Women's Music for the Screen

Diverse Narratives in Sound

Felicity Wilcox, Felicity Wilcox

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429559945
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Musique

Women' s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound shines a long-overdue light on the works and lives of female-identifying screen composers. Bringing together composer profiles, exclusive interview excerpts, and industry case studies, this volume showcases their achievements and reflects on the systemic gender biases women have faced in an industry that has long excluded them. Across 16 essays, an international array of contributors present a wealth of research data, biographical content, and musical analysis of film, television, and video game scores to understand how the industry excludes women, the consequences of these deficits, and why such inequities persist – and to document women's rich contributions to screen music in diverse styles and genres.The chapters amplify the voices of women composers including Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Anne Dudley, Rachel Portman, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Mica Levi, Winifred Phillips, and more. From the mid-twentieth century to the present, and from classic Hollywood scores to pioneering electronic music, these are the stories and achievements of the women who have managed to forge successful careers in a male-dominated arena. Suitable for researchers, educators, and students alike, Women's Music for the Screen urges the screen music industry to consider these sounds and stories in a way it hasn't before: as voices that more accurately reflect the world we all share.

1

Waiting for a Break

Barriers to Career Progression in a Man’s Industry

Catherine Strong and Fabian Cannizzo

DOI: 10.4324/9780429264924-2

Introduction

Film composers have been overlooked in studies of gender in film and music, due in part to their role not fitting easily into either the core group of creatives associated with making a film, or the art world of people who just perform music. For example, the otherwise very successful Gender Matters initiative in Australia, and the research it is based on (French 2014), do not include screen composers as a category of analysis. In recent years, however, data have started to emerge– often coming out of research done by industry bodies– that show that screen composition has traditionally been, and still remains, one of the most gender unequal specialties of music making. The proportion of people claiming royalties for screen composition (through collection agencies in countries like the US, Canada, and Australia) who are women is no more than 15% (see Strong and Cannizzo 2017; Gauthier and Freeman 2018, p. iv; Burlingame 2016). However, even this low number does not demonstrate the full extent of women’s exclusion, as women’s actual participation on feature films is lower still. For example, in the USA, from 2014–2016 only 1% to 2% of composers working on the top 250 films at the box office were women (Follows et al. 2016, p. 3), and in the UK screen composition has the lowest rates for women of all key creative roles in films, at only 6% (ibid, p. 27). This chapter will give an overview of the current state of the screen composition industries in the countries represented by some of the individual composers in this collection, using work by the authors in the Australian context for in-depth analysis of the issues identified. The aim is to understand what factors are keeping women from succeeding in this area of creative work.

Reasons for these low participation rates include but are not limited to: women being excluded from networks that are dominated by men; difficulty maintaining the type of schedules required in a high-pressure industry when also dealing with caring responsibilities; and a lack of role models and recognition for women. Women composers also encounter entrenched gender bias in film industry culture, and more overt expressions of sexism that make them feel excluded from or not safe in the industry, including, at times, sexual harassment and assault. Understanding the barriers women face is vital in developing ways to increase their presence in screen composition, and to enable us to fully appreciate the achievements of the women discussed in this volume. This chapter will look in detail at each of these areas, using research on gender in music, film, the creative industries, and wider society, but in particular drawing on empirical research from a stand-alone study on screen composition conducted by the authors in Australia in 2016–2017. This study comprised a survey administered online to all screen composers claiming royalties through the Australian Performing Rights Association and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (APRA AMCOS), and in-depth interviews with 27 screen composers (men and women, with none identifying outside these two categories). The data from this study will be used to flesh out and illuminate the broader trends occurring across countries, and closely echoes the finding of similar work done in Canada (Gauthier and Freeman 2018).

Gender Roles, Music, and Sexism

To paraphrase Marx (1968, p. 3), while we may choose how to live our lives, we always make these choices in a world organised and constructed by those who came before us, and whose value systems shape the way we understand ourselves and those around us. Screen composition is undertaken in a society that has inequality between the genders built into its very fabric, along with other notions such as heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality is the norm), a binary gender system that sets up ‘men’ and ‘women’ as the two categories that everyone should fit into, and the idea that people should be cisgendered (that is, they should identify with their sex assigned at birth). While it should be noted that none of these systems of belief are absolute, and all are constantly being challenged and resisted in various ways (including through the scholarship that this book presents), the ideas that they represent still serve to structure the conditions of people’s lives.

Within this system certain types of work have been marked out as being more suited to men, and others as being appropriate for women. This is usually related to other characteristics that, in this binary way of thinking, have been associated with these genders; for example, as women are positioned as being more nurturing, they dominate in professions such as nursing or teaching, whereas men, positioned as more adept at technical work, are present in far greater numbers than women in scientific jobs such as engineering or IT. The anti-social or non-conventional behaviour of men can therefore also be more easily excused as a by-product of a mind focused more on perfecting technical talent than on caring for others. These types of assumptions about who is better at doing what flow through to creative activities. On a fundamental level, women are underrepresented in the creative industries across the board (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2015), and in music making (Strong and Raine 2019) and film making (French 2014) more specifically. However, the particularly low numbers of women in screen composition warrant further scrutiny in this area.

