Music at 

Hand
OXFORD STUDIES IN MUSIC THEORY
Series Editor Steven Rings

Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin

Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Kofi Agawu

Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791,
Danuta Mirka

Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin

A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common

Practice, Dmitri Tymoczko

In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early

Nineteenth-Century Music, Janet Schmalfeldt

Tonality and Transformation, Steven Rings

Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature, Richard Cohn

Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Seth Monahan

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Roger Mathew Grant

Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music, Daniel Harrison

 Music at Hand

Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition

Jonat han D e   S ouza

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: De Souza, Jonathan, 1982–
Title: Music at hand : instruments, bodies, and cognition / Jonathan De Souza.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] |
Series: Oxford studies in music theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039254| ISBN 9780190271114 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780190271145 (oxford scholarly online) | ISBN 9780190271138 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—Performance—Psychological aspects. |
Music—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC ML3838 .D32 2017 | DDC 784.1/1—dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039254

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

This volume is published with the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment
of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For Heather
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix
About the Companion Website  xi

Introduction  1
1. Beethoven’s Prosthesis  6
2. Sounding Actions  28
3. Idiomaticity; or, Three Ways to Play Harmonica  51
4. Voluntary Self-​Sabotage  83
5. Compositional Instruments  109
6. Horns To Be Heard  145

References  169
Index  187
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

While writing this book, I benefited from many conversations—​some long and
ongoing, others very brief. In particular, I wish to thank Emily Abrams Ansari,
Shawn Allison, Andrea Bohlman, Seth Brodsky, Chelsea Burns, Mark Butler,
Christine Carter, Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Arnie Cox, Emily Dolan, Kimberly
Dority, Helen Fielding, Michael Figueroa, Abigail Fine, Michael Gallope, Luis-​
Manuel Garcia, Robert Gjerdingen, Jessica Grahn, Shannon Heald, Mark
Hopwood, Bryn Hughes, Sarah Iker, John Jenkinson, Ingrid Johnsrude, Alisha
Lola Jones, Mariusz Kozak, Trent Leipert, Anabel Maler, Jairo Moreno, Roger
Moseley, Katie Overy, Marcelle Pierson, Scott Richmond, Matt Schneider, Kris
Shaffer, August Sheehy, Peter Shultz, Pete Smucker, Daniel Smyth, Martha
Sprigge, Steve Van Hedger, Lee Veeraraghavan, Dan Wang, Kevin Watson, and
Mark Yeary. I  am also grateful to the Press’s anonymous reviewers, to reading
groups at the University of Chicago and the University of Western Ontario, and
to audiences who responded to portions of this book at conferences and colloquia
hosted by Cornell University, the University of Glasgow, Memorial University
of Newfoundland, Northwestern University, the University of Toronto, and Rice
University. These interlocutors’ questions and comments have greatly enriched
my thinking. Tips from Bob Kessler and John Kregor shaped Chapters 3 and 4,
respectively. And I  have learned much from my musical collaborators, includ-
ing LeRoy Bach, David Brackley, Lance Brown, Mim Eichmann, Doug Lofstrom,
Dan Lopata, Mark Kluemper, Dan Pearce, Ed Sullivan, Hans Vanderhill, and the
late Ed Hall.
This project first emerged at the University of Chicago, and I  would like to
think that it bears the mark of that place. Faculty members and fellow students
at Chicago both challenged and encouraged me; Thomas Christensen, Berthold
Hoeckner, Steve Rings, and especially Larry Zbikowski served as perceptive, gen-
erous mentors. The book has taken its present form at the University of Western
Ontario, where my students and colleagues form a stimulating artistic and aca-
demic community. At Chicago, my work was supported by fellowships from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mellon
Foundation. At Western, Dean Betty Anne Younker and the chair of my depart-
ment, David Myska, facilitated a term away from teaching that helped me com-
plete the manuscript.
Suzanne Ryan has been a wonderfully enthusiastic, patient editor. Along with
Steve Rings (in his role as series editor), she helped me develop and define the book.
x  T  Acknowledgments

At the Press, Adam Cohen, Jamie Kim, and Andrew Maillet promptly answered
questions about various publication-​related details, and project manager Damian
Penfold guided the book through the production process. C. F. Peters Corporation
and Breitkopf & Haertel gave permission to reproduce musical excerpts by John
Cage and Helmut Lachenmann, respectively.
My brother-​in-​law Scott Brandon created the motion-​capture images in his
lab at Queen’s University, and my father, Greg De Souza, produced the videos for
the companion website. My parents, sisters, and in-​laws also provided babysit-
ting, birthday cake, and other much-​needed diversions. Growing up in a home
filled with instruments made me a musician, and this background still colors my
interests as a music theorist:  my father’s father played harmonica (the focus of
Chapter 3), while my mother’s mother played organ (discussed in Chapters 2 and
5). Likewise, I am inspired by the musicality of my incredible daughters, Rilla and
Audra. But most of all, I want to thank Heather, my partner in music and in life.
She has both supported me personally and contributed to the book’s content, offer-
ing critical insights on bowing patterns in Bach, brass performance, piano peda-
gogy, and countless other topics. I could not have written this book without her.
A B O U T T H E   C OM PA N IO N W E B SI T E

www.oup.com/​us/​musicathand
Like many texts in music theory and analysis, Music at Hand invites readers
to listen, watch, and play. The book’s companion website presents audiovisual
examples, comprising performances by the author, motion-​capture videos, and
music-​analytical animations. These online examples are indicated in the text with
the symbol . To access the website, enter the username [Music5] and password
[Book1745].
Much of the music discussed in the book, however, is not represented on the
companion website. In such cases, recordings can generally be found in libraries
and online. And readers of all levels of musical expertise are encouraged to try out
examples at an instrument, as the website unfortunately cannot replicate the feel-
ing of fingers on a keyboard or lips on a harmonica.
Music at Hand
Introduction

Music is fleeting. It disperses as it is heard. And though I sometimes feel its vibra-
tions, I cannot touch, cannot see, and cannot hold them. Because of this, music
has often been considered the most abstract, most metaphysical art. Yet at the
same time, music is bound up with physical things: upright pianos and electric
guitars, tambourines, turntables, violas, bagpipes, microphones, headphones, and
iPhones, sitars, French or English horns, marimbas, flutes of metal, bone, or wood.
And all of these, in turn, are bound to human bodies.
Music at Hand investigates music’s corporeal grounding. This, in itself, is not
especially original, for questions of embodiment are hardly new to music stud-
ies. In the 1990s, for example, some musicologists asked about music’s role in the
history of the body (e.g., Leppert 1993; McClary and Walser 1994). Attending to
the embodiment of sexual and racial differences, their work recognized music as
“one of the means by which people learn about their bodies—​how to move, how to
feel, how (finally) to be” (McClary 1998, 87). Contemporaneous theorists, drawing
on psychology and philosophy, argued that embodied knowledge shapes musical
concepts (more about this in Chapter 1). These perspectives, which are often com-
bined, are complementary: where the first showed how music mediates bodies, the
second clarified how bodies mediate music. A third, related approach considered
aspects of musical organization and meaning that may be felt by performers but
not always heard by listeners. Suzanne Cusick (1994, 18–​20), for example, dis-
cussed a moment from one of J. S. Bach’s organ preludes that creates a sense of
physical imbalance for the player. For this style of “embodied music theory,” musi-
cal sound and text are supplemented by performing bodies.1
Though inspired by these precedents, Music at Hand has a slightly different
task: it emphasizes that performing bodies themselves are supplemented by instru-
ments. That is to say, certain forms of musical embodiment are possible only
with instrumental mediation.2 As such, I am specifically interested in musicians’

1. Modes of analysis that focus on performers’ bodies have been deployed by various scholars, includ-
ing Fisher and Lochhead (2002), Le Guin (2006), Rockwell (2009), Montague (2012), Yearsley
(2012), and Bungert (2015). This research participates in a broader musicological trend, theorized in
Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score (2014), that conceives of music as performance rather than text.
2. These kinds of musical embodiment are by no means universal, since there are musicians who
do not play instruments and musical cultures that do not make them (Kartomi 1990, xvii–​xviii).
Nonetheless, humans have used musical instruments since prehistoric times (see De Souza 2014).
2  T  Music at Hand

engagements with concrete objects, rather than musical gesture in general.3 Insofar
as players’ actions take shape around keys, fingerboards, mouthpieces, and so on,
it is necessary to examine how instruments are structured, how they make actions
audible and sounds manipulable. Here the book can be understood as a music-​
theoretical counterpart to recent research, inspired by media theory and history
of science, on instruments’ epistemological significance (e.g., Dolan 2013, 10–​13;
Tresch and Dolan 2013; Moseley 2015). From this viewpoint, musical knowledge is
grounded not in bodies alone, but in an interplay of techniques and technologies.
A theory of musical bodies, then, requires a theory of musical technics. This
uncommon word “technics” refers to technical matters in general.4 It corresponds to
the German Technik or the French la technique, which, depending on context, can
be translated as either “technique” or “technology.” The ambiguity can productively
bring these elements together, revealing their commonalities, their complemen-
tarity. Every technology, in this view, is associated with some technique. Technics,
moreover, is an inclusive concept. It encompasses seemingly disparate objects and
practices, from laptop computers to prehistoric hand axes, from the tools of indus-
try and warfare to those of art and play. Accordingly, “music technology” would
go beyond electronic devices and recording technology to include instruments and
forms of musical writing. And “musical technique” would involve performing skills
but also listening skills. Indeed, this book insists that such skills are closely con-
nected, that the acquisition of instrumental technique—​a process of bodily “tech-
nicization”—​affects the ways that players perceive, understand, and imagine music.
To support these theoretical claims, the book marshals diverse musical
examples—​classical and popular, old and new. It also mixes several modes of per-
formance analysis.5 I examine specific recorded performances (many of which are
improvised), while also reading scores in terms of their performative possibilities.
I reflect on my own experiences as a multi-​instrumentalist, while also exploring
pieces and instruments that I  cannot play, which I  approach from the outside.
And though I have not conducted formal fieldwork or interviews, I often consider
statements by expert performers. Each of my case studies, of course, is historically
and culturally specific. As such, I often have recourse to scholarship from music
history and ethnomusicology. (In fact, though the examples reflect my own exper-
tise in Western music, ethnomusicology offers some important antecedents to my
approach.)6 Yet my main goal is not to illuminate the musical cultures or social

3. Robert Hatten’s approach to musical gesture, for example, is predicated on an expansive definition of
the concept (2004, 93–​95). By contrast, I tend to follow a distinction made by the psychologist David
McNeill (1992, 78), who separates spontaneous communicative gestures from skilled forms of object
manipulation. From this perspective, playing “air guitar” is gestural, but playing a real guitar is not.
4. Prominent writings on technics include Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) and Bernard
Stiegler’s Technics and Time series (1998, 2009, 2011). Gallope (2011) discusses technics and music.
5. For recent methodological reflections on performance and analysis, see Cook (2014, ch. 2) and the
collection of essays titled “Performance and Analysis Today” in Music Theory Online 22/​2, intro-
duced by Barolsky and Klorman (2016).
6. Aspects of my work are anticipated in John Blacking’s reflections on human musicality, which engaged
both musical instruments and the anthropology of the body (1973, 17–​21), in John Baily’s (1977) study
of body-​instrument interaction in the performance of Afghan lutes, and in Bell Yung’s (1984) work on
kinesthetic and choreographic aspects of music for the qin, a seven-​string Chinese zither.
 Introduction  T  3

contexts from which these examples are drawn. Instead, their juxtaposition allows
generalizations about instrumental performance to emerge. Musical and analyti-
cal variety thus serves as a methodological feature. With this in mind, the book
might be imagined as a kind of collage.
This collage of music and ideas mixes disciplines, too, relying most consistently
on cognitive science and phenomenology. While I engage with experimental research
from music psychology, I am equally interested in theoretical work related to embod-
ied cognition. Embodied cognition—​like “embodied music theory”—​distinguishes
itself from approaches that treat mind and body as independent entities. To be spe-
cific, embodied cognition principally reacts against a computational conception of
mind, which emerged in the mid-​twentieth century. According to this model, bodily
input is converted into “nonperceptual” data, and the brain deals in abstract symbolic
representations that are essentially independent of the senses. Proponents of embod-
ied cognition, by contrast, argue for the integration of perception and cognition,
body and mind.7 Claiming that knowledge and experience are based in the body’s
sensorimotor capacities, they draw on behavioral studies, brain imaging, cognitive
anthropology, and so forth. This discourse, then, provides a repository of theoretical
concepts and empirical evidence about the relations among mind, body, and world.
Meanwhile, phenomenology—​a philosophical tradition inaugurated by Edmund
Husserl—​offers a first-​person standpoint that complements cognitive studies.8 This,
again, involves a blend of theory and observation. On one level, phenomenology is a
descriptive method, a set of techniques for analyzing lived experience. Husserl exam-
ines things as they appear to consciousness, attending to the correlation of object
and subject, to individual senses, to real or imaginary shifts in temporal and spatial
perspective. His reflections on the sound of a violin provide a characteristic example:
The tone of a violin with its objective identity is given through perspectives, it has
its changing forms of appearance. They differ according as I approach the violin
or recede from it, according as I am in the concert hall itself or listen through its
closed doors, and so forth. No way of appearing claims to rank as giving its data
absolutely, although a certain type, appearing as normal within the compass of my
practical interests, has a certain advantage; in the concert hall, at the “right” spot,
I hear the tone “itself ” as it “really” sounds. (Husserl [1913] 2012, 83)

Briefly put, the phenomenologist develops variations on experience, much as a

musician might compose variations to explore a familiar theme.9 Such techniques
7. Embodied cognition does not necessarily invalidate findings of the symbolic-​processing approach.
Theoretical work in this relatively new area often aims to show how earlier results can be reinter-
preted in terms of sensorimotor grounding, moving toward methodological synthesis (Barsalou
2010). Note also that these two streams of cognitive science have long inspired music theorists: for
example, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) adapts hierar-
chical structures from Noam Chomsky’s computationalist linguistics, whereas Lawrence Zbikowski’s
Conceptualizing Music (2002) adapts work on embodied metaphor from later cognitive linguistics.
8. For example, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch combine cognitive science with phenomenology in The
Embodied Mind (1991). There is even a journal, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, devoted
to this methodological pairing.
9. Here I am indebted to Don Ihde’s use of phenomenological variations in his work on the phenome-
nology of sound (2007) and technology (2009, 16–​19). For a practical introduction to the technique,
see Ihde (1986).
4  T  Music at Hand

can be separated from Husserl’s transcendental philosophy. For example, David

Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (1978)—​a book that describes how the author learned
to play jazz piano—​employs these methods without explicitly discussing phenom-
enological theory. When analyzing my own experiences as a performer, I continue
this style of applied phenomenology.
I also deal with phenomenology at a philosophical level, where experience
is linked to ontology. Here my principal interlocutors are later figures:  Martin
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty. Neither wrote much about music—​
Heidegger was more interested in poetry, Merleau-​Ponty in painting—​and some
commentators have critiqued their treatment of sound (Dyson 2009, 85–​95;
Cimini 2012). But I  am mainly concerned with other aspects of their thought,
namely Heidegger’s account of technology and Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy of
the body. For Merleau-​Ponty, “the body is our general means of having a world”
([1945] 2012, 147). That is to say, my body—​unlike external things that come and
go—​is always here for me. It is felt directly, imbued with affect and kinesthetic sen-
sation. My body makes perception possible. Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of
Perception, then, does more than celebrate somatic self-​awareness. Its attention to
bodily experience supports ontological claims that challenge computationalism’s
emphasis on disembodied informational patterns. In this view, we do not simply
have bodies. We are bodies.
To some, these interdisciplinary commitments might seem to lead away from
music theory proper. But I  would argue, on the contrary, that this type of meth-
odological synthesis is characteristic of the field. The history of theory is full of
musician-​scholars who took inspiration from contemporaneous science, philosophy,
mathematics, linguistics, and so on. Furthermore, this particular triad—​music the-
ory, cognitive science, and phenomenology—​is central to a well-​known essay by the
influential theorist David Lewin.10 In “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes
of Perception,” Lewin contends that theories of musical perception should consider
production as well as listening. When we play the final movement of Beethoven’s
“Appassionata” Piano Sonata, he writes, “we are not matching the fingers and posi-
tions of our right hands to a preconceived ‘perception’ of the theme; rather we are in
the act of perceiving the theme as we move the parts of our bodies to play it” (1986,
382, emphasis in original). As one way of responding to Lewin’s phenomenology, the
present book builds on his work in mathematical music theory, constructing trans-
formational models of various instrumental interfaces.
Certain aspects of these models will interest mainly readers with a background in
transformational theory. Yet this analytical apparatus also exemplifies something that
music theory can bring to interdisciplinary conversations. While Lewinian formalism
fixes aspects of musical performance, it also makes them legible for close analysis. It
has helped me to listen more carefully and to think more rigorously about performa-
tive actions and instrumental spaces. In this regard, the associated musical excerpts
and technical diagrams might be compared to the data and statistics presented in the

10. As Brian Kane (2011) has demonstrated, Lewin’s phenomenology relies on a particular interpreta-
tion of Husserl (associated with West Coast phenomenology), even as he anticipates certain post-​
Husserlian developments. For an applied phenomenology of musical listening, see Clifton (1983).
 Introduction  T  5

results section of a psychology article. They test intuitions about particular pieces and
performances. They reveal expected or unexpected patterns, confirming or denying
musical hypotheses. That is to say, in the wealth of musical detail gathered by analysis,
music theory seeks a kind of evidence. Such evidence might support claims about
“intra-​musical” principles (e.g., conventions of tonal harmony or form in classical
music). But it might equally speak to broader humanistic and scientific concerns,
involving cultural history, cognitive processes, representations of gender, race, and
disability, or the co-​constitution of bodies and technologies. Music-​analytical results
are admittedly partial, provisional, and susceptible to bias. Nonetheless, I cannot help
but believe that music, if we listen to it truly, can teach us about the world. With this
in mind, I have tried to keep the book’s analytical discussions accessible to nonspe-
cialist readers, who may find the audiovisual materials on the companion website
particularly useful.

The book’s opening chapters theorize connections among body, instrument, and
sound. Chapter  1 takes performances by the deaf Beethoven as an instance of
body-​instrument interaction. It shows how instrumental practice gives rise to
distinctive patterns of auditory-​motor coactivation in players’ brains, which may
be reanimated in perception and imagination. Elaborating on this general frame-
work, Chapters 2 and 3 examine particular instrumental interfaces. They focus,
respectively, on sound production and instrumental space, on how instruments
translate action into sound and how they distribute musical materials physically.
Chapter 3 also introduces transformational tools that are used throughout the rest
of the book. Its analyses—​which compare various styles of harmonica playing—​
suggest that idioms emerge at the nexus of instrumental “sweet spots” and players’
embodied habits.
Processes of instrumental alteration are explored in Chapter 4. When musi-
cians alter their instruments, they open up new possibilities for sound and per-
formance. But a series of analyses related to guitar improvisation indicate that this
process, by disrupting established auditory-​motor mappings, can also affect play-
ers’ perception.
The final two chapters ask how composers and listeners relate to instruments.
Chapter 5 focuses on the music of J. S. Bach, considering how instrumental idioms
may function as a resource for composers. Ultimately it argues that composition
is deeply intertwined with instrumentation. Turning to listeners who do not play
instruments, Chapter 6 reflects on the interplay of sound and source in Haydn’s
use of valveless horns. If historically situated audiences recognize schematic tex-
tures referring to instruments—​if, for example, they can hear virtual horns in a
string quartet or piano piece—​this implies that their perception also reflects mul-
tisensory associations centered on instruments. Like performance, then, listening
would be both embodied and conditioned by technology.
CHAPTER 
One
Beethoven’s Prosthesis

More than a decade after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, his secretary Anton
Schindler remembered the composer at play:

Beethoven was very fond, especially in the dusk of the evening, of seating himself at
the piano to improvise, or he would frequently take up the violin or viola…. In the
latter years of his life, his playing at such times was more painful than agreeable to
those who heard it…. The most painful thing of all was to hear him improvise on
stringed instruments, owing to his incapability of tuning them. The music which
he thus produced was frightful, though in his mind it was pure and harmonious.
(Schindler 1841, 174–​76)

This intimate scene of musical pleasure is also, poignantly, a scene of breakdown.

Deafness does not simply block Beethoven’s hearing. It alters his music-​making too.
Later accounts, unlike Schindler’s, often romanticize this disability, claiming
that it benefited Beethoven’s music.1 Hearing loss, in this view, distanced the
composer from the perceptible materiality of sound and inducted him into an
ideal, spiritual musicality. His late string quartets came to represent the belief,
historicized by Carl Dahlhaus, that absolute music “ ‘dissolves’ itself from the
sensual” (1989, 17). Understanding music as an unmediated expression of the
Will, this discourse metaphysically opposes “pure musicality” and “mere tech-
nique.” Beethoven’s music, it argues, has nothing to do with instruments or
manual skill.
Yet Beethoven enjoyed the physical practice of instrumental music despite
his hearing loss. He continued to play privately and probably continued to
write music at the keyboard (Ealy 1994, 273). Perhaps this is unsurprising,
given his background as a composer-​pianist and a renowned improviser.
Still, what was it like for Beethoven to perform music that he could feel but
not hear?
I want to use this scene not to demonstrate Beethoven’s exceptionalism, but to
explore cognitive processes that are common among hearing instrumentalists. The
scene, on a certain level, suggests a kind of phenomenological reduction. In music
scholarship, this Husserlian technique has been prominently associated with
“reduced listening,” a mode of purely aural perception in which sounds are freed

1. K. M. Knittel (1998) traces this view to Richard Wagner’s 1870 Beethoven essay. For further discus-
sion of Wagner’s influence here, see Goehr (1998, 123) and Kane (2014, 114–​16), and for a general
discussion of Beethoven and disability, see Straus (2011).
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  7

Figure 1.1  Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor, “Pathétique,”

op. 13, mvt. i, end of m. 10.

from their worldly sources.2 By contrast, Beethoven’s experience highlights every-

thing that reduced listening excludes—​kinesthetic, tactile, visual, and technologi-
cal aspects of performance. Asking about Beethoven, then, is a way of asking a
broader question: How do bodies and instruments condition musical experience?

Listening with the Body

Beethoven might have imagined music while resting in an armchair or strolling

through the city. But in Schindler’s anecdote, the composer moves his arms, wrists,
and fingers, pressing keys, pulling a bow across strings. Insofar as the story con-
nects Beethoven’s bodily actions and his inner hearing, it resonates with argu-
ments that present musical experience as essentially embodied.
Consider a brief excerpt from Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, shown in
Figure 1.1. The melody hovers, then descends through a chromatic scale, over the
dominant harmony that closes the piece’s slow introduction. It is a striking move,
for several reasons. It falls more than two octaves, a distance that effectively covers
the introduction’s entire melodic range. At the same time it picks up speed, cul-
minating in a series of one-​hundred-​twenty-​eighth notes that are commonly per-
formed in a free accelerando. This melody, then, gives a sense not only of musical
movement, but of musical momentum. It does not simply descend. It plummets.
My description of the passage is obviously metaphorical, and it plays with an
opposition of “high” and “low” pitches that pervades Western musical discourse.3
Yet this spatial mapping, however familiar, is far from universal. For example,
Sundanese musicians from West Java describe pitch relationships in terms of
size and tension (van Zanten 1986, 85). High notes are “small” or “pulled”; low
notes, “large” or “slack.”4 Many music theorists—​drawing on work by the cognitive

2. The most influential proponent of this method is the French composer Pierre Schaeffer, to whom
I return in Chapter 6.
3. As Lawrence Zbikowski notes, the high/​low metaphor is not limited to theoretical language. It also
supports “text painting,” where composers use musical motion to represent ascent or descent (2002,
63–​74).
4. These theoretical metaphors obviously relate to the construction of instruments. On pitch-​related
metaphors in other musical traditions, see Cox (1999), Zbikowski (2002, 67–​68), and Eitan and
Timmers (2010).
8  T  Music at Hand

Figure 1.2  Diagram of the verticality schema (after Zbikowski 2002, 69).

linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson (1980)—​argue that
such linguistic metaphors are made possible by underlying conceptual metaphors.
For Lakoff and Johnson, metaphoric processes of cross-​domain mapping are basic
to thought and action. And empirical research indeed shows that the conceptual
mapping between pitch height and vertical position can affect perception and
motor performance.5 For example, in stimulus-​response compatibility experi-
ments, participants—​with or without formal musical training—​respond more
quickly and accurately when higher pitches are paired with higher visual stimuli
(Rusconi et  al. 2006; Lidji et  al. 2007). Conceptual metaphors are theoretically
founded on “image schemas,” gestalts abstracted from sensorimotor perception.6
The orientational metaphor of pitch height would engage a verticality schema
(illustrated in Figure 1.2), a pattern that remains invariant throughout countless
experiences of up-​and-​down. For a Western listener, the passage from Beethoven’s
“Pathétique” might evoke such experiences: running down stairs, riding a roller
coaster, dropping a stone, or watching an Olympic diver. For a Javanese listener,
it might more readily suggest a process of expanding or loosening. In both cases,
the conceptual metaphor for pitch is culturally specific, while also grounded in
embodied experience.
Phenomenological terms can help clarify the meaning of “embodied experi-
ence” here. Edmund Husserl distinguishes between two German words for “body,”
Körper and Leib ([1909] 1973, 42–​55). On one level, the human body is a mate-
rial object. My hand and the piano are both concrete things, both physical bodies
(Körper). This is, in fact, a precondition for their interaction: without this common
substantiality, my fingers and the keys could not touch. Yet at the same time, my
own body differs from external objects, because I  experience it as a lived body

5. Eitan and Timmers review experimental research on pitch and space (2010, 405–​6). Empirical
research also suggests connections between the motor system and the perception of rhythm. Bodily
movement seems to facilitate different metrical interpretations of an ambiguous rhythmic pattern
(Phillips-​Silver and Trainor 2005, 2007). And functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show
that beat perception engages a network of motor-​related areas in the brain, involving the basal gan-
glia, premotor cortex, and supplementary motor area (Grahn 2009).
6. Image schemas were introduced by Johnson (1987). Rohrer (2005) discusses neurobiological evi-
dence consistent with the theory. Music-​theoretical applications of the concept have been explored
by Saslaw (1996), Brower (1997–​98), Cox (1999), Mead (1999), Zbikowski (2002), Adlington (2003),
Johnson and Larson (2003), Straus (2011, 107–​12), and Larson (2012).
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  9

(Leib). It is always present for me, imbued with kinesthetic sensations, and I move
it directly. Image schemas are based on this level of lived embodiment.
Husserl also extends the doubling to other people’s bodies. I might see your
hand as a material object or as a living hand like my own. Later phenomenolo-
gists, notably Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, develop this theme further, conceiving of
intersubjectivity as a kind of intercorporeality. We understand each other—​and
the world we inhabit together—​via shared sensorimotor capacities. This resonates
with recent investigations of a “mirror-​neuron system,” which is involved in both
performing and perceiving actions.7 Along these lines, Arnie Cox has proposed
that metaphors of musical verticality (and musical meaning in general) involve
“mimetic motor imagery”: that is, imitation, either real or imagined, of perform-
ers’ movements and sonic patterns (1999, 108).8
All of this suggests a preliminary interpretation of Beethoven’s late improvisa-
tions. Building on the cognitive perspective that approaches metaphor as a basic
structure of thought grounded in image-​schematic structures, the composer’s
actions can be understood as kinesthetic analogues for the sounds in his mind, as
embodied representations. If listeners perceive actual sound in terms of imagined
movement, Beethoven would instead perceive actual movement in terms of imag-
ined sound. The muscular exertions of his hands, arms, and feet would mirror
the music’s melodic, temporal, or textural outlines. Moving at the keyboard for
Beethoven would be like dancing to a silent soundtrack, like a kind of musical
mime that actualizes motor imagery already involved in musical listening.9
Though this interpretation accounts for some cultural influences, it does not
yet address the role of practiced techniques or musical technologies. It does not
yet consider Beethoven as a pianist or violinist. In the earlier-​cited experiments,
musicians had more complex associations between pitch and space than partici-
pants without musical training (Rusconi et al. 2006; Lidji et al. 2007). Besides map-
ping pitch height to vertical position, they also connected higher pitches with the
right and lower ones with the left—​as on a piano keyboard.10 Studying performers,
then, may nuance theories of musical embodiment, by highlighting the effects of
bodily skill.
Cognitive neuroscience can help reveal musician-​ specific connections
between listening and playing. In one representative study, experimenters played
familiar piano melodies for a group of student pianists (Haueisen and Knösche
2001). Though they listened while sitting still, the pianists exhibited significant

7. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008) examine the mirror-​neuron system in general, while Overy and
Molnar-​Szakacs (2009) discuss its relation to music.
8. Mariusz Kozak argues that an overemphasis on musical mimesis is problematic. If listeners merely
imitated performers, then their own bodies would be inessential to musical understanding, and
listening would be only “quasi-​embodied” (2015, 1.6). As an alternative, Kozak examines ways in
which listeners’ nonperformative movements organize musical experience, combining Merleau-​
Ponty’s phenomenology with motion-​capture analysis.
9. Cox’s (2006) discussion of subvocalization also fits suggestively with Beethoven’s habit of “growl-
ing” instead of singing (Schindler [1860] 1966, 125).
10. This mapping also affects action: for example, experienced pianists have great difficulty playing on
a reversed keyboard (Laeng and Park 1999).
10  T  Music at Hand

activation in the contralateral primary motor cortex (M1), as measured by mag-

netoencephalography (MEG). In another, amateur and professional violinists
tapped left-​hand fingerings for Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G major, KV. 216
(Lotze et al. 2003). Though this performance was silent, functional magnetic res-
onance imaging (fMRI) showed activation in the right primary auditory cortex
and left auditory association area. (Unsurprisingly, this activation was stronger
for professionals.) But when the same violinists imagined playing the piece with-
out also moving their fingers, the auditory-​motor coactivation disappeared, lead-
ing the authors to conclude that “the motor and auditory systems are coactivated
as a consequence of musical training but only if one system (motor or auditory)
becomes activated by actual movement execution or live musical auditory stim-
uli” (1817). These studies showed distinctive patterns of auditory-​motor coactiva-
tion in musicians’ brains.11 Note that this connection is bidirectional: sounding
music elicits activity in motor areas, and action elicits activity in auditory areas.
This auditory-​motor coupling might be figuratively described as a link between
the ear and the hand.12
Such results—​and embodied listening more generally—​can be explained via
Lawrence Barsalou’s theory of perceptual symbol systems (1999). As a proponent
of “grounded cognition,” Barsalou argues that cognition is based on sensory expe-
rience, not disembodied computational processing. In his account, perception
activates sensorimotor areas in the brain: visual areas capture aspects like shape
and color; auditory areas capture aspects like pitch and timbre; others involve pro-
prioceptive states, bodily movement or action, emotion, and so forth. The brain,
then, takes in distinct perceptual components, forming sense-​specific represen-
tations. At the same time, different sensory modalities are coordinated through
“convergence zones” that record patterns of coactivation (Damasio 1989). And
such patterns may be reactivated through top-​down processing to support mental
simulations that, Barsalou claims, ground even the most abstract concepts and
categories.
This empirical and theoretical work suggests another approach to Beethoven’s
improvisations. Early in his life as a pianist, Beethoven practiced common scales
and melodic gestures, idiomatic textures and chordal patterns. He developed
modally specific memories for their physical actions and sounding results, as any
competent pianist does. These coordinated sensory representations supported

11. For further evidence of auditory-​motor coupling in pianists, see Bangert, Haeusler, and Altenmüller
(2001), Drost et al. (2005), Bangert et al. (2006), Lahav, Saltzman, and Schlaug (2007), and Chen,
Rae, and Watkins (2011). Margulis et al. (2009) extend such research to violinists and flutists.
12. In general, instrumentalists’ brains have a larger than average hand area in the motor cortex
(Altenmüller and Gruhn 2002, 72). Yet there are also specific differences, depending on the instru-
ment. Professional violinists, for example, have larger areas for left-​hand fingers but not for the
left thumb or right-​hand digits (Elbert et al., 1995). And players who make music with other body
parts—​feet, mouth, and so forth—​have corresponding differences in auditory-​motor integration.
For example, Schulz, Ross, and Pantev (2003) found that trumpet players develop strong connec-
tions between the auditory cortex and the lip area in the primary somatosensory cortex (but not
the corresponding area for the index finger). Neural reorganization, finally, is more pronounced in
players who began to study their instrument in childhood.
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  11

musical schemas and concepts that he could reactivate and creatively recombine.
While improvising, for example, Beethoven could imagine a melody and realize
it with his hands. Yet since auditory-​motor coactivation goes both ways, mov-
ing his hands on the keyboard would activate auditory regions in his brain. This
suggests that Beethoven’s actions would also enhance auditory simulations after his
hearing loss.13 This conclusion is consistent with reports from musicians with sig-
nificant hearing loss, who describe powerful experiences of auditory imagery dur-
ing performance (Miller 2011). And it goes some way to explaining a statement by
Beethoven himself: “when I am playing and composing, my affliction still hampers
me least; it affects me most when I am in company” (quoted in Ealy 1994, 273).
The music Beethoven “heard” at the piano, then, would parallel the “phantasmal
voices” sometimes experienced by people who become deaf after learning to speak—​
people who “hear” simulated speech while lip-​reading.14 Perceptual symbol systems
theory would readily accommodate this auditory-​visual integration. As a general the-
ory of coordination between the brain’s sensory systems, the model equally accounts
for visual-​motor coactivation in expert dancers watching dance and in musicians
watching other instrumentalists (Calvo-​Merino et  al. 2005; Behmer and Jantzen
2011). However, even as this account of multisensory integration extends image-​
schematic and motor-​mimetic perspectives from music theory, it prompts further
questions. How are body-​sound relations mediated? How is playing an instrument
different from singing or dancing?

