The concept of intersectionality, in its widespread use across global academia, is rightfully under criticism if employed within a predominantly white, bourgeois[1] space to govern the integration of a supposed ‘other’ into a pre-existent, biased system. This paper ponders whether intersectional approaches can be a helpful tool to engage, both on a structural and a practical level, with the challenges of diversity in New Music.

The challenge starts with the term “diversity” itself, which is, just as intersectionality, another concept currently adapted as an addition to pre-existing, biased structures, as exemplified in economy-driven units of Diversity Management. The dynamic on display is one of tacking something onto a thing, not restructuring the thing itself. As long as “diversity” serves as a divider between those who define and manage it and those who are constructed by the use of the term as an ‘other’, its intended impetus—a more diverse community and more varied accessways to it—is lost.[2] Rather that addressing diversity in New Music, then, I want to consider the possibility of New Music as a diverse ecology.

Intersectionality is a concept that imagines spaces to convey itself. It is dependent on positionality as a place of perspective. In assonance to this, I will draw upon space and situatedness as a framework. My own perspective in this is that of a performance scholar and cultural historian who happens to be cis, white, and queer and has enjoyed education privilege. My aim in this paper is to connect applicable impulses for a more diverse practice of New Music with a discussion of underlying gatekeeping structures that tend to remain invisible and are often tied into the narrative of New Music as constitutive elements. Methodically, I will draw upon an intersectional lens. The paper will thus address intersectional theory, current critical readings of it, and its applicability to music as a field. In a second step, it will employ intersectional theory from a vantage point of Cultural Studies to discuss recent examples in New Music that address intersections of power and gender, race and class, and knowledge and socioeconomic impact.

My own writing, in this, may create blind spots I am not aware of. Addressing issues of privilege from a position of privilege is problematic as a dynamic, just as the terms “intersectionality” and “diversity” quickly become tools of gatekeeping when conceptualised top-down. This paper echoes such structural challenges, since at the root of these pages are conversations that were held in an open tent in the summer of 2018, outside the official structure of an academic conference at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.[3]

A tent is a mobile, temporary structure that is embedded into a specific situation. It is, in Western cities, rarely part of the official infrastructure. A tent in such spaces does not equal a house, or a home to an institution. Rather, a tent is an intervention, a structure without being a fixed structure, unable to be split into neat partitions. The tent at the root of this paper—the Darmstadt GRiNM tent—was a space to talk about diversity in New Music as a community.

My place in this discussion has changed, and my arguments, even if the same, may ring differently: they have moved from being the words of a participant in a tent outside the structure to a keynote at an academic conference,[4] and now to an entry in a peer-reviewed journal. The simple fact of speaking from another place affects the meanings my words will take on. If positionality is likely to cause blind spots, an intersectional approach to diversity in New Music means to employ a tool that presupposes certain elements (such as categories) and procedures (such as the interaction between those categories).[5] Intersectionality is a grasp on discriminatory realities that, as a choice of methodology, affects the politics of pluralism it discusses, and the realities that may result from it.

If the goal is to enable New Music as a diverse ecology without a hegemonic default setting, the path towards this goal is necessarily a structural one. Attaching formats such as workshops on diversity management or quotas dedicated to members of marginalised groups to the established infrastructures and institutions—festivals, competitions, and music schools—is an effective method to increase surface diversity, but at the same time maintains the hierarchical dynamic between an unmarked elite and the others it designates. A necessary second level of engagement with diversity is then to analyse one’s own path in moving through pre-existing musical infrastructures. This allows insights into how one’s own steps maintain or enable institutional strongholds, which then may serve as a touchstone in trying for a more diverse and more broadly accessible New Music instead. An unmarked default setting[6] that is not rendered visible as such creates a dynamic that then has to be rectified with diversity politics, such as installing compensation efforts for minorised voices. The core issue, then, is not the perspectivation a structure may carry, but the invisibility of this perspectivation. Despite the promise of newness that resonates within New Music as a designation, professionalized New Music overwhelmingly happens within a pre-existing industry and education system of Western classical music. The “New” in New Music obscures the fact that it is heavily drawing upon prior traditions as a frame of reference—including its roots in white, Western, male, bourgeois thought—and continues many of them. Exclusionist patterns are built into Western classical music in implicit knowledges and networks, while its outward self-narrative merges a supposed universality with a promise of elitism.

