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Hamer, Laura and Minors, Helen Julia
(2025).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003024767-1
Abstract
Throughout our careers in music education, we have both benefitted from three significant experiences which have led us to co-edit this book. Firstly, we have both had significant support, guidance, and mentorship from women in the music industries who had broken part of the glass ceiling, who had advocated for change, and who made efforts to facilitate us within the early twenty-first century to enable us to become autonomous, individual thinkers within our fields. Secondly, we both were given the opportunity to become managers in Higher Education and specifically to lead music departments unusually early (28–30) in our careers, rising to the position where our choices and decisions impacted entire student cohorts and teams of staff. Thirdly, we have both developed our research to encompass our passions, and at the same time this has developed our interests in making change for the better, to support wider access to music education, to ensure we facilitate the diversification of curricula, and so diversify the pipeline into the music industries. Our careers have been in different institutions, though we both chose to volunteer for the National Association of Music in Higher Education (now called MusicHE), and both have been trained as coaches and mentors. These activities have helped us to consider the subject within a national and global context in relation to policy and regulatory changes, and from this macro level, consider the wellbeing and needs of the staff we have had the good fortune to lead and to support, to collaborate with, and to explore the possibilities of our subject. This personal experience, the ‘I’ of our positionality, made us acutely aware of the barriers facing people across the music industries, both historically and currently. We wanted to explore this in more detail. We are very aware that many voices bring many experiences, and together, we can share examples of good practice, share stories and experience to help others, and also give voices to composers, musicians, artists, and craftspeople who perhaps have been marginalised. To this end, this book has been a labour of love for us. We chose to start this journey with launching a conference, the International Women and/ in Musical Leadership Conference, which we hosted in London between 7–9 March 2019 with the aim, as the conference website notes, to challenge and explore musical leadership:
Musical leadership remains ones of the most male-dominated musical areas. As late as 2013, female conductors achieved a significant first, when Marin Alsop became the first woman to direct the Last Night of the Proms. Although female composers, songwriters, and performers have attracted significant scholarly attention, the issue of women's musical leadership remains intriguingly under researched. This conference – timed to coincide with International Women's Day 2019 – seeks both to redress this by focusing upon the participation of women in musical leadership (understood in the broadest possible sense) and to promote academic-practitioner dialogue. 1
The conference brought together over 70 colleagues from more than 20 countries. The reach, the interest, and the relevance were global. Moreover, the urgency of the issues – to tackle inequalities, to give voice to underrepresented women, and to readdress industry disparities in programming, commissioning, renumeration, and in leadership – was stark. As such, this volume is extensive in bringing together many voices from an open call for contributions. Across its 48 chapters and 70 authors, collated into 6 parts, we have contributions and examples from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, England, Finland, France, Germany, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Malaya, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Scotland, Spain, Sri Lanka, UK, Uruguay, USA, and Wales.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
