Gender, voice, language, and identity in contemporary music and sound art
Introduction: Self and Other, World and Music
Inheritance operates on both a bodily and historical level. What we inherit forms the condition of our arrival in the world, an arrival that leaves an impression and is itself shaped by impressions left behind. As Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, if history is constructed from what is transmitted to us—the circumstances in which we live—then it is fashioned from what is given not merely as something “always already” present before our arrival, but as an active gift. History, in this sense, is a gift that, once given, must be received.
The realm of human affairs, as Hannah Arendt observes in The Human Condition, is a web of relationships that forms wherever people live together. Revealing oneself as a distinct “who” through speech, and initiating something new through action, always takes place within a pre-existing network where effects are immediately felt.
Starting Points
Questions about how gender influences both music itself and the lives of those who create it served as the catalyst for this collection. These questions connect gender to the closely related concepts of voice, language, and identity. Over an extended investigation, diverse perspectives emerged on these four ideas, the apparent mechanisms that govern them, and their implications for making music and sound art. Within the chapters gathered here, the four notions orbit one another, revealing different facets, viewpoints, and parallel threads. For many artists, these issues reflect back on each other: they simultaneously shape creative work and are expressed within that work.
The music field largely treats itself as abstract and decontextualized, and by extension as apolitical and untouched by questions of gender and feminist thought—except when a composition deliberately takes up such themes. Yet inequality persists: female and non-binary artists remain seriously underrepresented across the entire field. This disparity reflects historically entrenched social power structures rather than actual demographics. In this sense, the field's imbalance might be considered a symptom more than a cause; one remedy would be to recognize the art form as deeply contextual.
Connecting these four concepts also offers a way to resist being relegated to the so-called “pink shelf,” where books on gender and feminism are politely isolated from audiences who consider themselves unaffected. Gender, voice, language, and identity reinforce one another when examined together. Critical questions about authorship, the role of arts institutions and settings, and the relationship to the musical canon are all inextricably tied to issues raised by feminist theories. These concerns shape the form, sound, and environment of music and sound art, even when text, voice, or physical presence might seem to be absent.
The writings collected here emerged from a two-year research project pursued by a flexible group of artists and theorists. The project the other the self began with an in-depth survey asking practitioners in music and sound art what role they attributed to gender and sexuality within their field. Many respondents identified gender disparities in the practical workings of their domain, but their views on how gender actually intersects with music were complex and often contradictory.
These responses led to publication of The Second Sound, and the project continued with various activities and presentations to which most contributions in this book are linked. Artists produced outputs as diverse in form, strategy, approach, and language as the many sub-fields within the sounding arts from which they originated. In these works, the four core themes—gender, voice, language, identity—rub against each other in different ways, frequently engaging with primal states of being and fundamental experiences: notions of unsaying, fear, the effects of damage, the fragility of the domestic sphere, the origins of non-intelligible utterances like cries or whistles, tentative responses to the unknown and uncategorized, and the disclosure of private thoughts and feelings.
Gender, Voice, Language, Identity
Gender is performed and exists on a continuum, a flexible point between two poles. Identity is shaped and is not singular. Voice conveys uniqueness and carries political weight, especially when silenced. Language preserves history, including the stories left out. All four concepts are highly contextual, each carrying a sense of paradigm and otherness. The self and the other are defined through orientation and history, articulated through voice, and confirmed in language.
These four themes have a powerful presence in music in multiple ways. However abstract music may be, it represents—and possibly even designs—constructions of reality. The influence of identity, language, and voice is commonly accepted, but the idea of gender as a factor shaping musical or sound creation still meets strong resistance. In visual arts, this connection was recognized earlier, as activist and writer Lucy Lippard noted already in the 1970s. She offered a simple logic: “art has no gender, but artists do. We are only now recognizing that those ‘stereotypes,’ those emphases on female experience, are positive, not negative, characteristics. It is not the quality of our femaleness that is inferior, but the quality of a society that has produced such a viewpoint. To deny one’s sex is to deny a large part of where art comes from. […] Art that is unrelated to the person who made it and to the culture that produced it is no more than decorative.”
Nevertheless, many artists working with sound perceive this line of thinking as limiting rather than enriching. This discomfort appeared in the initial survey: because some degree of self-exposure is part of professional life, many artists wish to transcend the “drawers” of gender. They feel uneasy about the expectation to reveal their person to a male gaze that objectifies both men and women.
