The Tangible in Music

The Tactile Learning of a Musical Instrument

Marko Aho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138505018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315526997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

In the age of digital music it seems striking that so many of us still want to produce music concretely with our bodies, through the movement of our limbs, lungs and fingers, in contact with those materials and objects which are capable of producing sounds. The huge sales figures of musical instruments in the global market, and the amount of time and effort people of all ages invest in mastering the tools of music, make it clear that playing musical instruments is an important phenomenon in human life. By combining the findings made in music psychology and performative ethnomusicology, Marko Aho shows how playing a musical instrument, and the pleasure musicians get from it, emerges from an intimate dialogue between the personally felt body and the sounding instrument. An introduction to the general aspects of the tactile resources of musical instruments, musical style and the musician is followed by an analysis of the learning process of the regional kantele style of the Perho river valley in Finnish Central Ostrobothnia.

1 Introduction

Musical instruments and human bodies

Despite the reverberations of the 2008 financial crisis, and despite the fact that it had a disproportionate effect on the under 30s, who make up the industry’s largest number of customers, the musical instrument business in the USA had its fourth straight year of sales gains in 2013, with 6.81 billion dollars. The ‘Music Industry Census’, the annual summary of the musical instrument business in the USA, tells us that 2,472,700 new acoustic and electric guitars, 966,340 ukuleles, 136,576 acoustic and digital pianos, 912,500 portable keyboards, 140,600 drum kits and 911,400 brass, woodwind and orchestral stringed instruments were sold in the USA that year. In addition, there is a huge market for used musical equipment in online marketplaces such as eBay with daily offerings of millions of musical instruments.¹ These seemingly trivial details from the largest musical instrument market in the world exemplify the general popularity of playing musical instruments. It seems noteworthy that so many of us want not merely to listen to and think about music, but to produce music with our bodies, through the movement of our limbs, lungs and fingers, in contact with these objects which are capable of producing sounds. In the light of sales figures such as those above, and from what we can gather from the amount of time and effort people of all ages invest in mastering the tools of music, it is obvious that playing musical instruments is an important phenomenon in human life.

Musical instruments are played with human bodies, and that deserves some thought. We do not experience our physical bodies as objects like any other objects in space, but we face the world in a very specific, organic way, determined by the nature of the sensory and motor capacities of our bodies to perceive the world in a certain manner. The body is not just any chemical and mechanical machine, but rather an all-important source of meaning for us: one can only try to imagine what it would be like to try to grasp the unity of objects without already having a precognitive grasp of the unity of our bodily experience. The subjectively felt living body is nothing less than a precondition of the objective world-for-us, and something that makes our experience as human beings what it is. It would be hard to imagine a human being without music. There is something luxuriously pleasing in music, something that does not relate to anything intellectual. In more detailed terms, there exists a fundamental connection between music and body movement: people gesture to music everywhere, swaying their bodies to the beat, tapping their feet, or mimicking the movements they witness in musical performance. Musicians control their instruments by movements that are intended to carry essential musical meaning.

For music scholars, the link between motor movement and musical structure is not a new notion. Early comparative musicologists acknowledged that musical sounds are products of movements as well as thoughts, and that acknowledging this fact has certain consequences. It is perhaps not without interest that such thoughts were issued within a circle of scientists in imperial Vienna and Berlin who worked on such diverse subjects as musical universals, the perception of sound and pitch, gestalt psychology, descriptive psychology and what was later known as phenomenology. A brief summary of the pursuits of these men might be of interest: Erich von Hornbostel was a student of Carl Stumpf, and, among other things, assisted Stumpf in the 1904 investigations into the famous case of Kluge Hans, the horse who allegedly could count; other students of Stumpf were the pioneers of gestalt psychology Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and the founding father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, whose habilitation thesis Stumpf supervised in 1887, and who subsequently dedicated his seminal work Logical Investigations to his former supervisor. Carl Stumpf also happened to be the founder of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv, which his former assistant Erich von Hornbostel directed from 1909 until the Nazi regime took over in 1933; von Hornbostel, for his part, devised an apparatus called wertbostel, an aid for directional listening, together with Max Wertheimer, another notable early gestalt psychologist, who also would work with Aldhémar Gelb, the writer of a study of a certain injured First World War veteran named Johann Schneider, whose case, in turn, had a great influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his phenomenology of the bodily consciousness, which is the constitutive philosophical inspiration of the book you are reading now.² Erich von Hornbostel also laid out the Hornbostel and Sachs classification system for musical instruments in cooperation with Curt Sachs, who, together with von Hornbostel and Carl Stumpf, comprised the ‘Berlin school’ of comparative musicology, which later became to be called ethnomusicology.³

