Moreover, the designation of rehearsal as contemporary art has profound implications for art music's ontology. As opposed to Beasley and The Kitchen's transvaluation of nonart music into art music, here I contend that Meyers *de*values both forms, construing them equally as vessels for rehearsal. *Rehearsing Philadelphia* reimagines art music, then, not as the determinate outcome of a hierarchy built on musical literacy, but as an open-ended series of pedagogical processes involved in music's mediation and transmission. In recontextualising rehearsal as contemporary art, that is, Meyers decentres art music's work-concept while reframing an

22However, I discuss open rehearsals briefy below.

archetypically parergonal component of its—and other musics'—production. The object of rehearsal, Meyers further suggests, may not be restricted to the musical work, as in practicing a Bach cello suite, but can also apply to the individual musicians involved in rehearsal, as in a soloist improving their technique—a process Meyers applies to (para)institutional formations ranging from duos to ensembles to even, in the artist's vision, an entire city. In this sense, rehearsal might be said to promote liberal-humanist values involved in producing social harmony, working towards the greater good, etc. Yet rather than a teleology beginning with scores and ending in idealised performances, Meyers asks us to attend to the messy, imperfect processes involved in music's preparation, prior to its reifcation in concerts and public presentations. To paraphrase the manifesto for Meyers's *Kunsthalle for Music*, music is not necessarily what one imagines it to be—not its mediation via scores or even their proper culmination in performance (Meyers 2017). By displaying rehearsal as contemporary art, Meyers iteratively returns music to an unfnished, provisional state of (social) practice.23 He unlearns music as artistic-literary object in order to relearn its pedagogy as social process. But, alas, this is no easy task.

We soon learn, for instance, that exhibiting musical rehearsal represents a thorny paradox. Upon being displayed, that is, preparation for a performance or presentation ceases to be itself and becomes the thing presented, making a "performed rehearsal" a kind of self-cancelling aporia. This dynamic appears not only in Meyers's larger parainstitutional formations of Orchestra and *Kunsthalle for Music*, but emerges perhaps in distilled form in *Duet*. Bundled under a red jacket and sock hat, an elder visitor to Philadelphia's Love Park approaches Eduardo Luna, a member of the Philadelphia Heritage Chorale who beneath an unzipped hoodie dons a t-shirt emblazoned in primary colours with the *Rehearsing Philadelphia* logo. Both sing as they stare down at a music stand. Yet whereas Luna projects confdence with an outstretched right arm as though conducting, Jerry Forman appears tentative. Indeed, the trepidation seen on the fellow parkgoer's face, unlike his musically trained counterpart, can also be heard in his more restrained voice (Reyes 2022). The two are performing—or, rather, rehearsing— *Duet* as part of Meyers's Duo event. The three-page 'score' on the music stand they are reading from is, in fact, what Meyers calls a 'text/script': a formulation at once referring to the dramaturgical role of assigning speech to characters (Meyers has often presented his work in European theatres), and an ordinary musical score albeit partially in text form. The frst page explains the process by which one performer (in this case, Luna) invites a participant (here Forman) to rehearse the conventionally notated vocal music that appears on the following two pages. Meyers

23A similar use of musical 'display' appears in Rafael 2016. Meyers's work registers as contemporary art, for one, because it foregrounds its codes and institutional norms, even if it presents internally consistent musical materials (including institutions, ensembles, etc.) within a contemporary art frame.

suggests a couple of spoken lines for initiating the rehearsal, beginning with "Would you like to sing with me?" In its mildly self-mocking naïveté, the prompt recalls perhaps the bewildering icebreakers issued by children and museum staff in works by Meyers's long-time collaborator, Tino Sehgal.24 Yet opposed to the way Sehgal conceals the instructions for his performances, effectively rendering them immaterial, Meyers presents the process of learning and rehearsing his score *as* the artwork.

Rather than rejecting musical literacy, Meyers rehearses it as artistic content. *Duet*'s invitation to participate is labelled on the text/script's frst page as "Before". "After" consists of thanking the participant, while "Rehearsal" is more involved. Tellingly, there is no "Performance" section. Following the invitation, "Rehearsal" attempts to explain to the newly obtained participant what exactly they've signed up for. While anachronistically invoking the 'tell-teaching' techniques of oral tradition, its conspicuous self-reference and iterative use of Jakobsonian shifters also alludes perhaps to conceptual art.25 Picture Luna saying to Forman, "This is a composition by Ari Benjamin Meyers. It is called *Duet*. It has two parts, for two singers. One part is labeled Me, and the other part is labeled You. I will sing Me; I always sing Me". After explaining that the 'piece' is not simply the resulting music, but rather "an ongoing series of feeting moments" that is, the rehearsal—the spoken text turns to pragmatics.

[*go through each one, by frst singing and then repeating*]

[*play metronome*]

[*play tone*]

An odd contradiction inheres between the speaker's casual dismissal of a need to read music and the lines that follow which assume a veritable lexicon of musical knowledge. Motive, octave, pitch, tempo—all terms that despite having perhaps non-music-jargon equivalents are not defned or explained. Simultaneously obscurant and demystifying, at once fexible and overprecise, the instructions

(That's OK, neither can I…)

24 I am thinking mostly of *This Progress*, realised at The Guggenheim in 2010, in which a child greets each visitor with "May I ask you a question? What is progress?" Sehgal collaborated with Meyers on *This Variation* (2012), which consists of a darkened gallery and performers who dance and sing amid improvised electronic music.

25See Krauss 1977.

26Typography, spelling, and punctuation slightly modifed. Text available at Meyers 2014. Score available at Schipper 2022.

allow the participant to change octaves, while requiring them to sight-sing using, in the terms of solfège, *fxed Do*. "Volume" (and not dynamics) is a matter of comfort level, while tempo—♩=84 according to the next page—is exactingly determined either mechanically or electronically. No less frustrating for a beginner are the thirty-seven measures of two-part vocal music contained on the two-page score that follows. Granted, the only text is "La", it's in 4/4, and it consists mostly of half and whole notes. But there are also dotted rhythms, tied notes, phrasing/legato markings, a fermata, and chromatics. Furthermore, there's no key signature (it's defnitely not in C), and the tonal centre is shifty, at times ambiguous. Motive 1 contains the frst three notes of a B major scale, whose D# then begins to sound like a leading tone in E minor when the other voice answers it with a descending stepwise fgure in that key. One does not need to be musically literate to sense that this is no walk in the park. Which of course is the point.

If the music were too simple, that is, there would be little to rehearse. If it were thoroughly deskilled, there'd be nothing left to teach. *Kunsthalle for Music* applies this principle to Meyers's parainstitutional music gallery formation. While many works included in the gallery's songbook dossier are written using relatively standard notation (e.g. Charles Ives's *The Unanswered Question* [1906] or Julius Eastman's *Stay on It* [1973]), others are Fluxus event scores or text scores of experimental music. Yet, regarding the former, even Yoko Ono's *Sky Piece to Jesus Christ* (1965), which calls for orchestra performers to be wrapped in gauze bandages to the point of rendering them inert, implicitly requires at least the semblance of a traditional orchestra with relatively acceptable instrumental competencies. Otherwise, a performance risks the punchline not quite landing. Although Pauline Oliveros's *The Tuning Meditation* (1971) does not require a trained orchestra, it rehearses an operation common to all sorts of manipulatable pitch instruments. Oliveros, unlike Varèse, does ask musicians to tune. "Begin by playing a pitch that you hear in your imagination. After contributing your pitch, listen for another player's pitch and tune in unison to the pitch as exactly as possible". Oliveros's score thus requires various musicianship skills, including the ability to produce an imagined pitch and tune to another's sounding frequency. Not unlike Meyers's broader project, Oliveros recasts this ordinarily utilitarian musical activity associated with rehearsal as a source of artistic meditation. As it happens, Oliveros was also involved in organising ensembles, including the feminist musical parainstitution she assembled at the University of San Diego, the ♀ Ensemble, to whom she dedicated her related *Sonic Meditations* (1971) (Oliveros 1981, 13; Mockus 2007, 40). Part of *Rehearsing Philadelphia*'s Ensemble event, *Kunsthalle for Music* expands the artistic frame from the ensemble to the venue and from the institution to what happens in it. Rather than scores or performances, again their rehearsal becomes the work.

