A memory to the women who broke the silence with electronic music

Women well know that history is used to forgetting their existence and their achievements.

But electronic music allowed a group of them to break the silence to which they were condemned, creating sounds that 50, 70 and even 100 years later are still modern.

A selection of these pioneers, from different places, from different times, congregate in

(Sisters with transistors), the 2020 documentary by Lisa Rovner that Filmin has recently added to its catalog.

With great success, it is the artist Laurie Anderson who is in charge of lending her voice to her predecessors and narrating a story that dares not to sacrifice the experimental nature of its theme to please a mass audience.

does not lower its content, it is not condescending to the viewer or its protagonists.

She argues that what they did is still avant-garde, weird, radical, noisy and even awkward.

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If the feature film fails in something, it is in maintaining a narrative structure that is too conventional to analyze a phenomenon that is quite unconventional.

The biographies of each of these women follow one another in almost chronological order and separately, with little intersection between them or opposition to the present, which means that the solid historical context in which they are placed loses much of its strength.

Lithuanian Clara Rockmore was a childhood violin prodigy who amplified the sounds of her stringed instrument with the theremin exactly a century ago.

With her effervescent hairstyle, only controlled by scarves and turbans, she looked like a fortune teller capable of bringing the future closer to her audience.

Daphne Oram naturally claimed that the field of nerds could also be female: she from the BBC created the Oramics machine, which

sounds by converting graphic images into music.

of the time

in the 1980s .

And Delia Derbyshire transcended popular culture when she composed the theme song for the British series

.

Until they arrived, Rovner's documentary claims, the term composer was synonymous with a dead man.

And there were the modern Mozart and Beethoven to defend with their mere presence that women are the most untapped natural resource on the planet.

The film is also a reminder of all those possibilities that the arrival of technology brought with it.

Among them,

seeing some women take command of the situation in front of gigantic synthesizers, recording the sounds of a new industrial and electric world.

Faced with the cumbersome tool with which they created unpublished melodies, some of the protagonists of Rovner's story seem like cable girls, those women halfway between tradition and the liberation that labor independence granted.

Only, this time, they could express in a new and abstract way what was going through their heads.

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