For many cultural minorities—including women and non-binary individuals—an alternative canon of artists, working conditions, materials, and collaborative practices can provide an empowering basis for artistic identity. Along these lines, composer Jennifer Walshe created an imaginative musical history for her home country of Ireland, a nation with which she strongly identifies. Subordinated or “minor” cultures often become reduced to stereotypes partly because their stories are absent or perceived only in relation to a dominant narrative. As musicologist Susan McClary suggests, these cultures get incorporated into history as a confirming opposite, satisfying “a need for the construction of an Other […], whether it be associated with the feminine or some other object of ideological subordination.” For Walshe, rewriting the canon becomes a way to correct this imbalance, a method of writing history against history. The same systems of history and canonization are employed to define an alternative value set, no matter how invented that set may be. Hannah Arendt, following Plato’s concept of an “art of discrimination,” explains that separation can function as a tool for naming, connecting, and eventually establishing commonality within human relational systems.
Otherness—whether related to gender, voice, language, or identity—when it becomes clearly evident, has the potential to cause fear. This happens, for instance, with languages we cannot understand, rituals we cannot decipher, or voices that stir foreign emotions. Fear arises from a sense of losing control, as happens with sign language, which subverts the “control point of logos.” But otherness can also open up possibilities. Once its unique character is recognized, it permits creative usage, alternative definitions, and new representations. The Flemish word tussentaal literally means “in-between-language.” It is a beautiful and meaningful term, and could describe any artistic language developed through negotiating expressions of self, other, world, and canon. Tussentalen carry great potential for creativity and for reshaping reality, while paradigmatic notions must constantly reaffirm themselves and offer no room for creative or poetic use.
Creating: Material, Message, and Authorship
Creation does not occur in isolation; it must contend with concrete realities. It arises not purely from an author’s or creator’s imagination, intuition, and intellect, but also depends on material conditions, space, place, education, role models, and ideological systems of cultural value.
The path toward musical creation starts with imitation: reshaping, reassembling, and interpreting what is already found and available. We could say that part of creation is the capacity to invest the familiar with a sense of novelty, strangeness, and freshness—a process of orientation and reorientation. Sara Ahmed describes orientation as “alignment with what is, in spaces and for bodies which are already present. […] When orientation ‘works,’ we are occupied. The failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation: a tool is used by a body for which it was not intended, or a body uses a tool that does not extend its capacity for action. […] For bodies to arrive in spaces where they are not already at home, where they are not ‘in place,’ involves hard work; indeed, it involves painstaking labor for bodies to inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape.” For those whose bodies do not fit these spaces, reaching their own artistic language often takes longer, results in different life cycles and career rhythms, and the well-documented pay gap is only one manifestation.
Artistic creation is also subject to ideological pressures. Historian Marcia Citron has detailed how the concept of non-functionality became a quality standard in art after church and court began losing control. In Western art music, the value placed on non-functionality has fostered a cult of the Author, with any models differing from this ideal being dismissed as “folklore” or “hobby art.” There is no essentialist distinction in musical creation between men and women. However, the social and cultural contexts in which music is made and heard—including life circumstances, access to materials and education, and the social standing of creators—have real and tangible effects on how music is produced, how it gains circulation, and how it influences others. Throughout history, one strategy for dealing with a dominant cultural ideology has been to develop a double—or even multiple—artistic identity, similar to being at home in several languages each with its own emotional weight.
Creation asks two main questions: what is the material, and what is the message? What does an artist want, dare, and feel expected to speak about, and what means are available for doing so? Lucy Lippard recounts an encounter from the 1970s when she helped organize a group of female artists. As each woman introduced herself and her practice, Lippard noticed each one commenting, after a “curious pause,” “and I also make…”—revealing a parallel practice closer to their authentic self but deemed less important for the public gaze and the art market. These parallel practices typically took a different view on self and other; and, in Lippard’s words, they were about “make [ing] something from nothing.” Eva Rieger observes that such practices more often involved collaborative processes, holistic starting points, and a closer connection to the artist’s body and the human voice.
History and Canon
A canon provides the orientation points for artistic work within the larger story being told. It arrives bundled with musical training, role models, templates for navigating a career, and assumptions about cultural values embedded in artistic languages. It defines spaces. A canon is never an impartial tally of what has been made, but rather an active instrument in shaping what we even mean by “making.”
In her book, Citron explains the specific mechanisms by which “canonicity exerts tremendous cultural power,” since it “creates a narrative of the past and a template for the future.” Contrary to common assumptions, the canon does not reflect the demographics or cultural origins of the groups that constitute society. Instead, it represents underlying power structures and their historical shifts. General history and its ideologies form the framework within which a canon operates.
On a subtler plane below the history of facts and figures, there is also a psychological history inherited through identifying with—and separating from—those who raised and taught us. Philosopher and psychologist Carol Gilligan emphasized this dynamic. Working primarily toward understanding conceptions of morality by analyzing women’s voices, Gilligan’s research nonetheless resonates strongly with artistic creation. How artists handle collaboration, voice, form, text, space, and physical material is closely tied to their cultural identity. But Gilligan resists a purely biological viewpoint. She states, “the different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women’s voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute, and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to present a generalization about either sex.”
