Music and Gender

In this blog you'll be exploring the intersection of music and gender. We've already noticed some gender norms in the cultures we've studied. While African griots are both men and women, it's rare for a female griot to play an instrument--they usually just sing. But Sona Jobarteh breaks that mold! Too, it's uncommon for women in Africa to play the drums. But both men and women in Africa sing and dance in groups. As you study The Blues, you'll discover that, while many of the earliest blues musicians were men, it was blues women that really brought the genre to the general public, becoming famous singing the classic blues on records and in music halls. In future units we'll discover other instruments, styles, and roles that are typically assigned to specific genders.

I'm sure that, if you stop to think about it, you've noticed gender expectations in the music you've experienced. Have different genders listened to different types of music, or been expected to listen to different types of music? Within the style of music that you like to listen to, does the media treat different genders differently? In music ensembles, have you noticed a difference in who plays what instruments, or how different sections act in choir? Do you find that folks performing music-related jobs that aren't actually performing (dealing with sound equipment, conducting, teaching, managing, etc.) lean to one gender or the other? Do you know any girls that play the drums, and are they the only ones?

So, for this blog, I'd like for you to consider the intersection of music and gender within your experiences and tell us about those observations and experiences. Here are my specific expectations:

• Your blog should be at least 400 words long.
• Your blog should include a minimum of two media selections--videos, pictures, sound files, links, etc. More is better. And remember: we must be able to hear the music that you're talking about. Embed your videos rather than link to them.
• As always, keep your language respectful.
• Keep this blog centered around your own experiences and observations.

For me, I'm going to talk about one of my personal experiences, mostly because I have a good story to tell :-)

My mother-in-law, Karen, was an amazing woman. She received her Ph.D. in English while raising her son (my husband), ironed her sheets before putting them on her bed, took her 4-year-old granddaughter (my kid) downtown on the city bus regularly so that the granddaughter would have an appreciation for public transportation, and got up to go jogging in the morning before we'd all go hiking. She was dauntless. While growing up in Dayton, Ohio in the 1950s, though, she hit a snag: music.  She really wanted to play percussion in the band, but girls just did not do that in Dayton in the 1950s. So she took piano lessons, like a good girl. She actually got quite good at the piano, and played it for the rest of her life. Her two sisters followed in her footsteps, playing the piano and the flute--both were perfectly acceptable "girl" instruments of the day.

Fast forward from Ohio in the 1950s to Flint, Michigan in the late 1990s. Karen, all grown up and in her mid-50s, decided it was never too late to live the dream--it was high time she started those percussion lessons. She found a marimba at a pawn shop and signed up for private lessons at the Community Music School in Flint. Over the next few years she practiced diligently, getting good enough to play on a number of student recitals, use four mallets at a time, and give herself carpal tunnel syndrome. She and my father-in-law eventually moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and the marimba came with them. The marimba, in fact, lived in the spare bedroom--the one that my kid would stay in when we went to visit them. About ten years ago Karen passed away after a long trek with brain cancer, and the marimba sat in that spare bedroom and collected dust for a few years.

Perhaps it was all of those evenings sharing a bedroom with a marimba--we'll never know--but upon reaching the appropriate age (5th grade) the granddaughter, Tally, decided to follow in Mom-Mom's footsteps and play the marimba! Tally signed up for band at school and we went shopping for a beginning percussion kit, bringing home a set of bells (like a small marimba made of metal) and a snare drum. Then, on Tally's 13th birthday, the marimba traveled from Asheville down to Spartanburg, where Tal gleefully unwrapped it, reassembled it, and started practicing it in our study. When we moved into a different house six years ago the first two things Tally did the day we moved in was to hook up the wifi and to set up the marimba in the sunroom. 

And did anyone tell Tally that "girls just don't play percussion"? No, they did not. Over the course of the intervening generation it's become pretty normalized for folks of all genders to play percussion in the band. 

In fact, a few years ago the Spartanburg Philharmonic hosted the most famous percussion soloist in the world today: Dame Evelyn Glennie, a Scottish woman who travels the world, performing as a percussionist and advocating for the arts. Performing with her was truly amazing. (She's also been profoundly deaf since the age of 12, which adds another interesting layer to her story.)

Oh, and back to my kid: Tally wants to work for NASA some day. And no one in 2024 is saying that that's gender-specific either :-)

As you leave comments on your classmate's blogs next week, I'd like you to let them know if you've had similar experiences, or if yours have been different, and then expound upon that for a few sentences.