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Last Sunday I went to see Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
twistedchick; it's a documentary that follows the making of one Steinway piano over the course of the year that it takes the factory to make it.
If you've ever looked inside a grand piano, you know that they are amazingly complicated instruments, and currently the highest musical technology that doesn't involve electricity. But the process, from the guys sorting through stacks of wood and complaining that they aren't as big as they used to be (of course not, because sitka spruce aren't exactly a renewable resource at the rate we've been going through them!) to the cabinetry workers bending the case into shape, to the women assembling the mallets and keyboards, to the plate fitters and leg carpenters to the chippers and tuners, that's an enormous amount of effort and skill.
Which leads me to note that I don't think I've ever seen any SF story about colonizing another planet talk about the difficulties of making musical instruments, except Anne McCaffrey's YA novel Dragonsong and its sequels.
If it's a generation ship or anything other than easy, commercial Star Wars style interstellar travel, musical instruments are going to be high value items, just for the organic material necessary to make them. Once you get into time to make a modern orchestral instrument and the human capital in highly specific skills, they'll be prohibitively expensive to transport, beyond the reach of most new colonies.
And don't think humans would give up musical instruments. Even people with the most minimal material culture, like the San of Africa, have instruments like flutes, rattles and thumb pianos.
But what materials do you need to make musical instruments, and how much of an investment would that be for a colony struggling to terraform a new world? Plastics are likely to be out, because that would require petrochemicals or possibly hydrocarbons from gas giants/comets/asteroids, and really there are probably more pressing uses for those...
For myself, I'm lucky. I was a percussionist when I played back in middle school, and that means I get to play anything that makes a *thwock* sound when you hit it. Cowbells, plastic tubs, steel oil drums, whips, gourds, hollow logs -- just about anything can be used as a percussion instrument. Yes, there are marimba, chimes, bells, and all sorts of tuned instruments that fall into the range of percussion, but in general, it's pretty easy to jerry-rig 'drums'. Toddlers do it all the time with their parents' pots and pans.
But woodwinds? Brass? Strings? What do you think is the upper limit for each type if you had to bring all the materials (possibly in the form of seedlings and baby animals) with you onto a ship that wouldn't reach the destination for a generation or two? What would most people choose to bring if they were limited to only what they could carry? What would *you* choose? What about if you had to make it yourself?
twistedchick; it's a documentary that follows the making of one Steinway piano over the course of the year that it takes the factory to make it.If you've ever looked inside a grand piano, you know that they are amazingly complicated instruments, and currently the highest musical technology that doesn't involve electricity. But the process, from the guys sorting through stacks of wood and complaining that they aren't as big as they used to be (of course not, because sitka spruce aren't exactly a renewable resource at the rate we've been going through them!) to the cabinetry workers bending the case into shape, to the women assembling the mallets and keyboards, to the plate fitters and leg carpenters to the chippers and tuners, that's an enormous amount of effort and skill.
Which leads me to note that I don't think I've ever seen any SF story about colonizing another planet talk about the difficulties of making musical instruments, except Anne McCaffrey's YA novel Dragonsong and its sequels.
If it's a generation ship or anything other than easy, commercial Star Wars style interstellar travel, musical instruments are going to be high value items, just for the organic material necessary to make them. Once you get into time to make a modern orchestral instrument and the human capital in highly specific skills, they'll be prohibitively expensive to transport, beyond the reach of most new colonies.
And don't think humans would give up musical instruments. Even people with the most minimal material culture, like the San of Africa, have instruments like flutes, rattles and thumb pianos.
But what materials do you need to make musical instruments, and how much of an investment would that be for a colony struggling to terraform a new world? Plastics are likely to be out, because that would require petrochemicals or possibly hydrocarbons from gas giants/comets/asteroids, and really there are probably more pressing uses for those...
For myself, I'm lucky. I was a percussionist when I played back in middle school, and that means I get to play anything that makes a *thwock* sound when you hit it. Cowbells, plastic tubs, steel oil drums, whips, gourds, hollow logs -- just about anything can be used as a percussion instrument. Yes, there are marimba, chimes, bells, and all sorts of tuned instruments that fall into the range of percussion, but in general, it's pretty easy to jerry-rig 'drums'. Toddlers do it all the time with their parents' pots and pans.
