Supervisor: Professor Cathy Lane
Taking my cue from composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep
listening, a revolutionary practice of acute attention to sound and its
environs, my research looked at ways that a select group of six women composers
(Ellen Fullman, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Joan La
Barbara) have responded to the challenges of working within the field of
experimental music.
From
the invented musical instruments of Fullman to Oliveros’ feminist musical
economy and Lockwood’s radical sound gestures, experimental music created by
mid to late 20th-century women composers is startlingly innovative and its
range is immense. Moreover, these artists’ works are truly collaborative,
encompassing fine art, technology and new methods of performance. And yet their
contributions have not been recognised in mainstream canonical surveys: their
work has been marginalised within an already marginalised music. What responding
strategies have these composers created in order to make music? This question
is foremost in a practice-based project that will create for the first time a
history that examines the routes artists were forced to develop in order to –
literally and metaphorically – make a noise. This question is integral to an
investigation that looks at compositional process with a view on how these
methods manifest in 21st-century composition. Conducting semi-structured
interviews with these composers and developing a methodology built up from
psychoanalytic, oral historical and feminist theories, I also focussed on the
sonic knowledge that these interviews yielded, developing a theory of the sonic
artefact as a space of communication.
Under
the name of Louise Gray, I continue to write about experimental music and
performance (for The Wire and other publications) and I have become
increasingly interested in the wider context in which music is produced and
performed. Much existing criticism has done little to consider work within such
expanded contexts – political, artistic, sexual. My chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge
Companion to Women Composers (CUP, 2021) continues to address this lapse.
