November 23, 2026
6 pm CET
Madlen Poguntke: Which Voices Survive? Gender, Care, and the Unequal Afterlife of Women’s Musical Voices
Whose musical voice becomes part of history? The question is deceptively simple. Across musical traditions, women have sung, composed, performed, transmitted, and shaped repertoires for centuries, yet their historical visibility remains profoundly uneven. Some voices survive through attributed works, written sources, biographies, and established repertoires; others survive only indirectly, through the practices and traditions in which they participated. Still others become almost impossible to hear as individual voices at all. This paper develops my ongoing research on women’s musical histories in Germany and South Korea by shifting the focus from the question of what has been recognized as artsong to the conditions under which women’s musical voices become historically recognizable in the first place. I approach care not simply as preservation, but as the complex set of acts through which musical voices are selected, sustained, transmitted, and given historical meaning. What is preserved is never independent of how it is valued: whether a woman is remembered as a composer, poet, performer, religious figure, ritual specialist, or anonymous bearer of tradition affects what aspects of her musical agency remain visible. The paper brings into dialogue women from different historical contexts, including medieval European trobairitz and women associated with religious musical practices, alongside Korean gisaeng and mudang. Rather than placing these traditions into a single category, the comparison asks what happens when different forms of female musical authorship and performance encounter systems of historical classification shaped around particular ideas of the musical work, the individual creator, and written transmission. The Korean cases are especially revealing: gisaeng and mudang participated in highly developed musical and poetic practices and transmitted cultural knowledge across generations, yet their voices have often remained peripheral to histories centered on named composers and autonomous works. The paper therefore asks not only which women have been forgotten, but why certain women’s voices were easier to preserve and recognize than others. By examining the unequal afterlife of women’s musical practices, it argues that historical recovery is also a question of care: of whose voices are carried forward, whose forms of musical knowledge are considered worthy of transmission, and whose disappearances have become normalized within music history.
Madlen Poguntke is a flutist and musicologist whose work bridges artistic practice and academic research. She holds two Bachelor of Music degrees and completed her studies in secondary school music education at the University of Regensburg, followed by two Master of Music degrees in flute and traverso at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and a Master of Arts in musicology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She completed her PhD in music education in Munich and is currently pursuing a PhD in musicology at Seoul National University. Her research interests include women’s musical histories, historical performance practice, socio-historical approaches to music, and the role of AI in music and music education. She has received several awards and scholarships for her academic and artistic work and has contributed reviews and essays to music journals and other scholarly publications.
Briony Cox-Williams: Rethinking Sentimentality in Victorian Song
Many of the songs written in Britain during the Victorian era, particularly those by women, have been dismissed since as sentimental or saccharine, with incompetent musical settings. The discomfort that is evident in a contemporary relationship with what is seen as sentimentality shows in this discourse, along with a parallel dismissal of a genre seen as domestic and female. The reputation of the Victorian ballad has thus suffered in three ways: first, through a devaluing of music making by amateurs and by extension, music that is technically and interpretatively within their reach; second, in an unease/suspicion around the textual material; and thirdly in the corresponding dismissal of the “everyday” as unhistoric, uneventful and undocumented. However, a more sympathetic focus on the songs suggests a new way of looking at these, particularly around emotional response to events that were personal particularly to women, as well as ways in which women paradoxically have been seen to enact that emotion rather than experiencing it. This talk will look at the songs of four mid-century composers who underwent the same compositional training in the same institution, i.e. the Royal Academy of Music in London: Kate Loder, Helena Clint Miles, Kate Lucy Ward, and Clara Macirone. Starting with Sophie Fuller’s suggestion in ‘“The Finest Voice of the Century:” Clara Butt and Other Concert Hall and Drawing Room Singers of Fin de Siecle Britain’ that we no longer know how to listen to this repertoire, it will evaluate both the texts chosen and the compositional language employed served certain communicative purposes, and will explore how we might reclaim the underlying messages for contemporary audiences.
New Zealand pianist and researcher Briony Cox-Williams is a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As a pianist she has given concerts both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, working with instrumentalists and singers, with a particular concentration on neglected repertoires, composers and performersof the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. She has published articles on women composers such as Pauline von Decker, Fanny Hensel and Lili Boulanger, and on nineteenth-century performance practice in song. She is currently working on a book about the women students of the Royal Academy of Music in the nineteenth century. Other areas of research and teaching activity include nineteenth-century music aesthetics, concert programming, and the way in which gendered uses of language are coded into music theory and practice. Many of the PhD projects Briony supervises are based in these areas.