Instrumental Technology

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[Theodore Grayck & Andrew Kania (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and

Music (Routledge, 2011), 187-198]

INSTRUMENTAL TECHNOLOGY

Anthony Gritten

“Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts.”

(Nietzsche, cited in Kittler 1990: 195)

This chapter considers the significance of instrumental technology. The primary focus is on the

conventional acoustic instruments used in the Western classical tradition, the repertoire that

developed alongside them, and the strategies that performers develop to deal with both.

HUMAN TECHNOLOGY

Technology, often defined as the practical application of knowledge, has affected biology,

environment, society, economy, culture, and community in numerous ways, and has raised

ethical and social questions in the process. It has helped first-world economies to advance and to

raise living standards. The term “technology” refers to material objects like industrial machines

and kitchen forks, but also to computer software as well as organizational techniques and

protocols. It has even become a barometer of demographic shifts, with “the digital divide”

replacing “the class divide” as the preeminent measure of social progress and cohesion.

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Technology also affords social practices, providing both the time (indirectly) and the means

(directly) for the leisure classes to indulge their desires in artistic practices such as performing

music.

The discovery and manipulation of fire was a turning point in the technological evolution of

humankind, perhaps the greatest after the evolution of opposable thumbs. Archaeological data

suggests that humans domesticated fire by 1,000,000 BCE, and controlled it sometime between

500,000 BCE and 400,000 BCE. Clothing and shelter were similarly momentous technological

advances, and the adoption of both was central to the survival, and subsequent domination, of

humankind.

Turning to more conceivable history, technology and “techne” (craft) have a long and

respectable genealogy. Plato (2006), considering techne as a potential threat to civic balance,

treated the understanding of it as the proper foundation for governing the polis. Aristotle (1999)

described it as one of the five virtues of thought. Marx (1990) contributed to the critique of

technology in his work on labor, noting that machines objectify human knowledge and extend

the reach of the human brain, and arguing that technical evolution requires its own theory

independent of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Freud (2002) emphasized that tools

perfect humanity’s organs, expand their limits, and remove their constraints, though he had

misgivings about the role of technology. In the twentieth century, Heidegger (1993b) provided

what has since become the classic articulation of the subject in “The Question Concerning

Technology.” McLuhan (1962, 1964) explored the impact of mass communication technologies,

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while Baudrillard, Haraway, Deleuze, and Stiegler, among others, turned to technology, techne,

and “technics” in order to articulate humanity’s position in the world and its future potentialities.

This brushstroke genealogy highlights the immense ambition of humanity with regard to

technology. Only recently, with the rise in public awareness of climate change, has the speed and

importance of high investment technological progress – the first world ideology of “Research

and Development” – been seriously questioned.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Performing much music requires various forms of technology, of which the most obvious is the

musical instrument. (Whether the voice is an exception deserves consideration elsewhere.)

Musical instruments have existed as long as the cultures which they partly constitute. Generally

speaking, a tool is an object mediating between two domains and affording productive action,

that is, a means of passing energy between domains in order to achieve some desired end, as with

the transformation of potential into kinetic energy when bowing a violin string. A musical

instrument is a tool designed to make musical sound; most have been acoustic, and put to the use

for which they were designed. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical

instrument, whether bone, ebony, or silicon, and every musical tradition maintains acoustical,

symbolic, ergonomic, and aesthetic systems by which instruments are calibrated, used, and

valued – by which musical tools are used to fulfill the desires and intentions of their performers.

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Musical instruments are formed, structured, and carved out of personal and social

experience as much as they are built up from a great variety of natural and synthetic

materials. They exist at an intersection of material, social, and cultural worlds where they

are as much constructed and fashioned by the force of minds, cultures, societies, and

histories as axes, saws, drills, chisels, machines, and the ecology of wood. (Dawe 2003:

275)

Indeed, instruments tend to be valued anthropomorphically (Lane 2000: 31-2), as if they were

human, as Gerard Hoffnung’s cartoons suggest. Famous violins are thought to have sonic

“personalities” that their performers exploit to great effect, just as orchestras have “the

Philadelphia sound” and there is a French school of flute playing descended from Claude-Paul

Taffanel. In other words, we often recognize particular instruments by their trademark timbre.

Instruments also have an aesthetic value: “at once physical and metaphorical, social

constructions and material objects” (Dawe 2003: 276), they are pleasing to look at and can be

expensive pieces of property, as with gilded harpsichords and cathedral organs. All these are

reasons why we sometimes feel a vicarious pain when they are damaged or misused, whether by

removal men or as part of an aesthetic event (Davies 2003) – or when just carelessly played.