Instrumental Affordances

Embodied aspects of Beethoven’s “inner hearing” challenge a spiritualism that

often haunts Romantic visions of the deaf composer. Yet fixating on Beethoven’s
body can lead to other philosophical problems. First, to promote body over mind
would court a materialism that is just as dualistic as the idealism it inverts. Both
positions treat one term in the mind/​body binary as essential and the other as
accidental. Both positions, then, would inhabit the black-​and-​white world that
Jacques Derrida calls “the metaphysics of presence.”15 This kind of metaphysics

13. Barsalou (1999, 586) emphasizes that such simulations must remain partial, and this is philosophi-
cally significant. Claiming that simulations can be complete would effectively reduce perception to
the thought of perceiving, falling into an idealism that Merleau-​Ponty critiques in The Visible and
the Invisible (1968, 29–​43).
14. Oliver Sacks discusses these phantasmal voices in his Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the
Deaf (1989, 5–​7).
15. As Derrida explains, this metaphysics involves “the enterprise of returning ‘strategically,’ ideally, to
an origin … held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-​identical, in order then to think
in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to
Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the
positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essen-
tial before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc.” (1988, 93). Derridean deconstruc-
tion, in part, examines the inherent contradictions of such thinking, extending earlier critiques of
metaphysical presence by Heidegger (2010, 21–​25).
12  T  Music at Hand

prioritizes one term in a pair (such as presence/​absence, mind/​body, nature/​

culture, or masculine/​feminine).16 The privileged term is thought to stand on its
own, even though it is actually defined in relation to its partner, its supplement,
its conceptual shadow. Second, the mind/​body distinction cannot easily be dis-
solved. Arguments for radical integration risk reducing the body to the mind or
vice versa. It seems more productive, then, to maintain the tension between mind
and body, to accept that they intertwine without fully converging.
It can also be helpful to decenter the mind/​body complex by situating it in an
environment. In other words, cognition is not only embodied, but also ecologi-
cal. The verticality schema, for example, is not simply a consequence of human
anatomy. Rather, up and down are defined by gravity, by the earth under my feet
and the sky over my head. For Merleau-​Ponty, this means that a theory of the
body must already be a theory of the body’s integration with a world. I find myself
always in the world, and each worldly perception is “synonymous” with some
bodily perception (2012, 212).
Here phenomenology anticipates ecological psychology. Founded by James
J. Gibson, ecological psychology argues for direct coupling between action and
perception, between organism and environment.17 Gibson describes this as
a kind of “resonance” or “tuning” (1966, 271). Animals tune in to the world
around them, as a radio tunes in to the airwaves, responding to both flux and
regularity. This mix of variance and invariance can be illustrated with a visual
example. When I walk toward a chair, it becomes larger in my field of vision.
But because other aspects of the scene are constant and because the shift in per-
spective correlates with my movement, I do not think that the chair is growing.
Invariants here provide information about the chair and the surrounding envi-
ronment, while changes provide information about my own motion (Gibson
1979, 73).
Gibson would further claim that I  see the chair primarily in terms of its
affordances—​for instance, my ability to sit in or stand on it. I  perceive it not
as a bundle of properties or qualities, but as a thing I  can use (1979, 134). In
Heideggerian language, I  am oriented toward its “handiness” (Zuhandenheit).
Affordances involve a specific complementarity of animal and environment. That
is, they are possibilities for action by a particular agent. The chair affords sit-
ting for me because of my abilities and because of its size and shape relative to
my body. It would not afford sitting for a newborn baby or, to take an extreme

16. Such oppositions are often layered over each other. For example, Cusick argues that mind/​body and
masculine/​feminine together color the music-​specific opposition composer/​performer. “The com-
poser is masculine not because so many individuals who live in the category are biologically male,” she
writes, “but because the composer has come to be understood to be mind” (1994, 16, emphasis in
original). Later in the essay, Cusick wonders whether the instrument/​voice binary would be gendered
in the same way, with singing as a feminized, bodily counterpart to instrumental performance (21).
While this is plausible, the situation here is complex. Eighteenth-​century Cartesian dualism, in fact,
favored the opposite mapping: voice was thought to imbue music with rational expression, whereas
instrumental music was merely a mechanical affair, a “body without a soul” (Chua 1999, 82–​91).
17. I find ecological psychology to be a useful theoretical resource, whether or not one subscribes to
Gibson’s radical anti-​representationalism.
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  13

example, for a humpback whale. Affordances and abilities, then, are essentially
codefined (127).
While many ecological psychologists focus on invariant structures based in
natural law (like the changes in vision just described), affordances may also be
based in cultural regularities. For Gibson, the environment is both natural and
cultural, so these aspects of affordances should not be opposed (1979, 130; 1982,
412).18 Indeed, they are combined in musical instruments. A guitar’s pitches, for
example, become higher when the vibrating portion of the string is shortened,
and each string affords harmonics at the octave, at the twelfth, and so on: these
are physical invariants based in the acoustic properties of oscillating strings. Fret
placement and tuning involve cultural invariants, the products of musical tradi-
tion. The fretboard is designed for hands, resonating with human physiology, but
it also demands learned cultural techniques.
To capture some instrumental affordances in action, I return to the introduc-
tion from Beethoven’s “Pathétique” (shown in Figure 1.3). The piece opens in a
low register and slowly climbs, with voice exchanges expanding minor and then
diminished-​seventh chords. The opening dotted motif is recast in m. 5 as a lyri-
cal melody, which continues to rise—​before the aforementioned descent in m. 10.
Again, consider this massive chromatic descent. If the scale seems unremark-
able, note that many instruments—​even Western ones like harmonicas and valve-
less horns—​do not afford this pitch collection or range. By using the smallest
intervals available on the instrument, Beethoven enhances a sense of continuity in
the sonic descent—​and also makes audible one of the piano’s defining invariants,
its linear arrangement of twelve pitch classes within the span of each octave. The
player’s movement, like the sound, is conditioned by the instrument’s affordances.
When I play this measure, my right hand sweeps across the keys.19 (Video 1.1
uses motion-​capture imagery to trace this movement.) If I played the same notes
on the clarinet, though, my hands would remain in place while my fingers and
mouth did most of the work. And if I played them on a guitar or violin, I could
think of two kinds of falling gestures: one that moves down along the fret-​or fin-
gerboard and one that moves down across the strings.
From this perspective, thematic elements in the sonata’s introduction explore
diverse pianistic affordances. Before the plummeting close, the quiet singing theme
in octaves requires arm movement with a more or less fixed right-​hand shape,
while the left hand provides steady pulsing chords (mm. 5–​8).20 The melodic dou-
bling exploits acoustic relationships between octave-​related frequencies, but also

18. Along these lines, Eric Clarke extends the concept of affordance to music: “music affords danc-
ing, worship, co-​ordinated working, persuasion, emotional catharsis, marching, foot-​tapping, and
a myriad of other activities” (2005, 38).
19. This sweeping action returns in the descent that crashes into the recapitulation (mm. 186–​93).
Unlike the introduction’s closing, this is not fully chromatic. But at the level of the hand, the move-
ment from right to left, even larger than before, feels very much like an intensification of m. 9. The
feeling, I think, is enhanced because both drops are followed by the same music, the allegro theme
with thrumming left-​hand octaves and rising right-​hand dyads.
20. Beethoven sometimes specifies that parallel octaves be played in this manner, when they might be split
between the hands. This creates a particular keyboardistic effect, discussed by Taub (2002, 27–​28).
Figure 1.3  Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor, “Pathétique,”
op. 13, mvt. i, mm. 1–​10. Fingerings from an edition by Heinrich Schenker.
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  15

a keyboard that loosely coordinates this pitch distance with the average span of an
adult hand. In Figure 1.3, the fingering for the octaves given by editor Heinrich
Schenker alternates between thumb-​pinky and thumb–​ring finger pairings. This
performance strategy is facilitated by differences in finger length—​which make
the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the ring finger longer than the
corresponding distance between thumb and pinky (Baber 2003, 71–​72).
The sonata’s opening involves two-​handed chords with little lateral movement
(mm. 1–​4). The player’s hands are rhythmically coordinated but move in contrary
motion. This facilitates voice exchanges but also gives the player’s actions a mir-
rored quality, reflecting the symmetry of the pianist’s body.21 Again, this reflects
the instrument’s affordances, the complementarity of piano and pianist. It is possi-
ble because pianists’ hands develop more or less the same technique (as compared
with the specialization of violinists’ hands), because each finger can activate a note,
and because both hands are free to roam around the instrument (as compared
with saxophonists’ hands). When Beethoven repeats this opening motif—​before
the development (mm. 132–​35) and before the coda (mm. 294–​97)—​both sound-
ing and kinesthetic patterns recur. This obviously reflects an invariant correlation
between a pianist’s action and the resulting sound. But more importantly, both
sound and action are facilitated and constrained by the instrument’s affordances.
Just as gravity grounds the verticality schema, instruments provide the invari-
ance that enables players’ body-​sound coordination. Although instruments are not
needed for gestural analogues to music, their consistent mediation is essential to
instrumentalists’ auditory-​motor correspondences—​that is, to specific mappings
between actions and musical materials.
It is worth noting that perceptual symbol systems theory includes such exter-
nal grounding:  sensory representations map the world and may also be reacti-
vated by affordances in it (Barsalou 1999, 587–​88). Barsalou argues that situated
simulations—​ like Beethoven’s improvised auditory imagery—​ are organized
around “the action-​environment interface” (2003, 551–​52). And this ecological
emphasis distinguishes “grounded cognition” from “embodied cognition.” The
former assumes multiple forms of grounding, which might include bodily states
but also aspects of the environment, situated action, cognitive simulations, and so
forth (Barsalou 2008, 619).
A neuroimaging study by Marc Bangert and Eckart Altenmüller (2003) aligns
suggestively with this theoretical account of instrumental affordances and embod-
ied knowledge. The experimenters gave non-​musicians a series of ten lessons during
which they learned to play simple five-​finger melodies on a keyboard (see Figure 1.4).
The participants’ brain activity was measured by electroencephalography (EEG) at
the beginning, middle, and end of this five-​week process. During the EEG recording,
they listened to melodies like the ones they had played (but without actually play-
ing), and they played the keyboard (but without hearing the output). In other words,
their training always combined auditory and motor activity, but the testing kept them

21. Mirroring at the keyboard has been explored in various pieces, including Johannes Brahms’s
Intermezzi in E minor, op. 116, no. 5, and B♭ minor, op. 117, no. 2 (analyzed by Rings 2012, 41–​43),
and Béla Bartók’s “Fourths” and “Reflection” (nos. 131 and 141 from Mikrokosmos).
16  T  Music at Hand

Figure 1.4  Five-​finger melody used by Bangert and Altenmüller (2003, fig. 8),

representing the highest level of difficulty in the study. Pianists use numbers to
label fingers, counting up from the thumb (1) to the pinky (5).

Figure 1.5  Carl Czerny, “The Five Fingers,” op. 777, no. 1, mm. 1–​8.

separate. There was one difference between the groups: one played on a regular key-
board; the other played on a keyboard where the mapping between pitch and key
changed randomly after every piece. For the first group, then, the instrument’s affor-
dances were invariant; for the second, its affordances constantly changed. Bangert
and Altenmüller found that the group with regular affordances developed a strong
pattern of auditory-​motor coactivation—​the same kind of pattern seen in expert pia-
nists. And these connections started to emerge after only twenty minutes of practice.
The other group, despite weeks of practice, lacked this coactivation.22 With a highly
variable instrument, the usual links between hand and ear did not appear.
Though Bangert and Altenmüller use five-​finger melodies as experimental
stimuli, such tunes have been common in piano pedagogy since the early 1800s.
Carl Czerny—​a pianist-​composer who studied with Beethoven—​was a leading
proponent of the method, and he exhorted fledgling pianists to practice five-​finger
melodies “daily, with untiring diligence and the greatest attention” (1851, 13). As
is typical, Czerny’s “twenty-​four exercises on the five notes,” entitled “The Five
Fingers,” start with the right-​hand thumb on the tonic of C major (see Figure 1.5).
Further exercises in the set transpose this basic position to other keys. Moving the
hand during play, however, is deferred to a later stage, where it can be understood as
a shift between familiar positions. This pedagogical approach, then, aims to establish
a “home position,” in which associations between finger and scale degree are fixed.23

22. Further experiments with this general design might tease out the effects of varied repertoire. With
disjunct, dissonant melodies, it might take significantly longer to form a common representation
of ear and hand. I would expect simple diatonic chord progressions, however, to give results closer
to the five-​finger melodies from the original study.
23. The first pieces in the Suzuki violin repertoire reflect a similar strategy, albeit adapted to the affor-
dances of the violin: they are all in A major, using only the top two strings. The two semitones of
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  17

Such exercises do not simply strengthen the hands. They discipline students
in a broader sense, through a process that Michel Foucault calls the “instrumental
coding of the body” (1995, 153). As an example, Foucault cites instructions for
handling a rifle, found in an eighteenth-​century military treatise. Whether lifting,
carrying, or lowering his weapon, a soldier must follow a series of precise steps.
At each step, the instructions specify the position of hands, elbows, knees, fingers,
and so on, as well as their contact with parts of the gun. Soldier and rifle are inte-
grated like cogs in a machine, forming a body-​tool complex that may, in turn, be
incorporated into a larger military apparatus (164). Training in posture and move-
ment helps turn recruits into soldiers. It empowers bodies in new ways, while also
subjecting them to strict control.
In a similar way, Czerny’s teaching restricts and reshapes the piano student’s
bodily comportment.24 He explains how to sit at the piano and how to strike the
keys through a set of detailed rules (Czerny 1851, 3–​6), which recall the mili-
tary’s pursuit of correct posture and efficient movement. And his five-​finger exer-
cises coordinate parts of the body and parts of the instrument, combining and
recombining basic action components. Limiting students’ engagement with the
keyboard, of course, limits musical possibilities. But these restrictions also guar-
antee a high level of invariance, a predictability that should help sensitize them to
the instrument’s tonal and physical affordances—​or at least a basic subset thereof.
Even if these exercises foster somewhat rigid correspondences, they may still effec-
tively introduce beginners to instrumental links between action and sound.
Earlier I argued that Beethoven’s piano playing would stimulate his inner hear-
ing, but by now it is clear that this auditory-​motor coupling depends on instru-
ments. Beethoven’s instruments provided invariant correlations that engendered
patterns of neural coactivation. His instruments, then, did not just ground the
sound of his improvisations or his physical technique. By systematically connect-
ing the two, instruments made his embodied experience of phantasmal tones pos-
sible. Focusing on ecology thus leads to technology: the instrumentalist’s musical
capabilities emerge through interactions of body and world, technique and tool.

Habit, Concealing and Revealing

On this account, Beethoven’s improvisations are thoroughly habitual. They rely on

overlearned connections, developed through years of practice. Habitual playing,

A major are, in consequence, always located between the middle finger and ring finger, with the
same fingering on each string. Other strings and then finger positions are gradually introduced
throughout the method’s first book.
24. This discipline, of course, is not unique to Czerny. Elisabeth Le Guin considers its role in instru-
mental method books and dance pedagogy from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
(2006, 148–​53), while Ruth Solie (2004) shows how pianistic discipline contributed to the gen-
dered experience of middle-​class Victorian girls. Leslie Blasius (1996) relates this pedagogy, with
its decomposition and reconstruction of action, to earlier epistemologies of sensation.
18  T  Music at Hand

Figure 1.6  Basic keyboard chromatic-​scale fingering. The pattern uses the

thumb (1) on white notes and the middle finger (3) on black notes, adding in the
index finger (2) when there are two white notes in a row.

of course, is often derided as mechanical, unthinking. But is this not another

variation on the metaphysics of presence? A version that imagines self-​directed
subjectivity as the true origin of creative expression? This fantasy of pure self-​
awareness and self-​control mixes easily with other dualisms—​for example, setting
the creative mind against the automatized body. Yet habit may be both motoric
and mental. To be sure, because I am not fully aware of my habitual actions, they
may at times work against my conscious intentions (as when I  drive home “on
auto-​pilot,” even though I had planned to go to the grocery store). Nonetheless,
habit also enables human performance.
What do my fingers do when I  play that descent from the “Pathétique”?
They enact a series of interrelated moves, a chromatic-​scale pattern. The most
popular approach—​known as the “French fingering”—​alternates between the
thumb and middle finger, interpolating the index finger whenever there are
two white keys in a row (see Figure 1.6). Schenker’s fingering in Figure 1.3
follows the same logic but exchanges the roles of the index and middle fin-
gers.25 In both versions, the thumb is kept on white notes, reflecting a general
preference rule of keyboard fingerings: do not make this shorter digit reach for
the black keys. (This principle is clearly set forth, for example, in Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments [(1753/​
1762) 1949].) If asked, most expert pianists could explain the rationale for this
fingering. But they would rarely attend to this while playing the sonata. In per-
formance, the fingering feels automatic. After all, how could they perform the
piece fluently if they needed to consciously initiate every finger movement?

25. It locks into this pattern at the sixty-​fourth-​note septuplets. This fingering is associated with the
Polish-​Viennese pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky, a friend of Brahms (Verbalis 2012, app. 4).
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  19

Figure 1.7  Training melody and transfer melodies from Palmer and Meyer
(2000, 64).

The action must become habitual, so playing the scale feels like a single flow-
ing gesture.26
Such habitual actions are, again, both embodied and ecological. They inte-
grate hand and tool, body and world. Strictly speaking, Figure 1.6 does not pres-
ent a sequence of finger actions: it presents a sequence of finger-​key relationships.
Though pianists practice this fingering enough that it comes to feel relatively
invariant, the chromatic scale’s pattern of keys is actually more stable. Changing
the fingering does not necessarily change the sound; changing the keys does.
An experiment by Caroline Palmer and Rosalee Meyer (2000) reflects this dif-
ference between bodily and instrumental elements. They presented experienced
and novice pianists with a transfer-​of-​learning task. After practicing a particular
sequence, they would play another one as quickly as possible. The new examples
might share elements of the training melody:  some had the same sequence of
pitch classes but with different fingering; others preserved fingering patterns but
had different pitch classes (see Figure 1.7). With novice children pianists, learn-
ing transfer involved both physical actions and pitch relationships. With skilled
adult pianists, however, transfer occurred for pitch relationships, not motor rela-
tionships. Palmer and Meyer’s results point to an important difference between
experts with established performance habits, who may focus more on sound, and
less experienced players, who must focus more on hand movements.
Yet the way these authors frame their results is, in some ways, at odds with my
perspective, and examining these differences can help clarify the ecological impor-
tance of tools for perception. Palmer and Meyer write that “compared with novice
performers, skilled performers demonstrate more dissociation between abstract
sequence dimensions and movements, and a lower weighting of the movement
dimension” (2000, 67). In my view, this formulation is slightly misleading. Palmer

26. Habitual actions generally involve less activation in the brain and greater reliance on subcortical regions
than do novel actions. For a review of the neural underpinnings of habit, see Yin and Knowlton (2006).
20  T  Music at Hand

and Meyer’s description of pitch-​class sequences as “abstract” or “conceptual” is,

for example, somewhat problematic. The sound itself is immaterial, to be sure,
but it is also perceptually immediate. Furthermore, the repeated pitch classes
have a visible, tangible correlate in the pattern of keys on the instrument. The
excerpts that Palmer and Meyer call “conceptually same” are simply transposed
by an octave. In other words, this condition might just as accurately be described
as “pitch-​class same”—​or even “keyboard same.” This seems “abstract,” then, only
when the materiality of the instrument is overlooked.
Musical concepts, moreover, are not unique to the score or instrument: they
are also present in the pianist’s actions. After all, this experiment would not
be possible if the musical notation could not represent both the notes and the
fingering.27 To interpret the notation, participants in the experiment needed
pianistic finger categories (which differ from those of guitarists or violinists).
Such categories are deeply ingrained: for example, pianists have difficulty sight-​
reading a notated melody that has incongruent fingering indications (Stewart
et al. 2004).
Finally, the “dissociation” between pitch and movement might be better
understood as a mobile, flexible association between action and instrument. While
beginners often have one-​to-​one associations between fingers and keys (supported
by the “home-​position” pedagogy discussed earlier), skilled pianists can associ-
ate the same pitch-​key pattern with any number of motoric patterns. Palmer and
Meyer’s experiment shows that this remapping is effectively effortless for experts,
having no effect on their performance. Paradoxically, then, particular motor pat-
terns seem less important for expert pianists—​but only because they have devel-
oped their instrumental skills to a point where they require minimal attention.28
Phenomenologically, this situation is readily described in Martin Heidegger’s
Being and Time ([1927] 2010, 69). For Heidegger, tools are handy (zuhanden)
because they “withdraw” from my awareness. This lets me focus not on the tools,
but on the work. While I am fixing the porch railings with my father-​in-​law, I do
not contemplate the hammer as an object. Instead I use it actively, as means to an
end. Of course, this withdrawal is possible only when a tool can be trusted—​in
Gibsonian terms, when its affordances are invariant—​and when its use is habit-
ual.29 In this sense, habit hides the hammer.
But as habit conceals, it also reveals. When the tool changes my abilities, it
also changes the way I perceive the world. For example, objects beyond my nor-
mal reach appear closer when I plan to reach them with a tool (Witt and Riley
2014, 1356–​57). As such, Merleau-​Ponty argues that motor habits are also per-
ceptual habits. To illustrate, he discusses navigation with a cane. Once the cane

27. For a philosophical discussion of keyboard fingering indications as a supplement to staff notation,
see Szendy (2016, 47–​68).
28. As Palmer and Meyer note, the expert performers might show greater motor learning if the task
were more challenging (2000, 67).
29. If the hammer breaks or is missing, Heidegger adds, it demands conscious attention. Suddenly it
is no longer handy but “present-​to-​hand” (vorhanden). When practicing a new piece of music, for
example, I stop to work out fingerings only when a passage is especially difficult or unusual. This
kind of breakdown will be explored in Chapter 4.
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  21

becomes familiar, it withdraws. The person using it feels things through the cane’s
tip. Merleau-​Ponty emphasizes that this does not involve explicit reasoning about
the pressure of the cane in the hand, the position of the tip, the position of things
in the environment, and so forth. Instead, habit “relieves” the navigator of this
work. As Merleau-​Ponty writes, “The pressures on the hand and the cane are no
longer given, the cane is no longer an object that the blind man would perceive, it
has become an instrument with which he perceives” (2012, 154).30
My eyeglasses withdraw from my awareness in a similar way. I usually look
through them rather than perceive them directly. Why is this, given that the glasses
significantly modify my vision? According to the philosopher Don Ihde, they can
withdraw because they are transparent. Though they modify perception, they iso-
morphically reflect invariants in the world. In this sense, the stick is “transparent”
too. Yet the transformation of perceptual experience by the glasses or the stick is
not neutral: “for every revealing transformation there is a simultaneously conceal-
ing transformation of the world, which is given through a technological mediation”
(Ihde 1990, 49, emphasis in original). Ihde’s studies of technoscience suggest that
scientific instruments often create knowledge by modifying vision, making the
invisible visible. With a telescope, I can see objects that are extremely distant; with
a microscope, objects that are extremely small. Learning to focus a telescope or
microscope again combines action and perception. As scientists learn to adjust
these instruments, they also learn how to see through them. Ultrasound techni-
cians, for example, view the images they produce in a different way than expect-
ant parents, because they have acquired particular perceptual habits. As Hubert
Dreyfus puts it, “What one has learned appears in the way the world shows up”
(2002, 373).
Cultural or symbolic invariance can also facilitate a kind of transparency (Ihde
1990, 82). As you read this book, do you consciously identify each individual let-
ter? Hopefully not. Instead, thanks to habits of literacy, familiar shapes on the
page withdraw, revealing a world of discourse. (Of course, these same habits can
easily conceal typographic errors!) Musical notation works in a similar manner.
For literate musicians, the lines, clefs, note-​heads, beams, flags, and dots on the
page may coalesce into melodies and chords. In such moments, a score is less an
object of perception than a medium for perception. And something similar can
happen with musical instruments. As Merleau-​Ponty writes, “Musical notation
would not be a language and the organ would not be an instrument if the manner
in which one writes and in which one plays a note did not comprise a systematic
principle and did not as a consequence include the manner in which one writes
and in which one plays the other notes” (1963, 121). The section on habit in his
Phenomenology of Perception culminates in a discussion of the organ. It is a key
passage, worth quoting at length:

30. The results of an experiment by Serino and colleagues (2007) are consistent with Merleau-​Ponty’s
claims. Learning to navigate with a stick expanded participants’ sense of personal space, and this
effect was well established with blind participants who regularly used a cane in this manner. (I will
return to this study in Chapter 2.) Incidentally, navigating with a stick is a classic philosopher’s
example, appearing as early as Descartes’s Optics ([1637] 2001, 67–​68).
22  T  Music at Hand

An experienced organist is capable of playing an unfamiliar organ, whose key-

boards are more or less numerous, whose stops are differently arranged than
those on his customary instrument. He needs but an hour of practice to be ready
to perform his program…. He sits on the bench, engages the pedals, and pulls
out the stops, he sizes up the instrument with his body, he incorporates its direc-
tions and dimensions, and he settles into the organ as one settles into a house. He
does not learn positions in objective space for each stop and each pedal, nor does
he entrust such positions to “memory.” During the rehearsal—​just as during the
performance—​the stops, the pedals, and the keyboards are only presented to him
as powers of such and such an emotional or musical value, and their position as
those places through which this value appears in the world. Between the musical
essence of the piece such as it is indicated in the score and the music that actually
resonates around the organ, such a direct relationship is established that the body
of the organist and the instrument are nothing other than the place of passage of
this relation. (2012, 146–​47, translation altered)

During this brief rehearsal, the organist does not measure the distance between
stops in centimeters or contemplate it in a disinterested manner. It is in this sense
that the space of the organ is not an “objective space” but a lived space, an expres-
sive space, a space in which the skilled body feels at home. Because of the organ-
ist’s habits, the keys and stops show up as musical possibilities and, in a successful
performance, the body and instrument seem to withdraw into the music. “From
then on,” Merleau-​Ponty concludes, “the music exists for itself, and everything else
exists through it” (2012, 147).
Likewise, for the expert pianists in Palmer and Meyer’s study, the keyboard is
less an object of perception than a medium for perception. They access melodies
in or through the instrument. Beginning pianists gaze at their hands on the keys,
working hard to find the right notes in this field of black and white. But for expert
pianists, familiar patterns stand out at a glance. This allowed Beethoven to con-
tinue giving lessons, even after he had trouble hearing conversation. According to
Carl Friedrich Hirsch, who studied with Beethoven from 1816 to 1817, the com-
poser would catch students’ mistakes by closely watching their hands on the keys
(Thayer 1967, 664).31 Like the Heideggerian handyman, Beethoven focused not on
the piano, but on the music.
Later chapters will revise this initial account of habit, particularly Chapter 4.
For now, I will note that withdrawal is never complete, and this is partly because
habit is never complete. I am using two senses of the word “complete” here, mean-
ing both “full” and “finalized.” First, habits have limits. They apply only within a

31. Stories of Beethoven’s teaching resonate with an fMRI study by Hasegawa et al. (2004). In it, pia-
nists watched silent videos of hands pressing piano keys. Expert pianists were able to identify
familiar pieces by sight. While watching the videos, they displayed increased activation in the left
planum temporale, a part of the brain that is involved in lip-​reading, which integrates auditory
and visual information. In a similar study by Giacomo Novembre and Peter Keller (2011), pianists
watched silent videos of a hand playing chord sequences and copied the sequences on a muted
keyboard. They were slower to imitate chords that were harmonically unexpected. But even slower
were responses to harmonically expected chords that were fingered in an unusual way. On visual
expertise in guitarists, see Crump, Logan, and Kimbrough (2012).
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  23

certain genre of action. For example, chord shapes that are second nature to a jazz
pianist may be foreign to a classical pianist. Second, habits, unlike innate reflexes,
are acquired and more or less flexible. A habit can stagnate, of course. But since
it has been learned in the first place, it can also be unlearned, relearned. Habit,
in other words, is not fixed but dynamic, just like the patterns of brain activation
discussed by Barsalou.
Note also that these examples of habit involve things—​hammers, canes, eye-
glasses, microscopes, books, organs, pianos. These objects are not neutral. They
afford particular kinds of motor and perceptual habits; they reveal certain pos-
sibilities, while concealing others. Like the body, then, each of these things can be
understood as a medium for having a world.

