Preface

This online publication provides insights on women’s different musical practices around the world. By centering their musical agency, the articles in this collection explore how women use music to construct imaginary and real futures for themselves. The collection of multimedia articles is one of the results of the project World Wide Women – Female Musicians Crossing Borders and Building Futures, a project funded by Kone Foundation in 2021–2024. As part of the WWW project, we organized a two-day symposium titled Women – Music – Futures, where we invited both researchers and artists to present their work related to the theme of the symposium, which was described as follows:

In many communities around the world, women are important culture bearers fostering the transmission of local traditions to future generations. However, women also forge new roles in their communities in order to express themselves and to get their voices heard. In these efforts for empowerment, music can serve as a tool for refashioning oneself and one’s place in society, thereby building futures that might not have been possible otherwise. Music also frequently serves as a space for imagination and dreaming, for experimentation with alternative ideas about the past, the present, and the future.
The aim of this symposium is to discuss the agency of women musicians worldwide, and the ways in which they use music to construct imaginary or real futures for themselves. Often working in patriarchal environments and restricted by social norms and expectations of their communities, women demonstrate significant resilience and creativity as they seek to create space for musical activities. In this regard, mutual support and networks between women are important. Sometimes women choose music because it provides a platform for presenting their views and/or influencing their communities in ways that would not be allowed otherwise.

As a result of the inspiring discussions with colleagues during the symposium, we started planning a publication that would capture the diverse projects, themes, and approaches that had been presented and discussed at the symposium. We initially wanted to accomplish a multimedia publication where different types of media could be presented side by side, but soon run into difficulties when trying to find a platform and/or publisher that could support a permanent publication that would be in a different format than a printed book or an equivalent pdf file. Although a website is relatively easy to create, we also needed to have some guarantee that the website would not simply disappear as soon as the project ends. A further consideration was the fact that an independently published website would most likely not be considered a serious academic publication, so we had to think of other solutions. Finally, we decided to pursue a “double” strategy and work towards both a more traditional book publication and an online publication that would complement the book with additional materials and allow the reader to access both text and audiovisual materials on the same platform. At the time of writing this introduction, we are working together with Helsinki University Press on the book, and thanks to Global Music Centre you can now read, watch and listen to some of the fascinating contributions included in this online publication. The articles included, whether in the form of a podcast, a documentary video, or a combination of text, pictures and audio/video, deal with women’s musical spaces in the past and in the present, as well as the many ways in which women have paved new paths for themselves and others, thus imagining and creating new futures for us all.

We would like to express our thanks to the Kone Foundation and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) for financial support that has allowed us to actualize this online publication.

In Helsinki, July 2025,
Elina Seye & Nina Öhman

CONTENTS