Noting the categorization of instruments in terms of strings, membranes, and resonators, or

idiophones, aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones, this chapter is concerned with

what instruments have in common, which is their use as tools and machines. Instruments are

broadly ergonomic systems, designed with the local ecology of the parent musical practice in

mind: ergonomic in that they are task-focused in their construction, operation, and maintenance,

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and reward a particular kind of trained manipulation; ecologically grounded in that their history

both as individual instruments and as a genus can be traced alongside the very practices in which

they are designed to be used. (They can also be used for “extended” practices, as with Cage’s

music for prepared piano.) From an ergonomic perspective, the central component of a musical

instrument is the “interface” with which the performer engages in order to produce musical

sound. This interface, whether keys, holes, fingerboard, or double reed, consists of various

devices by which the performer measures and manipulates one or more variables or processes

that contribute to the production of musical sound. From the perspective of the instrument

makers and technicians that support the performer, the interface is also the “instrumentation,” so

to speak, of the instrument: those parts of its engineering with which technicians work in order to

improve the instrument’s stability, optimization, safety, reliability, and above all productivity –

to prepare for and facilitate the performer’s musical task. In this sense, a musical instrument

provides the performer with two things: first, a tool through which she can exercise and embody

her intentions with respect to her performance, and, second, a prosthetic extension of her body.

Even conventional acoustic instruments are thus, in principle at least, distantly related to virtual

reality, second life, and other emerging technologies that claim to generate and improve upon life

(rather than merely mimic it). Indeed, it is curious that Baudrillard did not consider music in

detail, for its practices would have made an interesting focus for his interest in simulation and

simulacra (Baudrillard 1983).

TECHNICAL THINKING

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In the Western classical tradition, the musical instrument is tied into the logic governing the

performer’s primary task, namely, to perform the musical work, with all the nuances that are

associated with “perform” in this context: compliance, representation, authenticity, expression,

spontaneity, singularity, and so on. Thus the role of the instrument is to facilitate the execution of

the performer’s intentions unobtrusively, the paradigmatic use of the instrument being congruent

with the following belief: “The outstanding performance of a fine musical work is, I suggest, an

invitation to transcendental listening, in that, paradigmatically, it avoids drawing attention to

itself as a performance (whether for positive or negative reasons)” (Johnson 1999: 85). Using the

instrument should be effortless for the performer and transparent to the music. If the performer is

a postman carrying and transmitting the musical package for and to the listener, then the

instrument is the postman’s van, designed to run smoothly and well oiled by the discourse of

musical appreciation on the one hand and the exercise of the performer’s skill on the other, but

not primarily appreciated for its own qualities. Underlying the ergonomically couched advice

about music “strategies” in empirical writings on performing (e.g. Parncutt and McPherson 2002;

Williamon 2004) is the assumption that using the instrument should be effortless, it functioning

entirely within the performer’s reach and being entirely focused on the task at hand, namely to

communicate the musical work with clarity and commitment.

It should be noted that there are at least two senses of “technical” at issue in the performer’s

engagement with her instrument: one ontological, one ergonomic. First, all performing is

technical because it involves physical training and implementing bodily and instrumental

movements in strategic ways that respond to the demands of the musical work as specified and

implied in the score. Second, only certain styles of performing are technical, that is, embody

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what can be called “technical thinking”: those that, as a result of direct intervention, use the body

in ways that have been specifically selected because they expend less energy than other ways of

acting. Indeed, according to this second sense of technical, in the game of performing “a

technical ‘move’ is ‘good’ when it does better and/or expends less energy than another” (Lyotard

1984: 44), when it helps the performer to reach goals quicker and to operate the game’s controls

and tools – her instrument – in a more productive and efficient manner.

The question, then, concerning the technology of the instrument and the technical status of the

performer’s actions concerns “functionality” (Lane 2000: 32-5). Performing must make

something with the instrument and show evidence of craftsmanship in its execution. The

discourse of Western classical music has almost universally assimilated this idea into its

ideology, concluding that performing is therefore governed by technical thinking, and by a

mentality of “problem solving.”

TOOLS AND MACHINES

Technology and aesthetic judgment have always been intertwined, and have developed alongside

each other. How they interrelate has not always been straightforward, especially in the modern

era. To use Heidegger’s analogy (1993b: 321), where once humanity harnessed nature

harmoniously in the windmill, now it challenges nature with the hydroelectric power-plant, and

technology – technical thinking – is the means through which it implements this challenge. In

recent decades, the rise of technical thinking and the digital turn have colluded to set in motion a

paradigm shift. We have drifted from a situation in which instruments are mimetic and geared

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towards the prior desires and intentions of performers, towards a situation embracing instruments

as the autonomous generators of new and unexpected expressions. This chapter is more

concerned with the first of these situations and the first type of instrument. Nevertheless, while

the implications of meta-instruments, software hacking, electroacoustic music, and other forms

of digital activity for the question concerning technology deserve treatment elsewhere, an

excursus on the digital instrument frames the particular qualities that the acoustic instrument

brings to the performance of Western classical music.

