Background: |
The annual International Women in New Music festival
at Cal State Fullerton, now in it’s fourth year,
has grown to become a significant meeting place for
the music community. The main goal of the festival is
to bring an up-to-date and detailed presentation of
new artistic trends and research issues encountered
when composing works as a woman. This spring’s
festival entitled, Merging Voices: Women in New Music,
is a celebration of women within the world of new music
and features a two-hour electro-acoustic listening room.
Speaking during the event is legendary composer Pauline
Oliveros along with works by an acclaimed group of international
female composers.
The Listening Room focuses on electronic or electro-acoustic
music—works that are sculptured in sound for loudspeakers,
not for live performances. The electronic domain gives
the composer the ability to directly communicate and
share intimate worlds without having to negotiate the
often difficult and political world of new music performance.
“This direct communication,” says artistic
director Pamela Madsen “offers a malleable and
expanding medium that produces music that is exceedingly
new yet, directly communicative.”
Each year the outreach of the listening room widens
to include new diverse voices of women throughout the
world. It has spread through the International Alliance
for Women in Music to American Music Center, Society
for Electro-acoustic Music, Electronic Arts and the
American Composers Forum. It now reaches to the female
d.j. scene, electronica scene and the free-improvisation
jazz/electronic music scene. “The festival,”
says Madsen, “offers an annual theme each year
which focuses on an aspect of “voice,” from
hysteria embodied, to transforming voices, to hearing
voices: enlistening the future to this year’s
theme of merging voices.”
She continues, “this year’s works are elaborate
soundscapes, painting surreal pictures of imaginary
worlds or depicting layered interior worlds of the mind.
Some are fun, experimental, some are serious, political,
and some are meditative, some intense and edgy.”
In response to the 2003 Electro-acoustic Listening
Room, Jennifer Logan, editor of Spectrum Press and Festival
of New Music wrote, in the IAWM (International Alliance
for Women Music) Journal:
“These events brought a greater
awareness of the magnitude of success women are having
with musical professions. To be present and to meet
some of these women—who welcomed each other with
such a degree of enthusiasm and grace, without pretension
or competition—I had the sense that we are all
links in an all-important global community of women
in the arts.”
“I feel that it’s important to give these
amazingly creative women composers and performers from
around the world an opportunity to join in a special
event such as this. Meanwhile, it provides our students,
campus community and all of Orange County a place to
speak about women in new music and electro-acoustic
music with others.” —Pamela Madsen, festival
artistic director
|