The collection of articles in TEMPO 292 provides the opportunity to examine recent research and approaches towards gender diversity in new music from an Australian perspective. The otherwise under-recognised contributions to the development of music by women and gender-diverse artists is spotlighted through academic research, industry strategies and creative approaches to music-making. Topics explored include artistic research in free improvisation, performance analysis and performativity, presented together with research findings drawn from mentorship programmes for female composers, gender diversity strategies in tertiary music education and the positive impacts of content targets in programming. Together these articles offer a wide range of perspectives on changing creation and performance practices, listening practices and audience attitudes to music in the twenty-first century. Contributors include leading scholar-performers active at the forefront of contemporary music in Australia, artists from the UK and USA, as well as national radio programmers and not-for-profit arts organisations.

The idea and meaning of ‘freedom’ in free improvisation has largely been determined by a masculine subject position. This paper proposes a thinking of free improvisation from a feminist perspective, drawing upon the writings of Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed and Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing, and on our own practices as improvising musicians. Reflecting on our own experiences in music and life, we ask: What does it mean to be a feminist free improviser? What inspires us to seek freedom through our improvisation practices? Can thinking improvisation through the lens of feminist theory inform our improvisational practices? We seek to think improvisation from a collective, inclusive origin. We posit that improvising is always, as Donna Haraway has suggested, ‘making-with’: creating, moment-to-moment, requiring interaction with the environment and its inhabitants. Free improvisation is not free if its practice is delimited by an exclusive world view. ‘Feministing’ free improvisation can challenge assumptions that undermine free improvisation's claim to freedom.

The rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.

Over the past two decades significant changes in approaches to gender equity have taken place in the fields of contemporary music and music research. However, women in music are still disadvantaged in terms of income, inclusion and professional opportunities. In Australia a national approach to improving gender equity in music has begun to emerge as once-controversial strategies trialled by four tertiary institutions have become established practices. This article discusses successful inclusion strategies for women in music, including the commitment to gender-balanced programming across all concerts at Queensland Conservatorium of Music by 2025, the introduction of mandatory quotas in recital programmes at Monash University, mentoring programmes for women composers at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and the development of coursework devoted to women in music at The University of Western Australia, as well as other initiatives that have emerged from them, both within and beyond the institution. Each approach is examined in the context of broader global discussions around gender and feminism. The public willingness to engage in discussions over sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination in the workplace that has resulted from the #MeToo movement is cited as key in influencing the engagement of students and professionals with these strategies and subsequent influence on performance practices, project development and presentational formats in new music.

In September 2015, ABC Classic set a target of 5 per cent women composers on air as the beginning of a push to combat serious gender imbalance in the works broadcast on the network. This target has gradually changed broadcast culture, encouraging content makers to champion women's music and allowing for major programming events and goals, and it has led to an increase of women composers broadcast from 2.2 per cent in 2015 to 9.9 per cent in the 2018/19 reporting cycle. This article examines our journey over this time, arguing for targets as a means to enact change and establish concrete outcomes. It explores the ways in which a target has encouraged us to consider gaps in the content offered along with new opportunities to present music by hitherto under-represented composers. It also reflects on the work ahead, acknowledging the ongoing importance of targets in moving towards better gender representation in classical music programming.

The Summers Night Project is an ongoing composer-mentoring programme established in 2018 by musicians Cat Hope and Gabriella Smart, with the support of the Perth-based new music organisation Tura New Music. The project aims to support and mentor emerging Australian female and gender minority composers to create new compositions for performance, with the aim of growing the gender diversity of composers in music programmes across Australia. Three composers were chosen from a national call for submissions, and works were performed by an ensemble consisting of members from the Decibel and Soundstream new music ensembles. Three new works were workshopped, recorded then performed on a short tour of Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia in July 2018. The project takes its name and inspiration from Australian feminist Anne Summers, author of the ground-breaking examination of women in Australia's history Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) and was inspired by her 2017 Women's Manifesto. This article examines the rationale for such a project, the processes and results of the project itself, and plans for its future.

