Many of the pioneers of electronic music were women. This book traces a genealogy of female producers and composers from the 1930s to the present.
It is not new to find outstanding works by women in the field of electronic music. Many of the pioneers of this art were women. One can trace a genealogy of female composers who, from the late 1930s and especially from the 1950s onward, opened or helped to open new paths in electronic musical experimentation in its various phases. As we recall Katrin Richter in her essay “Women and Their Machines”, On meoko.net, many of them played an essential role in the development of means and ends in that kind of musical genres.
Johanna Magdalena Beyer, Teresa Rampazzi, Else Marie Pade, Daphne Oram, Ruth White, Bebe Barron, Maddalena Fagandini, Mireille Chamass-Kyrou, Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Beatriz Ferreyra, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Annea Lockwood, Wendy Carlos, Franca Sacchi, Alice Shields, Pril Smiley, Maggi Payne, Suzanne Ciani, Daria Semegen, Laurie Anderson, Christina Kubisch, Lena Platonos, Christine Newby-Cosey, Fanni-Tutti, Ikue Mori, Manon Anne Gillis, Doris Norton, Gudrun Gut, and Phew are just a few names of the artists who populated the scene in its early years. From the 1980s onward, this type of musical movement began to proliferate.
Katrin Richter writes: “It wasn’t just people interested in the new technologies But beyond that, they were talented female composers at the forefront of its development, taking proactive roles by exploring how synthesizers and other instruments could and should be played. Quietly, locked away in studios and sound labs, many of these women researched and worked to advance the capabilities of musical technology, conceiving new ideas about how machines could be built and then testing them by playing them live on stage.”.
The escape to the postclub
The history of female electronic composers in academia has been extensive, but their erasure from official history has been even more so. They have been relegated to the background in photographs, relegated to the corner of groups, and relegated to an appendix in the annals.
In Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States (Ashgate, 2006) Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner denounced this methodical disregard. At the same time, she was alarmed to find fewer and fewer women in academic electronic and computer music. But she perhaps overlooked the shift that, since the 1980s (it's impossible not to think of industrial music, for example), had been occurring from academia to the fringes of the Pop metropolis. The work of the younger generations of avant-garde female composers and producers flourished in that hybrid electronic music, somewhere between club and experimental, in an incipient, non-generic, post-club aesthetic. With the two decades since the popularization of electronic, digital, and computerized production methods, easy access has led many electronic artists to self-manage their experimentation. The laboratory and sound studio can be a home studio, centered around a PC now more capable than some of the large experimental studios of the past. A PC that, moreover, also serves as a means of distribution by connecting to the internet. This kind of transfer is evident in the back-and-forth between scenes. A good example is the American scene. Holly Herndon who, after living for a time the clubbing Berlin native, he immersed himself in academia to gain a deeper understanding of techniques and concepts, and after this refinement, he has produced a cutting-edge proposal, enriched by both experiences. Herndon can visit IRCAM, but he can also perform his complex musical-sound operations with a laptop in a club. The unclassifiable and multifaceted Mica Levi or the changing Anna Meredith, Both British, even though their works have a different emphasis on electronic mentality and processing, could also serve as examples of this.
The phenomenon that is observed today in that field of pop electronics outsider It proposes a continuity and a reclaiming of the legacy of pioneering female composers. An inherited wisdom. Many of those mentioned, and other producer-composers, incorporate the discoveries and the experimental and avant-garde sensibility of these pioneers. They approach this hidden history of electronic music as if it were secret knowledge. Upon closer inspection, the connections and relationships become evident.
This influence is also notable in the clear tendency towards the synthetic or the abstract in some female composers who, after taking their first steps in areas closer to rock or post-rock, have gradually incorporated experimental and process-based materials, shifting their work towards borderline territories. Like the Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval (what the previews of his upcoming album promise) Blood Bitchas confirmed) or the Colombian Lucrecia Dalt, who has found a very particular path in texture and extraction from the organic. Other examples include the ever-exuberant and experimental Björk, Julia Holter (even when his music seems to have evolved into a psychedelic and surreal pop from more experimental latitudes) or Haley Fohr-Circuit des Yeux (although the American pop artist's style has one foot in American rock and the other in chamber music, and her use of electronics is more ornamental). This opens a path that leads to Liz Harris (Grouper), Eva Saelens (Inca Ore) and even groups like Broadcast, with the ill-fated Trish Keenan as an essential element.
Perhaps that secretly heroic role they played had a ripple effect, stimulating a boundary-pushing trend, a departure from the established norms, an artistic approach outside the spotlight of the pop industry and the roles historically assigned to women (if not a certain tendency toward their disappearance). It is not difficult to find here a continuing lineage of artists who associate beyond the center, a sisterhood on the fringes of cultural tradition.
This isn't about "feminine" electronic music. Such a thing doesn't exist, and in fact, using any kind of subterfuge about a "feminine touch" would be the opposite of what one actually hears. What one often perceives is precisely an antagonistic stance toward the identity-based and essentialist notion of gender. Perhaps the appropriate question is: why is it that much of today's electronic music, which conveys a different kind of excitement, captures something unexpected, and is also made by women, feels not only personal and artistic but also speaks to me? And perhaps the answer could be: because it openly breaks with or plays against what feminist authors like Judith Butler would call performativity.
