In my own personal experience, gender had no relation to music – at all. No lie, in my chorus class my senior year of high school we had a female singing the bass part (true, it was Chesnee, but still, the girl had skills).
In my marching band we we’re pretty well mixed when it came to sexes. Most of our marching band was female, and although the woodwind section was the majority females, the brass had quite a bit of estrogen in it as well.
No instruments were pegged as “boy” or “girl” instruments (except the flute and piccolo – we had a little boy playing flute my junior year and he got so much crud for playing a “girl” instrument that he quit. :( It was very sad because he was very talented. He is now a failing high school wrestler.)
But we had a lot of gender mixing within sections – our main sousaphone player my senior year was my friend Brittney Cromer. She had started on trumpet them moved to French horn and ended up on tuba when my friend Big Daddy was all by himself.
Chorus wasn’t all that different – we were a very tiny group with two full time males and a male who greatly wished to be female and sang soprano terribly. I can’t tell you how many times I just wanted to slug the boy… but I digress…
As for middle school listening tastes, they were flat out terrible when I was young. All that stuff that is now “old” rap. All that “Shawdy get low-low-low” crap… And boys and girls would listen to all the same stuff – it ended up giving boys the wrong idea of how to treat women and gave the girls the idea that they had to be a hoe in order to receive male attention. Now that I think about it, unwed teenage pregnancy was pretty high even back then. Alright, I’m off the soap box now.
Now, all of this in comparison to my almost-all-women environment, it’s pretty much like a mixed environment to me. I mean, I always hung out with girls and gay or bi-sexual guys, so being surrounded by mostly females are nothing new. Although now that I think about it, I’m exposed to more random music than I used to be – if it hadn’t been for my converse friends I would never have been introduced to the Korean DBSK or the group Nightwish who I am desperately in love with. I also don’t have to constantly listen to the likes of Ke$ha or Flo-rida… We have classier dirty music :) Like our renaissance songs about “I die, I die a thousand deaths a day” when dying means having sex… Yep, classy dirty music.
This blog sort of felt like a bit of a rant, but I wanted to forge forward and hit all the bases mentioned in our prompt.
Also, I will be seeing ya’ll tomorrow – my drive way is clear! Hooray!!!
I find it interesting that you don't see any disparity between musicians and their genders, especially coming from a small SC marching band like myself. I have never seen a boy play the flute at BHP. I shudder to think about how much teasing he would face if there was! Though everything else in my old high school band was relatively well-mixed, from females on sousaphones and baritones to males on clarinet, there was always a sort of hushed-up labeling regarding instrument choice. "Oh, Hailey plays the sousaphone, she must be a lesbian..." "Anthony plays the clarinet and hangs out with girls, he has to be gay!" All of the stereotyping is really rather disgusting. Why can't people just play what they want to play and leave well enough alone.
ReplyDeleteI've found through the years that, the more advanced you are, the more blended instrumentation is. At events like Region Band, All-State, and Winthrop Band Clinic, there were always a fairly even number of both girls and guys on each instrument.
The greatest differences, as I mentioned in my blog(s), seem to be in the percussion section.
As for choir, I found that the only males who joined the group were the ones who were, frankly, man enough to do it! It seems to take a lot of guts for a guy to join a choir for fear of being labeled. However, our choir in high school was rather well-respected, at least by those intelligent enough to respect music other than country in the first place.
I'll conclude my rant before I essentially post another blog under yours!
It's all very interesting, Katie--especially given the differences between your SC experiences and Abigail's SC experiences. It just shows that micro-cultures within a larger culture can have some very significant differences.
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