Composition itself has been framed as a masculine activity, with recent studies demonstrating the dearth of works by women composers being performed worldwide. In the 2019–2020 concert season, for example, in 1,505 performances by 15 of the top orchestras worldwide, only 8.2% included pieces by women composers (Donne Women in Music 2019). In addition to this, the music studio (a place that screen composers often need familiarity with) is also strongly coded as being a technological environment that women do not belong in. While the music industry is finding space for women in areas that they had been previously excluded from such as guitar playing, music engineers and producers remain overwhelmingly men, with only 2% of producers identifying as female in the US (Smith et al. 2018, p.5; see also Hopkins and Berkers 2019). Even as production equipment becomes simpler, more accessible, and cheaper, and despite many programmes and initiatives designed to get women engaging with such technology more, we continue to see, for example, far greater numbers of men than women enrolling in education related to it (Born and Devine 2015). In this way, there are barriers to women’s entry into this field that are related to socialisation and require fundamental societal shifts to take place to bring about significant improvement.

Women who do make their way into this space find that their presence is unusual and will be resisted in various ways. This can include through denying women opportunities on the basis of their gender alone, or through comments or behaviours that demonstrate a sexist attitude in that they belittle either a specific woman or women as a group, or throw doubt upon women’s ability to do the job to the same standard as men. For example, one Australian interviewee described men in the recording studio using statements like ‘put some balls on that woman’ when criticising a man’s musical performance, making it clear that ‘woman’ was an undesirable category to be in. Another composer talked about extra barriers being put in her way when she tried to get into a screen composition course, in comparison to the men also applying:

I had to really… jump through so many hoops even to be admitted, which I subsequently found out later that what I had to submit was way above and beyond what my fellow classmates had to do. So my interview alone went for two to three hours just to be admitted. But not only that, they made me go and write a piece to film, which I’d never done before… But I had no studio. I really had no experience. Then, nevertheless, I went away and did it, and it cost me money to hire a studio. But I had to do that, and none of my [male] classmates had to do that.

In Canada, women similarly reported being asked to do more work than their male colleagues to get a job, being more likely to be ‘asked to write a piece on spec without interaction with a client (cattle call)’ (Gauthier and Freeman 2018, p. vii). These forms of sexism that have often been naturalised to the point that they become hard to see (especially for men) are, however, reinforced at times by explicit displays that serve to intimidate, demean and, at times, physically hurt women. While rare, by being within the realm of possibility, they put all women on notice that there is a risk to them in working in such highly masculinised spaces. In the study of screen composers in Australia, for example, 36% of the women surveyed agreed that sexual harassment was ‘common’ in the industry, with a number providing anecdotal evidence of situations where they or someone they knew had endured such behaviour. While the Canadian study did not provide a statistical breakdown of responses in this area, they also included anecdotal responses, such as one woman reporting that she had ‘been approached inappropriately by male industry members many times’ (Gauthier and Freeman 2018, p. 22–23).

Networked Organisations

Access to informal social and professional networks is central to screen composers’ abilities to build and maintain their careers. Screen composition work is rarely advertised through formal job advertisements, rather circulating through social connections. In Australia, for instance, the majority of respondents described gaining work through personal contacts, both professional and through friends and family. Participants emphasised a need to maintain connections to networks, and how specific relationships and connections had led to ongoing employment opportunities. Socialisation and job seeking are highly interrelated activities for screen composers.

For those more integrated into reliable professional networks, the job-seeking process is described in terms of sociality, friendship, and the mundane routine of working life. The predominance of social networks and informal industry contacts in gaining access to work makes sociability an ongoing concern for gender equality and the sustainability of careers in screen music composition. Women screen composers often reported feeling at a disadvantage in competing with male colleagues for similar roles and opportunities and that some workplaces and social groups in the music industry were not welcoming to women. In Canada, women reported that ‘not knowing the right people in the industry’ was a major barrier to their career progression (ibid., p. ix). Similarly, the following narratives are typical of the kinds of exclusion reported by women screen composers in Australia, many of whom used the phrase ‘boys’ club’ to describe the organisation of the industry.

A complete boys’ club. And the nature of the industry is that it’s dominated by– not so much by individual composers but by post-production sound companies. And they’re not women. They’re all men. And they don’t tend to employ women… They have big, impressive studio complexes that cost a lot of money to set up. And that’s impressive for potential clients… all the women composers I know… are like me, just sole traders working from their own single studios. It’s a very different scenario.

(Caroline¹)

Experiences of both gendered exclusion from accessing work, and sexual discrimination, were attributed by nearly all participants to a masculine culture or ‘old boys network’ (Gill 2002). Whether working as an employee for a studio or as a freelancer, the composer’s capacity to develop trust with producers, studio heads, or musical directors was widely perceived to depend upon the degree of familiarity or homophily (Wreford 2015). Exclusion from these networks can be highly detrimental to developing a career in film composition. An Australian woman who started her career as an award-winning composer for a nationally televised documentary claimed that her absence from these networks limited her opportunities. An early career win in having work used by a major Australian television network initially gave her a sense of optimism about her chances of succeeding in screen composition:

I actually won [an award for] Best Music for a Documentary for that year… So it was quite successful. And I thought oh great, fantastic, I’ve got the potential for a career here. It didn’t happen though… And I sort of expected having won an award like that… I thought OK, so surely that will put me on the map and maybe I’ll get some– some people might ring me up. And I sent my show reel around to so many producers, but not a tweet.

(Jessica)

When asked why her career had not taken off, Jessica pointe...