The Role of Women in Music Production in Spain During the 1960s: Maryní Callejo and the “Brincos Sound” (original) (raw)

Gender in Music Production

The field of music production has for many years been regarded as maledominated. Despite growing acknowledgment of this fact, and some evidence of diversification, it is clear that gender representation on the whole remains quite unbalanced. Gender in Music Production brings together industry leaders, practitioners, and academics to present and analyze the situation of gender within the wider context of music production as well as to propose potential directions for the future of the field. This much-anticipated volume explores a wide range of topics, covering historical and contextual perspectives on women in the industry, interviews, case studies, individual position pieces, as well as informed analysis of current challenges and opportunities for change.

Ground-breaking in its synthesis of perspectives, Gender in Music Production offers a broadly considered and thought-provoking resource for professionals, students, and researchers working in the field of music production today.

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer is a sound engineer and producer with over two decades’ experience of all things audio and is a member of the Association of Professional Recording Services and a former board member and continuing member of the Music Producers Guild, where he helped form their Mastering Group.

Jay Hodgson is an associate professor of popular music studies at Western University, where he mostly teaches songwriting and the project paradigm of record production.

Dr Liesl King is Associate Head of School: Creative Writing, Media and Film Studies at York St John University in York, England.

Mark Marrington trained in composition and musicology at the University of Leeds (M.Mus., Ph.D.) and is currently Senior Lecturer in Music Production at York St John University.

Perspectives on Music Production

This series collects detailed and experientially informed considerations of record production from a multitude of perspectives, by authors working in a wide array of academic, creative and professional contexts. We solicit the perspectives of scholars of every disciplinary stripe, alongside recordists and recording musicians themselves, to provide a fully comprehensive analytic point-of-view on each component stage of music production. Each volume in the series thus focuses directly on a distinct stage of music production, from pre-production through recording (audio engineering), mixing, mastering, to marketing and promotions.

Series Editors

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, York St John University, UK
Jay Hodgson, Western University, Ontario, Canada
Mark Marrington, York St John University, UK

Titles in the Series

Producing Music

Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, and Mark Marrington

Innovation in Music

Performance, Production, Technology, and Business
Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Justin Paterson, and Rob Toulson

Pop Music Production

Manufactured Pop and BoyBands of the 1990s
Phil Harding
Edited by Mike Collins

Cloud-Based Music Production

Sampling, Synthesis, and Hip-Hop
Matthew T. Shelvock

Gender in Music Production

Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King, and Mark Marrington

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Perspectives-on-Music-Production/book-series/POMP

Gender in Music Production

Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King, and Mark Marrington

First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King, and Mark Marrington; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King, and Mark Marrington to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-61337-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-61336-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46451-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Contributors … vii
1 Gender in Music Production - An Introduction … 1
RUSS HEPWORTH-SAWYER, LIESL KING, AND MARK MARRINGTON
PART ONE HISTORY AND CONTEXT
2 Women in Music Production: A Contextualized History From the 1890s to the 1980s … 11
MARK MARRINGTON
3 The Role of Women in Music Production in Spain During the 1960s: Maryní Callejo and the “Brincos Sound” … 35
MARCO ANTONIO JUAN DE DIOS CUARTAS
4 The Representation of Women in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Trikitixa … 51
GURUTZE LASA ZUZUARREGUI
5 “Hey boy, hey girl, superstar DJ, here we go …”: Exploring the Experience of Female and Non-Binary DJs in the UK Music Scene … 82
REBEKKA KILL
6 She Plays the Pipe: Galician Female Bagpipers in the Production of Local Tradition and Gender Identity … 97
JAVIER CAMPOS CALVO-SOTELO
7 Rare Bird: Prince, Gender, and Music Production … 120
KIRSTY FAIRCLOUGH

