Music and Gender

As I’m pretty sure most of you know/have figured out by now, I’m a band kid. I live and breath band. I love Marching Band and all sorts of band music (and let’s be honest, I have A LOT of stories that I could tell you-a.k.a. ‘That one time during band camp…’). If you would like to hear all of my old band camp stories, please find me and ask! I’d love to relive the ‘good old days’.

In my experience with Marching Band, there were certain gender specific instruments. The flute, my instrument, was most definitely a female dominated instrument. Whether that was because that was what was expected or females were just better at it, I’m not sure. On the other hand, Percussion was mainly a male dominated series of instruments-especially the drum line. Of course, even with the predominant gender in these two sections, there were a few outliers-some boys that played the flute and some girls that did percussion. Other sections that were dominated by a single gender happened to be the low brass: trombones and tubas. Again, there were a few females, but it was mostly males. Is this because it’s expected that males play the heavier/lower instruments? Maybe…or maybe it’s because their lips are better suited to play the lower brass instruments than a female’s lips are.

Now, let’s think of a band room setting. Usually you have flutes on the first row, clarinets/saxophones on the second row, another row of clarinets with low reeds and maybe french horns, low brass and trumpets, and then all of the percussion. Maybe you can say that the actions of these sections is dependent upon how close they are to the band director, but it could also have to do with the make up of the sections. In my experience (from high school), the front row barely talks to each other. They ask a few questions then let it be. The second row is slightly more talkative-clarinets and saxophones are a pretty even mixture of male and females, The third row you can usually hear lots of whispers coming from. The fourth row (containing most of the males in the band) are a little louder and you hear laughter quite often. The percussion row…let’s not even talk about them, they’re in their own world. Is the difference because of the gender or the distance from the band director? Honestly, it’s probably a little of both.

Going through school, I got a lot of different music styles thrown in my face. My friends were a mix of males and females and they all had their own tastes. That being said, I could see some similarities in music between the male group of friends and the female group of friends. Let’s start with the guys. We all had a playlist of songs that we compiled for when we spent time together. The guys almost always put trap music/rap/R&B and so forth. While they didn’t all listen to those three specifically, enough of it overlapped to make it stand out. As for my female group of friends, some did contribute to the trap/rap/R&B, but they mostly went with pop/rock/punk. Maybe it’s that we gravitated towards each other because we liked the same music or maybe it’s because that’s the music our genders are supposed to like. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to really matter with my group of friends because we listened to everyone’s music when we were together.

I don’t know if I would say that the music is that much different in the all female environment than in a mixed gender environment. Converse is known for it’s diversity and that includes musical tastes. My roommates and I hang out all the time and have started a playlist where we add 10 of our favorite songs per every few months. It’s a mix of oldies, rap, country, trap, pop, punk, electronic, all country’s folk songs (mostly because of me), and you name it. I feel like this is a more diverse music setting than a mixed gender setting would be simply because we’re not trying to fit into a gender norm. In high school I could see that there was this one kid who didn’t like rap music, but he wanted to be cool so he would turn up the rap music in his car and blast it for his ‘friends’ to listen to. I feel like that would sort of be the case in a mixed gender setting. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe not. Honestly, there isn’t a way to know if I’m right or wrong because I’d have to go out and experience more mixed gender settings than I already do (and I have no time for that).