I recently attended a conference about gender equality and recruitment in the musical field arranged by the University of Oslo and MFO, the Norwegian Musicians’ Union. Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed; the lack of new and fresh results were almost nonexistant. On the contrary: it was depressing to notice the lack of understanding among men with power in the Norwegian music business for existing gender differences and the options for young people. The following text is a short summary of an article published in Musikk Kultur 2011:3.[1]
Democracy?
A wise lady, Anne Lorentzen from the Center for Gender Research, University of Oslo, said that it’s all about democracy. For a young girl who wants to play the guitar in a band, this includes a lot of challenges a boy with the same wish never will have to face. First of all she has to find someone to play with. To convince her parents about playing a typical boys instrument can also be a struggle. The toughest fight though, said Lorentzen, will certainly be to find an identity as a girl playing electric guitar since there are still few models to be found. Our task, as parents, teachers and musicians, is then to become such models, to create playing opportunities and to build acceptance for children and young people so that they can make free choices in their music makings. To give everyone the opportunity to make independent choices seems to be our main challenge.
Nature or convention?
To me it became obvious that the main issue of the debate was to make girls start to play rock and to make boys dance classical ballet. Above all, it was girls and young women who would chose differently. Throughout the debate the bad word was the singing chick.[2] The singing girl was someone you had to get rid of as quickly as possible. To stand in front of an orchestra and sing, that was the most useless and least cultural thing to do, and the girls who chose singing as their activity in the music school should kindly be advised to choose differently and wiser.
My opinion is that by arguing and debating in this way, one totally ignores an essential point. Shouldn’t we instead change our views on activities like singing or ballet dancing? Isn’t it really the words that we use, like the “singing chick”, or the “dance girl” that should be looked at with critical eyes? Isn’t it really to upgrade what we actually say and do which are the main issues here?
Just listen to the word; singing chick. Isn’t it dangerously close to washing woman, and to “la putta che canta”? Literally translated, the Italian phrase means "the whore who sings": a phrase used about an opera singer by a powerful man in Venice in the 17th century.
The words we use are strong expressions of our conscious, or more often unconscious attitudes; what we really believe and what we assume to be natural and right. We assume so easily that what we think and say is a natural thing, when it is really about conventions.
Let's pause for a moment and think about what the expression "singing chick" is associated with. Here's my picture: A pretty, young lady, a little daring and often "tacky" dressed. She stands in front of the jazz orchestra, rock band, symphony orchestra, piano and sings. Singing is something everyone can do, so of course she has no education. Her big advantage is just being pretty and young. The neckline is proportional to the quality of the singing, as a mean critic once said about a singer. What does she do all day then? She’s eating chocolate. She’s waiting for the evening to come when she will seduce us with her voice. The men in the orchestra, band, piano, on the other hand, they’re working. They have in fact been practicing for many years to be as good as they are. And they are still practicing.
The real singer
Now, what about the reality? Here is my second picture: Today's singing chick tends to have a master's degree from a university where she has been studying languages, literature, music history, music theory and singing techniques. During the day she, or he (of course there are male singing chicks too!), practices alone and together with other musicians. She works with a director, learning new repertoire, writes applications to get some money for a project, teaches singing and other subjects to have a steady income, and travel here and there by plane, boat, bus and car. If she is lucky she rays in front of an orchestra on the concert night. There she has the opportunity to reap some of the fruit of all she has sown, tended and worked with for many years. After the concert, she packs up her glittering robes, takes the bus home, makes dinner and repays some of her student debt. In other words she is similar to all of us. The big difference is that through the years her profession has had a poor reputation that has followed her through the centuries.
The courtesan
What about the historical picture? As the phrase from 17th century Italy indicates, there was no major difference between a so called courtesan and an opera singer or an actress at the time. In Venice, where the first public opera house opened in 1637, it wasn’t allowed to be seen in public for a respectable woman. As a result of this she would certainly not be seen on the operatic stage. That meant of course a challenge for the opera industry where you need singers of both sexes. The result was that almost all female singers came from "abroad", that is, from other parts of the Italian peninsula, especially from Rome.
Venice was also a Mecca for all types of entertainment, and especially in the carnival time the city was flooded by visitors. Venice was a republic, and the city was ruled not by a prince but by a council and an elected Doge. Consequently the city was relatively independent in relation to the Pope in Rome; the carnival gave opportunity to a commercial service of great variety. The Venetian courtesans were famous far beyond the republic's borders. They were said to be able to sing, to play instruments and to read poetry in addition to other less public arts. Giovanni Francesco Busenello, who wrote many librettos for the Venetian opera, dedicated one of his poems, to the Venetian woman Lucietta Gamba, where he calls her "The Singing Courtesan" or "La Putta che Canta". So the Venetian female singers were, generally speaking, either from Rome or a Venetian courtesan.
Luckily we do not have a profession similar to the Venetian courtesans in our culture, but there has been a sense of something unclean about female singers right up to our days. The Swedish professor Eva Öhrström writes in "Kvinnors musik" (Women music) that it was common to find paragraphs in contracts for female singers well into the 19th century which stated that they also should be "available" for the theater director.
We have a long tradition behind the expression "singing chick" and it isn’t always a pleasant one. The more important it becomes to start thinking about how we use the language, what we mean when we say things. We will never get to the bottom in a debate; we will never be able to change the basic underlying ideas about female and male music fields, until we hear what we are actually saying.
Les hele artikkelen på norsk her:http://www.musikk-kultur.no/nyesider/index.html; Syngedame.30.02.2011
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