Music, Gender, Climate, and the Natural World: Approaches Across Disciplines

The current debate concerning climate change brings us face to face with issues such as vulnerability and the interrelations between destruction, resilience, and regeneration affecting human beings and nature alike. The situation asks us to call into question the relationship between the human and nature, and to consider a repositioning and decentering of the human. Within this discourse, scholars, musicians, and artists have begun to ask how artistic processes can contribute to these lines of thought and action, as well as how a rethinking of the position of the human can affect our understanding of music and art, as well as the relationship of these to nature.

Ecomusicology has especially begun to address these questions. It can be defined from various angles, but can at a basic level be understood as “the study of music, culture, and nature in all the complexities of those terms…that considers musical and sonic issues, both textual and performative related to ecology and the natural environment (Aaron S. Allen, 2014). Concerns in intersectional “ecofeminism” suggest a productive overlap with this field of study, especially in the sense that ecofeminism takes the “position that there are important connections between how one treats women, people of color, and the underclass on the one hand and how one treats the nonhuman natural environment on the other” (Karen J. Warren, 2000).

This conference seeks to broaden both areas of study while bringing them together. What relationships between music, aesthetic reflection, and artistic practice emerge from thinking about ecomusicology and gender studies together? More specific questions could be, but are not limited to:

• In what ways do gender, music, sound and nature relate to one another?
• How might we look anew at historical concept of natures in music and art—such as nature as a place longed after, a place for living, and a threatening force—given new perspectives in ecomusicology and ecofeminism?
• How might space-specific compositions and sound art incorporate gender aspects in relationship to nature? What new methods, techniques, and forms of expression emerge from these practices? How do diverse perspectives on nature, corporeality, and gender play a role here? How does nature’s own agency affect our understanding of creativity, authorship, and compositional practices in these cases?
• The question of a repositioning or decentering of the human can initiate major changes in ontological thinking. To what extent is musical thinking affected by these debates, and what artistic results and challenges open up through these changes?
• What connections are there between posthuman feminism, ecofeminism, and ecomusicology? To what extent do current approaches in women’s and gender studies consider ecomusicological perspectives?

Please send your paper title, abstract (max. 300 words) and short biography (max. 150 words) until October 15, 2026 to the following email address: christa.bruestle kug.ac at We will inform candidates of our selection decision by end of November 2026. The languages of the conference are German and English. Talks will be limited to 25 min and 10 min for discussion. We plan a publication of the papers.