Conference Agenda

In much contemporary work on timbre, attention to timbre is implicitly or explicitly framed as a disciplinary virtue. By this I mean that grappling with timbre is understood both to be a corrective to scholarship that has woefully ignored timbre and that attention to timbre is understood to bring us, as listeners and scholars, closer to some sort of sonic reality. The burgeoning subfield of timbre studies has been slow to reach chamber music, and especially the Enlightenment-era string quartet. This lacuna is revealing: it gestures to the ways in which the string quartet has pointedly bypassed questions of timbre. The quartet has been held up as one of the paragons of “pure music,” while scholars and critics have stressed questions of the genre’s “internal logic” and the interrelatedness of its musical elements (Bent 1994). For many, the quartet is cerebral, absolute, and belongs to the “non-material world of the mind” (Dahlhaus 1991). This is not simply the product of later nineteenth-century formalist thought but has a longer history that is bound up with early writing on the quartet as a genre. Petiscus, writing on the quartet in 1810, declared that “the essential beauty of music lies not in [the] mere physical power of tone” (Petiscus 1810). Though this discourse does not necessarily name timbre, the quartet has long been defined against music’s more material existence: it has been a space of “timbrelessness.” One inviting musicological move here would be to unmask all of this as ineluctably timbral. One could argue that timbre was ultimately vital to the instrumental blend of the quartet and that the “timbrelessness” of the quartet is directly tied to ideas of timbral superiority and perfection associated with violin-family instruments in the early nineteenth century. Tracing the quirky reception of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74, this talk considers how this particular quartet reveals the implicit timbral constraints that governed the behavior of instruments in the genre of the string quartet, inviting us to consider how listening past timbre has its own valuable history and learned audile techniques.

The idea of the “Russian School” of musical performance has enjoyed considerable legitimacy across the globe since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Endowed with a constellation of aesthetic and pedagogical meanings, the Russian School has come to index superior technical execution and a specific sonic phenomenon: pervasive in the musical press is a robust discourse linking the Russian School to a distinct “Russian Sound.” Described by Joseph Horowitz as “quite flamboyant—addicted to rubbery tempos, throbbing colors and thundering volleys of sound,” the Russian Sound played a seismic role in the USSR’s global socialist project, becoming the single most important aesthetic ideal motivating the constitution of the exemplary Russian virtuoso across Soviet satellites. In this paper, I take up the development of the Russian Sound discourse in Cuba following the island’s 1959 Revolution that led to Cuba’s subsumption into the Soviet sphere. Understood by many Cuban musicians as timbrally self-evident, the Russian Sound came to shape and even determine how Cubans conceived of sound both in the abstract and in the act of producing it—it conditioned their entire system of aesthetic valuation. I argue that central to Cuba’s adoption of the Russian School was the replication of the ideal Russian virtuoso, which in turn meant the replication of the ideal Russian Sound. I suggest that the Russian Sound offers a new perspective on the affordances and limitations of materiality as a paradigm in thinking through the ephemerality and tenacity of sound. The Russian Sound shows us that despite the many problems that the “material turn” in musicology has solved in bringing music out of the realm of aesthetic autonomy, turning to the material conditions from which the Russian Sound emerges does little in the pursuit of defining it. But to dismantle the Russian Sound on the grounds of its immateriality would be to deny the undeniable power it has exerted in shaping entire communities and generations of musicians across the globe. To grapple with the effects of the Russian Sound might therefore be to surrender to the limits of timbre, language, and the knowledge we seek from music’s material remains.

A timbre studies truism has been that timbre’s ontology emerges from its evasion of precise linguistic description (Barthes 1978; Chion 2011; Dolan 2013; Van Elferen 2021). This paper moves beyond that assumption by examining how luthiers produce and theorize timbre through their intertwined discursive, material, and affective strategies for interacting with musician customers. Luthiers who craft violins, violas, and cellos often work with musicians to improve instrumental acoustics and ergonomics, during what those in the business call sound adjustment sessions. Here, I explore the kind of lutherie labor involved in sound adjustment sessions. I do so by drawing on ethnographic research with luthiers in New York City and Boston who work with Western classical musicians. I begin by tracing luthiers’ basic practices for sound adjustment, exploring their techniques for listening not only to instrumental sound, but also to their musician customers’ speech about sound. Such listening practices guide how luthiers tap away at violins with tiny tools, making tenths-of-a-millimeter changes that can alter instrumental acoustics. I also examine luthiers’ descriptions of occasionally creating aural placebo effects during adjustment sessions by wielding their authority as sonic experts, which is often gendered. Luthiers describe using placebo effects not to fool musicians, but rather to help them play with confidence, thereby producing optimal sound qualities, especially timbre. As one luthier commented to me, “so much of this is just psychoacoustics.” I follow this characterization to frame luthiers’ sound adjustment practices as “psychoacoustic labor.” Psychoacoustic labor involves care work to manage the shifting, non-linear, and affect- laden relationships between musical instruments’ physical production of sound, and sound as musicians, luthiers, and other listeners perceive it. The concept of psychoacoustic labor draws together scholarship in timbre studies and critical organology with the history of psychophysics, contemporary research on musical labor, and feminist scholarship on affective labor. I argue that psychoacoustic labor offers a nuanced way for music studies scholars to study the production of timbre at the nexus of language, materiality, and affect, with applications to studies of pedagogy and performance.