Det var meningen, at Mortenson skulle bo på landet i seks måneder, da hun for mere end 10 år siden trak sig fra livet i Berlin, koncerter verden over og et universitetsstudie på DIEM i Aarhus.

Idyllen blev et vendepunkt, der både ændrede musikken og kunstneren.

Derfor mødes vi til et interview på en vindblæst strand i Østjylland. 

Jeg undrede mig over, at der i pressematerialet blev understreget, at det var et non-binært kunstnernavn, men at Heidi Mortensens pronomen var hun?

»Jeg har i 20 år udgivet musik som Heidi Mortenson, hvor mine pronouns er she/her, og hvor jeg i pressemeddelelser omtales med mit efternavn Mortenson. Og det står jeg ved. Med Phtalo er jeg non-binær, og det føles godt. Det er spændende og en måde for mig at gå lidt på opdagelse, og jeg overvejer, om det er noget, jeg skal tage videre.

Med store privilegier følger stort ansvar. Derfor er det vel på sin plads, at den berømmede musikjournalist Kelefa Sanneh nu har udgivet sin første bog, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Den 45-årige amerikaner hører til blandt verdens allermest privilegerede lyttere og har i mere end to årtier haft ubegrænset adgang til koncerter i verdens lydlige navle – først som musikkritiker ved The New York Times, siden som fast kulturskribent for The New Yorker. Han har set og hørt det hele.

Måske er det derfor, han er gået så frygtløst til værks i sin debut som bogforfatter. Et historisk overblik over syv vidtforgrenede genrer er meget at gabe over, også selvom Sanneh klogeligt sætter bagstopperen ved 1970 – tresserne er allerede udlagt til hudløshed – og fokuserer på USA med enkelte afstikkere til Storbritannien. Det går måske nok ud over fordybelsen, men som overordnet projekt står udgivelsen stærkt.

Chicago Reader-skribenten er netop trådt ind i Hal 6 i Bremen messecenter og støtter sig forvirret til sin hipstermulepose. Rundt om hjørnet, ved den new zealandske stand, sidder to mænd i 40’erne med business-miner (eller også drøfter de forrige aftens fede bassolo) om munden og sipper siciliansk rødvin. Klokken er lidt over middag, og de første gratis cd’er rammer en i nakken som free lilletrommeslag. Musikere, bookere, journalister og labelfolk fra hele verden er landet i den nordtyske by til verdens største jazzmesse, Jazzahead.

Nogle stande er ikke Weltklasse, æstetikken er tilfældig, brochurer ligger på én lang række, og det er dét! ECM’s stand er som ECM lyder, clean og slick. Og pladerne koster penge. Som i den virkelige verden. 

Abstract

In September 2020 pop-artist Kh Marie (one of the authors) performed the sensory concert intet er nok (nothing is enough) in Aarhus, Denmark. The concert invited the audience into a concert experience of sound, scent and movements, creating a space for disorientation of the dominant refrains of the pop-stage. This article explores how the physical pop-stage has traditionally been a gendered object in Western culture that orients itself towards certain bodies; and certain bodies towards it, hereby leaving some bodies feeling out of place. The article thus argues that the traditional pop-stage is an example of how gendering of spaces is not only as a discursive orientation, but how it is also a material and affective issue that extends itself out into the subjects and objects that inhabit them. Through repetition of the gendered refrains, they become internalized, like the chorus of a good pop-song stuck in our heads. We analyse the sensory concert as one example of how to challenge the gendered stage that, through an attuning approach, creates tactics of disorientation that allow bodies and stage to resurface as a non-gendered space.

'Solastalgia' is the feeling of emotional or existential distress, experienced as we witness negatively perceived environmental change unfold in places dear to us. Since coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003, the neologism has supported suffering people in need of a term to describe their increasingly outspread eco-anxiety in time of ecological breakdown. Through the lens of collaborative composition and the use of audio technology, this audio paper explores what happens when composer Carola Bauckholt and violinist Karin Hellqvist collectively seek to address their solastalgia. The process of composing the violin-electronics-video work Solastalgia (2022), aims at the outset to address environmental change, but with the space of trust that develops between the collaborators, a process of role expansion is additionally catalyzed, challenging the field’s traditional roles of composer and performer. The repetitive act of mapping sonorities of fading ice resources, therefore not only offer the collaborators a space to stay with, and accept, their painful feelings of solastalgia, but further leads them into new collaborative artistic terrain.

»You look like 50% of the world's population, but are professionalised as a minority«

There are plenty of numbers today that show that composers, musicians and sound artists who identify as women are in the minority when it comes to representation on stages, festivals, museums, in academic research and music education as composer Juliana Hodkinson's so adequately condense in the quote above, which is an excerpt from her essay to the Seismograf Focus titled Sounding Women’s Work that was published in March 2022.

Gender biases and unequal representations affecting professionals identifying as women in a Danish context have for the past decade been well documented in several surveys initiated by Danish music institutions and trade associations (e.g. Koda 2020; Dansk Live 2018; DMF et al. 2017; DMF et al. 2012), something that recently has been underpinned by more qualitative studies (KVINFO 2022; DR and Bandcamp 2022). Additionally within the past few years various Danish composers and musicians identifying as women have publicly told of an industry that is characterized by experiences of sexism, ageism and lack of diversity. But even though there is an increased focus on gender and representation in the sound art and music industry, the experience of gendered expectations, and how these permeate everything from work practices to infrastructures in the sound art and music life, is still an under-illuminated research field.

The audio paper Intervals invites listeners to dwell into the story of women working and weaving hemp burial garment sambe in South Korea. The myth in sambe that is orally conveyed until now-time – like the author’s grandmother believed – is regarded that if you have the burial garment sambe when you are alive, you have a long life and die in peace. 

The author asked Sunhee, one of the women producing sambe, what it means to have and wear sambe and why it is important for them. Sunhee said: 

»We come to the earth, we are born into this world. 

We will, one day, go back to where we come from which we call it death. 

When we die, we should not leave anything behind, 

our body has to completely decompose. 

Abstract

How come women composers are still so inadequately represented in historical canons and museum exhibitions? With a focus on historical Danish women composers and from the perspective of the Danish Music Museum, I argue that this is largely due to memory culture, an incredibly powerful frame within the realms of classical music and curatorial practices. This is illustrated, first, by discussing an exhibition at The Musikhistorisk Museum & The Carl Claudius Collection, Kvinder komponerer [Women Compose] from 1980 and its (limited but notable) legacy 40 years later. Second, I triangulate between memory studies, gender studies, and historical musicology in order to discuss memory culture as an overlooked but all-important obstacle in the rediscovery of women composers. 

This article gives anthropological insight into how gender/ing practices mattered in P3´s organization of music production in the mid 2010s. Through field reports and interviews with actors in the field the article reports from a P3 production environment where gender/ing stereotypical cultural (music) models and everyday enacted sexism weaved in and out of unfortunate gendered alliances between the listeners, the hosts and a ‘blind’ management, and could be seen, at its best, to be sustaining status-quo when it came to gender representation in music (and inequality), and, at its worst, to be strengthening gendered un-equality. While trying to pin out some attention points to be aware of in everyday sexism in environments of music production, the article explores the potentials of combining an Anthropology of Learning with an Ethnomusicology of Affect in order to investigate processes of what anthropologist Cathrine Hasse calls for the ‘centrifugal and centripetal forces’ of ‘cultural models’ in work environments, which means, in this particular case, the inclusion and exclusion of gendered artefacts, bodies and things in the spaces of P3´s music production.