Sally Anne Gross, Reader in Knowledge Exchange at the Westminster’s School of Arts, has travelled across Europe from mid-September until the end of October to discuss music and equality, and to take part in a range of events, talks and workshops.
The tour started in Sopot, Poland where Gross was invited to the CultureonLIVE Conference, hosted by Music Export Poland and ZAiKS, Poland’s leading rights management and collection society. At the event, she discussed her and George Musgrave’s book, titled Can Music Make You Sick?, and attended a panel discussion on Women in Music. Gross also took part in a special workshop to develop a plan for the Polish music industry to address gender inequality.
Gross then presented a paper via webcam at the University of Tübingen, Germany titled Talkin’ Bout a Revolution: Social Media Music Activism Among Non-Binary, Non-Males and Women of Colour Musicians. The presentation was part of the Decolonial Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, and Patriarchy: Art, Activism, and Academia event, hosted by the Center for Gender and Diversity Research (ZGD) at Tübingen.
In late October, Gross headed to Budapest, Hungary to join a panel discussion on Power Dynamics in the Music Industry at the BUSH showcase festival. The panel talked about the problematic relationship between music and capitalism. The BUSH showcase festival invites pioneers and professionals of the Eastern European music industry to discuss current topics and trends, while also organising concerts by European musicians for the evenings.
Gross is an author, academic and music industry practitioner. She was the first women to work as a Director of Artist and Repertoire at Mercury Records UK in 1993, and chaired at the first ever panel on women in the music industries at In The City music conference in Manchester in the same year. In 2016 she founded the Let’s Change the Record, a project that focuses on bridging the gender divide in music production, by running audio engineering and song-writing workshops for people identifying as women or non-binary. She is also the co-author of Can Music Make You Sick, the largest study ever conducted into mental health in the music industry, published in 2017.
At the University of Westminster, Gross specialises in music and entertainment law and career development in the music industries. She also contributes to several modules on the Music Business Management MA and across other music degree courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Learn more about Music courses at the University of Westminster.
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