13 - Women Composers, Experimentalism, and Technology, 1945–80

Summary

Speaking at the start of Sisters with Transistors (2020), Lisa Rovner’s documentary film on women working in electronic music, the New York-based composer and software engineer Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945) identifies, not, as we might expect, the power of a tape machine to rework, with radical and infinite possibility, the sound palette available to the composer, but rather its promise to change the social and economic structure of music, to break apart gender differentials, and to explode power structures. This, first and foremost, is the emancipatory promise of machines that make music.

Spiegel’s musical education encompassed elements of a conventional compositional training followed by an early, and lengthy, immersion in the New York electronic studios created by Morton Subotnick in the late 1960s, and then at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, nearby in New Jersey, where she developed software for computer graphics.²