Blog

Are there instruments for men and instruments for women? An apparently banal question can lead us, if we go deeper into the subject, to the root of many behaviours of our society and the history of the last centuries. It is not necessary to explain, once again, that gender issues have intervened, and still intervene, in most activities and decisions of daily life. As if it were a transparent lens that varies everything, discriminations and habits related to sexual categories affect all aspects of life. Also to music, and much more than we can even imagine. Without entering into the exciting labyrinth of tensions and distensions between genre and musical situations, today I want to entertain myself only in some examples related to playing instruments.

Instruments -and musical specialization, especially when it became a profession - in European societies have been an almost exclusive male issue. Until a few decades ago there were not many cases of women playing instruments (they were singers, dancers or non-professional instrument players), so, before the 20th century, only a few of them could be named violinist, bassoonist, cellist or trumpeter, if we limit ourselves only to instruments of the classical orchestra. However, if we now review the proportion of students of orchestral instruments in our conservatories, we will find a clear female majority. What happened? What has changed? It would be easy to think that it is due to a <<normalization>> of gender proportions, but other facts show us that it is more complex than that.  In the world of jazz and 'modern music' there is still a very clear majority of male representation (except among singers), and a revealing distribution is maintained according to the social characteristics assigned to each instrument. This is not the place to do an anthropological study of the transformation between genres and instruments -there are many of them and so many others that we need-, but we do want to emphazise some cases that, paradoxically, make us observe in what different ways  we build social reality based on gender differences and on the values ​​that we assign to one or the other  (according to  the two genders activated in our culture, but always remembering that other cultures have had sometimes a greater number). For those who want to see it with different eyes, I do not want to stop recommending a classic: the film Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra Essay, 1979) by Federico Fellini, which portrays in a dispassionate and disturbing way many of the human relationships within a symphonic Orchestra.

How do women have to play the cello?

In Wikipedia's 'cello' definition (Neither in Catalan, English, Spanish, French or German) there is not a word that explains that the way  the cello was placed in the hands of women has varied substantially in the last two centuries. In the articles corresponding to the first internationally known cellist women, no one talks about the position of the instrument (until November 2017!). In fact, to know which were the first cellists who played the instrument betweenheir legs, we had to resort ourselves - about thirty years ago - to the oral recollections of some musicians and directors about to retire. During many decades of the 19th century - within a tradition that came from the 18th century and only broken by some women who could afford it, as King’s daughter, Henriette de France (1727-1752), who was portrayed by Nattier in 1754 with the viola da gamba between her legs - almost all the women who dared to play the cello had to do it in a 'modest' way, that is, placing the instrument in front of their legs, in a forced position and of remarkable inclination; or, also, with the cello in front of a leg that flexed backwards, in a very uncomfortable way; or, even, with the instrument just next to them, as seen in some paintings (you can consult Lidia Cabot Perry, 1892, A Young violloncelist).

The first woman who placed the cello without hesitation in between her legs, as men did, and developed an international career with the instrument was Guilhermina Suggia (1885-1950), native to Oporto and whose family was from Italy. Suggia studied in Paris with Pau Casals, and lived together from 1906 to 1912. With a little difference in years, Beatrice Harrison, born in 1892, also adopted the ‘male’ position.  Having saud that, the various positions were maintained for many decades, just as  an Italian director reminded us in the 1980s, who had still seen a woman playing the violoncello 'at her side' in an Italian symphony orchestra (we do not remember very well if it was in Naples) towards the 1950s.

However, it is not, strange, if we remember that until almost the decade of the sixties some women in our country sat 'sideways' behind the motorcycle of a man of the family. Or the images of aristocratic women in  Central Europe riding sideways in the saddle of the horse (I have the image in my retina the image, I cannot remember if it is part of my imagination or if it comes from  a cinematographic Sissi). All justified by a patriarchal  concept of 'modesty' of gender, clearly controlled and typified.

Until here our note about gender  position of the cello, although we threaten to continue with other instruments (and other genre images related to music) that have been part or continue being active in the activities of what it seems  'very little ideological' such as  'music'.