Gender In Musical Instrument Selection

Gender in Musical Instrument Selection by Katherine Sinsabaugh is her ground-breaking study focusing on a critical issue for a specific population of music students and for all instrumental music teachers. The research highlights the struggle that adolescent musicians who choose to play an instrument that is atypical for their sex have as they confront behavior generated by musical instrument sex-stereotyping. The population that Sinsabaugh focuses on, middle school age adolescents, is at a particularly challenging period in their development of sense of self. Their choice of instrument, as Sinsabaugh illustrates, can further confound their development of identity. Yet, Sinsabaugh’s work is not a series of stories with only discouraging outcomes. The narratives describe the support from family members, peers, and teachers that help these students resolve the tension that is often generated by their instrument choice. Sinsabaugh’s research has generated a series of studies by several authors both in the United States and internationally that focus on the population of musicians that Sinsabaugh originally identified.

The subsequent research has extended the original work so that a body of knowledge is now available that allows music educators and others to better understand how students who play instruments that are atypical for their sex develop beyond adolescents into adult musicians, who have managed the challenges related to their performance area as they pursued their professional goals. Although the research area has blossomed since Sinsabaugh’s original work was completed in 2005, Sinsabaugh’s work stands as the singular in depth study of adolescents challenged by their instrument choice and as the classic study on which all subsequent research has been based.

Hal Abeles
New York
April 2013