But woodwinds? Brass? Strings? What do you think is the upper limit for each type if you had to bring all the materials (possibly in the form of seedlings and baby animals) with you onto a ship that wouldn't reach the destination for a generation or two? What would most people choose to bring if they were limited to only what they could carry? What would *you* choose? What about if you had to make it yourself?
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Metal transverse flute would be a bit more complicated, because of the finesmithing required even after mining the brass or silver, but it could certainly be done.
And I'm not knocking singing, but people make *instruments* as well. It's just about the one thing that separates us from the rest of the animals. We make things to make things, and some of the things we make is music.
Likely we'd make do with just about anything to hand that made a note when struck or stroked or plucked.
Percussion for the WIN!
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There's also electronic instruments-- a digital keyboard would be one of the hardest things to manufacture on a new colony, until you had a real industrial base built up, but one of the easiest things to keep in good repair aboard ship.
For planetside manufacture: you can have the recorder immediately, if there's any native wood, and the panpipes, and the wooden transverse flute; you can have almost the full range of drums-- pretty much everything except timpani-- as soon as you slaughter your first cow or analogous creature.
Cattle will also give you horns, for a shofar or something along those lines, and gut, for stringed instruments. You can build a lyre with fairly simple woodworking tools, or a small harp, or an erhu or other basic bowed instrument. And you can have the shawm if you've brought cane plants with you, or found native substitutes.
Most other instruments will have to wait until you've got some sort of metalworking base. Bronze casting will get you bells and cymbals immediately; hammered brass-working will get you valveless trumpets and small kettle-drums right off, with larger drums, natural French horns, and the slide trombone following as you expand operations. That level of metalworking will give you the woodworking tools you need to make lutes, guitars, zithers, dulcimers, and the viol family, though not with the highest degree of refinement.
Valved and keyed instruments will have to wait until you've got the tools to make them, which probably means at least a small-scale steel industry. That plus wire-drawing technology will also give you steel strings, eventually.
The piano will be the last thing you start building, though modern Boehm-system clarinets will probably be the second-to-last. Violins and even cellos, a single artisan can make in her basement with a well-equipped home wood shop; my semantics professor built her own celli. I've never heard of anyone building their own orchestral clarinet for fun. (And the low clarinets would require not just an industrial-revolution level of technology but a whole musical infrastructure in place to create demand.)
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And brass-smithing might give you the pipe organ even before it gives you valved trumpets, if the demand is present-- all you need for organ pipes is the ability to roll or hammer a flat sheet and solder it into a tube and cut a notch in it.
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And the seeds and/or rootstock for all of those things would also be valuable, but I doubt you'd be able to establish most of them on most worlds, at least not without a lot of difficulty. And the rare materials and the skilled labor feed on one another-- if you've managed to establish mulberry groves and the silkworm in commercially viable quantities on your planet, then that's where the spinning, dying, and weaving industries will develop, so even if someone else does manage to start some silk groves, their finished product won't look as nice as yours for some time-- and with that head start, you can branch into all kinds of fiddly, skilled, expensive, and proprietary directions.
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I agree that you'd have drums pretty early, if you've brought something you can breed for meat and skin, and fast growing tree. Or can find native analogues.
On the other hand, if the colony world is like Mars in that you'd have to terraform from the ground up, and there are no native lifeforms, you're a hell of a lot more limited in what you can get going. Gourds for percussion and thumb pianos, reeds for flutes seem like the likeliest in that case, and forget about anything like a fiddle for several decades.
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And if you've growing bamboo, which you'd be silly not to, then you've got more than reed flutes-- you have the marimba, you have the shawm, you have the digeridoo. You might make something that would technically be a clarinet, though the Klangfarben would probably be pretty far off. If you've got some kind of cane and a small metal shop, you could reinvent the saroussophone family, though I don't know why you'd want to. You might also be able to use thin strips of bamboo, or some kind of bamboo laminate, in the bodies of stringed instruments-- lutes, mandolins, maybe even the guitar. No fiddles, though-- I agree with that. Anything where the response of the wood is more important than the shape of the resonator is going to have to wait for actual wood.
