11
Women in Audio
Trends in New York Through the
Perspective of a Civil War Survivor
Svjetlana Bukvich
There has been very little written about forces that shape a woman music
producer. More women are accessing audio technology today than ever
before, and this has been attributed, in part, as a result of music technology
becoming cheaper and ubiquitous in nature, rather than made possible by
a cultural shift created consciously over time. In the US, there is currently
a spotlight on women en long et en large – a loud buzz over ‘who gets to
say what happened in the bedroom’ – which spills out into other narratives
about women’s lives: however, the 4% of women in the music industry
who produce still haven’t left the blind spot of the public eye. The rest of
the world seems, for better or for worse, less impacted by this particular
tension – the mild hysteria of the “me too” movement on one hand and the
relative insignificance of its impact on the music industry on the other. In
the US the invisibility/visibility pendulum for women is generally swing-
ing harder – with yet-unseen results – and outside of it, there seems to be
less drama and a sense that change comes at a slower pace. The “global”
scene in music is becoming sonically hybridized, and yet, the behaviors in
and around the recording business stay staunchly entrenched in the cultural
folklore of those involved. Men and women are quietly suspicious of each
other in contexts where music is produced, because they question each
other’s motivations for being there. To complicate things further, there are
proven differences – perhaps less so in the US, but still pervasive – in pay
scale for the same job performed. All this is accompanied with a lingering
sense of confusion when it comes to understanding the gender roles they
occupy in the ever-stimulating magical arena called the recording studio.
I welcome this opportunity to bring attention to these matters by offering
some hopefully useful solutions, and to shed light on the challenges men
and women face when working together in sound, and beyond. Perhaps
selfishly, I also welcome the opportunity to outline my own experience
in the field, and create a profile that is identifiable within the history of
women who produce. I especially don’t wish to “add” a voice to anything.
In the call-and-response dynamic, I want to be the call.
So, who are we, women producers? I’ll narrow this question to where
I now live – New York City. Like many other women producers here,
I come from experiences that encompass other cultures. Those experiences
175
176 Svjetlana Bukvich
are suffused with the unique pulse of sounds hitting the concrete, of ideas
almost visibly expanding and contracting in a euphoric rush, of architec-
tural structures that challenge the laws of . . . well, everything. These rev-
elations are not unique to women, naturally, but the way women organize
this data influences how a signal flow is routed in the studio, or the archi-
tecture of frequency equalization on an audio track. Women and men are
not the same creatures, and that is okay. There are obviously differences
in biology, but also assessable cultural norms and expectations that shape
the way they look at things. They experience life differently. This should,
by all measures and means, be a ‘no-brainer’, but somehow I needed to
learn and re-learn that. In my youth, I continuously schlepped more synth
poundage than my petite body structure could bear. This was to prove that
I could handle my own gear in the same way the all-boy bands did. I don’t
do that anymore. Or, when I heard the mix of a song at 16 years of age
while doing back-up vocals in Sarajevo (then Yugoslavia), and summoned
the courage to offer a direction in the mix that had to do with what the song
was about – the relationship between a boy and girl – and got slammed
with: “It’s time you start to shave your legs”. I recoiled, said nothing,
and finished the takes. I knew that nothing was ‘wrong’ with my legs and
figured the comment was there to send me a message to stay in my place.
I remember desperately trying to create a space between the oncoming
feeling of hurt and the job at hand. Suffice it to say that today, with some
25 years of experience, and without the need of going into the validity of
the response to my offering, I can retort that my advice back then was as
sound as it would have been today for that very song, and that it would
have benefited the production in unmeasurable ways. The difference is
in the approach and the reply. Then, I felt fear. Today, I feel compassion
toward that man and his words. There can be a sense of threat in the studio
when a woman takes over, even fleetingly: deeper and more pronounced
in music than in most other fields. Since men’s work in the studio is often
looked down on by the rest of society as not being a “serious” profession,
they tend to hold their positions of power with extra zeal. This is prob-
ably true, or will be true for women too, and an interesting research topic
in itself. What if roles get reversed in this way one day? Wouldn’t we
have the same problem? As kitsch as this may sound, have we not heard
our own mothers warning against marrying ‘musicians’? I have person-
ally never met a woman, or man, who is not in music possessing an ability
to distinguish the many levels of responsibility and income levels in the
business of music.