Thanks to Marx’s work on labor (1990) and Heidegger’s on techne (1993b), we can distinguish

between tools and machines. The tool does not completely displace the performer from its

operation. The machine, increasingly though not necessarily digitally driven, is set in motion by

its user but operates semi-autonomously and contains within itself the means for further self-

generation and self-development; as Stiegler notes, it enables “the pursuit of life by means other

than life” (1998: 17-18). A tool extends its user’s reach; a machine displaces it (Bajorek 2003:

49-51; Marx 1990: 548).

Machines are premised upon the gathering, institution, organization, and production of clearly

defined and repeatable data. Their focus is thus not on the unique, the unrepeatable, the messy, or

the loose, but on what can be measured, abstracted, ordered, and represented in a symbolic

system. This means that machines are entirely driven by the question of form, rather than content,

ordering life but not creating it. Indeed, it is precisely this factor that affords machines their

greatest strength, namely, that they facilitate a certain kind of labor. This machinic labor,

however, short-circuits human labor with a quicker and more efficient means of getting the job

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done, with the implication that humans now have to develop skills to match those of today’s

machines, or risk becoming obsolete like yesterday’s machines. For whereas humanity once bore

tools (and now makes machines), machines themselves have gradually become the predominant

tool bearers, and humanity has thus become less technological in the strict sense of the term;

technology, not humanity, now seems to direct nature (Stiegler 1998: 23-4).

Returning to music, the musical instrument often embodies the qualities of both tools and

machines. As tool, it extends the performer’s reaching for personal musical expression and

affords her the productive illusion that she is “saving time” or “acquiring knowledge” by using

the instrument in this precise manner rather than any other (Reybrouck 2006). As machine, it

also generates unexpected forms of temporal articulation. The boundary between tool and

machine is not always rigid, as illustrated by Music-Minus-One recordings, which inhabit a

realm somewhere between tool and machine (Davies 2003a); they are not merely tools, because

they maintain a certain autonomy of their own, but they are not fully machines, because they still

require the performer to play along and complete the illusion of performing in ensemble. The

underlying point is that instruments present the performer with two simultaneous sets of

opportunities, and it is her responsibility to decide what ratio of instrument-as-tool to instrument-

as-machine to create as she performs. Improvisers, for example, make particular use of the

machinic potential of their instruments, one of their tasks being to challenge conceptions of what

is ergonomic and practical for the instrument (such is also the effect of virtuosity). Many

classical instrumentalists emphasize the prosthetic qualities of their instrument-as-tool and its

ability to facilitate a musical sound or style that mimics, or at least is analogous to, vocal

production, as with the way pianists often perform ascending anacrustic gestures at phrase

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beginnings. Interestingly, the analysis and performance literature (e.g. Rink 1995, 2002) tends to

take a functionalist approach to the issue, configuring music’s technological apparatus more as a

machine than as a tool; the question of whether this approach is thus able to consider fully the

role of aesthetic value judgment in performing (a frequent anecdotal criticism performers make)

deserves consideration elsewhere.

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES

If technology now leads the way, then the paradox of the performer’s relationship to her musical

instrument is that, qua technology, “[t]o be commanded, technology must first be obeyed”

(Winner 1977: 262; cf. Bajorek 2003: 56) Indeed, it is not pushing the point too much to claim

that technology produces performing to a significant degree, that performing is necessarily

technological. Configuring performing in terms of technical thought, in terms of the instrument

and its technical values, has consequences.

Our social practices evolve alongside our use of new tools and the refinements we make to

existing tools, in the sense that “if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside

us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular

culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody” (McLuhan

1962: 41). Stiegler (1998) argues that it is not the case simply that humanity is the subject of its

own history and technology its object, the means by which humanity implements its projects;

their interrelationship (both genetic and causal) is more complex. This is the issue of what Katz

(2004) terms “technology effects”:

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People no longer know or control what they have made. Their tools, far from being

neutral and amenable to different purposes, have become a “second nature” with its own

self-determining ends. ... Human beings objectify their energy into the technological

world which then becomes “animate,” while they become inanimate, passive and lifeless.

