Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Organology Study Group

Instruments and objects proliferate in music studies today: musicology embraces everything from Wagnerian steam engines, theremins, and unruly synthesizers to automata, music boxes, and shellac. This is a radical transformation for a field that has long focused on great musical works, understood as canonized monuments existing in an idealized, ineffable realm. Part of the appeal of studying a particular musical technology has been the conceptual solidity it promises: it seemingly serves as an archive of a particular soundworld. It is an access point to past listening culture, bound to a particular time and place, and one that reveals and unmasks hidden sonic values and laboring bodies. But the influx of these objects raises fresh questions: how is it that for so long we have been able to listen past our material reality? Must the study of instruments and technology always be a corrective to a more idealized understanding of music? To explore these questions, this talk turns sounding objects that have generally eluded music studies’ capacious organological embrace: small noise makers, musical toys, etc. My particular focus will be bird calls (lures), objects that have traditionally fallen between the cracks of organology and animal studies. Thinking about these diverse objects and their history draws attention to a host of productive questions around the materiality, immateriality, and ideality of instruments more generally.