To address those blind spots effectively, it is necessary to address them intersectionally. Rethinking, e.g., the position of Western musical heritages in New Music without considering class dynamics will not address the inherent elitism of classical music spheres.[7] Passing over gender will miss how deeply cis male imagery is embedded into musical infrastructures, from degree names and titles all the way to assumed work organisation that often still relies on large blocks of uninterrupted time, spatial privilege, single-author creation, and an absence of traditionally female-gendered care labour. And even including these aspects, others connected to it, such as race and ethnicity with their specific impact of class and gendered labour in different communities, still remain unaddressed. Ableist and ageists positions are likewise unmarked; the regional specificity of intersectional dynamics is so far rarely addressed.

Intersectional analysis encourages the consideration of contexts and their dynamics. It is, as a tool, applicable to a large variety of cultural, geographical, and historical settings beyond its initial roots,[8] yet it was initially formulated not as an abstract concept, but as a reaction to the specific reality black women in the U.S. faced in the second half of the 20^th century.[9]

Criticism of intersectional theory in recent years has centred on the appropriation of black feminist theory by an overwhelmingly white academic mainstream on the one hand.[10] The dynamic at play is one of a theory being employed by a system against which it was developed. On the other hand, current criticism of intersectionality has centred on its assumption of pre-existing categories. They would simplify and uphold structures of discrimination through categories of analysis instead of questioning them.[11] This recent shift in intersectionality theory focuses on the creation and dynamic relations of categories using the term “interdependencies” instead of intersectionality.[12] This focus parts with the image of the intersection insofar as an intersection implies a set of a pre-existing, separate markers (the “roads”), which omits the interdependent processes of marginalisation that are part of establishing these “roads” in the first place. Categories, as Lann Hornscheidt argues, do not exist as abstract entities prior to a marginalising reality that produces them.[13]

If we transfer this performativity of categorisation to the music industry, a term such as “composer” can be analysed in relation to the categories it constitutes: Does “composer” make a second term of “performer” necessary, and are they conceived within an unequal dichotomy? Similarly, the wording invites thoughts on whether a categorization as “composer” centres single-author creators who work with conventional notation and whether such a focus then marginalises collective creation, autonomous practitioners, or improvisation, or music cultures that frame authorship differently. It is a matter not as abstract as it may seem, if looked at in relation to college degrees or competition categories that are essential for visibility and professional credit in a global field.

“Composer”, to stick with the metaphor of the road and the intersection for a moment, can be seen as a road that intersects with others: it is a role in professional music that will depend on whether a person has had access to education privilege, which is often tied into socioeconomic backgrounds, which in turn often relates to marginalisation on a basis of race, gender, or disability. The intersection as an interdependent perspective, however, also serves as an inquiry into what constitutes a “road”, how—through what agency—“roads” are being built, and what remains, if we continue with the image, an unpaved stretch of dirt, devoid of access.

Performance scholar Peggy Phelan, in her 1993 book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, frames the act of seeing as “training careful blindness”:[14] the ability to see something would be established through learning not to see other things.[15] While Phelan is concerned with representational visibility from an angle of psychoanalytic deconstructivism, her question of “how to retain the power of the unmarked”[16] is applicable to the concern of categorisation and invisibility within New Music. The pattern of being able to see one thing by not seeing another is another way to describe the creation of the previously mentioned blind spots.[17] These spots are often inherited through tradition and elite access to it and need to be identified and marked to address the lack of diversity in institutional New Music effectively. In a similar vein, Devon Carbado connects a figure of thought related to Phelan’s conceptualisation of markedness with intersectional theory in his 2013 essay, “Colorblind Intersectionality”:[18] he describes the dynamic of removing discriminations by, often unwittingly, relying on other sets of discriminations. This dynamic is not limited to race and gender, but extends to class and able-bodiedness, to faith communities and sexuality, and, prevalent in music, to theoretical and physical knowledges. Whiteness, maleness, a bourgeois socioeconomic status and able-bodiedness hence need to be marked as a part of intersectional dynamics instead of being treated as unmarked default settings.

