People O

People, Objects, Meaning: Recent Work on the Study and Collection of Musical Instruments
Author(s): Kevin Dawe

Source: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 54 (May, 2001), pp. 219-232
Published by: Galpin Society
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KEVIN DAWE
People, Objects, Mean

RecentWork on the St
and Collection of Musical
Instruments
Since the Enlightenment, scholars have been concerned with collecting

and cataloguing an enormous range of historical and indigenous musical
instruments from around the world. The focus has been largely upon the
investigation of their material and acoustic properties, description of
probable methods of construction, sound qualities, the techniques required
to produce sounds from them, and their repertoire (where available). This
investigation has required centuries of work using scientific techniques of
measurement, classification, preservation, conservation, restoration and
reference to historic musical treatises, public records and private letters
(useful overviews of this work appear in Sadie 1980, DeVale 1990, Kartomi
1990, Birley et al 2000). The study of musical instruments and their
methods of construction, 'the science of sound instruments' (DeVale,
1990:4) or 'organology' as it has become known, has drawn largely on the
methodologies and techniques of acoustics, wood studies, materials
conservation, museum studies, and biological systematics. In most cases,
the musical instruments studied have ended up in display cases in private or
public collections - though they may be taken out for research and other
educational purposes, and even played on special occasions. Indeed,
musical instrument collections provide a handy educational resource and
bank of information for research. Who could deny the usefulness of having
to hand historic and often priceless European musical instruments, or non-
Western musical instruments from distant countries, for analysis,
comparison, and use as illustrative teaching materials amongst an audience
and research group as wide and diverse as schoolchildren and instrument
makers?
The great musical instrument collections of the world keep on growing.
Not restricted to the collecting culture of museums, what meanings are
attached to what is increasingly a global flow of indigenous, 'ethnic', rare,
vintage and collectable musical instruments? What does this extraordinary
movement, gathering, and amassing of material culture (from Stradivari to
didjeridus to electric guitars) say about the cultures that are receiving it and
about the cultures of provenance? In this essay, I shall attempt to provide
219
evidence for, and an argument in support of, the usefulness of much new
work on the study and collection of musical instruments - work that may
go some way towards beginning to answer such questions as those outlined
above. In this work, musical instruments are viewed as objects existing at
the intersection of material, social and cultural worlds, as socially and
culturally constructed, in metaphor and meaning, industry and commerce,
and as active in the shaping of social and cultural life. Organology is as much
about the study of culture and society as it is about the science of
measurement and manufacture; it can enhance our knowledge of the
meaning of measurement as much as reveal things about the science that
informs museum culture. It studies the lives of performers and instrument
makers, and more recently the organologist-as-fieldworker, as much as it
makes use of slide rules and anechoic chambers. Indeed, studies of the
Stradivari family, Heyde's catalogue of the Leipzig collections, Picken on
the construction of Turkish musical instruments, and Merriam on African
drum making are just a few examples of the great range and diversity of
organological (field) work (see especially the collection of papers in DeVale
1990, Issues in Organology). Like all disciplines, organology is changing,
assimilating, absorbing, growing, feeding, drawing in and intersecting with
a range of approaches, ideas, techniques and methods from other fields of
enquiry.
THE FIELD
Genevieve Dournon's Guide for the Collection of Traditional M
ments (1981) was an early attempt to draw all the strands o
together. The Guide emphasises, in the first instance, the need
and extensive documentation 'in the field'. That is, the place
where clear, detailed, and precise notes are taken and the lates
recording techniques (including audio and video) made availab
musical instruments in context and in relation to associated
within a particular culture. She notes, like DeVale and Karto
that:
'A musical instrument, which is not like other objects, is a tool that both produces
sound and carries meaning. The acquisition of musical instruments should give rise
to a specific, in-depth study for the purpose of gathering all relative information,
not only with regard to musical aspects, but with regard to all the other fields that
make up the socio-cultural context as well.' (Dournon, 1981:9)
The aim here is to draw attention to these 'other fields'. That is, in terms
of their bearing upon our understanding of the significance and meaning of
musical instruments within humari societies and cultures, their ability to put
flesh on the bones of classification systems, and their potential for bringing
museum displays to life. These 'fields' are not just the other areas of social
and cultural life that help to shape the worlds in which we find musical
instruments, but also the range of academic disciplines to hand enabling
us to expand, shape and hone our interpretations and analyses. The
220
application of a range of ideas and theories from the fields of anthropology,
ethnography, material culture studies, cultural studies, sociology, social-
cultural history, and media communications offers a more holistic and
