‘One equal music’: an exploration of gender perceptions and the fairassessment by beginning music teachers of musical compositions

Robert Legg*

Professional and Leadership Education, Oxford Brookes University, Harcourt Hill, Oxford OX29AT, UK

(Received 16 July 2009; final version received 10 November 2009)

Previous research in education has investigated the relationship between genderand perceptions of musicality, suggesting that teachers’ assessments of boys’ andgirls’ achievements in music are different and unequal. This empirical studyattempts to explore that relationship in more detail, building on research from thelate 1990s, by asking whether teachers’ quantitative judgements of musicalcompositions are linked with their perceptions of the gender of the composers.Sixteen beginning music teachers studying at a large university in the UK were thesubjects of the study. The article describes the three stages of the research and thesubjects’ responses to each stage. Although the small sample size prevents firmconclusions being drawn, the results tentatively suggest that the beginningteachers did link perceptions of musical quality with perceptions of gender. Thisfinding is discussed, and recommendations for further research are made.

Keywords: music; gender; composition; assessment; initial teacher education

Introduction

Over the last few decades, the complex nexus between musical discourse and issues of

gender has been the subject of a number of investigations, some of which have dealt

primarily with biologically determined gender (notably Bowers and Tick 1986) whilst

others have adopted a wider brief extending to gender identity and sexuality (Cusick

1994; McClary 1991; Pegley and Caputo 1994). Lucy Green’s (1997) monograph

Music, gender, education, however, represents the first extended analysis of gender

issues in the context of music education, and its importance and influence, alongside

those of allied publications (Green 1988, 2001, 2002), have consequently been widely

recognised throughout the music education sector.

A clear thread running through Green’s text is the idea that musical meaning in

the Western world is far from gender neutral, and that the ‘gendered’ meanings

expressed by and around music help sustain a ‘musical patriarchy’ (Green 1997, 15)

that alienates and excludes women and constrains their musical development within

society. Central to her concept of the ‘gendering’ of musical meaning is a distinction

between ‘inherent’ meaning and ‘delineated’ meaning, in which the former ‘operates

in terms of the interrelationships of musical materials’ (Green 1997, 5, original

emphasis) whilst the latter is derived from music’s ‘mediation as a cultural artefact

within a social and historical context’ (Green 1997, 7).

*Email: rlegg@brookes.ac.uk

Music Education Research

Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2010, 141�149

ISSN 1461-3808 print/ISSN 1469-9893 online

# 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14613801003746592

http://www.informaworld.com

It has been suggested that Green develops the concept of delineated meanings

more fully than that of inherent ones (Boyce-Tillman 1999; see also Hennessy 1998).

Certainly, Green’s own claim that inherent meaning is ‘neither natural, nor essential

nor ahistorical’ (Green 1997, 6) is an assertion of how difficult it is to discern such

meaning in musical ‘objects’ which, by their very nature, must be viewed through the

lens of social interaction. The inevitable dominance of delineated meanings in

musical discourse, and their influence over our understanding of inherent meanings,

Green argues, help to prohibit a view of music and musical activities that values the

achievements of men and women equally.

Green describes a power relationship based not on a simple, ‘one-dimensional

assertion of power by men over women’ but rather on a complex web of ‘tolerance

and repression, collusion and resistance, that systematically furthers the . . . divisions

from which musical patriarchy springs’ (1997, 15). In the field of musical

composition, she argues, values are particularly gendered: the delineated meanings

attached to music written by women bringing to bear a set of stereotypes, even a

discrete critical vocabulary, that would never be applied to music composed by men.

The examples marshalled in support of this argument are persuasive. Green

retells the story of the twentieth-century Scandinavian critic whose championing of a

young composer-compatriot was interrupted by the discovery that ‘he’ was in fact a

‘she’. The critic’s support for the composer continued, but whereas his praise for her

music had previously employed terms like ‘strident’, ‘virile’ and ‘powerful’, the

revelation prompted a switch to vocabulary including ‘delicate’ and ‘sensitive’ (1997,

102; also Green 2002, 57�8). The linguistic gendering here is self-evident.