PART TWO WOMEN IN THE STUDIO
8 Slamming the Door to the Recording Studio - Or
Leaving It Ajar?
HENRIK MARSTAL
9 Interview With Betty Cantor-Jackson … 145
SERGIO PISFIL
10 Twists in the Tracks: An Interview With Singer,
Composer, and Sound Producer Aynee Osborn
Joujon-Roche … 156
LIESL KING
PART THREE PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES
11 Women in Audio: Trends in New York Through the
Perspective of a Civil War Survivor … 175
SVJETLANA BUKVICH
12 Three-Pronged Attack: The Pincer Movement of
Gender Allies, Tempered Radicals, and Pioneers … 187
JULIANNE REGAN
13 Gender in Music Production: Perspective Through a
Female and Feminine Lens … 199
LOUISE M. THOMPSON
PART FOUR INDUSTRIALEVOLUTION
14 Addressing Gender Equality in Music Production:
Current Challenges, Opportunities for Change, and
Recommendations … 219
JUDE BRERETON, HELENA DAFFERN, KAT YOUNG, AND MICHAEL
LOVEDEE-TURNER
15 The Female Music Producer and the Leveraging of
Difference … 251
SHARON JAGGER AND HELEN TURNER
16 Conversations in Berlin: Discourse on Gender,
Equilibrium, and Empowerment in Audio Production … 268
LIZ DOBSON
Index … 285

Contributors

Jude Brereton is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Audio and Music Technology, in the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, UK. She teaches postgraduate and undergraduate students in the areas of virtual acoustics and auralization, music performance analysis, and voice analysis/synthesis. Her research centers on the use of virtual reality technology to provide interactive acoustic environments for music performance and analysis. Until recently, she was Chair of the Departmental Equality and Diversity Committee and was instrumental in achieving the Equality Challenge Unity (ECU) Athena SWAN Bronze Award, which recognizes the department’s commitment to gender equality. She is dedicated to progressing gender equality in audio engineering through innovative, creative approaches to teaching grounded in interdisciplinary research. Before beginning her academic career, she worked in arts and music administration, and is still active in promoting research-inspired music and theatre performance events combining art and science for public engagement and outreach.

Svjetlana Bukvich is a Sarajevo-born and NYC-based awardwinning composer, producer, and media artist. Her works have been presented widely in the US, including at The Kennedy Center, Tribeca Film Festival, Cal State Fullerton, Ailey City Theater, Lincoln Center, and Berklee Performance Center, among others, and internationally in Beijing, London, Berlin, Johannesburg, Helsinki, Odessa, and Copenhagen. Ms. Bukvich is the recipient of numerous sponsorships and commissions, most notably from the New York Foundation for the Arts (Fellowship in Music/Sound), New Music USA, USArtists International, and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. She is featured in the Jennifer Kelly book In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, where she is identified as one of the 25 outstanding women composers in America. Her only solo release to date, the genre-busting album EVOLUTION (PARMA Recordings), was hailed as “nothing short of spectacular” (Equal Ground). EXTENSION, her second collection of works, will come out on PARMA in spring 2020. The Sarajevo Philharmonic recently played a selection from this upcoming release to great acclaim. Ms. Bukvich is currently Assistant Professor at City University of New York, and has previously held positions as Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute and New York University (NYU).

Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo holds a double degree in history (Autónoma University of Madrid) and music (Conservatory of Madrid). He earned his doctorate in Musicology in 2008 (Complutense University of Madrid), and has formed part of several research projects on popular music, Celtology, and revival, specializing also in some areas of systematic musicology. The results of his activity have been exposed in several publications and international conferences. A relevant part of Campos’s academic work is devoted to Galician culture and the bagpipe as a popular instrument with a high symbolic potential that also conveys gender issues.

Helena Daffern is currently Senior Lecturer in Music Technology in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York. She received a BA (Hons.) degree in music, an MA degree in music, and a PhD in music technology, all from the University of York, UK, in 2004, 2005, and 2009, respectively, before completing postgraduate training as a classical singer at Trinity College of Music, London. Her research utilizes interdisciplinary approaches and virtual reality technology to investigate voice science and acoustics, particularly singing performance, vocal pedagogy, choral singing, and singing for health and well-being.

