Revisiting 'The Social Lives of Musical Instruments'

It is ten years since Eliot Bates's subtle and intelligent 2012 intervention in musical instrument studies (in Ethnomusicology), drawing on Arjun Appadurai's (1986) characterisation of objects as having a 'social life' . He ended his paper with thirteen provocative and apposite questions, characterised as ' rhetorical and practical' , which he hoped would ' contribute to a lived organology that is attentive not just to the vibrancy of living musical styles and musicians, but also to the vibrant life of the material world' , and in particular to the inadequacy of entirely ' human-centred conceptualisations of “performance” and “agency”.'
In this presentation I hope, in a small way, to begin to address the last two of Bates's (compound) questions:
“- How do instrument makers relate to the instruments they make at different stages in the making process, and how do those relations themselves relate to the myriad ways in which instrumentalists relate to instruments? Alternately, how does the proto-instrument mediate between the instrument maker and user?
- How do makers adapt/respond to changes in the available raw materials, construction tools, and instrumental forms/designs available to them and subsequently alter the way in which instruments are made? How far is too far, or in other words, how much can construction techniques, materials, or formal aspects change without resulting in a new instrument?”
I will do so by examining precise examples of making, some historically situated in the past, and drawing on my research on eighteenth and nineteenth century practices of woodwind instrument manufacture and distribution. Other examples will be very recent but driven by entirely contrasting goals: the reconstruction of historically-informed instruments using contemporary 3D modelling and printing technologies, and the adaptation of existing musical instruments for experimental musics which seek explicitly to expose what Andrew Pickering (2013) describes as the ' dance of agency' between humans and instruments.
Some issues which emerge as important in the study include the unstable notions of copies and originals, the accumulation of (often tacit) knowledge from multiple makings, the contrast between the permanence of the ' idea' of instruments and their mutability in the real world, and myths and realities associated with what makers actually do.