Prosthesis and Poiesis

If the keyboard enhanced Beethoven’s auditory imagination, the piano might be

described as a kind of hearing aid. Indeed, just as Beethoven used ear trumpets
to help him in conversation, he sought modified instruments that might prolong
his aural access to music. In 1817, for example, he wrote to Andreas Streicher,
“Be so kind as to adjust one of your pianos for me to suit my impaired hearing. It
should be as loud as possible.” Years later, Conrad Graf, the pianoforte-​maker for
the imperial court, would build Beethoven an amplifying “resonance plate” that
attached to his grand piano (Ealy 1994, 271). In this view, the piano, like eyeglasses
or a blind person’s cane, would be a prosthesis.
And yet there is a key difference between the piano and the ear trumpet. The
ear trumpet transforms sounds in the world, amplifying them for a listener. But
the piano is used to make sounds that do not already exist. A musical instrument,
in other words, is poietic. “Poietic”—​like poiēsis, the Greek noun from which it is
derived—​refers to the domain of production, to all kinds of making.
For many musicologists, these terms will recall the musical semiotics of Jean-​
Jacques Nattiez (1990), whose “poietic level” examines the perspectives of music-​
makers—​principally composers and performers. But my use of the word draws on
Heidegger’s “Die Frage nach der Technik.”32 In this essay, the philosopher famously
claims that the essence of technology is nothing technological. That is, technology
is not just about modern machines or industrialization. Seeking an older con-
cept of technology, Heidegger turns to another Greek term: technē. “Technē,” he
explains, “is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but
also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-​forth,
to poiēsis; it is something poietic” (1977, 12–​13). At its core, technology is about
making, about revealing a world.
Technē, though, does not refer to the act of making (Heidegger 2008, 184).
Instead, technē is a mode of knowledge. Throughout antiquity, the term is

32. Heidegger’s title is typically translated as “The Question Concerning Technology,” though Samuel
Weber (1989, 980–​82) argues that a more accurate version would be “Questing after Technics.”
24  T  Music at Hand

persistently linked to music, even specifically with musical instruments. In dia-

logues by Plato and Xenophon, Socrates repeatedly says that technē is needed to
play the flute and the lyre. A later Platonic work The Sophist similarly mentions
a musician’s technē, the art or craft of combining notes (Parry 2007). This active
knowledge empowers a player to exploit an instrument’s affordances, to bring
forth a world of sonic relationships, to make music.33
At the etymological and conceptual root of “techno-​logy,” then, is poietic
know-​how, a way of understanding based in making. From this perspective, tech-
nique and technology complement each other. The instrument, together with my
action, reveals a world. That phrasing—​with the artifact first, as the subject of
the verb—​might evoke questions about technical agency, which I will defer until
Chapter 3. At present, I want to suggest that poietic know-​how may belong not
only to the tool user, but also to the tool itself.
This suggestion invokes research on distributed cognition, such as Edwin
Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild (1995). The book presents an ethnographic case
study of a vessel in the US Navy, an amphibious helicopter transport that he calls
the Palau. Besides analyzing the ship’s social organization, Hutchins examines
many of the Palau’s navigational instruments. He concludes that these tools do
not simply amplify the cognitive capacities of their users. Instead, they typically,
and sometimes radically, change the task at hand. For example, sailors must often
calculate interrelated quantities of distance, rate, and time (147–​55). A  pencil
and paper may be used to record the numbers, holding them in a kind of exter-
nal memory while the navigator focuses on algebraic and arithmetic operations.
Alternatively, the calculations can be done with a three-​scale nomogram, a kind
of nautical slide rule. Since the appropriate mathematical relations are encoded in
the slide rule, the navigator’s task then involves lining up indices with numbers on
scales. Computational constraints are built into the physical structure of the tool
(96). It embodies cultural knowledge and strategies, and precludes certain kinds of
mistakes. In this sense, instruments may know things for their users.
The piano, for example, “knows” a certain pitch-​class collection: the notes of
the equal-​tempered chromatic scale. But it does not present twelve undifferenti-
ated steps. Instead, it materially highlights particular tonal structures endemic to
Western music. Its physical opposition of a diatonic white-​note scale with inter-
vening black-​note semitones corresponds to the notational culture of natural
and chromatically inflected pitches, and the resulting pattern of twos and threes
functions as a visual and tactile reference point for the player. This means, of
course, that white-​note modes like C major are easy to play. But the keyboard’s
topology highlights other patterns too. No less than Frédéric Chopin suggested
that B major fits the hand better than C, because it matches black keys—​les
touches hautes (literally, “the high keys”)—​with long fingers (1993, 66). In certain

33. Turning briefly to a philosophical technicality, this does not involve fixed, unchanging presence, but
a presence with temporality, presence that is revealed and concealed. In an essay on Rilke, Heidegger
describes this kind of presence using a musical metaphor: “our being is song, and indeed a song whose
singing does not resound just anywhere but is truly a singing, a song whose sound does not cling to some-
thing that is eventually attained, but which has already shattered itself even in the sounding” (2008, 184).
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  25

Figure 1.8  Frédéric Chopin, Étude in G♭ major, “Black Keys,” op. 10, no. 5,

mm. 1–​4.

respects, the black-​note pentatonic collection might be even easier to play. The
concert pianist Lang Lang demonstrates this in a parody of Chopin’s Étude in G♭,
op. 10, no. 5. Like all of Chopin’s études, this piece is a virtuoso tour de force. Its
melody flutters up and down the keyboard, always on the black keys that give
the composition its nickname (see Figure 1.8). Lang Lang brings out this “black-​
keyness” when he plays the piece backstage—​with an orange!34 As he realizes the
accompaniment figure with his left hand, he holds the fruit in his right and, fol-
lowing the melodic contour, drags it over the raised black keys. The result is not,
of course, a precise rendering of Chopin’s original—​but it is remarkably close,
instantly recognizable to listeners who are familiar with the piece. The trick is
possible because the étude exploits some of the keyboard’s distinctive tonal and
physical affordances. It works because the piano “knows” the pentatonic scale and
because it takes care of tuning.
Piano tuning, in fact, is an excellent example of distributed cognition. As
Chopin himself observed, intonation is “the tuner’s task,” and consequently “the
piano is free of one of the greatest difficulties encountered in the study of an
instrument” (quoted in Eigeldinger 1986, 23). Pianists rely on specialist techni-
cians to put their instruments in order. From there, tuning is a fact of the instru-
ment. The player cannot change it in performance. With a poorly maintained
piano, this can be a problem. Otherwise, it is quite useful. This is why Beethoven’s
late improvisations on violin or viola were “the most painful,” while his piano
playing might still be praised. For example, Clara Schumann’s father, Friedrich
Wieck, heard Beethoven improvise at the keyboard in 1826. “He played in a flow-
ing, genial manner,” Wieck reported, “… weaving in the clearest and most charm-
ing melodies” (quoted in Ealy 1994, 272). As Hutchins observed, the instrument
fundamentally changes the task at hand. When I  play a conventionally tuned
piano, I might hit the wrong note—​but I cannot produce a note between the steps
of the chromatic scale, a note without a name. Even when played with an orange,
the keyboard, as a space for action, brings forth a pitch world that is culturally
and historically specific.
Given these ideas about poiesis and distributed cognition, it seems best to be
careful about treating instruments as prostheses, as devices that extend the body’s
34. This video can be accessed at http://​youtu.be/​oiziGLe1jBw.
26  T  Music at Hand

“natural” sound-​producing capacities.35 Commonsense examples of prostheses,

such as artificial limbs, may imply that prostheses replace some function that has
been damaged. Marshall McLuhan takes this negative thinking to an extreme
when he claims that extension involves a kind of “self-​amputation” (1994, 45).
I prefer a broader concept of prostheticity. According to the philosopher Bernard
Stiegler, “A ‘prosthesis’ does not supplement something, does not replace what
would have been there before it and would have been lost:  it is added” (1998,
152). This definition goes back to an older, Greek sense of the word, which com-
bines thesis—​that is, putting or placing—​with the prefix pros-​, meaning in front
of, in addition to, or close to. A  pros-​thesis is something placed in front. It is
“what is outside” (193).
For Stiegler, the prosthesis can be outside in two ways. First, it is set in front
of me spatially. The piano is an external thing, fairly solid and stable. Unlike
my vocal cords, it is always located at a certain distance from my body. Second,
the prosthesis might be set in advance of me temporally. The piano in my front
room was built in the 1930s, which means that it is older than my parents. Yet
even a new piano engages this temporal dimension, since the piano as an instru-
ment preexists me. Here Stiegler’s understanding of prosthesis is tied up in a
phenomenological understanding of historicality. “Prostheticity,” he writes, “is
the being-​already-​there of the world, and also, consequently, the being-​already-​
there of the past” (235). This draws on Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness”
(Geworfenheit), an essential part of human existence (2010, 127–​28). I cannot
choose when or where I am born. Instead I find myself “thrown” into a world, a
history, and a culture that is already there, over which I have had no control. One
of Stiegler’s main tasks in Technics and Time is to show how technical objects
contribute to this already-​there, forming a kind of durable, external memory
that makes human culture possible. The piano, as part of the already-​there, offers
a certain access to a past through which I have not lived. It makes it possible for
me to play the “Pathétique,” remaking music from long before my birth, long
after Beethoven’s death.
When Beethoven improvised, then, he was bringing forth a world made
possible by instruments. That is not to deny the composer’s agency or his
musical innovations but to note how instrumentality is inevitably historical.
To borrow an image from Theodor Adorno, the improviser is like a child at
the piano, who feels around for a chord that has never been touched, never
been heard. “This chord, however, was always already there,” Adorno writes,
“the possible combinations are limited, and actually everything is already
stuck inside the keyboard” (2002, 32, translation modified). The interaction
of body and instrument—​with all its cognitive consequences—​is an interac-
tion of individual and culture, present and past. Instruments ground modes of
music cognition that are embodied, technically conditioned, and historically
situated.

35. Taking instruments as prostheses is common in writings on musical evolution—​see, e.g., Cross
(2007). (I discuss this trend more extensively in De Souza 2014.)
 Beethoven’s Prosthesis  T  27

Conclusions

“The music which he thus produced was frightful, though in his mind it was pure
and harmonious.” In a sense, Schindler was right. When the deaf composer impro-
vised, there was a gap between the sounds he made and the sounds he “heard.” But
to explain this situation, I have argued that Beethoven’s mind was integrated with
his hands, his tools, and a broader musical world. This means that Beethoven’s
imagination, which might have been understood as an instance of purest interior-
ity, instead shows how interiority and exteriority are irreducibly entangled.
Interiority and exteriority, mind and body, self-​control and habit… As the
chapter wraps up, consider one more dichotomy: cognition and perception. For
proponents of grounded cognition, there can be no clean break between the two
(e.g., Goldstone and Barsalou 1998). On the one hand, higher-​level cognition
engages the brain’s sensorimotor systems, and it is affected by bodily activity.36
On the other, when an animal perceives a predator—​even when a bacterium pre-
fers one form of sugar to another—​its behavior is already imbued with a kind of
sense-​making that, for some thinkers, represents a minimal form of cognition.37
This is not to ignore useful distinctions between cognition and perception but to
emphasize, once again, how they are entwined. It suggests that the essence of cog-
nition is nothing “cognitive,” meaning that thinking is just not about calculation or
symbolic logic but is, more generally, about making sense of the world. Moreover,
this implies that it is possible to think with one’s body. In Heidegger’s words, “All
the work of the hand is rooted in thinking” (1968, 16).
Beethoven at the keyboard, then, would be thinking with his hands and think-
ing with his instrument. Instrumental practice would offer not only a way of mak-
ing music, but also ways of perceiving, imagining, inventing, and reflecting on it.
Of course, this argument is not specifically about Beethoven. His example evinces
body-​instrument interactions and cognitive processes that are widespread—​forms
of grounding that constitute instrumentalists as such. Still, some implications of this
argument are more or less specific to expert instrumentalists. For amateur players,
action-​sound integration may develop to a lesser degree, and singers, dancers, and
listeners who do not play musical instruments would exhibit different patterns of
multisensory coactivation.38 Yet this framework also predicts differences among
skilled instrumentalists. Insofar as a keyboard differs from a fretboard, a pianist’s
habits will differ from a guitarist’s habits. This should affect performative action,
sound, and experience. To address these distinctions, though, the investigation must
go beyond general principles to analyze the affordances of particular instruments.

36. Psychological studies of gesture offer evidence for bodily influences on thought (Goldin-​Meadow
and Beilock 2010). For example, problem-​solving strategies change when participants’ hand move-
ment is restricted (Alibali et al. 2011).
37. The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela advance this view in Autopoiesis and
Cognition. For them, “living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cog-
nition” (1980, 13, emphasis in original).
38. For example, extensive vocal practice leads to structural changes in the brain, which differentiate
expert singers from instrumentalists (Halwani et al. 2010).
CHAPTER 
Two
Sounding Actions

According to Leonard Meyer, listening to music is like riding a bike (1973, 15–​16).
An experienced listener may safely ignore music theory and history, just as a
cyclist may ignore the bicycle’s engineering or physics. Riding a bicycle, of course,
is a standard example of know-​how.1 That is to say, knowing how the bike works
is not the same as knowing how to work it, and I cannot acquire this skill merely
by reading a book or watching others ride. Instead I learn how to do it by doing
it. I become a competent cyclist by pedaling and breaking, balancing or falling,
again and again. Meyer’s analogy usefully frames musical listening as habit and
skill, as procedural rather than declarative knowledge. Yet there is also a significant
difference between these activities: cycling is a form of human-​machine interac-
tion. And on this level, riding a bicycle seems less like listening than like playing
a musical instrument.
A phenomenological description of cycling can help flesh out the compari-
son, and such a description might begin with the rider’s body. On the bicycle my
feet  alternate, much as they do while I  walk. Right and left, up and down, for-
ward and backward. But cycling feet, unlike walking feet, never strike the ground.
Instead they stay in contact with the pedals and move with them, while my hands
do the same with the handlebars. As the handlebars swivel to the left or right, as
I turn them with my hands, the bike tilts; my whole body leans. Steering, like rid-
ing in general, thus involves a play of balance and instability. In all of this, my body
is integrated with the bicycle. Together we form a system. After all, the bike cannot
ride itself without me.
In a sense, I  am the bicycle’s engine. My legs power the wheels, and when
I pedal harder, they go faster. Still, there is a gap between my action and the bicy-
cle’s movement. It continues to roll after I have stopped pedaling. The bicycle, then,
does not simply absorb my energy; it amplifies it. Of course, this process is medi-
ated by the terrain, which is why cycling can reveal subtle declines and inclines
in an otherwise familiar path. While coasting downhill with the wind in my face,
riding faster than I can run, I need not pedal—​even if I do, the pedals may spin
freely. But while I am climbing uphill, those pedals feel stiff, and I become aware of
my own heaviness and that of the bicycle. In both cases, I may shift gears, trying to
maintain a satisfying resistance in the pedals, a sense of grip. Here I feel the bicycle
but also the ground through the bicycle. I  can feel, for example, when the path

1. This example is famously discussed by the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1958, 50), who
is cited later in Meyer’s essay.
 Sounding Actions  T  29

changes from asphalt to gravel. Riding a bicycle, in the end, can be understood
as a way of being in the world. As it alters my capacity for movement, the bicycle
transforms my experience of space, of speed, and of my own body.
Both riding and playing instruments involve a complementarity of technol-
ogy and technique. Both involve habit and withdrawal. But where the bicycle
converts action into momentum, musical instruments convert action into sound.
This chapter’s first task is to theorize that conversion. How do various instruments
transmit a player’s actions? How do they transform a player’s energy? Which sonic
parameters reflect bodily action? Which reflect instrumental affordances? Though
it starts by investigating sound production, this line of thinking ultimately reveals
how a musical instrument, like a bicycle, can mediate experiences of the body
itself.

Sounding Objects

Strike a cowbell with a stick, and it rings. A momentary touch has initiated vibra-
tions that stretch out in time and space. Of course, just as terrain affects the
bicycle’s momentum, performance environment can modify the bell’s sound. For
example, its ringing lasts longer in a reverberant concert hall. Nonetheless, the
sound emanates from the cowbell itself, from this quivering piece of metal. And
its sonic texture reflects that origin.
This relation between sound and source is central to ecological acoustics,
a branch of Gibsonian psychology that considers how animals tune in to sonic
aspects of their environments. People can hear the size of an object dropped into
water and the hardness of a mallet hitting a pan; they can hear the difference
between running upstairs and downstairs, between clapping with cupped or flat
hands (Gaver 1988; Freed 1990; Repp 1987). For ecological acoustics, sounds are
rich in information about the material forces that create them. Of course, such
information does not determine perception. Attending to sources represents only
one possible mode of listening, and the source of a given sound may be ambigu-
ous, unfamiliar, or misidentified.2 Still, this seems more likely with listeners who
are distanced from a sound source than with players who can hear, touch, and see
their instruments. Here different senses interact without fully converging. Insofar
as sound indexes objects, hearing communicates with other sensory modalities. “I
hear the hardness and the unevenness of the cobblestones in the sound of a car,”
writes Merleau-​Ponty, “and we are right to speak of a ‘soft,’ ‘dull,’ or ‘dry’ sound”
(2012, 239).
Or, with the cowbell, a metallic sound. In other words, the instrument’s timbre
can reveal aspects of its material. As William Gaver explains, “The damping of

2. Such misidentification may be fostered, though, by instruments that imitate other instruments—​for
example, the lute clavier (which I discuss in Chapter 5) or synthesizers (see De Souza, forthcoming).
Chapter 6 examines modes of listening in greater detail. For a critique of deterministic applications
of ecological acoustics (in discourse on electronic music), see Demers (2010, 36–​37).
30  T  Music at Hand

Figure 2.1  A standard cowbell pattern from salsa music (used with a 3:2 clave
pattern). The bottom line corresponds to the mouth of the bell, the higher line to
the body.

wood tends to be much greater than that of metal, which is why wood ‘thunks’
and metal ‘rings’ ” (1993, 11).3 Meanwhile, the bell’s frequency reflects its size
and shape—​aspects of the instrument’s configuration. Bigger bells, obviously,
are pitched lower. And parts of a single cowbell afford distinct tones: the mouth
sounds lower and fuller; the body, higher. This contrast is central to cowbell play-
ing, for example, in salsa music (see Figure 2.1). In all of this, the sound of the
instrument is predicated on its physical structure.
Yet ecological acoustics also considers the physical interactions that give rise
to sound—​in this case, how the cowbell is struck. Gaver specifically distinguishes
between the sonic effects of interaction, material, and configuration (see Table
2.1) and describes how interaction principally affects dynamic and temporal fea-
tures of the sound.4 Tapped gently, the bell is quiet; whacked, it yelps. The loudness
communicates the force of my attack. Note, too, the temporal difference between
striking the bell and scraping it. And the timing of the attacks corresponds exactly
to the sounding rhythm. From this perspective, sounds express ecological relation-
ships. Recall the example of looking at a chair as I walk toward it (in Chapter 1),
where visual invariants give information about the chair and changes give infor-
mation about my movement. Likewise, in the cowbell pattern in Figure 2.1, sonic
invariants reflect the instrument, while changes reveal the player’s movement. This
doubling—​this intertwining of action and effect—​underlies instrumentalists’
auditory-​motor coupling. Like a bicycle wheel, the instrument converts and
amplifies an aspect of my action. As I make the bell speak, it makes my energy
audible.
So hitting a cowbell may not be as simple as it seems. But how well does this
percussive model generalize to other instruments? Consider an instrumental
continuum proposed by Arnie Cox, which starts from a similar understand-
ing of sound production.5 Cox’s continuum ranges from instruments with
“no mediating device between the hands or mouth,” to instruments played via
implements (like mallets, bows, or keys), to electronic instruments, to mix-
ers and computers (2011, 16).6 By this point, musicians no longer provide the

3. Damping reduces the amplitude of oscillations (for example, through resistance, friction, or absorp-
tion of energy).
4. The stick’s material again affects timbre: obviously, the attack of a wooden drumstick differs from
that of a soft-​tipped mallet.
5. For Cox, the relation between embodied action and sonic patterns fits into broader ideas about
listening and mimetic motor imagery, already mentioned in Chapter 1.
6. Cox’s continuum also extends to “music not performed primarily or solely by performers,” such as
birdsong or the “music” of a noisy factory (2011, 16). Since this category involves neither instru-
ments nor players, I will set it aside here.
 Sounding Actions  T  31

Table 2.1  Acoustic effects of source attributes (Gaver 1993, 11)

Source Effects on the sound wave

Interaction
Type Amplitude function, spectrum
Force Amplitude, bandwidth
Material
Restoring force Frequency
Density Frequency
Damping Amplitude functions; also frequency
Homogeneity Complex effects on amplitude; also frequency
Configuration
Shape Frequency, spectral pattern
Size Frequency, bandwidth
Resonating cavities Spectral pattern
Support Amplitude functions, frequency, spectrum

energy that produces sound. This is a continuum of increasing mediation, then,

in which the player gradually loses touch with the site of sound production.
On one side, action and sound correlate; on the other, they dissociate. This
difference, however, cannot be reduced to an opposition between analog and
digital instruments. Though digital technologies sometimes obscure a per-
former’s movement, they may also amplify it. For example, the sensors in Tod
Machover’s “hyperbow” modify sonic output through gestural control.7 Insofar
as they afford continuous sonification of my movements, such technologies
arguably give more information about the body than the pointed sound of a
cowbell. And this is to say that the coupling of action and sound is not just nat-
ural but often engineered. On an electronic piano with touch-​sensitive keys, the
dynamics reflect the force with which I press the keys. A seventeenth-​century
harpsichord, by contrast, does not convey this aspect of my action. Whether it
is played roughly or softly, the harpsichord’s volume stays the same. Action and
sound, then, do not necessarily diverge as instruments become more complex
or as the number of mediators between my body and the vibrating medium
increases.
Besides ranking different degrees of mediation, then, it is important to identify
different kinds of mediation. The challenge is to tease apart various aspects of the
sound, various functions of the instrument, to make sense of the diverse ways that
musical instruments transform energy into sound. To that end, I turn to a distinc-
tive scholar in the field of organology—​whose work has surprising affinities with
contemporary music theory.

7. For more on Machover’s “hyperinstruments” see http://​opera.media.mit.edu/​projects/​hyperinstru-

ments.html.
32  T  Music at Hand

Instrumental Systems

Organology, the study of musical instruments, is inherently interdisciplinary, cov-

ering the science and engineering of instruments as well as their historical and
cultural aspects. Modern organology typically classifies instruments in terms of
the physics of sound production. For example, the widely used system of Erich von
Hornbostel and Curt Sachs divides instruments into four categories: idiophones
(“self-​sounding” instruments, such as bells and woodblocks); membranophones
(instruments with a stretched, vibrating membrane, such as drums and kazoos);
chordophones (instruments with vibrating strings, such as guitars and pianos);
and aerophones (instruments with vibrating air columns, such as flutes and pipe
organs). This scheme aims to include “the whole range of ancient and modern,
European and extra-​European instruments”—​and even instruments that have
yet to be invented (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961, 7).8 Its claims to universality are
founded on the science of acoustics. Yet somewhat paradoxically, this foundation
also reveals modern organology’s historical origins in nineteenth-​century Europe,
where acoustical research enjoyed great prestige and influence.9 By contrast,
Herbert Heyde’s Grundlagen des natürlichen Systems der Musikinstrumente (1975)
develops an organology that is grounded in a scientific trend of the mid-​twentieth
century: cybernetics.10
Cybernetics is popularly associated with virtual reality (as in the terms “cyber-
space,” “cyberattack,” and “cybersex”) and human-​technology hybrids (as in the
“cyborg” or “cybernetic organism”). But the field of cybernetics, as developed
in the 1940s and 1950s, investigates systems in general, whether technological,
biological, psychological, or social. Cybernetics is concerned not with a system’s
material properties but with its abstract structure and behavior. As Ross Ashby
puts it, “Cybernetics stands to the real machine—​electronic, mechanical, neural,
or economic—​much as geometry stands to a real object” (1956, 2). For example,
consider Claude Shannon’s model of a general communication system, first pub-
lished in 1948 (see Figure 2.2).11 In this system, a message from some information
source is fed into a transmitter. The transmitter encodes this message and passes it

8. In practice, electrical and electronic instruments pose problems for Hornbostel and Sachs’s scheme
(Kartomi 1990, 172–​74). Also, some scholars have criticized organology for prioritizing a kind of
scientism over social context (e.g., Bates 2012), in an argument that parallels attacks on music-​
theoretical formalism.
9. More broadly, nineteenth-​century organology emerged at the intersections of acoustics, industrial-
ized instrument-​making, museum culture, and colonial encounters with non-​Western music (see
De Souza 2013, 7–​14).
10. My discussion here responds only to the central section of Heyde’s 1975 treatise, titled “Systemklasse”
(Kartomi gives a brief overview of the book [1990, 189–​90]). Moreover, cybernetic thinking does
not characterize Heyde’s later scholarship, which explores diverse topics in the history and sci-
ence of musical instruments and organological methodology (e.g., Heyde 2001). He has also had
a distinguished curatorial career, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions, and
received the Curt Sachs Award from the American Musical Instrument Society in 1991.
11. Incidentally, Shannon—​one of the founders of information theory—​collected musical instruments
(Gallager 2001, 2683).
 Sounding Actions  T  33

Figure 2.2  Claude Shannon’s general communication system (after Shannon

1964, 34).
information
source transmitter receiver destination

message signal received message

signal

noise source

to a receiver, though not without interference from an external noise source. The
receiver then decodes the signal, hopefully reproducing the original message. For
Shannon’s purposes, it does not matter whether the signal is sent via telephone
wires, radio waves, or light beams. For a mathematical theory of communication,
each element in the system may be treated as a “black box,” reduced to a particular
function. This generalizing move—​a strategy of dematerialization—​has provoked
philosophical critiques of cybernetics (and the computationalist cognitive science
that still bears its influence), though it also facilitates the application of cybernetic
ideas in diverse domains.12
To approach musical instruments as cybernetic systems, Heyde starts by
black-​boxing instrumental components (1975, 22). The difference between
Heyde’s and Hornbostel and Sach’s approach is striking. For Heyde, a string, a
reed, and a drumhead belong to the same basic category (27). Each is a transducer,
which takes energy from some activator—​for example, a percussionist’s hand or
an organ’s windchest—​and changes it to sound. Every instrument couples an acti-
vator with a transducer. Instruments may optionally include further functional
components, which are listed in Table 2.2, with Heyde’s abbreviations and origi-
nal German terms. The signal may pass through a mediator (like a violin bow) on
its way to the transducer or through a channel at any stage. Controllers, resona-
tors, and couplers may modify the signal. The remaining categories—​intermediate
transducer, modulator, and amplifier—​ are specific to electric and electronic
instruments. After describing these categories (and subcategories within them),
Heyde combines them in a general musical instrument system (Ganzsystem der
Musikinstrument) (62). Any musical instrument, he claims, can be constructed as
a subset of elements from the Ganzsystem. Like Shannon’s communication sys-
tem, a musical instrument system is a system of inputs and outputs, which trans-
mits and transforms a signal.
For music theorists, Heyde’s functional categories—​arranged in a particular
order, with some essential and some optional elements—​may resemble a common

12. Hayles (1999) and Pickering (2009) offer critical histories of cybernetics, while Meyer (1967) com-
bines music theory with information theory.
34  T  Music at Hand

Table 2.2  Instrumental elements from Heyde (1975)

Label German term English term Examples

A Anreger Activator Muscles, lungs, bellows

V Vermittler Mediator Violin bow, guitar pick, piano keys
W Wandler Transducer Strings, membranes, reeds
ZW Zwischenwandler Intermediate Electric guitar pickup
transducer
M Modulator Modulator Distortion pedal, electronic organ
tone filter
Ampl Amplifikator Amplifier Electric guitar amp, loudspeaker
R Resonator Resonator Violin body, piano soundboard
K Kopulator Coupler Flute tube
[circle] Kanal Channel Violin bridge, flutist’s throat
St Steuerelement Controller Fingers, keys, switches

model of harmonic functions.13 Just as a tonal phrase starts with tonic function (T)
and leads to dominant function (D), instrumental sound production must start
with some activating energy (A) and lead to a transducer (W, for Wandler); and just
as predominant function (P) may intervene between T and D, a mediator (V, for
Vermittler) may intervene between A and W. Of course, Heyde’s ten instrumental
functions are more numerous than the three harmonic functions, and they do not
return to their starting point. Still, the comparison is useful. The interesting thing
about a particular tonal phrase is not that it uses harmonic functions, but how it
deploys them. Likewise, what is distinctive about an instrumental system is not
just the functional components involved, but the structure of connections between
components, what Heyde calls their “energetic, material, and informational cou-
plings” (22).14
To analyze such structures in particular instruments, Heyde draws schematic
circuit diagrams, diagrams of signal flow. For convenience, I will call these “Heyde
diagrams.” This graphic technique again recalls music-​theoretical methods, since
these schematics—​like Schenkerian voice-​leading graphs—​are more than mere
illustrations. Instead they supplement the written text, as a form of visual, sym-
bolic argumentation. Heyde often presents the diagrams with minimal commen-
tary, leaving it to his readers to investigate them independently. As a preliminary
example, I offer a simple Heyde diagram for the cowbell in Figure 2.3. In this case,
my body is the activator (A) and the bell itself is the transducer (W). These two
functions, which appear in every Heyde diagram, have distinctive shapes: a “cone”
for A and a trapezoid for W. Other components are represented as labeled rect-
angles. So one initial strategy for interpreting a Heyde diagram is to find the cone
and follow the arrows to the trapezoid. In Figure 2.3, they are not immediately

13. For a critical interpretation of harmonic function, see Hyer (2011).

14. All translations from Heyde are mine.
 Sounding Actions  T  35

Figure 2.3  Heyde diagram for cowbell sound production.

