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