Conference Agenda

“When The Pianos in Our Parlors Brought Death to Darkest Africa”: it is with this sensationalist title that historian Richard Conniff sought to grab the attention of the readers of the Magazine of the National Audubon Society in 1998. In this article, Conniff explained that the popularity of pianos at the turn of the twentieth century had resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of elephants, as well as in the deaths of innumerable enslaved workers involved in the East African ivory trade. Since the publication of this essay, multiple local historians in Essex County, Connecticut—the prime area for the transformation of elephant tusks into piano keys and actions—have grappled with this difficult heritage of their region. But despite music and sound scholars’ growing interest in questions of political ecology and social justice, no major study has yet documented the entwined histories of piano making, animal exploitation, and slavery. My paper starts filling this important gap by tracing the global history of US pianos from East Africa to New England, via the ports of Zanzibar and New York.

Drawing on a wealth of archival documents held in Ivoryton and Deep River, CT, and at the Smithsonian Institution (including correspondence between trading agents posted in Zanzibar and their US employers and families, guidelines detailing the transformation process of tusks into piano parts, interviews of factory workers), my paper analyzes the activities of Pratt, Read and Co, and Comstock, Cheney and Co—the two companies that produced ivory piano parts for the entire US market between the 1850s and 1950s. In contrast to Conniff’s sensationalist rhetoric, and in an attempt to undo the marketing narratives that both companies forged as part of their efforts to sell their products as imperial commodities, I focus on the practices that took place in Essex, to retrieve the labor, operations, and values involved in this encounter between the elephant and the piano, environment and music cultures, East Africa and US. In so doing, I bring ecopolitical perspectives to critical organological studies, while showing the relevance of pianos for studies of environment and empire.

In 1913, American Consul Maxwell Moorhead authored a report detailing the materials Myanmar-based piano builders used to craft instruments resistant to “extreme” local conditions. Moorhead explained that pianos could survive if they were built of mahogany, their celluloid keys screwed in place, and the back of the instrument filled with steel wool. This information was to be used, he noted, to bolster the American piano market in Myanmar.

“Keyboard Botany” aims to recover geopolitical and ecological lives of the piano in British colonial Myanmar. It shows that, contrary to many scholarly accounts of the piano’s colonial genealogies, the instrument was not merely imported, propagated through Southeast Asia by the East India Company. It was manufactured locally, too. Misquith & Co. is one particularly prominent example of this practice, operating piano shops across India, the Strait Settlements, and Myanmar between 1842-1911.

Misquith did not function in isolation, however. Drawing on periodicals and commerce reports, I begin by tracing Misquith’s exchange of knowledge of piano-building under severe climatic conditions with European and British luthiers. It was Misquith that taught them to inure their instruments to Myanmar’s environmental challenges and pestilent white ants. The expansion of the piano market in this region around 1900, and subsequent treatment of the instrument as enduring vehicle of colonial power, hinged, at least in part, upon forms of knowledge that originated in Southeast Asian piano shops.

I go on to examine Misquith’s collaborations with British institutions in Myanmar. Trade reports reveal that, in 1898, the British Government named Misquith’s chief officer to the Rangoon Trades Association. This coalition controlled Rangoon’s port, the commercial center of British Myanmar that received raw materials essential to colonial markets, including plant life extracted from Latin America by British botanists, developed on Southeast Asian plantations, and repurposed into piano cabinets (among other commodities). This association also monitored the implementation of British policies that dismantled local governmental structures and protections for villages. I ultimately ask how and why the colonial piano shop became both an appendage to imperial infrastructure, and entangled in systemic forms of colonial and imperial violence.

By the twentieth century, keyboard instruments were being produced all over the world, from Calcutta to Hamamatsu to Cape Town. This provoked concern from Asian and African music theorists about what might happen when traditional musicians incorporated them into their practice. K.B. Deval in India, Nicholas Ballanta in Sierra Leone, and Tanaka Shōhei in Japan among others warned that keyboards would incubate the “disease” of equal temperament, rationalizing Indigenous music to the tonal matrices of Western empires. Their solution was to invent keyboards tuned to seven-limit just intonation, or a tonal lattice comprised by networks of just thirds, fifths, and sevenths, which they argued could bolster pre-colonial practices and resist “Westernification.”

This paper traces the emergence of these keyboards from a global network of scholars interested in repositioning Indigenous musical practices within the colonial context. The tonal spaces they brought forth were meant to reinforce the theories of cultural geography and identity conjured by pan-African and pan-Asian politics, by embedding African and Asian musical practices within a global genealogy of tonal relationships. Drawing on insights from Nam June Paik, Bernard Siegert, and Martin Heidegger, I show how these instruments also point towards a general principle of media I call choropoetics, referring to the ways in which technologies affect how space is experienced, navigated, and conceptualized to create new artistic and political possibilities. I conclude with what I have learned from reconstructing Tanaka’s and Ballanta’s instruments myself, highlighting how their choropoetics guide hands and ears along defamiliarizing pathways for historians of music theory.