Gender Roles

   My first musical experience was at my old Baptist church. As some of you know there is usually a leader or a master conductor who is over the band and choir. Well now I that I think about it, there was always a man controlling that whole system. He was usually the piano player and he would ALWAYS get the solos..always..no exaggeration. He would run the rehearsals, told us what to wear, who had a solo (ha!) and what songs we were going to sing. I never really payed attention to that until now because maybe when you were 10 or 12, you never really payed attention to gender roles. I know I didn’t, I was too busy worried about friends and boys.

    As most of you know, I am a vocal performance major but I also played the viola in high school. Before I wanted to play the viola I wanted to play the drums but I had to play the xylophones first…no mam. So I decided to play the viola. Majority of the boys played in band of course, the boys mostly played brass instruments and very few played the percussion. As for the orchestra, we only had one boy play the violin. When I started middle school I begin to realize that boys were not playing in the orchestra because I had raging hormones and there were no boys to look at! We only had like three boys out of 20-25 people. When I got in High school nothing seemed to change with the boy to girl ratio. My senior year in High school, we only had about 6-8 boys out of 50 people playing in the orchestra.

    I was also in chorus and of course we had more females than males. I enjoyed being in a mix choir because it’s so nice hearing baritones and tenors. Male singers have a different timbre so it’s really exciting to hear something completely different. The males acted immature for the most part when it came to learning music. However, they learned their music quicker than the females. I did state chorus also and its like an audition for singers.

    Being in State chorus kind of changed my life. I was in the mixed chorus and there were more men than women. (score!) When we practiced a piece of music we always split apart from the men and practiced. I remember one rehearsal when the men came in and they finished before us. They performed their solo part in a piece called Qui Sedes. The tenors did their part towards the end of the song just by themselves. I thought I died and went to Heaven because it was so beautiful!

    Being at Converse, I now appreciate mixed choirs because I am in Chorale and it’s all women with no men singing. I missed hearing low notes from men or when the tenor section sings and it’s like “whoa..how can you sing that high and you’re a man”. I feel like when men are in a choir they are stable and they create such balance between women.  It’s so hard to explain. But I enjoy being in the chorale but sometimes I would like to hear and be around some testosterone.