Toward a Feminist Organology: Moya Henderson, Sekko, and Genealogies of Resistance

This research proposes a feminist organology as a speculative framework for interrogating the epistemic, material, and relational conditions of instrumentality in Western art music. Drawing on feminist genealogy, historiography, and archival research, it traces Australian composer Moya Henderson’s 1976 work Sekko, and her subsequent invention of the Alemba: a keyboard percussion instrument comprising three chromatic octaves of tuned triangles. Despite Henderson’s pioneering and often controversial contributions to Australian contemporary music, her visionary approach to instrument design and its interface with percussion has been largely overlooked. Through engaging with feminist, post-humanist, and decolonial discourses, this research argues that Henderson’s practices disrupt normative hierarchies and totalizing orthodoxies within percussion history, while also reflecting on how constructs of power occupy spaces and perpetuate privileges that sustain inequalities in cultural and creative practices. Furthermore, it examines how instruments operate as sites of gendered labour and resistance, exploring the potentials of feminist organology to invite new forms of expression, phenomenological understanding, and object-oriented ontologies.