Members and helpers of the South Gaoluo ritual assocation, Women in public performance: left, Herat, s right, spirit medium, Houshan Gender is one of the main themes in ethnomusicology as in all Walks of Life… —see a very basic sample of readings under this post in my flamenco series. I introduced gender issues in expressive culture and ritual in China here , including shawm bands, opera troupes, itinerant bards, and spirit mediums.
Much has been written on gender in the rarefied echelons of WAM : whereas female soloists have long been common, the male monopoly of conducting has only been broken in recent years.
And as to the orchestral musicians…. When he performed Mahler 2 with the LSO in , the orchestra had only two women the harpists, of course among players. The New York Phil admitted its first female section player in ; by it included 29 women. The Berlin Phil began recruiting the occasional woman in , but by there were only 14 female members out of positions. For the disturbing Nazi histories of these two orchestras, click here.
See also under Gender: a roundup. The WeChat article is based on a review of my book by Zhang Lili —though it was originally published in , she is more thoroughly familiar with my work on Gaoluo than anyone in China, and the CDTM editors have done an attractive job, adding colour images as well as tracks from the audio CD that comes with my book. I addressed this issue in the Coda of Plucking the winds pp. Through the period that I was doing fieldwork, I came to feel that such topics were not entirely out of bounds in the PRC, but now I understand that it is increasingly impossible to air them.
This is not the fault of Chinese scholars —even before any higher authority can censor their work, they instinctively censor themselves cf. Tibet: ritual singing in an Amdo community. A good introduction to these themes, based on my book, is my post South Gaoluo: a tribute to two ritual leaders.
