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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2050 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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Is there a music sharing thread? Probably not, and I get it, people have varying musical tastes. Anyway I am throwing this out there:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5x-u7iw7W1Y

The faux-ballet is called "Ma Mere L'Oye" and was composed by Ravel, and this is called Le Jardin Feerique which translates, alas, as "The Fairy Garden." A more fey title does not exist. Yet I love this part, and this iteration, in particular, though you can find others on Youtube. Enjoy. Or don't, of course.

That’s a gorgeous piece! Also, I think this is the first male harpist I’ve ever seen. Certain instruments have a significant gender imbalance, and if there’s a more female-coded classical instrument than the harp, I’ve yet to discover it.

I would have guessed the flute would be up there as a female-coded instrument for reasons, and cursory research suggests it indeed is; the harp is generally a clear number one with flute a distant second. In my brief research, I stumbled across a bunch of articles to the… tune… of certain instruments being too male and so are orchestras and This is a Problem that We Need to…

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.

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.

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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