This recursive operation of designating the artwork as the artwork's preparation produces an infnite regress, as paradoxes often do. Yet Meyers escapes this vicious circle, at least in principle, by devaluing art music's score-based workconcept and locating its ontology elsewhere: either in the ephemeral, 'feeting moments' of rehearsal seen in *Duet* or, indeed, in the parainstitutional frames designed to host them. Prior to this re-siting—or reinstituting—of music, however, Meyers must frst negate it. Meyers's *Anthem* (2017) is a partial text setting of his *Kunsthalle for Music* manifesto. Condensing down the latter's multiple paragraphs to a single slogan, *Anthem*'s only text is "Music is not!" Its two-page score is comparable to *Duet*, yet the single-part *Anthem* is considerably slower at ♩=60 and more than twice *Duet*'s duration. While roughly in C minor, it contains numerous dynamic markings and frequent time signature changes. Although *Anthem* appears to be for solo voice, the *Kunsthalle for Music* participants gathered in Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery decided to try it tutti. This partially ad hoc group included Curtis students and faculty, a couple of gallery visitors, my nonmusician guest, and myself. The music began quietly with a drawn-out, multimeasure "mmmm" on middle C. This humming continued, not quite in unison, and we attempted a slow ornament. Upon changing from common time to 5/4 thankfully, one of the Curtis faculty conducted—the "mmmm" expanded into an entire melodic phrasing of "music": the frst syllable melismatically outlined a minor third— "muuu-*UUUU*…"—before a half-step descent to "…sic". These softer "music" fgures repeated, slowly building to a dramatic *forte* climax with a pair of melodic leaps around "is not!"27 Applauding ourselves, we managed to get through the nearly fve-minute score, which surely would have beneftted from more rehearsal. Refecting on the experience, I recalled one of the philosopher Peter Osborne's interpretations of Meyers's "Music is not!" slogan: "The negation of what music *currently is*, via the negation of one or more of what are taken to be its essential predicates" (Osborne 2022, 67). While Osborne's other two interpretations are more totalising in scope—negating music as a whole and music as such, respectively—this one produces, paradoxically, an immediate and perhaps more extreme contradiction when sung in *Anthem*. Although the phrase is supposed to negate what music currently is, while singing *Anthem* music *currently is*. Indeed, we're singing it. And if we follow Meyers, this is true even—or especially—during its rehearsal. His manifesto continues: "Music is inherently not about perfection or reproducibility. Music is the act of an orchestra rehearsing" (Meyers 2017).

This brings us, full circle, to Orchestra, *Rehearsing Philadelphia*'s fnale. Recall again the Public Orchestra's performances of commissioned works by Allen, Rucker, Rubinos, Carlson, and Myers. If music is inherently not these virtually perfected, presumably reproducible public performances, what is it? Continuing to follow Meyers, if we had attended only the advertised Cherry Street Pier performance, we would have simply missed it. Had we skipped the Orchestra's rehearsal and saw only its recital, we would have merely witnessed an index of the music's preparation, evidence of this ordinarily parergonal activity. Which is to say, we'd have skipped the actual musical work because, in an inversion of convention, again, the music is its own rehearsal. At the same time, as is well known, symphonies frequently provide an exception to this convention. In

27Exclamation mark added here for clarity.

fact, many orchestras offer open rehearsals, some requiring audiences to purchase tickets, while others invite the public to participate in choruses or even instrumental sections. How does this differ from Meyers's project? More often than not, professional orchestras unambiguously separate high musical art from community outreach, just as they clearly demarcate performances from their preparation. Music may be *a* social practice, but it seldom rises to the level of social practice art.28 For Meyers, however, the cultivation of communities along with the parainstitutional frames he puts around them—beyond their resulting performances fgures as the work, and connects further to contemporary social practice art. To return, fnally, to the question of the status of the nonart music works in Meyers's transgenre orchestra programme: does he elevate them to the status of art music or do they remain merely artistic material? I contend that Meyers demotes these works *and* their art music counterparts into vehicles for rehearsal. In reinstituting, re-siting art music's ontology in rehearsal, Meyers debases these heterogeneous musics equally, indeed, by construing them as fodder for his social practice metascore. There are no more high and low, if only in a propositionally utopian sense, because none stands as a complete or fnalised musical work in the frst place. All become instruments for social process.

#### **4 Conclusion: Institutions Against Art Music**

In sum, the respective projects of Beasley and The Kitchen and Meyers suggest ways artistic (para)institutions can challenge art music's ontology. Meyers's approach, while prosocial in appearance, is propositionally destructive: again, to cite his manifesto, "Music is not!" There is no art music, at this extreme, because *all* music remains caught in a perpetual state of deferred preparation, construed merely as material for rehearsal within the artist's parainstitutional contemporary art frames. While hypothetical, even theoretical at its most powerful, Meyers's project gestures towards a levelling of musical hierarchy through the pragmatics of social practice. Rather than avoiding musical literacy, Meyers's relativises it by presenting it as another pedagogical item for rehearsal. Yet as opposed to Meyers's musical negation, Beasley and The Kitchen operationalise the constructive metaphor of assembly. Through their temporary artist-institution collaboration, they harness the powers of contemporary art curation, which at present uncontroversially include the ability to designate nonart as art. In their usage, this results in recontextualising practices historically understood as nonart music—rap, hip hop, jazz, pop, DJing—as contemporary art and, potentially, also as art music. This is not, however, to fatten the distinctions internal to those musical forms, nor is it to ignore the challenge that some musics already pose to art music's ontology; recall

28For a study of music as a social practice from 1994, prior to the term's wide-spread circulation in contemporary art, see Chanan 1994.

the work of Moran. But rather than understanding musical literacy as a basis for conferring the status of art music, Beasley and The Kitchen propose a revised set of criteria for the evaluation of musical art: criticality, refexivity, hybridity, and a transdisciplinary use of contemporary art materials along with an exhibited challenge to art music's historical ontology.

Importantly, this transvaluation—or devaluation in Meyers—of music is not simply a matter of labels and categories, as much as it may have implications for both, but rather concerns the problem of *what art music is*. While art music is no doubt the result of an underlying ideology—specifcally, artistic modernism in the case of new music—it is also an expression of that ideology materialised through practice, including but not limited to that of music institutions. As a hybrid concept itself—just consider the two linguistic units that compose it—art music further results from its imbrication in a broader artistic feld that, crucially and paradigmatically, also includes contemporary art. Disciplinary disparities aside, contemporary art remains the current expression of that component of art music historically associated with its highness. Pretending that musical hierarchy does not exist, decreeing all musics as somehow simply equal, insisting that one need not hear labels, or even dismissing art music as irreparably colonial or racist are ultimately ways of ignoring the problem, avoiding the critical reconstruction I think art music deserves. Illustrated in the work of Beasley and The Kitchen and Meyers, contemporary art may have an important role in such a reconstructive process. With this, music institutions might be wise to take its challenges to art music seriously, to see themselves—*with* contemporary art—as materially and ideologically involved in art music's transdisciplinary concept construction and critique.29 This is not to say that contemporary art has the power somehow to save art music from mediocrity or social injustice. But it is to suggest that addressing this vexed problem of what art music is—a problem that no doubt cuts across multiple felds—may also, if only in a small way, provide a key to its pervasive diversity and inclusion problems. Meyers and Beasley and The Kitchen offer two models by which parainstitutions can push against art music in its current formations. Proper institutions do not necessarily need to organise against art music to push with them, towards its reconstruction.

#### **References**

29Peter Osborne uses the italicised phrase "*transdisciplinary concept construction and critique*" in a related context: Osborne 2019, 136.

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**3**

### **Gender Issues as Criticism Within (New) Music Institutions**

Christa Brüstle

#### **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 scientifc and research activities and institutions in the EU (vertical and horizontal segregation). This equality-related goal was briefy summarised as 'fx the numbers'. It mainly refers to eliminating the underrepresentation of persons or groups of persons in certain felds. 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 diffcult matter. This also involves not only focussing on the 'numbers' but also bringing about a cultural change within institutions

C. Brüstle (\*)

© The Author(s) 2024

Institut 14 Musikästhetik, Kunstuniversität Graz, Graz, Österreich e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Grüny and B. Farnsworth (eds.), *New Music and Institutional Critique*, Ästhetiken X.0 – Zeitgenössische Konturen ästhetischen Denkens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67131-3\_3

('fx the institutions') as well as increasing and strengthening general gender knowledge and intersectional gender competencies in different areas ("fx 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).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 fgures 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 specifcally 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).

