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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2262 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 30, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I had a long conversation about this with a family member who often attends classical concerts with me, despite not being very knowledgeable about music nor having ever played an instrument past childhood. She was intrigued by the gender imbalances she’d noticed with certain instruments; like any good liberal feminist, she assumed it must be a result of girls and boys being socialized differently and, subtly or explicitly, nudged by music educators into picking up certain instruments rather than others, as a result of sexist stereotypes about which instruments are “supposed to” be played by each sex.

I explained that this doesn’t match my experience of being a musician in middle and high school. You don’t really see significant gender differences in, for example, the stringed instruments, with stand-up bass being a notable exception due to the fact that it’s a tall instrument which tends to be played by taller individuals. Wind and brass instruments are where you really see the biggest differences. (Other than, as previously noted, the harp.)

I chalked it up to the fact that when it comes to a wind/brass instrument, you’re using your actual lungs and voice to produce the sound. When you blow or hum into an instrument, you’re subconsciously expecting the sound to at least somewhat resemble your actual voice; if you’re a deep-voiced man, and you blow into an oboe or piccolo, the sound that’s going to come out is extremely different from the sound that your brain is used to your lungs and throat producing. I think that this produces a sort of cognitive dissonance that naturally drives people to prefer playing instruments that are more similar to their natural voices. Since stringed instruments don’t involve the use of the human voice, they don’t suffer from this same issue of needing to “identify” with the sound the instrument makes, and therefore you see less gender splits with those instruments.

The gender coding of instruments sort of holds but generally falls off when you get to the professional level. Any social stigma of 'oh your a man that plays the flute' falls off significantly by the time you're making a living playing an instrument, so skill level matters a lot more than social acceptance. Also, by the time you're a professional you survived every cliche and bully about playing a male or female coded instrument that no one cares about the current social coding of any instrument.

There was a study done about 'gender inequality' of professional orchestras, and while strings have gender equality, brass and winds are still VERY heavily male dominated except for flute which is female dominated. Clarinet is, oddly, the most male dominated instrument in professional orchestras.

I chalked it up to the fact that when it comes to a wind/brass instrument, you’re using your actual lungs and voice to produce the sound.

No brass or wind instrument uses their voice unless they're doing some fun extended techniques. Generally, the vocal cords are not used at all. I think it's more that winds and brass use the most musculature of any instrument. To maintain the level of air pressure necessary to activate and sustain notes requires a lot of core strength and embouchure also requires a lot of musculature. I think this amount of physicality when playing a woodwind instrument tends to favor males over females.

Since we're talking about classical music - here's a video of me with my woodwind trio playing a movement of Francaix.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lBvdIxBYQFw

Some disparate thoughts from me on the topic:

Harp - Needs a lot of fine motor control, so women are probably better at this. Plus it's very delicate and the player gets to show herself off to the audience, unlike something like the double bass or the drums where the player is behind the instrument.

Brass - Puffing your cheeks out is unflattering, teenage girls don't wanna look like this.

Flutes etc - High pitched tone and pursed lips, kinda girly so puts off the boys.

Drums - Big man hit thing hard with stick. Seems very masculine.

Guitar - This one I'm not sure about. My impression is that players are mostly male but the only reason I can see is that teenage boys think it'll impress the girls, maybe because it allows you to sing at the same time as playing. Electric guitar also means you can play in a band.

I don't know much about other instruments, but playing guitar is physically painful for a while. Less so with electric but if men go electric more than women by default do to tech bias or harshness bias then that cancels that out.

Harp - Needs a lot of fine motor control, so women are probably better at this. Plus it's very delicate and the player gets to show herself off to the audience, unlike something like the double bass or the drums where the player is behind the instrument.

Indeed. Given the low degree of straining involved and the high degree of visibility, the harp is a great instrument for women to look cUuUte while performing.

Funnily enough, here’s a Reddit thread on harpists and body image issues, started by a woman complaining that performing makes her feel self-conscious about her tattoo and looking “like a squashed dumpling sitting down.” Of course, the blame lies not with her choosing to get a garish tattoo or her being overweight, but rather “the current aesthetic stereotypes of harpists.”

The thread exemplifies Redditors in all their glory. I went between mentally eye-rolling and thinking “☕️” as I went from comment to comment.

I’m not suggesting that this is a conscious thought process; I’m suggesting that this is all going on at the level of the visceral and subconscious. Those people looking askance at you for playing flute were doing so because it is weird to see a big deep-voiced man with his lips pursed blowing into a little flute and making a girly pretty noise. And it’s equally weird seeing a quiet and feminine girl blasting out noise from an extravagant tenor-voiced trumpet.

I’m not saying that these are rationally correct value judgments. And certainly I’m both glad that you found joy in playing woodwind instruments and confident that you’re very skilled at them! I’m just saying that the “socialization” you’re talking about is not the cause of the gender imbalances we observe, but rather the result of more hardwired bio-social dynamics farther upstream. If half the girls in your music class had eagerly picked up trumpets, and half the boys had eagerly picked up flutes, I don’t think the music teacher would have forced everyone against their will to trade instruments until the gender assignments were “correct”.

Do you disagree? Do you think that all of those male trumpet players were secretly pining to play flute, but felt like they were forced against their will to play loud tenor instruments by the oppressive shackles of socialization and imposed culture?

I think it's pretty possible there's a feedback loop, or several, going on here. First, it does feel more masculine to be making loud, blasting, boisterous noises and more feminine to be making small, high-pitched, well-controlled ones.1 As such, more men choose brass and drums and more women choose flutes and harps. Then that becomes a stereotype - 'only girls play flutes, loser!' - that reinforces itself in a feedback loop of its own.

  1. Going one step deeper, what feels masculine or feminine does indeed change culturally a bit, but some basic outlines seem to hold pretty constant.

Interesting implication being that when men made up the whole orchestra, from flute to timpani, a wider range of masculine expression was allowed. Flute was a purely male instrument in the best Vienna orchestras until the early 21st century!

It's only the introduction of women into the orchestra that marks one instrument as masc and another as femme. Until then all orchestral performance was masculine, and the variety you chose could implicate the kind of man you were but not your masculinity itself.

I think this is what's missing from the modern gender debate with the supposedly traditionalist right wing view (that I am sympathetic to). Traditionally if there was a profession, men were almost exclusively doing it, and so we can realistically expect men to have a pretty broad palette of expressiveness.

I basically see it as male security -> women enter workforce -> male anxiety -> men undermining and sniping at each other, enforcing too restrictive gender roles. The result is broader male expression gets twisted into shame-coated "queer" outlets rather than being healthily expressed, and traditionalists are confused into not realizing the anxiety itself (part of) the problem.

You’re missing one key factor, which is that woodwinds objectively suck.

“Yes I would like to go eeeeeeee in the background, how did you know?”

Haha, I mean. I did choose to play the clarinet in Mid/High School, just to be different, and it was a great choice. There were 12 male trumpets, 11 female flutes, and like 6 other players, so it was a bit unbalanced.

My male friend did flute to be different too, but man did it not work. Skinny tall dude fluttering away in the front row, firmly embedded in a sea of girls tinier and cuter than him. I got to slack off in the middle row with 3 girls, 2 of them among the cutest in the class, and didn't even have to practice hardly at all bc who cares what the clarinets are doing so long as it's in the right key. Too bad I was socially incapable of acting on IOI's; our teacher was often trying to motivate me to practice by telling me how talented I was at pitch and breath control, which works great to impress 14yo band girls I guess.

Of course the real masterclass was the other, naturally social, friend who chose to be the saxophone player. the bastard

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