I think that Delia Derbyshire has been discussed here previously.
But women have played a huge role in all types of tech, since the early days (can you say "Grace Hopper"? I knew you could!). In the old days of "big iron," the people that actually touched the computers tended to be women. The men did their work with pads of paper. I started programming in the waning days of "big iron," and the roles had started changing. I think that a majority of the staff at Bletchley Park were women.
https://sisterswithtransistors.com/watch lists where to watch it for the US, UK and elsewhere (Vimeo) but the Vimeo excludes the following countries: France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Australia, Austria, Russia, Poland and Israel.
I can confirm as a Canadian that I'm having a hard time watching it without (presumably) a VPN.
If you're a frontend developer on HN reading this, please don't do what this website does - please list an absolute date/time stamp of your event in plain text on the page(s) in question. Thanks in advance.
Slightly off-topic; I can't read this article without scrambling my brain. Whatever review is hidden inside here is behind a wall of obscure references that only the niche target audience can understand, and as I try to navigate around all of these, I'm able to find a couple sentences which actually convey what's going on in the documentary and what the author thinks about it. Please don't write like this, you're only entertaining yourself [, the author].
Huh? The subjects are relatively obscure and most of the movies in question are from a long time ago. Finally, the film is specifically about people who did not get the recognition they deserve. And journals about a specific topic tend to talk about/ focus on things the author considers hidden gems. Stuff like this is why I appreciate HN. No one bats an eye at yet another article on an esolanguage no one will ever use in production yet you want to complain you have not heard of these women?
Hmm - based on the comment I thought I would find an article full off synth terms like LFO or subtractive synthesis or low pass 12db filter or whatever,but it reads like a regular movie review, focused entirely on people and their plight...
It is absolutely a regular movie review. I had no idea Roger Ebert's name was still being used after his death, but he was one of the most highly regarded movie critics ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert
> a wall of obscure references that only the niche target audience can understand
The first para contains references to
>> Beethoven and Mozart, even Elvis and John Lennon
The next para lists the 'sisters' themselves. I hadn't heard of them but then that is the whole point of the film under review
> I'm able to find a couple sentences which actually convey what's going on in the documentary and what the author thinks about it
I think the following para is quite explicit about what is going on.
>> The narrative, which is wonderfully told through a kind of archival collage that, along with the futuristic soundtrack of the profiled composers, makes it feel like an avant-garde art film. It explores its stars chronologically and tells of how they evolved the musical culture in terms of not only language but also technology, which itself opened up an array of new avenues without needing the approval of others, again, mostly men. What's interesting is that many of the women profiled were from classical backgrounds. Oram is a prime example, having turned down a spot at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Music so she could work at the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and eventually building a proto-synthesizer that used a bespoke notation system called "Oramics."
We then have several additional para that goes into more detail.
I like to think we'd all be better off operating "without needing the approval of others" be them male or female. In the end it's the open market of ideas and services that will judge you in your contemporaneous settings, but who knows maybe future generations will dig someone's particular works. Or maybe they can just do the work because they enjoy it themselves. Just to it.
This is a mistake I think of as "universalizing my preferences". Yes, it doesn't work for you. So one of two things is true: 1) a professional writer and a popular, long-running publication's professional editors have totally failed to do their jobs, or b) you're not the target audience.
In this case, it's definitely the latter. This is writing meant to be read linearly from beginning to end. The purpose of the early bits are to create interest and intrigue. To open questions in your mind that will be answered later. To activate concepts and feelings that are important to the mental experience the writer is trying to create.
The short version is that this was written for print, not the web: "Print is linear, author-driven storytelling. The web is nonlinear, reader-driven, ruthless pursuit of actionable content." -- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-style-for-print-vs-...
Eventually, the print-vs-web distinction will die out, but I don't think the print style will die. Instead, we'll rename it something like "long read". Because the info-foraging approach one use on the web has its limits. Sometimes I want to be taken on a journey by the author. As much as I love foraging, there are some experiences and insights that I don't get when I'm dashing around like a ferret who got into the adderall. For me that definitely includes movie reviews. If I want a quick summary, I look at Rotten Tomatoes or Google's infobox. If I want to understand the experience, I'm going to sit still for as many as four minutes and let a professional reviewer give me an experience.
"Long read" or "long form" is already a term for these articles, and I usually can't stand them in print either.
Fine, some people like when their information is presented in the form of literature. I don't mind it myself once in a while, but usually I find myself wishing they'd get to the point, and I feel no wiser for having taken so long when (and if) they do ever get there.
If nothing else, I really wish -- if only for the purpose of accessibility and inclusion!! -- that these longform articles would also include an abstract or summary stating the main points.
This is why I appreciate Axios coverage. It's so to the point and to the other extreme it's almost embarrassing to think of all the spilled ink others have poured forth.
I was so thrilled when I discovered Laurie Spiegel and wondered why she wasn't more famous. I feel like "The Expanding Universe" should be in the collection of everyone with even a casual interest in electronic music. Her website is also a trove of fascinating notes about early electronic music tech.
Looking forward to finding about some of the other artists mentioned here.
+1 for The Expanding Universe! East River Dawn from that album is one of my favorite pieces of music. Something about it is just so calming and serene for me.