1Cf. Heywood and Drake 1997; McRobbie 2009.

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 conficts 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 feld 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 feld 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.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

2Although in the face of increasing violence against women, the perpetrator-victim image is reproduced in real life.

thinking, because it ultimately threatens to limit or minimise one's own (male) personal privileges.

However, it may be assumed that the discussion and refection of gender is usually associated with a critique of power structures or a critical penetration of power felds. Power should be understood as "power relations in which only one stronger side asserts itself" and as "infuence that individuals—based on their disposal of resources or their abilities—achieve in social relationships" (Lenz 2010, 31, 32).3 Gender-specifc power structures and felds 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 Europeaninfuenced 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 refection of felds 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 fxed general, religious, and other groupspecifc 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).4 This includes not only a refection 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 scientifc fndings on (for example, endocrinological5) 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

3 "Machtverhältnis, in dessen Rahmen sich nur eine jeweils stärkere Seite behauptet", "Einfuss, den Personen – gestützt auf ihre Verfügung über Ressourcen oder ihre Fähigkeiten – in sozialen Beziehungen erreichen".

4 "Feministische Theorie ist daher im Grunde nur denkbar als ein Projekt der fortwährenden Deund Rekonstruktion von Wissen", "Herausforderung des *Anders-Denkens*".

5Cf. Kaplan and Rogers 1990, 205–228; cf. Richards, Bouman, Barker 2017.

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).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-specifc power relations and felds 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-refection 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 refecting 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-refection 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

6Gender "is institutionalized to the extent that the network of links to the reproduction system is formed by cyclical practices. It is stabilized to the extent that the groups constituted in the network have interests in the conditions for cyclical rather than divergent practice" (Connell 1987, 141).

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 refects on their gender-specifc manifestations.

However, the presentation and exclusive deconstructivist self-refection 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, confrm 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-infuenced 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 frmly 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 felds 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).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 profles that are linked to clichéd gender performances, be it the blonde, especially female soprano or the extroverted, self-confdent trumpeter. Here, a gender-specifc 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 ft into the traditional separation of high female (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto) and deep male voices (tenor, baritone, bass), although there are fowing 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 signifcant 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

7Citron describes musical canons as disciplinary and repertorial, which are intertwined.

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 felds 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 frst 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 feld and all connections between music and sexuality. It may be called prudery that this feld 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 infuence 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 felds 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 justifed and defned—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 feld in many ways.

#### **4 Gender Issues as Institutional and Discourse Critique—Contemporary Music**

In the feld 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, specifcally 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 signifcant that it was precisely in this environment that female artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, or Annea Lockwood frst 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 frst 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.  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 fulflment of his male sadistic needs, in which he also integrates the relationship with performers and audiences (Woolfe 2016).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 refection on its phenomenological, physicalsensual, 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

8Cf. the flm *The Artist & the Pervert* (2018).

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, artifcial 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.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?

9This reasoning assumes that these discourses were led by male composers, not female composers.

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 feld 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 fnd its rightful place, its own. […] Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, proft, and the false needs of a degraded humanity (Adorno 1997, 227).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-refection, one could assume that this discourse is maledominated, even if expression and emotion are no longer suppressed. Fred Maus

10Adorno, *Ästhetische Theorie*, 336–337: "Gesellschaftlich an der Kunst ist ihre immanente Bewegung gegen die Gesellschaft, nicht ihre manifeste Stellungnahme.  Soweit von Kunstwerken eine gesellschaftliche Funktion sich prädizieren lässt, ist es ihre Funktionslosigkeit. Sie verkörpern durch ihre Differenz von der verhexten Wirklichkeit negativ einen Stand, in dem, was ist, an die rechte Stelle käme, an seine eigene. […] Kunstwerke sind die Statthalter der nicht länger vom Tausch verunstalteten Dinge, des nicht durch den Proft und das falsche Bedürfnis der entwürdigten Menschheit Zugerichteten".

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 feld 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 feld of music is permeated by practices and theories that create, confrm, and—far too rarely—refect on unspoken and pronounced gender relations and connotations. In addition, there is a continuous interplay between numerically identifable 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 'fx the numbers', 'fx the institution', 'fx 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 refect 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-refexive, 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 Huddersfeld, 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 specifc compositional style that is characterised by great fexibility and openness to collaboration, and by a refusal to defne 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 specifcally 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 fexible, and fuid identity, which is not least refected 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 fnd 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 "fghting [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 defne herself as a person or her music, which cannot be described as commercially oriented pop music and also does not ft into the context of artifcial, 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 fst in the face (as many of us unfortunately know). The more you attempt to defne 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 feld 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.

#### **References**

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### **Darmstadt and Its Discontents**

**4**

Martin Iddon

#### **1.**

Just as there had been art which—before the 1970s, before Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, or Hans Haacke—might have been characterised as falling within the ambit of institutional critique, so there were musical precedents in the postwar avant-garde metonymised in the name Darmstadt. The most prominent event that might be viewed in this light is inevitably John Cage's visit to the Darmstadt courses in 1958, perhaps at its zenith in his implicit criticism of any institution which might privilege theoretical refection over listening:

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question? Do you know what I mean when I say inside the school? (Cage 1968 [1958], 41)1

Pointed though Cage's question may have been, his lectures also, perhaps more pertinently, blurred the line between whether they really were lectures or were, themselves, artworks. Position-taking with respect to Cage was the fashpoint for one of Darmstadt's most notorious clashes: while Karlheinz Stockhausen had implicitly shown his support for approaches which riffed on Cage's indeterminate notations, in his 1959 *Musik und Graphik* lecture series, Luigi Nono made no less clear in his presentation "The Presence of the Past in the Music of the Present"

M. Iddon (\*)

© The Author(s) 2024

1For a fuller account of Cage's visit, see Iddon 2013, 196–228.

School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, Great Britain e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Grüny and B. Farnsworth (eds.), *New Music and Institutional Critique*, Ästhetiken X.0 – Zeitgenössische Konturen ästhetischen Denkens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67131-3\_4

that, even if Cage might know what he was doing, his epigones seemed often to be using indeterminate notations more or less because performers of the quality of David Tudor seemed able to spin gold out of them (Iddon 2013, 231–52 & 255–60).

Yet for all Cage apparently caused European composers to orient themselves with respect to him, his impact in institutional terms was relatively small, perhaps by virtue of how straightforward it was to quarantine him, safely, as an outsider—an American cowboy—whose opinions regarding the infrastructure of the old country's new music scene could be regarded as entertaining but fundamentally irrelevant. That said, perhaps there was, too, an underpinning fear that he might have had a point, made visible in the unoffcial ban on his presence at Darmstadt through the tenure of the second director of the courses, Ernst Thomas, for whom the sign-sound relation encoded in the score acted as a guarantee that he was not being taken for a ride (Thomas 1959). In many respects, the Contre-Festival in Mary Bauermeister's Cologne Studio in 1960, though both conceived explicitly in opposition to the International Society for New Music's annual festival, held in the same city, is similar, in the sense that it had to be undertaken outwith the institutions of new music, with almost the only contact between the offcially sanctioned festival and Bauermeister's the presence in both of Tudor, who premiered Stockhausen's *Kontakte* on 11 June 1960, before a few days later, on 15 June 1960, in a sort of *salon des refusés*, performing the music of Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Sylvano Bussotti, George Brecht, La Monte Young, and Christian Wolff. Other members of the broader Stockhausen circle—including Aloys Kontarsky and Christoph Caskel—ultimately performed at the atelier and Stockhausen himself attended concerts there, surely in part trying to have a foot in both camps, a part of the 'offcial' avant-garde, but simultaneously opposed to it (Zahn 1993).