synthetic approach to the study of musical instruments. Such an approach
can be seen to draw, in particular, on the eclecticism and often pluralistic
approaches of ethnomusicology ('the study of the music of different
cultures', Pearsall 1999). In ethnomusicology there has been a concerted
effort to understand the role of sound-producing objects in human
instrumentality and in the interaction of people and objects, and what this
means. There is a growing body of publications in and outside of
ethnomusicology that reflect an interest in how sound-producing objects
are instrumental in retaining cultural memory, act as embodiments of
meaning, constructors of identity, icons of ethnicity and as sensors of place.
Recent edited collections include Schmidt (1994), Neuenfeldt (1997a &
1998), Dawe & Bennett (2001) and Waksman (forthcoming), whilst single-
authored works include Kartomi (1990), Leppert (1993, 1998), Th6berge
(1997), and Waksman (1999). Useful references to the role of musical
instruments in the construction of ethnicity, identity and place are to be
found in Stokes (1994).
In these studies, musical instruments are viewed as part of active and
potent symbol systems, whether they are on the shelf at a museum or in the
hands of a performer in some distant land. They exist in webs of culture,
entangled in a range of discourses and political intrigues, and they occupy
engendered and status defining positions. Above all, musical instruments
and their understanding in relation to a range of associated phenomena can
be problematic and they are clearly not neutral sites. Indeed, a range of
theoretical positions, issues and debates, from colonial discourse theory to
globalisation, and from the cultural politics of museum exhibitions to the
neo-colonialist exploits of 'world music' are now being re-examined
through their study.
ENTANGLED OBJECTS
At the same time as musical instruments are continuing to be inducted into
the world of museum culture, they are increasingly drawn into
transnational industries that import and export material culture and 'ethnic'
goods through means that set up networks akin to the 'travelling cultures'
described by James Clifford (1992). For example, complete gamelans
(percussion orchestras) are shipped from Indonesia to University
Departments, among other venues, around the world to provide the basis
of ensemble work experience for a range of students, professionals,
therapists and patients. Instruments such as the mbira (a 'hand piano' or
lamellophone) from Zimbabwe are taken up as symbols of nationalism and
political protest internationally. Similarly, the Australian didjeridu features as
a symbol ofAustralian aboriginality, solidarity and protest, as well as an icon
of ethnicity, essentialised primitivism and 'authentic' culture that informs
techno-tribal, 'world music', New Age, and 'global pop' productions and
221
sensibilities. Karl Neuenfeldt notes that although the didjeridu is 'an
ethnically and racially identified musical instrument, its ubiquity as a
commodity allows networks of cultural production to encompass people
from diverse cultural heritages' (Neuenfeldt, 1997b:117 and also 1997a).
He goes on to discuss the experiences of both Aborigines and non-
Aborigines involved in the retailing and performance of the didjeridu in the
local economy of Alice Springs, and the ways in which the instrument and
its culture are carried by global information flows and advertising.
Likewise, Dawe & Bennett note the omnipresence of the guitar in world
culture where it exists in cultural space nuanced by the convergence ofboth
local and global forces. In this 'glocal' space, its material form and sound are
relatively homogenous in global circulation, with guitars by Gibson,
Fender, Martin and Torres, for example, having provided the basic and
relatively standardised designs for a worldwide manufacturing industry. At
the same time, the guitar is the object of assimilation, appropriation and
change in local settings by quite specific means and in quite specific ways
through customisation and use in different music styles (Dawe & Bennett
2001, see also Schmidt 1990). More than ever, musical instruments are
carried along in 'global cultural flows' (Appadurai, 1990, 1996) as much as
they are locked in museum display cases and held in local traditions; they
are increasingly polyvalent and polysemic without necessarily being
polymorphic and polyphonic.
The ideas ofArjun Appadurai andJames Clifford, among others, may be
used to challenge organological orthodoxy with its largely delimited view
of the world of musical instruments and the worlds in which musical
instruments exist. In the view of Appadurai (1986), material objects have
social potential and a social life, where a 'thing' such as a musical instrument
can have a 'career' (a trajectory and a history) which often involves it having
mutating roles as a commodity. Building on analyses of exchange o
material goods in both colonial and post-colonial periods throughout the
Pacific region, Nicholas Thomas notes that in that context 'objects are not
what they were made to be but what they have become' (Thomas, 1991:4).
In general, we consume objects, give them meaning, and in doing so,
reproduce them, so to speak, in our own image - we colonise them. Thomas
goes on to say that a view such as this contradicts 'a pervasive identification
in museum research and material culture studies which stabilises the
identity of a thing in its fixed and founded material form' (Thomas, ibi
Like animals in a zoo or pinned butterflies kept in specimen drawer
musical instruments in collections and displays are out of place; but whi
their 'identities' inevitably deteriorate or change over time they may ta
on the role of something else to somebody else, someplace else. They can