It is a commonplace statement that people in general relate to music, yet music is no universal language, despite the self-promotion of the “serious” music industry as a super-national construction of a freely accessible space governed by affect. The overwhelmingly white, Western, bourgeois framework of so-called classical music is still largely, actively, unmarked and implicates New Music as well. The music industry, as a system of competitions and residencies, masterclasses and recommendations, commissions and royalties, does, in the majority, still not acknowledge its roots in education privilege, gender discrimination, and racial privilege. And attempts to address discrimination often happens, as Carbado points out, at the cost of other intersectional markers: the recurring debate about female conductors, for example, is acted out nearly entirely along a line of white, Western women,[19]  with perhaps the exception of Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra.[20] Region-specific infrastructures and their influence on access to education are likewise not part of that conversation.[21]

The classical music industry, as an economy, thrives on situated knowledge set to default. Thus, music professionals—performers as well as festival organisers and musicians who primarily define themselves as teachers—who move within this industry depend on access to this situated knowledge. Gaining this knowledge, through degrees and grants, mentoring and commissions, will make music professionals complicit in gatekeeping to a certain degree. The process of professional formation and validation as a musician within the traditional Western network of institutions signifies an enormous investment of time and money packaged within a narrative of a chosen elite. Professional training will easily govern a life schedule for an ample two decades; a prestigious degree generally equals a tremendous amount of financial debt. The socioeconomic borders of music education are an entwined hedgerow of financial and educational privileges. In addition to the money needed to obtain a degree, implicit, class-labelled knowledge of music and its associated settings function as a major gatekeeper.[22] Family role models, access to concerts and conversations about them and their etiquette, the possibility to learn a (Western) instrument and (Western) music theory in childhood: all these are still biographical staples of many established names in New Music. To level the field, both access to education and the role of informal musical training need to be addressed.

Exclusionist practices that maintain a supposedly universal field of New Music within an unmarked Western, bourgeois setting are often micropatterns of implicit, situated knowledge. They are mirrored in the range of instruments and framework of music theory expected in degree entry exams in Western schools that situate themselves as global.  If repertoire pieces are expected in New Music, they are often still tied to a canon of white Western serious music. The unspoken dress codes and codes of grooming when presenting at international auditions and competitions echo the white, bourgeois, binary gender norms of the mid-twentieth century. Unless these default settings are marked and understood within their positionality,[23] the outrage over cases of racial and cultural discrimination and appropriation will continue, in New Music as well as in the classical music business at large, since the established institutions will continue to educate and further homogenic groups that then make the designation of a differing ‘other’—without access to dominantly Western knowledge and networks—easy. These broad lines, such as Western/non-Western, easily obscure other demarcation lines of exclusion. An intersectional lens, as easily exemplified by the globalization of the concept of intersectionality itself, needs to be adjusted to cultural specificities. In a European context, a Northwest-Southeast slope of discrimination along ethnic and national lines is central to intersectional debates around structural inequalities, also in the music business. In music education, a similar dynamic applies central European urbanity that presupposes access to unofficial networks and perpetuates power of decision along those lines.

Following, I will present three 2019 cases linked to New Music that illustrate a structural lack of diversity. My aim in presenting these examples is not to identify culprits or present a case solution. Rather, I aim for a focus on the underlying structures that have enabled the situation in question.

In autumn of 2019, two longstanding histories of sexualised power abuse came to a head in the context of the #MeToo movement. Both Dan Welcher—composer and long-term Head of Composition at Butler School of Music at Austin—and Siegfried Mauser—pianist and former Head of the University of Music Munich and of the Salzburg Mozarteum, sentenced to jailtime for sexual abuse—served as ambassadors of New Music, but, more importantly, as influential teachers and mentors. The setting of white Western men in positions of power, the scene of contemporary music and its nimbus of innovation and border-pushing and paternalist teaching infrastructures signal that the sexualised power abuse may not have been individual, but systemic. The abuse—in the cases of both Welcher and Mauser—concerned students and female colleagues in positions of lesser degree-validated knowledge and less privilege of gender or race.