Liz Dobson is National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), director of the Yorkshire Sound Women Network, composer, and Principal Enterprise Fellow in Music Technology at The University of Huddersfield. In 2012 she completed her PhD entitled “An investigation of the processes of interdisciplinary creative collaboration: the case of music technology students working within the performing arts” (with the Open University). Since 2007 she has been working at the University of Huddersfield, where she teaches modules in sonic arts, sound for media, film music composition, and empirical research for musicians. She has been developing extracurricular practices that foster enterprise creativities and build initiatives from her research, including CollabHub and The Yorkshire Sound Women Network C.I.C. Liz has a commitment to supporting girls in music technology, demonstrated through fundraising and delivering workshops and summer schools, partnering with Sound and Music, and employing internationally established sound artists to teach and work with girls across a wide range of science and music activities. Liz has a number of academic and industry conferences that focus on access, collaboration, and knowledge co-development amongst people from diverse communities. For more information, you can see her research profile here: https://pure.hud. ac.uk/en/persons/elizabeth-dobson

Dr Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean: Research and Innovation in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK. Kirsty has published widely on popular culture and is co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (Routledge), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury), Prince and Popular Music (Bloomsbury), and Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media

(Bloomsbury) and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury). Kirsty’s work has been published in Senses of Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, SERIES and Celebrity Studies journals and has been featured on BBC 4, BBC Manchester, and in The Guardian and Creative Review amongst others. She is the co-curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film held recently at HOME, Manchester and has recently organized, I’ll See You Again in 25 Years, Twin Peaks and Generations of Cult Television (University of Salford, May 2015), Mad Men: The Conference (Middle Tennessee State University, May 2016), and the world’s first conference on Prince - Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince. Kirsty has lectured internationally on popular culture, most notably at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, the University of Copenhagen, Second City, Chicago, Columbia College, Chicago, Middle Tennessee State University, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and Unisinos, Brazil.

Dr Sharon Jagger is a specialist in gender theory and completed her PhD at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, a project that focused on the lives of women in the priesthood. Sharon is currently based at York St. John University, researching the university experience of trans and non-binary students and staff. Having also spent more than a decade in the music industry, Sharon combines her passion for supporting women as music makers and her academic research.

Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas is a PhD in musicology and an audio engineer. He graduated in history and music sciences at the University of Oviedo (Principality of Asturias, Spain) and then graduated in recording arts at the Middlesex University of London. He has been responsible for the academic programs of audio production and music industry at the SAE Institute in Madrid (Spain). He is a member of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production (ASARP) and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), associations in which he participates actively. As a member of the SfbEEthnomusicology Society, he coordinates the research group in music production. He is currently an associate professor in the Musicology Department of the Complutense University of Madrid.

Dr Rebekka Kill has worked as an academic for over two decades and has held leadership roles for around ten years. Her research interests are: festival performance, disciplinary pedagogy, practice as research, academic identity construction, and social media. Her outputs include performance art, visual practice, and written published outcomes. Her research addresses complex academic identities that are anchored in the dual contexts of discipline-specific pedagogy and practice as research in higher education. Dr Kill’s career as an artist is equally varied. She originally trained as a painter and still makes visual art. Alongside this she has worked as a nightclub DJ, taught DJ skills, and has worked at venues and at music festivals.

Dr Liesl King is Associate Head of School: Creative Writing, Media and Film Studies at York St John University in York, England. Her PhD in English from the University of London, Queen Mary focuses on representations of gender and progressive spirituality in women’s science fiction and fantasy in the late twentieth century. Through publications, teaching, and public engagement activities, Liesl is particularly interested in exploring the way in which science fiction enables readers to access secular and progressive spiritual perspectives. She is the caretaker of the online magazine Terra Two: An Ark for Off-World Survival (https:// yorkstjohnterratwo.com).

Gurutze Lasa Zuzuarregui finished her degree in history at the University of Deusto in 2001. She has studied the transmission of Basque culture at the University of Mondragon (2008) and cultural management at the Public University of Navarra (2012). She holds an MA in advanced methods and techniques of historical, artistic, and geographic research from the UNED (2014). In the labor market, she has carried out technical work in scientific libraries and has taught in different Secondary Schools. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy of Values and Social Anthropology (UPV/EHU), where she is preparing her thesis on the hybridization processes in the Basque culture. From 2015 to 2019 she has been a scholarship recipient to carry out the doctoral thesis of The Mikel Laboa Chair.

Michael Lovedee-Turner received a BSc (Hons) in audio and recording technology at De Montfort University (2014) and anMSc in audio and music technology at the University of York (2015). Michael is currently a PhD student in the AudioLab based in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York, investigating geometry inference for convex and non-convex-shaped rooms using spherical microphone arrays and machine hearing for room acoustic analysis of binaural room impulse response. Michael has previously co-authored an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) paper investigating gender diversity in authorship at audio engineering conferences, “The Impact of Gender on Conference Authorship in Audio Engineering: Analysis Using a New Data Collection Method”. Michael’s research interests include machine learning, virtual acoustic modeling, acoustic analysis, binaural audio, spatial audio, and room geometry inference.

