Musical instruments are material things—but is that all they are? The so-called “material turn” within music studies has brought renewed attention to the physicality of technologies, bodies, and particularly instruments (Bates 2012; Dawe 2015; Allen 2023). However, material-turn organology still presumes instrument stability, tending to treat instruments as materially coherent entities rather than unstable assemblages sustained through practice, technological flexibility, and cultural memory.

Building upon Emily Dolan (2025), I will probe the “limits of materiality” through the nineteenth-century African American panpipes, or “quills.” Through an archive of extant instruments, commercial and field recordings, textual accounts, and oral histories, I demonstrate that the quills were realized through a dizzyingly wide variety of materials, tunings, and number of pipes. Strikingly, wind instruments that would be taxonomized separately by later scholars—single-pipe fifes, edge-blown panpipes, and end-blown fippled flutes—were all understood by practitioners as different material manifestations of quills. What links these diverse manifestations is the characteristic method of playing, itself extending beyond the material instrument: “hooting,” the practice of vocalizing pitches in alternation with blown notes, deriving from sub-Saharan reedpipe traditions.

I argue that the quills reveal musical instruments to be more-than-material assemblages, sustained through embodied practice, cultural memory, and technological flexibility, thereby challenging organological models grounded in material fixity. This paper therefore asks the material turn in music studies to reconsider where instrumentality resides; not solely in objects and their physical properties, but in practices and imaginaries that endure beyond any single material form.