If I return to the question of underlying structures, it is telling that Mauser returned to the headlines in late 2019 because a group of established colleagues in musicology had edited a volume in his honour on the occasion of his 65^th birthday. The book counts prominent musicologists, musicians, and composers of New Music among its contributors.[24] The press coverage of the publication and its widely criticized exonerating attitude did not centre the perspective of the abuse victims or the categorisations that had established their lack of privilege. In the case of Welcher, the setting that enabled the abusive behaviour was tied into positively connotated narratives of artistic freedom, mentoring benevolence, and male genius. Taken together, these elements show how the infrastructure of an established professorial position permitted a prolonged sexualised abuse of power, including jokes, slander, touches, and affective labour.[25]

Both cases were only possible within structures of aiding and abetting, where power—in form of connections, recommendations, and grants—could be exercised. They were only possible because colleagues within the same power system, with differing degrees of dependency, looked the other way, time and again. Within an education system where names, filiation, and mentorships carry enormous weight, and where the mentoring situation of teacher and student happens within an economically framed space of creativity and individual development against a backdrop of tuitions and salaries, we may need to find new way to relate to each other before we can truly build towards a diverse ecology of New Music.

My second example is concerned with ethno-stereotyping and its economic implications. While New Music does not have to deal directly with the nationalist and colonialist oeuvre of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as a repertoire, the mechanisms of othered musical cultures and their appropriation is common practice. To visualise the pattern of fictional Asian women being instrumentalised for white Western (male) profit on a mainstream level, one does not need to look further than Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and its later 20^th-century retelling in Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Miss Saigon. Against this established perspective as a background, the case of Larry Clark presents an interesting example. In 2004, Clark—an established white composer and music publisher of so-called ‘educational’ music—started writing orchestra pieces under the nom de plume Keiko Yamada, suggesting the authorship of a Japanese woman. The considerable oeuvre Clark put together under this pen name all referenced Japanese tropes, including geography and festival culture; he collected accolades and royalties for it. When his alias was found out in the summer of 2019, Clark was blasted on social media. He apologised, citing his picking up a pseudonym as a normalcy in genre-swapping music writing and, in retrospect, a bad idea.[26]

Again, my interest here is not in passing blame and individual choices, but in the systemic structures that made Clark’s choices possible in the first place. As Anthony Tan has pointed out regarding “musical cultural objects”,[27] engagement with different musical cultures, especially from different and formerly colonised geographies, is commonplace and not necessarily problematic. The issue is the form of engagement that, again, positions an objectified other as defined by the invisible default setting of Western music.

The case of Larry Clark is structurally interesting because it ties an othering in terms of race and gender into economic profit in New Music: it depends on an industry of highly regulated music publishing and royalties. It likewise depends on the lack of diversity that a predominantly white, male bourgeois system has created, which makes an intervention like “Keiko Yamada” even possible. Clark took advantage of emulating a Japanese woman while at the same time enjoying the advantages that come with not being a woman of colour within the Western music industry: he chose to reinvent himself as a composer of orchestral works through an Orientalist alias. To change the structure underlying this case and work towards a diverse ecology of New Music, we do not only need to discuss individual actors, but the system of distribution and authorship.

The importance of distribution and authorship and the roles they build on is highlighted again by the third and final example I consider in this paper. In late October 2019, prominent singer Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit vocalist known for her work with katajjaq style in a variety of international collaborations, went head to head with New York City-based vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, a Grammy-awarded formation led by singer, musician, and composer Caroline Shaw. Shaw’s acclaimed 2012 composition Partita,[28] as Tagaq pointed out, incorporates elements of katajjaq-style singing; a fact that Shaw readily acknowledged. Her ensemble had taken a workshop with Inuit katajjaq trainers and subsequently worked with the patterns and styles they had learned about. Tagaq’s issue was not with the implementations of patterns, but with the lack of attribution and renumeration. Partita incorporates, in its third moment, Inuit throat singing technique in the form of a katajjaq piece called the Love Song that is widely recognisable for listeners accustomed to katajjaq as a specific female duetting setting.[29] The matter is complicated by differing framings of authorship that do not allow the katajjaq piece to be fitted neatly into the Western music traditions of a single-creator score, despite its specificity and recognisability.