A V1 V2 W R

muscular hand/stick cowbell

energy

connected. Instead, mediators—​the stick (V2) in my hand (V1)—​direct energy to

the bell. Note also that the bell itself performs a double function: it is a transducer
but also a resonator. The distinction in shading is also meaningful here. In Heyde
diagrams, human elements are shaded, while nonhuman elements have a blank
background. Therefore, another strategy involves looking for boundaries between
shaded and nonshaded zones. With the cowbell, that boundary comes between
my hand and the stick. “Reading” such diagrams involves comparing interrelated
levels, tracing various pathways through them—​a practice that is not unfamiliar to
music theorists. This type of analysis simply looks at the organization of an instru-
ment rather than a piece of music.
Of course, most of Heyde’s analyses are far more intricate than this prelimi-
nary example. Figure 2.4 reproduces and annotates his schematic for a Boehm
flute. Boxes on the right side of the diagram represent parts of the instrument: six-
teen keys (k1–​k16) and a mouthpiece (W), joined to the cylinder that constitutes
the flute’s body (coupler, K). Fingers of both hands are connected to the keys,
though the diagram indicates differences between the hands. Each right-​hand
finger operates multiple keys, while the right thumb is connected with none.
Meanwhile, each finger of the left hand is associated with a single key, and the left
thumb operates two. The activating energy here originates in the player’s respira-
tory system. Air passes from the lungs (A), through the windpipe (a small circle,
representing a channel), to the mouth (a switch symbol). Lips and mouthpiece
together form the transducer (W)—​and this symbol combines human (shaded)
and nonhuman (nonshaded) elements. On the whole, then, this diagram shows
the integration of flute and flutist. To paraphrase Heyde, the flute itself is only a
subsystem (26).
Heyde diagrams present systems of linked nodes. In mathematical terms, these
are a kind of graph.15 A mathematical graph is a collection of points connected by
lines. Formally a graph is defined by two sets: a set of vertices V (the points) and
a set of edges E that pair vertices from V. For example, imagine a graph where
V = {A, B, C} and E = {{A, B}, {B, C}}. This simple graph would have three points
and two lines. It might be drawn in various ways (as demonstrated in Figure 2.5),
but such visual representations are, strictly speaking, not a constitutive feature of
the graph.

15. Heyde’s main source on cybernetics—​a book by the neo-​Marxist economist Oskar Lange (1965)—​
is effectively a mathematical treatise on transformations, networks, and graph theory.
36  T  Music at Hand

Figure 2.4  Circuit diagram for a Boehm flute (adapted from Heyde 1975, 63).
hands fingers keys
k16
5 k15
k14
k13
4
k12
central r.h.
nervous k11
3
system k10
k9
n ZS
2 k8
n MS k7
n Sch 5 k6
4 k5
n ZS l.h. 3 k4
2 k3
k2
1
k1

A W K

lungs throat mouth lips/mouthpiece body of the flute

Figure 2.5  Four ways of drawing the same mathematical graph.

(a) (b) (c) (d)
A A C B A
A B C
B C B C

Graphs and networks are used in many diverse fields.16 In music theory, they
are central to transformational theory. Pioneered by David Lewin (1987), trans-
formational theory uses mathematical group theory to model musical spaces,
which may include but are not limited to pitch.17 (For example, later chapters of
this book will use transformational graphs and networks to explore various instru-
mental spaces.) The similarities go beyond the underlying mathematics to include
conceptual attitudes: cybernetics is interested in systemic behavior, just as Lewin

16. Sporns (2010), for example, examines the importance of graph theory for neuroscience.
17. Rings discusses graph theory as part of a broader introduction to transformational theory (2011,
110–​16). Readers who are familiar with transformational theory might note that whereas the
“contents” of a transformation network are discrete elements from a mathematical group, Heyde’s
schematics model a more or less continuous flow of energy. However, cybernetics often models
continuous variables in terms of a “discrete machine,” using the framework of transformations,
graphs, and networks as a more general conceptual resource (Ashby 1956, 28).
 Sounding Actions  T  37

is interested in “musical behavior” (1986, 377). For example, Ashby’s statement

that cybernetics “does not ask ‘what is this thing?’ but ‘what does it do?’ ” (1956, 1,
emphasis in original) resembles Lewin’s “transformational attitude,” which priori-
tizes subjective musical actions over objectified intervallic measurements.18 More
practically, this means that aspects of graph-​theoretical thinking exercised in trans-
formational theory—​for example, ways of thinking about a graph’s connectivity or
directedness—​can reveal interesting properties of particular Heyde diagrams.
From four source nodes representing the energy source, the graph in Figure 2.4
proceeds through a greater number of intermediate nodes before the arrows con-
verge on a single “root” node, what Lewin calls an “output node” (1987, 207–​8).
Beyond that, its structure meets the conditions for an oriented digraph, employed
in the study of tonal music by Steven Rings (2011, 111). Shared aspects of graphic
structure suggest a surprising analogy here: just as independent voices in a tonal
composition may start and finish in harmony, independent functional chains in
flute playing unite in the final sound. Except for their final convergence at K, the
two pathways in Figure 2.4 are indeed separate:  there is an activation pathway
involving the player’s respiratory system and the mouthpiece, and a control path-
way involving hands, fingers, and keys.
The energy that passes through this system originates in the performer’s ner-
vous system (n), represented by the four stacked, shaded rectangles on the left side
of the diagram. Yet this energy is not undifferentiated. Heyde distinguishes between
“energy-​state control” (Energiezustandssteuerung, labeled ZS) and “energy-​volume
control” (Energiemengensteuerung, labeled MS). The former involves qualitative
distinctions (for example, on or off), while the latter is quantitative (58).19 This
roughly corresponds to Shannon’s distinction between discrete and continuous
signals (1964, 34–​35). Flute playing involves both forms of energy: the fingers set
the keys’ state (open or closed), corresponding to discrete pitch changes, while the
breath involves variable amounts of energy (more or less), which create continu-
ous fluctuations in volume.
In a way, Heyde’s diagram shows relatively little about the flute’s sound. Figure 2.4
does not specify what notes are produced by the various holes or key combinations
on the flute. It represents a generalized Boehm flute rather than any particular flute
or type of flute. For the moment, this abstraction, by usefully bracketing out pitch
and rhythmic patterns, can focus attention on the process of sound production.
By bracketing off materiality, Heyde’s organology, like cybernetics in general,
posits a continuity between the mechanical and the organic. This theme is devel-
oped in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind:

Some of these pathways happen to be located outside the physical individual, oth-
ers inside; but the characteristics of the system are in no way dependent upon any

18. Here it seems worth mentioning that David Lewin, like Shannon, worked at Bell Laboratories, and
Lewin is cited as a contributor to Jasia Reichardt’s computer art exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity
(1968, 7).
19. The opening and closing of the mouth corresponds to a third kind of control, what Heyde calls
switch control (Schaltsteuerung, labeled Sch).
38  T  Music at Hand

boundary lines which we may superpose upon the communicational map. It is not
communicationally meaningful to ask whether the blind man’s stick or the scien-
tist’s microscope are “parts” of the man who uses them. Both stick and microscope
are important pathways of communication and, as such, are parts of the network in
which we are interested; but no boundary line—​e.g., halfway up the stick—​can be
relevant in a description of the topology of this net. (1972, 251)20

If player and instrument are integrated in a “control circuit” (Heyde 1975, 25),
aspects of technique can be distributed to the technology, and ultimately the
player can be replaced by a nonhuman substitute.21 For example, the human
flutist can be replaced by a mechanical one, as in a celebrated eighteenth-​
century automaton created by Jacques de Vaucanson. One of Heyde’s diagrams
for the machine appears in Figure 2.6. Vaucanson’s automaton plays the flute
with mechanical fingers and a mechanical mouth, powered by a system of nine
bellows. This translation from the human to the technical already implies an
analysis of the human as part of a mechanical system, and indeed Vaucanson
had studied the mechanics of human flute playing while designing his android
(Riskin 2003, 613–​16).22 This means that not only the flute but also the flut-
ist is a subsystem. The flutist who can be replaced by an android is already a
cyborg.

Activation versus Control

And yet cybernetics misses something important. The flute-​playing automaton

might reproduce certain musical behaviors, but it cannot re-​create the flutist’s lived
experience.23 Heyde’s distinctions, then, demand phenomenological interpreta-
tion. I am particularly interested in the distinction between activation and control,
as represented in the two converging pathways in the flute system. Returning to
my bicycle analogy, this resembles the gap between feet that pedal and hands that
steer. In fact, the German word that Heyde uses, Steuerung, can be translated as
either “control” or “steering.”24
When I strike the cowbell, I use the stick to relay my energy to the instrument.
But at the same time, I aim the stick at a particular part of the bell. Something

20. Focusing on the topology of the net is part of Bateson’s cybernetic refusal of Cartesian dualism,
which denies the distinction between the internal and external.
21. More generally, Bruno Latour theorizes both associations among human (H) and nonhuman (NH)
actors and their mutual substitutions. “Of course, an H-​H-​H assembly looks like social relations,”
he writes, “while a NH-​NH-​NH portion looks like a mechanism or a machine, but the point is that
they are always integrated into longer chains” (1991, 110).
22. For reflections on the historical and philosophical significance of musical automata, with their
mechanical doubling of human performers, see Abbate (1999) and Yearsley (2002, ch. 5).
23. Here I echo Merleau-​Ponty’s ambivalence about cybernetics, which he discussed in lectures during
the 1950s (2003, 165–​66).
24. Note also that Norbert Wiener (1948) derived the term “cybernetics” from the Greek kybernao,
meaning “to steer.”
 Sounding Actions  T  39

Figure 2.6  Circuit diagram for Vaucanson’s flute-​playing android (adapted

from Heyde 1975, 61). In this diagram, the box labeled T represents a “junction”
(Verteiler).

A1.1 P ZS
P ZS mechanical
A1.2
P Sch
fingers/holes
A1.3 St7
P ZS St6
A2.1 St5
St4
A2.2 St3
St2
A2.3 St1

A3.1

A3.2 T V W K

A3.3 mouthpiece
bellows

similar happens with the piano: my fingers make the strings sound (via the key-​
and-​hammer mechanism), but they also select the keys. With such instruments,
activation and control functions are mixed. These doubled actions might be com-
pared to vector quantities in physics, which combine magnitude and direction.
In this analogy, magnitude might correspond to the strength of the attack (com-
municated in dynamics), and direction to its placement (communicated in pitch).
Even with these percussive instruments, though, the functions may diverge to
some degree. Cowbell players often use a finger on the nonsticking hand to damp
the bell, adding some control over timbre and duration. And though pianists’ feet
do not typically produce tones, they can control aspects of duration or dynamics
through the pedals.25 Thus, activation and control—​though they can be combined
and must be coordinated—​are mutually irreducible.
These functions are distributed throughout the body in various ways. With the
piano accordion, for example, my fingers control the keys, but pushing and pull-
ing arms supply the energy—​and thereby control the volume—​via the bellows.
Because of this single power source, all simultaneous notes on the accordion share
the same dynamic, and it is not possible for the accordionist to bring out a line in a
polyphonic texture by playing it more loudly. Whereas playing a note on the piano

25. With certain kinds of piano, the player’s feet do produce sound: “pedal pianos” include a keyboard
for the feet, and pianos with Janissary stops, popular in late-​eighteenth-​and early-​nineteenth-​
century Vienna, have pedals that activate percussive effects inspired by Turkish military bands.
Such pianos, however, are rare today.
40  T  Music at Hand

is a percussive act, on the accordion I can hold a chord with my fingers and work
the bellows to sustain it, “breathing” in and out with my arms. In this situation,
I would be focused on activation and not control. As with other wind instruments,
I may seem to be maintaining and manipulating a stream of energy rather than
percussing an object.
With the violin, my right hand typically activates the sound, either through
the bow or through plucking fingers, while my left hand stops the strings.26 That
is to say, my left hand cannot make the notes louder or longer. Usually both hands
collaborate to produce pitches and rhythms, since the bow hand selects the string
or strings to be played, and the left-​hand fingers may rhythmically change notes
during a sustained bow.27 When I combine active bowing with an unchanging left
hand, the violin has the feel of a percussion instrument. When long, sustained
bows support rapid finger changes, I am more likely to feel as though I am manip-
ulating a flow of energy. Either way, violin hands are more highly differentiated
than piano hands or accordion hands, but also less independent.
The opposition of activation and control becomes clearer as functions are dis-
tributed between the player and the instrument. Figure 2.7 plots these possibilities
on a semiotic square.28 Each combination of terms creates a category, illustrated
with musical instruments in Figure 2.7a and with vehicles in Figure 2.7b.
If the piano is like a bicycle, the pipe organ seems closer to a Harley-​Davidson.
When I  play the organ, I  guide the instrument without providing its energy.
Slamming or caressing the keys does not affect the organ’s volume, which is set
by an expression pedal. The gentlest touch can create a thunderous tone. Though
I have surely initiated this sound, the instrument’s response may seem dispropor-
tionate. And the breath filling the pipes is not like my breath. This wind instru-
ment has an endless air supply, sustaining tone indefinitely. The organ, then,
combines two kinds of superhuman power—​in its endurance and in its strength—​
and puts them at my disposal. These possibilities are, of course, central to the idi-
omatic technique of the pedal point. For example, consider the fourteen-​measure
pedal near the opening of J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543, an
unstoppable sonic force grounding the passage work above (see Figure 2.8). The
excess of instrumental energy in such gestures engineers a sense of transcendence,
as powerful as any hidden orchestra or choir.29
The organ’s nonhuman breath is thematized even more clearly in György
Ligeti’s Volumina (1962), a piece that explores overwhelming sustained clusters,
shifting in color. At the end of the piece, Ligeti instructs the organist to switch off
the organ blower. The organist continues to hold down the keys, and the sound

26. An exception to this is left-​hand pizzicato, a technique found, for example, in the ninth variation
from Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice in A minor, op. 1, no. 24.
27. Note that the bow offers continuous control over rhythm and dynamics, but discrete control over
pitch. And though the left hand can produce continuous pitch variation (in vibrato or glissandi), its
fingers often seek to reproduce a discrete system of pitches.
28. The semiotic square is a tool for exploring structural oppositions, introduced by Greimas and
Rastier (1968).
29. On the transcendental effects of concealed orchestras (a technique particularly associated with
Richard Wagner), see Dolan (2013, 258–​64) and Kane (2014, ch. 4).
Figure 2.7  Semiotic squares exploring activation and control (a) with musical
instruments and (b) with vehicles. (Note that the handcar is a crank-​powered
railway vehicle, popularly associated with Wile E. Coyote.)

(a) human piano human

activation control

barrel pipe
organ organ

technological technological
control steam organ activation

(b) human bicycle human

activation control

handcar motorcycle

technological technological
control railway train activation

Figure 2.8  Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543,
mm. 10–​15. The pedal tone in the bass continues to m. 24.
42  T  Music at Hand

gradually falters as the instrument runs out of air. Here Ligeti reveals the limit of
a seemingly limitless energy source, highlighting an aspect of the organ that can
easily be taken for granted.
So far, I have focused on human-​controlled instruments. Yet as the square in
Figure 2.7a shows, other possibilities are latent in the opposition of activation and
control. Whereas the pipe organ combines mechanical energy with human con-
trol, the barrel organ inverts this pattern, combining human energy with mechani-
cal control. With this inversion, however, some may question whether it is truly a
musical instrument at all.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the barrel organ was commonly
used as a street instrument and in churches alongside “finger organs.”30 To play
the instrument, an organ grinder turns a crank. This crank performs two func-
tions, both hidden inside the instrument: it pumps the bellows, filling an air
reservoir; and at the same time, it rotates a cylindrical barrel that is covered
with a pattern of pins and staples. Each pin and staple opens a pipe to pressur-
ized air from the reservoir, releasing a note in a programmed sequence. (Most
barrels have multiple settings, to play multiple tunes.) Despite their popular-
ity, barrel organs were widely denigrated (Hicks 2014). This is perhaps not
only because of their contributions to urban noise or their populist repertoire,
but also because of the organ grinder’s ambiguous status as a musician. Some
might view organ grinding as a purely mechanical activity, in which the player
is automatized or instrumentalized. But playing the barrel organ does involve
some skill. At the very least, the crank must be turned in the correct direc-
tion, since reversing it can damage the instrument. The organ grinder also
controls the tempo, keeping it steady or varying it for expressive effect. And
barrel organs, like pipe organs, often have multiple stops. Finally, many organ
grinders obviously treat their work as a kind of performance. They often wear
distinctive costumes, and gesture, dance, or sing along with the music. In this
regard, they resemble the DJs studied by Mark Butler (2014, 95–​105). Because
their music-​making obviously involves technological mediation, both organ
grinders and DJs “perform performance.” They work to convey personality
and agency, to engage audiences, to emphasize “liveness.” Despite the barrel
organ’s commonalties with musical automata and later recording technologies,
then, it is still actively played.
Devices on the bottom edge of Figure  2.7a, in which both components are
nonhuman, might seem even more liminal as instruments. Again, these are not
necessarily digital or mechanical. A  prime example here might be the aeolian
harp, whose strings are activated by wind (an instrument that was discussed by
Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century). But what of instruments that have
to be started by a human? For example, a steam organ, which matches the pipe
organ’s mechanical power source with the barrel organ’s programming? Is pressing
an on/​off button the minimal form of instrumental technique?

30. As a sample performance, I  recommend the following YouTube video:  https://​youtu.be/​

ZClrDGnqd1Y. The earliest description of a barrel organ, however, appears in a ninth-​century
treatise by the Banū Mūsā brothers of Baghdad (Langwill and Ord-​Hume 2001).
 Sounding Actions  T  43

Of course, such questions are not uniquely related to musical instruments.

Instead they engage broader issues in the history of technology, which are discussed
in Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects. For Baudrillard, older objects rely on
human energy and ability, and are therefore shaped for the body. A  hammer’s
handle—​or a piano’s keyboard—​presupposes a strong, skilled hand. Yet, he con-
tinues, as technical objects have become more intricate, the related gestures have
grown simpler, ultimately creating technologies that are more complex than the
techniques required to operate them: “Buttons, levers, handles, pedals (even noth-
ing at all—​as when one passes in front of a photo-​electric cell) have … replaced
pressure, percussion, impact or balance achieved by means of the body, the inten-
sity and distribution of force, and the abilities of the hand” (1996, 51). Buttons,
in this account, demand neither effort nor dexterity. They reflect an increasingly
abstract—​but also increasingly free—​connection between body and object.
The Monome 64, developed by Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, presents an 8 × 8
grid of identical square buttons.31 The buttons can light up, but they are not pressure-​
sensitive and have no predetermined function. In Crabtree’s words, “The wonder-
ful thing about this device is that it doesn’t do anything really” (quoted in Emsley
2011, 43). A button takes on an effect—​triggering a sound, an audiovisual clip, or an
action in a video game—​only when the Monome is coupled with some software. The
Monome, then, combines strict constraints with endless customizability. On this
level, its buttons seem to embody the kind of abstraction theorized by Baudrillard.
But although the Monome could easily be set up as a kind of jukebox (where the
press of a button would play a complete prerecorded track), it is more commonly
used to realize various musical spaces and processes. For example, Crabtree’s “flin”
app (released under his performance name, “tehn”) creates an instrument with
repeating notes.32 Figure 2.9 models this arrangement. Each column of buttons
corresponds to a single pitch, with lower pitches on the left and higher ones on the
right. Similarly, the rows map onto duration, with higher rows producing shorter
notes. Pushing a button, then, produces a looping note with a unique pitch and
length. Each note is visually represented by a line of lights descending along the
column like slow-​motion raindrops. It is possible to press a few buttons and let the
app run indefinitely, to watch and listen as the notes go in and out of phase. Here
the Monome, like an automaton or aeolian harp, seems to play out a nonhuman
musical process. Activation and control both come from the instrument itself. Yet
it is also possible to intervene, to thicken or thin the texture, to change the notes or
durations, to reintroduce human control.
Butler describes this mode of performance as “playing with something that
runs” (2014, 106–​8). His description draws on his performing experience with
both classical music and electronic dance music (EDM). While playing piano, he
must remain constantly involved in sound production. But while DJing, he can

31. The Monome grid is available in larger sizes too. Butler examines these controllers in the context
of various technologies used in electronic dance music (2014, 87–​89). As he notes, the Monome is
not associated with any particular software. Instead, it works with a variety of programs, including
open-​source software developed by a community of users (88).
32. For a demonstration, see https://​vimeo.com/​418349.
44  T  Music at Hand

Figure 2.9  Diagram showing pitch and duration layout for “flin” on a

Monome 64.

short

duration

long

low high
pitch

step back and listen to a process unfold, taking time to plan his next move. “By
shifting some of the responsibility for sound production from the performer to
the machine,” Butler concludes, “EDM technologies cultivate the emergence of
a distinctively interpretive role during performance” (108, emphasis in original).
A related difference between pianists and DJs might involve the habits of auditory-​
motor integration discussed in the preceding chapter. Though DJs might develop
similar multisensory connections, they would likely be more flexible than those
found in classical pianists. (Again, the abstraction of the Monome may engender
a certain kind of freedom.)
In terms of the semiotic square in Figure 2.7a, “playing with something that
runs” might involve an alternation between human and technical control. It is
also possible to combine human and technical energy sources. With the electric
guitar, for example, I directly activate the vibrating string—​but the unplugged
guitar responds in a whisper. When I connect it to an amplifier and hit the on
switch, it feels like a different instrument. Simply tapping the string now pro-
duces a bold tone, especially if I have added a distortion pedal to this musical
circuit. The force with which I pluck the string is still reflected in the guitar’s
volume, but magnified, supercharged. Here, again, technical and phenomeno-
logical aspects of instrumental sound production mingle with cultural values.
For better or worse, the way that the electric guitar “empowers” its player is
bound up with the ways that the instrument has been gendered in popular
culture.33 Instead of being pinned in a single place on the square, then, this

33. Robert Walser (1993) and Steve Waksman (1999) have both examined such aspects of electric
guitar culture.
 Sounding Actions  T  45

instrument offers experiences of sound production that are defined by dynamic

tensions among the square’s elements.

From Feedback to Incorporation

Sound production—​conceived as the transmission and transformation of

energy—​might seem like a one-​way process. After all, the arrows in the
Heyde diagrams presented earlier always point forward. Yet for a performer,
sound also provides a kind of feedback. Indeed, Heyde’s first circuit diagram
includes a feedback loop—​an arrow that wraps around, going back to the
nervous system through the ear (1975, 24). Such a loop, in a sense, is implicit
in all later diagrams.34 (That said, certain self-​p owering instruments let the
player experiment with auditory feedback. Here I am particularly thinking of
an electric guitar technique known as “volume swells,” in which the guitar-
ist activates the string with the volume off, then fades in with the volume
knob or a volume pedal.)35 Auditory feedback helps guide specific aspects
of performance, particularly with continuous parameters. For example, audi-
tory feedback is essential for intonation on bowed string instruments. When
experienced cellists shift along the fingerboard but do not bow the string,
their left hand drifts away from the correct position (Chen et al. 2013). In this
case, the control pathway cannot properly function without the activation
pathway. Despite years of practice, the cellist’s motor performance depends
on auditory feedback.36
Instrumental performance involves other forms of sensory feedback too. Many
performers can see their hands on the instrument, and this visual information
can be useful when they are executing certain actions (such as large leaps). Visual
feedback is often important for beginners as well: for example, an experiment with
beginning piano students indicated that “covering the hands of the learners so
that they could not see the keyboard was to some extent detrimental to learning”
(Brown 1934, 527). Still, not all instruments offer an equal amount of visual feed-
back. A flute can be seen only peripherally, and a diatonic harmonica is completely
hidden in the player’s hands.
Tactile feedback is also essential, particularly for timing.37 Aschersleben,
Gehrke, and Prinz (2001) found that anesthetizing participants’ hands did not
affect their ability to tap as rapidly as possible or to air-​tap along with a beat. But
their ability to synchronize key taps with a beat was significantly compromised.

34. Feedback is a central concept for cybernetics, because of its role in a system’s self-​regulation.
35. Eddie Van Halen’s solo electric guitar track “Cathedral” from the 1982 album Diver Down uses
volume swells to imitate an organ. For an analysis of “Cathedral,” see De Souza (2016b).
36. Similarly, Hafke-​Dys, Preis, and Trojan (2016) investigated the effects of altered pitch feedback on
violinists’ motor performance. In this experiment, violinists accurately compensated for the pitch
shift, even when they could not consciously perceive the alteration.
37. Tactile feedback can be distinguished from kinesthetic or proprioceptive feedback, which involves
bodily movement but not touch.
46  T  Music at Hand

From this perspective, the hand is not just an output device. Rather, informa-
tion flows in both directions. The hand touches and is touched.38 Unlike its
auditory or visual counterparts, tactile feedback allows for experiences of resis-
tance. I feel my finger make contact with the piano key, and I feel it when the
key hits bottom. This feedback, again, is important for temporal regulation.
As the tempo becomes faster, pianists lift their fingers higher and strike the
keys more forcefully, and increasing tactile information in this way improves
temporal accuracy (Palmer and Dalla Bella 2004; Goebl and Palmer 2008).
Clarinetists do the same, even though their fingers do not affect note onset or
volume (Palmer et al. 2009). Tactile feedback can also pass through a mediating
implement. For example, I feel the cowbell at the tip of the drumstick, not at the
position of my hand.39
The key point here is that playing an instrument mixes multiple streams of
feedback, involving what Merleau-​Ponty calls “exchanges” between the visible,
audible, and tangible (1968, 143). This multisensory integration underlies the
action-​effect binding discussed in Chapter 1, shaping players’ perception and pro-
duction of sound. Beyond that, though, such feedback may modulate the experi-
ence of one’s own body.
Here, while recalling the Husserlian distinction between Körper and Leib, it
is useful to invoke a related distinction within the category of the lived body—​a
distinction between body image and body schema.40 The body image involves a
conscious awareness of my body, the lived body as intentional object.41 The body
schema, on the other hand, is preconscious and supports automatic movements.
Though the body schema involves reflexes and so on, note that this does not cor-
respond to a distinction between a natural and a cultural body. Learned skills and
habits register at both levels.
Though these two aspects of the body are typically mixed in lived experi-
ence, they may come apart. The classic example of a gap between body image
and body schema is the phantom limb. Since the patient is aware that the limb

38. Both Husserl ([1929] 1960, 97) and Merleau-​Ponty (2012, 94–​95; 1968, 147–​48) discuss this dou-
bling in terms of one hand touching the other. For Merleau-​Ponty, touching and being touched
intertwine without fully coinciding. “When I press my two hands together,” he writes, “it is not a
question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed,
but rather of an ambiguous organization where the two hands can alternate between the functions
of ‘touching’ and ‘touched’ ” (2012, 95). This non-​coincidence, to use a harmonic analogy, might
be compared to a pivot chord: it functions in two keys, but I can hear it only in one key at a time.
Wiskus (2013) approaches Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy of non-​coincidence via music, painting,
and literature.
39. Yamamoto and Kitazawa (2001) use a temporal discrimination task with crossed hands to show
that stimuli are not located at the position of the hand, but sensed at the drumstick’s tip.
40. Merleau-​Ponty discusses the body schema (schema corporel) in The Phenomenology of Perception,
drawing on earlier work in neurology by Henry Head (1920). For terminological issues here, see
Gallagher (1986) and Sheets-​Johnstone (2005). In a review of neurophysiological and psychologi-
cal research on the body schema, Graziano and Botvinick (2002) emphasize its reliance on inter-
connected sensory and motor areas in the parietal lobe and premotor cortex.
41. In phenomenology, intentionality refers to the “aboutness” or “directedness” of experience. That is,
every experience is an experience of something (and that something is an “intentional object”).
 Sounding Actions  T  47

has been amputated, it is no longer part of the patient’s body image. Yet it
persists in the body schema.42 As Merleau-​Ponty writes, “To have a phantom
limb is to remain open to all of the actions of which the arm alone is capable
and to stay within the practical field that one had prior to the mutilation”
(2012, 84).
More rarely, the body schema itself may be impaired, resulting in a loss
of the sense of bodily position and movement (Cole and Paillard 1995). One
patient suffering from this unusual neuropathy can verbally explain where her
body has been touched or locate it on a diagram but, without visual informa-
tion, cannot point to the place on her body. She knows the touch in terms of
body image but not body schema (254). Such patients are able to move their
bodies but must consciously regulate every move. Sitting on a chair, holding
an egg without crushing it, gesturing while talking—​these usually automatic
actions, for them, require effort and attention. As another patient puts it, he
cannot walk and daydream at the same time (262). Besides revealing the every-
day reliance on automatic bodily habits, such cases demonstrate the noniden-
tity of body image and body schema.
Exploiting this gap can produce fascinating phenomena, such as the “rub-
ber hand illusion” (Botvinick and Cohen 1998). While a participant is seated
at a table, one of the participant’s hands is hidden by a screen, and a rubber
hand is put in its place. An experimenter uses paintbrushes to stroke the hidden
real hand and the visible rubber hand at the same time. Through this coordi-
nation of visual and tactile feedback, participants come to feel that the rubber
hand is part of their own body.43 Surprisingly, such an illusion can take place
in the absence of the artificial hand: if the experimenter systematically strokes
an empty space while stroking the unseen hand, the participants may come to
feel that they possess an invisible hand (Guterstam, Gentile, and Ehrsson 2013).
And if the experimenter then “stabs” the invisible hand with a kitchen knife,
this evokes increased skin conductance (a common physiological measure of
arousal). The body schema, then, can incorporate even empty space, inducing a
kind of phantom-​limb experience.44
In a similar study, the experimenter gently taps a participant’s hand with
a small hammer (Senna et  al. 2014). The participant wears headphones, in
which the sound of the hammer against the participant’s skin is gradually
replaced by the sound of a hammer tapping marble. If the marble sounds are
temporally coordinated with the felt taps, uncanny effects appear after five min-
utes: the hand begins to feel numb, stiff, heavy, and hard. It feels like a marble
hand. In the rubber hand illusion, I come to feel what I see; in the marble hand

42. Phantom limbs are consistent with the phantasmal voices and other simulations discussed in per-
ceptual symbol systems theory (see Chapter 1). Indeed, some commentators argue that phantom
limbs provide strong evidence consistent with Barsalou’s theory (Edelman and Breen 1999).
43. Neuroimaging research suggests that the premotor cortex is involved in the multisensory integra-
tion that produces a sense of bodily ownership (Ehrsson, Spence, and Passingham 2004).
44. It is, however, considerably more difficult to induce the sense of ownership with an object that does
not resemble a hand, such as a wooden stick (Tsakiris and Haggard 2005). This suggests that such
illusions require a mix of bottom-​up and top-​down processes.
48  T  Music at Hand

illusion, what I  hear. Multisensory feedback reconstructs the sense of one’s

own body.
These experiments indicate conditions under which the body may incorporate
tools or other objects. Navigating with a stick alters the body schema because it
provides multisensory feedback. When blind people regularly use a cane, their
sense of personal space expands. Tactile and auditory awareness focuses on the
area at the tip of the cane. For experts, the perceptual changes are more or less
permanent, but they can be temporarily induced in sighted people who have been
trained to use a cane (Serino et al. 2007). Like riding a bicycle, navigating with
a stick involves practical know-​how, which, despite its conscious aspects, must
be grounded at the level of the body schema. “If I want to become habituated to
a cane,” writes Merleau-​Ponty, “I try it out, I touch some objects and, after some
time, I have it ‘in hand’ ” (2012, 144).45
All of this, finally, can help explain why musicians sometimes claim that an
instrument feels like part of the body. I would hypothesize that such experiences
are more common when multisensory feedback is maximized—​that is, when an
instrument’s sound reflects multiple aspects of the player’s action and when tac-
tile and visual feedback match the auditory image. In other words, the illusion of
instrumental incorporation seems more likely with human activation and control
than with a self-​propelling instrument like the Monome. Mediators like bows or
drumsticks (which, like the cane, can be felt through) might also enhance the illu-
sion. Gibson’s distinction between “detached objects” (which I  can pick up and
move) and “attached objects” (which are fixed) seems relevant too (1979, 133). But
this might simply be because detached instruments like the violin or flute stay in
continuous contact with the body.
Some players actively seek a sense of bodily extension. The trumpet vir-
tuoso Jens Lindemann, for example, tries to foster it in his students. “It’s a life-
long pursuit trying to get to that point of comfort,” he says, “but when you
do arrive there you realize that you’re just taking a piece of metal and you’re
blowing through it. It’s that simple and that complicated at the same time.”46 Of
course, the feeling of incorporation, like any form of withdrawal, will be fleet-
ing. The experience, surely, differs in notable ways from the experience of hav-
ing a rubber hand, and musicians may not intend that their statements about
such experiences be taken literally. Still, these psychological and philosophical
perspectives suggest that playing an instrument can change the experience of
one’s own body, that in music as in other domains the boundaries of the lived
body can be reshaped by technics.