(Herf 1977: 183)

Now, it may be the case, in what looks superficially like the tail wagging the dog, that

technology has allowed instruments to lead the development of performing styles and musical

repertoires, from the invention of the saxophone to Vanessa Mae’s turn to the electric violin;

from Josef Hofmann’s personal Steinway, made with thinner keys to fit his tiny hands, to the

mechanical and timbral advances of Cavaillé-Coll organs in nineteenth-century France; from the

gradual adoption of vibrato on the violin to Hendrix’s inverted guitar technique. It may be the

case that, metaphorically speaking, tools and machines are infantile in that they behave how they

want much of the time, with little loyalty to the performer, and it can sometimes feel as if “no

matter which aims or purposes one decides to put in, a particular kind of product inevitably

comes out” (Winner 1977: 278). It may be the case that technology exists in its own world and

holds an alienating mirror up to the performer, reflecting back at her all her technical and

aesthetic inadequacies while absorbing all her gifts and abilities without a note of thanks (the

horn player’s necessary spittle release brings the instrumental technology down to earth). It may

simply be the case that, as potential tool and machine, the instrument provides a degree of

alienation and resistance (Evens 2005: 160-73). But the performer must find a way not to reject

but to live with this alienation and resistance. She must turn it to her advantage as she searches

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for her voice, for “[w]hile McLuhan was right to stress technology’s shaping role in modern life,

the human side of the equation cannot be ignored” (Katz 2004: 191).

THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY

Before exploring some of the ways in which the performer can turn the potential alienation and

resistance of instrumental technology to her advantage, a note on what a failure to do so might

entail, a scenario often envisaged by pessimists (in extremis, Luddites).

Optimists and pessimists alike note that technology, in the form of ever more competent,

autonomous, and intelligent machines, is making numerous decisions for us, that instruments are

controlling an increasing number of the parameters of our interaction with the world, and that

tools are taking over more and more dirty manual work (in the first world, at least); indeed, the

very term “interaction” is gradually being replaced by the rhetoric of “interface.” Technology is

assuming its own momentum and pace of innovation, and we are witnessing a divorce between

the rhythms of technical and cultural development, the former evolving much quicker than the

latter; predictions that technology will one day survive without humankind are no longer just a

classic science fiction fantasy.

In many situations this is a relief, since it affords the use of time for other activities (such as

performing music). Whether, however, technology is appropriately focused towards performing

music (and aesthetic activity in general) needs debate. Aden Evans, for example, writes that

“extraction, distribution, and refinement are the most efficient path to a given end; they are

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modern technology’s techniques, through which it institutes its order” (2005: 64). Read literally

(as intended), this statement describes how digital computers deal with the data on CDs. Read

metaphorically, it describes, inter alia, a business plan for capturing natural petroleum resources.

What is interesting is the relative balance of these two readings, the metaphorical being much

more than a literary conceit, since it is clear that technology and its rhetoric has deeply infiltrated

world, thought, and praxis.

Assumptions that technological development has generally beneficial effects sometimes lead to

predictions that humanity will control the world using technology or that humanity will become

technology (as opposed to being technological, which it has always been). Such views are

epitomized by Paul Virilo’s work on speed (1995). Debates about musical technology, and in

particular the future of musical instruments, include similar assumptions and predictions, from

advocates of distributed performance networks (Harris 2006) to Stelarc (Caygill 1997). While it

is perhaps unnecessary to overdo “the threat of a whole-scale absorption into the digital” and the

“nightmare of a world where creativity is left to the computer” (Evens 2005: 131), it is important

to retain some skepticism about ideologies of techno-utopianism and caution regarding the

notion of human betterment which they tend to assume. Some, like Heidegger (1993b), hold

reservations about technology but maintain the importance of the issue. Others, like Marcuse

(1964), argue more forcefully that societies become more technological at the cost of their moral

freedom and psychological health. Others still, like Bakhtin, are highly critical of the abnegation

of human responsibility that excessive reliance on technology seems to imply:

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Thus instruments are perfected according to their own inner law, and, as a result, they

develop from what was initially a means of rational defense into a terrifying, deadly, and

destructive force. All that which is technological, when divorced from the once-occurrent

unity of life and surrendered to the will of the law immanent to its development, is

frightening; it may from time to time irrupt into this once-occurrent unity as an

irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force. (Bakhtin 1993: 7)

Adorno has broadly the same attitude as Bakhtin, though is more caustic:

Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of

pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and

tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would

survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.

