Keywords

1 Introductions and Origins at Darmstadt

Gender Relations in New Music, or GRiNM for short, is a heterogeneous collective of individuals advocating for increased gender equality, inclusivity, and further diversification of people and practices in New Music. It continues the work of Gender Research in Darmstadt or GRID, which emerged in 2016 during the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music as a spontaneous group spurred into action by statistics on the gender split in commissions made to (male or female) composers over the course’s history. Since then, GRiNM has continued as a loose network of individuals engaging in various kinds of critique and protest actions mainly at New Music institutions and festivals in the German-speaking countries. The group’s organisational structure has remained deliberately opaque since its inception, with many people able to use its acronym to represent its interests and speak out against established institutions and individuals in the often tightly knit New Music community. This opacity and lack of formal structure have also been strategies chosen by the group in order to maintain critical distance from the institutions it critiques.

This chapter will present several protest actions undertaken over the course of the history of the group Gender Relations in New Music from our own perspective. In presenting these actions, the goal is to produce a detailed account of what institutional critique in New Music can look like, as well as highlight some of the key sites of struggle that are unique to the dynamics of this particular field of the arts. We also briefly discuss the limitations of who is able to critique the institution, as well as the role of collectives in potentially helping to address this.

By ways of situating itself within a particular context, GRiNM views itself as part of a larger movement of collective-forming that has taken place over the last decade in response to issues of gender and diversity within the field of New Music.Footnote 1 To mention just a few, this includes Konstmusiksystrar in Sweden, Sounding the Feminists in Ireland, Yorkshire Sound Women Network and its regional offshoots in the UK, as well as Paye ta note, LOUD’HER, and Fair_Play, all in France. Gender Relations in New Music is (just) one of such collectives in which both authors happen to have been active. In our view, what these collectives have in common is their growth out of local concerns from practitioners who feel the need to unify and present themselves using a collective name to speak out against powerful institutions central to their professional lives. They seem to mostly be grounded in a critique of the specific deployment of cultural institutions within their respective countries, including higher education institutions, festivals, established concert venues, scholarships and prizes, and funding structures. This localness, combined with the act of coming together to speak out, highlights the importance of such collectives when considering forms of institutional critique.

To this end, we wish to highlight two important aspects of collective work for GRiNM. The first is that the collective as a format offers a space for multiple perspectives to converge. It allows for a range of affiliations and connections to established institutions to come together and speak as a coalition on a single issue, giving it a particular form of resonance and collective wisdom. In this way, it also undermines the focus on the individual that remains dominant in much New Music thinking and practice.

Second, we see the collective as a moment of speaking together, anonymously, as the product of so many different points of view, from young artists just starting their career, to established professionals with decades of experience to those occupying various roles and positions within the musical ecosystem. In music and the arts, where opportunities and success are built through relationships and networking, this kind of anonymity can also serve to protect from being given labels that will hurt one’s career, while providing the necessary support offered by a collective in order to “keep the complaint going” (Ahmed 2020).

2 Key Actions

With this particular positionality in mind, we now wish to explore some key actions attributed to both Gender Research in Darmstadt (GRiD) and Gender Relations in New Music, or GRiNM, which continued its work. The group formed as a way for participants at the Summer Course to discuss and ‘digest’ statistics produced by Ash Fure about the historical representation of women at the Darmstadt Summer Course. In the initial report, Fure writes

Digging through the labyrinth of digitized material, the most pressing question that came to my mind wasn’t what’s in this archive, but what isn’t? […] What histories speak through the cracks and absences in the archive? An impossibly complex question, perhaps, but one I thought I’d start chipping away at through the lens of gender. […] Our aim is not to impose an interpretation, but to carve out time for collective, focused engagement with the information. (Fure 2016, 1)

Fure’s research showed for example that until 2014, only 7% of compositions performed at the Summer Course were by female composers. The statistics unleashed a fury of informal meetings in the Course’s Open Spaces, where people of all genders expressed great concern for the imbalances within the contemporary music scene, not only based on gender, but also on many other factors such as class or ethnic background. This outcry also led to guerrilla protest interventions, from asking attending students, faculty, and artists to sign lifelong binding declarations in which they agreed to always promote gender equality while teaching, curating, and publishing, to attaching biographies of female composers from the Darmstadt archives onto rental bikes popular with course participants as a way of addressing these gaps in the archive that Fure outlines.

