PlaySpace (PS) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal dedicated to critical perspectives on performance research.
Faculty of Performing Arts, University of Stavanger
‘Land of Heart’s Desire’ – Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857–1930) and the Songs of the Hebrides
Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857–1930), daughter of famous Scots tenor David Kennedy, was a Scottish pianist, music teacher, suffragette, and collector of Gaelic songs. She toured the world as her father’s accompanist, studied singing in Milan and Paris, and read music at the University of Edinburgh. Widowed with two children to support, she taught piano and singing in Edinburgh, becoming part of the city’s avant-garde Celtic Revival circles. After visiting Eriskay in 1905, she collected, arranged, and published the Songs of the Hebrides, in collaboration with Gaelic editor Kenneth Macleod. With English composer Granville Bantock, she created The Seal Woman: A Celtic Folk Opera, premiered in Birmingham in 1924. Maligned after her death for exploiting and misinterpreting Gaelic culture, her oeuvre vanished from recital programmes, but her consummate art song versions of Gaelic traditional songs would merit their place in the standard art song repertoire, giving presence to both Gaelic Scotland among the Late-Romantic voices from all corners of Europe and a remarkable Scotswoman among British composers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Per Ahlander https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Exploring Berta Alves de Sousa's vocal chamber works
Berta Alves de Sousa (1906–1985) remains a forgotten figure in the history of Portuguese music, despite her pivotal role as a composer of vocal chamber repertoire in the mid-20th century. This article explores her life and contributions, focusing on her art songs, which draw on Portuguese literary traditions while incorporating influences such as Germanic and French musical styles. Her works, mostly composed during the 1930s and 1940s, reflect both personal creativity and an engagement with the nationalist cultural policies of the Estado Novo. The dispersal of her manuscripts across various collections hinders the study of her compositional chronology, but her artistic evolution—from late Romanticism to Impressionism and neo-modality—is evident. The 21-song cycle Promontório Sacro (1965–66) showcases the maturity of her style, characterised by lyrical melodies, an expressive vocal style, and complex harmonic textures. This article advocates for a renewed recognition of her critical contributions to Portuguese music.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Barros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
‘Higher Daughters’ – Women Composers in Viennese musical life in 1928
A study on the representation of art songs in Viennese musical life in 1928, the year in which both the 100th anniversary of Franz Schubert's death as well as the 25th anniversary of Hugo Wolf's death were commemorated, showed that far more than 3400 songs had been performed in concerts and on radio broadcasts. About 450 of these songs were written by 180 Austrian composers living at the time, including eleven female composers. In this paper these artists’ origins, education, living and production conditions as well as their professional and private networks will be described and the article will be rounded off by an exemplary presentation of a selected song from these composers‘ rich song oeuvres.
Copyright (c) 2025 Judith Kopecky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
As both gender and exile music research deal with ruptures in biographies and a scatteredness of remaining sources, women musicians affected by escape and exile are often confronted with a double erasure from music history. An example is Felice Wolmut—singer, composer, music therapist and pedagogue—whose estate lies scattered across various archives and whose story and musical creations remain unpublished to this day. Her ego documents draw a fascinating image of an intellectual musician, born in the Vienna of the Fien de Siecle, socialised in Red Vienna, who escaped Nazi Vienna and started a completely new life in exile in the USA. The sources offer insights into Wolmut's views on the artistic and political developments of the time and on the violent, patriarchal societies she was part of. Her autobiography, written in the late 1970s, reveals just as much about the 80-year-old narrating Wolmut as it does about the younger, narrated Wolmut. This article is based on a critical assessment of the sources, asking how they can help construct the historical figure ‘Felice Wolmut’, a woman and a musician whose voice has historiographically been (made) forgotten.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marie-Anne Kohl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Throughout history, female musicians have often been expected to be charming, young, and look attractive, but not to demonstrate mastery greater than their male counterparts. This social expectation has existed since female musicians appeared. One outcome of this emphasis on appearance rather than musical involvement is that after the death of female musicians, their impact is not nearly as documented as is the case for male musicians. ‘She’ is not recognised not only during her lifetime, but also posthumously. This paper introduces two musicians from Japan and the UK who lived at the same time - Nobu Koda (1870-1946) and Marjorie Hayward (1885-1953). I use concert reviews to demonstrate their backgrounds, as case studies of female violinists of the time. The first person in a community often receives an especially intense backlash - this was the case for Nobu Koda, the first composer of western classical music in Japan. Koda was a violinist, pianist, a teacher, and a composer, and was the first person who studied abroad as a Japanese musician. Although her outstanding talent and career, she was forced to quit her job in the music institute because of the negative campaign by competitors for her position of head of the department. Despite her 30-year contribution as an educator at the Royal Academy of Music, it is very hard to find the information about Marjorie Hayward the violinist today. There are many recordings of the broadcasts she made, however, further stories about her are not yet available. She started her professional career as a child prodigy, and many concert reviews in her childhood can be found, but the number of reviews decreased year by year. Comparing these two, we can see what kind of situations women have faced, and the detail of differences in the philosophies towards music in those two countries, at the dawn of western classical music in Japan, and at the same time in the UK.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maho Harada https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Copyright (c) 2025 Lise Karin Meling https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Per Dahl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