45. Another study by colleagues of Serino showed that tool use can alter perceptions of one’s own body.
After participants used a mechanical grabbing arm, their reaching behavior changed, and their esti-
mates of their own arm length slightly increased. Briefly put, they acted as though they had longer
arms (Cardinali et al. 2009).
46. See http://​www.artistshousemusic.org/​videos/​your+instrument+as+an+extension+of+your+body.
 Sounding Actions  T  49

Conclusions

Instrumental sound production, generally speaking, involves a certain reciproc-

ity: actions are converted into sounds, and sounds give feedback about actions. As
such, player and instrument together can be understood as a system that generates
and transforms musical energy. Yet because this coupling is realized in countless
ways, analyses of particular instruments must untangle the contributions of bodily
technique and instrumental technology, considering their phenomenological and
sonic effects.
Physical traces, of course, are also audible in voices. This is central to Roland
Barthes’s reflections on the “grain of the voice.” The “grain” refers not just to vocal
timbre but to contributions of “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous
membranes, the nose” (1977, 183). “The ‘grain,’ ” Barthes explains, “is the body
in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188).47
Additionally, the sense of vocal ownership, like bodily ownership in general, can
be influenced by multisensory feedback. In one notable experiment, the partici-
pants spoke words while simultaneously hearing a voice in headphones say the
same words (Zheng et al. 2011). With this congruence between auditory informa-
tion and vocal motor activity, the participants came to feel that the other voice
was their own.48 This “rubber voice” illusion is possible because vocal production
is both felt and heard.
As my voice resounds outside of me, it may sometimes be experienced as a
kind of object. Whereas instrumental incorporation brings a tool into the body
schema, this objectification exteriorizes voice, projecting corporeal activity out-
ward. But a voice is a slippery thing.49 After all, my voice originates inside my
body. I can neither grasp nor see it, and I hear it “from within” (Merleau-​Ponty
1968, 144; Vitale 2008). In the end, then, this chapter differentiates instrumen-
tal and vocal sound production. Singing is like running rather than cycling.
Though running and singing are undeniably technical, they do not require a
prosthesis—​something set before me—​that transforms my energy and grounds
my actions.50 Variations in vocal tension, for example, are not tethered to tan-
gible spots in the world. I can point to a middle C on the piano or violin but not
in my voice. Voices, that is, do not spatialize pitch in the same way that many
instruments do.

47. Barthes explicitly extends the grain to instrumental music, with a brief discussion of keyboard
performance (1977, 188–​89).
48. I would hypothesize that the voice can incorporate other sounds as well. This could be tested by
modifying the procedure of Zheng et al. (2011), replacing spoken words with sung notes and the
stranger’s voice with instrumental tones.
49. For a discussion of the ambiguities surrounding voice—​and a concise overview of the extensive
scholarly literature on voice—​see Feldman (2015). I  discuss voice-​instrument relations in De
Souza 2014.
50. Of course, this presumes a “naked” voice. Various musical technologies—​from kazoos to vocoders
to microphones—​do transform vocal energy. These instruments, it might be said, are “played” with
the voice.
50  T  Music at Hand

The question of instrumental space, however, goes beyond sound produc-

tion. Heyde diagrams may outline an interface’s topology, but they do not show
how it affords specific sets of pitches. Yet this will be crucial for understanding
how instrumental organization relates to tonal organization and how an instru-
mental space, with its boundaries and privileged zones, might affect players’ cre-
ative actions.
CHAPTER 
Three
Idiomaticity; or, Three Ways to Play Harmonica

In an experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain
Sciences, guitarists were asked to finger a chord in response to an on-​screen cue
(Drost, Rieger, and Prinz 2007). The chords were not difficult, either A major or
A minor. But as each visual prompt appeared, the participants heard a chord that
might—​or might not—​match the one they were supposed to play. That is, some-
times they heard A major when they had to play A minor (and vice versa). The
mismatched chords slowed reaction time but only when they had the timbre of a
guitar. If the distractor sounded like a piano, an organ, flutes, or voices, it had no
significant effect on the guitarists’ performance. When pianists did this same task,
though, they were influenced by piano sounds and organ sounds. The researchers
explained this result in terms of affordances: because piano and organ are both
keyboard instruments, they afford similar actions and musical textures. Despite
differences in action-​sound coupling, expert pianists may hear organ music kines-
thetically, sensing movement on the keys.
A subtle difference between the guitarists’ and pianists’ tasks raises further
questions. Guitarists played A  major and minor, but pianists played C major
and minor. Why would the designers of the experiment choose one key for the
piano, another for the guitar? The answer, for a guitarist, is obvious. The chord
voicings used in the experiment involve open strings, and they are particularly
easy to play. The corresponding hand shapes for C major and minor, though, are
barre chords—​that is, chords where the index finger stops multiple strings at the
same fret. Similarly, C has a special relationship to the piano, since the key of
C major entails only white notes. Such contrasts have less to do with the instru-
ments’ modes of sound production than with the way they organize pitch mate-
rials. With other instruments, the experimental task would have to be further
modified. The diatonic harmonica, for example, cannot play a major and minor
triad over the same root. How, then, do particular instruments realize pitch spaces
in physical space? How are instrumental interfaces structured? And how might
they structure players’ actions?
These questions evoke broader debates about technology and agency, which
are often framed around two theoretical poles.1 On one side, voluntarism and
social reductionism suggest that tools are merely vehicles for human inten-
tions. The most common expression of this view might be the National Rifle

1. For further discussion of such debates, see Ihde (1990, 4–​5) and, in a musical context, Taylor (2001,
25–​31).
52  T  Music at Hand

Association’s slogan, “Guns don’t kill people. People do.” On the other, technologi-
cal determinism claims that tools shape or control their users. This is conveyed
by Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” (1994, 7).
Both extremes are problematic. Clearly we make choices when using instruments,
and yet it sometimes feels as though they have a hold on us.
Ecological perceptual theory avoids deterministic oppositions here. As empha-
sized in Chapter 1, affordances and abilities are always codefined. But Gibson also
insists that a thing’s affordances exist independently of an agent’s needs or skills. As
he puts it, “The object offers what it does because it is what it is” (1979, 139). This
realism distinguishes Gibson’s “affordance” from Gestalt psychology’s earlier term,
“valence” (Aufforderungscharakter). Though both concepts suggest that objects invite
particular actions, the Gestalt theorist Kurt Koffka argues that valences belong to a
perceived “phenomenal object,” not the physical object itself. Gibson rejects this dual-
ism. Noticing or ignoring affordances does not change them. They are “always there.”
Note how this invariance unsettles voluntarism and social reductionism. Affordances
are not produced by agents’ intentions, nor are they merely projected onto an object.
That is why my attempt to use an object might fail, why the object might resist certain
uses, why it might do things that I do not want it to do.
Given those real constraints, though, an object’s affordances are potentially end-
less. A chair never forces me to sit in it. I could stand on the chair instead. I could
hide behind it. I could use it as a doorstop, an end table, a clothes horse, or a music
stand. It is impossible to list all of the chair’s uses or features. This openness subverts
technological determinism. A tool can always be put to some unexpected use.
This nondeterministic reciprocity between agent and thing challenges both
sides of the dialectic. But it also raises new problems. If affordances are theoreti-
cally innumerable, why are certain uses of an object preferred over others? Why
does it seem that a tool should be used in a certain way? Extending ecological psy-
chology here requires an account of artifact-​based skills that are learned, cultur-
ally and technically situated, and directed toward goals. To this end, David Kirsh
offers the idea of the “enactive landscape,” a set of affordances that are activated
for an agent. In other words, an enactive landscape is a space of possibilities, in
which technology and technique coevolve. As Kirsh puts it, “Music teaches us
that these … landscapes multiply furiously” (2013, §2.6). Musical instruments,
specifically, “provide musicians the physical landscape necessary to change their
possibilities—​to create a perfect niche for making music” (§2.6).
This chapter investigates enactive landscapes associated with a specific instru-
ment: the diatonic harmonica, colloquially known as the “blues harp.” Though the
harmonica’s origins are poorly documented, it was likely invented in Germany
around the 1820s as part of a vogue for free-​reed instruments that also produced
the accordion, the concertina, and various forgotten cousins (like Christian
Buschmann’s “aura” and Charles Wheatstone’s “symphonium”).2 In the second half

2. These free-​reed instruments were directly or indirectly inspired by traditional Asian mouth organs
such as the Chinese sheng, which had been known in Europe since the seventeenth century (for
example, Marin Mersenne described such an instrument in his 1636 Harmonie universelle). On the
origins of the diatonic harmonica, see Missin (n.d.) and Field (2000, 23–​24).
 Idiomaticity  T  53

Figure 3.1  A ten-​hole diatonic harmonica, or “blues harp.”

of the nineteenth century, the diatonic harmonica would be industrially mass-​

produced and exported globally (Wenzel and Häffner 2006). It was portable, fairly
durable, and inexpensive—​and these features contributed to its widespread popu-
larity. The harmonica’s use in folk music, blues, and jazz shows how this seemingly
simple instrument supports multiple enactive landscapes. Such landscapes call
for a mode of analysis that investigates performers’ moves through instrumental
space, an approach that may be informed by statements from expert players and by
Lewinian transformational models. At the same time, this analysis motivates theo-
retical reflections on instrumental spaces and idioms—​and ultimately an argu-
ment about technical agency.

Instrumental Spaces

The harmonica fits in my palm, but my hands cannot make it sound. The har-
monica, after all, is a particular sort of wind instrument, a “mouth organ.”3 It has
ten square holes, lined up on a comb (Figure 3.1). Breathing through these holes
activates tuned reeds hidden beneath the instrument’s metal cover plates. Here air
and sound are immediately joined, in their timing and their strength. The instru-
ment is louder when I blow harder; it stops resonating when I stop moving air
through it. Briefly put, the harmonica converts my breath into music.
This action-​sound coupling differentiates the harmonica from free-​reed instru-
ments that have bellows. With the accordion, squeezing and pulling arms activate
sound while fingers control pitch. With the harmonica, breathing provides both
power and steering. Breath strength controls dynamics, while breath placement
and breath direction control pitch. Because of its two sets of reeds, inhaling and
exhaling through the same hole give different notes. Moreover, the “draw” notes
(produced by inhaling) and the “blow” notes (produced by exhaling) form two
tonally distinct collections. Each of the harmonica styles analyzed here somehow

3. This is reflected in its original German name, Mundharmonika (mouth harmonica). Note, however,
that it affords breathing-​through for other animals too: for example, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo
has a harmonica-​playing elephant that holds the instrument in her trunk (Fazeli Fard 2012).
54  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.2  Two instrumental “arrays” (after Baily 2006, 116): (a) with the dutār’s
linear array, the player moves along a single string (for example, the pitch “Ma”
is five “steps” to the right of “Sa”); (b) with the rubāb’s tiered array, the player can
also move across strings (finding “Ma” at the same fret as “Sa,” on the adjacent
string).
(a) Dutar (linear array)

Ni Sa Ra Re Ga Ge Ma

(b) Rubab (tiered array)

De Na Ni Sá Rá

Ge Ma Me Pe Da

Ni Sa Ra Re Ga

responds to this complementarity between the instrument’s pitch affordances and

human physiology. In a sense, the harmonica musicalizes respiration.
At the same time, the ten holes on the comb set out a pitch continuum much
like a keyboard. Low notes are on one end (typically held on the left); high notes,
on the other. Such linearity is common among instruments, though not univer-
sal. (Instruments that set out pitch space in a nonlinear way include mbira, steel
drums, and bandoneon.) As I  play, I  coordinate my lips and the holes, moving
the harmonica left or right with my hands and sliding my mouth along the comb.
Since I can also change pitch by reversing the direction of my breath, harmonica
space offers two basic ways of moving—​side to side and in and out. It has two
“dimensions.”
The ethnomusicologist John Baily explores this multidimensional aspect of
instrumental interfaces in his study of two Afghan lutes, the dutār and the rubāb
(1977, 2006). Though their repertoires overlap, their instrumental spaces are quite
different.4 With the dutār, melodies are usually played on one string, shifting
along a single dimension. With the rubāb, melodies are usually played across three
strings. Baily calls the former a “linear array” and the latter a “tiered array.”5 He
illustrates their difference with a diagram resembling Figure 3.2.
Thinking in terms of “arrays” highlights different kinds of proximity in instru-
mental space. I  imagine their dimensions in terms of intersecting instrumental
“scales” (using Dmitri Tymoczko’s [2011, 116] expansive definition of “scale” as “a
kind of musical ruler”). If I am blowing through the harmonica’s third hole, I can
move “one step” along the comb to the fourth-​hole blow or I can move “one step”

4. In fact, musicians in the city of Herat devised the fourteen-​stringed dutār in the 1960s so they could
play classical music associated with the rubāb.
5. Baily and Driver (1992) extend this thinking to folk-​blues guitar playing.
 Idiomaticity  T  55

with my breath, changing to the third-​hole draw. In both cases, I sense a kind of
adjacency, although neither move would sound a diatonic “step.”6 Before investi-
gating the harmonica’s pitch affordances, however, I want to formalize this idea of
instrumental spaces with particular dimensions.
Instrumental arrays—​ instruments with dimensions that are divided into
steps—​can be represented via Lewinian transformational theory. As mentioned
in the preceding chapter, this approach uses mathematical groups to model vari-
ous kinds of musical spaces and actions, involving pitch, rhythm, texture, or other
domains. Joti Rockwell (2009), for example, has used transformational techniques
to analyze picking patterns on the five-​string banjo. Since transformational theory
deals with grouplike structures involving discrete quantities, it may not apply to
instrumental spaces that lack countable steps (such as the timbral space of a drum-
head). Nonetheless, it offers a productive way to model many kinds of instrumen-
tal patterns.
Tiered-​array instruments like rubābs and guitars involve two dimensions—​
across and along the strings. In other words, any spot on the fingerboard can
be modeled as a combination of fret position and string position. I write this as
an ordered pair of the form (f, s), with both variables represented by integers.7
Elements can then be transposed in either dimension:  across-​string operations
would take the form (0, +x) or (0, –​x), where x is any nonzero integer; along-​string
operations, (+x, 0) or (–​x, 0). Note that the numbers in my operation labels are
marked with a plus or minus sign. This emphasizes that they indicate movement
and also differentiates them from the notation for elements. That is, (+1, +1) rep-
resents an action (going up one string and up one fret), whereas (1, 1) represents a
place (the first fret on the first string). Such transformations can be applied either
to individual elements in the space (that is, notes) or to sets (melodies or chords).
The network in Figure 3.3, for example, models such moves in a passage from the
Kinks’ 1964 song, “All Day and All of the Night.” This sequence moves a single fret-
board shape around the fretboard. There is, however, more than one way to realize
this: moving along and across the strings or staying on the lowest three strings
throughout (see Video 3.1 ).8 As with Heyde diagrams, transformational graphs
and networks can be read in various ways. It is generally useful, however, to trace
the pathways formed by the arrows.9
By comparison, elements in harmonica space can be modeled as ordered pairs
of the form (h, σ), where h is the hole (represented by an integer) and σ is a sign
(+ or –​) that corresponds to blow or draw. For example, (3, +) is the third-​hole
blow. (This labeling method resembles common forms of harmonica tablature.) In

6. The first move, from third-​hole blow to fourth-​hole blow, creates a perfect fourth; the second, from
third-​hole blow to third-​hole draw, produces a major third.
7. For a more technical treatment of fretboard transformations, see De Souza (2016b).
8. Timothy Koozin analyzes this passage in a network that combines “fret-​interval types” with neo-​
Riemannian operations and pitch-​class transposition (2011, ex. 2). I analyze more complex along-​
string transformations in Chapter 4 and more complex cross-​string transformations in Chapter 5.
9. The layout of Lewin’s graphs and networks was partially inspired by Jeanne Bamberger’s use of
Montessori bells in cognitive research (see Lewin 1993, 45–​53). These bells can be arranged in
diverse ways, effectively enabling children and adults to design their own instrumental spaces.
56  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.3  Introduction/​verse riff from the Kinks, “All Day and All of the
Night” (1964): (a) notation; (b) transformation network, showing two ways of
realizing the riff in fretboard space. The riff uses a single fretboard shape. The
upper route in the network includes cross-​string transformations, whereas the
lower route includes only along-​string transformations. Note that guitar strings
are conventionally labeled 1–​6, with 1 as the string with the smallest diameter
(typically the highest string) and 6 as the string with the largest diameter.
(a)

(b)
(3, 3)
(0,–1) (+2,+1)
(3, 4)
(3, 4) (5, 4) (3, 4) (1, 5) (5, 4) (–2,0) (3, 4)
(+2,0) (–2,0)
(3, 5) (5, 5) (3, 5) (5, 5) (3, 5)
(1, 6) (3, 6) (1, 6) (8, 4) (3, 6) (1, 6)
(8, 5)
(+5,0) (–3,0)
(6, 6)

the ordered pairs that label harmonica transformations, though, the signs + and –​
represent preservation or change in blowing direction.10 This is illustrated by the
spatial network in Figure 3.4. In the nodes, the signs refer to breath direction; on
the arrows, they refer to preservation or change. To get from the third-​hole blow
(3, +) to the fourth-​hole draw (4, –​), for example, I move one step up the comb
and reverse my breath (+1, –​). Again, this works for individual elements or sets.
Readers who are familiar with transformational theory may note that the
group structures underlying these two models reflect different kinds of dimen-
sionality. The tiered array is based on a group that is isomorphic with ℤ × ℤ, while
harmonica space is based on a group that is isomorphic to ℤ × ℤ2. Neither is
modular like pitch-​class space—​that is, the top never flips around to the bottom.
This also means that they must be theoretically infinite, that an actual instrument
partakes of only a selected range of the abstract space.11

10. Julian Hook’s uniform triadic transformations use these same signs for modes and modal changes.
As Hook explains, “The set {+, –​} forms a multiplicative group isomorphic to the additive group ℤ2
of integers mod 2” (2002, 62). Multiplying a sign by itself gives +; multiplying the two signs together
gives  –​. This group can model other instrumental features too:  for example, bowing or picking
direction readily maps onto ℤ2, and trumpet valve positions can be represented as ordered triples
of the form (σ, σ, σ).
11. Imposing boundaries here would cause formal problems, since it would no longer be possible to
define intervals or transformations that hold for any element in the space (see Lewin 1987, §2.3.1;
Rings 2011, 19). This is why the models of Rockwell (2009) and Koozin (2011), which specify finite
sets of strings, cannot define cross-​string transformations (see De Souza 2016b).
 Idiomaticity  T  57

Figure 3.4  Spatial network for three adjacent harmonica holes. Reversing breath
on the same hole is represented by the operation (0, –​); moving along the comb,
by operations of the form (+x, +) or (–​x, +). These are combined in (+1, –​), which
moves up one hole and changes breath. Note that many operations in this space
are not shown on this network. These include inverses—​for example, (–​1, +)
is the opposite of (+1, +)—​and compound moves, such as the (+2, –​) action that
would take (3, +) to (5, –​).
(+1,+)
Blow (3, +) (4, +) (5, +)

(0,–) (+1,–)

Draw (3, –) (4, –) (5, –)

(+1,+)

Figure 3.5  Stevie Wonder, electric-​piano introduction from “I Wish” (1976). The

head of this riff starts on E♭ and moves up through black-​key space. Its tail starts
on C and moves up chromatically to E♭. Though each measure repeats the same
sequence of key and pitch classes, they have distinct pitch contours.

Some instruments, though, can be modeled as modular spaces. For example,

it is possible to imagine the twelve “key classes” on a piano in terms of the integers
mod 12 (ℤ12)—​that is, the mathematical group that corresponds to the numbers
on a clock face. This keyboard space, unlike fretboard or harmonica space, has
a single dimension. Yet it, too, involves more than one kind of adjacency. I can
move chromatically to the next key, or I  can move to the next key of the same
color, as in various “white-​note” or “black-​note” pieces (like the Chopin étude in
Figure 1.8).12 Mark Spicer (2011) cites the electric-​piano riff from Stevie Wonder’s
1976 hit “I Wish” as an example of a black-​note figure (see Figure 3.5).13 In fact, this
riff involves both types of adjacency in keyboard space. Though it initially climbs
through a black-​note pentatonic scale, the riff later drops to C and ascends chro-
matically to its starting note. While chromatic movement would be represented

12. In a presentation at the Society for Music Theory’s mathematics interest group, Hook (2014)
discussed key-​color invariance and pitch-​class transformations, an issue with interesting conse-
quences for fingering choices. James Bungert (2015) also considers key color in his analysis of
performance gestures in a Bach corrente, though his approach eschews mathematical formalism.
13. Noting that Wonder’s keyboard riffs often highlight black keys, Spicer (2011) speculates that
the blind musician might use these raised keys to orient himself at the instrument. Will Fulton
confirms the tactile significance of the black keys, showing a distinctive hand position in which
“Wonder keeps the thumb of his right hand at or below the ridge of the keys’ surface, allowing him
to gauge his position, with his remaining digits on the black keys” (2015, 275).
58  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.6  (a) “Key-​class” space and (b) a transformation network that shows the
mapping for an operation Key. Key takes each key class “up” to the adjacent key
class while preserving key color, creating a white-​key cycle and a black-​key cycle.

(a) (b) 0
11 1
10 2
1 3 6 8 10 9 3

0 2 4 5 7 9 11 8 4
7 5
6

Figure 3.7  Transformation network for Wonder, “I Wish” riff. Node shading

indicates key color.

Key Key Key Key–1 +4 +1 +1

3 6 8 10 8 0 1 2

+1

via mod-​12 addition, same-​color movement can be modeled by an operation

that I  will call Key. As shown in Figure 3.6, this function neatly partitions the
key classes into discrete white-​note and black-​note families. Note also that it can
be compounded and inverted: for example, Key2 moves up two same-​color key
classes, and Key–​2 reverses that. With this new theoretical tool, it is easy to create
a transformation network for the “I Wish” riff, which highlights these two kinds of
movement at the keyboard (see Figure 3.7).
This model of key-​class space conveniently replicates numerical note labels
from pitch-​class set theory. However, my networks represent locations on the
instrument, not notes themselves.14 In other words, the topography of an instru-
mental interface is theoretically independent of any particular tuning. Before par-
ticular melodies or harmonies can be derived from these networks, the space
must be connected with some set of notes. I call this an instrument’s place-​to-​pitch
mapping.
The piano has a one-​to-​one mapping: each pitch has a single location on the
keyboard. Yet other instrumental spaces—​such as the guitar’s tiered array or the
organ’s multiple manuals—​have a many-​to-​one mapping, in which the same pitch
might be found in more than one place.15 This kind of many-​to-​one place-​to-​pitch
mapping is also common to woodwinds like the clarinet, whose side keys permit
a range of alternative fingerings. Still others have a one-​to-​many mapping. On the

14. In this regard, my approach aligns with Joti Rockwell’s transformational model of five-​string banjo
music. Rockwell defines a function called PITCH that maps fret/​string locations on the banjo to
pitches (2007, 205).
15. In mathematical terms, such mappings are “onto” or “surjective” (see Rockwell 2009, 140).
 Idiomaticity  T  59

Figure 3.8  Pitch layout for a ten-​hole diatonic harmonica in C: (a) chart of

pitch layout for a harmonica in C, opposing blow and draw notes on each hole;
(b) pitches of a harmonica in C in notation (with tablature). Note that pitch
references follow the nomenclature established by the Acoustical Society of
America, where C4 is middle C.
(a)

(b)

trumpet or tuba, for example, a particular set of valve positions affords not one
note but a series of harmonics. The harmonica’s mapping is, in a sense, both many-​
to-​one and one-​to-​many. One pitch appears in two distinct places, and certain
hole–breath direction combinations offer multiple notes.
Blowing through a standard ten-​hole harmonica gives a major triad spanning
three octaves; inhaling gives the remaining notes of a diatonic scale (see Figure 3.8
and Video 3.2 ). This tuning pattern—​known as “Richter tuning”—​has several
idiosyncrasies.16 It repeats 5̂ among the drawn notes (in an isolated many-​to-​one
mapping), so the in-​breath and out-​breath give tonic and dominant chords. The
bottom octave (holes 1–​4) opposes these triads, skipping 4̂ and 6̂. The other end
of the instrument omits the leading tone. That is, the harmonica does not just
lack nondiatonic “chromatic” notes: depending on register, certain diatonic scale
steps are absent too. (In its middle register, for example, the harmonica affords
“Oh! Susanna” but not “Amazing Grace.”) This might be understood in terms of
a distinction, made by Tymoczko (2011, 11), between “scale” (again, a musical
ruler) and “macroharmony” (the total collection of pitches actually appearing).
The notes on the harmonica can be reckoned in terms of a diatonic scale, but its
macroharmony is a pattern of nineteen pitches where no two octaves are identical.
Register also affects the relation between blow and draw notes. On holes
1–​6, draw notes are higher than blow notes; this is reversed for holes 7–​10. In
the words of one player, above the sixth hole “is where the harmonica flip flops”
(Holmes 2002). This spot stands out when one is learning to play a major scale on
the instrument. As the network in Figure 3.9 shows, movement along the comb is
consistent throughout the scale: after every second note, I move up one hole. (Note
the regular alternation of 0 and +1 in the first part of the ordered-​pair labels on
the network’s arrows.) But I must change my breathing pattern above hole 6: when

16. As Pat Missin (n.d.) shows, we do not know exactly who “Richter” was or when he developed this
tuning.
60  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.9  Network for a harmonica’s central major scale. The asterisk between
scale degrees 6 and 7 marks a deviation in breathing pattern: this is the only place
where the player preserves breath direction, inhaling twice in a row.
) ) ) ) ) * ) )
(0,– (1,– (0,– (1,– (0,– (1,+ (0,–
(4, +) (4, –) (5, +) (5, –) (6, +) (6, –) (7, –) (7, +)
1î 2î 3î 4î 5î 6î 7î 1î

I move to the seventh hole, I keep my breath direction the same and inhale for two
notes in a row. This (+1, +) transformation, marked with an asterisk, is the only
one in Figure 3.9 that involves a + sign for breathing direction. More generally,
this “flip-​flop” means that any tune that combines blowing and drawing will have
a different breathing pattern for each octave. Note, in fact, that only one pair of
holes has the same pitch-​class affordances. (Holes 1 and 4 both offer 1̂ on the blow
and 2̂ on the draw.)
Many harmonica players explore the instrument’s two dimensions without
explicitly thinking about individual notes from Figure 3.8. Picking up the instru-
ment as a child, I simply felt the consonant stability of the blown major triad. Draw
notes, from this perspective, could fill in the gaps in this triad. This shows how
an instrument’s place-​to-​pitch mapping may involve hierarchical levels, some-
what like the nested pitch spaces theorized by Fred Lerdahl (2001, 49–​50). Here
the harmonica’s major triad—​the piano’s white keys, the five-​string banjo’s open
G chord, perhaps even the diatonic notes of the saxophone’s finger keys—​functions
as a referential pitch framework, whose steps can be subdivided. In the cases just
mentioned, the referential structure is essentially diatonic, which adds a certain
asymmetry to the interposition of intermediate notes.
Because of its characteristic gaps, the harmonica’s place-​to-​pitch mapping
exhibits a certain irregularity. That is to say, consistent moves in harmonica space
produce variable pitch intervals. The (+1, +) transformation, as highlighted in
Figure 3.9, produces a major second when it starts from (6, –​). But this move—​
going one step up the comb while maintaining breath direction—​more commonly
sounds a minor third, major third, or perfect fourth. There is a mismatch here
between instrumental scale and pitch scale. By contrast, chromatic button accor-
dions like the Russian bayan have a uniform place-​to-​pitch mapping. The evenness
of its equal-​tempered pitch collection is matched by its physical topography. The
bayan’s regularly spaced melody buttons set out three maximally even interval
cycles: as Figure 3.10 shows, the vertical axis moves by minor thirds, creating a
diminished-​seventh space; the major seconds of the northwest/​southeast diago-
nal offer whole-​tone scale segments; the minor seconds of the northeast/​south-
west diagonal, chromatic-​scale segments.17 This means that each pitch interval or
melodic pattern has a consistent shape, which may theoretically start on any but-
ton. Furthermore, keyboard shapes transpose and invert just like pitch collections.

