Music and Gender

Music and Gender 

Here's a gender stereotype video that I thought would be funny to start off with...

    

Growing up my family did not play any instruments and neither did I. Do I wish I would have learned to play guitar and piano, yes but I was involved with a lot of other extra activities and most likely would not have stuck through in the instrument department. Luckily enough I can say I was apart of our church choir and my middle school's chorus for all three years.  Granted I was in the church choir when I was five to about eight years old so I did not see much gender differences there because some of the girl's voices were lower than the boys at the time. 

          However, when I was in my middle school chorus I did notice a few things with gender and music. At my middle school, you either had to be in band or chorus. The first thing I noticed was more guys wanted to join the chorus than be in band class. Also, the guys that were in the chorus class thought they were "cool" if they had a deeper voice. As we entered high school many people wanted to join the group called the Choraliers who are a national title-winning chorus group at Clover High School, but more people started to get involved in the marching band at school because they as well were nationally ranked. What I noticed about the marching and regular band was that the percussion was predominantly all males, until my senior year when I remember one girl being apart of it. The marching band had way more men in it than women. Another thing I noticed about the marching band was that the drum majors were typically women, but the president of the band was typically a male. 

       I have been apart of three churches in my life, which all had different types of music and instruments involved. What they all have in common though is that I've only had a woman pianist, a male guitarist, and a woman lead singer. I have attended other churches and contemporary churches typically have fallen under the same lines of what I just said. 

       I wish I knew more about music and gender roles but this topic is super intriguing and I cannot wait to do more research and observations on the different gender roles in music.