About

Taking my cue from composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep listening, a revolutionary practice of acute attention to sound and its environs, my research looked at ways that a select group of six women composers (Ellen Fullman, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Joan La Barbara) have responded to the challenges of working within the field of experimental music.

From the invented musical instruments of Fullman to Oliveros’ feminist musical economy and Lockwood’s radical sound gestures, experimental music created by mid to late 20th-century women composers is startlingly innovative and its range is immense. Moreover, these artists’ works are truly collaborative, encompassing fine art, technology and new methods of performance. And yet their contributions have not been recognised in mainstream canonical surveys: their work has been marginalised within an already marginalised music. What responding strategies have these composers created in order to make music? This question is foremost in a practice-based project that will create for the first time a history that examines the routes artists were forced to develop in order to – literally and metaphorically – make a noise. This question is integral to an investigation that looks at compositional process with a view on how these methods manifest in 21st-century composition. Conducting semi-structured interviews with these composers and developing a methodology built up from psychoanalytic, oral historical and feminist theories, I also focussed on the sonic knowledge that these interviews yielded, developing a theory of the sonic artefact as a space of communication.

Under the name of Louise Gray, I continue to write about experimental music and performance (for The Wire and other publications) and I have become increasingly interested in the wider context in which music is produced and performed. Much existing criticism has done little to consider work within such expanded contexts – political, artistic, sexual. My chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (CUP, 2021) continues to address this lapse.