Can a Japanese play flamenco guitar well? Who decides what a concert is?

Here is an essay that leads us to ask ourselves countless questions that we had never asked ourselves about musical instruments: Can a Japanese person play the flamenco guitar well? Does a musical instrument have a gender?

or why isn't a brush equivalent to a clarinet?

The musician and researcher Wade Matthews tries to respond to all of them from different perspectives in the pages of

(Turner).

Due to the ease with which it arouses curiosity in readers, this essay should not be classified as a study aimed exclusively at music lovers, since it will also be appreciated by those interested in anthropology and cultural history.

Ultimately, this is a book for those who are attracted to human beings, their inventions and abilities.

The author distinguishes between the operative gestures, necessary to make the instrument sound, and many others of a different nature, such as the expressive ones, which help the public to understand the intentions of the performers.

The essay reviews musical instruments from the time when they were mere bones with holes ―approximately forty thousand years ago, according to the specimens found in the German cave of Hohle Fels― until today, when electronics have turned them into sound-generating machines of all kinds. nature.

But as I have already dropped above, this is not just a book on the history of musical instruments: it is, at the same time, a detailed observation about the link between people and the tools with which

music, chosen verb by Matthews to condense the functions of these musical objects, including in this category the human voice.

Matthews traces both the origin of instruments and the astonishing array of physioneurological skills required to make music, taking us back in time, describing a very pertinent scene: “In the making of a spearhead Of flint, the Neolithic human already used and developed muscular coordination, listening and, above all, from the perspective of the musician, muscular coordination guided by listening.

Aren't these the skills necessary to play the flutes found, for example, in Hohle Fels?”, asks the author, although he rules out that our ancestors developed these skills only for musical purposes.

A member of Electronicos Fantasticos!

during a concert in Tokyo on September 2. FRANCK ROBICHON (EFE)

The section of the essay entitled "Origins I" also covers the myths of the origins of certain musical instruments such as the Irish Gaelic harp, which even appears on the country's coat of arms, which leads us to debates in the field of ethnomusicology and organology. .

In fact, Matthews dialogues –and sometimes discusses– throughout his book with two texts that also deal with the objects we use to make music: Peter Schaeffer's foundational study entitled

(Alliance) and the writing by Bernard Sève (

, Cliff), focusing primarily on Western acoustic instruments.

The chapter dedicated to musical gesture contains refined observations about all kinds of performers: jazz, rock and classical, whose gestures when approaching the instrument is characteristic of the limited repertoire.

The author distinguishes between the operative gestures, necessary to make the instrument sound, and many others of a different nature, such as the expressive ones, which help the public to understand the intentions of the performers.

With the birth of electroacoustic music, the idea of ​​an instrument becomes more and more diffuse

In this complete section, only an analysis of the figure of the conductor is missing, whose gestures are particularly striking in his musical interpretation.

Perhaps because it is not possible to consider instrumentalists those who direct orchestras or choirs, they do not appear in this essay, although to delve into their movements and stage gestures we have the book by Mark Wigglesworth entitled

(Alliance).

Wigglesworth, who is also a conductor, considers that gestures are for conductors only a means to an end, just as fingers are for an instrumentalist: “(…) Although it is sometimes tempting to wish that a musician responds musically in the same way as the same gesture, the ever-changing variety of all the people involved in them will always be more interesting than any musical machine.”

Matthews devotes the second half of his essay to digital instruments.

As he did in the first part, he does not limit himself to examining them, but rather explores "the evolution of technologies and the concepts that would lead to them".

Starting with the Telharmonium, a two-hundred-ton instrument patented by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897, and continuing with the first synthesizers such as the RCA Mark II, Matthews traces a history of electronic instruments parallel to that of his hardware, his software and the sociocultural context in which they developed.

The evolution of musical notation in tune with that of musical instruments also has its place in this book, especially its adaptation to the birth of electroacoustic music, where the idea of ​​an instrument becomes more and more diffuse.

In fact, in the final pages of the book, Matthews goes so far as to ask himself, in tune with the musician Atau Tanaka, if today the concept of musical instrument is not rather "a useful metaphor that defines creative contexts for technology, delimits demanding usage scenarios and links innovation with artistic tradition.”

The essay closes with the figure of the DJ, that contemporary instrumentalist who, with his analogical gestures and technology, controls a series of sounds of digital origin, but who, in any case, manages to make our feet go to the beat of the music just like the instrumentalists of the band of a village verbena would do it.

Works mentioned

Wade Matthews:

.

Turners, 2022

Bernard Sève:

.

Cliff, 2018.

Pierre Schaeffer:

Alliance, 2003.

Mark Wigglesworth:

?

Alliance, 2021

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