I wish we could appreciate women's talents without feeling forced to prefix the whole thing with a blob about restoring them to their righteous place on the pantheon of whatever.
Moralized language makes it significantly more difficult to criticize, as doing so makes you immoral by implication, so any actual argument can be slapped down and ignored.
Can you explain how a media collage of archival video of women pioneering early work in synthesizers is discriminating towards men? I'm not sure I see how that is the case.
I am not the GP poster, and so I was not commenting on this specific case, but only on the more general principle. But if we apply the general principle to this case, it can be argued that placing women on a pedestal like this is both demeaning and othering them.
It's not close to putting on a pedestal. They are just being given their fair share, no more, no less. Actually it's not even fair, as most of them are dead.
I'm... really (honestly!) not sure how this demeans women? Like to put it clearer: I absolutely in no way can see even a path to understanding how it is demeaning to talk about things people did in the past, that were deliberately ignored or buried, because of their gender.
I'm also not really sure what you mean by "general principle", either, to be honest?
> I absolutely in no way can see even a path to understanding how it is demeaning to talk about things people did in the past, that were deliberately ignored or buried, because of their gender.
Not the parent, but a common take on pieces like this is that they’re trying too hard, and end up trying to promote people who’d clearly not have made any kind of “pantheon” even if they’d been men, yet frame it as if they would have. The tone of this piece is a lot like one of those, even if the film isn’t doing that (haven’t seen it).
As for how that might be demeaning, imagine if things were reversed and you read a piece about the forgotten Great Men Inventors that opened with put-downs of Roberta Oppenheimer and Thelma Edison and the Wright Sisters and demanded that we consider among their ranks the unjustly forgotten men inventors, who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin. Would that be inspiring to men, do you think? Or would it come off as lame pandering and an indictment of the premise (“there are tons of men who accomplished great things in the past but were ignored because they were men”) that they couldn’t find any better examples? Nb that a scarcity of such examples even given perfect record keeping is exactly what one would expect in a society in which one sex had had far fewer opportunities to do work we consider notable, no matter their actual potential.
> As for how that might be demeaning, imagine if things were reversed and you read a piece about the forgotten Great Men Inventors that opened with put-downs of Roberta Oppenheimer and Thelma Edison and the Wright Sisters and demanded that we consider among their ranks the unjustly forgotten men inventors
Those articles already exist though? I'm thinking about The Oatmeal's article on Nikolas Tesla versus Edison, which in no way actually devalues "Men as a concept". There are very many articles in which this is done and I haven't seen it been observed that it devalues men.
What's different here is that this is centering the oppression that these women faced from the men around them, and the society that they lived in. Now, of course you can't do that with most men, since they haven't faced of crushing, systemic oppression to that all-encompassing degree on a large scale like this. However, when it is relevant, it is told. For example, Turing's story is often interwoven with the fatal systemic oppression he faced, because he was a gay man. And I'm not sure anyone can say that specifically is demeaning to him.
What you're calling out here, excusing my arguments above, is merely hyperbole as part of marketing, and I'm not at all sure that's relevant to what this comment thread is talking about.
> who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin.
I'm... not really sure what you mean to do here? This is a confusing comparison to draw here.
I can't actually see an example of where Edwin Moore is remembered as 'inventor of the push-pin', whereas the women in these articles are remembered to some degree -- after all we have this archival footage! It's just that their names are not as prominent after the fact, which is unexpected given the tangible contributions that they made.
The fields you're comparing here are disparate, and Edwin Moore hardly had a professional career out of, say, making aeroplanes. Whereas these women were both highly regarded (The one woman turned down a prestigious job offer in a highly regarded musical establishment specifically to make electronic music), and their work was influential to their contemporaries -- they just aren't mentioned after the fact.
Given these two pieces of fact, the only reading I can see here is that you intended to deliberately draw a bad, dodgy example, and hoped I and other people wouldn't notice. Which seems rude at best. I'm not sure how the article demeans women, but your comparison here certainly seems to? I hope you can correct this, if this is not what you intended! Thanks for your response anyway!
From a certain perspective, it's 'demeaning and patronizing' to elevate individuals beyond their true valour, for whatever purpose. People are more than their 'race or gender' and most musicians define themselves as artists or musicians first, not by their gender, i.e. not 'female musician'. So to be treated by a different standard may offend their sensibilities as artists or professionals, i..e the part of them that is not oriented towards the specific aspect of intersectionality.
The Army is not the arts ... but for whatever reason at least in that organization the women generally really, really don't want to be treated differently. It's nice to be the 'first so and so to do such and such' but that's definitely not the point. They're not 'Lady Rangers', they are 'Rangers', full stop, and generally don't want a sliver of space in between what they are, and what the Men are.
Having not heard the music of 'Women With Transistors', I could be wrong ... but I'll suggest they're not on par with 'Beethoven'. So the issue then becomes the degree to which these ladies were overlooked, possibly due to sexism, and the nuances in that. That's the story. And there's a lot to unpack there obviously.
I think the controversy arises because some people question the legitimacy of comparisons with 'historical greatness' and then others interpret that to be a form of delegitimisation of the challenges the women faced, or that they were overlooked. Which could be true in some form of rhetoric, but I think is not true on it's face, or rather, it's a least reasonable to question whether or not the people in question here are 'Beethovens'.
