Abstract
The musical instruments of the 21st century and those of earlier times differ in many respects, be it their appearance, their technical functionality, their playing technique, or their sounds. And as they have changed, so too have our understandings of what a musical instrument is. The lacking precision of the current notion of the instrument and its incompatibility with contemporary instrumental forms are consequences of a technocultural process that raises fundamental questions about the identity of the musical instrument: When (and why) is something a musical instrument—and when (and why) is it not? In order to grasp the slight differences between the yet-to-be-defined instrumental and the assumed other, it seems reasonable to speak of instrumentality when denoting this particular specificity that instruments are supposed to feature. The present contribution seeks to prepare the ground for a reflective discussion on the concept of instrumentality and the underlying theoretical problem by considering not only the differences, but also the similarities between traditional and electronic musical instruments. Using a couple of different approaches to and views on the concept and defining a number of criteria of instrumentality, it eventually yields a picture of musical instruments that connects the contemporary ones with those known for centuries.
Keywords
- Material Object
- Musical Instrument
- Electronic Instrument
- Instrumental Performance
- Playability Evaluation
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This contribution is based upon work supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.
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- 1.
Interestingly, this clear distinction between musical instruments and playback devices is relatively new: as recently as in the 1930s, gramophones and phonographs, the playback devices of the time, were referred to as musical instruments (cf., e.g., Straebel 1996, p. 219).
- 2.
Tellef Kvifte’s 1989 book has made a promising attempt in this regard, but in the meantime the situation has changed significantly through the advent of digital musical instruments (Kvifte 1989).
- 3.
Cf. his contribution reprinted in the present volume.
- 4.
A good overview is given in Marshall (2008).
- 5.
Such cases also exemplify the relevance of a specific instrumental sort of acting on something in order to make it an instrument.
- 6.
See also Philip Auslander’s contribution in this volume.
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Hardjowirogo, SI. (2017). Instrumentality. On the Construction of Instrumental Identity. In: Bovermann, T., de Campo, A., Egermann, H., Hardjowirogo, SI., Weinzierl, S. (eds) Musical Instruments in the 21st Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_2
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