The established system of remuneration and the exclusionist patterns of artistic validation written into it are cast into the light by Shaw’s reaction, who suggested a reading of all artists names’ involved in the creation of the formation’s program before their recitals, as a way to give visibility and recognition to the artists who have taught the ensemble. What this reaction does not address, but renders visible, is a double standard of authorship applied to what A. Zoë Madonna (@knitandlisten) in her Twitter coverage of the dispute[30] calls “fine art” opposite “folk art”:[31] visibility may be an economic factor, but it does not equal payment.

Again, I am interested here in systemic infrastructures, the inequalities enacted by them, and the narratives that maintain them. In this particular case, the core issue is the framing of payable authorship. Roomful of Teeth booked a workshop with Inuit katajjaq artists[32] and then subsequently used the techniques and material they had learned about in their work. Hiring and paying teachers and then going forth and making one’s own music based on the education received is at the core of the music business. This business, however, does not exist disconnected from geopolitical and postcolonial realities. If musical authorship and an idea of genius are more readily applied along dividing lines of race, class, gender, and education privilege, then musicians from politically, socially, and economically marginalised communities who operate outside a largely Western idea of single-creator authorship remain excluded and underprivileged. “If you're composing from a place of privilege, and you learn about a marginalized group's musical tradition from a member of that group, who doesn't have that privilege, is it enough to just compensate them for hours worked?” A. Zoë Madonna asks.[33]

It took Tanya Tagaq’s international pull to draw attention to this specific case, where the dividing line was not merely one of credit given, but of what credit is given: as A. Zoë Madonna points out, there is a difference between paying an artist one time for a workshop, or paying them royalties as a collaborating artist every time a piece is aired or performed. Likewise, the divide between understanding someone as a practitioner of a tradition as opposed to a musician creating individual works outlines the unspoken default setting of white, Western, bourgeois music against which so many other musical traditions—even within Western, predominantly white settings—are pitted as others.

An international community of New Music today needs to reflect on what is an unmarked default and what is a marked other in its inherited infrastructures and institutions. New Music, set against a tradition to depart from, has and refers to a rich history. But being granted a history of music full of individual actors differs greatly from being located as a practitioner—not a creator—within a supposedly unchanging tradition, as so many indigenous musicians are. Being located outside of history, within a seemingly fixed tradition, makes individual artistic creation invisible. This is a systematic issue of marking musical knowledges in a way that maintains and reinforces hierarchies which are then echoed by a lack of opportunities, salaries, and agency.

To make New Music a diverse ecology will take a cascading approach of interventions to change narratives and positionality to finally change systemic structures. Many New Music professionals are not in positions where they could immediately enact change in biased systems they depend on for their livelihood, often from the outside. Even from the inside, careers in professional music tend to be economically precarious. The guiding principle of diversity work in New Music, then, could be a narrative of sharing as opposed to a narrative of addition. If the impulse is to “add a (marginalized) voice”, the question of how to add this voice, perhaps through a bursary or by creating an additional category in a competition, does not go deep enough. The actual question would be, “Why is this voice not part of this group yet, and what would it have taken to make this voice belong from the start?”

In describing the mechanisms of categories and invisibilities outlined in my examples, I have drawn from intersectionality and interdependency theory to point out blind spots in New Music. These are often built into structures and cannot be addressed without taking contexts into account: engaging with othered musical cultures must consider aspects of class and gender and their socioeconomic implications. Working against sexualised power abuse in music institutions needs to address mentoring narratives and the way they relate to gender and education privilege.

