Gender, voice, language, and identity in musical composition and experimental sound practices.
How do we get to imagine the music we make? Where and how is it grounded? What is the relationship between the art and its maker, and what and who does music represent?
Gender, voice, language, and identity are four important notions for musical creation, for the shaping of a canon, and for the interactions in the field. All four notions are strongly contextual and carry an inherent sense of paradigm and otherness. Other and self are defined via orientation and history, expressed via voice, and confirmed in language.
In this publication, these four core notions serve as a set of lenses permitting different perspectives on one another. However much the field of the sounding arts might pretend to be tangential to such affections, they provide important grounds for musical creation.
Some twenty artists have created a variety of outputs—as different in form, strategies, approach, and language, as they are rooted in a variety of sub-fields within the sounding arts.
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sounding arts. She is founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels. As a viola player, she has been involved in various collaborations with composers and improvisers, such as Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Stevie Wishart, Jennifer Walshe, Wandelweiser-composers, Christian Wolff, Antony Coleman and many of the young generation. She has taught and lectured at art institutes in Leuven and Brussels. Eckhardt is co-author of The Second Sound – Conversations on Gender and Music, together with Leen De Graeve.