Music and Gender

Growing up, I don’t really remember feeling that there was a gender divide within a musical context. There were an equal number of boys and girls that attended my Suzuki classes, and my church’s children’s choir was split about fifty-fifty as well. (Although I will say that most of the boys tended to drop out as they got older...) Both of my parents were also active in the church choir, as well as in handbells. As far as I knew, men and women both had equal roles in the music world, and I was content to just play my violin and sing in the occasional church play.

It wasn’t until much later that I started to realize that there was indeed a gender divide in the world of music. I remember listening to recordings of Perlman, Heifetz, and eventually Joshua Bell with my grandmother and parents, but I wasn’t ever struck by the fact that all of the great violinists were men until I was about eleven or twelve. This distressed me, but only because I wanted to find someone I could look up to as an aspiring violinist, someone like me, and it was apparently going to be harder than I expected.

My dad came to the rescue and showed me an article about Midori. I remember being in total awe of her because when all four of her strings broke at her debut concert, she took the concertmaster’s violin, broke two of his strings, and had to use the assistant concertmaster’s violin! Midori was awesome, and I thought she was the coolest thing ever, but my dad didn’t stop there. We went on to “discover” Sarah Chang, Hilary Hahn, Vanessa Mae, and Anne Sophie Mutter, all of whom I still strongly admire today.

Flash forward about a year: in middle school, I was coerced by my private violin teacher into taking strings instead of band, and while it bugged me so badly, I grudgingly agreed because I concluded that Hilary Hahn probably wouldn’t have whined about playing violin everyday during school. But before my schedule “went through” and was official, I spent a day in band.  In my grand total of fifty-odd minutes in band class, I noticed that all of the girls (except myself, what a surprise!) wanted to play a woodwind instrument, and all of the guys wanted to play brass or percussion. This was a little weird to me, because I’d never thought that instruments had gender assignments; instruments are instruments, and they all made music, regardless of who plays them. My strings class was more evenly mixed, but eventually most of the guys gravitated towards the cello and bass.

And that was the way things were throughout middle and high school, up until I came to Converse. I thought studying music at a women’s college was going to be a jarring experience, but as classes started up, and I began to form a routine, I realized that I didn’t really miss being in a mixed gender musical setting. In a way, coming to Converse and studying music here inspires me more than a co-ed school may have because I am surrounded by extremely talented female musicians, who are all passionate about what they do. I am essentially living my eleven year old self’s dreams because my friends inspire me to become a better musician, all the while showing everyone what it’s like to be a world class female musician.