Thammasat University students interested in music, management, business, history, gender studies, sociology, feminism, and related subjects may find a new book useful.

Women’s Leadership in Music: Modes, Legacies, Alliances is an Open Access book available for free download at this link.

The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of women and music.

It is edited by Assistant Professor Iva Nenic, who teaches ethnomusicology and cultural theory at University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia and Dr. Linda Cimardi, an ethnomusicologist at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.

The publisher’s description of the book follows:

Various modes of women’s contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women’s point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women’s agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives – from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology – this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women’s leadership.

The Women in Music organization has the mission to advance the awareness, equity, diversity, heritage, opportunities, and cultural aspects of women in the musical arts through education, support, empowerment, and recognition. Members include record label executives, music-tech entrepreneurs, artist managers, songwriters, musicians, attorneys, recording engineers, agents, publicists, studio owners, music publishers, and marketers.

Internationally, there are branches of Women in Music in Japan, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, among other countries.

In an introduction to the book, the editors note:

So far, women’s participation in global music history has been explored by various disciplines that study music and culture, especially after the expansion of feminist music research in the late 20th century. The gender turn in ethnomusicology and related disciplines, often coupled with feminist theory and practice, initially shed light on genderexclusive music practices, thus adding insights into the less known domains of female music-related activity to the broader map of the knowledge centered on global sonic cultures. A long line of scholars, musicians and activists put their efforts into correcting the negligent consideration of women’s activities in maintaining and creating music cultures by critically discussing the conditions and roles of womanhood in music and society. More specifically, they have highlighted the contributions by female performers, authors and cultural workers, but also pinpointed the constraints and hardship that women face while making music. However, the specific topic of female cultural leadership in relation to music has not been widely examined cross-culturally in contemporary scholarship, especially regarding a conceptual background that avoids the tropes of exceptionality and difference, bringing forth the issues of agency, resistance, collaboration and networking instead. Several locally oriented ethnographic studies as well as more general, cross-cultural edited collections have recently opened up the issues of leadership and gender in music, thus expanding the conventional approaches focused on the figure of a bandleader in music practices, the issue of leading roles within ensembles and the intersection between religious and cultural leadership, to name a few common research directions. While exceptional female performers were indeed praised and androcentric research perspectives were criticized and corrected within academia, the very idea of leadership-through sound, which stipulates that women perform from/through their gendered position, remains to be further explored outside the confinement of business-oriented leadership studies and similar fields that promote the corporate models of efficacy and do not investigate cultural leadership related to different communities at stake. As an alternative and a revision, the concepts of leadership in a wider theoretical sense and in relation to the cultural, economic and political context have been explored through models of transformational leadership and situational leadership and by analyzing women’s leadership in different social domains, among other approaches. More recently, in ethnomusicology, female musicianship has been observed and documented through rich ethnographic accounts highlighting the issue of invisibility in academic and everyday discourses. Moreover, it has identified and analyzed the obstacles encountered by women in relation to ethnicity, race, gender and professionalization. However, less attention has been paid to the shared structural conditions caused by the ever-changing, but persistent patriarchal ideologies, whose broader analysis could reveal more substantial challenges, struggles and identification processes that women in music currently experience. A critical topic to be investigated is continuity and/or disruption in legacies formed by intergenerational and transnational female networks in a contemporary world where local belonging and global proximity work together in specific manners, influenced by sweeping waves of crises and new alliances informed by feminism and other progressive social movements. By asking what can today be considered leadership in culture from women’s points of view and through a comparative perspective, this volume thus explores various modes of contemporary female cultural, social and political leadership by the means of music and as shaped through their different histories and cultural and political contexts. Another important aim of this book is to deconstruct the very notion of leadership by demonstrating that female agency and negotiations of ideas on gender, intersectionality and power, as well as wider social and political issues through music, should be considered a distinct form of cultural leadership, in contrast to their marginalization common in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, women doing (things with) music help improve visibility, stimulate empowerment and embody role models in music scenes both within local communities and in the contemporary global music arena. What is more, they also often tackle the “hard” subjects of inequality, misogyny, social justice and conservativism as they are open to discussing those problems because of their own experience of oppression in various renditions of patriarchy still present worldwide. Although the presented case studies mostly adhere to gender models based on the equation female-woman, our approach to gender and femininity rejects sexual determinism and acknowledges them as experiential self-concepts and embodied social constructs marked by fluidity, contingency and relationality with their multiple and complex personal and social renderings both in the historical and contemporary sense. Starting from this multilayered and flexible conception of femininity and womanhood, we endeavor to explore modes, experiences and notions of leadership with a fresh look. In addition to culture-specific or genre-centered observations in individual chapters, the book offers a transdisciplinary outlook on the issue of leadership, ranging from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology and specific sub-fields such as heritage and disability studies. The complex of chapters presents various female collectives and individuals from a cross-cultural perspective, approached through the conceptualization of female musical leadership, agency and transgression. The topics range from artistic or popular music critique performed by women to the proactive role of female musicians, the emancipation of women in music, the position of female amateur musicians in carrying a music legacy, women as cultural mediators in world music venues, female music aesthetics, contemporary networking of female musicians, combating sexism and racism by music performance, the role of women in contemporary music industries, and more.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)