When the need of transforming and remixing music education is illuminated, fields of tensions in relation to the traditional master–apprentice model of teaching often appear. Binaries have been constructed and critiqued in research to describe tensions at various music educational levels. Some studies have also asked for a holistic, “both/and” holding. In higher music education (HME), the need for new approaches in research to understand how teaching and learning is developing are asked for. As a contribution, the overall aim of the article is to illuminate to what extent traditional culture norms and structures are maintained and challenged at three European conservatories. The specific aim is to map possible fields of tension surrounding approaches to teaching and related learning. The analysis in this article partly builds on understandings of culture and institutions, and partly on theories of relational pedagogy. To get access to how leaders, teachers, and students experience participating in the teaching and learning of conservatory cultures, an interview study was planned. The transcriptions were treated by a thematic analysis model. The analysis explored three themes that represent fields of tension: teaching in relation to established cultural structures, to creating or not creating new learning trajectories, and collaboration or competition—the educational culture. The fields of tension found through the analysis concern relations between the traditional conserved conservatory teaching and new open and diverse thoughts about and actions within in HME teaching. It becomes obvious that creating new learning trajectories should be a common issue, involving students and teachers, as well as leaders of conservatories, and that competition should be supported by collaboration. A consequence of such a pedagogical approach would be that differences between programs for diverse instruments could be balanced, and that all involved could learn from each other, which demands flexibility between individual and collaborative learning activities.

 Classical music is an artform that can, symbolically and materially, construct ideas about nation and gender. Higher music education institutions are central to classical music production and shapes in particular the gendered nature of music and musicianship by gendering instruments and constructing notions of feminine and masculine styles of music. Further, the repertoire performed in higher classical music education has displayed elements of patriotism and nationalism. The aim of this article is to investigate how three European higher music education institutions – the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia; the Sibelius Academy at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland; and the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, Hungary – represent nation, gender, and classical music on their websites. The material analyzed here consists of selected multimodal pages from the institutions’ websites: video, text, links, and pictures. They are analyzed in a discourse-theoretical manner focusing on the construction of nation, gender, and classical music. Conclusions discuss the (white) male European master as integral to the heritage of classical music on the websites as well as differences in how the institutions present themselves as ‘national’. The article illustrates how contemporary classical music higher education in Europe relies on representations of national and masculine traditions despite being part of current European Union higher education initiatives promoting internationalization and gender equality.

What could create more displeasure in the performing arts than silence about power, sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination? Swedish performing arts has been described as a place where a code of silence rules, a code that has been challenged after the Swedish #MeToo movement of 2017 in film and performing arts. In this article, we aim to theoretically and empirically examine what silence around sexual harassment in the performing arts is, using feminist theory.1 And further, we discuss how it creates negative affect2 in the performing arts work environment. Silence or “theatre without action” as described by Rancière,3 has traditionally been regarded as a valuable creative tool in rehearsal work. However, the #MeToo movements have shone a light on how silence contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in film and the performing arts. Building on discourse analysis of qualitative individual interviews and recordings of rehearsals with employees of four performing arts institutions in Sweden, we examine the discursive and affective shape of silence in the performing arts today. Challenging the idea that great art comes out of suffering, we discuss how silence in the performing arts has consequences that risk being harmful, not only for the employees, but for art itself, as well as the audiences experiencing it. © Ann Werner & Isak Benyamine Benyamine and Nordic Theatre Studies.

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.

In this article interpersonal communication in Gender Studies teaching is mapped and compared in feminist pedagogy in three universities: Södertörn University in Sweden, Novgorod State University in Russia and Vilnius University in Lithuania. The aim of this article is, first, to compare the uses of feminist methodologies in teaching during the first semester undergraduate Gender Studies courses in a cross-case comparison. And secondly, to suggest developments needed to pursue teaching in Gender Studies in the three countries. Scholarly discussions about feminist pedagogies are accounted for and characteristics from the field are identified and compared in the three empirical cases. The article further draws on qualitative feminist methodology and concludes that while the contexts investigated are different, the methodologies used have similarities. In all three universities the teaching methods focus on students’ experiences and differences, teacher’s reflexivity, working in smaller groups, highlighting community building and empowerment. In the conclusion these teaching holdings are discussed, and further development of interpersonal communication in Gender Studies teaching is suggested.

This chapter analyses Swedish pop artist Titiyo’s artist persona on television, on Instagram, and in an advertisement campaign, as political. Contextualising her as black and Swedish in mainstream popular music, I draw on her ways of addressing issues of race and gender. The handling of racism within the examples from Titiyo’s career is realised through focusing on either racism in another place and time or inclusion of women artists and black women artists. Such focus is enacted without explicitly naming the issues, sexism, and racism in the music industries, and without pointing any fingers. Titiyo’s artist persona build on postfeminist ideas about the individually successful (black) woman, without addressing prevailing global gender and race inequalities.

In this article, the music, lyrics, and music videos of Maxida Märak’s 2019 debut solo album Utopi (Utopia) are analysed using feminist, decolonial theories. The article discusses how the construction of resistance to colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist oppressions takes form on Utopi, and shows popular music’s relationship to feminist and Indigenous resistance today. Lyrics, sounds, and images are analysed using discourse analysis, leading to the conclusion that Utopi holds ambiguous possibilities, of resisting settler colonialism, sexism, racism, and capitalism, while at the same time reinforcing neoliberal story telling tropes of individual success, and marketing Indigenous epistemes as goods. Currently the most visible Indigenous pop and rap artist in Sweden, Märak was born in Stockholm and considers Jokkmokk, in Sápmi, her home. She became famous for her music and political activism for Saami rights and Saami visibility in 2015, and reached a larger audience when she performed in the intermission of Melodifestivalen, the Swedish contest leading up to Eurovision, in 2018. During 2019, she released her first, full length album with songs about motherhood, land, class, love, sex, and loss. She sings and raps mainly in Swedish, and blends rap, pop, and Saami musical heritage. The conclusion of this article shows how land, and Saami feminine spirituality, are constructed as the basis for feminist, anticapitalist, and anti-settler colonial activism in Märak’s work.