Welcome to the Wolke Verlag blog! Here, we regularly share insights into our books and projects—including recommendations, author contributions, background information, and stories from our day-to-day publishing life.
The International Women’s Month has a long history. Its origins date back to the early women’s labor movements of the 20th century, when women in Europe and North America fought for political participation, better working conditions, and social equality. Today, the day serves as an occasion worldwide to highlight progress—but also to draw attention to where structural inequalities persist.
In the fields of art, music, and literature , women were long underrepresented or given less visibility. At the same time, it is precisely these fields that have repeatedly opened up spaces where new perspectives could be articulated—in texts, compositions, performances, and artistic practices.
As a publisher specializing in contemporary music, sound, and aesthetic thought , we view books as spaces where such perspectives can come to light: as essays, artistic reflections, theoretical interventions, or practical accounts.
In honor of International Women’s Month, we would therefore like to highlight a few titles from our catalog that were written or edited by women and offer diverse perspectives on music, voice, and musical theater.
The question of identity is one of the central themes of our digitized and highly connected present. Who or what determines who we are today—our origins, religion, social networks, or cultural affiliation?
In this volume, Franziska Kloos the Irish composer and performance artist Jennifer Walshe, whose artistic practice deliberately plays with constructions of identity. Walshe has developed a multitude of alter egos, reconstructed traces of a possibly fictional Irish avant-garde, and in 2016 formulated “New Discipline” , a program for music in which performativity and physical presence take center stage.
Her works combine music, text, video, and digital culture into multi-layered collages. Semantic fragments, internet aesthetics, and performative strategies open up new forms of listening and interpretation. This volume demonstrates how Walsh’s work deliberately blurs the boundaries between composition, performance, and media culture.
With Vocal Adventures , Lauren Newton, one of the great pioneers of vocal improvisation, presents a book about the voice that is as personal as it is practical.
Newton – for decades a defining figure on the international scene at the intersection of jazz, new music, and performance — shares her experiences with the voice as an instrument of expression and insight. In an accessible yet profound style, she guides participants through breath awareness, multiphonics, solo and collective improvisation, as well as the social and spiritual dimensions of vocal practice.
The book serves equally as an introduction to deep listening, a handbook for experimental voice work, and a reflection on imagination, physicality, and community in improvised sound.
Born in Oregon and living in Stuttgart since 1974, Newton has collaborated with, among others, Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Joëlle Léandre, Fritz Hauser, and Ernst Jandl. Her discography includes more than 85 releases; in 2020, she was awarded the Baden-Württemberg Jazz Prize for her life’s work.
What happens when opera leaves its traditional venues? The production by Ulrike Hartung and Gesa zur Nieden examines musical theater beyond the major cities —in places where new forms are emerging: in rural areas, in temporary spaces, or in participatory projects.
The contributions from scholars and practitioners highlight opera as a testing ground for social and artistic transformation. From inclusive formats and site-specific productions to new forms of collaboration with local communities, a picture emerges of an art form that reinvents itself when it leaves its familiar institutions.
Richly illustrated and conceptually multifaceted, this volume demonstrates how musical theater can remain socially relevant in the 21st century—without losing its aesthetic complexity.
The Pianist Jutta Hipp was one of the most extraordinary figures on the international jazz scene in the 1950s—yet she was long forgotten. Born in Leipzig in 1925 and originally trained as a visual artist, she quickly emerged in postwar West Germany as an exceptional musical talent in a strongly male-dominated jazz world.
As “Europe’s First Lady of Jazz,” Hipp successfully made the move to the U.S. In New York, she played with key figures in the scene and recorded for the legendary label Blue Note Records —as the first German and white jazz pianist in a milieu of African American musicians such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Horace Silver.
At the height of her career, however, she unexpectedly retired from the music scene and devoted herself to other artistic pursuits.
In Suddenly Hip(p) , Ilona Haberkamp traces this unusual life story and explores Jutta Hipp as a musician, artist, and public figure—set against the cultural and political upheavals of her time.
For over five decades, the Moers Festival has stood for musical experimentation, pushing boundaries, and a deliberately alternative approach to festivals. From the very beginning, it saw itself as a counter-model to the established concert industry: a social experimentin which exchange, improvisation, and community play central roles.