Following these actions a GRID representative was invited to the Summer Courses’ official autumn feedback think tank. The group moved online and put together a document with a list of proposals for both short- and long-term change to help the institution improve. The proposals were well received by the administrators and have since been partly implemented, such as changing the student demographics by splitting the ‘first come, first served’ policy into two (unfortunately gender binary) options: female/non-female, as well as having more gender diversity in the teaching faculty.

After the summer of 2016 the group had built up significant energy and, rebranding itself as GRiNM, went on to organise several more actions to generate statistics, which at that time were lacking, on gender representation at New Music festivals in Germany. Its next meeting took place at the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin in March 2017. The meeting focussed on brainstorming various ways people could take action, forming working groups, and creating connections in order to sustain the group long term.

GRiNM produced statistics through crowdsourcing them via ‘data-harvesting workshops’ where attendees would be invited to sit together with their laptops and go through physical or digital festival archives, entering them into a shared Google Sheet (which allowed for many people to edit at once). The first of these workshops was held at the 2017 Hoffnung 3000 festival in Berlin, a smaller, ‘self-curated’ artist-run festival attended by many members of GRiNM.Footnote 2 The statistics revealed, for example, that at Donaueschingen Musiktage, an important New Music festival in Southern Germany, between 2011 and 2017 only 18% of pieces were by women composers.

Equipped with statistics from the data-harvesting workshop, GRiNM’s next action took place at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in October 2017, where we engaged in several actions. The first was to use the statistics to create an advertisement placed in the festival’s printed programme reading “Donaueschinger Musiktage: 92.44% of pieces made by men since 1921”. GRiNM also made a presentation to composition students attending a programme at the festival, and distributed stickers to passers-by reading ‘92.44% MEN’ and ‘50/50?’, stating a discontent with the current state of gender imbalance in the programming and hoping to provoke discussion about quotas and tangible actions that should be taken by festival programmers against gender discrimination. For the traditional and established New Music audience of this festival, these questions seemed to be very provocative, and garnered attention for the importance of these issues at this prestigious festival. These actions were the product of collective work and discussions, yet were strategically undertaken by three members of GRiNM who firstly felt they could take on such a role at the festival (without potentially jeopardising their career) and secondly who had both the time and financial means to attend the festival, an example of how who is or can be GRiNM constantly shifts and depends on a variety of factors.

GRiNM continued with the workshop format as it was invited to subsequent New Music festivals in Germany. This included what would be a second workshop for the MaerzMusik festival in March 2018. The workshop’s goal was to calculate statistics on female identified, trans-masculine, and non-binary composers that had been commissioned over the festival’s history (GRiNM 2018). At the festival, GRiNM also launched its website, GRiNM.org, which was designed to both present the group’s statistics and activities, but also to allow for anyone else to submit posts, an extension of the group’s community-run spirit. The first part of the workshop included a presentation on post-colonial aspects in considering the new and experimental music context of Germany with researcher Thao Ho, followed by a discussion session with international visitors to the festival. The second part of the workshop was focussed on a data-harvesting of the MaerzMusik festival. The workshop found that, from 2010 to 2018, just 28% of pieces performed at MaerzMusik were by women, trans-masculine or non-binary people (Gender Relations in New Music 2020a).

It is important to state that the intention of the data-harvesting workshops was however not only to create statistics. First, while the findings did not come as a surprise to any experienced observer, they did indeed make the very blatant inequalities in this field visible and sayable. They provide quantifiable evidence that can be used in discussion and to further activist goals (see also Scharff 2018, 42). But the crowdsourcing activities, as with the initial GRiD debates spurred by Fure’s statistics, also had the purpose of connecting like-minded people together who were interested in this topic. The data-harvesting activities gave a straightforward, informal, repetitive goal that led to people chatting and getting to know each other. This was found to be particularly effective because many participants were interested in these topics, but felt unqualified to discuss them. Inevitable questions of categorisation, like assuming gender based on names, or how to deal with composer/performers or other non-standard categories led to equally productive discussions about the challenges of categorisation, and the nuance and complexity associated with achieving equal representation in real-world conditions. In many cases, GRiNM was also able to rely on the community’s collective pool of knowledge about festival artists’ self-identification (in terms of both gender identity and the spectrum between composing and performing) to fill in data. In others, the group used the close collaborative situation to decide collectively on the best ways to categorise information, and apply the same rules of thumb consistently across the dataset. In this way, the core of the exercise was always to emphasise that when looking at the data itself, the inequalities were so blatantly clear as to leave no question about the lack of representation of women and non-binary people in festival programmes, irrespective of how any one particular composer/performer was categorised. Through the community act of categorisation, the workshops also attempted to demonstrate that the strict or rigorous categorisation emphasised in music training programmes inevitably fails to capture the complexity of lived experience.

