The Materializing Rhetorics of Early Music

Rivers Cuomo—lead singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter for the band Weezer—recently detailed plans for his band’s series of four new albums, each inspired (in an acknowledged nod to Vivaldi) by one of the seasons. In doing so, he described the first album of the series (Spring, released March 2022) as “chock full of acoustic and ancient-sounding instruments. Recorder, acoustic guitar, mandolin, 12-string. So yeah, it’s a very natural, woody type of sound.”¹

Some will find Cuomo’s offhand association of organic materials with “ancient sounds” unremarkable. But others may wonder what, precisely “a very natural, woody type of sound” is. And what about this woodiness imbues instruments such as the recorder with an ancient sound? And finally, why do so many of us—like Cuomo—find ourselves dwelling on wood and other materials when we think about old music in the first place? Related questions have been posed about other examples of popular music, as in Elizabeth Upton’s lucid exploration of Jethro Tull’s 1977 Songs from the Wood album against the backdrop of notions of authenticity and of a pseudo-organic materialist nostalgia.² I propose here, though, that such examples are mere vestiges of the widespread rhetorics of materiality pervading Early Music itself.³

Consider, for example, Jonathan Manson’s account of the underhand bow hold used when playing the viol (or viola da gamba), in which—as distinct from cello, viola, or violin playing—the fingers of the right hand contact the bow’s hair: “The fact that you’re in direct contact with the hair also means you can feel the string quite literally through your fingers rather than mediated by a piece of wood, so that also gives you a very intimate contact with sound production.”⁴ Manson’s description appears within a series of educational videos produced for the website of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), in which ensemble members introduce web visitors to the period instruments they play, and to the historical performance practices in which their ensemble specializes. In another video from the series, Manson’s colleague Luise Buchberger compares the sounds of gut Baroque cello strings to fully metal strings. “Compared to modern metal strings,” she says, “these gut strings make a more textured sound; it’s raspy in comparison. If you think of the sound as peanut butter, the gut strings would be the rough kind…with ‘bits,’ more textured…and you feel more of the original material.”⁵

Common to Manson’s and Buchberger’s descriptions is a distinctive materializing rhetoric—a persuasive discursive mode absorbed with accounts of tactility and of intimate contact with the organic and “original” material components (wood, gut, hair) of vibrating, sounding materials, or in the case of Buchberger’s analogy, with their crunchy culinary stand-ins. If, as I argue, such foregroundings of sound source materiality are deeply ingrained in the public discourse of Early Music, how might we account for their proliferation, and what theories might help us do so?

I hope to address these questions by interrogating the means and motivations by which Early Music’s adherents foreground (or alternatively, disregard) the materiality of sound sources in their rhetorics.⁶ While it is clear that in the wake of the “material turn,” sound-based material studies have become increasingly attentive to “the concrete materiality of sound rather than its…source,”⁷ my focus in this essay is less on ontological considerations of the objet sonore than on the tangible materiality of palpable objects—especially musical instruments and their constituent physical parts.

While rhetorics are often verbal, I also highlight the role played by visual rhetorics, as well as by what we might call the “sonic rhetorics” of sounds whose qualities seem capable of persuading listeners to attend to their material causes. Aided by selected theories of Michel Chion, Roland Barthes, and others, I then propose three means of accounting for these rhetorics—again, ultimately affirming the privileged place of sound and the musical poetics it often animates.

Laurence Dreyfus once challenged us to conceive of Early Music as a set of social practices, signifying “first of all people and only secondarily things.”⁸ But it is also true that the Early Music movement has been marked almost since its inception by its preoccupation with “things” in the form of musical instruments.⁹ This preoccupation abounds especially in Early Music’s popular and public discourses. Take, for example, Bernard Holland’s 1983 New York Times contribution headlined “In Praise of Early Music,” in which the renowned music critic wrote that, “while clavichords, flutes and lutes still whisper to us today in a husky, grainy way, shawms, dulcians, crumhorns, gemshorns, rauschpfeifes, racketts and regals are startling, often flatulent, in their rawness.” “After one experiences the wholegrain, uneven crunch of the old transverse flute,” he opined, “hearing the modern instrument in Baroque literature can seem a little like chewing on Wonder bread.”¹⁰ Holland’s penchant for “crunchy” Baroque flutes, “grainy” lutes, and “flatulent” dulcians precedes a certainty on his part that anyone who prefers whole grain bread will ultimately feel the same way.