That's what the vibrant essay “Dismantling Womanhood: Electronic Music and the Artificiality of Identity,”, on thefourohfive.com, where Simon Chandler She states that “it is encouraging to see the rise in female composers whose work explicitly challenges the gender stereotypes that are too often imposed on them […] directly or indirectly questioning the notion of gender as a stable concept. What is most interesting is that they have achieved this almost exclusively through electronic music.”.
If we follow Nancy Fraser's ideas about identity and difference as something inherently repressive and exclusionary, feminism should not build a feminist identity or collective subject but the opposite: deconstruct all discourses made under the pretext of women.
Against gender roles
In contrast to the enormous visibility of "feminine" attributes in popular music, the partial anonymity of new female composers and producers implies a clear choice. In part, it's as if they proudly embrace, as part of their inherited legacy, the more shadowy existence once imposed upon the adventurous electronic artists who came before them.
But, in addition, in many cases there is a blockage to the construction of the essentialist gender stereotype through a deviation or détournement of the bodily and sexual attributes that are assumed to be inherent to it. This is the case of Copeland o FKA Twigs (This is partly thanks to the image distortion facilitated by visual artists like Jesse Kanda). All of this connects with the queer aesthetic of Ark, Lotic o Boychild.
Several artists (such as Pharmakon, Gazelle Twin, and Jenny Hval) reject the notion of the body as spectacle capital, as the perfectly controlled appearance typical of pop music stars that reinforces ideals of youth and health, seduction and pleasure. They connect with the carnal by including and accepting illness, decrepitude, and death, approaching the body's processes as an autonomous organism and the disconnection of the rational from the organic.
Meanwhile, other artists like Holly Herndon focus on the deconstruction of the quintessential attribute: the voice. Herndon proposes a reading of posthumanist notions of embodiment by Katherine Hayles. On albums like Movement o Platform, Herndon manipulates, distorts, and fragments the voice, stripping it of many of the attributes assigned by the construction of female identity. In fact, Hayles's posthumanist feminist proposals can be traced in the works of many of these composers.
Technical empowerment
In Technofeminism (Cátedra, 2006), the sociologist Judy Wajcman Wajcman warns of the underrepresentation of women in the scientific and technological fields and how, simultaneously, the use of technology decisively contributes to male supremacy. Against the notion that women don't understand science or technology, and therefore don't know how to use it, much less design it, Wajcman has explained how, in the early 1970s, theories of women's inferiority in these fields still purported to be based on supposed scientific studies. Science no longer supports such falsehoods, but the lie remains, still widespread even among the most educated and open-minded segments of the population.
Female composers and producers of electronic music, especially those who also program or develop the techniques (along with those already mentioned, such as JLin, Fatima Al Qadiri, Beatrice Dillon, and Helena Hauff), are shattering the idea of women's natural connection to certain human and artistic roles. They are empowering themselves by appropriating a territory historically denied to women. Thus, the creation of electronic logics, techniques, and/or methods for composing and producing music becomes an equal arena for transformation.
They exist, they do.
The liberating consequences of this empowerment are significant, as he explains in detail. Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch (Dream Traffickers, 2010), Towards the end of feudalism, as the growing power of a European peasantry that threatened to change the established order was suppressed, a campaign of terror was unleashed against women. From the mid-16th century and for 200 years, hundreds of thousands of women (up to several million according to some authors) were massacred and subjected to the most cruel tortures. The independent woman, who often led revolts against the injustice and hunger imposed by the powerful, the woman wise in ancestral knowledge, the sexually emancipated woman, or the woman who was simply deemed useless in labor or reproduction, became a hindrance, if not a threat, to power and, therefore, something to be exterminated.
In this genealogy of women who produce and have produced electronic music, there is something of a vindication of the image of the witch. The shift from the passive female role, even the sexualized effeminate image, to new modes of emancipation of the body-voice, empowerment through the conquest of technical knowledge, working in the shadows, invisibility and the use of the hidden, their gathering on the outskirts of the dominant culture (academic and popular consumer culture), the transmission of certain knowledge or influences even outside the academy… all of this would fit well with these extreme composers.
Etymology can always help. Witches are women who cast spells and use fetishes for magical purposes. Spell and fetish (its derivation passing through Portugal) have their origin in Latin. facticius, past participle of the verb facereThat is, to do. As a noun, "hechizo" (spell) means "enchantment, charm, an action that purports to have some magical power," and as an adjective, "artificial, unnatural, false." Is it possible that those who seduce with their electronic musical art are witches, witches who make music? They are unorthodox women who deeply understand the nature of the body and mind and wish to magically intervene in reality through the unnatural, artificial, technological creation of potions, spells, and fetishes, of sigils made with sounds.
Funded by the European Union through the Digital Kit program using Next Generation (EU) funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility
