Acoustic Organology
Organology (from Greek: organon, “instrument” and logos, “study”) is the science of musical instruments and their classification [1]. It embraces study of instruments’ history, instruments used in different cultures, technical aspects of how instruments produce sound, and musical instrument classification. There is a degree of overlap between organology, acoustics and ethnomusicology (each of the aforementioned being subsets of musicology).
–Wikipedia
I have loved to make music since childhood. My parents met while traveling together in a 70′s pop cover band, married, and popped me out in a year. My mom was a dual major in music and elementary ed. My dad was a professional trumpet player until they quit the band together. When I was born, we would listen to every kind of music mom could get her hands on. “What instruments do we hear?” She would ask. We would list them together. “Who is that composer?” she would challenge, as we listened to our daily portion of classical music in bed. In Mom’s car we’d listen to anything from Aretha Franklin to the Baha Men, from Ricky Skaggs to Gloria Estefan. She loved black gospel, bluegrass, and folk. Dad’s car was almost exclusively jazz and talk radio, but we loved to dance in our seats to the Yellow Jackets, the Brecker Brothers, Al Jarreau, and Chick Corea.
I played trumpet for six years in school, and was very much a “band nerd.” Every fall was marching band season, and every spring was concert band. I played in the state clinic, and I very much expected to be a music major in college. Making the Jazz band was always an ambition of mine, but by the time I was old enough, my focus had shifted to the visual arts. I never intended to leave music forever, and when I decided to go to college for visual arts, I always assumed that someday I would return to the serious study of music.
At art school I discovered a very interesting field called “Industrial Design”, and the rest is history. Ever since, I’ve been working with the design of functional objects, and playing drums and guitar on the side for fun. I got married. My wife got a Masters’. Now she’s going in for another Masters’. I begin to look for teaching opportunities, but realize that graduate schooling is a prerequisite for teaching at most institutions. I accepted that I would probably eventually want to get a higher degree of some kind, and for years I thought about what I would like to study on a graduate level. When I worked at Bose Corporation, I discovered that I have a deep interest in the field of acoustics and sound from a technical standpoint, and I began to search for opportunities related to sound. Then my wife said “What about ethnomusicology?”
Ethnomusicology is a very interesting field. In short, it is the study of music around the world and throughout history. With much prodding on the part of my lovely wife, I looked into it. It seems that while ethnomusicology is probably not exactly right for me, along the way I discovered something else that I think might be just the thing. Like ethnomusicology, it deals with the study of music throughout around the world and throughout history. But instead of focusing on the music itself, it focuses on musical instruments. It is the study of the objects used in the making of music: how they are made, how they function from the user’s standpoint, how they function from an acoustical standpoint, and even how they can be designed and built. It’s called “organology,” or specifically in my case, “acoustic organology.”
This was a breakthrough. As a product designer, I deal with the design of functional objects. The study of organology would allow me to study functional objects around the world and throughout history as pertains to the making of sonic art. And if that weren’t perfect enough, being a field that is heavily related to the study of objects of antiquity, it is a perfect complement to the work my wife is doing as an art conservator focused on the conservation of artistic and historical objects!
There is something poetically beautiful about the careful design of a musical instrument: it is the design of a highly technical instrument solely created for the purpose of artistic expression.
This is the beauty and the mystery of humanity, that we use the best of our substantial engineering prowess in the pursuit of abstract beauty. There is no material benefit to be had from a musical instrument, and nothing literal can be translated through it. It is not a system of letters to convey speech as in writing, or a sequence of movements to describe an event as in dance or theater. It is not a collection of pigments combined to illustrate a scene as in figurative painting, or even melodic verbal communication as in poetry set to song. The sounds that come from a musical instrument can have virtually no literal meaning. Instrumental music is the most inherently abstract art form, and therefor arguably also in some ways the least contrived; the most “true.”
I will never be a musical virtuoso. There was a time when I might have chosen to be at least a reasonably good player, but even that ship has probably sailed forever. But my love of music remains, and I can only hope that perhaps the study of organology, or something very like it, might enable me to participate meaningfully in the making of beautiful music, using the strengths I’ve developed in my training and experience as an industrial designer.
And perhaps by writing about my new-found dream, I will make it come true.