Mark Marrington trained in composition and musicology at the University of Leeds (MMus, PhD) and is currently Senior Lecturer in Music Production at York St John University. He has previously held teaching positions at Leeds College of Music and the University of Leeds (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering). Mark has published chapters with Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge, and Future Technology Press and has contributed articles to British Music, Soundboard, the Musical Times, and the Journal on the Art of Record Production. Since 2010 his research has been focused on

a range of music production topics with a particular emphasis on the role of digital technologies in music creation and production. Other interests include songwriting, music technology pedagogy, the contemporary classical guitar, and British classical music in the twentieth century. His most recent research has been concerned with the aesthetics of classical music recording and a forthcoming monograph on the role of recordings in shaping the identity of the classical guitar in the twentieth century.

Henrik Marstal is a Danish music scholar, writer, composer, and musician (primarily a bass player). He has obtained a PhD in musicology from the University of Copenhagen and holds a chair as an associate professor at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, i.e. the Danish institute for contemporary popular music. As a musician and producer, Marstal has been involved with several gold-selling rock and pop acts, and he has currently released albums with ambient electronica-project (starchild #2) and dreampop (marstal:lidell). In addition, he is a keen collector of rare effects pedals and has developed a great knowledge about the uses of them for creative purposes. As a scholar, Marstal’s main area of research is Western popular music and, to a lesser extent, avant-garde music since 1945. His work has appeared in numerous national and international music research and media outlets. Moreover, he has written numerous books, among these monographies on Arvo Pärt and the story of electronic music since 1900. In addition, he has co-edited a number of songbooks and has been a member of the Danish Arts Foundation. Last, but not least, he is an outspoken feminist and author of the book Breve fra en konsforreeder [Letter from a Gender Traitor] (2015).

Sergio Pisfil is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Sorbonne Université, France. His PhD, gained at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Simon Frith, focused on the history of live sound and its connection to rock music between 1967 and 1973. His research interests include the history, aesthetics, and social aspects of popular music, and he has been published in various edited collections and specialized journals of popular music. He is currently co-editing, with Chris Anderton, Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals (Routledge, 2021).

Julianne Regan achieved a UK top ten hit as the singer and co-composer of the acoustic ballad, Martha’s Harbour, in addition to eight top 40 hits with her band All About Eve. She co-wrote and performed on four studio albums, two of which reached the UK top ten album chart. Two major recording and publishing contracts later, she gained a distinction in MMus in songwriting from Bath Spa University, where she has been a lecturer in BA commercial music and MA songwriting since 2015. Choosing to maintain a low profile as a recording artist, she enjoys a collective passing on of the torch to her students.

Louise M. Thompson is an academic, blogger, activist, and accomplished music producer, known professionally as Orthentix. She is currently

studying a masters in creative industries at the SAE Institute in Australia. Her practical expertise and scholarship interests include gender and music production, electronic music aesthetics, auto-ethnography, musicology, and DIY modalities of cultural production.

Helen Turner is currently Associate Head (Fine Art) at York St John University. Helen’s research is mostly practice based, exploring discourses from a feminist perspective as well as stimulating experimental pedagogy, including attempting to subvert the researcher (performer)-subject power dynamic through participation. She uses ethnographic elements and is researching the creation of artefacts, songs, and rituals through participatory performance.