To speak of Kontarsky and Caskel as part of the Stockhausen circle is, too, to misrepresent, at least a little: they were no less close at the time, to Mauricio Kagel. Kagel's *Sur scène* (1959–60) blurs the distinction between presentation and representation of musical performers: an actor plays the part of an audience member—largely unimpressed by either the music or the audience 'proper'—while a speaker takes on the role of critic, who delivers a second-hand collage of sources, from the pretentious to the profane; three instrumentalists play the roles of performers, such that the moments when they do play notes take on the guise not only of the performance of rehearsal, but even seem to do so in quotation marks. Though premiered in Bremen the previous year, *Sur scène* was also the closing piece of the 1963 Darmstadt Ferienkurse: Kagel's description of the piece—and particularly the role of the critic—as a "reaction to the academicism of Darmstadt" leads Heile to conclude, rightly, that its position in the programme made it seem "a distorting mirror of the whole event" (Heile 2006, 40). Yet the object of this discontent is a stark reminder that, to the extent there was criticism of the institution to be had in the 1960s, it largely went only so far as to wish that Darmstadt might be less boring, recollecting Cardew's note the following year that Darmstadt represented "an excellent Academy [where] where problems like Notation and

Electronic Sound are competently handled in a rather academic way" (Cardew 1964), or Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski's more biting 1966 judgement: "a prosaic works convention" (Lewinski 1966). In this context, *Sur scène* might be read, above all, as a complaint about how dull it was to hear senior German intellectuals deliver their (all too) serious thoughts on the subject of new music.

#### **2.**

It was not tedium which led to real friction, but authority. In 1968, Thomas and Stockhausen felt the need to redact critical student responses to the ways in which Stockhausen had run his composition course that year. Against the apparently egalitarian ideas that might seem to have lain behind both intuitive music more generally and the collective approach to composition that the *Musik für ein Haus* project specifcally seemed to embrace, the students felt that Stockhausen had been doctrinaire, regarding how they went about devising their intuitive scores, how those scores would be combined in collective performance, and what performers were expected (or, even, allowed) to do with them. Yet, through the ministries of senior composer and institution, those critical voices are absent from the publication devoted to the course (Iddon 2004).

The following year, it was impossible to hide away criticism of Stockhausen. His seminars that year focussed on the intuitive music of his *Aus den Sieben Tagen* (1968) pieces, performed jointly by his own ensemble and the trombonist Vinko Globokar's New Phonic Art. Globokar himself argued that, so far as he was concerned, there was little distinction of note to be made between what happened when he improvised and when he was guided by Stockhausen's texts and, moreover, that if what Stockhausen truly wanted was intuition, then the ways in which he manipulated sound at the mixing desk—highlighting, for instance, what he would like to hear more of—militated directly against this. The apparent breach of protocol—a performer taking issue so stridently with the composer whose music they were performing—may well have been related to the former Nono student Helmut Lachenmann's provocative question to Globokar: when he played these pieces, from which of Stockhausen's fngers did he hang? Globokar had little intention of being thought anyone's puppet (Cavallotti 2020).

By 1970, participants at Darmstadt had brought their discontent into public, holding open meetings not only to make clear their objections to the direction Darmstadt had taken, but also to propose concrete actions. Above all, the participants seem to have felt that the aesthetic direction of the courses was too limited, especially because of Stockhausen's centrality, and that part of the core reason for those limits was how out of touch the leadership—Thomas, that is was with what young composers were interested in. The excessive, as it seemed, authority of both senior fgures was a bone of contention. The demands appear, at this distance, rather moderate: more time spent learning to compose, in seminar and group learning contexts; in those same group contexts, a breaking down of the divisions between composition and performance and, too, between notated

and improvised approaches to both; increased diversity, especially in terms of internationalisation, both among participants and faculty; more opportunities for participants to play a democratic role in the institution. The participant meeting elected a delegation to put their suggestions for change to Thomas, which included Bauermeister and Caskel, as well Reinhard Oehlschlägel, Rudolf Frisius, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, and Nicolaus A. Huber, whose expertise encompassed journalism in print and on radio, musicology, and composition. Huber had a personal reason to feel aggrieved since, although his *Versuch über Sprache* (1969) had been awarded a prize at that year's courses, the frst time a prize for composition had been awarded at Darmstadt, it was a second prize. The implication was that the jurors felt that no composition was of suffcient quality to merit a frst prize. There were rumours that Huber's principal offence was to have taken part of the text for the piece from Marx (Iddon 2006, 257–63).2

Contrary to the general perception of Thomas as a rather staid, unimaginative, and diffdent leader, he did act, revising the structure of the courses over a 'fallow' year in 1971, before the courses took on a regular biennial pattern from 1972. Though there was no democratisation—on the contrary, Thomas instituted an advisory board of new music luminaries: Caskel, Kontarsky, and the cellist, Siegfried Palm—he did institute a new studio space for composers to develop new work, a space in which composers could work collaboratively and do so in dialogue with faculty members: in the frst year, the composition studio was run jointly by Lachenmann and former Stockhausen Ensemble member, David Johnson. In previous years, the lecture-led format of the courses had created the impression that faculty members largely spoke to—or worse *at*—rather than with participants. Despite this, the three dissenters who worked most prominently as journalists of various kinds, Oehlschlägel, Frisius, and Stiebler, found themselves—in Stiebler's case, only briefy—barred from the courses, on account of having been involved in the (attempted) distribution of a pamphlet which seems to have been less scurrilous than a blanket ban would suggest. The three demanded, among other things, increased discussion of political aesthetics, a reduction in the centrality of established composers, and an elected advisory panel, to replace Thomas's *selected* one. In response, Kontarsky insisted that politics *had* been a signifcant focus, in lectures delivered by Carl Dahlhaus, Reinhold Brinkmann, and György Ligeti, not least, as well as in the premiere of Huber's *Harakiri* (1971) (Iddon 2006, 267–74).

By rights, *Harakiri* ought to have been premiered earlier in 1972, but its commissioner Clytus Gottwald had rejected it.  By contrast, *Harakiri* exhibits a deep cynicism about the ability of musical material to *express*—"the acoustical even does not establish

2Although the LP release of *Versuch über Sprache* claims that it won that year's Kranichstein Musikpreis, this is untrue, since that prize was not awarded for composition until the next instance of the courses, in 1972.

itself immediately as music. In this respect it is not music. […] I made it diffcult to mistake what are presented as elements of music as music itself" (Kutschke 2009, 84)—through a similar reduction: the opening ten minutes of the piece centres around an extremely quiet and unfocussed—in fact, unfocussable—drone, created via thirteen violins, playing their open A strings, detuned by over two octaves to the G-fat at the bottom of the bass staff. Throughout this whole section, the music actively performs its own inability to speak: from Huber's perspective, music's noble suicide might open up a self-refective space in which it could, at least, reveal the ways in which listening to music *as music* prevented engagement with live political problems; to Gottwald, it looked more like a hitjob (Kutschke 2009). In this sense, Huber's music looks like a sort of prototype for precisely the sort of critique that would prove to be unwelcome at Darmstadt for the rest of the decade.

The newly instituted composition studios had presented the work of younger composers in concert, many of whom would become established over the next few years: Michaël Levinas, Wolfgang Rihm, Clarence Barlow, Horațiu Rădulescu, and Gillian Bibby among them, the last of whom would be one of the joint winners of the frst Kranichstein Musikpreis awarded for composition in the same year. There were many more informal performances of new work during the studio sessions themselves, often including senior performers, as in Nicole Rodrigue's *Nasca* (1972), which involved both Caskel and Kontarsky, as well as Michel Portal, and was conducted by Globokar. The material demands of the protests having been met, perhaps it is no surprise that Kontarsky was unconvinced by the insistence that he ought to be replaced by an elected representative of the participants, not least since relatively few participants returned year after year. In combination, this suggests that though the protests were demanding things of the leadership, the only acceptable response would have to be one which originated *outside* the territory occupied by the leadership.

