When I first looked at this topic, I had a really hard time thinking about what exactly I would write. This was never anything that really occurred to me, aside from knowing that boys sang male roles in musicals and girls sang female roles, and being severely disheartened that I couldn't play Tony in West Side Story. However, when I thought a little further, I remembered the choral set up at my high school. I attended the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts, which was founded in the early 2000s by the Texas Boys' Choir. As you probably guessed from the name, TBC was a male only choir, meaning that all of the females had to be in a different ensemble, which was the Singing Girls of Texas. This separation was always very normal to me, and I didn't really think anything of it. That's just the way it was. I knew that my friends at different high schools were all in mixed choruses, but it never bothered me to be in a women's ensemble. To this day, the only experience I've had in mixed choruses has been through my church or through the chorus to a musical or opera.
However, all of my directors throughout my choral experience have been almost exclusively men. Aside from the director of my choir in elementary school and the director at a church I attended, all of my other directors have been men. This is a little bit interesting to me, seeing as I've been almost exclusively in women's choruses. I remember during high school, our director left to pursue a job in a different city, and we had to go through the process of hiring a new director. They allowed the interviewees to guest conduct our choir to get a feel for how we interacted with them, and out of all of them, there was only one woman, and the choir collectively decided we wanted a male director, to off set how much estrogen was in the room. I don't think that there is necessarily any merit to that argument, but that was the agreement throughout the entire choir at the time.
Although I've had almost exclusively male directors, I have only had female private teachers. That is not very weird in the grand scheme of things; there are a lot of women who teach private voice lessons, and it makes sense that I would have found myself only having female teachers. However, that does beg the question of why there are so many females who teach private lessons. Also, is that trend exclusive to vocal training, or does that permeate through other instruments? These are things that I hadn't really ever considered, but I think it would be interesting to look at statistics for this, and analyze the potential causes for any sorts of trends that were obvious.
One last aspect to music and gender that I have experienced has been this: throughout my study of music, I have been surrounded by mostly females. At my high school there was about a 4:1 ratio of girls to boys. I think I had 10 boys in my graduating class of 51. I was very accustomed to being surrounded by women even before coming to Converse. Obviously, being at Converse, that has only been amplified. Aside from the occasional male graduate student and male professors, I am continuously surrounded by women. I personally enjoy that kind of learning environment, and I think this is a good setting, but I would be interested to know if there is actually a difference in learning environments from single gender to coed.
I think it's interesting that you've only experienced male choral conductors. While it's true that there are much fewer female conductors than males in any sort of music, the choral world have more women conductors than, say, the orchestral world. As to the conductor vs. teacher observation, think about this: is there a gender imbalance in the general world of teachers? How about in those various folks that are "in charge." Hmmmm.....
ReplyDeleteWell, I can give you my input from the percussion world. In the parallel universe far from singing that is called percussion, I have only ever had private male teachers. In marching band, we had one female tech. Her name was Lara and she was my favorite. She unfortunately had to stop teching because she got married and had a full-time job as an elementary school teacher. The men were still there because none of them were married yet. (They still aren't). That was the only woman I ever encountered through twelve years of school. When I met my instructor here, Adena, I was a little hesitant because I didn't know what it was like to have a private lesson with a woman. I found out that it's even better, but I definitely didn't realize the judgements I had in my head until I met her.
ReplyDeleteHow interesting -- the boy:girl ratio in inter-school SATB choirs in Colombo is about 1:1. I don't know why, but there were enough people from each gender who considered choir cool to make the numbers pretty even.
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