Holland’s culinary-minded means of championing textural heterogeneity in Early Music shares much with Buchberger’s vivid description of gut strings’ textured rasp “with bits.”¹¹ Typically, though, discussions of gut strings (a favorite subject in the popular music press wherever Early Music is discussed) owe less to culinary analogies than to the macabre novelty that musical instruments strung with animal parts sometimes hold among the uninitiated. For example, an article in the popular British classical string magazine The Strad featuring the period instrument Consone Quartet bears the headline, “Gut strings feel honest and dirtier than the brilliance of metal strings.” The article, like the headline, is steeped in impressions of tactility and contact with interesting textures, all deriving, we are to understand, from the use of gut strings:

“Honesty” is here understood as the natural byproduct of labored contact with roughly textured sheep viscera and similarly “dirty” objects, in much the same sense that dust-laden ranchers are said to have “put in an honest day’s work.”¹³

In a similar vein, Pavlo Beznosiuk, early violin specialist and director of the period instrument Avison Ensemble, once praised the oboe da caccia (an early double-reed instrument with a leather-covered wooden body) for its “extraordinary woody and animal quality.”¹⁴ The notion that an instrument’s sounds or materials could possess an “animal quality” in the first place draws on widespread impressions of early instruments not only as organic, but as wild—and perhaps by extension, implies that early instruments offer a means of escape from all that is not wild (including the prototypical classical orchestra and its instruments, a point to which I will return later). Consider, for example, the following description from the website of the Baltimore Consort, a popular Early Music ensemble:

In this account, amidst a forestscape of deceased things, of organic “remnants,” musicians wield sorcerers’ magic via contact with these materials, and in doing so, reanimate a once-upon-a-time menagerie of beasts.¹⁶

The Baltimore Consort’s imaginative meditations on instrument materials differ in degree, but perhaps not so much in kind, from Jonathan Manson’s impressions of “intimate contact” that arise from feeling sheep-gut viol strings, mediated by horse hair, “quite literally through your fingers.” Such descriptions offer a small sample of a rhetoric intent on foregrounding not merely instruments, but the materials that those instruments comprise—and it is a rhetoric that infuses the discourses of Early Music multimodally. Consider the following video productions featuring several Early Music ensembles and soloists (Figures 1–5).

The extreme and insistent closeups of instrument parts that mark each of these examples (at times even displacing the player) foreground and fetishize gut strings, bow hair, and wooden instrument bodies in something of a visual analogue of the verbal examples cited above. These visual rhetorics seem keen on persuading viewers to celebrate the same “intimate contact” with instrument materials that Manson and others prize, and in turn offer these viewers a means of experiencing that contact for themselves, if only virtually and vicariously.

At one time it might have made sense to attribute such filming techniques to a desire to highlight exotic or unfamiliar equipment. But such reasoning seems tenuous today, when early instruments carry little of the novelty appeal they did in past decades—particularly for viewers who would seek out a video clip of, say, Philippe Pierlot playing the viol music of Marin Marais. A better explanation is that viewers’ experiences with these visual rhetorics simply resonate with the broader, multimodal constellation of materializing tropes to which they are already likely accustomed.

I turn here to three potential means of accounting for the abundance of these materializing rhetorics in Early Music, the first of which seems self-evident when one considers the following observation by Nick Wilson:

In this vision, Early Music functions as a lifeboat, rescuing the willing from a classical music culture taking on water. More specifically, materializing rhetorics provide a means of distinguishing Early Music and its adherents from what they perceive to be a dominant but imperiled “classical mainstream,” and are thus manifestations of the same countercultural—or perhaps more correctly, counterclassical—bent that has marked the Early Music movement since its inception.¹⁸

As Wilson notes, Early Music attracts a remarkable number of amateur musicians. Many of these are also avid collectors of instruments—a tendency that forms part of the social fabric of amateur Early Music organizations and gatherings. This preoccupation with “things”—with instruments—extends powerfully to professional musicians as well, as illustrated by fortepianist Malcolm Bilson’s oft-quoted assertion that “perhaps it is wrong to put the instrument before the artist, but I have begun to feel that it must be done.”¹⁹ It is no coincidence that such sentiments surfaced most often during a period (the 1970s and ’80s) when the liner notes of Early Music recordings routinely listed makers and construction dates of every instrument deployed on the recording—a practice rare outside Early Music. For professional ensemble members, instrument makers, authors or staff members of early music publications, and others trying to make a living in Early Music, these tactics were all-but-necessary means of marketing and commercializing what amateur musicians had the luxury to treat as ideological distinctions.

