This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination. But those are just the ones that made it big. The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks. Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do. This week we explore some of these instruments.
Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 1 – Journey to the Center of the Earth by Bernard Herrmann
Music is a mysterious and wonderful thing, isn’t it? If you don’t believe me, spend some time contemplating where the definition of music begins and ends. This is the domain of philosophers and aestheticians who of course study and ponder these matters in a disciplined and systematic way, but most of us come up against these questions at least occasionally in some form over the course of our day-to-day thoughts and judgments. I might boil the question down to a spectrum that looks like this:
NOISE ——————–MUSIC ——————– SPEECH
This is a bit simplistic, but it will move us in the direction of considering music’s nature. If sound is disorganized and without clear intention, we tend to call it “noise”. When a critic calls music mere noise, it is because he has not discerned enough organization to cross the threshold between them (whether the failure is on the part of the listener or the musician remains a matter of spirited and sometimes heated philosophical debate). You can read more about a musician who delighted in blurring the definition of this threshold in this post. On the other side of the spectrum we encounter the question of which characteristics distinguish music from speech. Have you ever considered this? Here are a couple items to show you how blurry that distinction can be:
You may also wish to see this post. So, obviously speech and language are very intimately connected, and a discrete point of difference is probably not really possible to discern. You can further muddy these waters by considering tonal languages, of which Chinese is probably the most famous example. In Chinese, you can change the meanings of words and syllables by speaking them at different pitches. How could you possibly point to a clear separation between speech and music in light of that? Still, philosophers of music try, and everyone acts as such a philosopher at some point. It is probably a valuable exercise simply to stimulate deeper thought about art, its possibilities, applications, and techniques.
What is clear is that music (however it is defined), like speech, is a human birthright. I haven’t done exhaustive research to this end, but I would speculate that in at least 9 out of 10 cultures (if not 10 out of 10) you would discover an original musical tradition of some sort, that is a form of organized sound that is clearly distinct in some way from their manner of speech. In most of these cultures you will also find tools designed to create elements of this music. We call these tools “musical instruments”. The word instrument is probably used in this context more than all of its others, to the point that the musical ones are those which most people think of first upon hearing that word, even though there exist instruments for a wide variety of technical purposes, from surgery, to flight, to carpentry, to food preparation. An instrument is simply a refined and delicate tool designed for the purpose of executing a task to a high level of precision. Musical instruments are such tools that allow humans’ innate musicality to be expressed through a variety of timbres and approaches. We can blur the distinction between “musical instrument” and “human body” in considering the sonic capabilities of our larynxes, hands, feet, tongues, lips, fingers, and parts.
Due to our acculturation we tend to think of musical instruments as a firmly set palette of colors, shapes, and mechanical operations – ask anyone in the West to name some musical instruments and they will almost automatically list some of the instruments associated with our traditions of rock or classical music: violins, pianos, drums, clarinets, trumpets, guitars, etc. But a musical instrument, itself, is an incredibly broad category with essentially infinite potential for variety. Those that have crystallized and remained in common use, such as those in the previous list, have demonstrated an extraordinary combination of ease of operation, ergonomics, effective projection, flexibility of musical expression, pleasing timbre, and technological innovation. Musical instruments are always being created, innovated, improved, refined, and retired. There will always be new musical instruments, and improvements to existing ones, and it is the job of performers and composers to stay abreast of these changes in order to apply them to their work.
The scholarly study of musical instruments is called organology. It is not the most widely-known discipline outside of the academy, but it is illuminating and often fun to engage with. It reveals to its students the inherent flexibility and infinite variety within the medium. Musical instruments are really just some combination of acoustic stimulus, amplification and (sometimes) pitch control. That’s an almost absurd reduction, and of course it’s the nuances and details that make individual instruments interesting enduring, but when you come right down to it, that’s the essence of a musical instrument. We tend to think of them in those neat, tidy categories given the families of the Western symphony orchestra, but it has not always been so cut-and-dry, and we can probably expect some kind of shift again in the near future.
There are brass instruments, made of shiny metal, and using a solid, detachable, cup or cone-shaped mouthpiece into which the player buzzes their lips to stimulate the sound. The pitch is controlled by the embouchure which kicks the pitch up through the harmonic series of the tube’s fundamental frequency, and also through a system of valves which changes the length of the tube and, consequently, its fundamental frequency. And then there are woodwind instruments, played (usually) by a vibrating reed or two, thereby exciting a column of air within a wooden tube, the harmonics of which are filtered via a system of holes and keys.
We tend to think of those two families of instruments as discrete and separate, but there have been instruments which hybridize the two systems and which seem strange to our sensibilities, shaped, by decades of orchestral standardization. A notable example is called the serpent. Developed in the late 1500s to bolster the volume of monks’ chanting, the curious serpent quite resembles its name, with a curved tube that snakes to and fro.
Visually and aurally, it may strike us as a musical platypus, neither fish nor fowl. One could say that it is half brass, given its brass-like mouthpiece, and half woodwind, given the wood that forms its tube and the system of holes and keys with which the player controls the pitch. Sonically as well it exhibits elements of both families, like a cross between the trombone and bassoon (and maybe a little shofar thrown in, if you know what that is):
The mid-low range of much of the orchestral music that we know from the eighteenth and nineteenth century was once played on instruments like the serpent, although it is no longer. But some recent composers have enjoyed unearthing and employing sonic resources like the serpent from the recesses of the distant past. A great example is Bernard Hermann’s colorful and evocative score from “Journey to the Center of the Earth” of 1959. Hermann mixes the raw, earthy color of the serpent in with the lower palette of this score, yielding some hair-raising orchestral sonorities:
Like speech, music is a human birthright. And mankind has shown a propensity to make music with objects of all kinds. We can’t help it because it seems to be our very nature. The study of musical instruments reveals a never-ending set of possibilities to this end, limited only by human imagination and ingenuity. While we tend to think of musical instruments in highly segmented categories from our current 21st century vantage point, deeply informed by the dominance of the symphony orchestra and rock band, there are fascinating colors to be found and fascinating music to be made between the largely arbitrary boundaries of these categories. The serpent, now mostly forgotten, is an example of this, ripe with otherworldly colors ideal for invoking the colors of other worlds.
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