Green’s proposition emerges clearly: when judging music written by a woman,

society employs ‘a pre-existing pedagogic discourse invoking masculinity and

femininity as a way of evaluating the woman’s work’ (1997, 98) and that this, in

turn, excludes women’s participation. She suggests several credible reasons for this

phenomenon, including Susan McClary’s convincing theory that:

To the very large extent that mind is defined as masculine and body as feminine inWestern culture, music is always in danger of being perceived as a feminine (oreffeminate) enterprise altogether. And one of the means of asserting masculine controlover the medium is by denying the very possibility of participation by women. For howcan an enterprise be feminine if actual women are excluded? (McClary 1991, 151�2)

Later, in a chapter focusing on the implications of gendered musical meanings in the

school context, an alarming discourse on the nature of girls’ and boys’ ability to

compose music is exposed. Evidence synthesised from questionnaires and structured

interviews reveals that whilst secondary school teachers ascribe boys’ success to their

‘imagination, exploratory inclinations, inventiveness, creativity, improvisatory ability

and natural talent’, achievement by girls was believed to be the result of working

practices ‘characterised as conservative, traditional and reliant on notation’ (Green

1997, 196).

Where did these startling opinions come from? Did Green in some way provoke

such judgements or ‘lead’ her respondents’ answers? It is certainly arguable that

questions inviting teachers to make comparisons between the sexes in relation to

composition (Green 1997, 198�9) were flawed because they implied a presupposition

that such differences existed at all. However, her affirmation that the teachers’

142 R. Legg

responses revealed ‘a high level of consensus and were marked by an unsolicited

convergence around a central core of issues’ (Green 1997, 194, my emphasis) provides

a degree of assurance in the trustworthiness of the process.

The research reported in this article, carried out a decade after the publication ofGreen’s seminal text, is a small-scale, quantitative exploration of one aspect of the

complex problem she identifies. Looking at a group of beginning secondary school

music teachers (n�16, of whom nine were female and all were White British)

undertaking a programme of initial teacher education (ITE) at a large university in

southern England, the study questions the role that gender plays in forming

perceptions of musical quality. Given the small sample size, the results should not be

regarded as conclusive. Several interesting themes emerge, however, suggesting that

developments in perceptions, if not in practice, have taken place over the past 10years. In turn these suggest the need for further work in raising awareness of these

crucial issues.

Music education and the initial teacher education (ITE) context

Green’s research has far-reaching practical implications for all kinds of music

professionals, but her findings are clearly of especial importance to the secondary

school music teacher community, and, by extension, to those training to becomesecondary school music teachers. The various ways in which her research matters to

music educators can be divided broadly into two categories, the line between which

can sometimes be blurred. First, the concept of patriarchal ‘gate-keeping’, by which

women are excluded from composing activities � by which they are, directly and

indirectly, ‘prohibited, discouraged, ridiculed and written out’ (Green 1997, 90) �raises stark issues of equality of opportunity and educational entitlement. Second,

the ‘gendering’ of discourse surrounding women’s music and the consequent

suggestion that ‘women composers [and] women’s compositions have been unjustlydevalued’ (Green 1997, 114) uncover serious implications for the validity and

reliability of assessment. This latter point is further complicated, of course, by the

high degree of subjectivity that is arguably inherent in the evaluation of musical

works (Stanley, Brooker, and Gilbert 2002; see also Mills 1991).

The specific context under examination in this article is a Postgraduate

Certificate in Education (PGCE) course undertaken by a cohort of 16 beginning

music teachers at a large, modern university in southern England. In common with

other such courses across the UK, its basic pattern, dictated by the ProfessionalStandards for Qualified Teacher Status and Requirements for Initial Teacher

Training (TDA 2007), unfolds over 36 weeks and combines periods of intense study

at university, during which time the beginning teachers attend lectures and take part

in seminars and workshops, with periods in local secondary schools, during which

time they undertake observation tasks and gain practical experience of music

teaching, under the supervision of a school mentor.

The implications of Green’s research for this specific group of people are great. It

is clear that the mediating factors in the ‘prohibition’ mentioned above are anythingbut straightforward, and it seems evident, therefore, that, at the level of the

individual practitioner, the potential to subvert or challenge the status quo is slender.

