The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Chair(s): Lidia Chang (Colorado College), Bobby Giglio (San Jose, Costa Rica)
Organized by the Organology Study Group.
This session hosted by the Organology Study Group will feature three papers by student/early career scholars working in the fields of organology, musicology, and/or material culture studies. The session aims to highlight new voices in the field and provide a platform for less-established scholars to connect with more senior members of the AMS.
Presentations of the Symposium
Instruments as specimens: How the Photographs of 19th-century English Instrument Collections Made Organology a Science
Maia Perez University of Illinois
Victorians are well known for their clutter and their collections, and one of the many things they collected during the nineteenth century were musical instruments. These instruments appeared in some of the London exhibitions, like the International Inventions Exhibition of 1885, and formed part of the collections of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A). They also, of course, drew the attention of individual collectors, like Francis Galpin. Galpin, with a substantial personal collection of musical instruments, was not content to merely hoard these instruments. He lent them to exhibitions, performed on them in concerts, and photographed and wrote about them for books and articles. Photography, by the end of the nineteenth-century, had already undergone several cultural shifts in understanding and use. It was an art and a science—capable of misleading audiences (as in the famous “spirit photography” examples) and of telling objective, scientific truths. Galpin’s photographs of “specimens” from his collection reveal his own scientific ambitions for the study of musical instruments, which would become the field of organology. And as organology has now seriously begun investigating its own origins, it is the perfect time to consider Galpin’s practices in both ordering and displaying his collections. His photographs of his instruments, alongside his writings and his earlier amateur-science pursuits, such as botany, invite a new interdisciplinary perspective on organology. Investigating this connection between science, photography, and musical instruments can help further our understanding of organology as a discipline deeply embedded in the culture, history, and thought of nineteenth-century England.
The Plek Machine: A Study of Automation in California’s Guitar Repair Shops
Jon Turner University of California Berkley
The traditional craft of guitar making and repair, a practice rich in history and global influence, is experiencing a technological revolution with the introduction of the Plek machine. This robotic innovation, emerging in the early 2000s and accelerating in the last decade, has brought significant automation to instrument analysis and repair, reshaping the artisanal landscape of musical labor. In California, a state boasting the highest number of Plek machines in the U.S., this shift towards automation presents a unique opportunity to explore its impact on the craft. Focusing on guitar repairs, I visited and interviewed most Plek owner-operators in California, to investigate how the Plek machines are redefining the fundamentals of the craft. This presentation will delve into the nuanced ways in which automation is altering the material connection between repair technicians and players, shedding light on a transformative phase in the evolution of guitar craftsmanship. The findings from this study not only illuminate the changes within guitar repair shops but also contribute to a broader understanding of how traditional crafts adapt and evolve in the face of advancing technology.
Berthelot’s Serpent Tablature: A Blueprint for a Lost Musical Instrument from Colonial Canada
Alex Belser McGill University
The Berthelot Manuscript is a largely unknown collection of music and didactic material from colonial Quebec, Canada that is over three hundred pages in length. Rich in pedagogical value, this manuscript contains musical exercises for the flageolet, bassoon, tambourine, and flute, as well as a Tablature du serpent. This manuscript was discovered in the archives of the Seminary of Quebec, with an inscription stating that it was donated in 1793 by “M. Bthe, the priest”. Thorough research on this subject by Canadian musicologist Elisabeth Gallat-Morin has revealed that the donor of the Berthelot Manuscript was the grandson [Charles Berthelot III] of the owner [Charles Berthelot I] of the music and didactic material that comprise it (Gallat-Morin and Pinson 2004). The Tablature du serpent gives basic instructions for holding and playing the serpent, but more importantly it contains a fingering chart for this instrument that suggests considerable deviations from the fabrication standard of other serpents. It is possible that that the intent of the craftsperson who built the original Berthelot serpent was to produce an instrument that could sound certain notes in tune by uncovering all of the tone-holes of this serpent rather than having to forcibly “lip” notes, as is the case for normal serpent playing. This effect is achieved by altering the placement of the first three tone-holes of the Berthelot serpent when compared to other specimens resulting in some notes being flatter and some notes being sharper than the norm. While serpentists are famously required to manipulate the pitch of unstable notes with their lips and with alternate “false” fingerings, certain notes, particularly the C-Sharp (at A=392) is without a doubt the most difficult note on the instrument and can often ruin a performance if improperly sounded. In this paper I will compare the fingerings from the tablature with other serpent fingering charts. Recent organological research from French scholarship will be used as a basis for discerning any possible acoustical deviations that this instrument might have possessed.
