Luck, Grief, Hospitality: Re-Routing Power Relationships in Music

A discussion of constructions of power in music looking through the lens of intersecting concerns with gender, race, and ethnicity. The talk unpicks some structures in relation to luck in new music; a politics of grief as art in Indigenous women’s business; and the ethics of hospitality as a shaping force in my work as a composer. These stories look at how cultural value is produced through processes of social and aesthetic representation and provide clues for re-routing power in order to increase support for women’s music (This article is a revised version of a keynote lecture presented at the Women in the Creative Arts conference, Australian National University, Canberra, on 11 August 2017). As a composer, I make work that connects across very different scales of time and identity, and I take a similarly intersectional approach in this chapter. When I write about women and inequality, that’s somewhat of a placeholder that also points towards underrepresentation of various groups in a broader sense, whether on the basis of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. These are stories about shifting power, about structural luck; about grief as art and politics; and about hospitality—the dynamic of belonging and not belonging; of the stranger becoming guest and then host.