Kat Young received an MEng (Hons) in electronic engineering with music technology and a PhD in electronic engineering from the University of York in 2015 and 2020, respectively. Their thesis investigated the feasibility of near-field binaural loudspeaker reproduction using computational simulation. They are passionate about gender representation within STEM, particularly non-binary issues, as well as live music, cricket, and hats. They are a member of the Audio Engineering Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Gender in Music Production - An Introduction

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Liesl King, and Mark Marrington

INTRODUCTION

The Perspectives on Music Production (POMP) series was devised to fill a perceived gap in publishing in the academic field of Music Production Studies. In particular, editors Russ Hepworth-Sawyer and Jay Hodgson felt a need for greater industry and professional representation and sought to create a series that would capture and reflect in equal measure both professional practice and academic discourse. We set out with the initial aim of publishing a collected volume on each section of the music production process as we had viewed it. Hence the first book in the series, Mixing Music, welcomed chapters by both practitioners and academics and set the blueprint for forthcoming edited volumes. Producing Music was released a year or so later, and others in the initially conceived strand, such as Mastering Music, are now in production. In addition, our related monograph series was inaugurated in 2019 with Pop Music Production, an engaging academically couched reflection on BoyBand culture and record production practice by Phil Harding (former Stock Aitken & Waterman engineer and producer for East 17). Harding’s contribution, we feel, successfully epitomizes the connection between industry and academia that the POMP series was created to represent. As the identity of the POMP series has taken shape, however, it has become apparent to us that much of what has been published, or signed for publication, within the series gives little consideration to issues of gender. Only Kallie Marie’s chapter, ‘Conversations with Women in Music Production’, which concluded Producing Music, has addressed such matters explicitly, and in doing so served as a significant call to action both for us as series editors and our editorial colleagues at Routledge. A discussion with our then commissioning editor, Lara Zoble, elicited warm encouragement for us to proceed, and the result is the book you now have before you.

In line with all the POMP collected volumes thus far, we have been at pains not to shape the present book with specially commissioned chapters, nor lead the discussion in any way. Our call for contributions simply suggested potential topic areas and themes - for example, gender in the workplace (including bias and stereotyping); gendered modalities

of production; gender and intersectionality; case studies, interviews, and reflective pieces. However, we wanted to leave the key terms of the title ‘gender’ and ‘music production’ open to interpretation and as far as possible remain flexible regarding the potential scope of the submissions. It has been extremely interesting in these circumstances to have received the breadth of chapters presented herein. Issues concerning specific record production scenarios are here, as one might expect in a book concerning ‘music production’: the book does contain, for example, the expected historical accounts of female recording engineers and producers and interviews with highly successful industry personnel, as well as academically framed accounts and analysis of gender issues within specific music production practice contexts. However, it also includes contributions that foreground gender issues in the wider context of music practice within the industry - in geographically localized musical performance situations, for example, or within particular socio-cultural contexts. Another important element of this collection is the subjective position piece, which has allowed for uniquely individualized responses that are no less rigorous in their analysis than the more academically framed contributions. This has ultimately made for a diverse ‘collection’ of differing perspectives and a wider interpretation of the potential meaning behind the title. The book you’re about to read, we hope, will consequently provide multiple useful access points to the discussion of matters of gender within the wider context of music production practice.

As with our most recent volume, Producing Music, we have organized this book in terms of topic areas within which it was most convenient to group the chapters received: ‘History and Context’; ‘Women in the Studio’; ‘Personal Perspectives’ and ‘Industrial Evolution’. By way of contextual scene setting, Mark Marrington initiates the present collection with a concise historical sketch of the participation of women in the field from the 1890s to the 1980s. His purpose is to situate women relative to changes in production practice, placing them in close relation to the production aesthetics of particular eras (often relative to genre) so that they can be more conveniently correlated with their male counterparts. While not intending to minimize the impact that gender discrimination has historically had upon the potential for women to succeed in the industry, the chapter nonetheless aims to foreground an optimistic, perhaps even celebratory, stance in regard to the very considerable achievements of those women who were able to make careers in the broadly considered field of music production over the course of the twentieth century.

In a similar but more focused contextual vein, Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas’s chapter, ‘The Role of Women in Music Production in Spain During the 1960s,’ discusses the first important female Spanish record producer, Maryni Callejo, and her production approach. He provides fascinating insight into the aesthetic context of record production in Spain during the 1960s, which was essentially to defer to the Anglo-American production styles of groups such as The Beatles. Callejo herself participates in this imitative aesthetic but makes an important contribution through her musical and arranging background, as well as her close involvement in the

recording process itself. To clarify Callejo’s role as a producer, Cuartas also usefully situates Callejo’s contribution in relation to Richard Burgess’s widely cited producer typologies.

