Conference Agenda

Founded in 1971 in New York as an artist-run space for experimental video and electronic music, The Kitchen has been historicized primarily as a venue for performance and media art. This paper argues that works presented there in the 1970s are more productively understood as sound installations that redefined listening as environmental and embodied encounter.

Focusing on Carolee Schneemann’s Up To And Including Her Limits (1975) and Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Dream House (1974), I show how The Kitchen functioned not merely as a site of presentation but as an infrastructural experiment that enabled durational, immersive environments structured by sound, light, and bodily movement. In these works, sound did not accompany action; it operated as spatial medium, redistributing compositional agency among bodies, object, and architecture. Audience movement and co-presence were not incidental, but constitutive of the work’s form.

Drawing on archival materials from The Kitchen and artists’ papers, I revise dominant narratives that frame 1970s experimental practices through performance, dematerialization, or medium specificity. Engaging scholarship by Michael Fried on theatricality, Juliane Rebentisch on installation aesthetics, and sound studies scholars including R. Murray Schafer and Brandon LaBelle, I argue that the concept of sound installation provides a more precise, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive analytic framework for understanding these practices.

Finally, reframing The Kitchen’s programming through installation foregrounds the central role of women artists—particularly Schneemann and Zazeela—in shaping the American avant-garde’s turn toward embodied, environmental sound, and challenges disciplinary divisions between musicology and art history.

During intermission at vocalist-composer Joan La Barbara’s performance at the 1977 Holland Festival, celebrated avant garde singer Cathy Berberian asserted that vocal experimentation had “hit an impasse” and singers who “dedicate their whole existence to developing” these techniques are “freak, they’re phenomenon—what they used to call me, but it wasn’t true in my case, because I can also sing.” This declaration could be regarded as surprising coming from the woman who had “vocalized” Luciano Berio’s 1961 Visage, an experimental tape work banned from Italian radio because it was “obscene.”

How can we situate Berberian’s statement within the trajectory of 20^th-century concert vocal music? One contextualization of that moment during the Festival is offered by Rizzardi (2021), who states: “Realistically, La Barbara was not the sole target of Berberian’s tirade,” referencing other featured experimental vocalists and groups. However, Rizzardi’s focus on the division of labor between the composer and performer, only hinting at “…all its gendered implications,” invites further scrutiny of how gender and its performance could instigate conflict between “singing” and experimentation.

Although Berberian did not explicitly state this, her comment almost exclusively concerned women singers, who had long had the role of executing the wishes of, or collaborating with, male composers (Krüger, 2022). How, then, might the “performance” and “technique” of gender (Butler, 1990; Spatz, 2015), and its relationship to Western classical singing (and experimentation stemming from that tradition), operate across different generations of female-identifying vocalists during the height of Second Wave Feminism?

Referencing related works including La Barbara’s own 1978 Cathing (sampling Berberian’s slights), Adriana Hölszky’s Monolog (1977) and Judith Weir’s King Harald’s Saga (1979), all of which investigate and develop contemporary subversions of the female voice, this paper argues that Berberian’s sharp comments—and her clinging to the Western classical expectations of “singing”—articulated a gender-driven rupture between generations of female-identifying vocalists in the experimental space. My investigation draws on both unexplored archival materials from the Festival as well as interviews with vocalists who performed on that occasion.

To subvert and overcome the gendered expectations of punk culture, female punk musicians became well-versed in varying musical strategies that resulted in distinctive signifiers within their music, fashion, visual art, and gestures. In this paper, I identify artistic influences and vocalic strategies employed in female punk performances that exemplify some of those signifiers, despite the punk desire for a genderless culture, resulting in the formation of a feminine musical rhetoric.

Drawing on vocal performances by the likes of Poly Styrene, Kathleen Hanna, and Kat Bjelland, I analyze consistencies in female vocal expressions from the 1970s and 1990s, tying together two eras of female vocal performance. By engaging with the existing work on rock vocality, female performance practices in rock music, and punk rock aesthetics by Helen Reddington, Stephanie Doktor, Laura Cofield, and Dick Hebdige, as well as philosophical scholarship by Sara Ahmed, Susanne Langer, and many others, I distill female punk vocality into various juxtapositions, foregrounding the contrast between which expressions were deemed socially appropriate and inappropriate for female rock singers. Some timbres found in punk rock, like heavy distortion, had been traditionally coded as masculine, resulting in any opposing timbre, such as pure tone quality, to be coded as feminine. Sonorousness and speech, purity and distortion, the guttural and the nasal, the permeable and the compressed; female punk singers purposefully set timbres against each other through their vocal production to illustrate the depth of the female experience.

Through dichotomous vocal expressions, female punk singers brought attention not only to feminine interiority but to the female form and body. Punk women’s creation of feminine signifiers went on to have widespread effects on multiple genres, including the silky indie of the 2010s as described in Dan DiPiero’s Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. Timbral juxtapositions in punk music characterizes a departure from the traditionally masculinist sound of rock music, an innovation which would expand the affective possibilities within subcultural rock music.