Marcia Citron extending this thinking into the musical realm, concludes that “certain tendencies, perhaps related to subject position or socialization, seem to manifest themselves in many works by women. Such tendencies are also available to men. The absence of any specifically female style is another indication not only of the difficulty of applying absolute meanings to music, but of the fact that women have been socialized largely in male norms. Thus the possibility of definite stylistic commonality among women becomes that much more remote. In general, [...] an understanding of canonicity requires a recognition that gender is inscribed in music. To deny this is to misread music as human expression.”
Music and sound art students today still base their education on an official canon that remains overwhelmingly male—and for that matter, largely Western, white, straight, and middle-class. Artists who do not fit this paradigm must face additional decisions: how to deal with disorientation, how to relate to a paradigmatic idiom, which language to use, and how to express difference. Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reflects on how carefully Virginia Woolf adjusted the tone of her language when writing A Room of One’s Own for the ears of prospective male readers. She likened this to the mode of survival—the “not-a-criminal, not-a-threat” performance—that a Black friend of hers constantly feels compelled to maintain. In classical music history, the claim that women are genetically incapable of original composition was often reinforced through pointing out that their music sounded like imitations of husbands, brothers, fathers, or teachers—the ever-cited Clara Schumann being only one example. It simply never occurs to the objectors, as an alternative view, that if these women had written in their own voice and idiom, they might not have been listened to, let alone understood.
Private and Public, and Other Dichotomies
Binary categories are embedded in Western philosophical tradition. Pairs like male/female, mind/body, or rationality/emotion, as well as sense versus sound, fine art versus applied art, official versus subversive, center versus periphery, nature versus nurture—all imply particular hierarchies. Historically, such dichotomies have been used to dismiss art produced by women and other cultural minorities. Nevertheless, much of twentieth-century philosophy worked to deconstruct these binary oppositions. Yet the substantial work of the last fifty years has not yet counterbalanced the preceding two thousand.
A crucial pair of concepts underlies the web of human relationships that Hannah Arendt references in the opening quote: the opposition between public and private. This distinction pertains to territory and fields of action, the spaces where music is created and presented. Arendt’s Vita activa explores what we do when we are active. Arendt categorized three types of human activity and assigned them to the private and public worlds. She stressed the necessity of people inhabiting both spheres while specifically emphasizing the significance of public appearance—which she tied primarily to “action.” In her view, “to live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to or separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.” Living such a truly human life demands “the presence of others, and this presence needs a space that is constituted specifically for this purpose, creating the necessary established and formal distance. […] The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.” The private realm, whose contents are hidden and which serves the needs vital for sustaining life itself, is the sphere where utility coincides with creativity.
The limited access of cultural minorities to the cultural public space has silenced many creative voices and created important gaps in our knowledge of art history. Yet subversive initiatives have emerged to create alternative public spaces within the private realm—the Salons of the Romantic period stand as the most notorious example. Creative women like Rahel Varnhagen and Fanny Arnstein developed platforms for discussion, exchange, and presentation in their living rooms, thereby subverting the established hierarchy between the domestic and the more formal public sphere. What began as simple private gatherings among friends grew quite powerful and may have sparked the developments toward the "death of the author" that Roland Barthes declared 150 years later.
Citron notes—via Nancy Miller—that "perhaps the timing is no coincidence; perhaps it is motivated at least partly by the fear of female encroachment when a real threat is sensed. This would make it both a preemptive and a reactive move." This is just one example showing that this dichotomy is not as clear-cut as we might imagine, or is at least a dichotomy in fluctuation. Citron proposes regarding it as a continuum: "Another way of dealing with public and private is to alter the implied relationality of the pair, so that private means something different from merely a poorer relation to public. In this line of argument, private stands for a rich realm of activities that yield insight into much previously untapped socio-historic activity. […] A possible model could feature a continuum between the two concepts, with a smooth and imperceptible transition from one to the other."
In the fifty years since "The Death of the Author" was published, the clear distinction between private and public has continued to break down, and alongside it other dichotomies are shifting similarly. It appears that we have entered an era of gradients—gender is now widely acknowledged as a continuum, most people on the planet navigate in several languages, identities mix, voices adapt according to context. And naturally, artworks are incorporating all of these possibilities.