mistranslated, subject to aestheticisation, or totally transformed, a
meanings can be added and subtracted from them. As anthropologist
museum curator Tony Buckley writes, whilst reflecting on a visit to
exhibition in a London museum:
222
'It is strange to come away from a museum ostensibly about "mankind",
feeling that it depicts no people, but this was, in fact, a museum of dehu-
manised objects. Somehow, the exhibitions had dissolved away the people
who had created the objects. One sensed that there was no passion for
mankind. Rather there was a passion to domesticate the wild; to make the
unfamiliar familiar to the inhabitants of the London suburbs. If we were to
encounter the denizens of the third world at all, we had first to transform
them and see them as proprietors of a worldwide craft shop. Unrecon-
structed people - people as they actually are - would get in the way of
objects.'(Buckley, 1993:1)
'The third world had been reduced to what the Sunday newspapers have
told us that the different countries of the third world have in common,
namely elegant, handcrafted objects made out of natural materials. From a
wealth of sometimes fascinating objects, the exhibition had given us a
cliche. It had reduced the third world to an up-market craft shop.'
(Buckley, 1993:4)
Whatever knowledge and information musical instruments reveal about
themselves in relation to data collected from 'the field' (itself a problematic
place), musical instruments out of place must also reveal things about their
location. They can be problematical in a new setting. They become part of
the new place, where curators and visitors interact with them, redefine and
transform them and where the original owners, builders and performers of
the musical instrument are not 'in the way'. Whether museum exhibit, or
'world music' production, the focus is not about studying what musical
instruments once might have been but on 'what they have become' as 'old
instruments in new contexts' (Neuenfeldt, 1998). Thomas notes that
'creative re-contextualisation and indeed re-authorship may thus follow
from the taking, purchase or theft' of material goods. He goes on to say that
'since exhibitions or museums of history are no less prominent now than in
the epoch of the world's fairs, that is a sort of entanglement that most of us
cannot step aside' (Thomas, 1991:5). It is conceivable that musical
instruments become so entangled with museum culture and colonialisation
by the 'host' that their meaning and exchange value are useful, and function
only in relation to, the concepts that makeup museum culture (as the
extract taken from Tony Buckley's visit to a museum exhibition
demonstrates). According to James Clifford this 'entanglement' is a means
of colonising, owning and accumulating the objects of 'outsiders', where
collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self,
culture, and authenticity. Musical instruments, like other museum objects,
are appropriated by the gaze of those visitors who look upon them and then
taken into the realms of the popular imagination. Surely this
problematisation of collecting is essential and revealing of the non-
neutrality of musical instruments (foreign or otherwise) within a particular
culture and society? Whilst each and every musical instrument is not a cult
object, surely they are all 'entangled' in one way or another?
223
Musical instruments, like other material culture, may even become 'art'.
James Clifford refers to the ways in which 'ethnic' material culture is
transformed into 'art' in the museums and galleries of the world via the 'art-
culture system' (Clifford, 1988). In turning to the way objects such as
musical instruments are transformed into such things as 'art' on their
'travels', it is appropriate to introduce the term bricolage. I use the term here
as defined in a seminal work edited by Hall and Jefferson, although it
appears earlier in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (1966). Bricolage refers
to 'the re-ordering and re-contextualisation of objects to create fresh
meanings, within a total system of significances, which already includes
prior and sedimented meanings attached to objects used' (Hall &Jefferson,
1976:177). In the examples given here, in relation to musical instruments,
whilst it might not be clear how much of a role 'prior and sedimented
meanings' play in new contexts, it is clear that new roles are assigned to
instruments and new meanings are acquired. What has become abundantly
clear is that 'some instruments in the late 20th century operate as
indispensable ingredients of artistic expression simultaneously at the levels
of culture, commerce and creativity. They are now part of a global cultural
economy and circulate in transnational networks of practice, commodities
and aesthetics. Instruments migrate along with musicians or are bought,
sold and bartered in a multi-million dollar-a-year musical marketplace'
(Neuenfeldt, 1998:5). Musical instruments are a part of this profound 're-
ordering and re-contextualisation' of objects in what Bourdieu has called
'the field of cultural production'. Bourdieu describes fields of 'restricted'
and 'large-scale' production which affect the creation, dissemination and
circulation of material goods. These fields are tied to systems of hegemony
and cultural dominance and to the contestation, negotiation and working
out of power relations in social and cultural exchanges on a worldwide
scale. Exhibitions, workshops and 'the field' can be profoundly problematic
places as can the role of musical instruments in systems of social and cultural
exchange; whether these systems actually turn out to be exchanging rather
than mining and exploiting must, of course, be questioned. Meanwhile
musical instruments continue to play a role in global tourism and the
pawnshops of the world.
PEOPLE, OBJECTS, MEANING