The most prevalent model of musical analysis goes straight from score to sound, without reference to decisions – planned or impromptu – made by the performer as they perform the score. Since 2000 performance analysis by, among others, Nicholas Cook and John Rink, has sought to bridge this gap by analysing performances of works, yet the performer's voice is still absent. Catherine Costello Hirata and Dora Hanninen attempted to capture more experiential qualities in their approach to analysis, yet here too the performer is unable to contribute. There is growing discourse featuring performers speaking about their creative process, however this is generally not framed in a formal analytical space. This article examines the landscape of musical analysis as new models emerge for analysis of the score in its performed realm. It builds on research that presented a formal performance analysis of a score in the context of a performance, and extends the model and ideas expressed to reclaim a space for the performer's experience of a score in musical analysis.

Much of contemporary western art music relies on objectivist and individualistic frameworks of intellect which oppose any focus on subjectivity, embodiment or emotion. These approaches deny composers, players and audiences the powerful experiences facilitated by works which are of body and of emotion. We suggest that by facilitating a return to body and emotion in sound we create potential for deep, cathartic, and transformative psychophysiological states. We argue that these states can create shared experiences that directly resist the isolating, homogenising, socially apathetic and narrowing path paved by frameworks of intellect. This refusal can facilitate collectivised movement towards an ethics of care, through mutuality, solidarity and empathy. This extends further than musical practice and builds potential inroads towards greater social and political transformation. We offer a toolkit of actions and frameworks that enable embodied and emotional sound use: intensity, stillness, improvisation, collectivised praxis and uncanoning.

PIXERCISE (2017–) is an open-ended collaborative work written by Kathryn Williams and Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh. The piece involves an ongoing process of physical training, and in performance combines specially tailored physical exercises with piccolo performance. This article describes the unusual composition, preparation, and performance of this work and is concerned with exploring the shifting collaborative relationship. It also explores some of the aesthetic and social ideas that motivated the piece and have emerged through critical reflection and have been further incorporated, including the process of self-improvement and overcoming expressed as a performance artwork; entanglements between physical transformation through exercise; attitudes to female-body image and exercise; and how this piece connects with a growing tradition of experimental musical performance practice and performance art.

A man and a woman fall in love: of all operatic clichés, this is surely one of the most perennial. However, even before the curtain was raised at the Deutsche Oper, there were indications that there was much more to Heart Chamber than this simplification might suggest. Indeed, the trajectory of Chaya Czernowin's previous three operas, beginning with Pnima … Ins Innere (1998–99), followed by Zaïde / Adama (2004–05) and most recently Infinite Now (2016), which was reviewed in issue 282 of this publication, shows that this is a composer who seeks to explore and question the very nature of opera whenever she works within the genre.

The thirty-second Wien Modern was an extraordinary month-long festival of concerts and events with almost 90 world and Austrian premieres. The excellent Klangforum Wien programme at the Wiener Konzerthaus, conducted by Bas Wiegers, was well attended by an enthusiastic and mostly young-ish audience, where the focus was two first performances for large ensemble: Klaus Lang's linea mundi and Mirela Ivičević's Sweet Dreams. The evening was, in fact, billed as being ‘in honour’ of Ivičević who had won the Erste Bank Composition Prize 2019 with this piece. Ivičević is a Croatian composer now living in Vienna and her work shows an involvement with big themes: politics, diversity and violence, among others. Apart from concert pieces she works with different media and takes by-products of popular trash culture often as a starting point for her work. In interviews she has talked about the ‘subversive potency of sound’, and said that her work is ‘raw, imperfect, unpolished’, which this piece, and other recent examples you can hear on YouTube, demonstrate, despite her quite rigorous musical education in Zagreb and Vienna. Sweet Dreams is a lively, noisy, busy piece about the rapid change between sleep and waking states. The large ensemble, including harmonium, electric guitar and harp, opens with monumental repeated sections, dramatic but with a sense of direction toward slow, strong, pedal entries. Rough punctuation from alto saxophone, bass clarinet and trumpet adds to the ‘rawness’ but the writing is assured with a particular, individual imagination and sense of colour that bodes well for future work.