The album [re]visiting Moers Festival, edited by Kerstin Eckstein and Kathrin Leneke, deliberately avoids a linear history of the festival. Instead, it creates a multi-voiced archive of memoriesin which musicians, visitors, staff, photographers, and eyewitnesses all have an equal voice.
Through fifty very different contributions—memoirs, essays, poems, drawings—a kaleidoscopic picture of the festival emerges. The book makes it clear that festivals are not only venues for performances, but also social spaceswhere artistic communities emerge and cultural experiments become possible.
The History of the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music is often told through the lens of prominent male composers: Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen. Yet women have been present from the very beginning—as performers, composers, organizers, journalists, and listeners.
In her study, Juana Zimmermann systematically reconstructs this previously little-known history for the first time. Based on extensive archival research, she documents over 450 womenwho participated in the summer courses between 1946 and 1961.
The book portrays Darmstadt not only as an aesthetic hub of the postwar avant-garde, but also as social and cultural arenain which a wide variety of women were active. At the same time, the study takes a critical look at the mechanisms of cultural memory—and at why many of these names disappeared from the historiography of music.
The volume Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Reader brings together theoretical essays from the postgraduate program of the same name at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2017, the program has combined cultural studies theory with practical research on auditory culture, sound art, and media production.
This publication focuses on essays by faculty members of the Theory Department from the 2020–2021 academic year. Their texts reflect the methodological and disciplinary diversity of Sound Studies—ranging from musicology and media studies to philosophy and acoustics, and extending to artistic research.
The reader is thus not merely a collection of individual essays, but also a record of an academic field that is increasingly emerging as interdisciplinary platform for thinking about sound .
International Women's Day commemorates not only the historical struggles for equality, but also the importance of visible voices and perspectives in culture and science.
For us as a publisher, this means publishing books that open up new ways of thinking about music, sound, and art—and providing authors with a platform to share their experiences, ideas, and artistic practices.
📚 You can find more books by female authors from our catalog in our online store.
Our bestseller of the week: a title from our catalog that is currently reaching a particularly large audience. Every week, we feature a book here that is currently in high demand.
With February’s Black History Month has just passed, it is a time to reflect on the profound contributions of Black artists to cultural history. In music, few figures embody the spirit of innovation and uncompromising artistic vision as vividly as Eric Dolphy.
Dolphy’s career lasted little more than five years, yet his impact on jazz and contemporary music remains immense. A true multi-instrumentalist, he moved effortlessly between the flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, and clarinet, developing a highly personal musical language that pushed the boundaries of jazz in the early 1960s. His collaborations with musicians such as Charles Mingus produced some of the most striking performances of the era, while his own compositions opened up entirely new possibilities for improvisation and ensemble playing.
In Eric Dolphy. Biographical Sketches, the French writer and music critic Guillaume Belhomme approaches Dolphy’s life not through a conventional linear biography but through a series of concise, evocative portraits. These sketches illuminate the artistic intensity of a musician who seemed to move constantly toward unexplored sonic territories.
Belhomme writes:
“By being an innovator, Eric Dolphy became an original. The depth of his message eventually caught up with him. From the source he created, a lineage of individual musicians—one that has not yet faded from view—has continually drawn inspiration, perhaps searching for ways to cross over to the other side, beyond the obvious and the easy.”
Dolphy’s music still resonates today precisely because it defies the obvious. His playing is characterized by sudden leaps, delicate lyricism, explosive energy, and a constant sense of discovery. Listening to Dolphy often feels like entering a musical language that is still unfolding.
For saxophonist Evan Parker, the book captures this spirit perfectly:
“Finally, we have an English translation of Guillaume Belhomme’s wonderful biography of Eric Dolphy. I know just enough French to realize that it is a heartfelt tribute to this great musician. This translation will allow readers to fully appreciate his work.”
Belhomme’s book is therefore more than a biography. It is a portrait of artistic independence and a reminder of how radically Dolphy reshaped the possibilities of jazz.
As we reflect on Black History Month, Eric Dolphy: Biographical Sketches invites readers to rediscover one of the most visionary musicians of the twentieth century.
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