This semester I am assisting Hans Tutschku with a class at Harvard University on improvisation with electronics. I asked several improvisers to choose pieces of music that are important to them and their practice.
First up is Richard Scott. Scott is a UK-born, Berlin-based composer and free improvising musician working with analogue modular synthesisers and alternative controllers, including pioneering work with the Lightning controller built by Don Buchla.
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, ‘Ten Minutes’ (1974)
Thanks so much to Richard for providing these insights into his listening world. Below is an example of his own live performances, or you can browse recordings on his Bandcamp page. Stay tuned for the next instalment!
Since 2011, I have made occasional forays into gender auditing as a way of paying attention to my position in the remarkably unequal field of contemporary music composition. My attempts were occasional — a couple of analyses of my immediate environments in recognition of International Women’s Day, some (perhaps brash) comments upon finding myself programmed on all-male concerts — and their irregularity was problematic.
What follows below is the result of restructuring this site. I have built a mechanism that allows me to quickly access up-to-date data for the concerts where my works are and have been performed — a reflection of the community as I participate in it. These are not exhaustive numbers.
My own personal performance context does not necessarily mirror all of contemporary music. Gender inequality is far more complex than a tally of whose music is performed. Gender audits do little to help reveal the causes of inequality. However, I do believe that at the very least they are a reminder of the work still left to do, an aid in strategic “gender mainstreaming,” and for any doubters, proof of a very real imbalance.
The data on this page includes events since 2007, running up until the time of posting. I don’t currently have the data to analyse how a composer’s age factors into this, but I’m working on it.
Some basic numbers
Number of works programmed — Total: 361
Works by male composers:297 (82.2%)
Works by female composers:64 (17.7%)
Breakdown of works performed by composer gender
Number of concerts — Total: 54
All-male programmes:22 (40.7%)
All-male concert programmes
Works programmed — Total: 6.6
Works by male composers:5.4
Works by female composers:1.1
The average concert programme
Career progression
It is often stated that there is a gradual filtering out of women at every stage of career progression: from school-age music studies, throughout academic pathways, and later in professional contexts. My data is limited, but I can compare the 4 years I was an undergraduate and masters student at the University of Manchester — when the vast majority of my performances were in student contexts and 24.7% of works performed were by female composers — with the period since then, for which that figure is just 14.6%. That amounts to a drop in representation of 40.8% in the 5 years since my Masters graduation.
Proportion of works by female composers for every concert
Just 2 concerts (of 54) have featured a programme where half or more of the works are by female composers.
On average just 17.7% of works played are by female composers.
The data
If you are code-minded and would like to play around with the event data, download the event data JSON-LD file. It contains data for every event in my archive, marked up with schema.org vocabularies.
By some spectacular fluke of nature — or rather the spectacular initiative of some wonderful people — the emergent, self-organising consciousness that is Tomorrow I will build a house here, if I can hold still is managing to tour Europe this December by hopping parasitically between musicians’ bodies. Try to make one of these performances:
There are fascinating differences to be discovered in the way each duo handles the piece, so suffice it to say it’s a pretty exciting month for me.
Berlin-based quartet DieOrdnungDerDinge are going to give the first performance of rumour — distant land at tonight’s opening event of this year’s Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik. We’ve been hard at work since late on Tuesday and the whole evening should be memorable. (It will also feature vocal performances from the spectacular Ute Wassermann.) Thanks go to everyone who has made this happen!
