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

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Though if you've got the technology to terraform from the ground up, then we can assume you've also got the tech for workarounds to some of the materials problems-- if you've got a good precision metal shop, fr'ex, you can turn out keyed metal flutes, maybe even a simplified saxophone if your hydroponics bay is growing reed canes. And steel strings for metal- or plastic-bodied instruments, maybe an all-steel dobro or a steel hammered dulcimer. Hell, if you've got electronics people and steel wire for strings, you can make electric guitars-- you might develop a whole classical tradition built on electronic and synthesized music.

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.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

You might have the tech for the workarounds, but that tech might be dedicated to things like breathable air, for instance. It depends on how deep the resource well that colonists brought with them -- considering how badly most of the settlements in colonial North America did, there might not be much.

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.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Wood quality *is* important, though I wonder now about bamboo laminates or composites-- you wouldn't get the same tone colors as with wood, but you might still get something pleasant.

And what gave you the idea I have something against contrabasses? I used to play the contrabass clarinet; it's my favorite instrument.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Aren't saroussophones contrabasses? Or am I thinking of the wrong obscure instrument family?

I'd kind of like to see serpents come back, just because they're so wacky looking.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

No no no-- the saroussophone is a double-reed brass instrument. I'm not sure they ever even made a contrabass saroussophone.

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.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Given the kind of people who generally populate SF, I think you might get an amateur luthier or three in the foundation population, but I doubt you'll get a professional woodwind-maker -- and it doesn't sound like you can make any sort of keyed woodwind without a lot of know-how.