#### **3.**

Arguably, the composition studios had precisely the scope to become this space, even if that was not obvious in their frst year. By 1974 it was rather better known than it had been in 1972 that intractable rifts had developed in the Stockhausen camp. Then, it would have been eminently possible to think that the studio leadership continued to mirror Darmstadt's own institutional history: Lachenmann standing for his teacher, Nono; Johnson standing for his former collaborator, Stockhausen. In 1974, Rolf Gehlhaar, himself formerly Stockhausen's assistant, took over running the studios. The usual critical press voices pointed to the ways in which Gehlhaar made use of process plans, which seemed reminiscent of Stockhausen's process plans for, for instance, *Prozession* (1967) or *Kurzwellen* (1968) (Frisius 1974). Frisius's description of this does not note, though, that the process plans Gehlhaar used were—recognisably, and not only because of the copyright notice—Feedback Studio process plans, the Cologne Feedback Studio having been set up precisely by Gehlhaar, Johnson, and Johannes Fritsch in dissatisfaction with the direction their work with Stockhausen had been taking, especially after the inevitable exhaustion of a months-long stay in Japan in 1970 (Fritsch 2010 [1993], 40).3 Nor does it acknowledge that part of that dissatisfaction stemmed precisely from a sense that, in a parallel with Globokar's complaints, their involvement in Stockhausen's process pieces ought, by rights, to have given them a stake in the compositional ownership of those processes.

Stockhausen's personal authority fomented more dissent in 1974. His demands for total, rapt attention to his seminars led him to suspend a participant for accounts vary—having arrived late or seeking to leave early, perhaps because of feeling unwell or to get some water, on account of the extreme heat in the unventilated hall, or because he already had a practice room booked. In response, Gerhard Stäbler, Johannes Vetter, and Jürgen Lösche produced a pamphlet under the auspices of the self-styled Initiative for the Foundation of a Society of Socialist Makers of Art, which critiqued Stockhausen's demands for seeming absolute authority and deference, and, perhaps more devastatingly, organised a walk-out of Stockhausen's next seminar (Iddon 2008).

Stockhausen might have been to some extent perplexed by the degree to which attacks were directly at him personally. From his perspective, it may have seemed only a few years ago that he was part of the crowd kicking against institutional pricks, even if the way in which he had—in 1960's attendance at the Contre-Festival, say—tried to position himself outside, while still very much taking advantage of, the establishment surely looks, with more critical distance, cynical. It is precisely on this fracture that the events of the 1974 courses rest, including the ways in which they present a possible alternate future for new music which never came to pass.

Stockhausen's major new piece—*Herbstmusik* (1974)—in many respects feels like it is intimately in touch with the mood of disquiet. The frst three of its four movement titles are literal descriptions of the on-stage events: "nailing a roof", "breaking wood", "threshing". In its last—"leaves and rain"—a tussle in the leaves between clarinettist and violist becomes apparently consensually erotic—if musically metaphorised, Stockhausen suddenly somehow bashful—in a closing duet. In the abstract, this might be thought of as a piece concretely fguring the problematics of ideas of musical autonomy, insulated against the realities of lived, and living, experience. Though Stockhausen's name was attached to the piece, *Herbstmusik* feels, too, like the devising process is still visible in performance. One way of reading the piece is that it also seeks, if a little ham-fstedly, to undo the authority of the composer through collectivity, *revealing* the collectivity that was at play in the *Aus den Sieben Tagen* performances, but which Stockhausen struggled to admit. This was certainly not the view taken by those who

3Fritsch points out, too, that Stockhausen endeavoured to persuade the rights agency, GEMA, to pay musicians a higher fee for performances of pieces where they had an increased level of creative involvement, on the model of jazz musicians, but was unsuccessful.

encountered the piece, though: any critique was invisible to Gustav Adolf Trumpff (1974), for whom the theatrical elements failed to obscure that the music—music and theatre apparently neatly separable in his view—was "thin", while Lewinski (1974b) cuttingly noted that the quality of the performers was rather greater than that of the composer. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (1974) struck at the heart of things when he noted that the fnal movement may well have been satyrical, but it was not satirical. He also, bitingly, observed that it was the anonymous stagehands who cleared the stage afterwards who were responsible for the most important job of work. This in combination with the student protest was the trigger for Stockhausen to be ejected from the courses, in which he had been (at least one of) the dominant fgure(s) since the 1950s. The idea of an individual *so* entwined with the institution offering such a blunt critique of that institution was unfortunately—and to a pretty large extent literally—laughable. Perhaps part of the problem was that Stockhausen did not seem to think it might be funny.

The waning—if not total collapse—of Stockhausen's star defnitionally opened up space for others, just the sort of space that protests against the institution had been calling for. Perhaps ironically, the most immediately obvious candidates were undertaking work explicitly critical of the institutional presumptions of new music in ways which at least touched the feld occupied, unsuccessfully, by *Herbstmusik*. Arguably the best of these, one of the stand-out pieces of the 1974 Ferienkurse, was Moya Henderson's *Clearing the Air* (1974), composed and performed as a part of Gehlhaar's composition studios. As the piece began, it could have been mistaken for something almost wholly recognisably new musical: the double bassist, Fernando Grillo, seemed to be accompanied by a fxed tape part, diffused through four—at the time stereotypically—over-sized loudspeakers, which interfered with what Henderson described as Grillo's "exotic, high-pitched extravagances" (quoted in Kouvaras 2016, 90). Yet the acute listener might already have thought that the fdelity of the electronic sound was too high, that the speakers reproduced acoustic sounds too perfectly. That listener would not have long to wait to have their suspicions confrmed: the live performers concealed inside the speakers—Christina Kubisch (fute), Davide Mosconi (oboe or, possibly, mizmar), Gehlhaar (clarinet), and Henderson herself (didgeridoo)—began to cut their way out of the paper speaker cones, before advancing, threateningly, on all fours according to Herbert Henck's account, towards Grillo with the same scissors they had used to escape their electronic prisons. Just at the point at which they raised their scissors, the lights were cut and the piece ended (Reese 2021, 54).

That same group was the source of no shortage of critiques of the environment and presumptions of new music. Kubisch's *Divertimento* (1974) asked fve pianists—at the same instrument—to play the same, increasingly complex, material, at different tempi. These tempi were provided to the pianists via what would now seem a simple means—in-ear click tracks—but which at the time involved Kubisch in some rather complicated manipulation of physical tape and the performers with obtrusive headphones. The piece represented, as Kubisch described it, "a parody of the precise demands of new music, which often leave little scope to the performers for interpretation. In contrast was the rather absurd image of

fve men at one piano, slaving away at the instrument while wearing headphones" (ibid.). One of the pianists was Davide Mosconi, whose *3 For* (1973) operates in not unrelated territory: here there are three pianists and one piano. The instructions of the third pianist ask them to move the piano in ways which make it impossible for the frst to carry out the actions on the keyboard and pedals asked of them. The second pianist, having smoked a cigarette, waits in the curve of the instrument until the frst pianist is inevitably unseated by the third, and then helps them off stage. Grillo's own *Itesi* (1974) was composed for double bass and dancer, performed by the composer himself and Muriel Jaer. According to one of the courses most regular reviewers, Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski, Grillo was not disturbed by the noise of audience dissatisfaction with a piece which concentrated on fnding different ways to generate sound from the double bass—under the strings, on the nut, a set of "circus effects", Lewinski thought—even if one's jaw might drop to read Lewinski's assertion that it was fortunate there was so much to watch Grillo do since Jaer was "no eye candy" (Lewinski 1974a). As Lewinski's later review of the courses as a whole made clear, "music as theatrical action" should be understood as no less critical of the Darmstadt institution, no less a reaction against the status quo, than explicit protests against Stockhausen. The young composers may have been "clueless", in Lewinski's view, but the fault lay with their teachers (Lewinski 1974c).