Gurutze Lasa Zuzuarregui’s chapter, ‘The Representation of Women in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Trikitixa,’ offers a detailed examination of women’s representation in the Basque country’s historical genre trikitixa, which in the author’s words consists of “instrumental, vocal, and literary elements”. The author introduces the history of the genre, which spans from the nineteenth century to the present day; outlines the chapter’s aims and methodology; and importantly scrutinizes gender in trikitixa in specific musical pieces across a number of topics including romance, sexual expression, motherhood, age, marriage, and in more recent incarnations, non-heteronormative encounters. The study offers a revelatory, in-depth look at the way in which trikitixa serves as a repository for the complex and changing historical attitudes towards women, gender, and sexual identity between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Rebekka Kill’s chapter entitled “‘Hey boy, hey girl, superstar DJ, here we go . . .’: Exploring the Experience of Female and Non-binary DJs in the UK Music Scene” is best explained by Kill herself: “this chapter uses autoethnographic, social history and narrative methodologies to explore the experiences of female and non binary DJs working in nightclubs. . . [A]n important observation is that the male to female ratio in DJing is approximately 50:1”. The chapter begins by describing the author’s historical relationship with music (an obsession) and some of her performance projects, which include a TED presentation entitled ‘Facebook is like disco, and Twitter is like punk’, and ’ 24/724 / 7 ', where she played seven-inch records in “approximate alphabetical order for 24 hours in a public space in Leeds”. Foregrounding her feminist project, she explains that in hindsight she is aware that the latter work was unabashedly about the “size of her collection”, her “knowledge” as a female DJ, and “resilience”. The author discusses the way her interviews with fellow female DJs explore various challenges of being a woman in an arena dominated by men, highlighting difficulties such as negotiating space harmoniously in the ‘tiny’ DJ changeover box. The chapter introduces projects and businesses set up to offer women DJs better access to the field, such as Miss Melodie’s DJ Academy, Equaliser, and the Keychange program. The writer’s key aim is to illustrate the need for more and enhanced spaces for women and nonbinary DJs, so that DJs of every gender/sexual identity might have the opportunity to showcase talents, obsessions, and musical know-how.

Next, Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo’s chapter, ‘She Plays the Pipe,’ provides an engaging historically couched discussion of the evolving situation of female bagpipers who originate from Galicia in the northwest Iberian Peninsula. His chapter begins with an overview of the socially constructed gendered traditions that have surrounded the instrument before proceeding to discuss the considerable transformations that have been brought about within the culture by pioneering female bagpipers since the 1960s. In addition to giving focused coverage to the important contributions made by the various artists profiled to the socio-cultural standing of the female

bagpiper, the author also considers their relationship to the music business, the record industry, and the developing global music marketplace.

Concluding the historical and contextual focus of the first part of the book, Kirsty Fairclough’s chapter, ‘Rare Birds: Prince, Gender, and Music Production,’ beautifully encapsulates the way in which Prince - a paradigmshifting musical icon - not only challenged black and heteronormative concepts of masculinity through his performances, costumes, and artistry, but also created a female-centric vibration in the music production space, one which specifically championed a number of female musicians, singer/ songwriters, and music producers, too. As Fairclough explains in her chapter, “Prince’s fluid performances of gender as a performer seeped into the studio, creating an environment that fostered inclusivity and equality in a traditionally masculine arena”. The first part of the chapter articulates the way in which Prince challenges conventional modes of being and doing (music, performance, gender) in the music business from the 1970s onwards. The second part specifically focuses on Prince’s collaboration with a number of female creatives, including Susan Rogers, who “[became] known in Prince fan and critic circles for her years working as Prince’s staff engineer in Minneapolis from 1983-87”. Finally, Fairclough sums up crucial aspects of the gender-shifting legacy that Prince left to the entire popular music industry, as well as to his fans across the globe, adding important dimensions to our cultural memories of this rare and uniquely dynamic bird.

In the second part of the book, the focus moves to three case studies of individual female practitioners in the studio. Henrik Marstal’s chapter homes in on a specific music production encounter in an auto-ethnographic reflection of his experiences of working with Danish alternative pop artist, Where Did Nora Go (the pen name of Astrid Nora Lössl). In doing so, Marstal interrogates gender relationships within the studio and the issues that can potentially arise in a creative environment. After an initial discussion problematizing the studio as a male-gendered environment, Marstal proceeds to an enlightening discussion of the dynamics of his working relationship with Lössl over the course of a series of EP and album projects. His conclusion highlights the importance of maintaining the balance of equal partnership as well as preparing oneself for the “ontological and epistemological tasks at stake” in studio-based gender collaborations.