In apparent contrast to the museum exhibit discussed above is the one that
was designed by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia. This
exhibit travelled around Pennsylvania in 1988 and included musical
instruments and workshops by instrument makers. The director of the
exhibition, Shalom D. Staub notes:
'The objects in "Crafts and Community" are not idiosyncratic; they represent the
work of individuals who are connected to communities with shared craft and aes-
thetic traditions. To make sense of these artifacts, the exhibition gives primary
importance to the craftsworkers themselves in order to reveal the complex rela-
tionships of people, objects, and social meaning.' (Staub, 1988:30)
224
It is the 'complex relationships of people, objects, and social meaning'
that I wish to draw attention to here. Alan Merriam's brilliant analysis of
drum making in an African village in the late 1960s, for instance, surely
must be one of first and earliest examples of musical scholarship to show
how completely musical instruments are entangled in webs of culture. He
brings the complexity of the processes involved in musical instrument
making to life, and his study of the Bala (Basongye) drum can be said to
epitomise his 'anthropology of music' (Merriam, 1964). He writes:
'The following description of what happened over the next ten days in connection
with the construction of a drum can be read in a number of ways: it describes the
construction process in minute detail, it can be viewed as an informal document of
small group activity; it serves as an ethnographic slice of life, and it delimits part of
the economic system. Above all, it illustrates the ethnographic experience, the
details of the never-humdrum gathering of data, the ramifications of that gathering
process, and the tentative groupings which characterise the work of all ethnogra-
phers. The description is presented as it was written in my field notes, with
explanatory information in brackets.' (Merriam, 1969:76)
'What can we learn from this detailed description of a work activity in Lupupa
Ngye? In the first place, we learn how the Bala, at least in this particular village,
construct a drum; but more precisely, and with more intrinsic value, we view drum
making as a social and cultural process. That is, instead of having to say merely that
the maker at such-and-such a stage "did this", we can see how "this" was related
to "that" and how this process impinges upon, and is impinged upon, by other
processes in the culture.' (Merriam, 1969:96)
'...a substantial number of bits and pieces of culture patterns were revealed, and
these included, among others: taboos; children's games; patterns of badinage and
boasting; real and ideal behaviour; technological information such as types of
woods, the sources of colours, and tool-use patterns; linguistic information,
including terms for parts of the drum, tools, woods...ideas of Europeans; concepts
of design; institutional friendships; learning by imitation...; and tricks and jokes.
Almost every one of these items requires further research, but all of them were
spin-off from the central procedure being studied.' (Merriam, 1969:99)
'In sum, what might be conceived of as a strictly ethnomusicological event illus-