If this ongoing enthrallment with instruments can be called a defining trait of the Early Music movement, it has been so from the beginning: Arnold Dolmetsch (one of the movement’s most famous pioneers) declared as early as 1930 that “the study of the Music of any period should…be based upon that of the instruments of the same period.”²⁰ The role that these “instruments of the same period” play in, as Wilson writes, “recreating the past” hints at a second explanation for Early Music’s materializing rhetorics. As imagined portals to historical soundscapes, musical instruments and other audile technologies often serve nostalgic ends. “People want certain kinds of instruments,” Jonathan Sterne writes, “because they want certain kinds of sounds—or, at least, to plug into those histories of sound.”²¹ These histories of sound are accessed most powerfully when the technology in question is itself old or is made to seem old, whether a lute, a viol, or a record player.²²

Just as often, though, this desire to possess, manipulate, and deploy nostalgic objects is less concerned with actual “histories of sound” than with vague exoticizations of pastness, as we encountered in the form of the Baltimore Consort’s “once living remnants”…“according to legend.”²³ As the “spruce, maple…, sheeps gut, [and] horses tail” of that example suggest, the potency of such nostalgia relies wholly on a hyperattunement to (often organic) material intermediaries, a fact that cannot but call to mind Baudrillard’s reflections on “wood…so sought after today for nostalgic reasons”:

If Baudrillard’s oak furniture is shot through with being—with material vibrance—the same must be said of wooden musical instruments, and about the rhetorics that call them to our attention.

In a recent study of acousmatic sound, Brian Kane notes that “once the content of some auditory perception is distinguished from its source or cause—once a split between the sonic source and its auditory effect has been established—then it is no longer possible to think of the sound object as determined by some physical thing.”²⁵ Kane’s observation rings true in many musical contexts, but it does not speak to cases in which the “content of some auditory perception” is bound so inextricably to the sound source that there is little content to speak of apart from that source—nor does it speak to cases in which the poetics of musical works rely on this bond. The ubiquity of such works, and such poetics, among musical repertoires to which many Early Music afficionados gravitate hints at a third means of accounting for the materializing rhetorics on which I have focused: The tendency among Early Music discourses to foreground material sound sources goes hand in hand with an affinity for musical styles in which instrument materials play important roles in a given work’s musical poetics—in other words, for styles in which composers and performers mean for listeners to perceive instruments as semiotically rich objects.

Such instruments produce sounds that “are rich in information about the material forces that create them,”²⁶ and we attend to these sounds in much the same way that we might “hear the hardness and the unevenness of the cobblestones in the sound of a car.”²⁷ It is worth considering whether such sounds might foreground their material sources in a manner similar to the verbal and visual rhetorics discussed earlier. Put differently, if the verbal and visual examples cited thus far can be regarded as fulfilling a rhetorical function by virtue of their ability to persuade listeners and viewers to dwell on tactile materials, it is worth considering whether sounds might do the same. Sounds that persuade listeners to attend to their material causes might then be said to exhibit a kind of materially absorbed sonic rhetoric.

The relative power of sounds to heighten listeners’ awareness of their material sources calls to mind an array of interrelated concepts, perhaps first among them the notion of indexicality.²⁸ Pierre Schaeffer’s écouter, as well as Michel Chion’s “causal listening,” are also pertinent,²⁹ as are questions of acousmaticity.³⁰ Despite his “enduring distrust for considerations of cause,”³¹ however, Chion bestows on us an additional idea that may be of even more help. He writes, in his Audio-Vision:

For Chion, the sonic qualities likeliest to act as MSIs are “details of shock, unevenness, friction, and so forth.” They might be found in “a voice, a footstep, a note…There is the clearing of the throat and breath in the case of the voice, the rustle of footfalls, minor contingencies of attack, resonance, or precision in a musical sequence.”³³ MSIs are not generally a product of the sound’s amplitude, or even of close physical proximity of hearer to sound source, but seem to derive primarily (though not exclusively) from the timbral domain.

When present in a given sound, MSIs display two related but distinct powers. First, of course, they heighten listeners’ attention to the materiality of the sound source. The sound of the viol may, if rich in MSIs, draw the listener’s focus to the instrument’s body parts—wood, gut, horse hair, or even rosin. But this indexical quality accounts only partly for the profound powers MSIs often display. Crucially, MSIs may also empower sounds to convey their material causes bodily to the ears of listeners, causing us to, as Chion says, “‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source.”

