“Isn’t That Life, in a Way: Trying to Accommodate Dissonance?” Reflections on Lesbianism and the Life and Music of Ann Southam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian composer Ann Southam (1937–2010) was a proud, outspoken, and generous feminist who found affinities between feminism and the minimalist musical language she developed in the late 1970s. At the same time, Southam was a very private person; it was only towards the end of her life that she began to speak on record about being gay. Music writer Tamara Bernstein, a friend of the composer, weighs the merits of focussing on this side of Southam’s life: the willingness with which Southam spoke in her final interviews about the difficulty of coming of age as a lesbian in the 1950s, and the fact that material related to this from her final interview has not been published until now; the importance of remembering how recently lgbtq rights were fully enshrined in Canadian law. Finally, alongside a caveat about the dangers of reductivism, and reminders that Southam found musical inspiration in other sources (e.g., nature), the author suggests ways in which Southam’s struggles with a sexual identity considered “dissonant” may have found their way into her music.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".