Music and Gender!

Hey ya'll! It's AC here again! Today I am going to talk about the specific attributes that play into music and gender, especially in specific cultures.  We have discussed many cultures in this class, so I am going to have a diversified blog where I touch on different attributes of cultures in my blog. I am going to start off discussing "Ho wy hey yo-six nations women." This is a piece in Native American culture that we discussed that the voices of the singers are all women. This one of the few that was all women's voices, so I wanted to touch on this one. The attributes that go into this piece are shuffle dance, shakers, drums, and a tremolo pattern. Usually in Native American music males and females have corresponding roles, but seeing this highlight of women's voices was beautiful to hear and see. We see deep culture in this music as well which is very interesting!

I am also going to touch on the music of the Andes with gender roles. Men are mainly the instrumentalist while women are the vocalist. They make beautiful pieces of music, these gender roles are specific to tradition most of the time and show gender roles throughout the culture of the Andes in a big way. Women bring a different tone and taste to Andean music. Renata Flores is one we touched on that has made a name for herself in pop, but keeping her culture alive. Clothing is usually brightly colored while singing for both males and females.

As we have seen in other cultures there are specific gender roles in making music in a lot of situations. Now we are going to touch on African culture with gender roles. We see men and women sing and play instruments, but a topic that was highlighted was griots. Griots are West African storytellers, musicians, and historians in their families. They keep track of every marriage, birth, and death through the generations of the village they live in or their family. This really piqued my interest and I am highlighting Maya Sona Jobarteh, she is the most well known female griot and one of the very few female griots. She is amazing and is actually teaching her son to become the next griot which I think is very cool. Here is a piece of her amazing music. It is called Gambia which she is highlighting where she lives and there is so much beauty in this!