“Friday night. 6 p.m. Don’t be late.”

The band room seemingly comes alive as the musicians huddle around each other, together making up the Carlmont Pep Band. Some would find it overwhelming – 300 Carlmont students crowded in a room. But senior Sam Bishop is used to it. It feels familiar to her like she’s home. She’s slightly nervous as the time comes for her to stand on the podium in front of the room, but she’s done this before. The entire room hushes slightly as she yells out the first song.

She leads the band into the stadium stands and patiently awaits her time to conduct. The game is a blur as people yell and play while Bishop’s attention is being pulled to several places at once. But she has trained for this. She commands the band with authority and puts her hands up, signaling the musicians to put their instruments up to their faces. Being in such a powerful position might be intimidating to some, but not to Bishop.

“I kind of just feed off of the energy,” Bishop said.

Bishop is currently a bassoon player in the Symphonic Band and wanted to try her hand at conducting. Bishop is not just any conductor. She just made Carlmont history by being the first and only female student conductor of the Carlmont Pep Band this past football season, according to the senior class of band students, who were freshmen when the first student Pep Band conductor took the baton. An important issue is raised by her success on the podium: women are often underrepresented in both conducting and bands. 

Conducting change

Tabitha Tetreault, Bishop’s former Peninsula Youth Orchestra conductor, has been a music teacher at Tierra Linda Middle School since 2009 and has a bachelor’s in music. Tetreault shared that even though she has been a teacher and conductor for more than 18 years, she felt insecure for a long time as a woman in her industry.

“I’ve never really felt confident in my skills until recently,” Tetreault said.

She detailed the struggles of being in a male-dominated profession. 

“I think men generally seem to be more confident in it because it’s been shown to them that they can do it. If you look at all of the famous conductors that have ever been alive, it’s mostly men,” Tetreault said.

According to the Midwest Clinic: International Band and Orchestra Conference, as of 2016, only about 15% of all college and high school band directors were women, only about 10 years after Tetreault began teaching. Currently, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t even have data on the amount of women conductors. 

“I think as women, we are asked to squish ourselves and make ourselves smaller anyway, and fit into this mold,” Tetreault said.

Breaking the silence

However, despite these factors, Bishop was still inspired to go up and conduct. 

“I was able to take control and actually lead the band. It felt powerful to lead the band because what I do impacts everybody else,” Bishop said.

Some of the problems detailed by Tetreault can manifest even in middle school. Joe Murphy has been teaching for over 20 years and has a degree in Tuba Performance. He is an award-winning music director. 

Murphy explained that a lot of schools encourage girls to play “girl instruments.” 

“Directors of young bands saying ‘You know what, you’re a girl and you should play the flute or a clarinet,’ happens a lot,” Murphy said.

He found that Tierra Linda Middle School, where he taught for about 16 years, was more equitable than other schools because they never discouraged girls from playing big, brass instruments and encouraged all incoming students to make their own choices. Women in brass have only recently been encouraged, according to Murphy.

“Ellen Bogoda made history in 1937 as the first woman brass player to be hired when she was appointed as principal horn player by the Pittsburgh Orchestra,” according to the National Library of Medicine.

Historically, there has been a correlation between gender and type of instrument, possibly based on social norms or pressures.

The National Library of Medicine also said that “a prominent feature of young students’ choice of instruments that has received considerable attention is the characteristic preference by girls for higher-pitched, smaller and lighter instruments, and boys for lower-pitched, larger, and heavier instruments.”

Disproportionate representation is even an issue within the Carlmont advanced bands. Bishop agreed that in the Symphonic Band, “there are more male-dominated instruments.”

“At Carlmont you could definitely see ‘these are the instruments that the guys play’ and ‘these are the instruments that the girls play,’” Maine Bilardello said.

Bilardello, one of Murphy’s old students, is a female trumpet player. She began playing in fifth grade at Tierra Linda and never stopped. She later went to Carlmont and played in the Symphonic Band. In her senior year at Carlmont from 2023-24, she was the only female trumpet player in the Carlmont Instrumental Music Program. 

“I am more masc presenting, so I wore a suit at concerts. But everyone thought I was a guy. I feel like I wasn’t even able to represent the women in brass,” Bilardello said.

A seat on the stage

There is a noticeable discrepancy in the ratio between males and females in Carlmont’s advanced bands as a whole. Even on the larger scale of the Bay Area, there is an extremely large discrepancy between males and females in honor bands.

However, band directors have an incredibly nuanced role in evaluating auditions. They are not necessarily sexist or biased. Michael Galisatus is a lecturer at Stanford and has been directing the Miles Ahead Big Band since 2015. 

“Out of the 90 people that audition, we probably get 10 or 15 females,” Galisatus said.

Regardless of any disproportionate ratios, Tetreault is still going strong as a teacher at Tierra Linda and conductor for PYO. Bilardello is now at the University of Washington and is a member of their marching band, where she is surrounded by other female trumpet players. Bishop has thrived as a student conductor and continues to play the bassoon. 

Bishop said that when she was a younger musician at Carlmont, she looked up to an older female bassoon player. 

“I actually played with another girl bassoonist. It was really nice to have her by my side.  She was a really great mentor,” Bishop said.

All of these trailblazing women spoke about strong mentors of their own who encouraged them to pursue their passion. Now, Tetreault, as a teacher, and Bishop, as a conductor, are inspiring a new generation of women to do the same. 

“If you feel like you’re being squished by a conductor, you’re not going to want to play for them the same way. If I can treat you with kindness and respect, hopefully, you can do the same to me,” Tetreault said.

Bishop’s experiences with music throughout her life have led her to encourage other young women to keep playing, even if they want to quit.

“I would tell her to take a step back, truly appreciate music for what it is, and give it another shot,” Bishop said.