On the other hand, as beginning teachers working with teenage children, PGCE

students might be viewed as having an unparalleled opportunity either to perpetuate

Music Education Research 143

or undermine girls’ exclusion from composing activities. They, perhaps above all

others, have a chance to redress the balance where opportunity and educational

entitlement are concerned. Similarly, given the prevailing dominance of teacher-

assessments in the UK’s public examinations at secondary level, these same people

have a further opportunity and responsibility, as their careers progress, to ensure that

their assessments are not subject to the gender inequality that Green describes.It is possible that examples of direct discrimination in relation to musical

composition remain, but, thanks in part to the national curriculum, there can be very

few schools today that organise subject entitlement on the basis of gender. The days

of woodwork for boys and cooking for girls, for example, are for the most part over.

Looking more closely at the implications concerning indirect discrimination, a

series of interesting issues emerges. Whilst all these issues deserve thorough

consideration, the scope of the current research means that the majority of them

will be left undisturbed here. More research is much needed in this area, and it is to

be hoped that future work will shed light on some of the specific problems and

concerns that follow.

Indirect discrimination, by its very nature, is harder to identify and harder to

eliminate. Two areas present themselves immediately. The first way in which music

education can indirectly discriminate against girls is by denying them appropriate

role models. Carlyle’s Great Man Theory (1841), which no longer prevails in history

lessons, has a corollary that is still reasonably prevalent in music education. So whilst

it is unusual for twentieth-century history to be taught through close study ofChurchill, Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt, it is still common for Bach, Mozart and

Beethoven to be characterised as dominant driving forces in the musical history of

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If it concerns itself only with male

composers, music education risks indirectly discriminating against girls by denying

them role models. Whilst history educators seem to have addressed this issue (see for

example Johns 1979; Woodbum 2006), secondary school music educators seem not

to have done so to any significant extent.

The second obvious category of indirect discrimination is the cultural ‘gender-

stereotyping of instruments’ of the kind referred to in the recent article by Hallam,

Rogers, and Creech (2008). In this study of 150 music services across the UK,

pronounced preferences for certain instruments were demonstrated by boys and girls.

Of those playing the electric guitar, for example, only 19% were girls, whilst a mere

11% of flautists were boys. We can only speculate as to how this imbalance impinges

on the current debate. Is it possible that the inherent harmonic possibilities of

polyphonic instruments such as the guitar are a better preparation for composing

than the predominantly melodic possibilities offered by essentially monophonic

instruments like the flute? Without further detailed research, of course, this can be nomore than conjecture.

A more detailed examination of the implications concerning assessment brings to

light two further issues pertinent to beginning music teachers. The first of these

relates to Green’s identification (1997, 196�8) of a series of perceptions amongst

music teachers relating to the relative quality of girls’ and boys’ work in composition.

The data from Green’s survey showed that the predominant discourse amongst

teachers was that whilst girls work harder, boys’ natural ability was greater.

Comments like ‘boys seem to have a greater creative spark’, ‘boys are more creative’

and ‘girls. . .don’t have as much natural ability’ (Green 1997, 196�7) typified the

144 R. Legg

views of many of her respondents. If these unenlightened beliefs were to be shared by

the beginning music teachers, who would later go on to assess pupils’ compositions

for public examinations, the likely danger is that this prejudice would interfere with,

and make impossible, fair evaluation of the pupils’ work. Perhaps equally serious is

the danger that girls exposed to these views would be socialised into believing that

their skills in composition were limited by their sex and, as a result of a self-fulfilling

prophecy, would actually underachieve.

The second issue here concerns the nature of the tasks set for assessment. Gipps

(1990; see also Green 1997, 240) has shown that success in mathematics and science

is affected by the feminine or masculine wording of a question. In one experiment

that she reports, whilst more girls solved a problem relating to the water-absorbency

of kitchen towels, more boys were able to solve exactly the same mathematical

problem when it was expressed in terms of the number of nuts and bolts in a toolbox.

Assessment tasks in music seldom use concrete situations of the type where gendered

language is possible, but some do require music to be composed in response to a

particular ‘special event’ (AQA 2008), or in a particular style or tradition. Where this

is the case, it is perhaps possible that advantage to one or the other sex is created.

