ABSTRACT
This essay explores how musical instrument makers relate to their primary materials and, in turn, how musical instruments connect music, nature, and society in particular cultural contexts. I emphasize the physical impact and symbolic significance of musical instruments in relation to more recent issues of their cultural and environmental sustainability. Musical instrument makers are literally “in touch” with the material world. Craftsmen attune to a particular set of natural resources, and they work with both resistant and malleable materials. Through the acquisition of a certain skill set, proprioception provides feedback whilst movements are entrained: knowledge of materials is not only memorized and cognitively processed, it is embodied and has tactile and olfactory dimensions. Within the workshop, knowledge of how to exploit the acoustic and aesthetic properties of materials is developed as part of a sensual culture. I advocate, following Jane Bennett, forms of culture that are more attentive encounters between the materialities that are people things. This ecological vital materialism brings out connections between different types of organic material in order to induce a greater ecological sensibility. I detect recognition and representation of this vital materialism among the discourses around musical instruments and in the workshops of particular instrument makers, whether the new breed of guitar maker in Scotland and Uganda or the older traditions of Spain (guitars) and Crete (lyra, bowed lute).
