when WEATHER surmounts gender, musically speaking

There is a famous - indeed iconic - NFB movie image of an Inuit (aboriginal) brass band in northern Labrador playing from the top of a church roof, the church itself at the highest point of the community.

Playing brass from the tops of roofs is so traditional up there that it would normally go without mention - except that the snow has piled up almost to the roof itself and there is snow still falling into the horns and down into the delicate valve mechanisms —- and  yet the band, wrapped in furs, cheerfully plays on.

Bach I think, something high class and classical the Moravian missionaries brought over centuries ago.

I know the sound and images tends to reduce hard-faced German businessmen to tears every time.

Ditto most of the rest of us.

Something about the indomitable human spirit overcoming everything - even the harsh arctic winter.

But it does tend to suggest that the well known division between gendered indoor and outdoor musics, found in most urban cultures, tends to break down a bit in the ‘breezy’ Canadian climate.

Here’s the scoop : men have always tended to play the outdoor instruments, outside while pushing women to only play the indoor instruments, inside.

The outdoor instruments par excellent are things like huge, loud, deep drums, harsh metallic cymbals, deep and high and loud metallic sounding brass.

Lots and lots of then, in massed formation, marching soldiers down the street and off to war. Or opening up a political rally or major sporting event.

Today’s outdoor instruments are stacks of Marshall amps, huge extended drum kits, PAs up the wazoo - set up at 100,000 seat stadiums.

Still mostly guy stuff.

Indoor musical instruments are mostly small, quieter, softer, made out of wood and gut strings : parlour guitars, violin playing styles (not the strident fiddle playing styles), wood flutes, welsh harps, tabletop pump organs. The musical groups are smaller and play softer on small instruments, because the musical space is much much smaller and acoustically enclosed by walls.

And because women were traditional assigned to stay mostly inside, to look after the small children and do cleaning and cooking, so too this music was mostly made by women, for the intimate family not vast crowds of strangers.

Think today perhaps of female folk singers, on acoustic nylon guitars, in small coffeeshops.

It was always presumed there was a rough equality here : separate spheres, with the men outside brass banding and the women inside string quarteting.

Maybe in Sunny Italy brother, but not in snowy Edmonton.

Half the year there you are likely to freeze your brass monkey off if you spent much time outdoors tooting your own horn.

Because of the weather, Canadian males have always had to play a lot more lady-like music in lady-like venues and its has affected our overall musical culture.

For the better, I might add.

If Canada’s most successful, most Canadian-like groups seem less aggressive, less macho than their American counterparts, there just might be a good reason why...