Sounding Fragilities

Sounding Fragilities unfolds a polyphony of writing about contemporary composition, music, and performing arts in the context of music theater. Edited by a theater and performance scholar and a composer and artistic researcher, this anthology views its field of investigation through the prism of positionalities. Irene Lehmann and Pia Palme invite readers to engage in intimate encounters with artistic practices, feminist and queer perspectives, and personal explorations of musicological, theater studies, technological, and ecological questions.

By presenting female composers who write with/through/about their own practice, Sounding Fragilities makes a remarkable contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the impact of artistic research. In this synthesis, the editors explore how overcoming the binary separation of art and science opens up access to rich yet fragile territories of artistic knowledge production and musical-theatrical modes of writing.

Sounding Fragilities. An Anthology brings together essays, conversations, and interventions on contemporary music, dance, and music theater, offering new, polyphonic approaches to listening, seeing, composing, and performing.

Artistic and academic researchers reflect on the fragilities of artistic materials, collaborations, and the communities that form around live performances. The contributions challenge the notion of isolated composers, choreographers, listeners, and scholars, emphasizing instead their interconnectedness as indispensable elements of a vibrant performance and research culture.

In this anthology, exploring the relationality, fragility, transience, and beauty of live performance is understood as a political, democratic, and ecological practice—from a feminist perspective and with an awareness of the current multiple crises in politics, health, and the environment. The urgency of encountering and interacting with one another appears here as the basis of human and political relationships.

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