Listening under pressure: gender, power, and the conditions of music-making

This article develops the concept of “listening under pressure” to examine how institutional attention is activated, withheld, displaced, constrained, and withdrawn in contemporary classical music institutions. While listening is often framed as an ethical virtue or interpersonal skill, the article argues that, in institutional settings, recognition emerges only when silence becomes reputationally, legally, or organizationally untenable. Drawing on feminist institutional theory, scholarship on complaint, and research on gendered cultural labor, it theorizes listening as a governed institutional process rather than a neutral disposition. Through qualitative analysis of publicly documented cases involving Lara St. John, Katherine Needleman, Rebecca Bryant Novak, Cara Kizer, and Esther Hwang, the article develops an inductive typology of institutional listening: withheld, procedural, punitive, revocable, and enforced. These modes show how institutions manage attention through silence, procedure, discipline, arbitration, and confidentiality agreements. Rather than adjudicating individual allegations, the article focuses on institutional response, public discourse, and the conditions under which recognition becomes possible. It argues that the central issue is not simply whether institutions listen, but who controls when listening occurs, whose risk compels response, and whose lives are reorganized after attention is granted or withdrawn. By foregrounding the governance of attention as a mechanism of gendered power, the article offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing institutional accountability, complaint, and recognition in music-making and beyond.