by or hereafter inven on storage or 876543 yy Martin e — ISBN 0-415-93845-7 hy and aesthetics, 2. Musi Trevor. IL. Middleton, Richi 1.3845 .C85 2002 306.4'84—d cal aspects. I. Clayton, Contents Introdu Idea of Culture CHARD MIDDLETON Music Scudies and PART I Music and Culture 1 Music and Bi GARY TOMLINSON, 3) Musicand C re: Historiographies of Disjuncture 4. Comparing Music, Comparing Musicology MARTIN CLAYTON 5 Musie and Se JOHN SHEPHERD 6 Music and Mediation: Toward a New ANTOINE HE logy of Music 7 Music and Everyday Life 8 Music, Cu JASON TOYNBEE e, and Creativity 9 Pa w 6 fo274 CHAPTER 23 The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments KEVIN DAWE ‘The sound-producing devices we call musical instruments are embedded in local music cultures worldwide as well as a part off cultural flows in which they are swept up and relocated (whether in hands of musicians, tourists, collectors, or museum curators). The that move musical instruments around the globe are tied to multi systems of social, cultural, economic, and political exchange, their and meaning negotiated and contested in a variety of cultural ‘The movement of musical instruments across cultural boundaries is especially problematic and sensitive isu, as much as “world music” thorny and contentious issue. After all, musical instruments are as bolic and emblematic of peoples and of places as any other musical nomenon, What I call “world music instruments” are those instru caught up in the transnational movement of consumer goods, the i national trade in “ethnic” crafs, global courism, and a mult dollar music business and musical instrument manufacturing indi Here, musical instruments are taken into new cultural eerritories beyond the range of experience of many of the people who bro them into being. Yet, a the same time musical instruments are se found in place in many local contexts throughout the world. When sidering the role of musical instruments in the modem world, quickly enters into a debate about the relationship berween object tion and modernity, and how peoples and their artifacts are repr ‘The Cultural Seudy of Musical natrumens misrepresented, or not represented at all. Ultimately, any field that defines ise as “the study of musical instruments” has to take all of these matters on board. 1 argue here thar the study of musical instruments is as much about the study of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies as i is about the study of physics, wood science, and biological systematics, Ie has to be, if we are to gain a better understanding of the affecting pres- ence of musical instruments in human music making and of the ways in which they (and their makers and performers) help to shape societies and cultures, and vice versa. Whether we are considering the place of musical instruments in the cosmological systems of indigenous peoples or the grand classifications of musical instrument specialists in the West, all such schemes are culture-specific in one way or another and are tied to hegemonic systems of one sort or another. Indeed, musical instruments are potent manifestations of such schemes in action, Elsewhere in this book, the readers attention is drawn to issues relating to culeural differ- ence, and “world music.” Here, I discuss these and other issues in rela- tion to the cultural study of musical instruments ‘Musical instruments are formed, structured, and carved out of personal and social experience as much as they are built up from a great variety of natural and synthetic materials. They exist at an intersection of material, social, and cultural worlds where they are as much constructed and fash- ioned by the force of minds, cultures, societies, and histories as axes, saws, drills, chisels, machines, and the ecology of wood. ‘The making of musical instruments (like the playing of them) requires 4 range of psychobiological, sociopsychological, and sociocultural skills (whether the maker is Antonio Stradivari, Leo Fender, or one of thou- sands of others makers, dead or alive). Indeed, musical instruments can Provide ights into the body-machine interface in their develop- ‘ment, construction, and the ways in which they are played. John Baily’s work on the plucked lutes of Afghanistan helped to reveal the ways in which “a musical instrument transduces patterns of body movement into patterns of sound” and how “the interaction between the human body and the morphology of the instrument may shape the structure of the ‘music, channelling human creativity in predictable directions” (Baily 197, 275). At another level, as socially constructed and meaningful, the morphology of musical instruments reveals through their shape, decora- tion, and iconography features of the body politic, as embodiments of the 25276 Kevin Dawe values, politics, and aesthetics of the community of musicians that t serve. They are at once physical and metaphorical, social constructio and material objects. In fact, as sound producers they are “socially co structed to convey