Going forward, based on the focus of underlying structures discussed heretofore, I suggest a multifold approach towards New Music as an accessible, diverse nexus. While structural change may most effectively be implemented by involving groups of differently marked people in artistic and logistical decision-making, there are a variety of micro-actions, many of them economically modest, that work towards a more diverse field of New Music.

Accessibility, from the point of view of an audience, is governed by spatial arrangements that define who has access to a venue and can move comfortably within a venue. It starts with ramps and manoeuvring space, but extends to aspects such as inclusive language and single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. It may include a babysitting service during events, or events that are designed to include groups of people who cannot be expected to follow concert etiquette, like small children or citizens with dementia. It may include events in spaces that are not associated with implicit elite knowledge and behaviours. Accessibility is further defined by ticket pricing, by the language(s) used in press materials, by programming and its wording; a typical example is the treatment of musical works by women. Accessibility includes include outreach programs and a reflection of their positionality—are they centred around transmitting and preserving elite knowledge, or are they designed as conversations that create a community? Accessibility to a venue as an institution also depends of staff communication and starts with how many people will see themselves represented in outreach personnel and in ushers, if an event is big enough to employ ushers.

In the organisation of festivals and competition, acknowledging a positionality is preferable to claiming universality. Just as systems of exclusion are geo-specific, in some communities, race and education privilege may be factors with higher impact, while in others, ageism, rurality, and socioeconomic status may be prevalent. Events should address the regional and communal situation and establish ties to it. Making some events, or parts of them, such as workshops or concerts, digitally accessible connects regionality to internationality. Entry fees, travel costs, and lodging can propose insurmountable barriers for diverse artists and audiences. Allowing for digital sub-formats and streamed entries can increase participation and visibility. If possible, event websites should be available in various languages or be at least linked to an automated translating service. Beyond a local idiom and English as a lingua franca, it is the use of Spanish, French, and Portuguese that addresses musicians from Caribbean, African, South American and Pacific communities as possible participants. On-site translation services, digital in form or aides, increase accessibility. The work towards changing the gender imbalance in New Music needs to address the realities of women from diverse communities: on-site daycare and spaces reserved for changing and nursing small infants are a standard first step. In competitions, the establishing and wording of entry categories can decrease or increase diversity. This extends to admissible forms of notation, authorship, instrument groups, and, if applicable, presented repertoire. It also includes dress codes that should not be implicit knowledge, but explicitly addressed and communicated.

In education, New Music will have to re-evaluate constituting factors in order to address structural gatekeeping. Those include a largely paternalist and elitist mentoring system, education privilege based on class and socioeconomic affluency, unmarked canon-building and canon knowledge, and a validation system based in notated single-creator authorship. How degrees are named and described factors into gatekeeping just as repertoire choices in admission auditions and expected formats of music in exams. International traditions included in the curriculum and who teaches them, with what faculty standing, is another aspect that can increase or dissolve gatekeeping. On a second level, New Music education needs to be aware that access to a recognised degree extends beyond an education of talent, style, and expression. New Music, perhaps more than any other aspect of institutionalised musical practice, is also rooted in an implicit knowledge of thinking music.

Artistic embodiment allows an intervention into the past to interrogate the historic terms that built traditions of visibility and invisibility and established, with Phelan, a sight dependent on partial blindness. The struggle for diversity within New Music happens on many levels. It cannot be achieved in a sense of possession: it is always, necessarily, a work in progress. What exactly that work is depends on the specific situation and its intersectional challenges.

Anke Charton holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Leipzig University (2012). She has studied at the Universities of Leipzig, Bologna and Berkeley for her M.A. degree. Research stays have led her to Spain, the U.S., the U.K., to Austria and to Malta. Her research centres on theatre historiography, music theatre and voice, and intersectional gender studies. Since April 2020, she has been the recipient of an Elise Richter Fellowship of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), conducting a project on practices and projections of the Siglo de Oro theatre. She has held positions at Detmold University of Music and University of Paderborn, Leipzig University, the Hamburg School of Music and Drama, and is currently TT Professor for “Theatre and Society” at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies of the University of Vienna.