‘Delia’s Gone, But I’m Settling the Score’
This article explores the intersection of vocal aesthetics, gender, and performance in the tradition of murder ballads, a genre rooted in historical narratives of femicide and gendered violence. Once serving as a blend of journalism, entertainment, and (moralizing) cautionary tales, these ballads evolved from impersonal storytelling to largely centering the interiority of male perpetrators, further reinforcing implicit misogyny and stereotypical portrayals of women, yet have also been continuously appropriated by female performers for their own, varied purposes. Following a personal reflection on this author’s relationship to an admittedly problematic genre, the issue of vocal aesthetics and performance are centered. Thereafter the genre’s more recent developments vis-à-vis gender and performance are traced, noting trends within the 20th century. Finally, 21st century reinterpretations by female artists who use the ballad both to reclaim power, adopting male-coded violence, and/or as a form of protest, are examined more closely. By foregrounding marginalized voices and addressing intersections of race, class, and gender, contemporary murder ballads may sometimes transcend their origins, becoming vehicles for social critique and resistance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Chanda VanderHart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Disturbing Jazz Compositional Canons through a Transdisciplinary Improvisational Approach
In October of 2024, Oded Ben-Horin (of Western Norway University of Applied Science) and myself experimented with a transdisciplinary and improvisatory approach towards research and education within jazz at the VOW Erasmus+ international training conference. We set out to interrogate modes of valorisation within the jazz sphere, especially given the lack of women composers represented in canonical jazz works. Our format challenged pervasive mechanisms by which particular artists come to occupy spaces of agency and prestige within the jazz world. Given the renewed interest in music’s immediate and material impact upon the body and its perseverance, and especially upon the performatively gendered bodies of jazz’s performance spaces, our presentation adopted a transdisciplinary (TD) approach and redirected this materiality to challenge notions of ownership through creative musical improvisation across musical genres and disciplines. This framework provided space for experimentation with our conscious, in-the-moment understanding of intra-action of disciplines within the Voices of Women project, enabling us to approach the material and discursive in an integral way. Specifically, we aimed to intervene in the existing barriers to canonical status, by drawing attention to under-recognized female jazz agents, especially Lil Hardin Armstrong, and the materials that evidence her many innovations, while also engaging dynamically with the material traces of her career. In our presentation, we gained new insights through musicological and historical analysis of new materials, which we then integrated into our improvisations, sometimes with each other and sometimes in dialogue with Hardin Armstrong’s media. Our TD, improvisatory approach aimed to integrate study and practice of little referenced materials of jazz women to allow various forms of knowledge to collide; through this, we simultaneously argued that, and practiced how, knowledge and insight do not pre-exist those collisions across disciplines. Thus, we exemplify a real-time performative approach to scientific practices which acknowledge that knowing necessarily occurs through the body and by means of direct material engagement with the world, past and present.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kristin Mcgee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper examines the life and work of Josephine Lang (1815–1880) within the context of Munich’s musical culture between 1827 and 1842. Drawing on a variety of sources, including historical newspapers, city maps, travel guides, and archival materials, the study explores Lang’s activities as a composer and performer, emphasizing the interplay between the spaces where her music was performed and the networks of musicians, patrons, and institutions that shaped her career. Special attention is given to her reception in the Munich press, which portrayed her as a “tone poetess” and celebrated her originality, emotional depth, and technical skill. By analyzing press reports and reconstructing performances of her songs, this paper highlights how Lang’s figurative voice as a composer resonated alongside her literal voice as a performer. This dual perspective not only sheds light on Lang’s significance but also offers insights into the dynamics of Munich’s musical culture, revealing the interdependence of spaces, actors, and cultural practices in shaping artistic life.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Magdalena Bredenbach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Within this paper I will explore the conceptual underpinnings and artistic processes behind two new works written for me by composer Geoffrey King; ‘Little Siren of the Stage’ and ‘Cuzzoni’s Letter’. These pieces make central the historical identity of female performer Francesca Cuzzoni, for whom Handel constructed roles well known in our contemporary operatic canon. This work forms part of my PhD research at the Royal Academy of Music in which I examine female performing identity across time, using Handel’s opera seria as a case study. In this article I question what contemporary operatic practitioners can learn about their identities via mirroring and centralising the historical performer’s influence over the historical, usually male, figure of the composer. At the crux of this paper is a discussion around what working with the lesser-heard voices of historical female performers can tell us about ourselves within the discipline of operatic performance today.