Objectives

It was clear that addressing all or even most of the issues raised above in a

meaningful way here would be impossible. The range of interesting and important

problems was simply too great to be tackled by a project of this size and scope. Of all

the possible areas for exploration revealed in the previous discussion, those

associated with assessment seemed more focused and more immediately compelling

than those addressing entitlement. Looking at the range of assessment issues, the

question of whether teachers favour boys over girls in a material way seemed

the most important one. This chain of decisions prompted the twin objectives of the

project to be formulated in the following way.

First, as a piece of research, the project sought to ascertain whether the beginning

music teachers in question were unfairly biased towards one or the other sex when

they assessed a range of musical compositions. Specifically, it tried to discover

whether the student teachers’ summative, quantitative assessments of compositions

would be influenced by their perceptions of the sex of the composer.

Partly in order to justify the time the research would take, however, it seemed fair

that, beyond the general contribution to research literature, the project would have

significant value to the teachers themselves. This notion led to the formulation of a

second aim, which was to raise awareness amongst the teachers of the potential

dangers of gender-bias in the assessment process, helping them, it was hoped, to be

as fair as possible when making assessments in future. Clearly, the importance of this

second aim would be yet greater if an unfair bias were, in fact, discovered.

A degree of compromise was required in responding to these aims, however.

Whilst the classic experimental methods suggested by the first aim seemed to require

that participants approached the activities as naively as possible, the demands of the

second aim were that the beginning music teachers be made fully aware of the

concepts and issues under examination. It was in response to these conflicting

demands that the method described below was devised.

Music Education Research 145

Method

The research project took place in three stages over an academic year. An initial

seminar was used to present and discuss some of the issues arising from Green’s

research, and in particular the idea that teachers might consider boys to be more

creative than girls (Green 1997, 196�8). A small amount of pre-reading was required

(Green’s 2002 article) and the beginning teachers were invited to share their

experiences and views on the subject, especially in relation to the extended school

placement they had just completed. A directed discussion took place and was

concluded with an activity in which teachers got together in pairs to organise a

hierarchy of values relating to the broader issues of music, gender and education.

The second stage took place a month later, when, during an unrelated session on

listening materials, the teachers were asked to respond to 10 short excerpts of

nineteenth-century music. The excerpts were each about a minute long, and were

taken from piano miniatures and duo sonatas firmly rooted in the Western classical

tradition. The teachers were asked to record whether they believed each piece had

been written by a man or a woman, but they were not required to give a reason for

their choice, nor was an explanation for the task sought or given.

Some two weeks later still, in the final stage of the implementation, the teachers

listened to the 10 excerpts for a second time. On this occasion, in a seminar session

dealing with issues of assessment, they were asked to rate the works quantitatively,

according to criteria adapted from those used to assess pupil compositions for public

examinations (AQA 2008, 44). The focus of these criteria, as in the original document,

was the organisation of sounds. Thirty marks were available for each piece, and

descriptors were used to identify achievement bands within those marks. Between 6

and 10 marks, for example, a piece should show ‘successful use of simple resources’

but would be ‘of limited ambition’; between 16 and 20 marks, it would ‘organise

sounds to produce an effective sense of structure and some colour’; whilst in the top

band, between 26 and 30 marks, it would be ‘musically interesting and satisfying’,

‘make inventive and idiomatic use of the chosen medium’, and ‘demonstrate a

completeness [and] wholeness’. Teachers gave a mark out of 30 for each work and were

asked to write a brief comment summarising the reasons underlying their given marks.

Responses and results

Teachers’ responses to the first of these seminars were unanimous. There was a high

level of interest in Green’s writing and all teachers regarded the beliefs that Green

had uncovered as old-fashioned if not repugnant. Moreover, the teachers regarded

these views as ones that they certainly did not share. Where it came to assessment, a

consensus emerged in which gender was not regarded as an issue they would consider

actively, nor was it a factor that they believed they would allow to impinge upon their

judgement. The underlying discourse was certainly that in the decade or more since

Green’s research took place, prevailing attitudes had shifted significantly towards a

much more egalitarian position. ‘This is no longer a problem’, was one memorable

comment.

Given this observation, the teachers’ responses to the second seminar were

surprising in two ways. First, there was no obvious opposition to the notion that

guessing the sex of a composer might be possible or desirable, let alone prudent.