trates clearly the interrelatedness of human culture. Not only was the drum made,
but scores of information about the culture and society were enacted and per-
ceived. Making a drum is not only an ethnomusicological process but an ethno-
graphic process as well, with implications which extend it far beyond our
knowledge of the music of Bala society.' (Merriam, 1969:100)
Merriam's analysis of the place of drum making within Bala society

provides a model study with which to approach the study of musical
instruments and their construction (see also, for example, Berliner 1993).
He viewed drum making as a complete whole involving physical, social,
cultural, economic and political processes. I have attempted to engage with
such a model in a study of guitar making in Spain and in an investigation of
the role of the lyra (upright, three-stringed, bowed lute) in the musical
culture of Crete (Dawe, 1996, 1998, 2001a, 2001b, forthcoming). Guitar
225
makers inhabit a unique world formed out of the intersection of material,
social and cultural worlds. In this musical habitus (this nexus of practices,
structures and structuring forces [Bourdieu, 1977]), musical artisans
function not merely as makers of cultural artifacts, but as agencies setting a
variety of social practices in motion. Lives and livelihoods are literally built
around the guitar and the guitar workshop. Guitar makers are in a position
of power and authority, and custodians of the knowledge that brings the
guitar to life (Dawe, 2001a).
The aim of my study has been to try and reveal the forces and mecha-
nisms operating within, and converging upon, the world of guitar making,
as well as local responses to these forces. Local discourses of identity and
authenticity emerge in this distinctly 'between-worlds' setting, forming a
poetics of place and a politics of craftsmanship. In these discourses, 'here',
rather than 'there', is 'better'; whilst 'better' is 'made by hand' rather than
'made by machine'. This quite specific case of 'the global' being appre-
hended by 'the local' shows that workshops are not places where guitar
makers exist in splendid isolation, rather their lives and works have a
dynamic relationship with 'the outside world'. Clearly, the dimensions of
Arjun Appadurai's 'global cultural economy' model, with its set offluid and
overlapping landscapes (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes,finanscapes and
ideoscapes), converges and interacts with the guitarscape of the workshop in
quite specific and subtle ways. This interaction comes in many forms, from
the rising prices of timber to the fluctuating interest in the classical guitar,
from the ways in which global tourism enters into the workshop to the
banter between small workshop owners and internationally acclaimed
guitarists.
In my study of guitar making, as in Merriam's study of drum making, 'a
substantial number of bits and pieces of culture patterns were revealed'. I
will mention here the rapid-fire verbal exchanges between Manolo the
guitar maker and his friends and customers in the workshop, revealing a
pattern of relationships expressed in good-natured banter, friendships and
business dealings. Manolo liked to quip and tell a story, it was part of his
'fine tuning' (everyone relaxed and got to know him better) and a means of
bringing the material culture of the shop to life. They were also a means of
re-establishing the sense of a brotherhood of the guitar in a world inhabited
mostly by men. Stories and jokes came quick and fast, tending to bounce off
the equally colourful walls of the workshop, which were decked out in eye-
catching displays of guitar memorabilia. With the photographs that lined
the walls of his shop, Manolo tried to create a faithful representation of his
past, his achievements, and the people he had met and shared stories with.
These pictures provided a visual counterpoint to the verbal exchanges
going on in the shop. It is important to note how meaning is carried in the
iconography, gestures and kinaesthetics associated with musical instru-
ments. For example, in Crete a villager may play 'air' lyra, an act which is
carried in gesture and posture and is meaningful even when the instrument
is not present. So powerful is the trace of the instrument in Cretan culture,
226
so powerful is its contribution to a certain way of imagining Cretan iden-
tity and what it is to be a man in Cretan society, and so powerful is it as a
means of using and understanding the body.
BODY POLITIC
The workshops of the Basongye drum-makers, the Spanish g
and the lives of Cretan lyra players are clearly embedded in d
and cultural milieux. The pictures and images (for instanc
expressive culture) in the guitar shops of Spain and elsewhe
social markers, credentials, advertising, and assemblages of
Indeed, there is an emerging interest on the part of music
United States, in particular the work of Richard Leppert
concerning the significance of visual representations of musi
work, which intersects with the work of a number of music i
not only includes reference to musicians but also musical in
the domestic settings in which they were played. According t
that remains of music in the image is its trace as a socialised
question arising from visual representation is hence one of
cultural function' (Leppert, 1988:3). Elsewhere (Dawe 1996
(forthcoming) 'Lyres and the Body Politic'). I consider how th
is displayed in musical instrument shops, featured in the imag
covers and carried in body language through posture and gestu
and as more than a trace in 'socialised activity'. Combined w
power of photographs to manipulate and control (Sontag, 19
mythology realised, em-bodied, turned into a permanent way
speaking, walking' (Bourdieu, 1977:93) may find meaningf
through photographic imagery, gestures, postures, and the w
musical instruments are played (see Baily, 1995).
In more recent times, the 'anthropology of the body' has
the ways in which meaning is quite literally 'embodied', an
relationship of the physical body to the body politic (see F
Featherstone et al 1991; Shilling 1993). These works draw on
theorising about the ways in which the body is socially constr
ing Marcel Mauss' notion of habitus (Mauss, 1935), an idea
Bourdieu develops and describes as 'systems of durable, transp
sitions' (i.e. ways of being in and of the social world (Bou
These dispositions - dress, bearing, postures, gestures, way
talking, standing, sitting - are cultivated, disciplined, conve
the incorporation of social meanings (where the body bec
with social meanings, norms, values and beliefs) and is ther
constructed. Indeed, the body is colonized, politicized; it b
'body politic'. Here, social thought is not abstract, cerebral
ied in the Cartesian sense, but rooted in the way we use our b
I argue that the Cretan music ensemble, with the lyra as its
belongs to, and subscribes to what Chris Shilling calls a 'bo
base this argument upon evidence that I have presented els
227
reference to the musical construction of celebrations, folklore, visual
culture and musical instrument making. To play lyra and laouto, musicians
(99.9% male) have to subscribe to a regime imposed by 'tradition', by
teachers, by authorities, by those in power and those with 'the knowledge'.
They have to learn musical techniques and repertoires, acquire the
necessary mental and physical dexterity, stay awake at celebrations lasting
up to fifteen hours, manage an audience of 1000 inebriated guests, in short,
a host of skills that require the disciplining of the body and the sharpening
of the mind. According to Shilling, 'in the affluent West there is a tendency
for the body to be seen as an entity which is in the process of becoming; a
project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an
individual's self-identity' (1993:5). I include professional musicians in the
category of 'the affluent West' and am convinced that the Cretan music
'project' demands that individuals be conscious of and actively concerned
about the management, maintenance and appearance of their bodies
(whether at celebrations or on CD covers). Those with the power to
oversee this project are the older and established virtuosi, record producers
and patrons of the 'tradition' - those with connections and influence. On
the evidence provided here then, we can see that the Cretan body project
is managed in Cretan terms, that embodiment is culturally constructed, and
that this connection to the body (in performance, visual culture and
folklore) bears upon the construction of the lyra as a masculine instrument.
The lyra is not only emblematic of cultural difference in Crete, setting
Crete musically apart from the outside world, it is engendered and thus
empowered and a part of the body politic.
SOUND, AFFECT AND MEANING

