Gendered Spaces in the History of Music Technology

Abstract

The historiography of electroacoustic music in the newly established studios for electronic music of the 1950s is marked by its recurring perspective on male composers and their compositional achievements. The early studios for electronic music in Europe such as the French Studio d’Essai in Paris, in which Pierre Schaeffer and colleagues developed the first revolutionary approaches to musique concrète were located at radio stations and served as a place for experimentations and development of new electronic instruments, new sonic endeavors and new forms of music production. 

An increasing number of recent feministic writings in musicology and other disciplines (such as Cathy Lane, Louise Marshall, Joanna Mary Langton, Tara Rodgers etc.) has been shifting their interest towards a feministic reading of the impact of women in music. In line with this way of thinking, my dissertation project investigates the studio for electronic music as space – referring to Doreen Masseys notion of space as the product of intersecting social relations. This interpretation of space will serve as a base for a feministic approach to provide a socio-historical overview of the compositional achievements of Danish composer Else-Marie Pade (1924-2016) and the French composer Éliane Radigue (*1932), who both developed in the course of their careers particular compositional styles, while challenging existing listening habits and uses of newly developed electronic instruments. 

My paper centers on my empirical research in the private archive of Else Marie Pade as well as the archive of the GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris and around Éliane Radigues home studio, offering a feministic perspective on space as a metaphor for the studios that can be interpreted through a socio-economical, intersectional perspective, trying to reveal the female composers’ strategies to enter highly hierarchical and exclusive spaces, that were dominated by patriarchal structures and thus create their own musical approaches, new musical techniques, and instruments.

Biography

Katja Heldt is enrolled as a PhD candidate at Lunds University in Sweden researching women in studios for electronic music in the early beginnings of Electronic Music. She studied musicology at the University of Cologne, Université de Montréal and Humboldt University Berlin with focus on electronic music, transculturality and decolonization in new music. As an author, she writes for music magazines such as Positionen, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Circuit – Musiques Contemporaines, Glissando and VAN. She works for the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music and was responsible as project manager for the research projects “DEFRAGMENTATION – Curating Contemporary Music” on gender equality and diversity in contemporary music festivals and “Donaueschingen Global” on diversity in new music as part of the 100th anniversary of the German festival Donaueschinger Musiktage. 

Abstract

Hi-fi home audio systems are modular—that is, they are made of a collection of interchangeable components such as turntables, receivers, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. At the advent of hi-fi culture in the 1950s, modular audio systems were marketed primarily to white, middle-class men while all-in-one console systems were advertised in women’s and home magazines. As early as 1952, well-known audio critic Edward Tatnall Canby reinforced this gendered technological divide when he wrote, “Aunt Minnie can run a [console system] and so can three-year-old-sister Jane…Me I’m a hi-fi man of sorts and I want my stuff really separate…The separate-unit system is the thing for me.”  

In this presentation, I introduce my concept of modular masculinity, a framework that reveals how post-war technological discourse reflected and encouraged an understanding of masculinity as flexible, reconfigurable, and dynamic. Drawing on theorizations of modularity by media theorist Tara McPherson and historian of technology Andrew L. Russell, I take seriously the ways in which midcentury hi-fi media connected home audio, modularity, and 1950s American masculinity. I show how the hi-fi system, with its separate, customizable components, facilitated a range of technological possibilities that allowed men to explore a variety of masculine roles: moody musician, loving father, dutiful husband, resourceful carpenter, exacting engineer, and so on. My case studies center on material from midcentury magazines such as High Fidelity, Audio, and Popular Electronics; as well as corporate records from the Ernest Dichter Papers and David Sarnoff Library.   

Modular masculinity is a flexible framework for analyzing the social, political, and economic forces that shaped understandings of the ways men engaged with home audio technologies. I use modular masculinity to move beyond rhetoric that defines masculinity as the opposite of femininity and instead reveal it as a multivalent formation that develops both in dialogue with and independent from femininity. Gender has never been a simple male-female binary and this deep dive into the discourse surrounding midcentury hi-fi equipment illuminates complex constructions of music technology and masculinity that continue to influence marketing and consumer behavior today. 

Biography

Kelli Smith-Biwer recently graduated from the Ph.D. program in musicology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Leveraging her past work experience in IT and network engineering, she seeks to broaden the conversation around gender, equity, and audio technologies. Her dissertation centers on the gendered buying and listening practices in high fidelity audio culture in the United States. Kelli has published in the Journal for the Society of American Music, won the 2018 Somers Award for Excellence in Teaching, received the 2019 James W. Pruett Research Fellowship, and was the inaugural UNC Arts Everywhere Music Technology Fellow. 

A vital aspect of Kelli’s work hinges on community engagement and advocacy. She has arranged workshops taught by Black, queer, and femme-identifying producers; facilitated hands-on music technology demonstrations in local venues; and founded gender inclusive electronic music ensembles at Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina.

Abstract

Guitars and amplifiers made at Fender between 1948 and 1960 are among the most valuable and collectible instruments in popular music. Fender’s instruments from this era are exceptional in that they bear the handwritten signatures of the Mexican women by whom they were assembled—a transitional bit of ephemera from before the company switched to rubber stamped serial numbers in 1960. Today these extant builder signatures have become highly valuable features for vintage instrument collectors, and the women behind the signatures have become heavily mythologized for their proximity to the company’s golden age. Because collectors know so little about these women as people, discourses about them often inadvertently reinforce spurious stereotypes that cast Mexican women as ideal laborers due to their supposedly nimble hands and fingers.

Following Fender’s builder-signed Tweed era instruments, this paper asks after the relationship between the infrastructure behind electric guitar gear and guitarists’ ideologies of “tone.” Via extensive ethnography on social media sites with vintage instrument collectors, I show how collectors have hailed Fender’s earliest employees for the superior tone of the instruments they built—often attributed to their supposedly “nimble fingers.” Much in the same way that guitarists mythologize virtuosic guitar gods by stressing that their tone is produced “in their fingers,” I suggest that an analogous discourse has developed tracing the tone of vintage Fender instruments to the hands and fingers of the women by whom they were assembled. Employing oral history and archival research, this paper also aims to counter these essentializing narratives by way of an employee-centered history of Fender’s mid-century factory system. 

Biography

Erik Broess is a guitarist and musicologist who is finishing his Ph.D. in Music History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, “Unobtainable: Electric Guitar Gear Culture & The Mythology of Tone,” explores guitarists’ epistemologies of sound by following the various materials which they understand to be sources of “good tone.” These sources include electronic components, building materials, global infrastructures, and scenes of making that underlie the contemporary guitar industry. His history of Fender’s mid-century employees is forthcoming in the Journal of the Society for American Music and was recently awarded the Lise Waxer Student Paper Prize from the Society For Ethnomusicology’s Popular Music Section in addition to being named runner-up for the Wong Tolbert prize by the Society’s Section on the Status of Women.