And I'll say again - I haven't seen it, so I can't really be sure of this specific case, rather, I'm explaining how confusion can arise in these kinds of cases.
> "he's so smart and talented" "I know, and he's black too!"
The subtle implication is that most smart and talented people are not black, that smarts and talents are atypical in blacks and more common in other races.
> The cycle will end by itself in time through a series of under-corrections, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Perhaps, but that’s not what the reality is at the moment. At the moment, there are what amounts to large corrective movements, which some argue to be over-corrective, and others who argue that anyone who is against any large amount of correction must be arguing against any correction at all.
> comments like yours that undermine attribution of women
Clearly you are part of the last of the aforementions groups.
Women have been oppressed for centuries, and in the grand scheme we are only just beginning to emerge from that (in america).
Today it is absolutely necessary to “prefix the thing” and there is still a long road ahead of damage to undo.
After equality has been the norm for several generations (it is still not the norm today), maybe then we’ll be ready to talk about removing the prefix.
I particularly don't get the "dead" part about complaining about "dead white men." We all end up dead, one way or another. It will happen to the sisters with transistors, too.
I think part of the situation is that almost no one gets widespread recognition until after they are dead to begin with, if that.
Not even those with a massive PR campaign, plus many experimentalists do not want to divert that kind of effort away from technical progress.
So this is expressing a lagging indicator of a lingering statistic.
Well, electronics itself is only about a hundred years old and it started out completely male dominated and decades of development continued from that point.
Mainly development of technology not diversity, and that was truly challenging.
And even though male dominated from the start, it was still out of reach to almost all men too, more so for those few oportunities mostly to undertake experimental efforts.
So statistically at the beginning, electronics was virtually inaccessbile for almost all men & women to a somewhat equal degree.
It was just not one of the things you could certainly do no matter how much you really wanted to, you had to basically get lucky in addition to your ambition.
I think his point is pretty clear in that paragraph: "Music is haunted by the specters of Beethoven and Mozart, even Elvis and John Lennon, with the canon being built around these names that we are told deserve not just celebrating but worshipping. These old, dead white men." The problem is the dead overshadowing the living.
Isn't that the very point of a canon? It takes time for a society to ratify the quality of a cultural artifact, to sift through the chaff and decide on what and who the 'greats' are. Invariably, at any given point in time, most of them are dead.
It's possible that in the long run, people will consider Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, etc. to rank with Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It doesn't seem likely, though. I don't think Elvis will rank either, or even does now - does anyone consider Elvis a great musician?
That could well be the mechanism of a canon. But I'm not sure it's the point. There are a bunch of notions that go with it that seem to serve societal functions.
To me, it looks like canonization is more to do with our primate desire to find/create status hierarchies. That seems bad enough when we do it with living people, creating the sort of structures that enable oppression of disfavored groups. But it seems both sillier and worse to do it with dead people.
So I suspect the point of a canon as selected by people of social power is to reinforce the social power structure. Something like what the Catholic church does with canonization. They get to gatekeep "goodness" and control the knowledge and resources that let up-and-comers grow. It becomes another stick to beat the young with, a way to make them "pay their dues" to people holding power.
So my hope is that in the future nobody will waste much time doing fantasy mental tournaments for "greatest" artist between different eras.
Your view is very cynical. But as you say, everyone engages in these kinds of status games - even totally powerless people will happily debate the greatest X of all time, so I don't see how this process can be seen as one driven by the powerful only.
I also don't see how your egalitarian vision of a 'flat' cultural world is practically possible. There is limited attention and time span available to people to experience culture (read/listen to music/look at paintings, etc.) That time span will have to be allocated to certain works over others, and doing it randomly is obviously a bad system. People will inevitably give each other advice on the best way to invest that time and a canon will emerge.
If it could exist, I think it would be a very unpleasant world, personally, with no common cultural referents. Allusion would disappear from cultural works, because only a tiny fraction of your audience would recognize what you're alluding to.
It's not driven by the powerful only. But for a long time they were definitely the ones who determined the canon.
I'm not interested in a perfectly flat world. I disagree that a unitary canon will emerge on its own. I don't object to individuals saying, "I like X, maybe you will too." What I object to is the use of power to create and maintain status hierarchies.
I also think it's ridiculous to suggest that lack of an imposed canon will end cultural references. When I look at social media, I see a carnival of reference. Things still become widely seen, widely heard.
And if your dark fantasy came true, so what? That would mean that each person has found art that is more meaningful to them than whatever was previously being imposed as important, and found community with that "tiny fraction" of others who found the same things valuable. Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
> Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
This is where I'm not getting you. What are the powerful forces imposing the canon? Who is forcing you to listen to music (or read books, or watch movies, etc.) that you don't like?
What is considered great arises out of organic, decentralized processes. There's no central bureau of music that requires everyone to listen to Mozart because they decided he's the best.
Your serious belief is that everybody just happens to like things? There are no structural forces that influence what gets created, promoted, or held up as "great"? That in the arts there's nobody with more power than anybody else?
I suppose by the same token, the highly improbable demographics of Fortune 500 CEOs, legislators, and faith leaders are just some statistical quirk?
Please tell me more about this world you live in. I would like to visit sometime.
I wish that too, and eventually we will get there. But there is a lot of progress and catching up before we get there.
