Beyond the 2%: A Manifesto Raising The Bar for Womxn Composers

Beyond the 2% - A Manifesto Raising the Bar for female Composers on the Classical Stage, Opera, Concerts and Festivals

LIVE / IN PERSON

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Vienna Festwochen Festival and the Segal Center will host a panel in New York on Feb. 7th 2024, 6:30 PM calling for action to address the devastating current state of representation when it comes to female composers on the contemporary classical stage, opera, concerts, musical spaces and festivals. 

Join us to create and sign a global manifesto demanding immediate change and decolonization in a still deeply entrenched patriarchal field resisting to change. With Vienna Festwochen Festival artistic director Milo Rau, Tania León, Du Yun, Marcia Sells/Met Opera NYC), Kristin Marting/PROTOTYPE and other representatives from New York art institutions.

A Statement from The Vienna Festwochen: 

DID YOU KNOW THAT ONLY 2% OF THE WORKS INCLUDED IN THE CONCERT SUBSCRIPTIONS HAIL FROM WOMEN? 

At 13%, the average share of women in the programme reaches its peak – and that’s only in cases of explicitly contemporary concert series. If the development towards equality continues to progress at the same rate as in the past decades, an equitable future will remain a distant prospect. 

With the start of the new artistic directorship under Milo Rau the Wiener Festwochen found the Academy Second Modernism, a global platform that demands and promotes the visibility of womxn composers. Vienna is considered the capital of modernism, exemplified in music by Arnold Schön- berg’s revolutionary soundscape. Yet, this modernity remains incomplete: eurocentric, masculine, elitist. The Wiener Festwochen, with Nuria Schoenberg Nono as patron, are globalising mo- dernism, making it more female and lead it into the present. Second Modernism wants to make good on the promise of modernism at long last, as a global platform of womxn composers in Vienna. 

The aim of the Academy Second Modernism is the voluntary commitment of theatres, operas, festivals, concert halls and ensembles to significantly increase the proportion of works by womxn composers in their programmes. For each of the 50 female composition students of Schönberg who were forgotten or unheard in the past, the Wiener Festwochen will work together with Arnold Schönberg Center to welcome contemporary womxn composers from the whole world – in accordance with the number of Schönberg’s female students: 10 per year of the course of 5 years, starting from 2024. As ambassadors of Second Modernism the invited composers will present their compo- sitions on two evenings (June 8 and 9). They will be performed by Klangforum Wien. During the day, the womxn composers develop strategies of visibility, form networks together and, as initiators of the music and theatre landscape, engage in public discourse with experts on this topic.