r/musicology

[The essay below originally appeared in my Substack. I thought it might chime with a few here]

https://substack.com/home/post/p-219055570

Introduction

There is no moral high ground, no covert misogyny, no challenge to the institutional hydra that could be misconstrued as ‘far right’ or otherwise politically expedient here. Instead, I feel a weary regret about what I’m having to describe below, because while the risk of being misinterpreted is less of a drag than the nefarious purposings of the hydra that need calling out, both are still a drag.

A recent informal stock-take of the contemporary music ecosystem uncovered something quite eerie: I realised that no fewer than five female composers immediately sprang to mind (there are more) who utilise their own personal suffering—particularly mental health issues—in the service of tactical career advancement. It’s not particularly hard to see why this has happened: when an administrative class relinquishes its capacity to evaluate musical substance such as raw technique and architectural ingenuity, fearing that to do so might compromise the social engineering objectives of the state-central funding pots on which its continued comfort depends, a compliance matrix of identity markers and social messaging emerges to fill the vacuum. Enter the era of the Composer-as-Concept-Broker. While this state of affairs affects both male and female composers, the latter have chosen suffering as the most effective tactical crowbar, owing to traditional feminist grievances that are easily relatable by virtue of having already been culturally assimilated. In effect, composers are simply adapting to the imperatives of an ecosystem’s own survival instincts and—crucially, I would argue—confusing empowerment with subjugation. After all, what empowerment can be derived from an administrative class that determines these survival conditions to protect its own funding streams? All composers are affected by this extraction model except perhaps for those in the top tier of institutional visibility who are allowed to carry on as before (or those who have exited the ecosystem entirely).

I also wish to state here, plainly and unequivocally, that the true clinical devastation of mental health emergencies—the stripping away of creative energy, the erosion of cognitive insight, the unremitting sequelae of the initial breakdown, the years of isolation from a community—entails the poleaxing of a career rather than the making of one. This devastation is of a different order altogether from the kind of corporate cosplay of the professional martyr who must pitch polished auditable scripts of acceptable suffering to secure funding for their next project. My contention is not with the composers who do this—they have few valid alternatives—but with the kind of ecosystem that permits and encourages such degradation to occur for its own benefit. This theatre keeps state funders happy if no one else.

The five exhibits below are real female composers whose names I have redacted. My intention is not to blame individuals, but to demonstrate the nature and extent of the degradation at the behest of the institutional hydra. Each anonymous exhibit represents an interchangeable head of that hydra—highly codified typologies that the compliance matrix currently rewards, cultivates, and replicates—where the composer is best understood as an expendable resource that serves to perpetuate the hydra’s life-cycle.

Exhibit One—The Hissing Hydra

Here the composer uses her tinnitus and auditory anomalies in the service of making her work, or ‘research’, legible to the compliance matrix of funding committees. By collaborating with science laboratories she creates an academic cachet that renders her concept amenable to financial support from more than one field. The concept and the process—centering, for example, ‘aural diversity’—are more auditable by such committees than musical substance ever could be. The immunity to criticism lies in the moral shield vouchsafed by personal, medical suffering. In this playground, any negative critique of material craftsmanship is interpreted as aggression towards, and exclusion of, the ‘other’. ‘Otherness’ here is a performative gambit that sits uneasily with, say, the biological otherness of intersex (as distinct from the ideological otherness of ‘queerness’) which remains mostly a private, unmarketed, unglamorised experience for that population. Yet ‘otherness’ sits very comfortably within the modern cult of persona, whose carefully curated visual aesthetic in this case suggests the composer herself is the artwork. There is a logical parallel between this and an OnlyFans account, in the sense of the absolute commodification and exhibition of the intimate, private self for corporate capital.

Exhibit Two—The Ritualising Hydra

Given that alignment has replaced artistic excellence as the primary benchmark, it is not uncommon these days to see the rewarding not only of ideological conformity within the compliance matrix, but also a kind of performative self-framing alongside it. Composers have had to become adept at composing themselves as political agents, cultural representatives and trauma-bearers. Our next exhibit is an example of the latter, a composer-performer who successfully navigates the festival circuit by cashing in on edgy multimedia performance-art spectacle. Taking her cue from artists like Orlan and Marina Abramović, she packages the on-stage re-living of psychological distress—for example panic attacks or PTSD through blood-letting—for a cathartic reclamation of agency. This is gold to festival directors because the package ticks so many desirable boxes at a time when there is no longer any real belief in new music per se; and the ‘hard-hitting spectacle’ automatically generates useful publicity. If an honest listener finds the actual music etiolated or structurally derivative, the cartel reframes the critique as aggression towards a survivor. The moral framing effectively outlaws any objective evaluation.