17. On symmetrical divisions of the octave in the English concertina, see Gawboy (2009). On the
theory of maximally even sets more generally, see Clough and Douthett (1991).
 Idiomaticity  T  61

Figure 3.10  Partial map of a bayan’s tuning pattern. Unlike the piano, the
bayan offers the same pitches in multiple places. This network shows the octave
between C4 (middle C) and C5. (Lower pitches are at the top of the network,
reflecting the way that the instrument is held.) Each button, represented by a
node, can be understood as the intersection of three consistent dimensions.
Descending arrows move +3 semitones in pitch space; rightward arrows, +2
semitones; leftward arrows, +1 semitone.

Because of the bayan’s many-​to-​one place-​to-​pitch mapping, there are also many
opportunities for alternative fingerings. These features, of course, differ in signifi-
cant ways from the nonrepeating breathing patterns of the harmonica and the
one-​to-​one mapping of the piano.
For emphasis, let me briefly present another variation on irregularity/​uniformity
with strings instead of free-​reed instruments. The standard tunings for violin and
double bass involve consistent intervals between adjacent strings, moving by perfect
fifths or perfect fourths, respectively. This means that a fingering pattern generally
creates the same sounding intervals, starting on any string.18 The five-​string banjo,
though, is tuned to a G-​major chord. Its place-​to-​pitch mapping is irregular, much like
the harmonica’s. Because each pair of adjacent banjo strings forms a different pitch
interval, melodic fingerings change depending on their position in cross-​string space.
If uniform mappings facilitate transposition, irregular ones may foster the
sense of a privileged “home key.” Players of instruments with irregular mappings,
then, often change their instrument when they want to change keys. I put a capo on
the banjo to create open strings that fit a new key, or I get another harmonica from
the case.19 Such adjustments can help preserve connections between locations in

18. To be precise, this works only for fingering patterns that do not involve the open strings—​a bound-
ary of the instrumental space.
19. A capo is a small device that clamps onto the neck of a guitar or banjo, stopping all the strings at
the same fret. By transposing the open strings, it allows a player to use familiar chord voicings in
any key. For example, I might use a capo to play in A♭ major: playing in “G major” with a capo on
the first fret, in “E major” with a capo on the fourth fret, and so on.
62  T  Music at Hand

an instrumental space and particular tonal qualia. It is easy to switch from one
harmonica to the next because their physical interface is identical and their
instrumental scales are related by exact pitch transposition.20 (A similar situation
applies to the various members of the saxophone family—​and is reflected in their
transposing notation, which specifies the note on the instrument, not the concert
pitch.) That said, there are subtle differences in the feel and timbre of harmonicas
that are tuned in different keys. In terms of ecological acoustics, these distinctions
between high and low harmonicas are related to differences in material, specifi-
cally the reeds’ restoring force (see Gaver 1993, 10). Lower-​pitched harmonicas—​
for example, in A or G—​speak easily and have a more mellow sound. Their reeds
are more flexible. Higher-​pitched harmonicas, like E, require stronger, supported
breathing and have a brighter tone. The reeds’ flexibility also affords one of the
harmonica’s most characteristic gestures: bending.
Once again, my breath not only initiates but also sustains the harmonica’s
sound. I can use breath, then, to add accents or vibrato. By changing breath pres-
sure, along with mouth and tongue position, I  can temporarily shift the pitch.
This adds a degree of mobility, a term that I borrow from the Renaissance theo-
rist Gioseffo Zarlino (1588, 218–​20). The concept emerges from Zarlino’s disputes
with Vincenzo Galilei about tuning.21 “Mobile” instruments can bend notes. This
means that, like voices, they can make music in just intonation (which Zarlino
believed to be numerically perfect). By contrast, “stable” instruments have fixed
pitches and, therefore, require tempering. Violin, trombone, and theremin are
mobile instruments, while piano and xylophone are stable ones. The former group
can slide through the pitch continuum, whereas the latter divides it discretely.
Since the intonation for mobile instruments is not strictly governed by holes or
keys, playing them in tune relies on physical and auditory feedback. Players of
these instruments, in other words, have to worry about tuning in a way that pia-
nists do not. That said, they also have greater flexibility in the pitch discrimina-
tions they can employ, which makes it possible to more precisely match their pitch
to that of other players. Zarlino includes a subcategory for stable instruments
with some measure of mobility, since performers of certain instruments can alter
pitches through blowing or fingering. The harmonica belongs here, combining
stability and mobility.
The harmonica affords bending only in particular places (see Figure 3.11). This
depends on the physics of the paired reeds.22 Only the higher note on a hole can be

20. This suggests that canonic music-​theoretical relations may be relevant to instrumental pitch map-
ping. Open strings on the violin and mandolin share the same pitches, while those of the viola and
cello share pitch classes. Viola and violin have the same pitch intervals between strings, but with
different pitches. Ukulele strings share unordered pitch-​class intervals with the highest four strings
of a guitar (but neither pitch classes nor pitch intervals). This is far from abstract for a guitarist
picking up the ukulele for the first time: recognizing it allows a guitarist to use familiar fretboard
shapes on the unfamiliar instrument.
21. For a discussion of Zarlino and Galilei’s relationship and its historical context, see Palisca (1961).
Note that Zarlino’s distinction—​in terms of Heyde’s organology—​would roughly correspond to a
distinction between “continuous volume control” and “discrete state control” for pitch.
22. For an experimental investigation of harmonica pitch bending, see Johnston (1987).
 Idiomaticity  T  63

Figure 3.11  Bending chart for a diatonic harmonica in C.

B6
Blow
E6 G6 B6
bend
Blow C4 E4 G4 C5 E5 G5 C6 E6 G6 C7

Hole 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Draw D4 G4 B4 D5 F5 A5 B5 D6 F6 A6
Draw D 4 G 4 B 4 D 5 A5
bend
F4 A4

A4

bent, meaning that the breathing direction for bends again “flip-​flops” around hole 6.
The bent note is always pulled down, and notes can be bent only into the space
between the blow and draw. That is why there are the most possibilities on hole 3,
where the blow and draw are a major third apart, and why bending is impractical
on holes 5 and 7, where they are only a semitone apart. In general, the draw bends
on the bottom half of the instrument are the easiest to play, because the reeds are
lower-​pitched and therefore more flexible. And this difference is important for
various styles of harmonica performance.

Idiomatic Multistability: Folk, Blues, and Jazz Harmonica

Mapping an instrumental space only begins to reveal how players inhabit it, for
the enactive landscapes that an instrument supports appear most fully in perfor-
mance. Here the investigation proceeds on two levels. It examines individual per-
formances, using transcription and close analysis. Yet these details also inform
broader comparison. Like a set of phenomenological variations, interlinked ana-
lytical vignettes bring out broader patterns of variance and invariance. They show
how an instrument’s affordances ground its styles without fixing them. Analyzing
harmonica performance thus drives a music-​theoretical argument against tech-
nological determinism. It demonstrates how instrumental idioms are negotiated,
emerging from the interaction of player and instrument.

Bob Dylan, “Queen Jane Approximately”

Such negotiation is particularly clear when a melody needs one of the harmonica’s
“missing notes.” My grandfather played this way at family sing-​alongs, either sub-
stituting a nearby pitch for the missing note or breaking away from the melody
64  T  Music at Hand

Table 3.1 Harmonica tablature symbols used in

transcriptions (numbers refer to holes on the instrument)
+ Blow
–​ Draw
′ Semitone bend
″ Whole-​tone bend
″′ Minor-​third bend
° Overblow
s. Tongue slap
vib. Throat (not hand) vibrato

to add an accompanying line. This is required less frequently, though, when

one is playing major-​key folk tunes that emphasize the tonic triad. Figure 3.12a,
for example, presents basic harmonica tablature for Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane
Approximately” from his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. In this notation, num-
bers correspond to the holes of the instrument: a number on its own represents
a blown note; one with a minus symbol represents a drawn note. Figure  3.12b
presents the tune in notation. (For an explanation of symbols used in this and
following transcriptions, see Table 3.1.) The melody is quite easy to play, despite
its demand for nearly constant exhalation. Only seven of its forty-​eight notes are
drawn. (It is also easy because it mostly involves staying on the same hole or mov-
ing to an adjacent one.)
Since the basic tablature of Figure 3.12a gives single numbers, it might seem
that only one hole is played at a time. But the harmonica readily affords chords—​
within specific limits. It is easy to play I and V triads, and V7, ii, and vii⌀7 chords
are also possible in particular spots. (Other chords, of course, are not available.)
Harmonica players often use chords as a kind of melodic thickening, with the
player’s mouth taking in more of the comb.
This approach is central to a folk-​harmonica style that is particularly associ-
ated with Dylan. His solo on the studio recording of “Queen Jane Approximately”
begins in the middle register: a two-​note pickup leads to a held single tone (at
3:13 on the original track), which Dylan gets by pursing his lips (see Figure 3.13).
As he repeats the pickup gesture, however, Dylan takes in more notes (m. 5). He
starts the third phrase with a similar pickup but shoots to the top of the instru-
ment, repeating the held G/​C dyad on holes 9 and 10. Dylan then ends the phrase
by jumping down to a tonic chord (end of m. 10). The final phrase—​the eight-​bar
group where the song repeats “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”—​stays with
this open-​mouth chord, rhythmically huffing and puffing, gradually returning
to hole 6 (3:41–​3:58). This short solo shows off several of the harmonica’s affor-
dances, exploring its possibilities for single notes and full chords, the tonal oppo-
sition of blow and draw, and all three octaves. Dylan explores the instrument’s
side-​to-​side dimension in m. 9, while the end of the solo privileges its in-​and-​out
dimension.
 Idiomaticity  T  65

Figure 3.12  Bob Dylan, melody from “Queen Jane Approximately” (1965).

The transformational networks set out in Figure 3.14 reveal a correspondence

between the solo’s beginning and its end, which is demonstrated in Video 3.3 .
The repeated “pickup gesture” and the cadential “huffing and puffing” are rhyth-
mically and melodically distinct. Yet they involve the same operations in harmon-
ica space. (Recall that I model elements in this space as the combination of hole
and breath direction, written as an ordered pair of the form (h, σ [sign]).) Dylan’s
pickup melody, represented as a single line in Figure 3.14a, reverses breath on the
same hole (0, –​) and then reverses breath again while moving up one hole (+1, –​).
The closing realizes these actions on lower holes (first in mm. 15–​17, then in mm.
17–​19; see Figure 3.14b). Here Dylan realizes the gesture with full chords through-
out, cycling the initial (0, –​) before the final (+1, –​).
66  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.13  Bob Dylan, harmonica solo from “Queen Jane Approximately”

(1965).

This ((0, –​), (+1, –​)) motion is characteristic of the major-​scale pattern pre-

sented earlier in Figure 3.9. Yet the opening of Dylan’s solo places this gesture on
holes 6 and 7, the spot where the harmonica switches between drawing-​to-​move-​
up and drawing-​to-​move-​down. (Recall that this is where the scale in Figure 3.9
deviated from this characteristic pattern.) This strategy produces the pentatonic-​
tinged G–​A–​C that is prominent throughout the solo:  Dylan moves directly
between (6, –​) and (7, +) seven times, adding the intervening (7, –​) only once. The
instrumental placement of 6̂, then, shapes the sound of this solo and, more gener-
ally, Dylan’s style of playing harmonica.
 Idiomaticity  T  67

Figure 3.14  Transformational networks for Dylan’s solo on “Queen Jane

Approximately”: (a) network for melodic pickup from mm. 1–​2 and mm. 4–​6 of
Dylan’s solo on “Queen Jane Approximately”; (b) network for end of Dylan’s solo
on “Queen Jane Approximately” (mm. 15–​17, then repeated immediately in mm.
17–​19).

(a) (0,–) (+1,–)

(6, +) (6, –) (7, +)

(b)
(5, +) (0,–) (5, –) (6, +)
(+1,–)
(4, +) (4, –) (5, +)
(3, +) loop 2× (3, –) (4, +)

It bears mention that this style has often been criticized. One player describes
it as follows:  “Almost no bends, lots of chords, lots of go-​forth-​and-​back-​notes.
No harp teacher I know will teach his students to play like that” (Shikida 2007).
In this view, Dylan’s harmonica playing lacks skill; it reflects the technology’s raw
affordances. Dylan himself acknowledges that this technique is not considered to
be “proper,” but says it defines his “harmonica and guitar sound.” “Most of the
time, I would blow out of the harmonica,” he explains, “because everybody sucks
in. The proper way to play is like Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson would
play—​which would be to cross it—​and I found myself blowing out more because
nobody was doing it in that area” (quoted in Appleby 1992, 20).

Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Born Blind”

Dylan’s reference here is to the “cross-​harp” or “second-​position” style of playing

associated with blues harmonica.23 Cross-​harp playing interprets the instrument’s
tonal affordances in a way that its nineteenth-​century designers never expected.
Where first position takes the blow chord as the tonic triad of a major scale, sec-
ond position takes the draw chord as the tonic of a Mixolydian mode. A C harmon-
ica, for example, can be used to play blues in G, affording both bending and a flat
seventh scale degree. While folk-​harmonica players, like most other wind players,
inhale between phrases, blues players usually use such moments to expel air.24 (This
works well for blues-​harmonica players who are also vocalists: they can breathe
out while singing and breathe back in during short harmonica breaks between
phrases.) This reflects the phenomenon that Don Ihde calls “multistability,” which

23. Dylan also plays this style, though it is less closely associated with him. His cross-​harp playing often
ends up in a high register that blues players typically avoid (for example, see “Pledging My Time”
from Blonde on Blonde [1966]).
24. Blues-​harmonica tablature reverses the marked/​unmarked categories represented by Figure 3.12.
In blues-​harmonica tablature, that is, an unsigned number denotes drawing, and blowing requires
a plus symbol.
68  T  Music at Hand

he finds in both visual illusions and technological variation (1986, 67–​79). Like a
figure/​ground reversal, cross-​harp playing flips the hierarchical relation between
the harmonica’s two chords, remapping the link between breath and tonal qualia
while preserving the inhalation/​exhalation pair.
Demonstrating G blues with a C harp, the noted harmonica player John
Sebastian discusses one tonal consequence of this position: “What you don’t have
really is what they call the dominant or the D chord. All you have is your D note
[on the first-​and fourth-​hole draw].” Sebastian, however, thinks of that challenge
as an opportunity. “And so that’s where your creativity is really going to come into
play here because it’s during that V chord, dominant chord, whatever you want to
call it, the D-​seventh or D chord that the harmonica has to play around to get the
sound” (1992, 3:08).
Cross-​harp playing also exploits the relatively easy draw bends on the bottom
half of the instrument. This adds bluesy inflections and the chromatic notes that
define the blues scale (♭3̂, ♯4̂, and ♭7̂). Referring to a chart that resembles Figure
3.11, David Barrett (1995, 32) explains that the draw notes include twice as many
bendable notes and three times as many “blue notes” as their blown counterparts.
The draw bends, then, complement the flat Mixolydian seventh, and in this sense,
the style is overdetermined.
Cross-​ harp position defines the dominant blues-​ harmonica idiom.25 For
example, consider Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “Born Blind” (1957).26 “Born Blind”
is a blues in F played on a B♭ harmonica (see Figure 3.15). His solo features a
repeated gesture that, in many ways, resembles Dylan’s opening on “Queen Jane
Approximately”:  a short pickup, a sustained note, then falling off (1:07 on the
track). Williamson, however, mainly inhales, going between non-​bent and bent
notes. It is possible to hear the reeds’ resistance in bent-​down notes that rise up to
their straight counterparts: for example, note the bending on hole 4 in m. 2 or the
slow release of G up to A in m. 9.27 (The latter also shows one way to “play around”
the dominant in Sebastian’s sense.)
While most of the solo is inhaled, in mm. 5–​6 Williamson combines blow-
ing and drawing in a characteristic triplet riff over the subdominant (1:16). This
riff—​which appears on other tracks by Williamson, such as “Help Me” (1963)—​
is demonstrated in Video 3.4 . His tongue-​slapping articulation thickens the
texture here, subtly bringing out the I and IV chords that underlie cross-​harp.28

25. The relatively rare examples of straight-​harp blues—​by Jimmy Reed or the Harmonicats—​stick
to the top register to exploit blow bends. Their sound is marked by the major-​sounding sixth and
seventh scale degrees.
26. “Born Blind” was a new version of 1951’s “Sight to the Blind,” which Williamson had recorded in
Mississippi.
27. This bending can be understood in terms of ecological acoustics: here it is possible to hear defor-
mation and return, as discussed by Gaver (1993, 10).
28. Barrett explains tongue slapping as follows: “When in the tongue blocking embouchure your lips
are over three holes and two of those holes are blocked by your tongue. If you breathe in first and
then quickly slap your tongue into position, all the air that it took to vibrate three holes is then
punched through the one hole left over. The effect is a thicker sound because of the initial vibration
of the three holes, and a wicked attack on the hole left over” (1995, 92).
 Idiomaticity  T  69

Figure 3.15  Sonny Boy Williamson II, harmonica solo from “Born Blind”
(1957). (A slightly different transcription appears in Weiser 2001, 55–​56.)

Figure 3.16a presents a schematic version of the riff and labels its three distinct
segments α, β, and γ. Locating them on a spatial network derived from Figure 3.4
shows how each segment involves a kind of “neighboring” motion in harmonica
space:  γ moves along the comb, while α and β alternate breathing on the same
hole (see Figure 3.16b). Figure 3.16c frames each of these as a loop. This clarifies
some relationships between α and β. First, they grow out of the same basic (0, –​)
transformation. Moreover, α actually becomes β when it is transposed down one
hole with inverted breathing (–​1, –​). The flipped breath pattern that takes α to β
is physically immediate when one is learning this riff, as is their dimensional dif-
ference from γ.29 One player visualizes this as a kind of “knot” in harmonica space
(Graham, n.d.).
The emphasis on drawing repeats with the return of tonic harmony in m. 8,
when Williamson returns to a variation on his opening gesture. The remainder of
the solo stays with the bottom three holes of the harmonica. With the final return
of tonic harmony (m. 11), though, a moment sticks out: at the bottom of a falling

29. In Mel Bay’s Complete Classic Chicago Blues Harp, Barrett (1995, 59) presents an exercise that sys-
tematically takes the γ triplets from one end of the harmonica to the other, both blowing and
drawing.
70  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.16  Williamson’s triplet riff from “Born Blind,” mm. 5–​6: (a) notation

with tablature; (b) spatial network, placing riff segments in harmonica space;
(c) network showing (–​1, –​) relationship between segments α and β.

(a)

(b) γ
(–1,+)
(3, +) (4, +)
(+1,+)
β (0,–) (0,–) α

(3, –) (4, –)

(c) α β γ
(0,–) (0,–) (–1,+)
(4, +) (4, –) (3, –) (3, +) (4, +) (3, +)
(0,–) (0,–) (+1,+)

(–1,–)

line, Williamson briefly blows the first hole, sounding a B♭ (4̂), which is the bottom
boundary of the instrument but which does not fit the chord. For a knowledgeable
listener, this example of what David Temperley (2007) calls “melodic-​harmonic
divorce” briefly reveals the instrument’s underlying pitch collection.
Where Dylan effectively uses the harmonica’s full range on “Queen Jane
Approximately,” Williamson’s solo stays on the bottom four holes. In other words,
his high point is around Dylan’s midregister home base. This registral preference
responds principally to the possibilities for drawn bending in holes 1–​4. This is
not to say that Williamson never exceeds this range, only that it is less common
in blues-​harmonica playing. It does not seem coincidental that a solo in which
he ventures into a higher register—​during an extended jam on “Take Your Hand
Out of My Pocket” (1958)—​was not released until fifteen years after Williamson’s
death. When he uses the pentatonic subset around holes 6 and 7 and slides to
the top holes—​gestures central to Dylan’s solo—​the unbent notes, particularly the
unadorned major IV triad, sound very unusual (2:12–​2:29 on the recording). They
go to the edge of the instrument and the edge of the blues-​harmonica idiom.

Howard Levy, “Blues in Six Keys” and “Sweet Georgia Brown”

Just as second-​position playing involves a Mixolydian interpretation of the har-

monica’s diatonic affordances, higher positions may exploit other modes. Third
 Idiomaticity  T  71

Figure 3.17  Overbending chart for a diatonic harmonica in C.

position (or “double-​cross-​harp”) is Dorian, the fourth is Aeolian, and so on,

moving through a diatonic cycle of fifths.30 Dylan, for example, uses such posi-
tions on minor-​key songs like “All Along the Watchtower.” Yet this technique has
been explored most thoroughly by the Grammy-​winning jazz-​harmonica player
Howard Levy, who has developed the ability to play any diatonic harmonica in
any key.
Of course, extended modal positions do not, by themselves, step outside of
the instrument’s diatonicism. Levy also uses a technique of “overbending” that
provides a full chromatic scale. “I realized that there were some missing notes
on the ten-​hole diatonic harp that just weren’t there,” he explains. “Being a pia-
nist, I thought that this was impossible. They had to be there somewhere. So by
stubborn experimentation, I found the missing six notes that allowed me to get a
three-​octave chromatic scale” (Musicians Professional Resource, n.d.). Without
going into the physics of the phenomenon, overbending is effectively the opposite
of bending: overblown notes are on the bottom half of the instrument, opposite to
the draw bends; overdrawn notes are on the top, opposite to the blow bends; and
where bending gave lower notes, overblowing gives higher ones (Holmes 2002; see
Figure 3.17).

30. For a detailed introduction to harmonica positions, see Holman (2000).

72  T  Music at Hand

Levy says that he visualizes a piano keyboard when he improvises on the har-
monica (Paulson 2009). His extended technique, then, overcomes the harmonica’s
conceptual constraints by simulating another instrumental space.31 By his account, he
always thinks in C major, mapping the harmonica’s open notes onto the keyboard’s
white notes and the bends and overbends onto the black notes (Levy 1992). This nat-
ural/​chromatic opposition reveals a similarity between the conventional piano key-
board and Levy’s overbending harmonica.
Levy demonstrates this approach in “Blues in Six Keys,” the introductory per-
formance from his instructional video New Directions for Harmonica (1992). With
each twelve-​bar chorus the tune moves up a semitone, starting in F major and ending
in B♭. With the Dylan and Williamson examples, tonal patterns make it clear—​to a
harmonica player, at least—​which key the instrument is in. Here this is less obvious.
Overbending, after all, lends itself to single-​note melodies, which Levy plays in a fully
chromatic bebop style. Yet he also supplements this approach with gestures that are
particularly idiomatic to the harmonica. These characteristic gestures reveal that Levy
is playing a B♭ harmonica, which means that he begins the track in cross-​harp posi-
tion and finishes in straight-​harp.
Several aspects of Levy’s cross-​harp section echo the blues style I illustrated with
“Born Blind.” Near the beginning, for example, he alternates between the 3̂ and the
lowered ♭3̂ that are both available on the third hole (mm. 5–​6 in Figure 3.18). At the
end of the first line (m. 8), Levy slides down to ♭7̂ with a whole-​step bend on the sec-
ond hole—​a gesture that Williamson explores in the corresponding measure of his
solo from “Born Blind” (see Figure 3.15, m. 4).
The instrumental space may be even clearer when Levy plays on more than one
hole at the same time. As Figure 3.19 shows, he repeats an A/​C dyad in the fifth
chorus, a blues in A (mm. 57–​58). This gesture adapts part of the B♭ harp’s drawn
F dominant chord to the key of A major.32 The start of the final chorus (in B♭) brings
another trick typical of the harmonica:  the shake. Shaking involves the sustained,
rapid alternation between two adjacent holes; it is particularly characteristic of blues
harmonica. Levy holds sustained shakes throughout mm. 65–​66, gradually moving
up the comb. Unlike most of “Blues in Six Keys,” these measures reflect simple move-
ment in harmonica space: the network of Figure 3.20 illustrates this repeated (+1, +)
shift up the comb. (The D♭/​F♭ blow bends on holes 8 and 9 maintain the exhalation
from m. 65, even though they require different breath pressure.) After the sophisti-
cated tonal twisting of several intervening keys, Levy has returned to the harmonica’s
stylistic and tonal home, to one of its easiest and most characteristic tricks.
In a complementary demonstration, Levy plays the jazz standard “Sweet
Georgia Brown” in F, using several harmonicas (see transcriptions in Figures 3.21–​
3.23). He describes the tune’s opening progression (D7–​G7–​C7–​F) as a series of
modal positions and then uses the four harmonicas that place one of those chords
in cross-​harp (that is, harmonicas in F, B♭, C, and G).33 The different positions

31. Levy, in fact, sometimes plays both instruments at once—​holding the harmonica in one hand,
using the other to comp or play piano melodies in unison with the harmonica.
32. This chorus, in other words, is a rare instance of the Locrian sixth position.
33. Since Levy does not play the main tune on the G harmonica, I have omitted it here.
 Idiomaticity  T  73

Figure 3.18  Howard Levy, “Blues in Six Keys,” mm. 5–​17. The performance
opens with a blues in F, played in cross-​harp position.

are audible here in contrasts between bent and straight, drawn and blown notes.
Straight-​harp and cross-​harp are also the positions where he uses chords and more
arpeggios. These differences are perhaps clearest in Figure 3.23. Its second phrase,
in cross-​harp position, involves nearly constant inhalation and bluesy bend-
ing (mm. 6–​9). In the following straight-​harp phrase (mm. 10–​13), by contrast,
there are no bent notes. Here Levy moves up and down the comb, outlining a
C-​major triad (m. 12). When he reaches the more unusual “first flat position” in
m.  14, though, Levy abandons the composed melody and improvises a flowing
bebop-​style line.
In Levy’s own words, his improvisations respond to the instrument’s “sweet
spots.”

Every time you play a different mode on the harmonica the bends and the sweet
spots on the harmonica change. For example the first note of the scale when you
play in the Lydian mode is a bend in this [low] octave. It’s a straight note when you
play in this [middle] octave. And you get all sorts of juicy bends like around the
sixth and the third over here…. So when you play in these positions, there’s all sorts
of expressive possibilities that start happening on the instrument that are totally
different from when you’re playing in cross-​harp. (Levy 1992, ch. 9)

In ecological terms, a “sweet spot” would be a place where the object’s affor-
dances converge with the agent’s abilities in a particularly strong way. The sweet
Figure 3.19  Howard Levy, “Blues in Six Keys,” mm. 53–​73. Blues in A and then
B♭ close the piece.

Figure 3.20  Transformational network for Levy, “Blues in Six Keys,” mm. 65–​66.

(7, +) (+1,+) (8, +) (+1,+) (9, +) (0,–) (9, –)

(6, +) (7, +) (8, +) (8, –)
 Idiomaticity  T  75

Figure 3.21  Howard Levy, “Sweet Georgia Brown” (straight-​harp).