For language and in relation to identity, the Martinique poet and theorist Edouard Glissant offers a comparable alternative to the "either-or," noting that "one can imagine language diasporas that would change so rapidly within themselves and with such feedback, so many turnarounds of norms (deviations and back and forth) that their fixity would lie in that change. Their ability to endure would not be accessible through deepening but through the shimmer of variety. It would be a fluid equilibrium. This linguistic sparkle, so far removed from the mechanics of sabirs and codes, is still inconceivable for us, but only because we are paralysed to this day by monolingual prejudice ('my language is my root')."
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Shared territory and the notion of quality
When separations between opposites are no longer clear-cut but dissolve into continuums, territory must be negotiated and shared. Although embracing diversity might theoretically benefit the sounding arts field as a whole, for many musicians quotas feel like a straightforward threat to their spots in the line-up. Feelings of competition and empathy within the field shift when different voices, identities, genders, and languages arrive in the spotlight. As Martha Nussbaum has suggested, solidarity and inclusion toward the common good applies to the same, not to the Other. So the question becomes: at what point does the establishment detect Others as "different"? Or: how much can we be together while staying different?
Here, the argument of quality is often brought forth to justify resistance to diversity in the field regarding line-ups, festival programs, teaching staff, and much more. What quality might actually mean usually remains unclear. There are many diffuse and contrasting ideas about virtuosity, intellectuality, innovation, and public relevance, but these notions are difficult to pin down since they relate in complex ways to access, education, and the fulfillment or subversion of social norms. There is the idea of "meaningfulness," but for whom? To what is our music related? To or with whom do we want to speak? Who is listening and who can understand?
In my own experience over many years as a performer and as curator of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, I have found that it is possible to shift my own paradigms of quality through conscious decision and effort, by avoiding immediate judgment and by acknowledging the person behind—or rather "in"—the music. It was important for me to realize that notions of quality are idiosyncratic and can never be general or universal. In The Second Sound, one participant noted that "I am sure that improvised, electronic and experimental music are all defined by masculinity in some ways. And I feel that, as a woman, I have perspectives and aesthetic tendencies that are valuable, that are still being ignored and left out, that need to be explored," as a tentative direction toward an idea of communication and connectedness as a touchstone of quality and importance of music.
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Listening and contextuality
The notion of listening was not planned in the initial thematic setup, yet it appears at some point in almost every contribution to this book. Listening as art form or starting point, as determining, as tool for creation and general change. Listening as learning and understanding, as responsibility. There is listening to words, sounds, tone, and beyond text; listening in context, listening as a political act, listening to what is hidden, to inner and outer noise, and to din.
Listening has a close yet flexible connection to all four notions of gender, voice, language, and identity. It is the foundation of creative processes, as it is the first step toward learning and understanding, creating permeability in both a bodily and intellectual sense. Carol Gilligan expresses the inseparability of voice and listening: "Voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds. Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing. This ongoing relational exchange among people is mediated through language and culture, diversity and plurality."
But it is important to be aware that listening is strongly influenced by context, expectations, and ideologies. We are more ready to listen to something that is known or at least recognizable to us in some way. Therefore, a musical or sound art language from other cultural realms—including the female—often needs contextualization to gain access to it, to meet and listen to it in an unpreconditioned way. On the other hand, we adapt our voice, language, and sounding art to the conditions of listening we meet. To speak up and create, a significant risk must be taken: how authentic can, may, dare we be? Meeting an open ear goes a long way toward taking this risk with clarity.
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End and on
The question of this publication is how identity, creativity, and artwork are connected, or where they might possibly disconnect. Ultimately the question of male, female, or other-gendered art might fall away and become irrelevant. However, for the moment, the notions of gender, voice, identity, language, and their intersections provide an important set of lenses through which to assess the field. Division can be a means to see clearer and to take informed decisions on how to continue—dividing to get together, to shake the whole field, its notions of quality, its institutions, its canon, and its dynamic. It is about power, subversion, and empowerment.
I would not, of course, have undertaken this project with the same enthusiasm if these were not questions that concern me personally. During my life I have experienced the reception and impact of feminism change several times, shaking society regularly and being meaningful for several generations and for all genders. Although the professional field of music continues to hold itself tangential, the response of a 40-year-old male composer to a question in our survey about how starting a family influenced his career—saying that "having children made me want to make music that was more fun and approachable"—is a small but meaningful example of the impact feminism has had on musical creation itself.
Alongside my personal interest in these reflections, this project is dedicated to my mother. After her death, I saw her with more distance, less directly connected to myself. As a woman in the historical situation of the second feminist wave, I could see how she had struggled—with herself, with her husband, and with society. She was an excellent listener and found a place for herself in this way, but would also have liked to be acknowledged as the competent artist she was. She stretched the boundaries as much as she could without blowing up her personal ties. Now I see that she did that partly for me, as I do it for my daughter in turn—but just as much for my son.