Well, I think people would bring whatever they *could* carry onto the ship, though maybe with an emphasis on versatile instruments that work well in a small dance band-- fiddle, guitar. Accordion. For aerophones, brass instruments and metal flutes would probably be easier to keep in good repair, long-term, than wood-bodied instruments, though the artificial climate on board ship would be less stressful on wood than dirtside weather.
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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Date: 2007-06-24 07:24 pm (UTC)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.)