Figure 3.22  Howard, Levy, “Sweet Georgia Brown” (cross-​harp).

spot offers less resistance, more possibilities. Unlike the difficult and unstable
overblown notes, for example, draw bends are fairly easy to play and can be col-
ored with throat vibrato. They are unique—​unique in the sense that they appear
only at certain places on the instrument and also in the sense that they are par-
ticularly characteristic of that instrument. Levy’s “new directions for harmonica,”
then, build on the same sweet spots—​the same privileged affordances—​that drive
 Idiomaticity  T  77

harp’s glissandi—​in these moments, instruments do not seem neutral or transpar-

ent. Their individuality, their materiality, their presence as mediators is sounded.
Idiomatic music reflects what an instrument can and cannot do, what it does
willingly and what it does reluctantly. Yet as David Huron and Jonathon Berec
emphasize, “What makes something idiomatic is not that it is easy to play, but
that it is easier to play given the specific prescribed circumstances compared with
other possible performance circumstances” (2009, 119). Huron and Berec develop
a computational model that shows how idiomatic compositions for trumpet
become more difficult when they are transposed up or down and when the tempo
is changed. In my terms, their “transposition idiomaticism” has to do with instru-
mental space and place-​to-​pitch mapping. Their “tempo idiomaticism,” on the
other hand, involves action-​sound coupling: if a trumpet piece’s tempo becomes
too slow, the player may run out of breath; if it speeds up too much, tonguing may
become impossible. With both, idiomatic trumpet music plays to the instrument’s
sweet spots—​not too slow, not too fast, in a key that fits just right.
Instrumental idiomaticity seems distinct from tonal idiomaticity. Though they
obviously overlap, an instrument may win out in moments of melodic-​harmonic
divorce. But like the linguistic and tonal idioms discussed by Robert Gjerdingen
(2007b, 121–​24), instrumental idioms involve characteristic patterns that cannot
be predicted by grammatical rules alone. When speaking a foreign language or
composing for an instrument I do not play, I may easily construct utterances that
are grammatically correct but stylistically nonsensical, and such mistakes may
be identified only with reference to standard practice. (A francophone learning
English, for example, might say, “Let’s call a cat a cat.” This literal translation of a
French idiom contains no syntactic errors. Nonetheless, anglophones call a spade
a spade.) Corpus analysis suggests that about half of spoken and written language
involves conventional word combinations (Erman and Warren 2000). To address
this, teachers of English as a second language often use special dictionaries of col-
locations, whose closest musical equivalents would come from improvisational
pedagogy—​books of jazz licks, eighteenth-​century partimenti, or the Persian
Radif.35 In idiomatic performance, then, speakers or players do not select every
word or note individually; they also draw on larger, ready-​made sequences.
Gjerdingen brings up this aspect of idiomaticity in a brief response to Huron
and Berec, arguing that difficulty depends not only on “particular fingering or reg-
isters” but also on a performer’s “musical upbringing” (2009, 124). Indeed, from
an ecological standpoint, idiom must involve both instrumental affordances and
players’ habits. Overemphasizing one or the other risks a return to technological
or social determinism. As the multistable opposition of straight-​and cross-​harp
demonstrates, the instrument itself does not give rise to an idiom. The idiom is
realized in players’ overlearned actions, in the ways they typically move through
an instrumental space, revealing some affordances and concealing others.

35. Partimenti are figured or unfigured basses to be completed in keyboard performance (see
Gjerdingen 2007a). The Radif is a collection of melodies in each of the Persian modes (dastgāhs),
whose motifs are used in improvisation (see Nettl 1992).
78  T  Music at Hand

Beyond that, the linguistic analogy can help clarify how musical idioms reflect
social habits. Idioms are produced, maintained, and negotiated in communities.
My individual case studies, then, also stand in for particular traditions. Dylan’s
harmonica playing, however idiosyncratic, is linked to Woody Guthrie’s folk style,
Jimmy Reed’s straight-​harp blues, and so on.
Here it seems productive to consider the ecological understanding of soci-
ality offered by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. “Sociality,” he writes, “does not
depend upon the organization of sensory data, initially private to each perceiver,
in terms of an objective system of collective representations. Rather, sociality
is given from the start … in the direct, perceptual involvement of fellow par-
ticipants in a shared environment” (2000, 167). Sociality, from this perspective,
is about shared perception and action, shared abilities and affordances, about
inhabiting an enactive landscape together. For Ingold, an object becomes a tool
only when it is joined to a technique (319). In other words, to see something as
a musical instrument is already to have an idea, however rough, of how it might
be played.
The communal perception of affordances is important to Bernard Stiegler too.
Recall Stiegler’s general argument (outlined in Chapter 1): tools reveal traces of
their users’ actions, forming a kind of external memory that makes human cul-
ture possible. Idiomaticity, for Stiegler, coordinates individuals, communities, and
technical objects (2009, 67). While individuals develop distinctive personal styles,
idioms are rooted in social groups (157). And this localization creates a certain
untranslatability, even as idioms inevitably overlap (84). Stiegler illustrates his
argument with the common Latin origins of French, Italian, and Spanish, yet the
musical elements shared by different instruments also facilitate idiomatic cross-
over. Levy’s harmonica playing, for example, shares something with his piano
playing; Williamson’s playing, with his singing. Ultimately, Stiegler thinks that idi-
oms show how the relation between humanity and technology—​between speakers
and their languages or musicians and their instruments—​is socially conditioned,
though not socially determined. With a characteristic ontological twist, he even
claims that this kind of idiomaticity marks all human existence (157).

Technical Agency and Motor Agency

A theory of idiomaticity helps explain how instruments shape players’ actions,

how coordinated affordances and habits give rise to distinctive musical dialects
made of seemingly prefabricated patterns. Yet this can also shed light on ambigui-
ties related to technology and agency. Why might I sometimes feel that my body
is improvising on its own? Or that I am being played by the instrument? As with
questions about instrumental incorporation, the answers here are related to the
prereflective body schema, for the body schema supports both the perception of
affordances and the sense of agency.
A series of experiments by Mike Tucker and Rob Ellis shows that objects
prime the actions they afford (1998, 2001, 2004). Seeing a graspable object—​or
 Idiomaticity  T  79

even reading its name—​elicits unconscious simulations of hand action.36 These

simulations are particular to the thing’s affordances: for example, grapes and
hammers evoke different kinds of gripping. Merleau-​Ponty seems to anticipate
these results in The Phenomenology of Perception:  “The gesture of reaching
one’s hand out toward an object contains a reference to the object, not as a rep-
resentation, but as this highly determinate thing toward which we are thrown,
next to which we are through anticipation, and which we haunt” (2012, 140).
He refers to this as a mode of “being-​toward-​the-​thing,” in which the body is
aimed at objects and responds to their call. Embodied responses to affordances
go beyond simulation for people with anarchic hand syndrome (Marcel 2003,
76–​81). Such patients, who typically have brain damage involving the supple-
mentary motor area, respond involuntarily to objects in their environment.
They might pick up a pen and start writing, without any conscious intention
to do so.
These responses instead involve what Merleau-​Ponty calls “motor intentional-
ity” (2012, 113). Motor intentions drive automatic movements. They are phenom-
enologically recessive, difficult to describe in words. Elisabeth Pacherie (2008)
gathers evidence to show that motor intentions have a separate neural substrate
from conscious intentions and a different timescale. For example, when skilled
drivers encounter an unexpected obstacle in the road, they may avoid it a split sec-
ond before consciously recognizing it. Quick responses like this can outpace con-
scious thought, creating a momentary dissociation between action and subjective
awareness (Jeannerod 2006, 46–​49). Note, also, that motor intentions or automatic
movements are not limited to biological reflexes; they equally involve learned,
technical skills (like driving a car). All of this complicates common notions of
agency, demonstrating that actions are not always “caused” by self-​conscious
decision-​making.
Psychologists and philosophers, then, distinguish between action, a sense
of ownership (the experience of my body being mine), and a sense of agency
(the experience of causing or controlling action). These elements, though usu-
ally integrated, can come apart in delusions of control, whether pathological or
experimentally induced. Patients with schizophrenia typically have no problem
with motor control or the sense of ownership. They can complete physical tasks
following an experimenter’s instructions, and they feel their moving bodies as
their own. But for some of these patients the sense of agency is severely impaired.
Their bodies seem to be controlled by alien forces. Neurologically this is related
to problems with bodily representation and self-​monitoring, to a breakdown in
the unconscious correspondences among predicted action and visual, proprio-
ceptive, and kinesthetic feedback (C. Frith 2005, 754–​56; Graham et  al. 2014).
Disruptions to perceived agency and disruptions to the body schema often go
together.37

36. Simulation is key to many theories of grounded cognition (Barsalou 1999, 2008). For a review of
other relevant experiments, see Kirsh (2013, §2).
37. For a discussion of the distinction between ownership and agency, see Gallagher (2012). In general,
problems with the sense of ownership relate to disorders of the body image, whereas problems with
80  T  Music at Hand

So it is perhaps unsurprising that instrumentalists’ sense of agency can be

reduced by altered auditory feedback (Couchman, Beasley, and Pfordresher 2012).
They feel less control when pitch or timing changes unexpectedly, upsetting the
multisensory integration that subtends experiences of instrumental withdrawal
and incorporation.
But I would further argue that idiomatic fluency, paradoxically, might either
enhance or reduce a player’s sense of agency. Both effects are likely most common
with music that is idiomatic and also difficult. At fast tempos, I sometimes react
musically before I know exactly what I am doing, like the driver dodging an unex-
pected obstacle. On the one hand, this mix of skill and challenge is characteris-
tic of “flow,” a psychological state that combines an increased feeling of control
with decreased self-​consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 52–​66). On the other
hand, because objects prime motor intentions for actions they afford, the over-
learned patterns of idiomatic performance may seem to be inevitable responses
to some external imperative.38 For a fleeting moment, it may feel as though my
body or the instrument or the music itself is in charge. Examining this paradox,
the philosopher Eddy Nahmias argues that musicians and athletes do not make
detailed, self-​conscious decisions in the course of play. This kind of overthink-
ing, in fact, would hinder performance. Instead, Nahmias suggests, the player has
“a general intention or plan to play well” and then lets the details unfold (2005,
774).39 I monitor my playing as if from a distance, watching in wonder my own
fingers move.
Let me elaborate by describing a performance at a late-​night gig in a
Chicagoland café. During an up-​tempo blues, I switch from mandolin comping
to a harmonica solo. I step up to the microphone, but there is no time to plan,
no time to select a particular starting note. So I  start by drawing air through
the bottom half of the instrument, orienting myself as I  play. I  glance at the
guitarist, the bass player, the small audience. In this moment, I do not explicitly
think of chord changes, breathing patterns, or licks I have learned. Instead, I feel
that I am listening to the harmonica’s suggestions, following pathways that seem
both familiar and new. I respond to possibilities as they present themselves: here
I can bend and here I can shake; here I reach a boundary and must turn around.
I manage a flow of energy that passes through the harmonica—​leaving space at
first, then building to a climax. As my solo finishes, I hardly know what I have
played. But I know that it would have been very different had I chosen to solo
with the mandolin or another instrumental partner. My sense of technical
agency here relies on motor agency, on my schematic responses to the harmon-
ica’s affordances. The instrument might not be an autonomous agent—​but, in a

the sense of agency relate to disorders of the body schema (Gallagher and Vaever 2004, 121). As a
side note, patients with schizophrenia tend to be especially susceptible to the rubber hand illusion
discussed in Chapter 2 (Peled et al. 2003; Thakkar et al. 2011).
38. For the phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis, things themselves are experienced as imperatives
that “order the diagrams and variations of our postural schema and exploratory manipulations”
(1998, 64).
39. In such cases, Nahmias claims that general intentions may support a sense of authorship (an expe-
rience of being the source of action), even without a robust sense of agency.
 Idiomaticity  T  81

sense, neither am I. My own embodied agency is distributed; my actions respond

to the instrument’s call.

Conclusions

Movement around an instrument—​like all movement—​involves a certain spa-

tiality. In fact, instrumental interfaces coordinate different varieties of space.40
Place-​to-​pitch mapping links technological and tonal spaces, each with particu-
lar dimensions and scales of measurement, and this doubled space is inhabited
by a performing body.41 As Merleau-​Ponty put it in his description of the organ
rehearsal, the player may settle into the instrument “as one settles into a house”
(2012, 146). Instrumental space, then, is not simply a homogeneous geometric
field, but the correlate of a lived body, an affordance space, an enactive landscape.
Here the player is both constrained and free, since the interface conditions perfor-
mance without determining it. The idioms that emerge from this negotiation show
people and instruments truly making music together. These idioms make the fit
between space and action audible, in music that sounds like it feels good to play.
By focusing on variations of technique, this chapter has more or less treated
the instrument—​in this case, the diatonic harmonica—​as a given. Yet expert play-
ers are highly aware of differences among harmonica models. Levy favors Hohner
Golden Melody harmonicas, which have plastic combs and equal-​tempered tun-
ing, whereas many blues players prefer Marine Band harmonicas, with wooden
combs and a tuning that is closer to just intonation. On this level, there is no such
thing as “the” ten-​hole diatonic harmonica. The instrument does not correspond
to a single technological object.42 Moreover, though some durability is essential
for instrumental prostheticity, instrumental technology is not immutable. Its sta-
bilization requires active maintenance, and though the social actors that repro-
duce musical instruments and idioms often act in predictable ways, they do not
always do so.43 In other words, instrument and idiom may be transformed as well
as preserved.
A more complete study of harmonica playing would also have to consider
variations in technology. While Levy uses overblowing to get the equivalent of
“black notes,” for example, others have done so by using redesigned instruments.
Chromatic harmonicas are typically equipped with a button that raises the note
being played by a semitone. While their form is less standardized than a ten-​hole
blues harp, one common model is a sixteen-​hole instrument developed for the

40. In the context of painting and dance, Merleau-​Ponty argues that aesthetic experience opens up
new forms of spatiality (1964, 159–​90; 2008, 39–​42; 2012, 546n86). A painting, for example, can be
experienced as having depth, despite the canvas’s flatness.
41. Of course, instrumental performance may involve other kinds of space as well, such as the visual
space of notation or the architectural space in which the music is played.
42. Timothy Taylor (2001, 7) elaborates this idea with reference to clarinets; De Souza (2016a, 148–​58),
with reference to guitars.
43. For a theoretical discussion of stabilization in technology and society, see Latour (1991, 123).
82  T  Music at Hand

classical harmonica player Larry Adler. This essentially offers a C-​major harmon-
ica and a C♯-​major harmonica, played through a single comb.44 To play it in various
keys requires the kind of pervasive natural/​accidental (or white-​note/​black-​note)
thinking reflected in Levy’s pianistic visualizations. (Indeed, Stevie Wonder, whose
sensitivity to keyboard topography was mentioned earlier, is a master of the chro-
matic harmonica.) This shows how Levy’s technique and Adler’s technology end
up in the same place conceptually, loosening the consistent association between
instrumental space and tonal qualia.
Other harmonicas, however, specifically avoid this kind of reconceptualiza-
tion. Some preserve straight-​harp relationships between hole and scale degree but
afford the minor mode. Harmonic-​minor harps flatten the thirds in the blown
triad, while keeping the same dominant-​function draw notes; natural-​minor har-
monicas also have a minor draw chord (to permit minor cross-​harp playing).
“Melody-​maker” or “country-​tuning” models similarly shift to a Lydian mode, so
that cross-​harp position offers a major scale. This allows blues players to play their
habitual licks—​but with a leading tone in place of the Mixolydian subtonic. Other
ten-​hole models like Brendan Power’s “PowerBender” maximize bends:  placing
every drawn note above its blown counterpart permits draw bends on every hole.
These alternative harmonica tunings already show how modifications of the
technology presuppose certain techniques. Melody-​makers or PowerBenders are of
little value to first-​position players; harmonic-​minor models are similarly ineffec-
tive for dedicated cross-​harp players. This suggests that instrumental alteration
can provide insights about how players’ habits can be adapted or disrupted. And
this can help refine my account of auditory-​motor integration, complicating the
connections between instrument, action, intention, and sound.

44. The sixteen-​hole chromatic harmonica also regularizes pitch and breathing patterns, repeating the
complete major-​scale pattern from the blues harp’s middle register in all octaves.
CHAPTER 
Four
Voluntary Self-​Sabotage

My wife and I are playing violin-​piano duets at a wedding reception. And as soon
as I  start the accompaniment to Jules Massenet’s “Meditation” (see Figure  4.1),
the rickety baby grand starts to give me trouble. The F♯ below middle C sticks. It
refuses to bounce back into position. I reset the key without stopping the piece, but
the problem persists. Every time I hit the note, it has to be manually fixed, and for
the rest of the gig I remain acutely aware of this single, previously unremarkable
black key.
This experience recalls Martin Heidegger’s discussion of handiness
(Zuhandenheit) in the “tool analysis” of Being and Time (2010, 72–​74). While I am
busy hammering, Heidegger says, I hardly notice the tool. I am more focused on
the work, on whatever I am doing with the hammer. Likewise, while playing piano,
I rarely think about the keys; usually I am more focused on the music. But some-
times my hammer breaks. I stop. I look at the tool. Suddenly this thing demands
my attention. Instead of being handy (zuhanden), the broken hammer is “present-​
to-​hand” (vorhanden).
Musicians are familiar with such moments of “presence-​to-​hand” (Vorhan­
denheit), moments when an instrument’s affordances change unexpectedly.
A sticky key, a broken string, or a tuning problem can disrupt my integration with
an instrument. Here I am made aware of its materiality, distracted by its “thing-
ness.” I become conscious of my equipment and my body, improvising around the
problem, adjusting the instrument or my fingering in the course of play.
Some musicians create a similar kind of breakdown on purpose by altering
their instruments. Like Heidegger’s broken hammer, an instrument that has been
retuned, prepared, or redesigned can “get in the way.” It may surprise, resist, or
provoke its player.
The guitar offers a rich set of case studies here. Like most stringed instruments,
the guitar is easily retuned or prepared. But tinkering is also an essential part of
guitar culture, especially with electric guitars. Players often customize instru-
ments, pickups, effects pedals, or amplifiers. They personalize mass-​produced
gear. Historically this interplay appears alongside the development of jazz gui-
tar, which depended on amplification technologies that were often homemade
(Waksman 1999, 20).1 Jazz and rock guitarists’ practices of alteration show how

1. Of course, certain adaptations, like Les Paul’s solid-​body design, initiated lasting changes. Here
instrumental alteration intersects with the history of instruments: individual experimentation may
become stabilized in communal practice (see Pinch and Trocco 2002; Bijsterveld and Schulp 2004).
84  T  Music at Hand

Figure 4.1  Jules Massenet, “Meditation” from Thaïs, mm. 1–​4.

changes to an instrument relate to sonic organization and bodily technique. Yet

statements by the players themselves—​along with insights from psychology and
philosophy—​suggest that these changes also affect perceptual experience.

Auditory-​Motor Disalignment

Instrumental modifications can interrupt learned connections between hand

and ear. Does this disruption contradict my earlier emphasis on auditory-​motor
integration? Not exactly. As discussed in Chapter 1, sensorimotor integration in
perception and memory relies on repeatable patterns of coactivation. Yet such
associations are dynamic, not rigid. Since sensory modalities have distinct neural
substrates, they are always potentially separable. Brain injuries can make this tragi-
cally clear. The possibility of dissociation, then, is built into the theory of grounded
cognition. At the neural level, even a “single” sense is not holistic. Seeing, for
instance, involves multiple neural pathways (Jeannerod 1997). An object’s visual
properties activate various groups of neurons, cuing perceptual schemas related to
shape, color, and so on. Because these schemas are independent at the neural level,
they can be transformed and combined in novel ways (Barsalou 1999, 593–​94).
Schemas may form a framework that is “filled in” with new content; other times,
the structure of a schema itself may be altered. Such changes, additionally, might
involve bottom-​up or top-​down processes.
Experiments with altered auditory feedback provide some insights into
dynamic remapping in musical performance. Steven Finney (1997), for example,
asked expert keyboard players to play two-​part inventions by J.  S. Bach—​but
manipulated the instrument’s MIDI output to produce unexpected sonic results.
The keyboard might be silent, or participants might hear their playing delayed
by 250 milliseconds. During some trials, single notes would occasionally sound
a tone or semitone off (producing a note outside of the current key). In others,
key-​to-​pitch mapping was randomized. Another condition produced a wholly
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  85

different piece, with each key press activating the next note in the giga from Bach’s
D-​minor Sonata for Solo Violin.
These alterations affected participants in distinct ways. The silent keyboard
did not impair performance. Like the deaf Beethoven’s improvisations, this repre-
sents a situation where motor action and auditory simulation work together.2 With
delayed auditory feedback, however, participants played more wrong notes, their
performances took longer (meaning that the tempo decreased), and their hands
were less coordinated. The delay introduces a mismatch between production and
perception.3 It violates the binding of action and effect, which is not specific to
music but basic to ecological acoustics.
Perhaps surprisingly, Finney’s pitch alterations had no significant effect on
performance. Why is that? Certainly, an instrument’s pitch organization is arbi-
trary in a way that action-​effect coupling is not.4 Yet it also turns out that Finney’s
remappings—​to random scales or even another piece by Bach—​are so radical that
players quickly learn to ignore the unpredictable pitches. As with a silent key-
board, they let their hands lead. Later experiments indicate that altered pitch feed-
back impairs performance only when the perceived music is structurally similar
to the planned music (Pfordresher 2005).5 Wrong notes from earlier or later in the
melody I am trying to play are more confusing than wrong notes from outside of
the key (Pfordresher and Palmer 2006). A kind of auditory-​motor “disalignment,”
then, is generally more disruptive than dissociation. In disalignment, sound and
action are connected but not identical. There is a gap or divergence between them.
Though the following analyses examine disalignment with altered instru-
ments, it bears mention that a sense of disalignment may also arise with unaltered
instruments. For example, the ethnomusicologist Steven Friedson discusses “a
dialectic between what is heard and how it is played” in the vimbuza drumming of
northern Malawian healing rites (1996, 132–​58). This stems from the gap between
a polymetric rhythmic surface and bimanual playing technique. The music within
these rites seems to switch between twos and threes, creating multistable acoustic
illusions like the optical illusions discussed by Ihde (1986, 67–​79). Nonetheless,
players’ motor patterns feel fundamentally duple because vimbuza drumming tech-
nique maintains strict alternation between hands. Something comparable occurs
in the music of the Shona mbira, whose sound is enhanced by the rich buzzing and
overtones created by bottle-​top vibrators and a gourd resonator. As Paul Berliner
writes, “The music reflected back to [the mbira player] by his resonator as he plays

2. This matches the results of Repp (1999). Unsurprisingly, the absence of auditory feedback is a greater
problem for ensemble performance (Goebl and Palmer 2009).
3. For a review and theoretical discussion, see Pfordresher (2006). Delayed auditory feedback is
less disruptive if the delay can be perceived in terms of subdivisions of the beat (Pfordresher and
Palmer 2002). This is because the player is able to synchronize action with sound via a larger metric
structure.
4. This also differentiates instruments from voices. As discussed by Pfordresher and Mantell, musical
instruments have a certain “susceptibility to disruption” (2012, 168; see also Howell, Powell, and
Khan 1983, 773).
5. Playing a reversed keyboard—​where high and low pitches are systematically inverted—​is also more
difficult than playing a keyboard that generates random pitches (Laeng and Park 1999).
86  T  Music at Hand

seems to be more complex than that which his fingers alone produce” (1993, 130).
Here the effect emerges both from rhythmic complexity and from the way that the
mbira, as an instrumental system, amplifies and modifies a player’s musical input.
“Extended techniques” in contemporary music can give rise to similar experi-
ences. For example, Helmut Lachenmann’s “Dal niente” for solo clarinet decom-
poses the clarinetist’s usual technique. It unyokes action schemas—​of fingering,
breathing, and tonguing—​that are usually integrated. Certain sections involve
fingering or blowing alone; sometimes notes fade in and out, playing with the
boundary between breath and tone (see Figure 4.2a). This demonstrates the sepa-
rability of different motor schemas. But Lachenmann also plays with the clari-
netist’s habits. The rapid key clicking that opens the work often involves stepwise
motion. (This means that it often involves sequences of individual finger move-
ments.) Surprisingly, Lachenmann sometimes mixes this technique with famil-
iar motor schemas. Line 28, for instance, has a descending D-​major scale (see
Figure 4.2b)! Such diatonic patterns might not be audible to the audience, but they
can jump out at the player, since overlearned patterns like scales engage strong
auditory-​motor habits. Like the violinists tapping Mozart in the fMRI machine
(discussed in Chapter  1), the clarinetist here may experience sonic simulations
driven by physical action.
“Dal niente” belongs to a series of compositions from the late 1960s and 1970s
that Lachenmann calls musique concrète instrumentale. He defines this as “a music
in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner of their
production takes at least as much importance as the resulting acoustic properties”
(Lachenmann 1996, 381). These pieces, then, try to sustain a kind of breakdown,
to prevent the player’s bodily exertions and the instrument itself from withdraw-
ing into the music.
Another piece in the series, “Guero,” treats “the piano as a six-​manualed
variant … of that Latin American instrument” which gives the piece its name
(Lachenmann 1996, 384). The graphic notation, shown in Figure 4.3a, sets out the
space of the keyboard and measures time in seconds. Then it specifies different

Figure 4.2  Helmut Lachenmann, excerpts from “Dal niente” for solo clarinet
(1970): (a) opening, annotated with playing techniques; (b) line 28, highlighting
an unexpected, silent D-​major scale. © 1974 by Musikverlage Hans Gerig, Köln,
1980 assigned to Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. Used with kind permission.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  87

Figure 4.3  Helmut Lachenmann, excerpts from “Guero” for piano

(1969): (a) opening, showing Lachenmann’s “instrumental clef ” (with
translation); (b) lines 12–​13, with annotations explaining graphic notation and
scraping technique. © 1972 by Musikverlage Hans Gerig, Köln, 1980 assigned to
Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. Used with kind permission.

surfaces to be scraped or struck—​the upper surface of the white keys, their front
edge, their top, and so on (see Figure  4.3b). It might seem that such pieces do
not require preexisting instrumental techniques, that Czerny’s finger exercises or
Chopin’s études will not prepare you to play “Guero.” In this view, anyone could
learn these pieces, since they make everyone a beginner. Yet this would miss out on
part of Lachenmann’s aesthetic goals. He is interested in subverting musical habits,
in pushing against established auditory-​motor associations. Hence the composer
describes “Guero” as “a manual and also a psychological study for the pianist”
(384). It aims to develop new performative and perceptual skills by disrupting
a pianist’s technique. Lachenmann’s musical experiments with disalignment and
dissociation thus parallel Finney’s and Pfordresher’s psychological experiments,
using disalignment and dissociation for artistic rather than scientific ends.
All of this relates to the composer’s distinctive modernist understanding of
“beauty.” Beauty, for Lachenmann (1980, 22), is found in moments of human
potential—​the potential to know oneself and the world, to change one’s actions,
to change one’s mind. “By allowing oneself to experience this ‘non-​music,’ ” says
Lachenmann (1995, 101), “… listening becomes genuine perception. It is only now
that one begins to listen differently, that one is reminded of the changeability of lis-
tening and of aesthetic behavior, reminded, in other words, of one’s own structure,
88  T  Music at Hand

one’s own structural changeability.” Lachenmann’s music, then, can be understood

as a kind of phenomenology, “deliberately incorporating, provoking and revealing
perception.”
The rest of the chapter shows how this can be achieved through altered instru-
ments. With an altered instrument, realizing the simplest tune may become con-
fusing: I no longer know what notes I am playing.

Retuned Instruments: Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago”

The jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel (b. 1970) describes creative development as a

cycle of stability and instability, learning and unlearning. “You start off not know-
ing what you’re doing,” he says, “then you organize things so they become ordered.
When that order becomes static, you have to break it up to create another state of
instability, which, in turn, throws you back into chaos. That’s what continuing on
to the next step is all about” (Rosenwinkel 2007). On his 2001 album, The Next
Step, this dynamic process is driven largely by instrumental modification: he uses
alternate tunings for four of the record’s eight tracks.6
Rosenwinkel had found success in the mid-​1990s with a Composer’s Award
from the National Endowment for the Arts and a recording contract with the
prominent jazz label Verve. But at the point when he started work on The Next
Step, Rosenwinkel was dissatisfied with his playing. “My knowledge of the guitar
was hindering my relationship to the music,” he explains. “I felt like I knew too
much about what I was doing and not hearing the music directly.” This is not sim-
ply about practiced hands falling into predictable patterns. Rather, Rosenwinkel
frames this as an inability to hear the music properly. It involves perceptual or
conceptual habits as much as performative ones. In cognitive terms, Rosenwinkel
is describing particularly tight auditory-​motor connections. If he already knows
what his actions will sound like, he may come to hear his playing as unsurpris-
ing, overly schematic. A description by Rosenwinkel’s colleague Christian Rover
(2006) evokes the instrumentalized simulations discussed in Chapter 1: “To have
a certain collection of voicings for every harmony, and a sound you already inter-
nally hear before you actually play it, would eventually make it redundant to still
play it.”
Rosenwinkel’s solution was to retune his guitar in a form of “voluntary self-​
sabotage.” “Anyone who has ever tried this,” Rover comments, “knows that one
twist of a tuning peg can turn you into a beginner in an instant. Just like the first
time you touched a guitar all you have is your ears to rely on—​and that’s exactly
what Kurt’s intention was.” There is some sense to this metaphor. Beginners rely
more on visual feedback and pay more attention to motor patterns than do expert
performers (see Palmer and Meyer 2000, discussed in Chapter  1). Since their

6. While alternate tunings are uncommon in jazz, they are often used in other guitar traditions, from
the widespread drop-​D tuning (that lowers the lowest string a whole step) to various open tunings of
folk and slide blues guitar.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  89

mapping between hand and ear is still being formed, they lack the perceptual hab-
its that Rosenwinkel found frustrating.
In other ways, though, this professional musician was quite different from a
beginner. Rosenwinkel was able to adapt various motor skills to the altered instru-
ment. His right-​hand picking, for example, would be unaffected. This reflects a
general principle:  retuned instruments change place-​to-​pitch mapping, while pre-
serving the instrumental interface. The experiments by Pfordresher and colleagues,
cited in the preceding section, imply that new mappings might be most challeng-
ing when they preserve aspects of a familiar tuning too.
I analyze relationships between standard and altered tunings through
transformational voice leading theory, an application suggested by a specu-
lative “scordatura fantasy” by David Lewin (1998, 38–​41). Figure 4.4 repre-
sents alternate tunings as mappings between two pitch sets. This shows each
string’s movement in pitch space and sums up the mapping as a whole with two
metrics of transformational voice leading, “consistency” and “displacement.”
“Consistency” measures the mapping’s uniformity:  it counts the number of
voices that move by the same pitch interval (Straus 2003, 315). Higher consis-
tency values mean that the mapping is closer to transposition—​and that it pre-
serves more inter-​string intervals from standard tuning. Rosenwinkel’s favored
retuning takes three strings down a semitone; it is semiconsistent. By compari-
son, the scordatura for Toru Takemitsu’s “Equinox” keeps four strings consis-
tent. “Displacement”—​the total number of semitones traversed (Straus 2003,
320)—​further quantifies distance from standard tuning. Where Takemitsu’s
tuning moves only two semitones overall, Rosenwinkel’s tuning moves twelve.
Rosenwinkel’s scordatura is further from standard tuning than Takemitsu’s.
Every string moves, and the tuning does not repeat pitch intervals between adja-
cent strings. Yet Rosenwinkel also maintains some familiar features. Because three
strings transpose together, he can play standard fretboard patterns involving those
strings. This is particularly notable with the perfect fourth between the highest

Figure 4.4  Tuning transformations for guitar scordatura by Kurt Rosenwinkel

and Toru Takemitsu. “Consistency” counts the number of voices that move the
same distance; “displacement,” the total number of semitones shifted.
76  T  Music at Hand

Figure 3.23  Howard Levy, “Sweet Georgia Brown” (first flat position).

folk and blues harmonica. His innovation is not to leave them behind but to add
to them, systematically multiplying the modal thinking of cross-​harp, putting the
sweet spots into new musical contexts.34

Idiomaticity

Instrumental “idioms” typically engage such “sweet spots.” When Dylan goes back
and forth between tonic and dominant-​plus-​6̂ or when Williamson bends under 1̂,
3̂, and 5̂ (but never 7̂), their music seems to be organized around the harmonica’s
characteristic affordances, its physical and sonic possibilities. In other words, idi-
omatic playing makes it possible to hear aspects of action-​sound coupling and
instrumental space. In moments of instrumental idiomaticity—​from the harmon-
ica’s bending to the horn’s hunting calls, from the fiddle’s string crossing to the

34. These technical variations, of course, are not comprehensive. The openness of affordance theory,
mentioned earlier, means that they could not be. Rapper Doug E. Fresh, for instance, plays har-
monica while beat-​boxing. Since he is using his lips to articulate the beat, he cannot always have
his mouth on the instrument. Instead, he holds the harmonica in front of his microphone and
sends percussive blasts of air through it. With this technique, it is not possible to isolate single
melody pitches. Instead, Fresh capitalizes on the harmonic affordances of the harmonica: he gets his
audience to sing a melody while he accompanies them with harmonica chords and mouth percus-
sion. The resulting tonic/​dominant alternation—​similar to the end of Dylan’s solo on “Queen Jane
Approximately”—​demonstrates the pitch affordances of the ten-​hole harmonica in a particularly
clear way.
90  T  Music at Hand

Figure 4.5  Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 1–​9. (This follows an improvised

solo-​guitar introduction.)

two strings. Such zones engage established performance habits. They allow the
player to forget temporarily about the retuning, making other areas on the instru-
ment more surprising by comparison. All of this involves cross-​string intervals, of
course; relative pitch relations along the strings, which are determined by acous-
tics, remain constant. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Rosenwinkel privileges
motion along the strings in the opening track from The Next Step, “Zhivago.”
“Zhivago” is a contemporary jazz waltz. After a free solo lead-​in, Rosenwinkel
establishes the driving triple-​time feel of the composition proper. The guitar
descends for eight measures, then repeats the progression with bass and drums
(see transcription in Figure 4.5). Together they develop a new vamp, shown in
Figure 4.6. At m. 33, the saxophone joins the guitar with a skipping theme that
will return throughout the eighty-​six-​measure composition (see Figure 4.7).
The following analytical notes consider these opening sections, using the
transformational model of guitar space introduced in the preceding chapter. As
illustrated in my network for a riff by the Kinks in Figure  3.3, I  represent fret/​
string positions as ordered pairs of the form (f, s). (Transformations in this space
are represented by ordered pairs that show movement in these dimensions with
integers marked by + or –​.) This model makes it possible to show how “Zhivago”
thematizes certain kinds of movement on the fretboard, even more than specific
hand shapes or harmonic objects.7

7. For a similar approach, see Montague (2012) and Bungert (2015), who analyze thematic keyboard
gestures in Chopin and Bach.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  91

Figure 4.6  Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 17–​24.

