Study Session 24 The Evolution Of Musical Instruments

Abstract

Abstract This session dealt primarily with extramusical influences on the development of instruments. The speakers stressed that instruments evolve largely independently of musicians’ concerns, and that political and economic forces and technological innovation can powerfully stimulate or retard their development. New types of instruments, such as the piano in the eighteenth century, can inspire unpredictable changes in musical style. But, as the piano’s history demonstrates, extension of an instrument’s idiom in unexpected directions (e.g. by Henry Cowell and John Cage) may have minimal effects on its design. Common assumptions about the relationship between musical style and instrument design were thus brought into question. Innovative instrumentmakers do not merely serve composers’ ‘needs’. Rather, the medium precedes the message; the saxophone, for example, developed a distinctive idiomatic voice only after much experiment—some would say, only in the jazz age. As the fate of the once ubiquitous reed organ demonstrates, an instrument’s immediate success in the market-place may bear little relation to the quality of its repertory; but an instrument survives in general use only if it inspires a critical mass of enduring music.