The proto-ethnomusicologists’ linking of music and movement was directly evoked by the early study of African music, where the relationship between motor movements and the resulting polyrhythmic sounds is possibly most obvious. Von Hornbostel described a melody in African music as an act of motility: ‘song, like speech, is sounding gesture, originally not detached from that of the limbs’.⁴ Again on African music, he wrote: ‘[the player] realises melody above all as an act of motility, regarding its audible quality rather as a side-issue, although a desirable one’.⁵ Accordingly, Curt Sachs stated that ‘the instrumental impulse is not a melody in a “melodious” sense, but an agile movement of the hands which seems to be under the control of a brain center totally different from that which inspires vocal melody’.⁶ Like his predecessors, Gerhard Kubik, a later Viennese ethnomusicologist working on African music, made a distinction not only between what is being played and what is being heard (often different in East and Central African instrumental music), but also between the acoustic image and the motor image which cannot be heard at all.⁷ Ethnomusicologists, after Jaap Kunst had coined the term in 1950, elaborated on these earlier remarks, acknowledging fully that African music was deeply rooted in patterns of body motion. John Blacking, in his studies (undertaken in 1955) on the Nsenga kalimba lamellaphone, writing on the way the shape of the music becomes influenced by the spatial properties of the instrument, stated:

The most significant common factors of the kalimba tunes are not their melodic structures, but the recurring patterns of ‘fingering’ which, combined with different patterns of polyrhythm between the two thumbs, produce a variety of melodies … the theme is physical and not purely musical.⁸

Reaching out to other musical cultures, scholars of the 1980s and 1990s began to form a more general understanding of movement in instrumental performance. John Baily explained the relationship between the physical layout of a musical instrument (in his case the Afghan lutes dutâr and rubâb) and the motor movements this allowed as follows:

‘Acoustic music’ is the product of human movement processes and embodies aspects of the human sensori-motor system, which to some extent and in various ways shapes the structure of the sonic product. Musical instruments are like machines with which human sensori-motor systems interact. The instrument itself has an ‘active surface’ in relation to which the body moves. A musical instrument is a type of transducer, converting patterns of body movement into patterns of sound. The technical problems that arise in learning to perform are likely to be very revealing about music and the human body, with what goes on at the human/musical instrument interface, with ‘ergonimics’ of the music, showing how it fits the human sensori-motor system and the instrument’s morphology.⁹

An interest in tactile and kinaesthetic playing of musical instruments has been part of mainstream ethnomusicology for some time, as exemplified by the works of Baily, Kubik and others.¹⁰ It is noteworthy that as sophisticated motion capture and brain imaging technology became available to music psychologists in 1990s, and despite the emergence of ‘cognitive ethnomusicology’, ethnomusicologists by and large ceased to be interested in the sensorimotor side of music, many choosing to study cultural corporeal performativity instead.¹¹ The reasons, apart from the overall importance of anthropology in North American ethnomusicology, were most likely a general lack of training in clinical psychology and information technology, and perhaps also wariness of the positivist and reductionist ways of the cognitivists. Of course, despite apparent clashes of paradigms, there is clearly common ground between ethnomusicology and the cognitive sciences. In the last decade or two cognitive science has started to take embodiment seriously, having been preoccupied with the symbolic powers of the brain for such a long time. In the end, it may be that the advances made in cognitive science and music psychology, too important to be overlooked, will lead to the firm reinstatement of the sensorimotor body in the ethnomusicological agenda in times to come. This would be nothing new, but rather the re-establishment of something that was present at the very inception of the discipline.

