Since the spring, I’ve been working with Ellie Hisama on organizing a two-day event celebrating the work of Suzanne G. Cusick through a two-day symposium, a concert of new music by women, and the publication of a Festschrift volume in Professor Cusick’s honor that will appear as Vol 19 (2015) of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, guest-edited by Emily Wilbourne.
Visit http://www.WomenMusicPower.com for more details. The website is being updated continuously and I can’t wait for us to share more information about the concert (a performance by an exceptional new music ensemble is in the works!) and the symposium schedule (an exciting group of scholars, colleagues, mentors, and former pupils is coming together!).
I am truly happy to be working on this event as Professor Cusick’s work is very special to me. It was her article “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem,” published in a 1994 issue of Perspectives of New Music, that started off my thinking about women’s bodies and music technologies, which later became the subject of my dissertation. Also, I am pretty sure, it was one of the pieces of scholarship that introduced me to the work of Donna Haraway. Plus, Cusick’s series of articles on the CIA’s use of music as torture in the so-called War on Terror is, to me, some of the most important, provocative, and timely work happening in music studies right now (here is her taped interview with Make Music Monthly if you don’t like reading).
LUCIE VÁGNEROVÁ 