Nowadays when I watch films or read books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s the depth of casual sexism is quite shocking. So that shows some progress. But still there’s a tremendous amount of inequality to be overcome.
What an excellent example because Star Trek was itself so very progressive for its time. Yet despite that may plot lines still centered around very rigid sexist assumptions.
Sorry to go on a tangent, but I am surprised how many TNG episodes have 'alien species that is thinly veiled stand-in for some human race'. And this is a show that would have been woke for it's time.
Well science fiction is merely a way to examine current society. The SF angle is an attempt to get a little "outside" perspective.
It's pretty hard to make truly alien aliens, as the more alien they are, the harder they are to understand, identify with etc, making the stories themselves less interesting.
The aliens in The Gods Themselves are pretty alien but still have, from time to time, a human-like mode of thinking which Asimov used to explain their behavior. The Bug Wars is the only book I've read that has no humans at all, though the aliens' mentalities are somewhat human, again to make them comprehensible.
Famously "different" aliens (e.g. Moties, the bugs of Ender's Game & sequels) are actually pretty human in motivation.
And the inscrutable aliens (e.g. Starship Troopers) are clearly inscrutable stand-ins for contemporary political enemies.
The various literature on intelligent machines has the same problem.
Not to detract from the whole point as far as Star Trek showing its social-commentary age, but AFAIK “Code of Honor” specifically was very much an early outlier in TNG history, including starting with a director who didn't direct any other Star Trek episodes.
Tangent on a tangent, but my daughter was recently binge-watching The Clone Wars animated series and at one point I had to ask: "So they have Space Asians there?"
Well, they already have Space Knights, Space Gunmen, and Space Witches, so why not.
It seems that to whom? To you? To a group? If so, who? And what data lets you speak for them?
As they say, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". So if you're in a previously favored category, it's only natural that the loss of that boost might seem like overshooting.
The real test, of course, is objective metrics. Looking at who's in Congress or who's running Fortune 500 companies, it seems like we're a fair ways from overshooting. (If you have data otherwise, please do share.)
But if we do overshoot, so what? Overshooting is common in all sorts of systems as they self-correct. The important thing to me seems to be reducing the magnitude of the swings as we converge on a new norm. Given that the previously baseline is a couple millennia of violent gender oppression, seems like we're certain to do better than that.
Like how we appreciate people with blue eyes talents or tall people or left handed people without mentioning it?
Thing is those people aren't born in different bell curves with different expectations, considerations, cultural histories, and preferences.
Additionally this isn't just about talents, this is about being talented in a seemingly traditionally male arena, engineering. Women in engineering will always be of note since most women do not choose to be there.
The highly-entertaining 1993 documentary "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" [1] devotes much attention to Clara Rockmore [2], an incredible figure I'm glad to see is a subject of this new film. I think it's fair to say Leon Theremin wouldn't have made it far without her.
“Music is haunted by the specters of Beethoven and Mozart, even Elvis and John Lennon, with the canon being built around these names that we are told deserve not just celebrating but worshipping. These old, dead white men.”
What a distasteful opening of an otherwise interesting article.
As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people’s throats... No, most simply listen to their work being enamored by the virtuosity and talent of these people who lived centuries ago. Framing their work in the context of contemporary American identity politics is very cheap journalism, and distasteful.
And let’s not conflate classical music with postmodern experimental electronic music either. They don’t belong to the same league. I do appreciate both genres, and while we can argue about the subjectivity of art all day long, there’s a reason why the former enjoyed wide acclaim throughout the eras, while the latter remained an obscure academic interest.
> As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people’s throats...
No, but patriarchal and racial structures in society have historically suppressed artists who weren't white and male.
Adam Neely has a good video on how the term "music theory" here in the West is essentially just "the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians" [1]. It's worth a watch if you're interested in music.
>patriarchal and racial structures in society have historically suppressed artists who weren't white and male
This is plain false. Those non-white and non-male artists who have reached sophistication and virtuosity comparable to Mozart and Beethoven were and are still acclaimed. Don't try to shove a narrative where there isn't one.
Also, this doesn't add anything to the discussion about why audiences prefer dead (!) white (!!) male (!!!) composers like Mozart and Beethoven over the works of early experimental electronic composers. The answer is simply because most people don't like listening weird noise.
Your theory is that although we have clear historical evidence of centuries and centuries of broad societal oppression based on gender and race, that there was some countervailing force in art that perfectly balanced that out such that the playing field for art was entirely level?
Please do explain what that force was. In detail. With examples. Because that sounds entirely implausible to me.
Before she approached "marriageable age" and was forbidden from performing, she was an equal musical talent to her brother, and sometimes received top billing.
> there’s a reason why the former enjoyed wide acclaim throughout the eras
That reason is in no small part the propagation of taste via culture.
> As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people’s throats...
An unsubtle description perhaps, but it does get at the idea of how cultures promote certain work at the expense of others. Yes, there's certainly "forcing down the throat" that occurs, via peer pressure, education, public promotion, and so on, but there's also the suppression of contributions that don't fit the society's constraints.
Name some of the great female composers of Beethoven and Mozart's era. I'll wait.
You now either have to take the position that "women just aren't that good at music," or you have to acknowledge that something was going on at that time - something that still happens today. That something is strongly hinted at by the comment someone else posted about Maria Anna Mozart, who was "forbidden from performing once she reached marriageable age."