(Adorno 1978: §19; cf. §§76, 77, 81, and 125)

Even taking their respective historical-political contexts into account, though, both thinkers

overstate the case. Despite that fact that “schemes [for considering musical instruments] are

culture-specific in one way or another and are tied to hegemonic systems of one sort or another”

(Dawe 2003: 275), human responsibility nevertheless remains central to the performer’s task in

the wake of any technological change to society’s – and hence the performer’s – musical

instruments. What is required is less the “either-or” rhetoric of Bakhtin and Adorno (technology

or humanity) and more the “both-and” of responsible aesthetic judgment as practiced by the

performer: How can the instrument be both her tool and her machine? Should she use general

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registration pistons in the performance of Buxtehude’s organ works, even although such playing

aids were unknown to the composer?

I’LL BE BACK, OR, THE RETURN OF THE PERFORMER

Despite these claims for the autonomous power and ambition of technology as embodied in

musical instruments, and the continuing rise of machines to unprecedented levels of performance

and capability, it remains the case that, against the odds, human intervention is needed for

performing acoustic Western classical music. Indeed, while this year’s cutting-edge

technological innovations will become next year’s landfill, the technological antiquity of the

acoustic instrument does not present an insurmountable problem for the performer, since

antiquity does not imply obsolescence; like wine, some instruments get better with age. If

instrumental antiquity were a problem, then Stan Godlovitch’s admirable stand against the

development of synthesizers and other artificial performing devices, arguing that technological

“challenges [to the traditional model of performing] fail to damage the model’s internal

coherence or show it to be inconsistent” (Godlovitch 1998: 4), would have been indispensable.

While instrument manufacturing has got quicker and cheaper, benefitting countless households,

there have been fewer labor-saving benefits for the performer. It may be that there are certain

situations in which live human presence is less necessary than it used to be, as with bomb

disposal or the computing power needed to profile national demographic shifts, or even with

aspects of the manufacture of musical instruments themselves. But performing acoustic Western

classical music is not one of these situations, even though technology provides a range of tools

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and machines, including musical instruments, and deepens the performer’s awareness of what

constitutes a tool and what can be used vicariously as one.

Performing is not only a technical activity. Indeed, the problem of technical thinking is that, as

Heidegger argues, it tends to reduce thinking to a process “in the service of doing and making,”

while actually “[i]t is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-

forth...where aletheia, truth, happens” (Heidegger 1993a: 218-19). It is for practical reasons, then,

that performers sometimes have an ambivalent relationship to music’s technologies, often only

listening unwillingly to recordings (Katz 2004: 198-9 n. 61). Beyond a threshold concern for the

technician’s assurance that the instrument is prepared and the keypads are no longer sticking, and

notwithstanding the varying obsessions with, for example, scraping new reeds or experimenting

with new rosins, the performer has other imperatives to fulfill and values to create, champion,

and critique. Her task is to overcome the potential alienation of her technological situation, of the

simultaneous tool and machinic qualities of her instrument, and turn it to her aesthetic advantage.

In general, rather than becoming “transfixed in the will to master [the instrument’s technology],”

the performer must turn her attention elsewhere (Heidegger 1993b: 337) and focus on passing the

threshold between green room and stage. What music psychologists call “expert performing”

(because they see it as an example of technical thinking), amateurs “professional playing”

(because they are not in–the-know technically), and listeners “beautiful, sublime, wonderful,

tasteful,” and so on (because technique is not their primary concern), happens when the

performer acts as if she is not using technology, as if using the instrument is effortless and it is

neither tool nor machine.

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For the duration of this valuable illusion, which is the duration of performing, questions of the

profitability of technical thinking and the efficiency of technology are distracting. They tempt the

performer away from the more important questions around the aesthetic judgments that, for the

duration of performing, remain a vital input and output of the performer’s activity. Given that

such judgments are effectively para-technological, this makes performing a slow, prosaic, loose,

reflective, and messy activity.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has followed technology through its role in human life and in music performance,

noting its extraordinary influence on thinking, its recent division into tools and machines, and its

current development beyond the reach of the human mind. Some of its many advantages have

been mentioned, along with a few disadvantages. Returning to the human pre-history mentioned

at the start, it is worth recalling the Prometheus myth and its association with techne (Meagher

1988): Fire is domesticated from a state of wildness, and always threatens to flare up and become

wild once again, to expose our essential mortal powerlessness. This is the predicament we live

through alongside “our” musical instruments. Will they do what we want? For this reason, as

Heidegger (1993b) and Davies (2003b) both argue, they deserve our respect.

See also Medium (Chapter ??), Performances and Recordings (Chapter ??), Authentic

Performance Practice (Chapter ??), Adorno (Chapter ??).

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