Music in Space

[neotoma]

Last Sunday I went to see Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 with 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?

Comments

[venivincere]

Pipes are generally easy to make, and can be done from any bit of tubing or a strong reed, if you happen to live in marshy parts. Also, a harmonica is small and portable. And... singing. Sheet music and knowledge how to read it, and just singing. Likely we'd make do with just about anything to hand that made a note when struck or stroked or plucked.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

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.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I thought it was interesting that on Pern they basically reinvented/continued classical music, but with the guitar as the basis of the string quartet rather than bowed instruments. They reorchestrated everything to work with the instruments they had. Also, their choral standards seem quite high.

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.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

You also have things like body percussion. It's possible that the innate sounds the human body can produce, besides singing and handclapping/footstomping would be explored and become a highly skilled art form in its own right.

[twistedchick]

Transverse flutes can be made of nearly anything -- I know someone who made one from PVC pipe. The requirements there have to do with shape, more than anything else.

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.