Music studies scholars often consider musical instruments foremost as tools for producing sound and music. Yet, I suggest this obscures many of the ways that violin makers engage with the instruments they create and care for. My research shows that among violin makers, looking at instruments is often more important than listening to them, for the purposes of making, repairing, and evaluating them. In this paper, I follow violin makers by setting aside listening (for now) to ask what we can learn about sounding and musicking from the ways they interact visually with instruments.
I explore violin makers’ visual techniques through an ethnographic account of the process of learning to make a violin at a lutherie school in Cremona, Italy. There, student and professional violin makers use visual techniques in the workshop during every step of the violin making process. When students and teachers look at antique instruments’ outlines and surface textures, visual techniques enable them to see evidence of music histories. When students learn from teachers to use light and shadow as tools to see the shapes of the curves they carve in blocks of wood, visual techniques emerge in relation to contemporary technologies, materials, and bodies. Meanwhile, violin makers’ hopes for their instruments’ future musical sounds are yet-inaudible sonic potentials that motivate their visual and tactile labor. I argue that sounding and musicking with violins relies not only on musicians’ and audiences’ audile techniques, but also on instrument makers’ visual techniques. In other words, sound is more-than-sonic.

Pianos are perhaps one of the most recognizable musical instruments worldwide, yet piano technicians – the craftspeople who keep pianos in tune and in working order – are nearly absent from ethno/musicological literature. In this paper, I present an ethnography of this understudied yet essential group, to examine piano technicians’ relationships to the instruments they work with on a daily basis. I argue that technicians – particularly those who service pianos in domestic settings – develop a skill of “desensitization,” as one technician described it, which helps them better objectively evaluate an instrument’s repair needs. Terms such as “Piano Shaped Object” (or PSO), which refers to a piano that is beyond repair and slated for disposal, as well as medical terminology that describes piano technicians as doctors or surgeons operating on their piano “patients,” reflect the need for technicians to emotionally distance themselves from the piano. I reveal how technicians operate as mediators between pianos, owners, and players, negotiating conversations about piano maintenance, care, regulation, and even, at the end of an instrument’s life, disposal. This research draws from my fieldwork as a participant in a North Bennet Street School class, interviews with piano technicians in New England, piano tuning manuals, and a Facebook group for licensed piano technicians. Investigating how people form and intentionally break emotional connections to instruments can help us better understand the meaning of musical instruments in our personal lives, and the presence (or lack) of emotion in how we treat and care for instruments.

After experimenting with parts from various domestic appliances, electric guitar innovator George Beauchamp settled on a sewing machine motor to power the machine on which he made his first electromagnetic pickups in the mid-1930s. Other tinkerers followed suit: Paul Bigsby’s and Leo Fender’s respective machines and their processes resembled sewing machines and their operations: the user pressed their foot on a pedal to regulate the winding mechanism’s speed. Instead of thread, they wound a thin copper wire around an oblong bobbin. Thus the sewing machine, a symbol of women’s domestic labor, became the perfect machine to fabricate the devices at the core of the twentieth century’s most masculine musical symbol, the electric guitar.
During Fender’s Golden Age (1946-1965), several Latina women workers were responsible for winding electromagnetic pickups. This presentation examines the skills which Fender’s female employees brought to their work. Oral histories bring the perspectives and experiences of these workers into dialogue about their labor, revealing how the Mexican American women workers who wound pickups for Fender were skilled at sewing, a craft which requires considerable practice, planning, precision, and engineering. The Fender company benefited from their ability to problem solve and fix finicky machines, find better ways to complete their tasks, and recruit and train women from their familial and social spheres. Their expertise both illuminates and complicates fetishistic discourses about their labor.