In that context, your denial of obvious facts starts to seem monstrous.
> Framing their work in the context of contemporary American identity politics is very cheap journalism, and distasteful.
The US didn't invent the patriarchy, it inherited it directly from the European societies that settled the US, and Beethoven and Mozart's society was a big part of that. Beethoven was born 6 years before the Declaration of Independence; Mozart 20 years before; and Germans were one of the biggest groups to settle the US.
Your adulation of those musicians is a direct consequence of your embedding in a cultural context that you seem blissfully unaware of. The reason you like them is because you are directly descended, a mere 10 generations back, from peers of those musicians. You were brought up in a culture that privileged their work, and have absorbed that indoctrination uncritically.
One of the other pieces of indoctrination you've absorbed is apparently that the culture didn't, in fact, systematically and unfairly suppress the voices and capabilities of women, which is why you haven't replied to the comment about Maria Anna - you can't afford to acknowledge it, since you can't refute it, and it eats at the foundation of your indoctrinated beliefs.
Attitudes like yours hold back the development of a more equitable society. You should rethink them.
>Your adulation of those musicians is a direct consequence of your embedding in a cultural context that you seem blissfully unaware of.
As someone whose musical taste spans from classical composers to jazz pioneers, from early Chicago house to ceremonial flute music from Indonesia, I can only smirk at your comment.
Mozart's sister's talent may have been suppressed, or she might have been content with her life, we will never know. By judging the actions of 18th century Germans, it is in fact you who seem to be unaware of the modern cultural context that you're embedded into. Modern American morals are neither universal, nor ultimate. Thinking that they are in fact is the colonialist attitude. You should rethink that!
>Attitudes like yours hold back the development of a more equitable society. You should rethink them.
Sweetie, don't try to shove a narrative where there's none, this isn't Twitter. Noone argued against your "equitable" society or whatever. I've just pointed out a fallacy in the distasteful opening of the original article, namely, that early electronic musicians (some of whom happened to be women), weren't sidelined in favor of Mozart, Beethoven or Elvis. Rather, people simply preferred those kinds of music over their experimental bleep bloops.
And don't try to derail the conversation with deconstructionist "arguments", such that people's preference for 19th century classical composers, or rock music over early experimental electronics stems from some internalized colonialist heteronormative bias, because that's bollocks. Sure, art is subjective, and if someone was raised by a pack of wolves then they would likely prefer the sound of howling over Beethoven's 9th symphony, yet I seriously doubt that early electronic musicians (yes, some of whom happened to be women) would have reached wider audiences even if women weren't historically disadvantaged. This is simply not a question of gender.
> Mozart's sister's talent may have been suppressed, or she might have been content with her life, we will never know.
Oh yes, we have no possible way of knowing whether women's talent was historically suppressed. It's a mystery for the ages indeed.
Your own comments are a perfect demonstration of the phenomenon you're denying.
> By judging the actions of 18th century Germans, it is in fact you who seem to be unaware of the modern cultural context that you're embedded into. Modern American morals are neither universal, nor ultimate.
I'm not an American. And I suppose I should accept that you're embedded in a deeply sexist culture, and have a vested interest in maintaining that. But really, you could at least be a bit self-aware about it.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadBut women have played a huge role in all types of tech, since the early days (can you say "Grace Hopper"? I knew you could!). In the old days of "big iron," the people that actually touched the computers tended to be women. The men did their work with pads of paper. I started programming in the waning days of "big iron," and the roles had started changing. I think that a majority of the staff at Bletchley Park were women.
https://metrograph.com/live-screenings/sisters-with-transist...
I can confirm as a Canadian that I'm having a hard time watching it without (presumably) a VPN.
The first para contains references to
>> Beethoven and Mozart, even Elvis and John Lennon
The next para lists the 'sisters' themselves. I hadn't heard of them but then that is the whole point of the film under review
> I'm able to find a couple sentences which actually convey what's going on in the documentary and what the author thinks about it
I think the following para is quite explicit about what is going on.
>> The narrative, which is wonderfully told through a kind of archival collage that, along with the futuristic soundtrack of the profiled composers, makes it feel like an avant-garde art film. It explores its stars chronologically and tells of how they evolved the musical culture in terms of not only language but also technology, which itself opened up an array of new avenues without needing the approval of others, again, mostly men. What's interesting is that many of the women profiled were from classical backgrounds. Oram is a prime example, having turned down a spot at London's prestigious Royal Academy of Music so she could work at the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and eventually building a proto-synthesizer that used a bespoke notation system called "Oramics."
We then have several additional para that goes into more detail.
In this case, it's definitely the latter. This is writing meant to be read linearly from beginning to end. The purpose of the early bits are to create interest and intrigue. To open questions in your mind that will be answered later. To activate concepts and feelings that are important to the mental experience the writer is trying to create.
The short version is that this was written for print, not the web: "Print is linear, author-driven storytelling. The web is nonlinear, reader-driven, ruthless pursuit of actionable content." -- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-style-for-print-vs-...
