Jennifer Marie J. Yang, MD

I saw this article from The Guardian yesterday on female percussionists, or the lack thereof. I guess it’s a good one to look at for Women’s Month (International Women’s Day was March 8).

Out of curiosity – as I do with a lot of questions that suddenly pop into my head – I decided to perform an internet search for “gender” and “musical instruments”. This musical instrument from Bali in Indonesia showed up. No, I didn’t mean that, but good to know that it exists. It is now filed away in my trivia-loving brain.

Anyway: The Guardian article was written by Emily Gunton, a conservatory-trained professional percussionist who “has enjoyed a busy freelance career, yet I never felt compelled to put myself through auditioning for a manel – otherwise known as a panel of men”. She also notes that there are more men named “David” in London’s top 7 orchestras, compared to women percussionists. Overall, the number of women in professional orchestras have been increasing, but still lag behind the men when you look at all instruments. The percussionists are way behind the violinists and wind players, though. Here’s an article from Quartz.com from 2018 with cool information.

Part of the reasoning here, she explains, is there are “boy” instruments and “girl” instruments – children at an early age are exposed to this notion of gendered musical instruments and therefore are swayed away from a non-typical way of making music. The drums, along with the trombone and tuba, were masculine, while the violin, flute and piano were female (multiple articles in the academic literature demonstrate this – for example: see here, and here). Aside from appearances, timbre and pitch might also play a part. Simplistically: Timbre = the characteristics that make a violin sound like a violin, through which you know that it is not a harp; it’s how you can tell one instrument from the other even if they are playing the same note. Pitch = how you distinguish a low note (say, produced by the left end of the piano keyboard) from a high note (on the right of a keyboard).

I suppose this was one reason that the seeming contradiction of the Australia Drummer Queens live show (pictured here) appealed to me. Aside from being a punny title (Drama Queens), Drummer Queens featured eight talented professional percussionists in their element. Girls playing boy instruments, and doing it well, breaking stereotypes.

One last tidbit, with regards to Performing Arts Medicine: women musicians are at greater risk of injury because of “one size fits all” instruments. The “one size” is generally large, or fitted to male hands. Getting a smaller instrument can help, however not all instruments are commonly manufactured with such options. There are ¾-scale violins for example, and ⅞-scale piano keyboards. Other instrument modifications can also help, like straps or special instrument rests.

Maybe – maybe – in the future we’ll get somewhere where boys and girls play all instruments well and without prejudice. But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, expose children to all musical instruments, and let them choose as they please.

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