Stability Designing Time and exploring Sound with Instruments

Wolf, Rebecca (2019): Stability Designing Time and exploring Sound with Instruments. In: Musiktheorie, Bd. 34, Nr. 1: S. 63-81

Abstract

In the history of innovations in musical instrument making, the decades around 1800 encompass a very productive era. One particular type of instrument was of special interest to musicians, amateurs, composers and scientists:the friction instruments. The prototypes were the musical glasses as well as Franklin's glass harmonica, which inspired many subsequent inventions. They all have in common the capacity to produce long sustained sounds, which can be varied during playing. The main focus of this article is on the experiments and instruments by the acoustician Chladni and the Harmonichord of the automaton builder family Kaufmann. I aim to combine these instruments' histories with the different facets of the German term "haltbar" which not only refers to an object's durability, but also to the physical act of holding an object in one's hand ("das Halten"), the duration of an instrument's tones ("das Erhalten"), as well as the tenability of a theory ("die Haltbarkeit"). In the same way that materiality may refer to the physical object as well as an abstract concept, when looking at the selected instruments, their potential for acoustic research and music theory can be jointly examined with the sensory experience of music-making.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften > Department Kunstwissenschaften
• Themengebiete: 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 900 Geschichte
• ISSN: 0177-4182
• Sprache: Deutsch