Abramo, J. (2011).

Gender differences of popular music production in secondary

schools. Journal of Research in Music Education, 59(1), 21-43.
doi:10.1177/0022429410396095
Abramos (2011) article is based off of his experiment in a secondary schools
Popular Music class. He was interested in if or how gender played a role with the
students, while working in small groups. Abramo (2011) however did not study to an
extent how the compositions of these groups were affected based off of gender as he
manly focused on the rehearsal process. He had five groups which he studied, where
his participants were some of his students that volunteered. There were three groups
that consisted of students who identified as the same gender and two groups that were
mixed. These students either were acquaintances or close friends. In the all-male
group, Abramo (2011) found that the guys communicated ideas nonverbally through the
use of musical gestures and a clear leader was established from the beginning, while
the all-female groups worked together with no clear leader. Also the all-female groups
called their rehearsal a collaboration, using dialogue to communicate with one another.
The mixed groups in this study did not work as harmoniously together as they did with
their gender. The girls would continue to try to run rehearsals with language while the
guys would play over them, not wanting to stop rehearsal to discuss smaller aspects of
their piece. Abramo (2011) references Green (2001) when he says the boys' paracommunicative processes were the typical popular music processes. Nonlinguistic
communication, musical play, and experimentation separate popular music practices
from classical music processes and others used in the traditional class room. (p.36)
What I found very interesting about this article is the notion that popular music
practice and pedagogy is tailored to the learning style of males. The very definition of
the popular music process might render the girls' practices invisible and push them
away. If the research and pedagogy of popular music continues to conceive of these
practices as only a process whereby spoken language is ancillary to musical gestures,
and not as a process that also may include the compartmentalization of talk and
performance, then girls might become alienated. (p.37) When composing with friends, I
found, unlike the study, the girl and I did not communicate well together to create a

roadmap of the piece. While working with John, we were able to quickly discuss our
goals and the basic chord structure and then work together harmoniously. I am
interested if personality plays a role, not just our identified gender. I want more studies
to be conducted on this subject with a larger test group that varies in ages, races and
genders. I would be curious to see the results of people working together who also dont
identify as a traditional gender. This could be agender, bigender or cisgender. Also
though transgender individuals identify with one of the traditional genders, I wonder if
this dynamic would affect groups.