Many women producers in New York, and other great cities – London,
Berlin, Los Angeles – where they can realize themselves in music, have
similarly tricky work memories from their home turfs and have needed to
overcome them, thus taking the energy away from their work. In my expe-
rience, as suggested in the early part of the century by biologically cen-
tered gender theorists such as Simon Baron Cohen, and through societal
conditioning, women I work with have brains that look at the universe in a
relational way. Things don’t stand as isolated islands: everything is inter-
connected; there are exponential possibilities in relational combinations in
177 Women in Audio
a single-family unit, neighborhood, workplace, city, country, world. Some
of my fellow women producers in NYC have roots in tribal cultures on
the verge of collapse, some come from ancient cultures older than Moses’
tablets, some from sleepy bourgeoisie cultures, some have progressive
working-class backgrounds, etc. These women are gloriously diverse, tal-
ented, and diligent and they are all here, ready to pounce, and change
things. Paradoxically, they look at the world with these deep probing eyes
and manifest meticulousness, inclusiveness (for the lack of a better word),
and exceptional care in the studio and in the festivals/events they produce,
and yet, they are looked at as curious, isolated islands. It’s the women’s fes-
tival, the women in audio, the women composers, the women who lunch.
Coming from Yugoslavia, a country whose model of living no longer
exists due to the collapse of its experimental socialism and the brutal fight
for money and territory helped by a new wave of tribal and nationalis-
tic rhetoric, I have found myself increasingly re-connecting the broken
pieces I took with me, consequently adding my “American experience”
to my “new world order” fantasy. This fantasy includes, first and fore-
most, the re-ordering of the hierarchy in the “who sings under the dotted
line” game in audio. I recently saw the Carole King musical Beautiful
on Broadway. An anomaly for the times in which she lived – she signed
her work as songwriter and producer – her early desire to author was met
with “she writes girl songs”, and was given a chance because of that. The
ratio between the probability of her career longings and the amount of hit
songs she amassed is soaringly high. King made a dent in the culture that
didn’t know “she” was possible in the role she secured. In my opinion,
Kate Bush too falls into this particular category of trailblazers, and a few
others. The situation is not all that bad, though. It is remarkably better than
it was in the nineteenth century, for instance (yes, you can laugh here),
and the very fact that I can write these words is a step forward toward
having a music industry that co-creates with the other 50% of the planet.
My desired scenario is this: the bastard proliferation of technology and its
cheap price will inevitably pull in more women, and the pendulum will
start to move toward their interest areas, therefore giving them more say.
This could happen very dramatically in the fields of 3D sound and other
immersive technologies, since women tend to live in that kind of world
in their minds anyway. If they get to this field early enough, and claim
these technologies for what they think is important for humankind, they’ll
reinforce the rule the big corporations will have to then accept. In traffic
court, it’s called ‘the right of way’. NYC is a prime candidate for this to
unfold. My feeling is that within the current political climate – and yes,
all art is political – there is a sense of daring, hurriedness, and decadence,
as when, I suppose, Rome was nearing its end. In a moment like this – in
between radically different technological stages where nanotechnologies,
Big Data, and talk of parallel universes are seeping daily into our cups of
coffee – grand ideas can take hold, so stay alert! I, myself, don’t intend to
be left behind.
I’ll narrow the question of who women producers are even further here
and offer some images/situations that shaped me personally. When it
178 Svjetlana Bukvich
comes to record production, I am interested in what with Simon Zagorski-
Thomas calls ‘active musicology’, i.e. musicology that generates the kind
of understanding that “helps us ‘do’ music more effectively”. The diarized
sections are mixed with the rest of the discussion here in an effort to do
just that: to stretch the commonly accepted structure of an academic paper,
and hopefully, offer a deeper insight into the subject matter – forces that
shape a woman music producer – viewable from different angles and time-
spaces. To me, this knowledge is important to be available because tradi-
tional epistemology, in the words of Alison Jaggar, is shaped by the belief
that emotion should be excluded from the process of attaining knowledge.