Copyright (c) 2025 Victoria Hodgkinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
In 1996 and 1998, I came across music of female composers thought to be lost: first, orchestral and piano music, orchestral songs and the performance material of a feminist operetta by Lou Koster (1889-1973) and two years later, the entire musical estate of Helen Buchholtz (1877-1953). In contrast to Lou Koster, Buchholtz had been completely forgotten at the time. In 1999, the heir to Buchholtz's estate decided to make the manuscripts, which he had kept in his cellar for around 50 years, available to the public. Thanks to his decision, I was able to found and manage the Helen Buchholtz Archive at the feminist documentation center CID |Fraen an Gender. The Lou Koster Archive was opened three years later. Collections on contemporary female composers from Luxembourg were added in the following years. The aim of these new archives was not only to make the music accessible again, but also to research it, promote it through educational projects, edit it and have it performed again in concerts, as well as recorded on CDs. Since Buchholtz’s music was completely forgotten and there were no recordings of it, the history of interpretation of her music was a blank slate. To bring the works back to life, I worked together with various interpreters: pianists, singers, and orchestras. Due to these projects, the two composers have become better known and their music is now being performed again in Luxembourg as well as abroad. An important aspect of my work with the historical music was to bring it into dialogue with contemporary music. I therefore invited female composers to write new music inspired by Buchholtz and Koster. The commissioned compositions were premiered in concerts and most of them were recorded. In 2022, a new research project titled MuGi.lu (Music and Gender in Luxembourg) was launched at the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with MUGI (Musik und Gender im Internet, a joint research project of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar). Thus, the archival, research and music mediation work that has been carried out at the CID |Fraen an Gender for the last 25 years is now being continued at the University of Luxembourg in a new form: with the development of digital archives, an emphasis on oral history film interviews and the project's own homepage, which focuses on sources of different materiality (https://mugi.lu).
Copyright (c) 2025 Danielle Roster https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
The English composer Clara Macirone (1821-1914) and her music have often been seen as the embodiment of Victorian gendered sensibility and this, alongside the dismissive attitudes towards what has been seen as her alma mater the Royal Academy of Music’s concentration on amateur music-making in the nineteenth century, has led to a misinterpretation of her place in her musical milieu. Forced from an early age to become the sole provider for her parents and siblings, Macirone’s clarity of thought and understanding of the means by which she was proscribed through her gender offers us a vivid contemporary account of women’s relationship with the musical world about them. This paper uses Macirone as a case study of ways that assumptions have either devalued women’s music-making as both composers and performers, or written them out of music history altogether.
Copyright (c) 2025 Briony Cox-Williams https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Copyright (c) 2024 Per Dahl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Egge – en kontrapunktisk norsk mellomkrigstidscollage
Copyright (c) 2024 Olaf Eggestad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Harmony Analysis Tasks in the Music Theory Admission Test for Higher Music Education in Norway
The digital music theory admission test for higher music education in Norway uses two alternative symbol systems for harmony analysis. In the view adopted here, both systems are unnecessarily complex for an admission test, where a lower level of theoretical knowledge would suffice. In addition, both systems focus on the so-called Euroclassical music tradition and largely ignore the conventions of other musical styles. Moreover, the literature suggested for candidates preparing for the test is not properly aligned with the test. This article outlines the harmony tasks in the admission test, discusses issues with the test design, reviews the literature suggested for candidates, and explores the symbol systems used in the test. As a proposal for development, the article suggests that a different analysis system be used for the test.
