Gender and Music Performance: Rationale of the study
Copyright © 2007 Dr Desmond Sergeant
Music and Communication
Bertrand Russell said of speech that 'it expresses the state of the speaker and changes the state of the hearer'. Much the same can be said of music. Music's purpose is to create in, or communicate to the hearer ideas, moods, feelings, and emotions. Oxford Dictionary of English gives Music: the art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.
Music communicates with the hearer at several different levels. The first, basic level is the that of the tonal soundscape – the pitches, chords durations, silences arranged by the composer with the intention of passing on to the hearer his own thoughts and feelings. The second level is that of the music's instrumentation – the colour created by differences and contrasts of tone colour of various instruments which give the music additional character, warmth and colour, enhancing the capability of the basic sound structure to communicate feeling. The third level is superimposed over the first two through the expressive powers of the performer, through choice of tempo, and by manipulation of dynamics, timing, timbre, pitch inflection, vibrato and other qualities. Without this third level we would have no basis for preferring the performance of one artist above that of another.
The artistry of a performer arises from engagement of his/her imagination, sensitivity, awareness, musical intelligence, their 'feelingfulness' with the structure of the music, and of course, their instrumental technique. These qualities and attributes are highly personal; it would seem strange indeed if they were argued to be unrelated to those psychological attributes we describe as personality. Think of any well-known singers – Maria Callas, or the three tenors – it would be difficult to remember their performances without also recalling how they present as persons. Is this interaction of personality and performance unique to singing, or does it pervade all genres of music performance?
Personality
"Look here, Laura, men and women don't react in the same way. What it comes down to is this. Men are really the sensitive sex. Women are tough..."
Starkwedder, in Agatha Christie's 'The Unexpected Guest', Act II.
This line given by Christie to her character catches our attention because it runs counter to the personality stereotypes we commonly attribute to the genders. We are all aware in a 'commonsense' way that men and women are differ in some aspects of behaviour -that there are social, emotional and perhaps mental/intellectual differences between the genders- that women think, act and react differently from men. A common tacit assumption is that differences in bodily characteristics influence mental ones. Some of the stereotypes that are characteristically assigned to the genders are that women are more passive, more caring, emotional, moody, more prone to fear or anxiety than men; that men are tougher, more aggressive, dominant, more resilient than women.
Awareness of such stereotypes is evident in children from an early age; for example, 2-3 year-old children have been shown to attribute to a 'boy' doll that 'he never cries'. Undoubtedly, as parents, we must accept some responsibility for the inculcation of gender stereotyping through our differential behaviour to and treatment of boy and girl children, through reward systems and reinforcement. Even the toys we give them tend to be gender-oriented. The manufacturer of dolls' prams aimed specifically at a market of little boys has yet to set up in business! Boys come to realize that they must avoid certain 'feminine' types of behaviours. Gender stereotypes have been shown in numerous studies to be clearly reflected in the choice of musical instruments taken up by children.
However they may be engendered, the reality of differences in psychological make-up is confirmed by research literature of personality and gender, though they do not necessarily turn out to be those of which 'commonsense' informs us. In the general population, men tend to score more highly on introversion and independence than women, while women tend to be more sensitive and anxious than men. Men and women also tend to use language differentially.
Musicians as a group tend not to conform to the patterns of traits found generally in the wider population. For example, male musicians tend to be more reserved, detached, critical (aloofness), show greater sensitivity and self-sufficiency (tough-mindedness) than the wider population norms for men, whereas women musicians are more taciturn, less happy-go-lucky (lower in surgency) than their non-musician peers.
When men and women musicians are compared, women show greater warm-heartedness, sensitivity and surgency than their male colleagues, but male/female differences tend to be less pronounced than in the wider population norms. Personality is normally studied in adults through self-report techniques, using rather lengthy inventories of questions about their tendencies to respond in given ways to certain situations. They therefore tend to reflect the ways in which people may react rather than define their tendencies to action.
Gender in performance of music
What is not yet clear is the relationship between gender, personality and action in music. Are styles of musical performance 'unisex', or are the gender differences of personality that have been identified by psychologists revealed in subtle ways in the way that music is interpreted and expressed?
If there are differences, it would be reasonable to expect that they would be detectable by musically experienced listeners, especially ones who are themselves performers at a high level in a mixed-gender profession.
As musicians, we may feel that 'commonsense, and everyday experience' tells us that there are no grounds for believing that men and women differ in their capabilities of interpretation of music. The music recording industry, however, acknowledges no such equality. Of the recordings of solo instrumental music listed in the 'Red Classical Music Catalogue' (2004 edition) which lists all published CD recordings currently extant, approximately 72% are performances by male artists, and 28% by female. A typical example is that of recordings of the suites for unaccompanied 'cello by J.S.Bach, of which 55 are recordings by male 'cellists compared with 5 by female.
Why is this? Are there simply more male musicians than female? The intakes of students to music conservatoires in the United Kingdom and the members' handbooks of the Musicians Union and ISM show that this is not the case. Or are male 'cellists so superior to female as to account for such a disbalance?
Questions of gender equivalence in musical performance are therefore important ones, especially for women musicians, but they are ones that can only be resolved by experimental study, and this is the purpose of the present study.
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