International Women’s Day 2016

Welcome to a special playlist celebrating International Women’s Day, 2016! In this bonus playlist we’ve gathered together the works by our amazingly talented, previously featured, Australian female composers since our beginnings in January 2015, through to our most recently released playlist in March 2016.

According to author Rosalind Appleby (2012) in Women of Note: The Rise of Australian Women Composers, Australia has been leading the way in gender balance in composition. “The figures continue to grow: in 2011 the AMC recorded women making up 25 per cent of composers or in real terms 146 of 585 composers are women.” Here at Making Waves we’re so excited about the thoughtful and high-quality work we’re seeing from so many Australian colleagues, regardless of gender, and we’ve made it our mission from the beginning of the project to strive not for the “75-25” benchmark, but for gender parity in our curation. We’re thrilled to note that the campaign theme of International Women’s Day in 2016 is #PledgeForParity.

What do you think music-lovers, listeners, composers, performers, ensembles, arts organisations: is gender parity in music/the arts something on your radar? Have you got any general thoughts about gender and music, or the intricate ways other aspects of identity intersect with gender, in the fabric of music? In the industry? Leave a comment; we’d love to hear your thoughts. To read more on this topic we suggest starting with Rosalind Appleby’s recent article Women Composers – there always have been and there always will be, here.

Lastly, we feel it is important to mention that this playlist is in no way exhaustive of the number of amazing women creating music in Australia. In fact, we feel we’ve barely even scratched the surface! With this in mind we ask that you take the time to get to know the work of a composer below and share this playlist with your friends, students and colleagues. If you enjoy our playlists you may like to sign up via our Making Waves E-Bulletins at the bottom of the page.

Composers, as always, we encourage you to Submit your latest work to us at any time.

YOUTUBE

The ‘playlist’ button will bring up a track listing which you can use to skip back and forth between the works. If you want to check out the playlist and works in more detail, there is a button at the bottom right of the picture taking you directly through to YouTube. Please be mindful that this is an hour worth of video, and it will chew the data! If you were going to tune in on a mobile device without a large data allowance, please consider listening in over wi-fi instead.

BANDCAMP

Click the play button to stream audio, or the album title, ‘buy’ and/or ‘share’ links to proceed through to the Bandcamp page listing full album and recording details.