Copyright (c) 2024 Esa Lilja https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Lise Karin Meling https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Sign and Expression in Performing Stravinsky's Neoclassical Works
The signs and expressions on the sheet music are the pivotal point of communication between the composer’s idea of the musical work and the musician’s interpretation. Performing Stravinsky’s neoclassical works is challenging because he gives guidance through various media and on several intellectual levels through his books, scores, and recordings. In a multi-layered communication model, the differences and discrepancies between his writings, the vocabulary of articulation in his published scores, and his interpretations of his music on recordings will be analysed. In performing his neoclassical works, it is necessary to bear in mind the subjective and intersubjective approach to interpretation in the way Stravinsky demonstrates in his recordings and especially in the vocabulary of articulation signs in neoclassical works.
Denne petiten skal handle om den tradisjonelle håndhilsningen. Det å føre den høyre hånden frem mot den du ville hilse på.
Copyright (c) 2023 Per Dahl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Lise Karin Meling https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Yemen through the lens of Hayat Al-Sharif
When I started my photography journey, I travelled through seven governorates to document Yemeni heritage, handcraft and art. I initialized my work with aid from an artisans organization based in Washington DC. After the war started, I have been working with humanitarian projects to illustrate stories of the suffering of Yemeni women and children.
Copyright (c) 2023 Hayat Al-Sharif https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this essay I analyze how the artifacts of questioning and listening became resourceful in the procedure of excavating the personal and political reasons behind the migration journey my maternal grandmother Voinha (who turned 100 years old on April 08th 2021 and passed away on March 06th 2022) embarked on in 1945 from Ananindeua and Belém (Amazon rainforest region) to Rio de Janeiro (BR); and further, my own immigration journey from Latin America to the Middle East and on to northern Europe, fifteen years ago. How coupling questioning with listening allowed an oppressed woman to speak for herself, fostering in this way dramaturgies that brought awareness to feminist empowerment as a means to tackle the colonial and patriarchal ways in which the Brazilian national identity, among many others, is constructed. The writing style is mainly anecdotal and based on conversations I had with Voinha on different occasions. The recordings of our last in-person encounter on September 15th 2018 became the foundation for the performance Feliz Aniversário, created primarily as a way of giving Voinha agency in telling her own migration journey. Excerpts of this audio and video footage will be further analyzed alongside this essay. The methodology adopted is autoethnography with the intention to offer nuanced, complex, and specific knowledge about particular lives, experiences and relationships (Adams, Jones, Ellis 2014). Within autoethnographical methodological tools, I delve on reflexivity with the aim of troubling the relationship between researchers ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and offering a re-examination of the paradigm modernity/coloniality as simultaneously shaped through specific articulations of race, gender and sexuality (Lugones 2007). The final intention is to analyze how turning back to my ancestors’ and my own experiences, identities, and their socio-political implications; how analyzing them according to gender and queer theories and from a decolonial perspective, could potentialize my current practice focused on autobiographical performance. One last important point to be acknowledged is my role as an artist-researcher examining the complex ethical and creative processes of working with intimate family memories, observing the growing necessity of developing dramaturgies of care and resistance (Malzacher 2008).
Copyright (c) 2023 Iury Salustiano Trojaborg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
HIP as a Creative Tool for Performance Design
In the 20th century a wave of experimentation and discussion hit most artistic disciplines. As pianist-researcher Mine Dogantan-Dack points out, classical music has been slow to join in. Although composers have been experimenting with the musical language, classical music performance as an artistic practice has relatively stayed untouched. In the area of vocal music, the traditional recital format with the singer standing by the piano is THE standard. In my doctoral research project, I aim to challenge and explore alternatives to this traditional format. I start by investigating the original performance practice of Satie’s mélodies to then design three different performances of this repertoire using various artistic methods and theoretic concepts. The first one is based on the approach known as historical informed performance (HIP). Satie’s mélodies are little known and seldom performed. They are also difficult to appreciate at a first hearing: incredibly short, condensed in their simplicity, lacking catchy melodies and with obscure texts. My hypothesis is that the standard way of performing them, as a static vocal chamber music recital, doesn’t suit them and makes it in fact harder for the public to appreciate them. Investigating the original performance practice then became a way to rediscover other aspects of the music, beyond the dogmas of the score, and to find inspiration for creating alternative modes of presenting classical vocal chamber music. In this paper I retrace my use of HIP as a creative tool for designing performances of classical music.