Marking 2 years since GRiNM’s inception, the group returned to the Darmstadt Summer Course in 2018. Due at least in part to the group’s continued activism, there appeared to be a growing awareness of the importance for festivals to address and coherently respond to issues surrounding gender and diversity. As part of this movement, the Summer Course organised a conference entitled Defragmentation–Convention on Curating Contemporary Music, part of a larger research project funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and jointly initiated by the Darmstadt Summer Course, Donaueschingen Festival and MaerzMusik Festival, in cooperation with the Ultima Festival Oslo. According to the statement on the project’s website, the goal of the conference was to “accelerate structural and habitual change” and “develop better practices” around the issues of “gender & diversity, decolonization and technological change” in New Music Institutions (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt n.d.).

In the view of the group, the conference did not go far enough in addressing deep-seated structural problems with how New Music continues to discriminate and reproduce mechanisms of exclusion. Following the conference’s opening speech, members of GRiNM stood up and read in unison a statement criticising it as tokenistic and merely paying lip service to this slew of crucial issues. The manifesto began by stating that

“New Music” remains a bastion of racism, sexism, classism, ableism. The unacknowledged systemic violence of our community is a scandal. Acknowledging the seriousness of “New Music’s” continual exclusions demands an equally serious and systematic response. (GRiNM, personal communication, 2018)

It later outlined what in GRiNM’s view were the critical questions to be addressed to develop the way forward for the Darmstadt Summer Course:

The GRiNM network is made up of as many divergent ideas and identities as individuals. We make no claim to have simple “solutions” to the problems at hand. Instead, we are unified in our commitment to doing the hard work that is the only way to enact infrastructural change. What is a “New Music” Festival? What could it be? Not shying away from discomfort, confusion, and complexity, we want the audience of this year’s Darmstadt Summer Course to take ownership, to understand themselves as the ones in charge of “New Music” and the story of its future. (GRiNM, personal communication, 2018)

GRiNM’s argument was that the solution to New Music’s ‘diversity problem’ would not come by making a list of set demands, but through open discussion about the very categories that shaped New Music. Critiquing the stultification of the conference’s planned frontal lectures, GRiNM invited delegates to join the group in a temporary marquee set up in the front yard of the school building where the Summer Courses take place. Over the next week GRiNM held a series of open discussions in the marquee on various topics with participants from both the Summer Courses (students and teachers) and the conference (academics and artists), creating an ‘off’ or ‘para’ space to have discussions on these issues as well as crossing the divide between discourse and practice.

GRiNM also engaged in other forms of creative activism at Darmstadt, creating an Instagram account to post memes that were both making fun and being critical of the Darmstadt Summer Courses.Footnote 3 The group tagged its posts with official hashtags in a practice known as ‘hashtag hijacking’ in an attempt to insert itself into the online presence of the Summer Courses, as well as to address a larger online community interested in New Music. The group also engaged in more performative interventions, such as raining down flyers onto the audience at the end of the premier of Lisa Lim’s opera Atlas of the Sky which contained the provocative statement “Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2020 – 0% of pieces made by white cis men” in order to raise awareness about what the Darmstadt Summer Courses are, and more importantly, what they could be.Footnote 4

3 Assembling a para-institution

The concept of ‘para-institutionality’ was important to the group’s internal discussions during that time, which had become defined as a strategy for ‘parasitically’ inhabiting, as the collective noun GRiNM, the institutions that the group’s individuals were already in some way part of. The idea was for GRiNM itself to never need to undertake activities to ‘maintain’ itself as an institution, instead co-opting the resources of other institutions that its members were associated with in order to continue to exist. This involved tactics such as redirecting resources from other organisations to support the group’s cause and reappropriating the logics of institutional collaboration to apply for funding monies. The group also insisted on occupying speaker positions on conference and festival programmes simply under the acronym ‘GRiNM’ rather than individual speaker names, in order to maintain flexibility in regard to who would speak or felt able to speak, returning to the question of ‘what have you got to lose’. In another example of this approach, the group funded the various actions at the Darmstadt Summer Course using the speakers fees which two members of the group received for running a workshop at the Defragmentation conference.