Exhibit Three—The Infantilising Hydra

This exhibit regards the way in which our entire Western society is structured as injurious to her mental and physical health. She holds the oppressive mechanisms of the patriarchy accountable for her depression and fatigue, and makes a case for the abolition of capitalism, authorship, and evaluation as the only means of relieving her symptoms and making composition inclusive, accessible, and free from psychological and physical strain. As a result, her work on the whole eschews conventional music notation, preferring general instructions for the performers. Her titles are redolent of a certain lost innocence, and foreground community and collaboration, for example, ‘from the trees and from my friends (bean piece 3)’ for orchestra. This kind of response to the world around her can be considered a ‘regression to childhood’—the exact phrase Hans Keller used in summing up Pink Floyd in 19671. Two years earlier, in 1965, Cornelius Cardew had just composed ‘Bun No. 1’, also for orchestra, and to my mind the lineage connecting Cardew and our third exhibit is quite clear. That quaintly English zeitgeist of beans, buns, trees and friends evokes—for me at least—a sort of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ childhood experience; and Cardew soon went on to repudiate capitalism explicitly in favour of Marxism-Leninism, in particular its Maoist agrarian off-shoot. There is a shared predilection for community and collaboration, even if Cardew’s 1970s music rejected graphic scores to focus instead on a kind of populist tonality and jejune, agitprop folksong. Our exhibit has merely added the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s to the mix, and occupies the anomalous position of being the recipient of a state-central (BBC) commission for her orchestra piece, while at the same time denouncing the socio-political infrastructure that enables her career to benefit from such patronage. There is a conspiracy theory (ratified to a certain extent by John Tilbury) that Cardew’s death in 1981 from a hit-and-run driver was caused by MI52; but it seems unlikely that this exhibit’s current ideological compliance with the matrix will endanger her in any way. After all, the current social engineering imprimatur of that matrix includes feminism, outreach, and accessibility, and any grumblings about abolishing capitalism are taken merely as legible tokens of social signalling and ideological fluency.

Exhibit Four—The Spinning Hydra

This exhibit is a curio in this essay in that the disabling acute anxiety it relied on for career advancement over a decade ago—which ‘made normal life impossible’, according to her—has been entirely scrubbed from the composer’s personal website now that peak institutional visibility has been achieved. This editorial tendency is entirely in keeping with the behavioural law I first put forward in my ‘Advice and Encouragement for the Serious Younger Composer’ essay (Substack, May 18^(th) 2026), which states that composers dispense with identity markers when at or near the apex of the professional pyramid, because their music’s autonomous standing would otherwise be compromised. At this level, preserving the illusion of meritocracy for the sake of professional pipelines becomes the most pressing consideration. Thus we can say that the compliance hydra maintains a double standard by demanding performative suffering at lower institutional levels while projecting meritocratic excellence at the summit. I find it a challenge to square the ‘true clinical devastation of mental health emergencies’ I mentioned earlier with the co-opting of a mental health condition as a sort of fashion accessory to be discarded once it has outlived its usefulness: what I understood over a decade ago to be a vulnerable act of radical honesty now seems little more than calculated corporate cosplay. In addition, the web pages I remember visiting in the 2010s about the mental health issues seem to have got lost—as if the raw psychiatric data have been quietly and strategically deleted from the public storefront. It is worth remarking that if this composer considers her carefully stage-managed ascension to be victorious empowerment, then it is also worth remarking that empowerment is irrelevant to a compliance matrix whose self-serving extraction model liquidates artists once their practice, in this case a turntabling-classical fusion, ceases to pay the expected dividends. It would be wise to remember that the new music ecosystem is not about composers as such, but about their usefulness to institutions.

Exhibit Five—The Branching Hydra

Our final exhibit makes forensic use of genealogy when overlaying field recordings, photographs, and interviews with refugees and war survivors connected to her past directly onto passive instrumental backdrops. In this way the composer deftly sidesteps composing in any serious sense of the term. By packaging real-world suffering on a silver platter for prestigious string quartets and orchestral series, an absolute moral shield is manufactured. Criticism can be neutralised as an act of heartless denial, or systemic exclusion, of the victims themselves. When this composer explicitly claims that she ‘almost doesn’t care if someone notices the music behind the story’, the ultimate end-state of the compliance matrix becomes apparent: here is a landscape where musical craft has been exiled to the dimming hinterland, in exchange for the administrative class’s enthusiastic bankrolling of a house-trained, high-concept proxy trading in generational trauma.

