To study gender issues in electronic avant-garde music, meant for me in the first place asking: how? Research into gender issues in electronic music is sparse; only the last few years it is beginning to develop. Moreover, the existing studies of electronic music in general are predominantly technical or formalistic. It is difficult to see how such an approach can be related to gender issues - except by pointing out that it is remarkable that gender is not discussed in this predominantly male world of electronic music.
As a musicologist, I wanted to focus on the music itself, and not so much on social practices in institutions like music studio's or on musicotechnological artifacts like synthesizers, tape recorders or software. By focusing on electro-vocal music, it is more easy to link with gender issues, since voices mostly are, or seem to be, gendered.
The electronic voice seems to me a good point of entrance to break up the "neutral", formal, masculine discourse around electronic music: voices mostly have, or seem to have, a sex. And where most composers are male, most singing voices in electronic music are female. Moreover, the voice can be a link to gender issues of other disciplines like opera, film, literature and psychoanalysis.
In my doctoral research I compare the ways male and female voices are used in electronic avantgarde music, and relate this to other vocal practices, in opera, film and popmusic. Some compositions in which gender issues are prominent, I analyse more closely. I pay also attention to the discourse around the compositions, by paying attention to program notes, articles and criticism. One part is devoted to works by female composers and the question whether there is a specific feminine style, an écriture féminine. Another important part of my research is the issue of authorship.
Since research into gender issues in electronic music is sparse, I looked around into feminist musicology and gender and technology studies to find a background that I could use. I found an important similarity between these two disciplines: some feminist musicologists criticise the predominant focus on mostly male composers and instead they pay attention to feminist listening strategies. This can be compared with the shift in gender and technology studies from the mostly male inventor to the often female users. By way of an actor-network, more women can be brought into view than was traditionally the case. Although a composition normally is considered to have one author, of course an actor network can also be made of a composition. When we also consider the performers, listeners, critics, publishers, etc., more women come into the picture than by focusing on composers alone.
A very common gender pattern in electronic music is the combination of a male composer with a female singer. In some cases, the female singer is a live-performer accompanied by a tape - this is a rather traditional situation, in which the composition is one level, and the performance is another level of the musical work. It is amazing that there are many composition for female (virtuosic) singer and tape, and almost none for male singer and tape.
With pure tape-music, however, vocalists contribute to the composition in the production process - there is no live performance, the composition only exists on tape. In fact, composer, vocalists, instrumentalists, technicians, all contribute to the composition more or less at the same level. I argue that in this case author politics need to be rethought: I would like to consider the composition as a co-production by co-authors. However, in practice we still often find in the presentation of the compositions the pattern male composer/author and female vocalist, while sometimes the female vocalist is not even mentioned. Althought her vocal creation is essential for the composition itself, the female vocalist is mostly not considered as a co-composer, co-creator or co-producer.
It is interesting that in popmusic (which is also electronic music), female singers more and more gained power and status and became co-composers and co-producers (for example Madonna, Björk, Alanis Morissette, and many others). This is also the case in performance art, with singer-composers like Meredith Monk and Diamanda Galas. In academic modernist avantgarde music however often the female singer stayed in a more traditional role or even became invisible, while the male composer became a seemingly solitary creator.
For a more detailed discussion see the papers on my website.