After the actions at Darmstadt in 2018, GRiNM wanted to avoid continuing to be invited (often last-minute, and with little funding) as a kind of ‘pressure-release valve’ for festivals who felt obligated to discuss their lack of diversity, deciding therefore to initiate its own event. In November 2019, the group thus organised the GRiNM Network Conference 2019: Experiences with Gender and Diversity in New Music at the Zurich University of the Arts. The idea was to bring together a wide range of people working in the fields of research, education, programming and administration, to share their experiences on the topic from different perspectives. The resulting conference activated the network that had been forming in/around/through GRiNM, bringing it together as a peer group as a way of communicating to the New Music community that the issues that GRiNM had been advocating for were important for the larger CCM community to take seriously.

GRiNM extended the unifying gesture of the conference with a special issue of OnCurating Journal that included the academic papers and reports from the field presented at the conference, solidifying the existence and importance of these positions within the growing debate in CCM and sharing them with an audience beyond those who attended the conference in person (see Farnsworth and Lovell 2020).

4 Pandemic Activism

By the time GRiNM had launched the journal issue, the COVID-19 pandemic had begun, which would have a substantial impact on the group’s activities. Until this point, GRiNM mainly focussed on meetings and actions at (in-person) festivals. Due to the situation, during 2020 and 2021 GRiNM turned to mostly text-based interventions.

At the beginning of 2020, GRiNM engaged in a collaboration with the German New Music magazine Positionen. Over four issues, GRiNM directly addressed its readership through a series of 2-page spreads.Footnote 5 The group returned to working with statistics, taking a playful approach, calling the series Checking Boxes with GRiNM, referencing the complicated relationship between institutions committing to policies to promote diversity and the difficult work of putting these commitments into practice, which often requires a “move beyond the tick box approach to diversity, in which institutions go through or along with a process but are not behind it” (Ahmed 2012, 118–119). “Chapter 1: Composition Professors”, focussed on the gender of those holding professorship positions (not teaching contracts or lectureships) at major universities and music schools in German-speaking Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). For this the group adopted a ‘tick the box’ approach with three options, taken from what has now become standard for all job advertisements in German: Male (M), Female (F), Divers (D). This highlighted the fact that the vast majority of professors were male. “Chapter 2: Curators of some New Music Festivals” in the next edition left the boxes unchecked as an open invitation to readers to tick the boxes themselves, and as a gesture back towards our desire to crowdsource statistics as itself a form of activism.Footnote 6 Here the group included more categories such as class/socio-economic background and race/ethnicity/migratory background, wanting to move away from solely gender-based categorisation and make visible the many ways in which discrimination manifests itself. This change was part of GRiNM’s shift to a more intersectional approach to diversity that became core to the group’s understanding of these issues over the course of its work. “Chapter 3: Selected Juries” looked at the people making the decisions about composition awards and prizes. In the final contribution, a letter to readers titled “Out of the Box with GRiNM”, the group wrote about the limitations of statistics in understanding the complexity of privileges and exclusions which exist, but also their necessity in illuminating the reality of institutions and power structures in the European New Music community, asking readers to engage with a series of questions posed by GRiNM around diversity, such as “To what extent should music institutions support new and diverse forms of performing, listening, and creating, rather than continuing to solidify existing norms?”, a question which resonates closely with the direction of the current volume (2021, 9).Footnote 7

In September 2020, GRiNM was invited to be part of a symposium organised by the Creative Europe project Sounds Now entitled Curating Diversity in Europe–Decolonizing Contemporary Music. It contributed to the symposium by publishing an online questionnaire in advance of the event, and distributing the answers the group received during the conference as printed handouts. As explained at the beginning of the document,

A danger of symposia on such fundamental issues is to spend too much time establishing definitions and problems. Our goal is rather to jumpstart this process so that we can spend more time committing to meaningful exchange and enacting prompt, lasting, and tangible changes.

