Pronouns and Singing

Two weeks ago, as I listened to the Lutheridge Music Week rehearsals, the director mentioned how he had changed his use of pronouns.  No longer does he say, "The women will sing this part" or "The men come in here."

Now he says, "The higher voices will sing here" or "The lower voices should come in here."  And as he directed, he did indeed use that language for the most part.  He did this even though he had a fairly traditional choir in terms of gendered distribution.  He could have used the older designations:  there weren't any women singing bass or tenor, not any men singing in a higher register.  

I can't help but notice a certain fury about pronouns in certain parts of our national discourse and on social media.  Some of the fury is couched in outrage about precision and language, and yet, I'm guessing those people don't really care about that level of accuracy.

I was impressed with how the choir director quietly modeled inclusion and precision, and with how he reminded his choir, many of whom would go home to direct their own choirs, of the importance of that inclusion.  And in later conversations over meals, I heard about people who had been rejected from choirs because they didn't sing in a traditional way--their voices were too high or too low, and they weren't allowed to sing in choirs organized by gender.

It's hard for me to imagine that there are people out there who are still so deeply committed to a strict gender binary that they would be so exclusionary and hateful.  How naive of me--and how encouraging that there are directors out there, working to make the world a bit more inclusive and encouraging us all to do the same.