In two nights in New York, I saw three world premieres and four other recent pieces at two very different concerts. Friday, 15 November at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn was the concert FOR, the first of two nights called FOR/WITH curated by the trumpeter Nate Wooley. The venue was celebrating the life of its late founder, the artist Suzanne Fiol, and her work was displayed around the hall with an appropriate sense of reverence and intensity. Wooley featured a composer I admire, Eva-Maria Houben of the Wandelweiser collective, and an uncharacteristic solo trumpet piece that she wrote for him called chanting ballads. Like most of Houben's work it was stark, simple and repetitive, and seemed to place the performer in a battle with himself, its briefly sustained tones becoming daunting events, spaced as far apart from each other as they were. Unlike most of Houben's work, it took advantage of the trumpet's entire range of pitch and dynamic, which at first seems to be entirely out of place with the atmosphere of the work, but, as it goes on, one of course realizes that this is the point and there is so much in these bare, somewhat awkward trumpet sounds to listen for. Every extraneous sound – both from the trumpet and from the hall – becomes part of the piece. My mind moves to curation: does Houben's music demand more control over a concert? No phones maybe? I feel for the performer: while the work does what I love most about solo works, which is to take us out of the regular ‘concert’ feeling and give us the sense that we're witnessing a ritual with a strange tool, I then end up focusing on the performer's unintentional ornamentation. A few clammed notes: are they supposed to illustrate the fragility of the instrument, its tone and its user, or are they also intended as part of any tool's thorough exploration? I've played Houben: it's hard. I get it. But I do think the point is to be charitable as a listener and enjoy every sound equally, in an attempt to divorce oneself from preconceived notions of ‘successful’ playing. What at first seemed like quite an awkward undertaking became an empowering experience for me, and, one hopes, for Wooley as well.

Ellen Arkbro has been much fêted in experimental scenes (though not – or not yet – so much in the sort of new music scenes with which hcmf// remains associated) for her two records, For Organ and Brass (2017) and CHORDS (2019). Her performance with Marcus Pal in St Paul's Hall in Huddersfield follows a number of other shows in the UK, including at TUSK festival in Newcastle and at the Barbican in London. The pair are based in Stockholm, where they seem to be part of a burgeoning experimental organ scene. Their just intonation drone music comes with impeccable credentials: both studied with La Monte Young, and Pal also studied with Catherine Christer Hennix. The organ emitted a quiet diminished octave as the audience filed in, a dissonance resolved as soon as Arkbro sat down at the organ manual. What followed appeared to be a reworked and extended version of CHORDS for organ: the organ articulating perfect intervals and single tones, sounding something like a harmonic series and something like the I–IV–V of rock and blues, while Pal's computer-generated additive synthesis, speakers carefully directed upwards parallel to the organ's pipes, combine with the organ's familiar sound to create dense and jagged masses, chords transforming into timbres and back again.

As I enter Georgia Rodgers’ Line of parts, I am struck by the instrument for which she has composed: three levitating circles of loudspeakers, one above the other, that form a cylinder of sound rising up above my head. They are housed inside a space-age enclosure, clad in complex geometric foam shapes; a circular array of chairs facing outwards sits in centre of this space, inviting an independent and reflective – rather than communal – listening experience. This space wraps you in it: a womb-like architecture of sonic potential.

After occasional previous engagements in the north of England, including a particularly memorable performance at Distractfold's Cut & Splice Festival in 2017, Hanna Hartman was engaged as composer in residence for hcmf's 41st iteration. Hurricane Season, a world premiere, was also an hcmf// commission. It was for objects, electronics, amplification, magnified projection and a rather large-sized magnet (or perhaps more than one), which I imagine most of the commission fee was spent on getting through international customs. The aural component of the piece was fairly unremittingly scratchy and granular, the sort of soundscape one might expect to hear if holding a stethoscope to a dead tree filled with insects. And it was certainly a soundscape – the sounds seemed to result not so much from the motions and frictions of the different materials (though, I assume, most of them actually did come from this) but hover around the space cavernously as a sort of underscoring to the action. Hartman's preoccupation with exploding the finest grains of material was here achieved at once aurally and visually, with the mega-enlarged projection complimenting the various gradations of scrapes and squeaks of the moving objects. I'm coming to this from a New Music perspective, so my frame of reference here is more Mikrophonie than Child of Tree, but one could just as easily go down the route of reading Hurricane Season through the more experimental tradition of allotting objects an aural agency which might be overlooked otherwise.