Women Musicians

[SMcD]

Well, maybe I oversimplified that. Testosterone fuels us male keyboardists to go up on stage and improvise in front of a bunch of people, and (Too much) testosterone makes teenage boys pick guitar because "It can get you laid", etc.

[SK]

Simple answer: boys and girls just excel at different things, while for some, there's no barrier at all.

simply put: because they don't have the need to wave their dicks around. The playing of piano is one thing, the need to play it in front of a bunch of strangers is another. Boys by nature are show-offs.

And some can be drawn to an instrument from an actual interest in music.

 

If I'd known I played piano all that time as a kid just so someday I could show off for a bunch of strangers, I would have picked a less popular interest... like guitar, or sports.

[Gismo Recording]

Just remembered another one. I saw a band recently on Austin City Limits called The Decemberists that had a female keyboard player. I don't know her name though.

[ITGITC]

2nd pass...

 

(First (for a special forumite friend of mine) - "gals" = girls / women / ladies / females. No disrespect intended by using this term.)

 

Why more guys than gals play keyboards in a band:

 

1. Bandmembers must overcome obstacles, some of which are easier for guys:

 

a. Putting up with other GUYS in the band.

b. Moving heavy keyboard equipment.

c. Staying out all night.

d. Travelling - and all the inconveniences that go with it.

 

 

2. Gals don't need to work hard to get offers from guys. Whereas this is a top priority for some/many of us (or used to be). Guys play in bands to increase their chances with the ladies.

 

3. If you're a gal playing keyboards in a band, you're unique. There aren't many. I suspect your girl friends might treat you as an outcast as rehearsals, gigs, and travelling with the band takes a committment. Otherwise that time may be spent with them instead.

 

4. Most gals that I know don't jump into the technical aspect of keyboards like guys do. Guys often have a great interest in this aspect of the instrument. I don't think this pull is quite as great in gals. I'm sure there are exceptions.

 

5. Gals who have husbands/boyfriends probably have a tough time leaving them to play gigs or attend regular rehearsals. So to be successful, a gal would either have to be single or have a very understanding husband/boyfriend - or be connected to another bandmember. And we all know how that usually plays out.

 

6. I'm going for another cup of java. I'm sure I'll think of something else...

 

[iLaw]

I don't have the training to analyze this scientifically, but I've raised two daughters in a heavily music-oriented household filled with pianos (electric and acoustic) and organs, drums, flutes, violins, cellos, Strats and J Basses. I've watched them and their friends since kindergarten sorting out their musical tastes and performance preferences.

 

I'm betting that they and their female musician friends would agree most with Bill(@WelcomeHomeStudios). Jazz and rock ensembles are just a little too overtly aggressive.

 

And they would have already agreed by junior high, long before the weights of amplifiers or the lateness of gigs had come to their attention.

 

Larry.

 

 

 

[ITGITC]

 

There are lots of folks playing bluegrass in my area.

 

I can easily see my daughter playing with these folks.

 

For those who remember, she is studying music (viola) at Appalachian State University. She's a sophomore.

 

She's LOVING IT!

 

Music is cool.

 

Tom

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

...And some can be drawn to an instrument from an actual interest in music.

 

Interest in music is an entirely different process than the need to get up in front of strangers and perform music. Some of the very best players that I know have no interest in ever playing for anyone other than themselves and their friends. It is not a question of getting girls or making money or anything else other than the pure love of making music. Totally beside the point of the question, which has to do with the number of female keyboardists performing on stage.

[iLaw]

There are lots of folks playing bluegrass in my area.

 

I can easily see my daughter playing with these folks...

Same here. In fact our younger daughter had a quartet in junior high that played all bluegrass on traditional string quartet instrumentation. She loved it.

 

Now she sings opera. The Fender Strat that she begged for in grade school has probably clocked less than two hours of playing time in its life. OK by me. My job is to lay out the opportunities and see what they pick up, then what they hold on to.

 

Larry.

 

 

 

[Cygnus64]

...And some can be drawn to an instrument from an actual interest in music.

 

Interest in music is an entirely different process than the need to get up in front of strangers and perform music.

 

Keys in a band aside, there are millions of women who get up on stage and tear it up. As you noted, the PSO probably has more females than males. Women performers can be fearless and more ferocious than men. They can be more cut-throat and extremely political to boot.

[ProfD]

Keys in a band aside, there are millions of women who get up on stage and tear it up.

Millions?

 

Without my hearing aid and reading glasses, it sounds like your number includes, uh....dancers too.