Betty Cantor-Jackson’s career as the ‘Betty Tapes’ engineer, tracking the Grateful Dead live shows, is represented through a fantastic interview piece by Sergio Pisfil. Through candid discussion, Pisfil enquires about the gender balance in the engineering teams at the Grateful Dead shows. The interview provides insight into the situation Cantor-Jackson found herself in and her particular approach to overcome being in a “totally male dominated situation”.

Liesl King’s interview with singer-songwriter and audio producer Aynee Joujon-Roche explores a story that takes place between the late 1980s and the present day, across a range of music and audio-production venues in Los Angeles, Denver, and Nashville. During the interview Joujon-Roche describes an early ‘Cinderella’ story in which she auditions for Star Search

and is later telephoned by Glenn Frey’s (The Eagles) assistant and flown over to Aspen, Colorado to perform - the beginning of a musical and professional journey marked by a variety of complex negotiations and transformative collaborations. The interview exposes examples of particularly hierarchical, male-dominated practices in the popular music and film industries across the period. On the other hand, Joujon-Roche describes the many occasions where she has experienced wonderfully collaborative experiences with men in audio, and offers her own understanding of what contributes positively to creatively productive situations. She explains the ideal in the following way: “Maybe you’ve experienced this, where you’re involved in a creative process, and you’re with the opposite sex, where you just become humans, musicians - making music, where I’m not looking at ‘Oh, wow, those are nice breasts’, or ‘Wow, he’s so tall and handsome, look at his jaw line’. No, we’re just humans, in the same tribe, making music, and that’s such a beautiful thing, when those outer things can fall away”. Liesl King frames the interview by drawing on theoretical perspectives advanced by Monique Wittig (1992), Adrienne Rich (2003), and J. Halberstam (1998).

Personal perspectives are the particular focus of the third part of the book, beginning with Svjetlana Bukvich, who gives some considerable context to her international experience as a music producer, from her experiences of the Yugoslavian war and those displaced through it, her childhood in Ethiopia and later Scotland, and her eventual settling in New York. This chapter explores the author’s rich history of engagement with music and music-making across her experienced geographical spaces. She explains that women’s complex, complicated, and difficult histories often enable them to bring resilience to the job of making and producing music in masculine environments. Bukvich’s creative, fictocritical essay draws on detailed memories of musical epiphany in order to reveal episodic insight into sonic revelation, gender relations, genre hybridity, and artistic collaborations. Relaying what happens when musicians from a range of cultural and musical backgrounds unite to create music, she says: “to me, what they are sharing ultimately is an understanding of, and a bending of time”. Bukvich’s narrative makes reference to classical and electronic music, progressive rock, jazz, and a range of other genres, too; yet crucial to the chapter’s creative vision is the writer’s point that ultimately, genre divisions can prove “stultifying”. Through her closing reflections she hopes we can generate a ‘win-win’ situation where “men and women in the music industry will benefit from creating opportunities for working together”.

Next, Julianne Regan provides a revealing and highly personal account of her journey through the music industry since the early 1980s, along the way highlighting some of the key gender-related issues she has encountered when dealing with male colleagues. She then moves to reflect on the current situation, pointing out the important role of what she calls ‘gender allies’ and ‘tempered radicals’ (a number of whom are male) in changing the culture of industry from within. At the same time, Regan reminds the reader of those earlier female pioneers - Delia Derbyshire, Kate Bush, Björk, and others - whose work has been pivotal in changing

the perception of women within the industry, complementing those profiles outlined by Mark Marrington in Chapter 2.

Concluding this section, Louise M. Thompson draws on interviews with “nine female producers from North America, Mexico, Australia, and the Netherlands,” providing a “trans-local perspective on the female producer and an examination of music production through a female lens”. She draws on a range of feminist theorists, including Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz, and Teresa De Lauretis to help underpin her points about feminine, female, and feminist approaches to music production, and to provide a framework for understanding/deconstructing the comments made in reference to women and men by the women who are interviewed. This chapter navigates provocative theoretical terrain, as all the women interviewed here suggest they have a specifically ‘feminine’ approach to electronic music-making and production, citing (in sum) a preference for minor keys, aesthetically pleasant studio environments, and relaxed, supportive, non-hierarchical production styles. The author acknowledges that not all women producers conceive of themselves as feminine, but it is noteworthy that nearly all the women she interviews celebrate what we might call historically feminized approaches to music-making and recording, which the author terms ‘gendered modalities’.