It was Henderson who would be the principal winner of 1974's Kranichstein Music Prize. On a certain reading—since the inaugural 1972 award was split equally three ways, between Bibby, Helmut Cromm, and Martin Gellhorn— Henderson's win of the major award in 1974 brought the last, and only occasion on which an equal gender balance was achieved. This did not seem to be a cause for celebration at the time: Frisius, admittedly one of Thomas's most trenchant critics, implied that the verdict in favour of Henderson was suspect since the jury for the prize was made up of six performers and just one composer, Gehlhaar himself (Frisius 1974). No less signifcant was the fact that one of Henderson's co-winners—of the lesser prize of DM300 rather than the DM800, awarded to Henderson—was a composer of colour, Alvin Singleton, for his game piece, *Be Natural* (1974). Intriguingly, neither is mentioned in the *Basler Nachrichten*'s review of the courses, which awards the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis to Detlev Müller-Siemens who, like Singleton, won one of the smaller awards (Damm 1974).4

Grillo, Henderson, and Mosconi returned in 1976. All three appeared on the programme, in different guises. Henderson, as might be expected from the major prize winner of the previous courses, had a piece presented on the main programme: *Stubble* (1975–76) for an on-stage soprano and an unseen bass, playing

4The Indian composer, Clarence Barlow, would win in Thomas's fnal year as director, 1980. There is a decline between the frst and second decade of the award: of twelve awardees between 1972 and 1980, two were composers of colour, and two were women. In the following decade, there were ffteen awards made, two to women and none to Black or Asian composers.

the role of the soprano's talking table. At that table, the soprano is making preparations for a date, preparations which become increasingly absurd and, to the same degree, increasingly pointed: she shaves her legs—recalling her mother's warning that she could be regarded as a "gorilla" if she didn't—before continuing her hair removal regime to nostrils and eyebrows, then to merkin-esque armpits, eventually drawing improbable lengths of black thread from the nipples of the fake breasts behind which the soprano has been standing. The score's dedication "to all those women emancipated in the Year of the Woman 1975" unpicks any reading that Henderson's female subject should be read as a powerless hysteric subject to the imagined whims of an absent male body, making the piece rather more pointedly critical of the ways in which second-wave feminism might be seen to have achieved *symbolic* progress at the expense of genuine societal change, neatly exemplifed through the stalling of the ratifcation of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, which ground to a halt after North Dakota's ratifcation on 3 February 1975 (Macarthur 2001, 160–64). The piece passed by largely without comment, however. Robert Rollin's retrospective—a near-lone report, which seems unfortunately to have rather misread the point—suggested that in "ridiculing" the desires of the female subject to "please", "Darmstadt's unwritten tradition of having one work involving nudity was upheld" (Rollin 1976, 22).5 Lewinski (1976) refused even to name Henderson: his suggestion that, for some of the composers who had worked with Kagel in Cologne, their acuity of their satire was undermined by the fundamental technical faws it concealed, nonetheless evidently had Henderson as one of its principal targets. It is, too, diffcult to see a piece like Henderson's refecting Jungheinrich's claim that the courses seemed like "dull exercises for a specialist audience of composers" (Jungheinrich 1976).

 The performance was surely striking but, as with Henderson, practically ignored, save by Gerhard Schroth (1976), who regarded Mosconi as a prime example of those young composers who remained concerned that the boundaries of music should not be drawn simply where sound or notation seemed to end, and Klaus Trapp (1976), who did seem to sense some of the critique at the heart of things: "a sarcastic vision of the end of all music or despair about there being any sense in 'composing'?".

Despite 'collective composition' having been one of the things most demanded only a few years earlier, when it was undertaken within the 1976 composition studios—again run by Gehlhaar—it received little fanfare. Although Trapp's review is entitled "Musical Olympics"—a recollection that the courses that year coincided

5This is, incidentally, a tradition unknown to the present author.

with events in Montreal—he fled it before the fnal concert, which delivered more fully on that conjunction, in a collective composition, *Laufarten* (1976), which is to say "running styles", devised by Grillo, Mosconi, Ines Klok (who had been the harpist in Mosconi's *Quartetto* and earlier a member, with him, of the avant-jazz group, the Natural Arkestra de Maya Alta), Alain Dubois, Glen Hall, and Nouritza Matossian. All were involved in the performance, supplemented by Caskel, Henderson, Gehlhaar, Michel Gonneville (the bass in Henderson's *Stubble*), and Benny Sluchin. One of the regrettably few reports of the piece recounts musicians undertaking gymnastics on the horizontal bar, according to the demands of Gehlhaar's trainer's whistle, and, more specifcally, a leapfrogging Caskel and Grillo, with double bass, on the trampoline (Grabmann 1976).

Grillo's central contribution to the courses—performances of Iannis Xenakis's *Theraps* (1976) and his own arrangement of Giacinto Scelsi's *KO-THA* (1967/75)—won him the Kranichstein Musikpreis, for performance, but his compositional efforts were limited to his involvement in *Laufarten* and the promise of a return visit in 1978, specifcally to develop a site-specifc piece for Darmstadt's railway museum, in the suburb of Kranichstein, jointly with Mosconi: the two had spent enough time there to convince the chairman and the press offcer of the museum not only to record sounds from the museum, but to provide them with foor plans so that they could sketch out where musicians and audience members might be within the space (Höfer 1976). Of this small group, which seemed to be making critical work which, nonetheless, also delivered on the demands of the protests of the early 1970s, none would return in 1978. The composition studios *had* done their work of creating a space where the institution itself could be (safely) criticised, but it required the rest of the infrastructure—both the institution itself and journalists, several of whom had pressed for change in the frst place—to attend to, promote and integrate, those critiques for their force to be felt.

#### **4.**

Siegfried Palm had noted, of the 1974 courses, that the two major trends that could be observed were, on the one hand, the composers interested in the critical deployment of theatre and, on the other, those composers who would ultimately become gathered together under the general description of the *Neue Einfachheit*, at this time more likely to envision Müller-Siemens as its future leading light than Wolfgang Rihm (Lewinski 1974c). Lewinski, at least, felt that Rihm was struggling to shake off the infuence of his teacher, Stockhausen (ibid.). By 1976, broadly the former had almost entirely supplanted the latter, whether in Frisius's withering claim that the courses were taking 'a confdent step into the nineteenth century' (Frisius 1976) or the many plaudits afforded Detlev Müller-Siemens and Hans-Jürgen von Bose. The sense that tonality was very much back on the agenda was surely bolstered too by the presence on the programme of music from, frst, Tilo Medek—a visitor from East Germany, perhaps most obviously in his *Eine Stele für Bernd Alois Zimmermann* (1975–76)—and, second, Cristóbal Halffter, whose native Spain was in its transition towards democracy. His Cello Concerto (1974) was, on account of Siegfried Palm's illness, given its German premiere by Ulrich Heinen. Indeed, this coverage of the bold step forward into the past seems to be exactly that which eclipses the much more obviously progressive and radical work being undertaken by Grillo, Henderson, Kubisch, and Mosconi, notwithstanding the complaints of many commentators that what they really *wanted* was progressive, radical work.

Ernst Thomas and his advisory board *could* have brought these composers into the fold, as it were, demonstrating the openness of the institution to critique and, through that, renewing it. Yet Henderson and Mosconi would never return to the courses. Grillo, even though he had won the courses' major interpretation prize, would not be back until the accession of the next director in 1982 and, even then, there was more interest in his abilities as a double bassist than his activities as a composer; Kubisch would not return until the next director *after that* took over, in 1996. The institution instead doubled down on the other side of the equation: the opening concert featured the premieres of three new string trios, by Bose, Rihm, and Wolfgang von Schweinitz, commissioned by the courses. Elsewhere on the programme, via the composition and interpretation studios, could be found music by Manfred Trojahn, Hans-Christian von Dadelsen, Müller-Siemens, and a further piece by Schweinitz. Dahlhaus—whose lectures were often positioned as a sort of intellectual 'state of the nation' address—spoke on "the simple, the beautiful, and the simply beautiful" the link to the *Neue Einfachheit* composers rather clearer in his German title: "Vom Einfachen, vom Schönen und vom einfach Schönen", his title in any case recollecting a presentation given earlier in the courses by Bose: "The Hunt for a New Ideal of Beauty".

It was Rihm's lecture, "The Shocked Composer" however, which made clear that, at least from Rihm's perspective, his *Musik für drei Streicher* (1977) represented a very particular sort of institutional critique. New music was, Rihm argued, governed by a sort of dialectical refusal, which guaranteed its progress into the future. Yet one refusal—the refusal of tonality—had become so sedimented in new music that, if there was a manoeuvre which was reactionary, it was to continue to insist upon the absolute abhorrence of the major third and the formal possibilities implied by it. To acknowledge this might be to begin to accept what it would mean to be "free", compositionally speaking, Rihm argued (Rihm 1978). Moreover, Rihm's trio was the embodiment of his critique: the ways in which it enters directly into an evocation of Beethoven—noted by reports at the time—and also—surely more strongly, but *not* discussed in contemporary coverage—Berg, in his *Lyric Suite* (1925–26) above all, but *without* the arch, ironic quotation marks in, for instance, Medek's evocation of Mozart, speak to an active recovery of and engagement with tonality in direct fashion (Lewinski 1978a; Ely 1978).6 It was Berg, too, who was the subject of the homage in the subtitle

6The relationship with Berg was, however, stressed a few years later by Christopher Fox (1982), 51.

of Klaus K. Hübler's First String Quartet (1977), a reference much more tangible in the piece than those familiar with his later music might expect. Explicitly, Rihm's critique cavilled against the institution, against what it had refused, but in a literal sense to return it to itself, to reject its own disavowal, so that music could *be music*, in a fairly clear opposition to those approaches which deployed music *against* itself, in a sort of scepticism of the possibility of saying anything at all, certainly without going *beyond* what music might have seemed to be. For all Rihm's dreams of freedom, his critique was aimed squarely at remaining *within* a particular sphere, even if extending the forms of motion possible within it.