What I am inviting the reader to do here is experience alternative ways to
interact with time and emotion in an academic-writing setting, especially
when it comes to learning about women producers. What we do in our
practice is handle time and emotion. But, I’d argue, we do it differently
from men. What Australians call the ‘fictocritical essay’ is probably the
closest inspiration for what interests me here: putting bits and pieces of my
memories in relation to accepted authoritarian pools of knowledge about
the matter. Another epistemologist who wrestled with the lack of criti-
cal thought that reflects women’s position in the field, and whose ideas
influenced my contemplations about women in music production, is Jane
Tompkins. She offered that “an epistemology does not consist of ‘assump-
tions that knowers make’ in a particular field: it is a theory about how
knowledge is acquired which makes sense, chiefly, in relation to other
such theories”. In other words, I’d like to offer a window through which
I’d like to gaze myself, and invite others to see the view. My sense is that
at this point in time, women who choose the path of music production
all had to have had more than ordinary life circumstances, which in turn
prepared them to face the challenges in the profession as it is today. Some
created them consciously, knowing well that they’ll need to learn from
the results of their unfolding. I belong to this group, and offer this writ-
ing as a possibility for learning in the young field of theory about women
producers.
SARAJEVO, YUGOSLAVIA, 1971
My sister is 13 and I am 4 years old. She is going to both general education
elementary school and elementary music school, which was then com-
mon. Being her little sister, she teaches me Für Elise by L.V. Beethoven,
two hands. As my feet couldn’t reach the piano pedals, she tells me I could
play loudly in places I want to. She takes me to her piano teacher to
show me off. I play the entire piece and, before I finished, there are other
teachers entering the room through the very, very tall, Austro-Habsburg
wooden double doors, and then more teachers. I am making sound with
my hands, just as I please, and they seem to be captivated by it. I enjoy
myself immensely. I didn’t know at the time that I would be, years later,
playing the Minimoog synthesizer with the same kind of exhilaration, a
kind of free abandon in the inclusion of images I felt were missing since
I couldn’t touch the pedals with my feet.
179 Women in Audio
SARAJEVO, YUGOSLAVIA, 1974
Mali Slager is a children’s festival of song, and I’m singing “The Straw-
berry Gardener” with the Sarajevo Symphony. It is the only song in minor
key – this I know because I sneaked into the hall during rehearsals to
hear all the other contestants. I am to sing in minor key with a choir!
That is a pleasing thought. At home, the writer of the song comes with his
black achten taschen filled with handwritten notes on staff paper. To this
day I don’t remember names well, but I know his: Edo Pandur. I think he
is very important and interesting because he can imagine what his piano
playing will wind up sounding like as an entire orchestra. I wish to tell him
that I too sometimes imagine sounds and things while I play the piano. The
pieces my teacher gives me have little stories hidden in them. His face is
serious though, and I don’t dare disturb the little time he seems to always
have with me. I know I can sing the tone leading to the chorus really well
(later on I discover it’s called a leading tone in harmony), and I like how
hearing me do it brings a fleeting smile to his solemn face. In the song, the
lyrics talk about a butterfly who, riding as a knight on an early morning
ray of light, lands on a poppy petal. My mother wants me to motion with
my hand to the sky at that point in the song, since I was going to be on
TV. During the live televised event, the live orchestra, the choir, the big
microphone, and the dark chocolate-colored dress I didn’t like all con-
verge. I start to sing the second verse instead of the first, while motioning
with my hand to the sky. I do a decreasing of volume in my voice and slow
down the time in my head. I anticipate the entrance of the horns and land
the remainder of the first verse correctly, switch the lyrics of the second
so that they were not heard twice and that it all makes good sense for my
Strawberry girl. That night, I learned that I can manipulate what is heard,
and that the perception of sound differs from person to person. The audi-
ence apparently knew nothing of my mess-up.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA, 1978
I am sitting on a tall wall that surrounds the elementary school – a slight
little girl with golden hair. My dad was supposed to pick me up, but he
isn’t here. As the minutes go by, dread and then fear start to fill my chest.
The sense of time seems stretched, unattainable. The schoolyard echoes
with the rhythm of girls playing hopscotch: “A-B-C-D-College, A-B-C-
D-College!” This was Addis’s best school, with British and local kids
in attendance, as well as some stand-alones like myself. I strain to focus
on the quintuplets as they start to form sonic arcs with some counting in
Amharic (ānidi, huleti, šositi, ārati, āmisiti) coming from the left field.
Then there is the sound of the 1970 Mercedes my dad drove – off-white
with navy leather seats – passing by with a Doppler kind of effect as it cir-
cles around and then vanishes through the school gate. In my mind all this
is a language of salvation. Looking back, I didn’t know if I heard music
in all that clamor to suppress fear, or if my fear opened up a new kind of
space for sound. All I knew was that I was going to see my dog Jimma
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