In the final section of the book, the focus turns to gender issues in the wider industry context, opening with a discussion by Jude Brereton and her colleagues, of the reduced uptake of music production as an area of study by females. Anecdotally, here in the UK we cannot fail to observe, each year, the continual weight of male versus female music production students higher education appears to attract. Despite decades of discussion around this disproportion, it sadly never seems to shift, despite concerted efforts by so many of us. Brereton et al. discuss this disproportion and provide us with some insight into reasons why and ways in which our community might redress the balance through a vision for the future in a detailed analysis.

Sharon Jagger and Helen Turner’s chapter, ‘The Female Music Producer and the Leveraging of Difference,’ begins by foregrounding one Londonbased music studio with male toilets, devoid of tampon machines, as a way into considering whether “the physical and social world of the music production space emphasizes and reproduces sex and gender difference”. The writers focus on interviews with two female music producers aged 38 and 22 , respectively, which dovetail in their analysis of the way feminine approaches to music production can be used to leverage economic capital and enhance the studio experience. They explore reasons why men may continue to be the majority in educational arenas, and how autodidactic routes pursued by women producers of music often lead to feelings of insecurity and imposter syndrome. Through a deconstruction of the interviews they carry out, the two writers argue that although emotional labor can be seen as an additional burden for women in audio - used to smooth the way for all concerned - successful production depends on social finesse in addition to technological skill, resulting in high-quality artefacts produced and curated by women; therefore, audial artefacts produced and curated by women.

Finally, Liz Dobson’s ‘Conversations in Berlin: discourse on gender, equilibrium, and empowerment in audio production’ considers qualitative data, personal experiences, and narratives that enable readers to understand some of the issues women face in audio production, and provides a path to understand how “personal and systemic sexism may be contributing to a situation where women leave professions in audio engineering”. Considering interviews with 18 women in audio based in Berlin, Dobson explores the way in which women are often held to higher standards within the industry, as well as the relationship between some men’s stereotyped perceptions of women’s technical prowess and the concomitant result on female practitioners. She foregrounds the integral value of access to social networks in terms of facilitating economic, personal, and symbolic capital. Dobson draws on concepts such as Goh and Thompson’s (2014) “inspired development of sonic cyberfeminism” to consider ways in which the industry might work from the inside out to increase the numbers of confident, empowered, technically agentic women producers of audio.

In conclusion, we would like to offer a few remarks concerning what we, the editors, regard as being the particular value of the collection of writings published here. In recent years, those closely involved in professional music production have witnessed several heated verbal discussions and debates concerning gender in the music industry, at trade events, academic conferences, and so on, as well as between professional colleagues in various situations, which have not necessarily resulted in the most positive outcomes. Indeed, in some extreme cases a perception has emerged that the foregrounding of this dialogue has set people adrift from their original relationships and collaborations - in other words, from the things that had previously connected them musically and spiritually - precisely at the very juncture when such discussion ought to have been widely inclusive. This is perhaps where a book such as this can provide assistance. Taken as a whole, the work of the writers featured in the current collection represents a potent and prescient cross-section of thought on the subject of gender in music production, available in written form for consultation. As such it provides a convenient vehicle for the more measured contemplation of a body of arguments and ideas painstakingly formulated by a range of individuals, all of whom are deeply concerned with the issues herein. At the very least, it is hoped that such a resource will afford a means of approaching the verbal debates around the various topics broached in this volume with an improved understanding of both the terms in which they are couched and the underlying assumptions that have informed them.

REFERENCES

Goh, A. (2014). Sonic cyberfeminism and its discontents. In CTM Festival & J. Rohlf (Eds.), CTM 2014: Dis Continuity Magazine (pp. 56-59). Berlin: CTM. Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Rich, A. (2003) ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. In: Journal of Women’s History, Volume 15, No. 3, pp 11-48. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.