[Cygnus64]

Keys in a band aside, there are millions of women who get up on stage and tear it up.

Millions?

 

Yup, millions. There are almost 7 billion of us, millions is a relatively small number. China currently has 30 million kids studying piano, no foolin.

[iLaw]

(flippant comment that I immediately regretted and quickly deleted)

[Moonglow]

....6. I'm going for another cup of java. I'm sure I'll think of something else....

....and until some major biological or genetic phenomenah occurs, women do have the babies.

 

Does seem unfair. We give them our 90 seconds (foreplay included), and they get the nine-month gestation process plus their component of the child-care responsibilities. Stands to reason this would remove them from music at an age when they would be honing their music/performance skills. While I'm sure this is true for other occupations, and that there are mothers who are successful musicians, it seems the music life presents some unique challenges (late hours, touring) not found in other jobs.

[ProfD]

Keys in a band aside, there are millions of women who get up on stage and tear it up.

Millions?

 

Yup, millions. There are almost 7 billion of us, millions is a relatively small number. China currently has 30 million kids studying piano, no foolin.

Well, with millions of women musos, Dan (80s-LZ), I don't know why none answered your ad.

 

To be the only male muso surrounded by 30 women in an orchestra pit, it probably looks like millions.

 

Matter of semantics but I don't see millions of women musos. Not when the preliminary list in this thread stopped at about 25.

 

....and until some major biological or genetic phenomenah occurs, women do have the babies.

Still, many women choose not to have children. They could very well continue being musos just like their male counterparts.

[Steve Nathan]

Boys and girls are different, but not so different as we boys have insisted for so long. The truth is, there are fewer girl performing musicians because we've endeavored to keep it a "boys club" as long as we can. Just like when we kept 'em out of our forts and tree houses as toddlers, we've kept the environment unwelcome to girls. Same as Computer Science departments, hunting clubs, school sports, race car driving, fire fighting.....the list is endless. Women continue to make slow inroads into historically male dominated fields, but it is a constant struggle against the same kind of BS arguments cited here. The same ones used to "explain" why women shouldn't be educated, why they could never be trusted with the vote, why they should be payed less and couldn't be presidents. A generation or two more and discussions like these will be "quaint". They're not waiting for us to evolve. They're coming and there's nothing we can do about it. It's about time.

[iLaw]

We're confounding the issue here. It may or may not be true that in an absolute sense there are fewer female musicians. Nobody's got time for that census.

 

What is obviously true with no need for a census is that certain instruments and musical genres are disproportionately favored by one sex or the other. As has already been pointed out, there is no shortage of female classical pianists or harpists. On the other hand, I think it's a safe guess that rock guitar players are predominately male. I've got no research on this, but something in the back of my head says that this has at least as much to do with Bill's "need to wave" as it does with any exclusionary boys' club mentality.

 

Larry.

 

[ITGITC]

(flippant comment that I immediately regretted and quickly deleted)

 

Yeah... I've done this.

 

OK. I've done it many, many times.

 

Thank you for putting up with my sh... shenanigans.

 

Or maybe you're all just slow readers and I deleted it before you saw it.

 

[Morizzle]

I just listened to an album of this trio: http://www.myspace.com/centertrio

 

Female drummer. Kicks ass like two male drummers!

[Cygnus64]

[Matter of semantics but I don't see millions of women musos.

 

I take it you've never played Mahler 8.

 

Indulge me, for I am a numbers freak. The musicians union (AFM) has 100,000 members (US and Canada). The overwhelming majority of them are classical players in most cities. Nashville, LA, NYC etc will be different, but in a city like Pittsburgh, 95% of union work will be classical. In other words, most rock/jazz gigs are not union, so those players don't have to be a union member and aren't counted in the 100,000 figure. This very forum has a ton of pros, but very few are union.

 

Europe has a pro orch in every town. Japan has a ton. China is getting a ton. Each one has 90 players. And that's classical, a small segment of the music audience.

 

Add in klezmer bands, cruise ship bands, polka bands, Mariachi bands, tribute bands, period instrument groups, Disney World bands, wedding bands, Tuvalan throat singers, gypsy groups, organists at baseball games, MILITARY bands, Society bands, bluegrass, newgrass, country, schmountry, rappers, crappers, pipa players, lounge lizards, the Swiss bands that wear lederhosen, Celtic Women, Celtic men, the 3 tenors, the 3 Irish Tenors, the 3 black Tenors, the 3 sopranos, the 3 Castrati, and the biggest of em all: Religious groups.

 

Millions.

