Master’s Work: Constructing a Music Instrument as a Material, Cultural and Social Object (original) (raw)
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Musical Instruments as Material Culture
Walter Chinaglia: Towards the Rebuilding of an Italian Renaissance-Style Wooden Organ. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:210-dm-studies5-4 , 2020
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet unter https://dnb.de abrufbar. This book is licensed Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. For copyright information on images, please see the list of figures. Walter Chinaglia, "Towards the Rebuilding of an Italian Renaissance-Style Wooden Organ" 1st Edition
Ethnomusicology has a reputation of being an engaged discipline that deals with ethical issues. This engagement is subject to dynamic changes embedded in and expressed through discourses on the quality of its knowledge contribution. This paper is dedicated to the many issues coming with internet archives introducing or explaining musical instruments, which contribute widely to simplifications and degeneration of actually available knowledge. One of the problems resulting from that is the re-introduction of colonizing patterns into the ethnomusicological discourse on musical instruments. This paper aims at showing alternatives to this self-infecting practice of re-colonizing academic writing.
The Instrument and its Double: a New Perspective on Instrument Making
2012
This essay defines a process whereby the concept, design, development and construction of musical instruments are part of a method of music composition. In this method, a musical instrument is first and foremost a formless container of meanings that constitute the narrative of a particular composition. It is therefore a guiding interface or mediation between the composer and the symbolic material he has collected to arrive at a particular musical lexicon. Moving away from the common perspective on writing for specific instruments as the main scoring method in music composition, this process redirects the focus from instruments with a fixed design to instruments in which design is a variable. Whereas in the former method an instrument is chosen for its specific timbre, texture, volume, etc., in this method the instrument represents an additional set of variables that is used in the development of the composition(s). It challenges the fixation on making music for "conventional" instruments and on making instruments for "conventional" music. It proposes a new approach to making music by including the process of developing the tools (the instruments) for that aim, while considering it as an open field for the composer to develop his own cultural and aesthetic modes of communication through music.
University of California Press eBooks, 2017
xxix "Th e main fault of this book is in fact that it is still the only one. More than six hundred pages devoted to objects weigh down one pan of the scale. To counterbalance it, the author should also have produced a Treatise on Musical Organization of equal weight. " 1 Th is statement appears on the fi rst page of the "Penultimate Chapter" of the Treatise. It could be construed as a mitigating disclaimer, although this would be a grave mistake. But we should not forget that the Treatise is a work by Pierre Schaeff er; his prose style, along with the scrupulous care with which he used the French language, is part and parcel of his message. Consequently, the passage must be read within the context of the book and its overall formal plan. I could have begun with another apparently alarming sentence written some eleven years earlier: "It is possible to devote six hundred pages to not saying what one had to say" (659). But neither of these passages is an admission of failure or regret. On the contrary, they represent a deliberate rhetorical strategy. In addition to closely argued sections on linguistics, acoustics, classifi cation, and description, Schaeff er's writing contains many self-eff acing remarks and wry comments on contemporary music (these are oft en directed to "a priori" methods of composition). His language is, therefore, integral to the book's subject matter and its methodology. With commendable honesty Schaeff er acknowledged there are areas where more still needs to be done, but rather than suppressing such sentiments, he identifi es them and invites readers to acknowledge that as far as music is concerned, "making" and "doing" are ongoing processes. 1. Pierre Schaeff er, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 663. Subsequent citations of this edition are given parenthetically in the text.
Music & Material Culture Programme (2016)
2016
Under what forms and ways can Music, in its materiality, be embodied? A part from bodies, voices, performances, sounding devices and written notations are the main forms of material heritage at our disposal. Music collecting developed really from the Renaissance when Music printing and Musical Instrument Making became activities regulated by specialized trades and guilds. Music lovers established ensembles of books and instruments for different purposes: to use, to study, to enjoy, to manifest power, to symbolise culture and identity.
A CULTURAL APPROACH TOWARD THE NOTION OF THE INSTRUMENT
ICMC Proceedings 2009, p. 347-350
In the field of computer music research the development of new input devices for musical performance and sound in- teraction plays an important role. This paper explores the cultural implications embedded in the use and concept of the notion of the instrument in such fields. Cultural implications in this particular context are the meaning structures that evolve from knowledge expressed through language and developed through practices. The main focus of this inquiry is based on the potential to detect the impact of new computer music research on its socio-cultural environment. Concepts such as assemblage and ecology will propose alternative ways to address the hybrid relational (interdisciplinary) networks that create such input devices. This approach proposes alternative models to conceptualize interaction as performative relations between humans and non- humans, as outlined in the domain of Science and Technology Studies. Computer research interweaves the cultural dimensions with a social context and foregrounds the political implications signified by its practices and technologies. Keywords: instrument, (epistemic) cultures, ecology, environment, network, assemblage, apparatus
STUDIA INSTRUMENTORUM MUSICAE POPULARIS (NEW SERIES), 2023
This collection of contributions is a choice of papers given at the 24th symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Musical Instruments held from 29th of March to the 1st of April, 2023, at the Faculty of Music, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka. One may find contributions of Rastko Jakovljevic, Ahmad Faudzi Musib, Choduraa Tumat and Bernard Kleikamp, Hoh Chung Shih, Huang Wan, Gisa Jähnichen, Liu Xiangkun, Sulwyn Lok and Andrew Filmer, Chinthaka P. Meddegoda, Nishadi Prageetha Meddegoda, Christopher A. Miller, Renzi, Nicola, Timkehet Teffera, Xue Tong, Adilia Yip, and Zhong Wei Cheng. All had to say something very important either about sound manipulation or about musical instruments of humans as part of nature. Or did anyone know before that Jimi Hendrix manipulated his sound effects or how waza trumpets of the Berta are quickly tuned and which instruments accompany a joik in reality? These, and many other questions can be answered through reading the articles compiled in this volume. They celebrate diversity in their own way.
SIMP, 2023
The accelerated development of technology and climatic changes, which is progressively interwoven with each other, will unavoidably lead to changes in the production and use of musical instruments. It is time to investigate into these upcoming changes and their impact on many features of social life, with the views on past issues included. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to give a first overview on how practices with musical instruments can be continued on different levels of production and use through a historically informed kind of musician and instrument producer. Insofar, this overview can be seen as a beginning of diverting from a physical fixing in ethnic belongings and financial approaches widely requested among musicologists of the 21st century. 'The global perspective cannot be the end of musical instruments' is one of the theses being discussed with the help of most recent literature on the topic. It is dedicated to the second main topic of the symposium.
The instrument as the source of new in new music
Proceedings of the 2nd Biennial Research Through Design Conference, 25-27 March 2015, Cambridge, UK, Article 26, 2015
Like any traditional instrument, the potential of a new instrument and its possible music can only be revealed through playing. How can we treat technological matter as yet another material from which our notions of possible future instruments can be constructed, intrinsically intertwined with and informed by a practise of performance? Our approach to developing instruments for musical performance strives to not just make technology, but aesthetic and cultural objects. A musical instrument is not an interface and should not be designed as such, instead, instruments are the source of new in new music. We would like to present an instrument design process conducted with a musician as visionary and agenda setter. As the instrument grows and evolves through the various stages, it remains playable and faithful to the desire to make music. The resulting objects are experimental prototypes of technological matter, which allow analysis and meaning to be specified through physical and tactile interaction with the object itself. At RTD2015 we will present a range of these intermediate prototypes and play the finished instrument.