Eventually, the print-vs-web distinction will die out, but I don't think the print style will die. Instead, we'll rename it something like "long read". Because the info-foraging approach one use on the web has its limits. Sometimes I want to be taken on a journey by the author. As much as I love foraging, there are some experiences and insights that I don't get when I'm dashing around like a ferret who got into the adderall. For me that definitely includes movie reviews. If I want a quick summary, I look at Rotten Tomatoes or Google's infobox. If I want to understand the experience, I'm going to sit still for as many as four minutes and let a professional reviewer give me an experience.
Fine, some people like when their information is presented in the form of literature. I don't mind it myself once in a while, but usually I find myself wishing they'd get to the point, and I feel no wiser for having taken so long when (and if) they do ever get there.
If nothing else, I really wish -- if only for the purpose of accessibility and inclusion!! -- that these longform articles would also include an abstract or summary stating the main points.
Looking forward to finding about some of the other artists mentioned here.
I'm also not really sure what you mean by "general principle", either, to be honest?
Thanks in advance!
Not the parent, but a common take on pieces like this is that they’re trying too hard, and end up trying to promote people who’d clearly not have made any kind of “pantheon” even if they’d been men, yet frame it as if they would have. The tone of this piece is a lot like one of those, even if the film isn’t doing that (haven’t seen it).
As for how that might be demeaning, imagine if things were reversed and you read a piece about the forgotten Great Men Inventors that opened with put-downs of Roberta Oppenheimer and Thelma Edison and the Wright Sisters and demanded that we consider among their ranks the unjustly forgotten men inventors, who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin. Would that be inspiring to men, do you think? Or would it come off as lame pandering and an indictment of the premise (“there are tons of men who accomplished great things in the past but were ignored because they were men”) that they couldn’t find any better examples? Nb that a scarcity of such examples even given perfect record keeping is exactly what one would expect in a society in which one sex had had far fewer opportunities to do work we consider notable, no matter their actual potential.
Those articles already exist though? I'm thinking about The Oatmeal's article on Nikolas Tesla versus Edison, which in no way actually devalues "Men as a concept". There are very many articles in which this is done and I haven't seen it been observed that it devalues men.
What's different here is that this is centering the oppression that these women faced from the men around them, and the society that they lived in. Now, of course you can't do that with most men, since they haven't faced of crushing, systemic oppression to that all-encompassing degree on a large scale like this. However, when it is relevant, it is told. For example, Turing's story is often interwoven with the fatal systemic oppression he faced, because he was a gay man. And I'm not sure anyone can say that specifically is demeaning to him.
What you're calling out here, excusing my arguments above, is merely hyperbole as part of marketing, and I'm not at all sure that's relevant to what this comment thread is talking about.
> who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin.
I'm... not really sure what you mean to do here? This is a confusing comparison to draw here.
I can't actually see an example of where Edwin Moore is remembered as 'inventor of the push-pin', whereas the women in these articles are remembered to some degree -- after all we have this archival footage! It's just that their names are not as prominent after the fact, which is unexpected given the tangible contributions that they made.
The fields you're comparing here are disparate, and Edwin Moore hardly had a professional career out of, say, making aeroplanes. Whereas these women were both highly regarded (The one woman turned down a prestigious job offer in a highly regarded musical establishment specifically to make electronic music), and their work was influential to their contemporaries -- they just aren't mentioned after the fact.
Given these two pieces of fact, the only reading I can see here is that you intended to deliberately draw a bad, dodgy example, and hoped I and other people wouldn't notice. Which seems rude at best. I'm not sure how the article demeans women, but your comparison here certainly seems to? I hope you can correct this, if this is not what you intended! Thanks for your response anyway!
The Army is not the arts ... but for whatever reason at least in that organization the women generally really, really don't want to be treated differently. It's nice to be the 'first so and so to do such and such' but that's definitely not the point. They're not 'Lady Rangers', they are 'Rangers', full stop, and generally don't want a sliver of space in between what they are, and what the Men are.
Having not heard the music of 'Women With Transistors', I could be wrong ... but I'll suggest they're not on par with 'Beethoven'. So the issue then becomes the degree to which these ladies were overlooked, possibly due to sexism, and the nuances in that. That's the story. And there's a lot to unpack there obviously.
I think the controversy arises because some people question the legitimacy of comparisons with 'historical greatness' and then others interpret that to be a form of delegitimisation of the challenges the women faced, or that they were overlooked. Which could be true in some form of rhetoric, but I think is not true on it's face, or rather, it's a least reasonable to question whether or not the people in question here are 'Beethovens'.
And I'll say again - I haven't seen it, so I can't really be sure of this specific case, rather, I'm explaining how confusion can arise in these kinds of cases.
But it looks like an exciting watch for sure.
The subtle implication is that most smart and talented people are not black, that smarts and talents are atypical in blacks and more common in other races.
That would essentially be gaslighting half of earths population.
The cycle will end by itself in time through a series of under-corrections, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
And I’m sorry to say that comments like yours that undermine attribution of women are not part of the solution.
No.
> The cycle will end by itself in time through a series of under-corrections, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Perhaps, but that’s not what the reality is at the moment. At the moment, there are what amounts to large corrective movements, which some argue to be over-corrective, and others who argue that anyone who is against any large amount of correction must be arguing against any correction at all.
> comments like yours that undermine attribution of women
Clearly you are part of the last of the aforementions groups.
I see progress as a series of under corrections, like a pendulum swinging back and forth, eventually settling into a neutral middle state.
