Creating from the Body: Gendered Agency in Contemporary Music Performance

Abstract

This article explores how practices led by female performers can offer a situated model for challenging two deeply entrenched conventions in Western concert music: Werktreue (the ideal of fidelity to the composer’s score) and the paradigm of the disciplined yet ostensibly “neutral” performer’s body. Grounded in my artistic practice as a Brazilian-Mexican performer-creator, I present four electroacoustic audiovisual works for five-string electric cello—developed in collaboration with visual artists Adela Marín (Costa Rica) and Jessica Rodríguez (Mexico) as part of the collective Féminas Sonoras. Drawing on feminist theory, decolonial thought, and a practice-as-research methodology, I explore how aesthetic choices can function as critical tools for reclaiming artistic agency. I introduce the concept of the female sonic body as a situated, culturally inscribed site of authorship and knowledge production. Rather than reproducing dominant paradigms of concert music, the performer-creator practice seeks to re-signify the act of performance as both a feminist and epistemological intervention.