Entanglements with instruments: musical instruments and museums

Entanglements with instruments: Musical Instruments and Museums
Musical instruments are dynamic systems - not static ‘conservable’ objects, but items in a constant state of change, seasoning, adjustment and decay. They are also crucial indices of human activity – narratives of use and value – which can frequently only be appreciated through being actively engaged with. Without such intimate engagement, knowledge is lost. Often the real experts in ‘conservation’ are not conservators, but those ‘private collectors’ who engage in active dialogue with their instruments - players. Of course the critical player always engages in this dialogue, knowing intuitively that musical instruments are assemblages. Flautists are forever switching head-joints and adapting tuning; trombones are now marketed as ‘modular’; guitarists spend vast amounts of time and money setting up and adjusting their instruments. Indeed this aspect of instrument ‘making’ is the most expensive and complex bit: the mutual adaptation between player and instrument which involves a dialogue between instrument, maker, other players, and other makers or experts, as the raw ‘instrument’ is gradually adapted to the player’s imagining.

This paper will look at the various narratives around (and borne by) musical instruments, arguing that they function in a ‘performance ecosystem’ in which the distinctions between player, instrument and environment are not self-evident: that these apparently distinct categories are in fact always involved in multi-directional feedback loops in which it becomes misleading to study one component in isolation. Building on this argument it is suggested that current ‘instrument-building’ practices, in which maker/players avail themselves of hybrids of physical materials and computation systems (physical models in computers), and the interactions between these, offers up a significant challenge to ‘organology’s position as the study of objects. It is further argued that this suggests a more fruitful direction for musical instrument studies, in which all of the networks of knowledge around an instrument - acoustic, sociological, historical, sensory and imaginary – are regarded as equally significant.

Viewed in such a manner questions of scarcity, authorship (maker identity), measurement, classification and conservation – which have been the stock-in-trade of organology’s growth from antiquarianism – can be placed in a critical perspective. It can be seen that studies based in statistical analysis, computer modeling, and personal narratives might contribute equally richly to an appreciation and understanding of the role of musical instruments.