Musical Instruments as Assemblage
Traditional analysis and classification of musical instruments is often based on an account of the material characteristics of instruments as physical objects. In this sense, their material basis as a kind of purpose-built technology is the primary focus
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Abstract Traditional analysis and classification of musical instruments is often based on an account of the material characteristics of instruments as physical objects. In this sense, their material basis as a kind of purpose-built technology is the primary focus of concern. This chapter takes the position that musical instruments are better understood in terms of their place in a network of relationships—an “assemblage”—with other objects, practices, institutions and social discourses. Particular attention is applied to the violin, the electric guitar and the phonographic turntable as examples. The assemblage is variable, and the same instrument can be used differently and take on different meanings depending on its place within a particular assemblage; indeed, it is the assemblage that allows us to consider devices like turntables as musical instruments even though they were not designed for such purposes.
1 Introduction: From Musical Instrument to Assemblage If one were to pose the question, “What is a musical instrument?” the answer would seem obvious: we all can conjure up in our mind’s eye the image of a piano, a violin, a trumpet or an electric guitar; or, in our mind’s ear, the sound of a wailing saxophone or a drum kit pounding out rhythms. Indeed, the term “musical instrument” is typically used to refer to a relatively narrow range of purpose-built technologies—technologies designed for the production of musically useful sounds; what is, or is not “useful,” of course, will vary according to musical culture, genre and context. The simple status of musical instruments as technical objects, however, is not without its consequences: organology, the science of musical instruments, is in part dedicated to the classification of musical instruments according to their essential P. Théberge (&) Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 T. Bovermann et al. (eds.), Musical Instruments in the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_5
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physical traits and sound producing mechanisms, their individual historical development, and their geographical and cultural distribution. In this sense, modern organology is perhaps best exemplified in the work of Sachs (1940), with it’s elaborate classificatory scheme: developed earlier, at the turn of the century with E.M. von Hornbostel, the system attempted to classify all musical instruments, regardless of their cultural origins, in terms of their mechanism of sound production and then further differentiated them according to various physical characteristics. It is perhaps no accident that this descriptive and classificatory system arose as an offshoot of the early period of Comparative Musicology where the gathering of sound recordings and the collecting of musical instruments were key to the field and the colonial context within which it emerged: musical instruments were thus understood as cultural artifacts to be gathered and
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