[ITGITC]

[Gismo Recording]

Who was the woman who played organ in the SNL band back when GE Smith led it?

[marino]

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNfAofMmygI

 

 

[ITGITC]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNfAofMmygI

 

 

Wow.

 

That performance floats my boat.

 

Trips my trigger.

 

Is the cream in my coffee.

 

Pushes my buttons.

 

Wait... I'm not finished. (Help me somebody.)

 

Thanks Carlo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[iLaw]

Getting an answer to this question on this forum is admittedly the blind leading the blind, so yesterday I assembled two informal focus groups of adult female musicians; eleven total. As to be expected, only one was a rock musician, and she was the vocalist in her band. Of the rest, three were singers of one sort or another, the rest instrumentalists. I put to them the following question (I selected rock music to limit the variables and because rock, I think, most strongly reflects the inbalance we're discussing):

 

"Recogizing that there are of course exceptions, why are most rock instrumentalists male?"

 

For whatever it is worth, and making no judgments on their responses, here are the unedited, unexpurgated results:

 

"Rock is depressing"

"Rock is grotesque"

"Rock is mostly a guy thing, like video games" (this from the rock vocalist)

"You have to be in a group" (she then added, jokingly, "a group full of rock musicians!")

"Rock is for guys who are trying to attract chicks"

"Rock instruments are guy instruments"

 

There was wide agreement on all of these points. When I asked, as a follow-up, whether they thought that rock bands subtly or overtly excluded female players, they unanimously disagreed and most felt that the rock bands that formed when they were school-age would have drooled to have girls in the band (girls being, after all, why they thought the guys were in a rock band in the first place!).

 

Lots more on this, but I hate long posts.

 

Larry.

 

 

[ITGITC]

...most felt that the rock bands that formed when they were school-age would have drooled to have girls in the band (girls being, after all, why they thought the guys were in a rock band in the first place!).

 

Lots more on this, but I hate long posts.

 

Larry.

 

 

 

Excellent research. Thank you.

 

It's interesting that their responses to your question were very much like our responses here.

 

And yes, the guys I know whould have drooled to have girls in the band for that very reason.

 

Tom

 

 

[Steve Nathan]

"Rock is depressing"

"Rock is grotesque"

"Rock is mostly a guy thing, like video games" (this from the rock vocalist)

"You have to be in a group" (she then added, jokingly, "a group full of rock musicians!")

"Rock is for guys who are trying to attract chicks"

"Rock instruments are guy instruments"

 

There was wide agreement on all of these points. When I asked, as a follow-up, whether they thought that rock bands subtly or overtly excluded female players, they unanimously disagreed and most felt that the rock bands that formed when they were school-age would have drooled to have girls in the band (girls being, after all, why they thought the guys were in a rock band in the first place!).

 

 

This only proves for me that adult women have been shaped by the world they grew up in. We tell little girls that rock is gross, math is for geeks, not pretty girls. Video games are for dorks, not beauty queens. Put down that bat....you'll get your dress dirty. Sugar and spice, Paris Hilton and Hanna Montana. Oh, and "prick waving" vs. "boys clubs"? It's not either or. We are different, but it's because we are prick wavers that we form boys clubs. We're not inherently more talented, or even more suited. We may be more competitive, but we're not born better.

We want the girls out front so other slobs will buy more beer while they drool at the "chick singer". So from childhood we steer them away from the guitars and into the high heels.

[Cygnus64]

I saw a girl at a RUSH concert one time. She might have been an usher, or maybe a skinny dude with long hair, I'm not quite sure.

[MonksDream]

I find the lack of female voices in this forum and this thread telling.

[mate stubb]

Hmm.

 

I went back home to play at a Woodstock party this past summer, which featured an entire day of local bands/recording artists. There were lots of female musicians onstage in the various bands - maybe my town is weird.

 

One of them is a talented young drummer/lead vocalist/band leader. She played on my band's album a year ago and I recently returned the favor on a track for her CD, which is just being released.

 

http://www.hotrodmotm.com/images/studiostock/phyl.jpg

http://www.hotrodmotm.com/images/studiostock/studiostock4.jpg

http://www.hotrodmotm.com/images/studiostock/studiostock3.jpg

[bluzeyone]

I have a female musician friend that has serious stage skills and tons of charisma. When the band we were working in at the time broke up, she started to work on a duo act. It never did launch and when I asked why she told me that it is frightening to be a woman act and go by yourselves into clubs to play for a bunch of drunk bulls at the bar. I never thought about that before but that could be one of the reasons.