The head of popular music at the BBC, Lesley Douglas, has sparked controversy by suggesting that men "tend to be more interested in the intellectual side of music", while their female counterparts' relationship with the art form is one rooted in emotion.

The head of popular music at the BBC, Lesley Douglas, has sparked controversy by suggesting that men "tend to be more interested in the intellectual side of music", while their female counterparts' relationship with the art form is one rooted in emotion.

I think this might be the link Reiner meant to post (??) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/18/bbc.radio

And there's a related article here:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2258116,00.html

I'm not sure it's that far off the mark, actually.  It can't account for ALL men or ALL women, but surely the male-dominated population of such discussion boards as these (especially in the more intellectually or philosophically rigorous subject areas) is a piece of evidence in support of the theory?  This board currently has ratio of 4.7 males to 1 female.

And in my circle of friends - which consists principally of a randomly-acquired extended selection of people with whom I deconstruct operas and concerts in the pub following live performances - I am in an even smaller minority.

One of the dispiriting things about this is what Ms Douglas regards as the "intellectual aspects of music":

"the tracks, where albums have been made, that sort of thing."

Or, to put it another way, the technical details of commercial recordings.  I should have hoped that, even for a BBC apparatchik, the words "music" and "intellectual" might have meant something slightly broader ....   

Thanks, Ruth, for the correct URLs.

Both of these articles are centred on non-classical music where some might argue that the extent of intellectual response expectation - and some, possibly fewer, might argue that the extent of emotional response expectation - may be less high than in the case of "classical" music and, as "perfect wagnerite" rightly observes, "one of the dispiriting things about this is what Ms Douglas regards as the "intellectual aspects of music"".

Leaving that aside, however, my principal reservation is that the question of whether or not men and women listen differently to any kind of music is something about which journalists and others can speculate to their heart's content in the absence of much reliable provable data from the field of neuroscientific research; I am not suggesting that such a difference may not exist, but it's something about which we yet know comparatively little.

Whatever we eventually do discover about this, Ruth is in any case right to point out that it almost certainly won't apply to ALL men and ALL women, so the entire subject is one that seems to me currently to be full of grey areas and very little else, although there's surely no denying that the outcomes of such research will at the very least prove fascinating.

Hear hear

This kind of statement really annoys me in its generalisation and lack of precision in making a general statement.

It could be interpreted as "Each and every man spends more of his listening time interested in the intellectual aspects of what he is hearing than engaged in the emotional reaction" (and a corresponding statement for women).  i.e. 'Tend' could mean proportion of time rather than proportion of the male populace.

It alienates men who react emotionally to music more than they enjoy intellectualising about it, and women who do the opposite.

And surely it has little to do with attracting women to a radio station - even if all women reacted 100% emotionally to music and couldn't care less about it intellectually, does that really relate to how you present music on a radio station?  The relevant statement from the head of Radio6 should be much more about "women tend to prefer presentation of music on radio in the style of   XXX" - whatever the research says - and therefore we have chosen a DJ who has that style.

Thanks

Tommo

Exactly. The accusation made at the beginning of the 1920s about some of what was going on in the musical world at the time, especially in Paris - "emotion is out of date and intellect a bore" - may seem overly simplistic and barbed nowadays, but the person who made it clearly also failed to see any realistic and practical distinction between the two where musical creation was concerned. The person who wrote it was a man, by the way; his name was Frederick Delius.

I fear that one of the motives behind statements such as the one we're discussing here is in part the current obsession with convenient pigeon-holing. One may as well extend it onwards from where it left off and suggest that women composers think more emotionally and men more intellectually when they compose, or the same kind of thing in respect of performers (and I wonder what, for example, Marin Alsop would make - or what Elizabeth Maconchy would have made - of that?). And speaking of performers, does this apply only to instrumentalists, singers and conductors? Does it even apply only to the practice of music? I think I'll buzz off now and listen to what's left of BBC Radio 4's Today programme and see if Sarah Montague is really more emotional and John Humphrys more intellectual in their respective presentations (actually, I've no idea if they're on Today today, but you get my point, I expect)...

Well, probably quite simply because feminist musicology has been a large component of such a thing, and the protagonists there tend to be, well, female (not all of them, but certainly most).