Music & Religion OR Music and Gender

 For our next blog posts, we're returning to having you look at the music of your own music-culture. The idea here is to take the lens of ethnomusicology and shine it back in your general direction. There are no right or wrong answers here, just honest observation. In an effort to not overwhelm you with too many blog posts, I'm letting you pick the direction you'd like to go here--you can discuss how either music and religion or music and gender intersects in your own musical experiences. We've found ourselves noticing both of those relationships in the cultures we've studied, and we'll be noticing them even more as the semester progresses. 

If you choose Music & Religion: Think about how music and religion intersect in your own experience by considering both use and aesthetics. For instance, many Native American groups use  a good amount of music in their religious ceremonies and teaching. Too, their songs are an important means of transmitting religious ideas from generation to generation. The aesthetics of much of their music--what they find to be beautiful and meaningful--includes stylistic traits that can be traced back to significant religious ideals, such as cyclic and repetitive forms, the use of vocables and animal sounds, and the pervading "natural" vocal timbres. So, write about how music is used in religion in your experience, and what stylistic traits of that music seems to be an outcome of the overall religious beliefs. A few questions you might ask yourself as you get started: How is music actually used in religion in your experience? What is its purpose? What sort of performing styles are expected, and are there any rules that should be followed? De the prevailing religions of your surroundings have an influence on what is found aesthetically pleasing in music? Is there any way in which the values of those religions are inherent in the way music is built or experienced?

If you choose Music & Gender: Think about how music and gender have intersected in your own musical experiences. We noticed that almost all the drumming in Native American music is performed by men, but there was also a bit in the American Roots video that showed a younger generation of girls to be taught drumming, too. We also noticed a difference in expectations in the way the Native American dancers both danced and dressed. Some questions to ask yourself as you get started: In your experience, have different genders listened to different types of music, or been expected to listen to different types of music? Within the style of music that you like to listen to, does the media treat different genders differently? In music ensembles, have you noticed a difference in who plays what instruments, or how different sections act in choir? Do you find that folks performing music-related jobs that aren't actually performing (dealing with sound equipment, conducting, teaching, managing, etc.) lean to one gender or the other? And, of course, you're free to branch out and include any commentary on LGBTQ+ issues that you might like to add. 

As with the My Musical Culture blog, please shoot for at least 400 words, and please include embedded media where you think it might illuminate your ideas. Be sure to proofread your work, and give credit to anyone who's ideas or words you might choose to incorporate. 

For me, I'm going to talk about Music & Gender, mostly because I have a good story to tell :-)

My mother-in-law, Karen, was an amazing woman. She received her Ph.D. in English while raising her son (my husband), ironed her sheets before putting them on her bed, took her 4-year-old granddaughter (my kid) downtown on the city bus regularly so that the granddaughter would have an appreciation for public transportation, and got up to go jogging in the morning before we'd all go hiking. She was dauntless. While growing up in Dayton, Ohio in the 1950s, though, she hit a snag: music.  She really wanted to play percussion in the band, but girls just did not do that in Dayton in the 1950s. So she took piano lessons, like a good girl. She actually got quite good at the piano, and played it for the rest of her life. Her two sisters followed in her footsteps, playing the piano and the flute--both were perfectly acceptable "girl" instruments of the day.

Fast forward from Ohio in the 1950s to Flint, Michigan in the late 1990s. Karen, all grown up and in her mid-50s, decided it was never too late to live the dream--it was high time she started those percussion lessons. She found a marimba at a pawn shop and signed up for private lessons at the Community Music School in Flint. Over the next few years she practiced diligently, getting good enough to play on a number of student recitals, use four mallets at a time, and give herself carpal tunnel syndrome. She and my father-in-law eventually moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and the marimba came with them. The marimba, in fact, lived in the spare bedroom--the one that my kid would stay in when we went to visit them. About seven years ago Karen passed away after a long trek with brain cancer, and the marimba sat and collected dust for a few years.

Perhaps it was all of those evenings sharing a bedroom with a marimba--we'll never know--but upon reaching the appropriate age (5th grade) the granddaughter, Tally, decided to follow in Mom-mom's footsteps and play the marimba! Tally signed up for band at school and we went shopping for a beginning percussion kit, bringing home a set of bells (like a small marimba made of metal) and a snare drum. Then, on Tally's 13th birthday, the marimba traveled from Asheville down to Spartanburg, where Tal gleefully unwrapped it, reassembled it, and started practicing it in our study. When we moved into a different house two years ago the first two things Tally did the day we moved in was to hook up the wifi and to set up the marimba in the sunroom. 

And did anyone tell Tally that "girls just don't play percussion"? No, they did not. Over the course of the intervening generation it's become pretty normalized for folks of all genders to play percussion in the band. In fact, for some complicated Covid reasons, Tally's marching band didn't even use marimbas last fall, and so she and a number of her friends--all girls-- played the snare drum. (Well,  ok, there are still some guys on the snare line, but the numbers are pretty even.) Snare drums, for the uninitiated, are some of the most macho instruments in the marching band. And it's totally ok now for the girls to play them.

Oh, and Tally wants to work for NASA when she grows up. No one is telling her she can't do that either.

So this is just an example from my own world of how gender can affect someone’s personal interaction with music, and how that gender/music link can drastically change over the course of 50-60 years.