This second quality of MSIs points in the direction of a different theoretical frame—one that predates Chion’s theory and helps surmount the inability of MSIs alone to account fully for the materializing rhetorics at the heart of this study. It is also a theory that has been applied so widely as to have devolved, in the words of Jonathan Dunsby, into “something of a slogan.”³⁴ I am thinking, of course, of Roland Barthes’s essay “Le grain de la voix,” first published in 1972. For Barthes, grain is a logical outgrowth of what he—adapting Julia Kristeva’s term “genotext”—identifies as “geno-song,” the “voluptuous,” nonrepresentational “diction” of language that conveys sounding body parts directly to the listener’s ear. “Listen to a Russian bass,” Barthes proposes, “…something is there, manifest and stubborn…something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages.”³⁵

The author is clear, however, that grain is not reducible to a kind of vocal grittiness that merely indexes the singer’s body.³⁶ Furthermore, the author insists, “the ‘grain’ of the voice is not—or is not merely—its timbre.”³⁷ “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs”³⁸; it is the “materiality of the body emerging from the throat.”³⁹ Reduced to its essence, then, Barthes’s conception of grain involves sounds that, by virtue of their forms rather than their communicative potential, “[throw], so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear.”⁴⁰ Venturing subtly but significantly beyond Chion’s theory of MSIs that cause us to “‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source,” Barthes’s adamance that grain empowers sound to act as an actual conveyance of sounding bodies—a “voice that bodies forth,”⁴¹ or a “bodily missile which has detached itself from its source, emancipated itself, yet remains corporeal”⁴²—is not a poetic indulgence for Barthes; it is essential to his theory.

But to suggest that the body parts conveyed by sound to the listener’s ear might be those of nonhuman instruments is to undo Barthes’s titular pun—reinstating bois in place of voix—and to retool the author’s anthropocentric reading of materialized sound with the help of object-oriented ontology and other recent materialist frameworks.⁴³ Chion’s concept of materializing sound indices is of particular help here, as it is quite at home without modification in discussions of instrument materiality. He notes, in fact, that while

I am thinking of a musical work for solo viol. The piece revolves around a four-measure refrain—a meandering D-Major melody supported by frequent two- and three-note chords. Early in this refrain is a moment far more arresting than it should be. It is a two-note chord comprising an open-string low G together with an F sharp above—nothing more than a suspension, the F sharp resolving itself to an E after a dissonance spanning just the length of a dotted quarter note. But on the bass viol, the sound produced at this moment is arresting: a beating, throbbing dissonance similar in character to the wolf tones whose unchecked vibration cellists work so hard to eliminate.⁴⁵

We are, in fact, already acquainted with the music to which I refer; it is Marin Marais’s “Les voix humaines” (pub. 1701), the work featured in Figure 1 in a performance by Philippe Pierlot. (I recommend listening again to the beginning of the work with capable speakers or headphones. The moment to which I refer first occurs at 0:19 in the video.) The piece’s Barthesian resonances begin with its suggestive title, but do not end there; when sounding the dissonant chord I have described, most viols vibrate almost excessively, and the same “beating” pulsations that the player feels through direct physical contact are felt also by listeners, reified by Barthes’s grain theory.⁴⁶ Stated simply, this dissonance on this instrument seems deliberately and precisely engineered to “[throw], so to speak, the anonymous body” of the instrument “into my ear.”

I concede that my experience of this moment as one that materializes the viol’s body is a subjective one. At the same time, I find corroboration elsewhere of the materializing effects of similar phenomena. Just a few years prior to Barthes’s propagation of his grain theory, Pierre Schaeffer used the same word to refer to a different concept. For Schaeffer, grain was a quality of certain highly textured, sustained sounds—particularly pulsating sounds. Among his examples is the low register of the bassoon, which “allows us to hear simultaneously both a low tonic note and what we call the ‘grain,’ which is precisely this perception of distinct beats.”⁴⁷ At times, Schaeffer’s grain seems nearly interchangeable with his allure, which Brian Kane describes as “a typo-morphological feature of internal beating, vibrato, or pulsing that is found in sustained sounds.”⁴⁸

For Schaeffer, both allure and grain were largely undesirable, precisely because of what he regarded as their troubling tendency to shackle sounds to their material causes. As Kane clarifies, “The sound objects selected must not be strongly marked by their indexical features that encourage recognition of the source or cause…allures have the potential to make the listener overly aware of the sources.…Or, to put this into the framework of Traité, the allure of a sound source offers the possibility of promoting the mode of listening known as écouter—an indexical listening for sources.”⁴⁹ One might say, then, that allure or grain in a Schaefferian sense often leads to grain in a Barthesian sense.

