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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?
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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!