Yeah, so do women of the last few centuries! (and more)
Today it is absolutely necessary to “prefix the thing” and there is still a long road ahead of damage to undo.
After equality has been the norm for several generations (it is still not the norm today), maybe then we’ll be ready to talk about removing the prefix.
Not even those with a massive PR campaign, plus many experimentalists do not want to divert that kind of effort away from technical progress.
So this is expressing a lagging indicator of a lingering statistic.
Well, electronics itself is only about a hundred years old and it started out completely male dominated and decades of development continued from that point.
Mainly development of technology not diversity, and that was truly challenging.
And even though male dominated from the start, it was still out of reach to almost all men too, more so for those few oportunities mostly to undertake experimental efforts.
So statistically at the beginning, electronics was virtually inaccessbile for almost all men & women to a somewhat equal degree.
It was just not one of the things you could certainly do no matter how much you really wanted to, you had to basically get lucky in addition to your ambition.
It's possible that in the long run, people will consider Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, etc. to rank with Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It doesn't seem likely, though. I don't think Elvis will rank either, or even does now - does anyone consider Elvis a great musician?
To me, it looks like canonization is more to do with our primate desire to find/create status hierarchies. That seems bad enough when we do it with living people, creating the sort of structures that enable oppression of disfavored groups. But it seems both sillier and worse to do it with dead people.
So I suspect the point of a canon as selected by people of social power is to reinforce the social power structure. Something like what the Catholic church does with canonization. They get to gatekeep "goodness" and control the knowledge and resources that let up-and-comers grow. It becomes another stick to beat the young with, a way to make them "pay their dues" to people holding power.
So my hope is that in the future nobody will waste much time doing fantasy mental tournaments for "greatest" artist between different eras.
I also don't see how your egalitarian vision of a 'flat' cultural world is practically possible. There is limited attention and time span available to people to experience culture (read/listen to music/look at paintings, etc.) That time span will have to be allocated to certain works over others, and doing it randomly is obviously a bad system. People will inevitably give each other advice on the best way to invest that time and a canon will emerge.
If it could exist, I think it would be a very unpleasant world, personally, with no common cultural referents. Allusion would disappear from cultural works, because only a tiny fraction of your audience would recognize what you're alluding to.
I'm not interested in a perfectly flat world. I disagree that a unitary canon will emerge on its own. I don't object to individuals saying, "I like X, maybe you will too." What I object to is the use of power to create and maintain status hierarchies.
I also think it's ridiculous to suggest that lack of an imposed canon will end cultural references. When I look at social media, I see a carnival of reference. Things still become widely seen, widely heard.
And if your dark fantasy came true, so what? That would mean that each person has found art that is more meaningful to them than whatever was previously being imposed as important, and found community with that "tiny fraction" of others who found the same things valuable. Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
> Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
This is where I'm not getting you. What are the powerful forces imposing the canon? Who is forcing you to listen to music (or read books, or watch movies, etc.) that you don't like?
What is considered great arises out of organic, decentralized processes. There's no central bureau of music that requires everyone to listen to Mozart because they decided he's the best.
I suppose by the same token, the highly improbable demographics of Fortune 500 CEOs, legislators, and faith leaders are just some statistical quirk?
Please tell me more about this world you live in. I would like to visit sometime.
Nowadays when I watch films or read books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s the depth of casual sexism is quite shocking. So that shows some progress. But still there’s a tremendous amount of inequality to be overcome.
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Up_The_Long_Ladder_(epi...
[2] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)
It's pretty hard to make truly alien aliens, as the more alien they are, the harder they are to understand, identify with etc, making the stories themselves less interesting.
The aliens in The Gods Themselves are pretty alien but still have, from time to time, a human-like mode of thinking which Asimov used to explain their behavior. The Bug Wars is the only book I've read that has no humans at all, though the aliens' mentalities are somewhat human, again to make them comprehensible.
Famously "different" aliens (e.g. Moties, the bugs of Ender's Game & sequels) are actually pretty human in motivation.
And the inscrutable aliens (e.g. Starship Troopers) are clearly inscrutable stand-ins for contemporary political enemies.
The various literature on intelligent machines has the same problem.
Here's more fun recaps:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
Honorable mentions:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
Well, they already have Space Knights, Space Gunmen, and Space Witches, so why not.
Often times it seems we are overshooting with attempts to create better societies - or worse shooting off in the wrong direction.
As they say, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". So if you're in a previously favored category, it's only natural that the loss of that boost might seem like overshooting.
The real test, of course, is objective metrics. Looking at who's in Congress or who's running Fortune 500 companies, it seems like we're a fair ways from overshooting. (If you have data otherwise, please do share.)
But if we do overshoot, so what? Overshooting is common in all sorts of systems as they self-correct. The important thing to me seems to be reducing the magnitude of the swings as we converge on a new norm. Given that the previously baseline is a couple millennia of violent gender oppression, seems like we're certain to do better than that.
Thing is those people aren't born in different bell curves with different expectations, considerations, cultural histories, and preferences.
Additionally this isn't just about talents, this is about being talented in a seemingly traditionally male arena, engineering. Women in engineering will always be of note since most women do not choose to be there.