Perhaps it is no accident that, as a movement marked by its embrace of materializing “indexical features,” Early Music saw one of its most productive and formative periods during the late 1960s, as if in open rebellion against efforts to champion the dematerialization of “sound objects” as epitomized by Schaeffer’s Traité of 1966. It is certainly the case, to return to the present example, that precisely what Schaeffer sought to avoid is a defining feature of Marais’s “Les voix humaines,” embodied in the wooden viol—“grainy” now in three different senses.

To find Marais’s “Les voix humaines” evocative of Barthesian notions of voice requires a certain tolerance of anachronism, particularly when one concedes the tendency among many instrumental works from early 18th-century France to bear rather abstruse titles. But a different body of Marais’s frequently performed works is clearer in concept. Popular in 17th- and 18th-century France, musical works in the tombeau genre took the form of musical elegies, most often written for viol, lute, or harpsichord. Appearing in the same publication as “Les voix humaines,” Marais’s most famous of several such works is the “Tombeau pour M^r de Lully.” This politically shrewd tombeau for the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose death in 1687 did little to relax his grip on the French musical establishment, offers multiple examples of the kind of granular, materializing effects that Barthes and Chion would ponder almost 300 years later. Midway through this work, listeners are confronted with a striking passage of triple stopped chords that, in their half-step descent, create punctuated, percussive parallel tritone dissonances. (See Figures 6 and 7. The passage in question occurs at roughly 4:18–4:30 in each example).⁵⁰

What does one hear in such passages? Perhaps the “lacerated, pitiful, damaged, breaking, or disintegrating voice” of a larynx overtaxed by sobbing—a “voice at the edge of voicelessness”?⁵¹ Or perhaps the pounding of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s conducting staff as it delivered its mortal blow to his foot, leading to the composer’s death (according to legend)? What is certain is that any such exegesis relies first on the power of these noises, these granular MSIs, to “pull the scene toward the material and tangible,”⁵² throwing the sound sources—viol, strings, bow—materially into our ears and into our consciousness. Only then can these chordal stabs draw our attention to the semiotic potential of the now-foregrounded wood, gut, and hair.

Thanks to the complex poetics of the tombeau genre, the material foregrounding here is even more significant than it might first seem. Consider the following imaginative scene, appended by French lutenist Denis Gaultier to the tombeau he composed (published in 1652) upon the death of fellow lutenist Henri de L’Enclos:

Gaultier’s imagined instrument conveys the dead in multiple hyper-material senses: The tree from which its wood comes once drew nourishment from the corpses at rest in its native cemetery; its “mournful wood” serves as a resting place for L’Enclos’s ashes; and of course, whenever it plays the “Tombeau de M^r de L’Enclos,” it conveys memories of its late dedicatee.⁵⁴

Hardly unique to Gaultier’s tombeau, this hyper-attunement to—and conflation of—instrument bodies, human bodies, trees, and tombs is a defining characteristic of tombeaux, inhabiting even the genre’s name (literally, “tomb”). The genre’s poetics fail unless and until they are licensed by a sonic foregrounding of instruments and their material components. It should surprise no one, then, that video productions of lute tombeau performances often default to the same close-up framing of instrument bodies we have already seen (see Figure 8). Here, the materializing effect seems to derive both from the encultured sensibilities of Early Music as I have described them and from the materialist poetics of the genre.

Jonathan Sterne reminds us that “the fetishism of instrumental sounds always gestures toward a set of relations that lie beyond the instrument itself.”⁵⁵ Lutes and viols have long demonstrated profound sets of such relations, offering rich sites of both coded and explicit meaning in music from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.⁵⁶ The tombeau genre exemplifies these meanings, but hardly exhausts them; Marais’s well-known “Tableau de l’opération de la taille” (a gruesome, verbally annotated work for solo viol depicting a surgery to remove a bladder stone) and other works attest just as emphatically to the viol’s iconic links to human bodies in the throes of exhaustion, sickness, or death.⁵⁷

While any instrument’s materiality might potentially be construed as meaningful, the lute and viol’s richness in this regard owes something to the fact that their sites of sonic excitation are exterior to their bodily resonating chambers and therefore visible. By the same token, many of the sounds these instruments produce seem to convey a quality of exteriority, thanks largely to a timbral profile rich in MSIs. Listeners are invited to hear (and thus contact in a Barthesian sense) their gut(s), tinged in the case of the viol with what is best described as a pseudo-laryngeal “string fry.”