The Geometry of the Compliance Matrix

I should stress that not all female composers utilise their suffering for career purposes, unlike the exhibits above. This is in part because not every female composer is as career-driven as these, who tend to assume that a lack of progress, or being stuck at the bottom of the pyramid, signals active discrimination against women. In my ‘Advice and Encouragement’ essay, I also wrote that ‘composers who find themselves near the bottom of the pyramid have not failed. They are simply positioned where almost everyone is positioned. The proportions of the pyramid make that inevitable’. This has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with ‘an ecosystem where scarcity is structural rather than meritocratic’ (ibid.).

At the same time, there is good news for women right now: given how gender-parity programming quotas intersect with the one-in-five baseline ratio of female-to-male practitioners (as observed across university music departments, as well as by the Gaudeamus Foundation3), the odds of career advancement for women, in comparison with men, are currently fantastically and irrefutably in women’s favour, by virtue of basic arithmetic. Of course, it is tempting to conclude from global orchestral data, such as the 2026 Donne Foundation’s report that over 90% of programmed concert hall minutes are filled by male composers’ music4, that discrimination against female composers is alive and kicking. But the data conflate the historical dead canon with contemporary living patronage, and thus wildly distort the contemporary picture.

To those composers who still cannot quite believe they are trapped in a compliance matrix, consider the following:

1. How many times have you taken the advice not to upset conductors, festival directors, record labels, performers, critics, publishers, and so on? What was the reasoning behind that advice? What did you gain or lose by heeding it?

2. How many times have you found it difficult to find institutional support (e.g. publication) for a perspective that might be considered controversial or against the ideological orthodoxy? If so, why might that be?

Of course, I’m not blithely suggesting that there was ever absolute artistic freedom in the halcyon days of yore; what I am suggesting, though, is that compliance in recent years is more predicated on ideology than it has ever been. And that is a huge problem because ideology tends to trounce rational thinking.

Concluding Remarks

It is my sincere hope that this investigative dissection of the compliance matrix results in these anonymous exhibits’ waking up to their precise coordinates. It is time to realise that what seems like empowerment is in fact an elaborately choreographed, extractive swindle. The institutional hydra doesn’t give a fig about your vulnerability—performative or otherwise—as long as it can commodify your suffering for the sake of its own spreadsheets. The moment you stop dancing for the brokers, reclaim artistic sovereignty, and refuse to let an administrative class dictate the terms of your artistic survival, things will start to get real again. Just as women say that the patriarchy is bad for men, I should like to suggest that identity politics—and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in general—are bad for women: they turn women into caricatures of trend-chasing and shallow optics, where the notion of faux feminism5becomes the ascendant ideal.

1

Keller, Hans: Verdict delivered on The Look of the Week, BBC2, originally broadcast May 14^(th), 1967. Musicologist and critic Dr. Hans Keller famously characterised the emerging, loud psychedelic output of early Pink Floyd (represented by Syd Barrett and Roger Waters) as a ‘regression to childhood’, adding his characteristic rhetorical qualification, ‘but, after all, why not?’

2

Tilbury, John: Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished. Copula, 2008. See particularly Chapter 15, and pages 982–1004 regarding Michael Mansfield QC, Jahn Maharg, and the Fascist/National Front context

3

Editorial: ‘Too Much Noise?’ Tempo, Vol. 72, Issue 284 (Cambridge University Press, March 2018), p. 3. The peer-reviewed musicological editorial preserved the documentation from an email exchange with the Gaudeamus Foundation, tracking that out of 336 avant-garde score submissions parsed for the ‘Young Pioneers’ prize cycle, approximately 20% were submitted by women. This 1:4 ratio explicitly correlates with the current postgraduate demographic baseline

4

Donne, Women in Music. Equality & Diversity in Global Repertoire, research report published September 14^(th), 2026. Examining the programming datasets of 110 orchestras across 30 countries during the 2025–2026 season, the report noted that while works by women accounted for 8.5% of overall programmed counts, they constituted only 4.5% of total playing time (totalling 23,526 minutes out of 520,339 scheduled performance minutes). Living male composers continue to be structurally conflated with deceased canonical entries to project an un-nuanced index of active institutional bias

5

Khader, Serene: Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Boston 2024: Beacon Press) unmasks neoliberal, individualistic ‘girlboss’ tokenism as a series of deceptive myths designed to serve affluent, elite actors within the dominant infrastructure while structurally leaving non-elite women behind. See also Katie Martell’s www.fauxfeminism.com, where ‘faux feminism’ is defined as the systematic processing of female empowerment into a shallow tagline or corporate public relations tool