Institutionally, Darmstadt sanctioned *this* critique, but not the other. It had done so on a programmatic level by the prominence given to composers who, by this point, were fairly securely categorised as a loose group, in the concert hall and lecture theatre. Much more potently, however, Rihm was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis for his *Musik für drei Streicher*. The norm developed since 1972 was that the prize would be awarded to a student: with a piece on the main programme and a scheduled lecture, Rihm could hardly be considered that. Moreover, his music was already, as it were, pre-approved, in the sense that Darmstadt had itself commissioned the piece, an act which also guaranteed it a rather better performance than those which could only be developed during the ambit of the 2 weeks of the courses.7 In a sense, Darmstadt as an institution might have been seen to have been saying 'yes, critique us, but like this, not like that'. In 1978, both Caskel and Kontarsky were Kranichstein Musikpreis judges, even more implicated within the institution by virtue of having been part of the advisory board that planned the courses.

1978, in fact, looks to be the template for the European new musical sphere of the 1980s: Brian Ferneyhough, who had delivered one of the previous session's analysis lectures, was promoted to become one of the senior composers, alongside Lachenmann: the pair were the compositional representatives on the Kranichstein panel. Gérard Grisey provided an analysis lecture, his "Zur Entstehung des Klangs…", a foundational text of the nascent spectral movement. Gérard Condé's review in *Le Monde* was not mistaken in suggesting that the implicit choices to be made in 1978 were between Rihm, Ferneyhough, and Grisey, but without noting that, in certain respects, this was to suggest a choice between three favours of Stockhausen: Rihm had, it seemed, fnally sloughed off the excessive infuence of his former teacher, but Ferneyhough was already starting to be seen as a sort of hyper-serialist developing the language of Stockhausen's early Klavierstücke, while the impact of *Stimmung* on Grisey's musical practice was immediately, aurally, apparent. Condé even neatly fags them as "the new Darmstadt School" (Condé 1978). The addition of Lachenmann—both Stockhausen's tormenter in 1969 and the person who handed on the composition studios to Gehlhaar, who was tainted, if unfairly, by his association with Stockhausen—to this grouping in a way

7The argument is briefy rehearsed in Lewinsk 1978b.

merely recalls Lachenmann's own heritage, as Nono's most famous pupil. In some respects, Lachenmann might be seen as the 'acceptable face' of the sort of critique posed by Huber, in that *his* version of *musique concrète instrumentale* is always suffused with a nostalgia for the past—sometimes seemingly literally and tangibly erased—as opposed to Huber's use of similar resources to express a scepticism that there can truly remain new worlds to be won. Ferneyhough, even, might be seen to be presenting the 'properly musical' version of Kubisch's critique, in that both tilt at what happens when the strictest demands of new music are pushed into limit cases.

This was the situation inherited, but also promoted, by Thomas's successor as director, Friedrich Hommel, from 1982. A sort of factionalism between these camps rapidly developed, as might be expected given the structural sense in which they replicated historical antagonisms. In 1984, the factions were joined by a small group of minimalists who, just as one might have half-hoped, joined in with the local internecine confict, booing Ferneyhough's *Études trascendentales* (1983–85)—presented in not quite fnished form—and, by some reports, throwing paper planes during the performance (Post 1984). Minimalism, as it were, completed the set, since from the German perspective it was ineluctably bound up with a Cageian tradition and had, in fact, frst been brought to Darmstadt by Christian Wolff in 1974, in the form of Glass's *Music in Similar Motion* (1969) and Fredric Rzewski's *Coming Together* (1971). Hommel—in one sense surprisingly, though equally he arguably had little choice—suggested that he actively *welcomed* these conficts among participants, insisting that it embodied the lively passions of young musicians, passions which it was Darmstadt's fundamental job to support and encourage (Iddon 2012).

On this reading, what may well have genuinely seemed to Christopher Fox like "almost anarchic openness" (quoted in Gronemeyer 1996, 76) appears more like an institutionally sanctioned re-run of Darmstadt's greatest bust-ups. They follow a script known since the late 1950s, a script which, for a brief time in the 1970s, looked like it might get rewritten. More, Hommel's embrace of this—his insistence both that it is a *good thing* that the participants cared enough to be at such signifcant odds with one another and that those disputes are matters in essence *for* the participants, but not for the institution—effectively defangs them as critiques. In short, these 'offcial' critiques are ones for which the endgame is already known, because they have already taken place. Not only that, but they are critiques that point entirely inwards, within and towards the sphere of compositional activity: there is no scope for the same critiques to be directed towards the institution, especially not an institution actively engaged in *enabling* those critiques.

The most potent critiques made of Darmstadt in the 1970s—or, perhaps, the ones that look most like the sorts of critique that a contemporary world would *want to have been made* of Darmstadt in the 1970s—were precisely those which sought to escape the institution and which were, in so doing, so unacceptable to it that the only option was to eject them, thinking in particular of the contrast which might be drawn between Foucault's reading of critique—not that it demands not to be governed but that it demands not to be governed like *that*—and that of Jack Halberstam or in José Esteban Muñoz's embrace of what they term queer failure, a failure which never wanted to "win", "a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and […] a form of critique" (Halberstam 2011, 88). The prospect of that 1980s Darmstadt which didn't take place—one where the major fgures might have been the compositional quartet of Grillo, Henderson, Kubisch, and Mosconi, rather than Ferneyhough, Grisey, Lachenmann, and Rihm—looks like a sort of utopia, the most progressive new music that could have been imagined looking forward from the 1970s, an imagined past which might still inspire the present, the potency of which derives from the fact that it did not happen. "Queer failure is", Muñoz opines, "about escape and a certain kind of virtuosity" (Muñoz 2009, 173).A future critique might very well want to lay claim to this (r)ejected territory.

#### **References**

Jungheinrich, Hans-Klaus. 1976. Es geht doch irgendwie weiter. *Frankfurter Rundschau*, 24 July.

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**5**

# **Epistemological Stagfation and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Music Research**

Patrick Valiquet

Tracing a speculative path through the economic history of experimental music research, informed by the New Musicological trope of the discipline's 'lateness' to postmodernism, this chapter explores an alternate historiography foregrounding the slowness, partiality, and ambivalence of epistemic change under the accelerating austerity and privatisation measures imposed on American and European universities since the 1980s. In this new perspective, the rapid expansion of music research in the high modernist universities of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the production of what economists called a 'crisis of democracy', threatening to turn burgeoning youth publics against the violence and exploitation that made the expansion of state systems possible in the frst place. Then, from the early 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, academic contemporary music research stagnated aesthetically and socially while questions of modernisation devolved into an intensifying series of intergenerational and intersubdisciplinary competitions for symbolic power. In contrast with neomodernists who profess esoteric, subject-centred, dialectical critique as the key to renewing the university as state apparatus guaranteeing a rational and just distribution of cultural and epistemic resources, this chapter suggests that the frst critical step is to ask new empirical questions about the modes of subjectivation made available by uncritically 'disruptive' institutions that have willingly traded away their capacity for social and aesthetic critique in exchange for access to fnancialised markets of funding, personnel, and reputation.