Other instruments from the Early Music instrumentarium are similarly imbued with a power to throw their innards—their plectra, fipples, or twisted gut—into our ears in the same manner as the cartilages and membranes of Barthes’s vocal examples. This stands in stark contrast to other instrument types, whose sounds point to a hidden “bodily interior, an intimate partition of the body which cannot be disclosed—as if the voice were the very principle of division into interior and exterior.”⁵⁸ Mladen Dolar was referring here to the human voice, but his words ring true also of the piano, to name one example, whose sound-generating collisions are sited acousmatically, deep within an opaque exoskeleton whose six and more layers of black paint and high gloss plastic-based finishes work to erase any visible link to its wooden materiality. Unlike the gut strings, horse hair, fingernails, and rosin at the lute or viol’s frictive points, the piano’s sound sources are both moderated (by the careful dampening of hammers) and mediated (by encasing these hammers and the strings they strike inside an enclosed body), rendering the sounds they produce “causally vague” for most listeners.⁵⁹

Generally speaking, the sounds of a modern piano (at least when no unconventional or “extended” techniques are being used) exemplify an increasing tendency among Euro-American art music traditions over the last two centuries and more to valorize timbral homogeneity. Or, to cite the more complex example of the 19th-century European orchestra, it is reasonable to regard “the long-simmering interest in old instruments and repertoire that blossomed into the modern Early Music movement” as “a counter-reaction to the increasing volume and homogeneity of the nineteenth-century orchestra.”⁶⁰ Those willing to generalize even further will note the contribution of such timbral homogeneity to a far-reaching cognitive severance of sounds from their material sources, and to the resulting “romantic ‘immaterial’ conception of music.”⁶¹

To be sure, a modern piano’s material presence may in some cases be felt as vividly as that of a viol or other common Early Music instrument. It would be absurd, furthermore, to argue that the tonal signature of a piano cannot convey a sense of intimacy. It seems an important distinction, however, that for many listeners, the piano’s sounds are likelier to index “the piano” as a token than they are to index the instrument’s concealed sounding parts.⁶² Far from being considered a shortcoming, this trait has been cultivated deliberately throughout most of the piano’s history.⁶³

For centuries, efforts to diminish the material-indexical properties of instrument sounds in Euro-American art music have taken place under the guise of “addressing tonal flaws.” This is partly because the instrumental sounds likeliest to function as MSIs or to “throw” the objects that produce them into listeners’ ears are the scratches, rasps, chiffs, susurrations, and other fricative or sibilant sounds often branded “noise.” To quote Stan Link, “Noise becomes a metaphor attaching a kind of tactility to sound.”⁶⁴ One particularly clear example of such efforts is the advent of flat-wound strings designed to moderate the short abrasive rasps of a guitarist’s position change.⁶⁵ Like similar examples, this invention arose from a desire to filter out sounds that are unwanted precisely because of their tendency to index and thus dis-acousmatize their material sources.⁶⁶

Our understanding of noise both as an ontological category and as a cultural phenomenon has been furthered in recent years by the work of Steve Goodman, Greg Hainge, and Marie Thompson, among many others.⁶⁷ Thompson, for one, laments that “definitions of noise are underpinned by a series of polarities…noise is set in binary opposition to signal, silence and music. Noise is that which detracts from the signal, destroys the ‘goodness’ of silence and is to be excluded from the realm of the musical.”⁶⁸ Noises, then, are something akin to sonic weeds. For some, dandelions are an affront to the uninterrupted homogeneity of green grass; for others, they are food. So it is with noise, whose multivalence helps to explain the appeal of confronting noise ontologically rather than culturally.⁶⁹

But while bracketing Marais’s pulsating major seventh dissonance from “Les voix humaines” as a sound object may temporarily allow one to sidestep culturally embedded definitions of noise, doing so obscures important meanings that might arise from those definitions. In fact, the “valence and timbre descriptors”⁷⁰ related to noise sometimes provide a valuable means of gauging culturally specific attitudes toward materializing sounds. Paul Théberge has noted, for example, that “whereas sound engineers typically prefer ‘clean’ recordings to ‘dirty’ ones, rock guitarists often go to great lengths to ‘dirty-up’ their sounds.…Sociologically, such reversals of conventional meaning could be regarded as one way in which pop musicians affirm (if only to themselves) their position as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream culture.”⁷¹ I am not alone in finding similar reversals among Early Music cultures; Michel Chion himself is among those to have examined the role of “noise” in Early Music:

Martin Elste is even more direct in binding noise to materiality within an Early Music context, writing here about “timbral sensuality” in recordings of J. S. Bach’s music:

Similarly concerned with noisy materialism is Richard Taruskin’s well-known review of Harnoncourt’s famed Bach recordings, here focusing on the first movement of Cantata 178, Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält: “Mr. Harnoncourt applies to the dotted rhythms the awful Gnashville sound he has gradually developed for such occasions, the strings of the Concentus Musicus hurling their bows at their instruments from a great height, producing as much scratch as tone.” Alluding next to Bach’s aria “Liebster Gott, erbarme dich” from Cantata 179, which calls for instruments and singers to descend to their “very lowest, least tractable range,” Taruskin finds that “the whole performance sounds loathesome and disgraceful. And these are the words: ‘My sins sicken me like pus in my bones; help me, Jesus, Lamb of God, for I am sinking in deepest slime.’” Taruskin’s withering criticism ultimately proves to be anything but, for he concludes that this aria “utterly depends on its performers’ failings, and on the imperfections of their equipment to make its harrowing point.”⁷⁴

This same “undermining of human agency”⁷⁵ has been related more recently by Martha Feldman to the human voice: “Some kinds of vocal failure—construed here as deliberate vulnerability and fragility—when emitted by a virtuoso, can be as necessary to the arsenal of the extraordinary singing voice as lyricism, pyrotechnics, or eloquence, and at least as apt to affect its auditors.” “Recognizing deliberate vulnerability, collapse, or breakage,” she continues, “grants that voices can be allowed to ‘fail’ as readily as to succeed, and that in some instances a voice can be thought to succeed at failing.”⁷⁶ Rhetorical tactics that rely on such collapse or breakage succeed in part because of their potential for objectifying and foregrounding meaningful materials. (As Bill Brown has noted, “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy.)”⁷⁷ How apt Feldman’s account of deliberate vocal failure seems also in light of the instrumental music we considered above—of the MSI-laden grain of Marais’s viol as it hearkens to les voix humaines, or as it sings in tombeaux of the bodies it embodies, indexing the assemblage of organic materials that we call “a viol” and “a bow,” and so exploiting the materializing clamor of looming collapse.

Among Early Music cultures, so deeply invested in notions of playing with history (and in the imaginations of some, playing history), such materializing noises are valued partly for their ability to convey a sense of authenticity. Greg Hainge’s description of the “Mom’s typewriter” computer font, “an eminently nostalgic product, intended to emulate the print of old pre-electric typewriters” is instructive here:

This font’s tendency, according to Hainge, to foreground “noise…in such a way as to suggest a more embodied, physical past era different from our own,”⁷⁹ like Early Music’s investment in materializing noises and the rhetorics that promulgate them, indulges in nostalgic imaginings of a pre-electronic past when noises and their material sources were less separable. Industrialization, according to this strand of thought, distanced consumers from sites of material production—we rarely see the growing vegetable or grazing animal before they become our dinner; we rarely see the tree before it becomes our dining table—just as sound has been bracketed from its causal origins. “HIP [historically informed performance] has often made a virtue out of sounds that are not specifically ‘musical’ but come as a consequence of the instruments and techniques used,” writes John Butt. “Perhaps the interest in the historical context and the ‘effort’ of production acts as a counterweight to the increasing disembodiment resulting from mechanical reproduction.”⁸⁰

Noise not only reverses this disembodiment in the minds of many Early Musicians, but also forestalls potential accusations of “Renaissance Faire” inauthenticity—in much the same way that dirt, manure, and animal smells certify that we are on a real farm rather than in an Arcadian counterfeit. This is sometimes the case even when the “dirt” is itself counterfeit: According to the website for the Kontakt Player digital software sampler, for example, the “viola da gamba [or viol] sample pack” replicates the instrument’s “strident, husky sound” and its “earthy tones [that] provide a rustic alternative to the classical string sound.”⁸¹ The software designers’ means of capturing this rusticity is, among other things, by including articulation options such as “scratch” and “rough.” As Stan Link notes, “We now have some very high-tech means to achieve ‘lo-fi’ ends.”⁸²