However much we study an instrument out of its original context in a
laboratory or lecture hall, we will never be able to capture the full meanin
that it had for the people, society, culture, subculture, tribe, clan, family,
individual that produced it. The museum, lecture-hall, or wherever is a
very different place from the field. The reason for a musical instrument'
creation and the importance and meaning of its sound, shape and sheer
presence cannot be fully appreciated and understood. Indeed, the very
intention to make an instrument along with the actual processes and
practices that converge in the making of it are tied up with all sorts of ritual
values and beliefs. In her seminal book on the Concepts and Classification o
Musical Instruments, Margaret Kartomi (1990) shows that the meaning and
significance of musical instruments as cultural phenomena for 'insiders' in
particular culture or cultural context can be very different to the meanin
and significance they have for 'outsiders'. Kartomi's study of a great variet
of indigenous classification schemes shows how musical instruments ar
connected to fields of meaning that at one end of the scale pervade enti
cultures and even nations, whilst at the other end of the scale are tied t
quite specific contexts and localities. These semantic fields also intersec
with and form the basis for indigenous theories of music and musica
228
performance practice. Moreover, we can as does Regula Burckhart
Qureshi link the sound of a musical instrument to its importance as a
cultural object:
'The Indian sarangi is uniquely endowed with meaning...But it was playing the
instrument that drew me into the web of meanings emanating from the sounds I
was learning to hear and make...I entered a distinctive sound world ranging from
the ethereal to the down-to-earth, a sound world which is intimately connected to
the object of the instrument itself.' (Qureshi, 1997:1)
It is often forgotten that musical instruments are primarily used as a

