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Music in Space
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?
no subject
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.