1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108323
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Rockmore
https://ww.youtube.com/watch?v=nd517b80srQ
What a distasteful opening of an otherwise interesting article.
As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people’s throats... No, most simply listen to their work being enamored by the virtuosity and talent of these people who lived centuries ago. Framing their work in the context of contemporary American identity politics is very cheap journalism, and distasteful.
And let’s not conflate classical music with postmodern experimental electronic music either. They don’t belong to the same league. I do appreciate both genres, and while we can argue about the subjectivity of art all day long, there’s a reason why the former enjoyed wide acclaim throughout the eras, while the latter remained an obscure academic interest.
No, but patriarchal and racial structures in society have historically suppressed artists who weren't white and male.
Adam Neely has a good video on how the term "music theory" here in the West is essentially just "the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians" [1]. It's worth a watch if you're interested in music.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
This is plain false. Those non-white and non-male artists who have reached sophistication and virtuosity comparable to Mozart and Beethoven were and are still acclaimed. Don't try to shove a narrative where there isn't one.
Also, this doesn't add anything to the discussion about why audiences prefer dead (!) white (!!) male (!!!) composers like Mozart and Beethoven over the works of early experimental electronic composers. The answer is simply because most people don't like listening weird noise.
Please do explain what that force was. In detail. With examples. Because that sounds entirely implausible to me.
I am reminded of Maria Anna Mozart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart
Before she approached "marriageable age" and was forbidden from performing, she was an equal musical talent to her brother, and sometimes received top billing.
None of her compositions have survived.
That reason is in no small part the propagation of taste via culture.
> As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people’s throats...
An unsubtle description perhaps, but it does get at the idea of how cultures promote certain work at the expense of others. Yes, there's certainly "forcing down the throat" that occurs, via peer pressure, education, public promotion, and so on, but there's also the suppression of contributions that don't fit the society's constraints.
Name some of the great female composers of Beethoven and Mozart's era. I'll wait.
You now either have to take the position that "women just aren't that good at music," or you have to acknowledge that something was going on at that time - something that still happens today. That something is strongly hinted at by the comment someone else posted about Maria Anna Mozart, who was "forbidden from performing once she reached marriageable age."
In that context, your denial of obvious facts starts to seem monstrous.
> Framing their work in the context of contemporary American identity politics is very cheap journalism, and distasteful.
The US didn't invent the patriarchy, it inherited it directly from the European societies that settled the US, and Beethoven and Mozart's society was a big part of that. Beethoven was born 6 years before the Declaration of Independence; Mozart 20 years before; and Germans were one of the biggest groups to settle the US.
Your adulation of those musicians is a direct consequence of your embedding in a cultural context that you seem blissfully unaware of. The reason you like them is because you are directly descended, a mere 10 generations back, from peers of those musicians. You were brought up in a culture that privileged their work, and have absorbed that indoctrination uncritically.
One of the other pieces of indoctrination you've absorbed is apparently that the culture didn't, in fact, systematically and unfairly suppress the voices and capabilities of women, which is why you haven't replied to the comment about Maria Anna - you can't afford to acknowledge it, since you can't refute it, and it eats at the foundation of your indoctrinated beliefs.
Attitudes like yours hold back the development of a more equitable society. You should rethink them.
As someone whose musical taste spans from classical composers to jazz pioneers, from early Chicago house to ceremonial flute music from Indonesia, I can only smirk at your comment.
Mozart's sister's talent may have been suppressed, or she might have been content with her life, we will never know. By judging the actions of 18th century Germans, it is in fact you who seem to be unaware of the modern cultural context that you're embedded into. Modern American morals are neither universal, nor ultimate. Thinking that they are in fact is the colonialist attitude. You should rethink that!
>Attitudes like yours hold back the development of a more equitable society. You should rethink them.
Sweetie, don't try to shove a narrative where there's none, this isn't Twitter. Noone argued against your "equitable" society or whatever. I've just pointed out a fallacy in the distasteful opening of the original article, namely, that early electronic musicians (some of whom happened to be women), weren't sidelined in favor of Mozart, Beethoven or Elvis. Rather, people simply preferred those kinds of music over their experimental bleep bloops.
And don't try to derail the conversation with deconstructionist "arguments", such that people's preference for 19th century classical composers, or rock music over early experimental electronics stems from some internalized colonialist heteronormative bias, because that's bollocks. Sure, art is subjective, and if someone was raised by a pack of wolves then they would likely prefer the sound of howling over Beethoven's 9th symphony, yet I seriously doubt that early electronic musicians (yes, some of whom happened to be women) would have reached wider audiences even if women weren't historically disadvantaged. This is simply not a question of gender.
Oh yes, we have no possible way of knowing whether women's talent was historically suppressed. It's a mystery for the ages indeed.
Your own comments are a perfect demonstration of the phenomenon you're denying.
> By judging the actions of 18th century Germans, it is in fact you who seem to be unaware of the modern cultural context that you're embedded into. Modern American morals are neither universal, nor ultimate.
I'm not an American. And I suppose I should accept that you're embedded in a deeply sexist culture, and have a vested interest in maintaining that. But really, you could at least be a bit self-aware about it.
> Sweetie
Lol. You're quite the master debater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZscRHkLMt0
It's funny because here Dave is just learning about synths, and it predates Paul Schaffer joining him with his own wall of synths.