(Gender Relations in New Music 2020d)

The action tried to highlight the danger of ‘diversity talk’ becoming an end in itself among those concerned about a lack of diversity in New Music. Responses to the survey confirmed this danger, while also revealing a large amount of what Ahmed (2004) has called ‘declarations of whiteness’, where declarations of bad practices such as racist attitudes (saying you are racist) are implied to be the same as good practices (not being racist), when they are not. This suggested that there were complicated dynamics at work around the perceived role of the symposium that could have been further explored during the event.

5 Post-Pandemic

During the pandemic, there was a worry within GRiNM that the restrictions and lockdowns would have the greatest impact on exactly the minorities the group advocated for. While anecdotally, this seems to have been the case in much of larger society, as is typical, the statistics for New Music do not currently exist. Writing in early 2023, we can see in retrospect that although issues surrounding gender, diversity, and decoloniality have become increasingly mainstream, the 2–3 years of ever-changing hygiene restrictions and cultural shutdowns in Germany effectively put a halt to GRiNM’s efforts. We mention this insight not in order to position ourselves as armchair experts on governmental pandemic response, rather we think this result is somehow intimately linked with the structure of the group itself, and by extension the way that it positions itself (still insisting on the present tense) in regards to institutional critique.

As a group, GRiNM resisted investing in the forms of stability that being an institution can provide, in order to avoid needs for stability influencing its critical positionality, relying instead ‘parasitically’ on other institutions to provide this kind of stability to its members. The belief is that GRiNM’s critique must stand on its own, and not end up becoming an institution itself that would inevitably need to navigate the semantically simple but operationally impossible act of moving from a critique of institutions of New Music to GRiNM itself becoming a New Music institution providing critique.Footnote 8 Taking this position also apparently meant that the ambient entropy of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly interrupted the group’s work. Returning to the earlier reflection on collective work, it raises a broader question: when collectives are about coming together, what happens when collectivity is interrupted?

In mentioning these aspects, we would however be remiss in not also calling attention to the form of capital that can accrue through writing about GRiNM (as a quantifiable research output, as a line in a CV, as promoting something you were involved in within further networks, etc.). This is once again why it is crucial to emphasise the collective and distributed nature of the work GRiNM does, as distinct from the work of writing about it as named authors.

With this in mind, we conclude this article asking: who is in the position to do institutional critique within New Music? When the effects of COVID-19 wipe out many of the more fragile connections, we could propose that it is, problematically, often those in the greatest positions of institutional stability, for example having secure positions at universities or cultural institutions that are able to engage in the labour of critique at all. Scharff calls this situation “vertical segregation”, referring to “the over or underrepresentation of particular groups in positions of power and prestige” (2018, 43). She adds as well that “In the cultural and creative industries, women are underrepresented in positions of authority and prestige” (Scharff 2018, 43), citing a report commissioned by the Bundestag in 2013 (Deutsche Bundestag 2013). This then raises the question: what forms of critique can such practitioners offer and what or who is included or excluded?

Through describing the work of GRiNM and several of its key actions in this chapter, our goal has been to present some of the potentialities and challenges of collective, institutionally critical work in New Music. Considering the interconnectedness of its various institutions and the consequences of potentially being ostracised from them, institutional critique as an individual can be highly risky. Power relations are often far from equal and personal opinions still have a strong influence, despite discourses centred on recognising ‘high quality’. By contrast, collectives offer an opportunity to come together, exchange, discuss, strategise and speak as a group with a stronger and louder voice. The modes of critique practised can be performative, playful, comical or, otherwise, depending on what people feel comfortable doing with a group (as opposed to alone). If Ahmed describes much of diversity work as “banging your head against a brick wall”, then mustering a collective can be a way to amplify the power of those who perceive the institution as resistance (2012, 26–27). By presenting GRiNM as an example, we insist on the incorporation of such collective, critical and sometimes invisible or imperceptible perspectives into a rigorous and reflective institutional critique of New Music.