- I believe everyone has creative potential and therefore opportunities for music-making should be available to everyone, Jill Halstead says.

I am visiting Halstead in her homely office at The Grieg Academy. A cloudy Bergen day steels the light coming through the windows, but Halstead´s passion fills the room, a fire lit decades ago in the mining town in the North of England where she grew up.

- For me, music was always political, as a teenager music was all about rebellion and social change. I grew up listening to rock music and experimental music and playing in heavy metal bands, it was a musical world outside of formal school.

Music and Politics
This year Halstead became the second female professor at The Grieg Academy - Department of Music. Halstead brings with her critical perspectives on race, class, gender and disability studies, and much of her work focuses on the politics of musical participation.

Her own education began as a child playing the piano, and she later taught herself to play the guitar.

She says her upbringing made her acutely aware of how participation in the arts and culture can be blocked for many people, where she says, deep rooted obstacles remain.

- When studying for my first degree in music, I studied composition, and I remember very clearly when I realised that I had never studied, or even heard a piece of classical music written by a woman. I asked my composition teacher about it, and he said that was because women had never written any great music! So then I wondered what that meant for me as a young woman studying composition, to look at an entire tradition and not to see yourself in it.

A woman in the music industry
This laid the foundations for Halstead´s research career, and she went on to publish two books on the subject of the gendered politics of musical composition in 1997 and 2006.

Throughout her career Halstead has worked in both the British music industry and higher education institutions for musical education. For 15 years she played and taught electric guitar professionally in the UK, working in commercial music, as a studio musician alongside working in music education.

- It was often difficult doing studio work, it is a very pressurized environment and I would often get very negative comments about being a woman, says Halstead.

Girls with guitars – a rare species
At the Grieg Academy Halstead appreciates the cooperation with her colleagues in music therapy. With her fellow professor, Randi Rolvsjord she has published articles about the gendering of instruments.

- There are lots of sounds we connect to gender. Randi Rolvsjord and I have written about women´s singing voices and the guitar. The guitar, and especially the electric guitar is still very significant example of a gendered musical practice but there are others. For example, in a recent report about the Norwegian Recording Artists

Association (Grammofonartistenes Forening) stated that only 7% of the guitarists and 4% bass players who were members were female. Female pianists count 26% of the pianist members, but only 4% of the keyboard players.

Introducing popular music at Goldsmiths
While the music industry can be difficult for women, Jill Halstead says that there has been some positive developments in the democratization of music education.

- From 2000 I worked at Goldsmiths University in London, and at that point it mainly attracted young white people and socioeconoically advantaged backgrounds who where interested in either classical music or traditional jazz. I wanted to develop a music program that didn´t tie people into particular genres but focused on creative development and music as a multi media phenomena. I was given the task to write the first programs in popular music there. A very meaningful job, which attracted a much more diverse group of students than before, says Halstead who adds that we still have a long way to go to provide the necessary opportunities to allow musicians from all kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities into higher education.

Bringing disciplines together
Before she worked at Goldsmiths she was one of the original team of artists and educators who developed the teaching philosophy at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). She worked there from 1994.

- It was a really exciting place to work, a renowned artists came to teach, literally on my first day at work I met Paul and Linda McCartney, so that was really something! I learnt a lot from some very talented colleagues, which I have carried with me across my career. Back then LIPA offered quite a radical change from the traditional types of music education in the UK, they worked across art forms with dance, theatre, design, sound technology and community arts, they focused on developing creative and technical skills and were encouraged to develop critical prespectives on the relationship between art and culture. They took oral and popular music practices seriously, and so developed programs that were really open to young people coming a wide range of communities.

From London to Bergen
Jill moved to Bergen with her Norwegian husband in 2009 and took up a position at The Grieg Aacademy - Department of Music. She has specialized in collaborative interdisciplinary projects, often exploring issues of identity and empowerment through music. She has amongst other things worked with vulnerable young people, long term unemployed, and offenders in prison, and she has collaborated with dancers and choreographers and film makers.

Bring the people in
Recently Halstead and professor Brandon LaBelle at the Department of Fine Art received funding for a project funded by the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design that explores the meeting points and divergences of a range of art forms and practices which engage with social and political imperatives through collaborative, participatory and inclusive ways of working. The project is named Socially Engaged Arts (SEA) 2017-2018.

- All art forms are engaged socially to some degree, but the aim of Socially Engaged Arts is to explore arts that are dependent on social intercourse as a factor of its exsistence. On 15. November 2017 a kick-off meeting of the project was held at KMD. The group consists of around 20 artists, researchers teachers and therapists from a range of different strands of music, fine art and design. Introducing the project Halstead stressed that Socially Engaged Arts is an open space that can constantly be defined, redefined and called in to question, its ambiguity making a field with great potential to generate new meanings and ways to engage.

“I Can’t Find Myself”
Socially Engaged Arts is planning a mini festival and international symposium in May 2018 in partnership with Bergen International Festival. The events will be open to the public,

- The aim is to generate interest and debate around art practices that create change rather than commodity. We hope to engage a wide variety of people in creative work that asks questions about the arts and the nature of participation, isolation, activism and inclusion, Halstead says.

One of her contributions to the festival will be a performance of “I Lost You Only To Discover I Had Gone Missing (2016)”. This is a new work Jill Halstead made with Beatrice Allegranti. Dance Theatre. Jill and choreographer and film maker Beatrice Allegranti have a long running cooperation and label themselves a creative feminist duo. “I Lost You…” is a live piece that continues work in the international “Demenatia Reimagined” project. The project previously resulted in a screendance work “I Can’t Find Myself” (2015) a piece aims to stimulate public debate about dementia care in society and is based on the experiences of those living with dementia. Jill Halstead has composed the music and written the lyrics, and performs it in the film.

- The aim of the film and the live performance is to create a wider understanding of people living with dementia and how dance and music can enhance kinesthetic (ed.note: our sense of movement) and affective responses – not only for those who live with dementia but also for their carers.

- Now we are in another process, developing a series of participatory dances for people living with early onset dementia. Work I find inspiring and humbling. I am so pleased that the new KMD-faculty opens up wider spaces for Socially Engaged Arts, Halstead says with a spark in her eyes. The sky over Bergen cloudy as ever, but in between are traces of stubborn blue.