146 R. Legg

Second, there was a surprising level of agreement amongst the group about the sex of

the imagined composers. Of the 10 excerpts, there was strong agreement (80% or

more) that three were written by men, whilst it was equally strongly agreed that

another four were composed by women. Only the remaining three excerpts werecontested, with no clear agreement on the sex of the composer emerging. (As it

happens, all 10 pieces were composed by women.)

Responses to the third seminar were equally interesting. Some found the

assessment activity challenging, and expressed doubt about the overall reliability

of the process, particularly in relation to public examinations. Others questioned

aspects of the criteria, detecting an ethnocentric focus on the development of musical

ideas that would privilege compositions adhering to a broadly Western classical style.

All teachers, however, completed the task. The results were collected and aggregated,so that each excerpt had a mark out of 30 representing the mean average of the 16

marks it received.

The discussion that followed focused on a comparison of the data from the

second and third seminars, summarised in Table 1.

The apparent correlation between the higher-scoring pieces and the pieces

thought to have been composed by men seemed at odds with the teachers’ stated view

that gender was never a factor in their assessment of pupils’ work. In order to respect

the participants’ privacy, marks given by individuals were not considered ordiscussed at any point in the implementation. However, the overall picture helped

to problematise the teachers’ opinion that the attitudes Green revealed in her

research are no longer prevalent. To use Green’s terminology, it seems that, in the

teachers’ minds, the musical ‘delineations’ concerning success had become inex-

tricably linked with those concerning maleness. Whilst this by no means provides

incontrovertible proof of bias, it is a partial answer to the question of whether

teachers might allow gender to count towards quantitative assessments.

Evaluation

At the end of the third session, the teachers were given the chance to evaluate the

project using a structured questionnaire. Four strands were developed across the 15

completed questionnaires. First, eight teachers felt that although aggregating the

data had been useful in order to ‘protect’ individuals, this had also hidden the resultsof the few teachers who appeared to buck the trend. They would have liked these

‘outliers’ to be more prominently represented. Second, five teachers thought that the

rather specific musical provenance of the excerpts was an unnecessary confusion, and

Table 1. Judgements of quality compared with imagined sex of composers.

Majority view of composer’s sex Mean average of marks given

M 29.7

M 27.1

M 23.8

F 24.8

F 19.0

F 18.2

F 17.9

Music Education Research 147

that, whilst they might have been biased where salon music of the nineteenth century

was concerned, their judgements in relation to pupils’ compositions would be more

robust. Third, nearly everybody agreed that the activities had raised the general level

of awareness where gender issues in music composition were concerned, and that, in

particular, their preconceptions had been challenged. Last, 10 of the 15 respondents

commented that the seminars would help them to keep fairness in mind as they

undertook future assessments of pupils’ work. These last two strands indicated that

the project’s second aim, to raise awareness amongst the teachers of the dangers of

gender-bias in assessment, had been successfully realised.

Conclusions

Caution must be exercised in drawing conclusions from the ‘experimental’ part of

this project. The small numbers involved, in terms both of subjects and musical

excerpts, make it difficult to assert findings with any level of statistical certainty.

There is also an issue concerning the validity of the exercise. The activities probed

teachers’ perceptions of quality and of gender. These areas are allied to, but not

precisely the same as, the question of whether composer-gender influences

assessments. And whilst the former may hint at the latter, it should be made clear

that a causal link has not been proven.The rationale behind the project, however, was to raise awareness of the issues,

rather than to provide scientific evidence of bias. With that in mind, the principal

recommendation made here must be that such activities and discussions are worth re-

running, in the current context and in others, in order to increase the level of

consciousness with regard to this important topic.

In terms of recommendations for future research, a larger empirical study of

gender perceptions amongst music teachers must be a priority. It would also be

useful to examine pupils’ perceptions to see whether they also link delineations of

gender with those of quality, building on the useful work of North, Colley, and

Hargreaves (2003). This could be achieved using a similar methodology to that

employed here. Looking at the influence of the gender of the assessor as a further

variable (see Greatorex and Bell 2004) would be possible if a larger sample was

studied. Finally, the important area identified by Gipps (1990) concerning the nature

of tasks set and their relative bias towards successful completion by boys and girls is

one that is yet to be explored adequately in the music context.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Jane Spiro for her comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes on contributor

Robert Legg is senior lecturer in music education at Oxford Brookes University.

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