P. Valiquet (\*)

Birmingham, United Kingdom e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024

C. Grüny and B. Farnsworth (eds.), *New Music and Institutional Critique*, Ästhetiken X.0 – Zeitgenössische Konturen ästhetischen Denkens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67131-3\_5

#### **1 Musicology's Critical Lateness**

Surely one of the most emblematic historiographical strategies of the self-proclaimed 'New Musicology' in the late twentieth century was its complaint that music scholarship was *late* to certain transformative currents in critical thought. Not only, chides Joseph Kerman, is the musicologist "a relative latecomer" in the history of the university, but "nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life in general" (Kerman 1985, 14–17). The rhetoric of lateness signals a respectful orientation towards the past as well as a desire for renewal. But why should contemporaneity elude musicologists so persistently in the frst place? Refecting, some two decades after Kerman, upon music scholarship's specifc deferral in relation to the epistemological and aesthetic innovations associated with 'postmodernism', Judith Lochhead observes a dialectic in which, on one hand, professional theoretical writing was still dominated by the formal and technical concerns of mid-twentieth-century modernist pioneers, and on the other, practitioners and critics held to an even more antiquated belief in the ineffability of music's expressive power (Lochhead 2011, 169). It seemed natural at this time that intellectual and theoretical innovation was going on elsewhere while musicians and musicologists were preoccupied with practice.

This conclusion bears closer scrutiny from a contemporary perspective in which postmodernism is no longer as novel nor as simple a category as it was almost four decades ago, when New Musicology was at its newest. Lochhead's retrospection is instructive in that it draws attention beyond the bad habits of particular musicians and audiences to highlight the unequal distributions of cultural capital that *produce* musicology's theoretical inertia as a complex, dynamically differentiating assemblage. Notice, however, that her focus is exclusively on lateness as *lack*; there is no attention to the actual theoretical activity that did happen in universities while music theorists and composers supposedly keep the world around them at bay. Absent are the institutional conditions that produced postmodernism, before it became the innovation that musicologists were supposedly missing. Both aporias were essential to the New Musicology's performance as heroic arbiter of musical contemporaneity at the turn of the millennium. But are we to believe that English literature and Philosophy departments discarded modernism quicker and more eagerly than Music departments? Was the postmodernism that came after the watershed of the late 1980s just a set of natural practices emerging in the wild?

Ironically, not only does the trope of lateness oversell the originality of those who invented it, it now also frequently serves as evidence of a hidden alliance between postmodernism and neoliberalism, which critics like J. P. E. Harper Scott (2012), Björn Heile (2011), and James Currie (2012) portray as the main adversary of contemporary musicological rigour. These nostalgics seem to want to follow Theodor Adorno in confating serious music's capacity to "satisfy its own concept" with musicians' moral right to produce social critique (Adorno 1976, 28–29). The problem, however, is that Adornian critique presumes a perspective on the social that contemporary universities no longer pretend to make possible. Working in tertiary education today in the so-called 'European Research Area' all but obligates arts and humanities researchers to *renounce* the kind of protective material detachments that were so central to the production of modernist critical theory when it was new (cf. Arendt 1961; Bourdieu e al. 1991; Birnbaum 2018). I will not be the frst to note, however, that the past for which these critics pine was one that blocked participation by the increasingly feminised and racialised workforce which is now faced with the challenge of rethinking academic music instruction 'from the inside' (cf. Hisama 2021). The trope of lateness inadvertently gives the frustrated modernists who toil under neoliberal doxa a scapegoat for the violence they endure—it shifts responsibility for austerity away from the managers, politicians, and oligarchs who impose it and on to the anti-imperialist, feminist, socialist subaltern who voices the complaint.

Modernists are entirely justifed, of course, in their opposition to four decades of ruthless managerialism, depleting resources and ever sinking labour standards in universities, but identifying postmodernism as cause of this confguration is dubious. Rejecting postmodernism offers no protection against the demise of the contemporary university's ability to foster critical cultural production. Of course, understanding the real conjuncture of postmodernism and neoliberalism in European and American universities still requires something like a 'critical' framing of the events. I agree with Marianna Ritchey (2021), however, that this implies also fnding new ways of understanding what grasping critically *is*, if not simply advancing 'reason'.1 If returns to or redistributions of critique are to bring order back to scholarship in any sense, then, as Stephen Muecke has recently argued, they must also avoid folding the real complexity of events and experiences *back* into anything like a universal subject of reason (Muecke 2021, 37). Indeed, recent historical research shows more and more that modernism itself never actually amounted to the serene and impartial instrument of sociocultural progress that its adherents imagined (e.g. Geoghegan 2020; Saint-Amour 2018).

Luckily for the New Musicology, the historiography that supports the Adornians' accusation is spurious, and the reality of postmodernism's intersection with neoliberalism still awaits empirical articulation. A brief look in the archive will show that musicologists *did* participate in the invention of postmodernism, but also that this work was frustrated and even suppressed in the very frst waves of austerity. In fact, suppressions of postmodernism persisted for nearly two decades until enough power had accrued to new methods that they warranted mainstream attention in seminars, thesis defences, and conferences. Music departments were never actually *late* to postmodernism: it lived among them from the beginning and they actively repressed it until the gaps it had opened became too big to fll.

1And, indeed, there is a growing body of work seeking answers to this question for the classical music industries and the musicological professions. See, e.g. Cheng 2016; Scharff 2017; Levitz 2018; Bull 2019; Lochhead et al 2019.

This chapter is too brief to offer an exhaustive account of the resistance postmodernism faced in music departments during the frst neoliberal attacks on the modernist university in the 1980s and 1990s. It can, however, explore some of the reasons why postmodernism's advent in the 1970s came as such a shock to musicological norms, taking as its case study the music department at the centre of the debates that defned postmodernity—the site of the concept's maturation, if not exactly its birthplace—the Centre Universitaire Expérimentale de Vincennes (Paris 8), established in haste to quench the revolutionary fervour of May 68. The richness of the experimentation that took place at Vincennes, in the face of severe austerity and moral panic, illustrates how much early postmodernism *depended* on a modernist model of university life, even as governments increasingly sceptical about the returns on state investments in education were questioning their efforts' ftness to purpose. The music department at Vincennes was so radical that it escaped the attention of anglophone contemporaries almost entirely and is now largely absent from histories of twentieth-century music in spite of its importance. It would be decades before New Musicologists could begin to absorb the shock, and when they did, they ignored the musicology produced at Vincennes and took to domesticating the work of philosophers and sociologists anew. But maybe the high modernist university produced a monster and then immediately disowned it. Maybe the value of its epistemological innovations spiked at exactly the moment when productivity fattened out.

Evidently, avoiding the modernists' errors is not a simple matter of placing our bets on the opposite side. Rather, we need to re-stage critique in something like a 'non-modern' perspective (cf. Latour 1993; Pickering 1995), de-naturalising the relation between music research and the university, and moving beyond naïve assumptions about the historical 'progress' of technological and aesthetic commodities. It is not a simple question of multiplication, however, solvable by mapping out larger and larger webs of musical action, in the manner of actor-network theorists (cf. Piekut 2014). Instead, we need to use myth and metaphor to speculate about new explanations for empirical data that has previously been forgotten and thus cannot be folded into existing ontologies. What musical institutions *are in fact* is a question of complex, pluripotent machines producing continuous and discontinuous events of material, mental, and social individuation at the critical edges of the dynamic milieux they inhabit (Stiegler and Donin 2004).

Thinking with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's later work on analysis, I propose to treat actor-networks not as a neutral descriptions of social ecology, but rather as specifc machines for producing and studying specifc social ontologies at specifc times (Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Deleuze 1993). In this account, objects do not *have* relations as properties: 'strokes' of relation need to be 'drawn' between objects from particular, situated points of observation, which in turn have their own horizons, vanishing points, and 'lines of fight' (Deleuze 1993, 20; cf. Strathern 2020). Since the energies needed to produce relations are always fnite, no network can simultaneously present the same features to all of the different agents moving across its edges and folds. Paths across an actor-network have an inherently contingent and speculative quality, which neither modernism nor postmodernism can explain away.

Although my approach may seem negative, the point of the alternate history I set out below is not to dismiss the range of new ideas that did survive the 1980s and 1990s in spite of austerity and conservative retrenchment. I present a positive, empirical account of a site of theoretical innovation that tests theories of progress in the face of newly excavated evidence. I want to fnd a new metaphor to explain how the neoliberalisation of European universities helped to manage specifc epistemic ruptures and prevent them from overfowing into revolutionary social change. In doing so I propose to, both experimentally and with the support of new empirical fndings, bring the European university into the foreground of the story of the progress of generic 'contemporary music' in the late twentieth century.