meaning” (Feld 1983, 78) and remain “sacuraced wit meaning” (afer Derrida 1978). These approaches can be compati Baily’s work revealed as much about human motor pattern performance as about the relation between changes in the construction ‘musical inscruments and music made to be meaningful in a multicul nation-state (Baily 1976), Debate about the field of “organology” (the study of musical ins ments) suggests that chere is indeed some effort to combine centuries scientific work (including classifying and measuring) with new perspective offered by the cultural study of music (involving ethnography and cculture studies, for instance). Perhaps not surprisingly the di involved in this process (i., the bringing together of both scientific ‘cultural perspectives) have been encountered (0 a great extent a {gists efforts to design classification schemes capable of incorporating, the musical instruments of the world, No wonder then that many assumed that the field “attends only or primarily to the classification instruments” (DeVale 1990, 1-2). ‘One can only applaud the panopticism of some scholars in their ef to treat musical inscruments within the framework of classification tems. AC least they have given serious attention to musical in outside of the Western world in constructing systems “into which, can be integrated in order to show their relationships and affinit (Montagu and Burton 1971, 49). Afterall, how else does one set ab achieving order out of the chaos of such a diverse set of objects? AS ethnomusicologist I would suggest nonetheless thac schemes construct and used by the people who built and played the instruments should used wherever possible (Zemp 1978; Dawe 2001). Obviously, objects need some kind of sorting and interpretation, ifthe are to be displayed to effect in a museum exhibition, form a “colle and be accessible and retrievable for esearch and display purposes. no doubt that the schemes developed since the late nineteenth have been useful in providing the means whereby even nonspecialist crs are able to assemble, organize, and maintain museum collect ‘musical instruments and their catalogues. The schemes apply a b Eurocentric logic to collections of musical instruments from diffe parts of the world. Afterall, instruments from around the world use The Cultural Soudy of Musical Inrumens lar sound-activating devices (for example, strings, membranes) and res- ‘onators (for example, the “bodies” or boxes of guitars and other lutes, the tubes of flutes). These and other recurring features provide some scientifi- cally based criteria with which to sort instruments into groups or types. ‘The most widely acknowledged classification system (and the one upon which others are based) is that of Hornbostel and Sachs ((1914] 1961). Based on a system devised by Mahillon, it uses four main taxa: idiophones, aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones. The cri- teria used to define groups and types are continuously tested and refined (creating microgroupings) chrough an ongoing investigation of material and acoustic properties, methods of construction, sound qualities, tech- niques required to produce sounds, and tuning systems, while applying scientific techniques of preservation, conservation, restoration, measure ment, and classification. Usually, a downward classification is employed, moving from a highly abstract level downward to a more specific levels for example, idiophones, idiophones struck, struck directly, struck upon, and so on. The highest classes are broken down into their subclasses until the individuals that are their members are reached. Downward classifica- tion is based on any arbitrary viewpoint that disregards historical factors (Kartomi 1990). ‘Such schemes establish an ordering system that shows up particular aspects of design that the musical instruments in a collection have in common, and enable them to be placed in an access and retrieval system, facilitating an overview of the science of musical instruments and their construction techniques and materials analysis from around the world. Musical instruments have very different meanings in their culeures of provenance from those that are invested in them in museums, In other words, such an object has culture-specific meanings, those meanings ateached to it chrough entanglement in a web of local cultural relations that position it within a local musical world. The Australian didjetidu, as manufactured and played by Aboriginal people (they call themselves Yolngu,” and in northeast Arnhem Land the instrument is called yidaki [Neuenfelde 1997, vil) is very much a part of a unique cultural heritage. ‘The instrument is used in ceremonies and ritual practices that are thor- ughly shaped by Aboriginal experience, thoughts, skis, needs, and desires, and it has great importance as an emblem and marker of ethnic and cul- ‘ural identity. In anthropological terms, this is the emic perspective, Which aims for “the understanding of cultural representations from the 7