185 Women in Audio
in the room, or talent. It’s about acknowledging the roles people are in (she
is here to do a mix, not to date, or he is here to sing, not to hang) and not
confusing them with the personal set of cultural gender clichés.
In my work, I like to mix genres. I deconstruct, rebuild, repurpose,
imagine, and re-imagine. What brings me joy is to see musicians from
different backgrounds and with expertise in different genres share in
the intimate space of a composition. To me, what they are sharing ulti-
mately is an understanding of and a bending of time. That is one of
the most precious gifts I gain from the mixing of genres. That under-
standing, however, comes from instrumentalists’ – and my – experience
with different musical languages (American minimalism, art and pro-
gressive rock, German classicism, Italian polyphony, Russian roman-
ticism, jazz, ethnic idioms). Once I have a feeling for a musician or
an ensemble, I apply their most appropriate language to the context
of the piece according to my judgement and requirements. There’s a
definitive structure involved, rarely with improvisatory freedoms, and
with notated parts and recorded electronic sound. As opposed to giv-
ing my music to anyone who wants to play it, I like to know who I’m
composing for, if possible. This aesthetic probably resembles a rock
ensemble practice more than that of an ensemble in the classical field,
even though I work with classically trained musicians most of the time.
This is possible now for me because in my work I assume the role of the
producer as well as composer. This means that I can fully take control of
all aspects of performance, timbre, timing, microphone placements, and
the ultimate intention in the sound of a piece. I am drawn to technolo-
gies that hold a promise for the attainment of ‘flow’, or of uninterrupted
and immersive experience in art. As children, we have a glimpse at that
freedom, and then we take on heavy specialization. I aim to reinstate
some of that early flow (“tok”) by creating a language which expresses
the experience of life now and reads much like strings of micro-
euphorias, vectors, prisms, and vines intertwining, branching out, accel-
erating. When I look around, things seem to come out of one another,
much like in a fractal sequence, or a cell splitting. I understand music’s
elements as something organically interconnected. (I talk about this
in the book In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the
United States by Jennifer Kelly.) Music genres don’t hold my interest
because I see them as stultifying, as something that breaks things
apart, and as mere steps toward human emancipation, not their final
destination.
I don’t fantasize that all this should be known to a guy who’s fold-
ing cables with me so that he can gauge what to do and what not to do.
I expect, though, that with global access to data, men and women will
be more open to that which they know little about, and will embrace the
learning. Men and women in the music industry will benefit from creating
opportunities for working together. In music lies freedom, and together,
we are better positioned to free the world from the shackles of prejudice,
pitch/tuning domination, gender bias, genre compartmentalization, tribal-
ism, doctrine, and, ultimately, poverty. It is a win-win situation. I believe
186 Svjetlana Bukvich
that it is where we could head as a species. The way new space can be cre-
ated is by imploding models that don’t work, and music is probably one of
the fastest highways that can teach us that.
SELECTED RESOURCES
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the
Truth About Autism. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of
Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Jaggar, M. Alison. Love & Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.
Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Kelly, Jennifer. In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United
States. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Moorfield, Virgil. The Producer as Composer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Tomkins, Jane. Me and My Shadow: New Literary History, Vol. 19, No. 1.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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