source for producing sound and that primarily sounds are ultimately 'socially
constructed to convey meaning' (Feld, 1983:78). Qureshi, in a fascinating
discussion of the ways in which the sarangi (an upright, bowed lute)
intersects with many of facets of the culture in which it is found and of
which it is an important part, goes on to say that:
'But it was only when my sense of context, and reference for the sarangi began to
expand beyond the Western formalist agenda of "learning the instrument" and
"learning the music" (or mastering phonetic/phonemic distinctions or rules) that I
was able to direct my focus toward the complex and intensely affective meanings
which were being shared in wide-ranging conversations around the musical, phys-
ical, and metaphorical site of the sarangi. I faced a rich palette of responses to that
single instrument and its sound: moral depravity as well as emotion, devotion, feu-
dal domination and servitude, with women who sing for men, and men who play
for women. This led me to explore how people experience the sarangi, how play-
ers, listeners and patrons negotiate the contradictory, multiply referenced meanings
of its music and how the power of music serves the interests of power.' (Qureshi,
1997:5-6).
Qureshi's vignette of what it was like to learn the sarangi in a particular

cultural setting, provides us with a rich insight into how gender, power,
emotion, and feeling are socially and culturally achieved, affected and built
around a musical instrument. Musical instruments are active as sites of social
and cultural exchange, worldwide; reflected in as many different ways in
the glass cabinets of museums, the grooves of world-beat records and the
photographic memorabilia of tourism as they are meaningful and affective
in distinct music cultures. Recent work on the study and collection of
musical instruments continues to provide fascinating and important insights
into the dynamic relationship that exists between people and objects, and
what it all means.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wish to record my special thanks to Tony Buckley for allow
his unpublished material and to the anonymous referee wh
with some very helpful comments. I also wish to thank th
Research Committee of the Open University for its gener
my ongoing fieldwork in Crete and Spain.
229
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People, Objects, Meaning: Recent Work on the Study and Collection of Musical Instruments

Author(s): Kevin Dawe

People, Objects, Mean

Since the Enlightenment, scholars have been concerned with collecting

PEOPLE, OBJECTS, MEANING

'In sum, what might be conceived of as a strictly ethnomusicological event illus-

Merriam's analysis of the place of drum making within Bala society

SOUND, AFFECT AND MEANING

It is often forgotten that musical instruments are primarily used as a

Qureshi's vignette of what it was like to learn the sarangi in a particular

Appadurai, A. (ed) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodit

(1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press.

(1969) 'The Ethnographic Experience: Drum-Making Among the Bala

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