Isha's blog

When Women Play: The Relationship between Musical Instruments and Gender Style By Ellen Koskoff In many societies throughout history, musical roles and performances have been proved to be divided along gender lines. In 1995, only a small 10% of ethnomusicological journals referred to women performing musical instruments (Koskoff, 1995, p. 115). These studies, classified into four basic contexts provided an important background towards a theory of gender and instrumental practices.  In western classical music and music traditions in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa musicians were supported by a small elite or ruling class. Both male and female musicians came from a low social status, however, only women were described and linked to their roles, commonly portrayed as courtesans (Koskoff, 1995, p. 116). Examples such as the Jaina in Tunisia and the geisha in Japan highlighted the ambiguous and sometimes powerful role of the courtesan/musician. Most of their roles were related to s...

  When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the history of human music-making changed. Listeners no longer needed to be physically present at a musical performance to hear it, transforming the way people experienced music. However, due to the difficulty of reproducing enough of its wax cylinders, the phonograph didn’t provide a real commercial opportunity until later on (Cottrell, 2010, p. 5).   Soon, Edison was competing with a new technology. Emile Berliner’s gramophone, developed in 1888, worked with a flat disc system that could be reproduced in large quantities. The main difference, however, was that the gramophone worked as a playback-only machine, meaning that it could not record musical sound. It depended on others to provide its source materials, marking the origins of the commercialization of recorded sound. From this point on, the distribution of these materials could be controlled, monetized, and eventually industrialized (Cottrell, 2010, p. 5).  As the rest...