“Through listening to sound objects with their instrumental causes hidden, we come to forget about the latter and attend to the objects in their own rights,” wrote Pierre Schaeffer. “That is what acousmatics proposes: turning our backs on the instrument and musical conditioning, and placing sound and its musical ‘potential’ squarely before us.”⁸³ The “musical potential” of sound, for Schaeffer, could be realized only after cause-indexing sounds were severed from their material sources in an act of “reduced listening,” achieving a vision of “sounds themselves” independent of their “origins and meanings.”⁸⁴

Schaeffer’s passionate advocacy of reduced listening has left an indelible mark on our relationships with sound, so much so that attending to the materiality of sound sources is frequently dismissed (if not always explicitly) as a product of precursory or even puerile thinking.⁸⁵ In a scheme reminiscent of Schaeffer’s characterization of écouter as cognitively antecedent to entendre, Barthes, for one, depicts what he calls the “first stage of listening, that of indices” via the image of a “child listening for noises which can tell him of the mother’s desired return.”⁸⁶ We find similar signs of Schaefferian influence in William Gaver’s influential study of auditory perception, when the author distinguishes “everyday listening” (by which he means listening “to the characteristics and identities of the instruments themselves”) from “musical listening.” “Musical sounds,” Gaver writes, “seem to reveal little about their sources, whereas everyday sounds often provide a great deal of information about theirs.”⁸⁷

Michel Chion once likened causal listening to a bird “trapped in the cage of its cause and so made an index of a discourse about its cause,” rather than its being “allowed to freely resonate and to sing and escape into the air and from its causal fate.” He argued, further, that “the benefits that many derive from maintaining causalism are obvious: it…permits certain entrepreneurial artists to hold us ransom to causes (along the lines of ‘this sound was created on a period instrument’).”⁸⁸ It is telling that Chion would single out “period instruments” as tools suited to the seemingly subversive task of “maintaining causalism.” In an important sense, then, the materializing rhetorics of Early Music offer a means of resisting the goal of Schaefferian “reduced listening,” and more broadly, of realizing a future in which we are more, rather than less, attentive to sounding materials.

In their future-oriented vision of a “New Organology,” John Tresch and Emily Dolan call on us to

Situating ideas about instruments and machines among Early Music cultures that celebrate modernity and nostalgia in roughly equal measure complicates this vision, and will continue to do so in the future. As Veit Erlmann has noted:

Examples of Early Music’s “modern sensibilities” are abundant, and I would like to conclude with the case of Liam Byrne, the viol player featured—along with theorbist Jonas Nordberg—in Figure 5. In 2015, Byrne garnered attention for a project in which visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum were invited to join him, one at a time, inside a plaster replica of Trajan’s Column to hear him play his viol. Rather than inducing claustrophobia or simply awkwardness, the experience was evidently quite moving to many of those who partook, and provoked reactions ranging from a few words (“very rich…was a very rich three minutes”) to one listener’s almost euphoric recounting of his contact with resonant materials and their vibrational forces: “What I was most struck by was the physicality of it, and I was kind of surprised by that—that I could feel especially some of the lower notes and the lower tones…how it wasn’t just the sound experience, which again was a very rich experience, but I could feel it especially inside my chest.” These quotations are taken from a short video detailing Byrne’s project entitled “Inside Voices” (Figure 9).⁹¹ The soundtrack for that video features a single musical work, presumably one that Byrne played for listeners huddled with him inside the column: Marin Marais’s “Les voix humaines.”

Byrne has positioned himself as “a virtuoso performer on the viola da gamba [or viol] who combines a fluency in historical styles with a thirst for the new.”⁹² Judging from his recordings, as well as his own descriptions of those recordings, both the “historical” and the “new” propel Byrne toward an absorption with the materiality of his instrument. In 2019, he released an album of mostly contemporary music for viol, Marais’s “Les voix humaines” being the only Baroque-era exception. The album is itself a case study in the rhetorics of materiality, beginning with the title itself—Concrete—but continuing in the album’s online liner notes, excerpted here:

How transgressive all of this seems when considered alongside Schaeffer’s admonition to “keep [the listener] away from any reference points and also from preoccupations about how things are made.”⁹⁴ It may seem tempting, at first glance, to characterize these descriptions, and the music to which they refer, as the cultural residue of new materialist ontologies simply repopulated with old materials. But they also exemplify powerful tendencies more central to Early Music’s cultural identity than has been realized. Like the words of Luise Buchberger and Jonathan Manson cited earlier, Byrne’s materializing rhetorics are not exceptional; they are emblematic of cultures that aspire to reclaim the centrality of sounding materials.