia Palme thus represents a ‘cultural feminism’: “Cultural feminists tend to believe that they should make an environment free of masculine values as they perceive them, and that specifically female body experiences are powerful forces in constructing a female ideology” (Taylor 1993, 386–387). It is therefore assumed that female artists create their own working, cooperation, performance spaces, and forums that they practice empowerment in order to evade or oppose male networks and power structures. The preoccupation with one’s own body, especially the work with one’s own voice, also appears as a feminist artistic refuge, presumably among other things because the female voice suffers (almost) no voice mutation and thus represents a continuous, albeit flexible, and fluid identity, which is not least reflected in the multiple role of a composer, performer, musician, and improviser (Cusick 1999). In the context of contemporary music, however, occupying and expanding one’s ‘own female space’ means a form of institutional critique that—even if it can be ignored—aims to set an example in the present and to work hopefully for a future in which female artists receive full recognition, as Virginia Woolf 1929 put it in her famous statement:

As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while (Woolf 1993, 103).

The artist Terre Thaemlitz positions herself musically and activistically somewhat differently from Pia Palme, but she is equally concerned with “fighting [dominant] culture with culture” (Thaemlitz 1997). Palme and Thaemlitz also have a basic attitude in common, which refers to the fact that their art does not arise and exist absolutely and independently of social and artistic contexts. In addition, authorship is a permanent open question for both, which arises on the one hand through collaborations with colleagues and audiences and on the other through consciously established musical and performative references. One example is Thaemlitz’s links to the music of the American synth-pop band Devo, to the British electropop musician Gary Numan, or to the band Kraftwerk (Thaemlitz 2018). Thaemlitz also combines her music with social, gender, and capitalism-critical messages, which result above all from her experiences and perceptions as a transgender person. Thaemlitz does not want to clearly define herself as a person or her music, which cannot be described as commercially oriented pop music and also does not fit into the context of artificial, contemporary composed works:

For myself, the power of transgenderism – if any – rests in this vagueness and divisiveness. It is not a power of distinction or difference from other genders, but rather the power of seeing representational systems of distinction or difference between genders collapse. It is not a power of transformation, but rather the power of transition. It is not a ‘third gender’ offering unity, or a middling of genders. It is, by all means, a threat to the myth of social unity. Within the transgendered community, it is the potential to de-essentialise acts of transitioning in relation to social process. It is hard reality like a fist in the face (as many of us unfortunately know). The more you attempt to define it, the more it eludes and betrays you (Thaemlitz 2004).

The musical ambiguity in Thaemlitz’s works can be seen, for example, in their appearance as electronic dance and ambient music, with repetitions and psychedelic spatial sounds. But they also undermine the pure formation of atmosphere, for example, through messages in titles, through quotations of speeches, or certain references in remixes. In addition, it is the performance contexts and the audience that Thaemlitz prefers and appeals to that indirectly form a ‘counterculture’, be it certain subcultural bars and clubs or the audience of contemporary performance art and experimental electronics.

The thematisation and discussion of gender aspects in music, in music theory and musicology, and in music institutions such as music colleges and universities is always associated with a critical awareness-raising, which, among other things, makes power relations visible and attacks them. This implicit and explicit critique within the thematisation of gender aspects is often noticeable through the concern and defensive attitudes of those addressed, who, for whatever reason, adopt a counter-attitude. Especially in the field of music, it is also common to declare gender aspects irrelevant because music is allegedly apolitical or, as art, has no contact with sexuality or sexual orientation. We experience the opposite every day, whether in music appropriated by right-wing populist parties or in associations triggered by Ravel’s Bolero, not to mention cases of abuse that take place especially in music practice. Precisely for this reason, knowledge transfer and competence building regarding intersectionally extended gender discourses and gender are necessary in institutions of music, to which music as art belongs.