Else Marie Pade

“In Denmark, I often felt a bit ridiculed as a female composer. Even my own husband was bothered by my creating music. One might say that I was doubly isolated in Danish composer circles, partly as a composer of electronic music, partly as a woman.” – Else Marie Pade

Else Marie Pade was born in Denmark in 1924. During the early 50s she became the first Danish composer of electronic music and Musique concrète.

While Denmark was not interested by Else’s work, Stockhausen and Boulez required her tapes to use during lessons and seminars held throughout Europe. These included “Syv Circler” (Seven Circles) 1958  ↓

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De-gendering the Electronic Soundscape

An inspiring theses by Jennifer M. Brown of Southern Cross University

De-gendering the Electronic Soundscape: Women, Power and Technology in Contemporary Music.

Graphic Scores by Women Composers – Heresies 1980

Graphic scores by women composers.
From Heresies magzine #10, “Women and Music”, New York, 1980.

• Kathleen St. John, Centipede
• La Donna Smith, PARTBE
• Kay Gardner, Atlantis Rising
• Daria Semegen, Jeux des Quatres
• Heidi Von Gunden, Whistle Music: A Sonic Exorcism
• Beth Anderson, The People Rumble Louder

Download full PDF of magazine here

Heresies, a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.

Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic-music compositions and her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse…

Ivana Stefanović – The Epistle of Birds 1976

Ivana Stefanović is a Serbian composer born 1948 in Belgrade. She trained as a violinist, and since the late 1960s, worked as music editor at Belgrade’s national radio and television. Her compositions include orchestral and vocal music, as well as radio art and stage music.

Ivana Stefanović – ‘The Epistle of Birds’ – a tape collage of bird songs published on 7″ in 1976 by Russian state label Melodyia

Geneviève Calame – Labyrinthes Fluides

“During the 1970s, classically trained Swiss composer Geneviève Calame (1946-1993) worked at Geneva’s Studio de Musique Contemporaine, where she composed various electronic music compositions likeL’Oiseau Du Matin (1972) or Geometry I, II, III (1975-1976). She was the co-founder of the Artistic Research Team, or A.R.T., in 1971, working on intermedia projects including video and new technologies. Created in the A.R.T. studio in 1976, Labyrinthes Fluides, is based on the EMS Spectron video sythesizer. allowing sound waves to generate pictures and movement.” Continuo

Maryanne Amacher – Music for Sound Joined Rooms 1980

Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009): Living sound, for “Sound-joined Rooms” series (1980).

“…meanwhile, the entire house was full of sound, circulating throughout the rooms, out the doors and windows, down the hill, past sedate Victorian mansions…cont“

Pozzi Escot – The Poetics of Simple Mathematics in Music

In 1999, American music composer and researcher Pozzi Escot published The Poetics of Simple Mathematics in Music, a study of the geometrical grounding and mathematical structure of various music traditions from the Middle Ages, Romantic era, Native American Indians or contemporary European avantgarde. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1933, Pozzi Escot teaches music theory and composition at New England Conservatory. She is the editor of Sonus – Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities. In 1976, she wrote Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music.

Hildegard Westerkamp

Hildegard Westerkamp is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. She presents soundscape workshops, lectures internationally, performs and writes… She is a founding member of the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and a co-founder of Vancouver Co-op Radio…

Listen via her website HERE

Maryanne! Maryanne!

a note from John Cage to Maryanne Amacher …

Suzanne Ciani, Trailblazing Synth Musician

Radio piece with Suzanne Ciani on NPR, including clips of her music. She talks about gender politics in the history of music composition, the joy of composing and more… LISTEN HERE

Daphne Oram Documentary – Wee Have Also Sound-Houses

A Portrait of Eliane Radigue

Pauline Oliveros – Valentine

Pauline Oliveros’s Valentine in performance 1968

Meredith Monk – Songs of Ascension 2008

Selected Discography of Women’s Electro-acoustic Music

Selected Discography of Women’s Electro-acoustic Music compiled by Elizabeth Hinkle Turner. Click on image below to view –

Ruth White – Evening Harmony 1969

“Ruth White (born 1925) is an American composer known for her electronic music compositions. While most of her career was dedicated to educational recordings, she is perhaps most famous for being an electronic music pioneer, most notably for her early explorations of sound using the moog synthesizer…”

Elizabeth Keathley

“…a defining moment of my high school education happened in this wise: in mychemistry classroom, before the beginning of class, a small group of boysgathered around the teacher and laughingly tried to persuade him to sign a petitionrequesting that Walter Carlos come to our school to play all of the Well TemperedClavier on the Moog synthesizer. Thinking that that sounded pretty neat, I offeredto sign the petition. “You don’t know anything about Moog synthesizers,” thealpha boy sneered. “Yes, I do.” “Then you don’t know anything about Bach.”Thus dismissed on both technical and musical grounds—surely because of mygender—I was unimaginably delighted in the late 1970’s when Walter became Wendy.” – Elizabeth Keathley 2001

Suzanne Ciani demonstrating Sound Synthesis

Charlotte Moorman performs with Paik’s TV cello

Nam June Paik collaborated extensively with cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991), including in their 1976 Kaldor Public Art Project, in which they presented an exhibition of Paik’s objects and more than 40 performances in Sydney and Adelaide. In one of these performances at the Art Gallery of NSW, pictured here, Moorman plays Paik’s ‘TV cello’

Making Spaces: Feminist Contexts in Sonic Arts

A superb paper by Holly Ingleton, click H E R E to view PDF

Katharine Norman

“Katharine Norman is a composer, sound artist and writer, currently an independent scholar and research fellow at De Montfort University’s centre for Music, Technology and Innovation. She has an especial interest in listening, sound and place, and her creative work traverses several disciplines with an emphasis on music and sound art, often involving text…”

Visit her website here : www.novamara.com

Katharine Norman – Soundscapes

Presentation by Katharine Norman on soundscape music analysis for the AHRC funded project ‘New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis.

Ellen Fullmann on the Long Stringed Instrument