This is generally my experience, as well, and what I was going to say. Brass and percussion was all male, except for a female glockenspiel player. Woodwinds had more females, but they weren’t exclusively female. We had no strings, even in symphonic band. But our flute and piccolo players were all female.
My daughter did, for 6 years. In high school, during marching season, she was in the pit.
Yes.
Nicanor Zabaleta was world-renowned.
In our band they were clarinet players who wanted to play Jazz.
Unfortunately, the one guy who tried to play flute in our middle school was razzed about it pretty bad. Bad enough that he changed instruments. I hope that isn’t the case with the OP’s son.
I played flute in middle/high school, and I’m a guy.
I was the only guy in our middle school that played flute. I did get ragged on it pretty hard. My usual response was “hey, I could have played tuba and hung out with all the guys, or I could play flute and get all the ladies, oh yeeaaaaaaaa” (The real reason I played flute was I liked the sound, but having the ladies around was a nice bonus.)
In high school it wasn’t as bad as kids start to grow up. In my four years, there was only one other make flute player. He turned out to be gay, and dropped out of band after two years (I don’t know if those are related).
At some city wide band camps held at the local community college, there were a couple of other male flute players, which made the ratio go from something like 1 : 20 to 3 : 20.
If he likes it, let him. Kids will tease each other about something.
Not that it’s right, but there are definitely stereotypes. Only girly boys play flute or clarinet. Girls shouldn’t play tuba or drums, etc. I was a sax, we were mixed. All 3 male clarinet players in my high school band turned out to be gay, and we had no male flautists at ALL from grades 6-12. I would definitely advise my child to play whatever made them happy, though. Jethro Tull was a badass male flautist.
Now that I think about it, our first-chair tuba player was a tiny girl who marched sousaphone. That was pretty cool. We had a few girls in the percussion section but they all preferred the mallet instruments (xylophone, marimba, etc).
The regular percussionists in my highschool band split pretty evenly between boys/girls. And my percussion ensemble was actually majority female, since the band teacher recruited a bunch of normally woodwind or brass players from the regular band.
Other than that I saw the pretty much the same gender distributions as other posters; small woodwind instruments like flute/clarinet were overwhelmingly played by girls and big brass instruments by boys. When we took up secondary (or tertiary) instruments the gender segregation wasn’t so obvious, but very few people took their non-primary instrument seriously.
My best friend played flute on jr high and high school and he did get teased a bit, but largely speaking, it wasn’t bad.
I played the violin and while it’s true–as stated above–that strings and woodwinds did tend to be dominated by girls–it didn’t matter much.
Learning an instrument can be highly rewarding, and remember that band and orchestra geeks are a social group of their own.
When it comes down to it, kids who love music enough to be in band are going to appreciate another person who loves music and plays well. While there are stereotypes, they don’t matter much and it can be part of the bonding rituals.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there are some folks who study this topic.
A quick Google search turned up this PDF, written by somebody at Ohio State. While mostly focusing on the gender distributions among music educators, it also provides some statistics (and further references) about school-aged instrumentalists.
From page 81 of that documents:
[quote]
A number of studies have been conducted on instrument gender associations and preferences (Abeles & Porter, 1978; Delzell & Leppla, 1992; Fortney, Boyle, & DeCarbo, 1993; Griswold & Chroback, 1981). In both the Abeles and Porter study, as well as the Delzell and Leppla study, drums were considered the most masculine of eight instruments, followed by trombone, trumpet, and saxophone. Fortney, Boyle, and DeCarbo found in actual choices made by middle school children that the majority of female students (70.7 percent) chose flute and clarinet, 10 percent chose saxophone, 5.4 percent chose percussion, and only 10.5 percent chose any member of the brass family. Compare this to choices of male students, 50.3 percent of whome chose a brass instrument, 18.1 saxophone, and 17.6 percent percussion.
So is Ian Anderson.
I think that string bass (and piano when lids are smaller and younger) lends itself to gender bias because it helps to have big hands. I can’t recall being in an orchestra with a girl on bass. Other than that, although most instruments might have been dominated by one or the other sex, it was never 100 percent. Violin, viola, and cello were probably in the 50-60 percent range.
Apologies for that partial post a few posts up. I accidentally hit “Submit”, and the edit window expired before I could finish it up. Below is the whole thing:
Perhaps not surprisingly, there are some folks who study this topic.
A quick Google search turned up this PDF from 1994, written by somebody at Ohio State. While mostly focusing on the gender distributions among music educators, it also provides some statistics (and further references) about school-aged instrumentalists.
From page 81 of that document (bolding mine):
I’ve not followed up with the references from which those numbers were drawn. However, from my time in high school band during the 1980’s, the quoted numbers do not strike me as unreasonable. The author moves on from the quoted stuff above to discuss how these choices of instrument can wind up affecting later experiences and job-seeking chances of those students who pursue music education as a career.
My daughter was steered toward clarinet in the fourth grade; she dropped it after two years. Since we had an instrument in the house, when my son joined band he played the clarinet. He is now a HS junior has absolutely no issue with it, and is in fact dating the girl who sat next to him last year. I have heard him remark that clarinet is “a girl’s section” in a “whaddya gonna do?” fashion when they design their section t-shirts and that sort of thing. There are a couple other boys in the clarinet section. Oh and they’re the top band in the state, having won a number of state marching championships in the largest division, including 2012. He also is semi-proficient on the sax and trombone, of all things.
His high school is very tolerant of kids’ choices in a wide array of issues. No one razzes or teases anyone very much, something I like very much about this school. Just to let everyone know that, here at least, high school isn’t necessarily the miserable experience that everyone expects it to be.
When I started in band in fifth grade, the gender divide was pretty clear: Girls played flutes, Girls and a few boys played clarinet, Boys and a few girls played cornet, Boys played trombone and drums. In junior high when we branched out into the secondary level of instruments, most of the French horn players were girls from the cornet section, Tubas were mostly guys from either trombone or cornet, saxes were pretty clearly split into altos being girls. tenors and basses being boys. Some flutes migrated to oboe or bassoon, but mostly the girls from clarinet.
Hit send too early:
In all my years in bands, through college, I can remember one male flute player, my friend MarK. He got teased a bit, but it was the late 60’s so the whole hippy flute thing was going on. It always surprised me (a female flute player) that all the famous flute players were men, when they were so underrepresented in school bands.
Pink Floyd was a really good singer!
Who’s on first bass?
I teach in a boys’ school, so all instruments are male. No one being teased.
In Peru, the Andean Harp is mostly a “male” instrument becasue bands may end up walking a lot, and carrying it all day long is hard.