The tactile and kinaesthetic in musical performance

There are certain premises on which this book is built. The ‘tangible’ in the book’s title refers to the perception through touch, and the sensation of body movement and position involved, when playing musical instruments. These tactile and kinaesthetic senses enable us to play a musical instrument, and not only to play, but to play in an expressive manner and according to a musical style. The implication here is that, as a matter of fact, we always play expressively and in a given style, as long as we play with our sensorimotor bodies. Often what is being referred to in similar context is a concept of instrumental idiom, a term that is related to the ergonomic and acoustic features of the musical instrument; these features, in turn, lend themselves to playing in a particular manner, that is, idiomatically, with the human body, resulting in the sonic features of a musical style. Musical intentions are realised as musical sound in a dialogue between the musician’s body and the musician’s instrument, and therefore there cannot be one without the other. In music-making, these three components define the resulting sonic product initially as allowances; musical creativity, however, turns these into distinct resources.

To elaborate, the instrument alone is merely a lifeless object with a certain shape and physical features, but it is a powerful technological resource which comes to life when musicians ‘breathe life into it’ – begin to use it in their own way. Playing music on a musical instrument, and the pleasure musicians get from this, emerges from an extremely intimate dialogue between the personally felt body and the sounding instrument. To a skilled player, the instrument can even seem to evolve into an organic extension of the body. In fact, a basic feature distinguishing playing an instrument from singing, the oldest and most basic means of producing music, is the way a musical instrument provides the player with a means of transcending the limits of the physiological body, producing a sound that may be ultimately big enough to fill a sports stadium.

The musician possesses the motile body, but unlike the musical instrument, the musician’s body is not a machine, since this body amounts to a thinking and feeling human being, whose muscles, bones and nerves are ultimately irreducible from the individual’s immaterial thoughts, feelings and attitudes. Given the social nature of music, making music must be thought of as, among other things, a way of communicating the personally felt. What surfaces in the act of expressive playing a musical instrument is the affect. The expressive dimensions of music have received a lot of attention when music’s universal popularity has been considered. The emotive experience comes to the fore as a motive for human musical activity. On the other hand, the affect and the human sensorimotor system have a concrete neurological connection. All this makes the musician’s musical expression, the act of playing, a resource for powerful affective social communication. The musician’s personal manner of playing is, in turn, always a comment on some historical and culturally specific conventions and aesthetic guidelines concerning how an instrument should be played. We may refer generically to these principles as a style. A noteworthy fact is that a player’s sense of a musical style is primarily felt in contact with the instrument, and cannot be acquired through discourse.

The tactile and kinaesthetic interplay between the musician and the instrument thus unites (1) musical style as a physiological resource based on tacit as opposed to propositional knowledge; (2) the musical instrument as a technological resource, a transducer of body movement, with an interface and morphology that lend themselves to certain kind of ergonomics; and (3) the musician’s sensorimotor body as an expressive resource. All these resources are united under the heading ‘the tangible in music’, which is defined here as the site where musical ideas and impulses are transformed into gesture and touch on a musical instrument. Among other things, what is under investigation here is a learning process incorporating a never-ending exploration of the musical instrument. The musician’s musical expression, the stylistic boundaries with the corresponding motoric practices, and the tacit and sonic features of the instrument, meet in the act of playing, as the flesh touches the matter: this tactile and kinaesthetic interplay between the musician and the instrument can thus be approached comprehensively through the e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Supplementary Resources Disclaimer
• List of music examples
• List of audio examples
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Exploring the musical instrument
• 3 Playing in style
• 4 Communicating expression
• 5 The cultured musical style, musical instrument and musician
• Bibliography
• Index