Copyright (c) 2023 Heloise Baldelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This essay builds on the author’s spectatorship of the monumental performance installation, O Barco/The Boat, by Grada Kilomba, during its opening in Lisbon on September 3, 2021. Drawing inspiration from that work, the essay explores the concepts of spiral time and oraliture, as presented in Leda Maria Martins’ scholarship within performance studies, culminating in the introduction of the notion of decolonial unearthings. The text further presents how the idea was coined in the context of the author’s practice, research, and archive. The development of decolonial unearthings as a conceptual tool is supported in the study of European colonial history, especially the transatlantic traffic of enslaved people and Afro-diaspora Orisha mythology. Unearthing and remembering are thus regarded as steps toward the healing of colonial wounds.
Copyright (c) 2023 Deise Faria Nunes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Designing Emergent and Self-Organized Play Space
In this paper I will present a project for a ”play space” where I was asked to present a design for Stavanger Forum. This project is a good example of a self-organized and Template Algorithm design that triggers and attracts the Multiplicity design needed for a de-colonization. Update 14.12.2024: New file uploaded, with two new pictures and some ortographic corrections.
Copyright (c) 2023 Randy Naylor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Alternative Forms and Approaches to Operatic Practice in Australia
This timely research presents an excerpt of my analysis of opera and operatic practice in Australia in 2021. The aim of the broader research is to interrogate the sustainability, viability and evolution of the Australian operatic field. Situated during the globally recognised Coronavirus pandemic era, this qualitative research project was conducted over the period 2018–2021. The fieldwork component of the research is an investigation conducted through long-form interviews with a selection of the central figures in the operatic field in Australia today. This excerpt is from Chapter 8, Part III Stories We Tell: Making and Staging Opera in Australia. I examine how and why repertoire opera is being reframed, and who is taking the lead in this reframing, juxtaposed with the personal and societal cost of performing unexamined extant opera works and perpetuating the ‘opera gaze’. The vision and division of the operatic field is deconstructed in an exploration of contemporary Australian opera and contemporary practices, fictional ritual spaces, and explorations of gender, Aboriginal opera and decolonising the postcolonial operatic lens.
Australia, decolonisation, diversity, First Nations, opera, power,
Copyright (c) 2023 Sally Blackwood https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Decolonizing curatorial ways: Curating from Sámi perspective
The paper explores multiple perspectives on curating indigenous art and builds upon the case project of the nongraduate program for Sámicurators and its part realized in autumn 2022 at the SámiCenter for Contemporary Art in Karasjok. The curatorial ways are discussed from a threefold perspective: decolonizing curatorial practice, nonhierarchy of narratives, and pluriversal curating. The findings outline the main tools applied, such as the involvement of Sámicurators and scholars, nonindigenous scholars working with Indigenous art, the use of the lecture, presentation, and experience formats, and language use. The value of the project was in the unfolding of a broad perspective of what curating Indigenous art and research can be.
Copyright (c) 2023 Marija Griniuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The expression 'in tune' is established among musicians and music lovers but is also used allegorically in other contexts. I present a multi-layered model of communication that can unveil the background and diverse logic establishing concepts we use on artefacts and their expressions. The model can be seen as a tilted version of Ogden's triangle, where the fundamental element is the arbitrary connection between the sign and its expression. The model develops several layers of concepts to make an analysis of what colonized art is. Examples from music demonstrate that the expression 'in tune' is a colonized understanding of certain structures of scale systems developed within a historical and socioeconomic context. This kind of understanding makes adjustments to the intentions of a musical expression, as well as to the identification and interpretation of a musical performance. Update 14.12.2024: New file uploaded, with some corrections in footnotes.
Copyright (c) 2022 Forfatteren https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Something you would balk from thinking about
Copyright (c) 2022 The author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0