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You can get an amazing amount of instruments out of bamboo (http://www.world-bamboo.com/en/instruments.cfm), though I don't know about the tone quality of a bamboo marimba; the marimbas I know are pretty dense wood... but if you brought bamboo, giant reed, and rivercane, you'd have a great basis for a material culture based on a highly renewable resource, assuming you're careful with your carbon and water cycles.
What have you got against contra-basses? Except that they look like a bitch to play and sound like foghorns, I mean?
I think a lot of stringed instruments would have to wait, because guitars and fiddles both sound through the body of the instrument, so the wood quality is important -- and trees would take a long while to establish, and even longer to grow to useful-for-instruments size.
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And what gave you the idea I have something against contrabasses? I used to play the contrabass clarinet; it's my favorite instrument.
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I'd kind of like to see serpents come back, just because they're so wacky looking.
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The contrabass clarinets, in E-flat and B-flat, are probably second only to to the grand piano in terms of difficulty-- you're looking at up to six feet of rosewood or blackwood, in two sections as thick as your arm, with a bell and a curvy neck and cork joints and Boehm nickel or silver fittings all the way up the body, four to five feet of them, comprising screws, rods, flat and coiled springs, and keys backed in cork, felt, and leather. And attached to that massive piece of wood, they have to be *perfectly* fitted and tuned for anything to work.
I played a rosewood E-flat contra in college-- it was a ten thousand dollar horn then, and would go for very nearly that much on the secondhand market today. It was brand new my first semester, and so touchy that the difference in temperature and humidity between my locker and the practice room would make springs and pins come loose and go flying; it took a semester's worth of almost weekly trips to the shop to fine-tune it so it would all hang together. And that was a top-of-the-line horn.
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I agree, you'd see a lot of percussion instruments (oddly, Pern doesn't seem to have as many--maybe a blind spot on the author's part) and a lot of vocal performance. With the lack of trained singers, you'd probably get more people with "regular" voices singing because of need, and less of a conviction that only "real" singers should perform (I think this is one of our current culture's nagging problems). Small, portable instruments, like guitars, zithers, harmonicas, violins, clavicords, would all do well onboard ship, and with proper care and a fair amount of kludging for parts, would last a long time. If catgut or steel strings weren't available, I would think people would figure some sort of string material, even if the sound quality changed. As time went on, people would compose for that string quality in mind.
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You'd get more people singing at younger ages, which would improve the entire pool of singing ability. That's the real problem -- musical education is considered a 'frill' in the USA today.
I think replacement strings would be a limiting factor, at least at first. Catgut strings would require a population of sheep large enough that you could slaughter a few without a qualm. I'm not sure, but brass instruments and transverse flutes might be more durable -- what parts need to be replaced on them, and how often?
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And on trumpets, as long as you kept them clean and dry and oiled the valves, they'd last a long, long time.
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Heee... geez, that sounds like a McGuffin for a Firefly story to hang on.
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Hmm. With brass and modern flutes you have a lot of valves and keys. I don't know how often they wear out. It's certainly true that strings have a ridiculously short life span. Maybe bowed instruments would fall out of use, since it's harder to get a sound from a bowed string as opposed to a plucked string--I can't see bowing a rubber band, for instance, but you can certainly get a sound out of plucking it.
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I would not be so fast to rule out fiddles, some cello analogue and bass; the major requirements for them are the ability to carve wood (or other substance) to a shape, rather than to extrude it or press it. There are electronic carbon-fiber violins now, and cellos, which take up little space and weigh not much, but are electronic. I see these easily fitting on a spaceship. If you go back a generation or two, there were cigar-box fiddles and washtub basses, and people made music with them. I do not want to think that future generations would be less creative. Yes, dried sheep intestines make good strings, and so do extruded or coiled metal wire -- but there are any number of kinds of nylon that work as well. There are also synthetic substitutes for Siberian horsehair for manes; I expect that more will be found.
Drums and flutes can be made of anything. I'm not as sure of the requirements for making shaums or serpents -- though they existed back a few hundred years before modern technology.
And there's always the possibility that the material available in the new place will result in the creation of new instruments.