Greetings,
I'm currently writing a paper for a women, gender and music class and I was wondering if any one could help me. Basically my paper looks at the compositions of female marimbists and compares them to compositions of males as well as the performability of gender on the marimba. I am particularly looking at the works of Keiko Abe versus works like Merlin (Andrew Thomas) and Velocities (Joseph Schwantner). Also I want to focus on Nancy Zeltsman, Keiko Abe and E. Glennie to contrast their styles of performance.
Does anyone know why there are so many more female Japanese marimba players as apposed to male Japanese marimbists? Can anyone comment on any male or female marimba performances that they have seen/played in the past that stood out in the area of gender performance?
Does anyone know how many men (and how many women) perform marimba professionally full time.
Also any comments on my paper topic or help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Christopher
In https://www.marimba.org/cgi-perl/marimba/tree_bbs/t_bbs.pl?cmd=VIEW&no=4225 Chris wrote:
> Does anyone know why there are so many
> more female Japanese marimba players
> as apposed to male Japanese marimbists?
I am writing this completely irresponsibly,
but I can think of several reasons:
(1) Living on a professional income of
being a Marimbist is extremely hard.
As a girl, in Japan, you can depend on
her husband/boyfriend's income, but
as a man, you cannot. Naturally, men
will shy away from being a Marimbist.
Actually, this is true of most other
instruments. If you go to a music
college/university, majority of the
students are girls.
(2) Marimba in Japanese is "Mokkin", which
translates as "Wooden Koto". Koto is
a Japanese Harp (well, musicologically,
it is a kind of Zither). Now, Koto
historycally has been a female instrument
at large. (On the other hand, Shakuhachi,
a kind of bamboo flute, is predominantly
a male instrument.) This may be another
factor.
Cheers,
Nat
I think things are definitely balancing out now. something I noticed when I was in middle school and high school, the boy percussionists always got snaredrum, timpani, or bass drum. Where as, the girls always got the mallet parts, bells, xylo, etc. Actually, I went to my hometown for thanksgiving, I hadn't been in about three years. I met someone who played percussion in the All-City concert with me back in 6th grade (about ten years ago). We remembered how she always got to play bells and xylophone where as I always go to play timpani. She said she was alwasy jealous of me for being able to play these big drums, where as I was jealous because I thought I was too stupid to play the bell parts.
This could even go back to maybe women having more developed brains in their early teen years more than men? But once you get to college age, thigs balance out.
Or, maybe it has to do with their musical background even more they picked up percussion. Alot of girls who were good mallet players in middle and high school used to take piano lessons when they were little. But boys were more inclined to be playing baseball or football than playing piano. Maybe it was "too girly" for them (this is thinking in the realms of elementary school).
These impressions that I get come from my experiences in the U.S. I am sure its different in other places, just like how Nat mentioned in Japan.
~Behzad
