Gender Relations in New Music

Gender Relations in New Music (GRINM) is an activist and research group committed to challenging and redressing the inequalities of opportunity and representation along lines of gender and sexuality, as well as race and class, that afflict new music institutions and scenes worldwide. GRINM was initiated during the 2016 Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music. In this three-day workshop, hosted by Georgina Born, Arnbjorg Danielsen and Ashley Fure, the group will engage in collective deliberation about GRINM’s principles and goals, how to organise GRINM going forward, and its political strategies. The stress will be on practice and theory and their interrelations: if GRINM cannot be useful to musicians, composers and sound artists, curators and critics, then it has little purpose. At the same time, GRINM offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the nature of a de-centred but coherent political movement, engaging with the work of such theorists as Chantal Mouffe, Marilyn Strathern, Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd and Amy Allen. GRINM aspires to be a movement adequate to our times: if “decolonizing time” registers the limits of Eurocentric modernist assumptions of artistic, cultural and social progress, then, paradoxically, music and the arts nonetheless offer an experimental stage on which to realise and develop, enact and perform, on many levels, what must be considered a progressive politics without guarantees.

Core questions include: how can music become the site for such realisation and enactment? From materialist and aesthetic standpoints, do different genres – music theatre, sound art, improvised music, electronic music, opera, the string quartet – offer distinctive potentials for actively reshaping inequalities, and if so, how?

How, in new music and sound art, can we take steps to boost diversity and equality among those commissioned and performed, published and taught while retaining commitments to high musical and artistic ambition? And how can new music institutions, in their variety, be encouraged radically to reform themselves?

Mit Georgina Born, Arnbjörg María Danielsen, Ashley Fure