In the first section’s descent, the bass note begins at the twelfth fret of the
bottom string (12, 6) and steadily works its way to the open string (0, 6). Here
Rosenwinkel alternates between two basic hand positions, labeled α and β in
Figure 4.8. I  add subscript numbers to distinguish different instances of these
chord shapes: the number refers to the position of the sixth-​string fret (that is, the
bass note). The move from α12 to α10 is a straightforward along-​the-​string trans-
position, (–​2, 0). The shift between α and β, however, is also an along-​the-​string
move. The two shapes hold frets on the same strings, and my fingers slide along the
fretboard as I shift from one to the other.
Defining two contextual transformations will help us conceptualize the rela-
tionship between the two shapes. J formalizes a “pivoting” gesture. J holds the
fret on the lowest string of the shape constant and moves the others up by one.
A complementary perspective is provided by another transformation, K. K moves
the lowest-​string fret down one, while holding the others. This will prove to be a
kind of “thematic move” throughout the piece. Figure 4.9 and Video 4.1 dem-
onstrate these operations, applying each to α10. These transformations, however,
might apply to any fretboard shape and may appear in standard tuning. For exam-
ple, K and J–​1 can be used to toggle between two voicings in a common descending
“ii–​V” progression (see Figure 4.10 and Video 4.2 ).
Readers versed in transformational theory will note that J and K are opera-
tions (not simply transformations), since they are invertible. Their inverses—​J–​1
and K–​1—​undo the move, taking β back to α. More specifically, I am describing
groups of operations isomorphic to the integers under addition.8 This means that

8. This means that the model incorporates negative fret numbers, which must be included for formal
reasons (Rings 2011, 25–​27; De Souza 2016b).
Figure 4.7  Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 33–​46.

Figure 4.8  Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 1–​6, labeling basic hand positions.
Subscript numbers refer to the fret on the lowest string. For these hand positions,
I include only the lower anchor note on the highest string (excluding the added
melodic neighbor note). This underlying schematic shape for α—​with the highest
two strings sharing a fret—​emerges clearly in mm. 4–​5. Here the higher note on
the first string is added at the end of the bar, whereas throughout mm. 1–​2 this
highest note covers the basic shape.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  93

Figure 4.9  Two contextual operations for fretboard shapes in Rosenwinkel,

“Zhivago.” Both connect α and β. J holds the bottom-​string fret and moves the
others up one; K moves the bottom-​string fret down one, holding the others. The
inverses of these operations (J–​1 and K–​1) take β back to α.
α10 β10 α10 β9
(8, 1) (9, 1) (8, 1) (8, 1)
(8, 2) J (9, 2) (8, 2) K (8, 2)
(10, 3) (11, 3) (10, 3) (10, 3)
(10, 6) (10, 6) (10, 6) (9, 6)

Figure 4.10  Contextual fretboard operations with a chromatically descending ii–​

V progression, which appears in many jazz standards (including Duke Ellington’s
“Satin Doll,” Miles Davis’s “Four,” and John Coltrane’s “Lazy Bird”): (a) an
idiomatic voicing for this progression, using only the highest four strings on a
guitar in standard tuning; (b) transformation network modeling these voicings
via K and J–​1 (the inverse of J).

the operations can also combine with themselves: for example, performing K twice
in a row (K2) moves the lowest-​string position down two frets. Furthermore, these
contextual operations commute with transpositions in fretboard space. The order
in which these transformations are combined does not change their product: for
example, (–​2, 0)J = J(–​2, 0). Figure 4.11 demonstrates the combination of pivoting
and shifting along the fretboard with the middle section of the Beatles’ “Blackbird”
(see Video 4.3 ).
Figure 4.12 represents the opening section of “Zhivago” in networks that com-
bine J and K with transpositions along the string. (This section is performed in
Video 4.4 .) The first two networks show that Rosenwinkel repeats a sequence
of hand shapes as he moves down. The interpretation that uses J highlights the
bass line, showing that it always drops two frets after α forms. Thinking in terms
of K obscures this somewhat. Yet as Figure 4.12c shows, K also accounts for the
descending motion in mm. 7–​9 and 15–​16. Though these measures introduce new
Figure 4.11  John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Blackbird” (1968), mm. 13–​
14: (a) notation; (b) a network that combines the pivoting gestures J and K with
along-​the-​string transpositions on a guitar in standard tuning. (The interested
reader can pursue such gestures throughout the rest of “Blackbird,” starting with
the characteristic (+8, 0)J leap in the song’s first two measures.)

Figure 4.12  Transformation networks for Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 1–​16:

(a) network for mm. 1–​6, 9–​14, using J to connect α and β; (b) network for mm.
1–​6, 9–​14, using K to connect α and β; (c) network for mm. 7–​9, 15–​16.

(a) α12 α10 β8 α7 α5 β3

(10, 1) (8, 1) (7, 1) (5, 1) (3, 1) (2, 1)

(10, 2) (–2,0) (8, 2) (–2,0)J (7, 2) (–1,0)J–1 (5, 2) (–2,0) (3, 2) (–2,0)J (2, 2)
(12, 3) (10, 3) (9, 3) (7, 3) (5, 3) (4, 3)
(12, 6) (10, 6) (8, 6) (7, 6) (5, 6) (3, 6)
(–5,0)

(b) α12 α10 β8 α7 α5 β3

(10, 1) (8, 1) (7, 1) (5, 1) (3, 1) (2, 1)

(10, 2) (–2,0) (8, 2) (–1,0)K (7, 2) (–2,0)K–1 (5, 2) (–2,0) (3, 2) (–1,0)K (2, 2)
(12, 3) (10, 3) (9, 3) (7, 3) (5, 3) (4, 3)
(12, 6) (10, 6) (8, 6) (7, 6) (5, 6) (3, 6)
(–5,0)

(c)
(0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 1)
(0, 2) K (0, 2) K (0, 2)
(0, 3) (0, 3) (0, 3)
(2, 6) (1, 6) (0, 6)
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  95

Figure 4.13  Transformation networks for looping schema from Rosenwinkel,

“Zhivago,” mm. 17–​32: (a) network with fretboard transpositions; (b) network
with variant of K.
(a) (0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 1)
(0,0) (0,0) (0,0)
(0, 2) (0, 2) (0, 2) (0, 2)
(0, 3) (0, 3) (0, 3) (0, 3)

(5, 4) (+1,0) (6, 4) (+1,0) (7, 4) (+1,0) (8, 4)

(5, 6) (6, 6) (7, 6) (8, 6)
(–3,0)

(b) (0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 1) (0, 1)

(0, 2) (0, 2) (0, 2) (0, 2)
*K–1 *K–1 *K–1
(0, 3) (0, 3) (0, 3) (0, 3)
(5, 4) (6, 4) (7, 4) (8, 4)
(5, 6) (6, 6) (7, 6) (8, 6)
*K3

hand shapes—​that is, new chord voicings—​they involve comparable movement

along the fretboard.
The second section reverses and extends the K motion from mm. 7–​9. It takes
a parallel shape up the neck, against stable higher strings (see Figure 4.13 and
Video 4.5 ). Rosenwinkel loops the process four times, adding to the higher
strings with each repetition. The step-​by-​step action on the lower strings can be
modeled as the inverse of a K variant—​call it *K—​which would move the frets
from a shape’s lowest two strings (instead of just the lowest).9
The new theme at m. 33 also involves cycling between hand positions (mm.
33–​39, 47–​52, 63–​68). The chords that support it can again be modeled by J or K,
alternately straightening the shape and offsetting the lowest-​string note (see
Figure  4.14a and Video 4.6 ). The melody itself, though, introduces the first
cross-​string movement as it explores the instrument’s many-​to-​one place-​to-​pitch
mapping. The “same” melodic figure is alternately realized on different strings,
related by the first transformations involving string crossing, (+2, +1) and its
inverse (–​2,  –​1). As shown in Figure  4.14b, this figure is also shifted along the
fretboard by (–​2, 0), outlining part of a whole-​tone scale. In later sections (which
are not shown here), this action loop forms an antecedent that is answered differ-
ently each time.
These analytical sketches highlight some characteristic physical positions and
movements in “Zhivago.” Rosenwinkel privileges along-​the-​string movement and
bass-​pivoting or bass-​displacing gestures (modeled by J and K). These sections can
be further understood as a series of action cycles: an eight-​measure loop, repeated

9. With the second pass through the cycle, Rosenwinkel adds the top string; with the third, a held note
on the top string’s seventh fret. In the last place in the loop, the eighth fret is fingered on the fourth
string—​but this fret is sounded only after the final repetition of the cycle, shifted onto the third string
(in m. 32).
96  T  Music at Hand

Figure 4.14  Transformation networks for Rosenwinkel, “Zhivago,” mm. 33–​

46: (a) chord pattern from mm. 33–​39; (b) melodic transformations for mm. 33–​
46. In (b), “Ret” stands for retrograde.

twice (mm. 1–​16); a four-​measure loop, repeated four times (mm. 17–​32); a two-​
measure loop, also repeated four times (mm. 33–​39). Each loop is shorter, more
focused, than the one that precedes it.
The way Rosenwinkel lingers in these grooves, which make up most of the
composition, foregrounds a kind of haptic engagement with the music. By this
I mean that physical shapes on the instrument take precedence over usual har-
monic labels. Rosenwinkel discussed this in a 2010 master class:

What was cool about it was that I didn’t really know what this chord was. [Plays a
chord.] What is that? I don’t know. It seems like a major seventh. I wasn’t sure, you
know, and I didn’t know what the notes were. So I had to take a tuner, to plug into a
chromatic tuner to tell me what that note was, you know, so I could write it down.
And then I kind of started to figure out what the harmony was. Slowly, very slowly.
But it was really cool because no longer did I have this intellectual relationship with
it. It was just pure sound and discovery.10

This suggests that Rosenwinkel’s motor habits and auditory expectations readjust
more quickly than his theoretical awareness. Even as his hands and ears become
familiar with the altered fretboard used in “Zhivago,” his “intellectual” percep-
tion of the music lags behind. Rosenwinkel’s retuning temporarily disrupts his

10. A brief video from the event can be viewed at http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=QVSNccMNtJU.

Of course, this master class is a performative and pedagogical situation, in which Rosenwinkel
consciously models a certain type of musicianship. Still, his comments fit with my own experience
of “Zhivago” and its unusual guitar tuning. I find it difficult to name the notes or chords as I play it,
even though I have transcribed and analyzed the piece.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  97

symbolic experience of the music and instead foregrounds its sensory, “aesthetic”
qualities.

Prepared Instruments: Fred Frith, “Hello Music”

The English multi-​instrumentalist Fred Frith (b. 1949) has more than four hun-
dred items in his discography. He has played with experimental rock, folk, and
jazz groups, written film scores and orchestral pieces, and taught composition at
Mills College. One of his most acclaimed recordings, though, is a forty-​minute set
of unaccompanied improvisations, simply titled Guitar Solos. For this 1974 album,
Frith modifies a 1936 Gibson K-​11 archtop by adding a second pickup at the nut
(that is, the end of the strings farthest from the bridge). He then taps the strings
with his hands or with found objects, recording the results. This explores, Frith
says, “the difference between the touch of stone, the touch of glass, the touch of
wood, the touch of paper—​those kinds of basic elements that you’re using against
the surface of the strings which produce different sounds” (Milkowski 1983, 24).11
Clearly, like Rosenwinkel, Frith seeks to defamiliarize the guitar. But instead of
retuning, his approach involves instrumental preparation.
Where retuning changes an instrument’s pitch mapping, preparation incor-
porates foreign objects at the site of sound production, and this often transforms
pitches into complex inharmonic sounds. Preparation, in a sense, turns any instru-
ment into a percussion instrument. It disrupts habitual associations by crossing
categories. That is, a prepared instrument may not simply produce unexpected
notes. It may instead produce unexpected noises—​metallic or wooden, thudding,
rattling, or ringing.
Preparing an instrument, then, suggests a certain openness to noise that Frith
first encountered in John Cage. “Reading [Cage’s] Silence when I was about eigh-
teen changed my attitude completely, far more profoundly than listening to any
music ever would have,” says Frith. “That book brought very sharply into focus the
idea that sound, in and of itself, can be as important as … melody and harmony
and rhythm. The sound itself is just as important. And from that notion I started
viewing the guitar itself from a different point of view altogether, just to see what
I  could get out of it” (quoted in Milkowski 1983, 23). Frith’s exploration of the
guitar, of course, parallels Cage’s approach to the piano. The composer “invented”
the prepared piano in the late 1930s, adding screws and bolts to the instrument’s
strings to make it sound like a percussion ensemble. Cage (1979, 8) describes this
as a process of “continual discovery,” full of delight and surprise.
That sense of surprise is central to Cage’s concept of experimental action, “an
act the outcome of which is unknown” (1961, 13). Experimental music for Cage
disrupts the “straight line between anticipation of what should happen and what
actually happens” (167–​68). When the composer formulated this idea in the

11. For more details of Frith’s performance techniques, see Dawe (2010, 78). They are also documented
in the film Step Across the Border (Humbert and Penzel 1990).
98  T  Music at Hand

Figure 4.15  John Cage, Our Spring Will Come (1943) for prepared piano, mm.
1–​4. All the strings in this excerpt are prepared, so the apparent harmonic
progression indicated by Roman numerals does not sound. © 1977 by Henmar
Press, Inc. Used by permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved.

1950s, he explained “experimental action” in terms of chance composition and

music with indeterminate performance (69). Yet Cage’s work with the prepared
piano—​principally between 1938 and 1951—​precedes these techniques: here the
altered instrument itself renders an action’s result unpredictable, transforming the
habitual into the experimental.
In cognitive terms, this reshapes expected action-​effect coupling, learned asso-
ciations between hand and ear.12 Playing prepared instruments might feel less dis-
orienting than playing retuned ones, since their remapping is closer to the random
auditory feedback that induced auditory-​motor dissociation in Finney’s studies.
But a prepared instrument, like a silent or random keyboard, may suspend audi-
tory expectations while preserving motor schemas. Cage’s notation for prepared
piano—​which indicates the keys to be pressed, not the resulting sounds—​presumes
“normal” pianistic habits. (In this respect, it resembles notation for string music
in scordatura.) Our Spring Will Come (1943), for example, even uses familiar tonal
patterns (see Figure 4.15). On the page and under the hand, it projects a sense of
F minor. An apparent V 24 chord even seems to “resolve” to a kind of i6, more or
less as it would in a tonal context (mm. 2 and 6). But since all of these strings are
prepared with bamboo strips or screws, the resulting sounds are percussive, lack-
ing clear pitches. Tonal schemas and motor schemas are pulled apart; the action’s
result becomes unpredictable.
The continuity of technique reflected in this example correlates with a conti-
nuity of technology: preparation changes an instrument’s sound production, not its
interface. The piano and the prepared piano both have keyboards, just as the guitar
and prepared guitar both have fretboards. In other words, preparation does not
obscure the basic instrumental space.
I will illustrate with some analytical comments on “Hello Music” from Frith’s
Guitar Solos (1974). “Hello Music” brims with jaunty energy. Frith starts with a
jazzy, syncopated motive that recurs throughout the first third of the piece. After

12. For Cage this helps deconstruct the traditional separation of matter and spirit, life and art, action
and sound—​which results partially from the way that tones are rationalized, possessed, or made
repeatable by music theory.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  99

Table 4.1  Formal outline for Fred Frith, “Hello Music” (1974)

Letter Time Gesture/​texture

A1 0:00 Chord/​cross-​string gesture (4×)

0:05 Answer (cross-​string)
A2 0:10 Opening chord/​cross-​string gesture (4×)
0:14 Answer (along-​string steps; vibrato at 0:16)
0:21 Strumming (vibrato at 0:24)
A3 0:25 Opening chord/​cross-​string gesture (4×)
B1 0:31 Chords up and down along string
0:38 Contrary motion
C1 0:46 Bimanual tapping triplets (parallel)
D 0:51 Slide/​hammer-​on counterpoint
E 1:00 Free transition
C2 1:06 Tapping triplets (wedge)
A4 1:15 Opening chord/​cross-​string gesture (3×)
B2 1:21 Chords along string
F 1:27 Ascending scale

contrasting middle sections, he comes back to this opening gesture for an upward-​
spinning codetta (for an overview, see Table 4.1).13
In the context of the album, “Hello Music” represents a balance between
more atmospheric tracks (like “Glass C/​W Steel”) and more tonal ones (like “Not
Forgotten” and “Hollow Music”). The pitches throughout this track are mostly
indistinct, hovering around a threshold of inharmonicity. But its gestural qualities
still reflect the space of the guitar’s tiered array.
The additional pickup at the nut defines the overall sonority of “Hello Music.”
Like more common forms of preparation, this alters the way the instrument pro-
duces sound. It makes it possible to hear two sides of a stopped string—​both the
side between the finger stopping the string and the bridge, and the usually inau-
dible side between the finger and the nut. One tap of the string, in other words,
produces two interlinked notes. Despite the pitches’ fuzziness, there is a system-
atic inversional relationship here. Dividing a string at its midpoint would create a
point of balance: the pitches for both sides would meet an octave above the open
string. Away from this midpoint, though, whenever one side of the string is short-
ened, the other is lengthened.
Frith exploits these affordances through finger tapping, a technique that would
become a standard part of the solo rock guitar vocabulary, particularly associated
with the virtuoso Eddie Van Halen.14 With tapping, both hands articulate notes
through hammer-​ons and pull-​offs.15 In other words, the guitarist strikes a string

13. This method of charting free improvisation parallels a mode of “phenomenological analysis” by
Borgo (2005, 77–​78).
14. For a discussion of Van Halen’s use of the technique, see Waksman (2001).
15. “Hammer-​ons” and “pull-​offs” are guitar techniques whereby notes are attacked by the fretting
hand alone. With a hammer-​on a finger is percussively placed on the fret; with a pull-​off it is per-
cussively removed.
100  T  Music at Hand

instead of fingering-​and-​plucking it. Tapping thus introduces a disjunction within

the kinesthetic domain: besides freeing up associations between hand and ear, it
undoes the guitarist’s usual coordination between hands. Like Lachenmann’s “Dal
niente” for clarinet, it breaks playing technique into schematic components.
“Hello Music” thematizes several patterns of body-​instrument interaction. The
A motive, which opens and pervades the piece, engages the guitar’s cross-​string
dimension. It features a loud chord repeated twice, followed by quieter, quicker
plinks. The chord, obviously, stops multiple strings at once, and Frith maintains its
placement as he repeats the motive. He does not move it up or down the neck. The
motive’s plinking tail descends across the strings in clean, disjunct leaps. (Near the
beginning of the track, these downward skips involve successive perfect fourths,
a characteristic interval from standard guitar tuning.) The self-​doubling created
by the guitar’s preparation further clarifies this movement: with the plinking, the
two “parts” have the same contour. (As just noted, moving along one string would
create contrary motion between parts.)
Frith’s A  motive, then, juxtaposes two common ways to articulate a guitar
chord, activating the strings simultaneously and activating them in succession.
Despite the unusual timbre, the motive’s basic gestural or textural profile can be
found in much music for non-​prepared guitar.
After establishing the string-​ crossing motive, Frith gradually introduces
motion along the guitar’s neck. While this strategy briefly appears in his “answer”
to A2 (0:14), it becomes prominent in the middle sections of “Hello Music.” In the
section I have labeled B1 (0:31), Frith moves a chord up and down the neck, an
action that brings out the inversional relationship between doubled pitches. This
is especially clear at 0:38, when the two parts move fret by fret in contrary motion.
Sections C and D also highlight movement along the neck. The bimanual tapping
of C creates rapid triplets on a single string, involving the open string and then
two higher notes (one played with the left hand, the other with the right). In C1,
the two tapped notes move up and down in parallel; later (C2), they diverge in a
“wedge” shape. The independence of hands is also particularly audible in the D
section that intervenes between C1 and C2: here Frith develops a kind of coun-
terpoint between a sustaining part that slowly slides up a string and another that
taps in place. These prolonged glissandi, near the piece’s midpoint, are the most
expansive along-​string gestures in the piece.
From this perspective, the central “themes” of “Hello Music” are distinctive
modes of exploring the prepared guitar’s fretboard. Its “form” emerges from the
contrast between these strategies. In Table 4.1, I separate these large-​scale sections
with horizontal lines. From A1 to A3 Frith focuses on the chords and string cross-
ing of the opening motive. The middle section (from B1 to C2) is more varied,
exploring several ways of moving along the strings. The final section (from A4
to F), perhaps surprisingly, resembles a conventional recapitulation, juxtaposing
his earlier themes. Frith returns to the opening motive, then a gesture from the
middle section (B2), and closes with a kind of codetta (the quickly ascending scale
of F). As mentioned earlier, the pitches throughout “Hello Music” are fuzzy. But
Frith’s gestural strategies are clearly differentiated and audibly related to the gui-
tar’s space. That is why this prepared guitar—​a thumping, plinking guitar—​still
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  101

sounds like a guitar. On this level, “Hello Music” is experimental and, at the same
time, highly idiomatic.
Note that “Hello Music” explores one particular setup, just as other tracks on
Guitar Solos take shape around other preparations—​playing with objects, placing
a capo in the middle of the fretboard, and so on. Each preparation offers distinc-
tive materials for a player to explore. Similarly, the same preparation on individual
instruments may produce different results.16
In the words of Frith’s collaborator, the guitarist Derek Bailey, “The instru-
ment is not a tool but an ally. It is not only a means to an end, it is a source of
material, and technique for the improviser is often an exploitation of the natural
resources of the instrument” (1992, 99). From this perspective, the instrument can
be understood as a creative partner. The linear motion developed in the middle
sections of “Hello Music,” then, responds to the inversional relations created by
the nut pickup. Imagining body-​instrument interaction as collaboration recalls
Frith’s writing about improvisation with human partners:  “Improvising is … a
place where we can meet on equal terms and discover things we never knew, or
hear what we thought we knew in a new light. It’s a conversation, an exchange.
There are no rules, other than to listen well and act accordingly” (Frith 2005).
Improvising with other musicians—​or instruments—​demands listening, respect-
fully attending to their difference from me. In this sense, instrumental alteration
reveals instrumental alterity.

Redesigned Instruments: Pat Metheny, “Into the Dream”

As instrumental preparation modifies the body of the instrument, it overlaps with

instrumental redesign. Whether or not Frith’s extra pickup creates a “new” instru-
ment, his later work moved in that direction. From the 1980s, much of his solo
improvisation involved homemade instruments:  pieces of wood with strings, a
pickup, and a bridge. Imposing too crisp a distinction between preparation and
redesign would be unhelpful, but let me propose a working definition. Retuning
and preparation change an instrument’s sonic affordances but not its basic inter-
face. Redesign, by contrast, alters an instrument’s basic shape or space and, cor-
respondingly, possibilities for interacting with it.
The Grammy Award–​ winning jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has long been
involved in processes of instrument design, and his work here illustrates a range
of possibilities. His collaborations with the Ibanez guitar company, for example,
produced the PM-​100 and PM-​120 models, promoted as “the first radically new
body shape in a major commercially released jazz guitar since the late seventies”
(Metheny 2000, 11). These archtop guitars feature a double cutaway that is more
commonly associated with rock guitars like the Gibson SG. This cutaway is not

16. Cage, for example, said that his experiences with prepared piano “showed [him] how different two
pianos are from one another [even though] music (so-​called) makes us think two pianos are the
same” (1961, 182).
102  T  Music at Hand

merely cosmetic: it lets Metheny curl his thumb over the top of the neck at higher
fret positions. Still, this represents a relatively subtle change.
With Metheny’s “Orchestrion” project, he uses a guitar, equipped with MIDI
technology, to control an array of mechanical acoustic instruments, including
pianos, basses, tuned and untuned percussion, and “guitarbots.”17 These may play
preprogrammed parts or improvised loops. This redesign affects action-​sound
coupling, much like the self-​activating instruments discussed in Chapter 2. When
the Orchestrion functions as “something that runs,” the guitar acts as an input
device, the means by which Metheny intervenes in a technologically sustained
process. This innovation changes the overall instrumental system but has mini-
mal effects on the interface. The Orchestrion’s varied robotic parts are all played
through a standard fretboard.
For present purposes, I am most interested in the kind of redesign that alters
the instrument’s interface. This is realized in one of Metheny’s collaborations
with the Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. Manzer has created many instruments
for Metheny, including a baritone guitar, an acoustic soprano guitar, an acoustic
sitar-​guitar, and a fretless classical guitar. Arguably their most unusual creation,
however, is the forty-​two-​string Pikasso II guitar (see Figure 4.16).18 “In 1984,”
remembers Manzer, “Pat Metheny asked me to design and build a guitar with ‘as
many strings as possible.’ ”19 To achieve this goal, however, they did not expand
the fretboard: the Pikasso’s main neck, like a standard guitar’s, has only six strings.
Instead they added three new sets of twelve strings, which are always open. This
means that the Pikasso participates in a tradition of “harp guitars,” dating from the
nineteenth century, that include additional, unstopped strings.20
To describe the Pikasso, Metheny has offered an instrumental analogy. “It’s
really the closest thing I’ve come to something like a piano that’s also a guitar,” he
says. “You can really have a lot of notes ringing and sustaining over other notes
without using any kind of electronics.”21 With its capacity for sustained notes and
its extended range, the Pikasso may certainly recall the piano. Beyond any sonic
similarities, though, the Pikasso may resemble the piano in terms of interface and
playing technique. Though the baritone neck replicates a standard tiered-​array

17. Metheny names this system after various historical “orchestra machines,” which are discussed by
Dolan (2013, 187). The main distinction between the Orchestrion and MIDI guitar controllers—​
which Metheny has used since the 1980s—​is that its sounds are not synthesized or sampled but
produced live.
18. The first Pikasso guitar is an electric version, played, for example, on Metheny’s collaboration with
Ornette Coleman, Song X (1986). Here I will simply refer to the acoustic Pikasso II as the “Pikasso,”
since it has featured more prominently in Metheny’s work. I have discussed the Pikasso and “Into
the Dream” in a chapter on the Pat Metheny Group’s 2001 concert video Imaginary Day Live (De
Souza 2016a). Though certain analytical details overlap, the focus there is on visual aspects of per-
formance rather than instrumental alteration.
19. See http://​www.manzer.com/​guitars/​index.php?option=com_​content&view=article&id=25&Ite
mid=24. Manzer would later increase this maximum by ten for the fifty-​two-​string Medusa guitar
made for Henrik Andersen.
20. On the history and organology of harp guitars, see Miner (2015).
21. For Metheny’s comments on the Pikasso, see “About the instrumentation,” http://​www.patmetheny.
com/​features/​imaginary/​inst.htm.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  103

Figure 4.16  Pat Metheny playing the Pikasso II guitar (Rodby 2008).

fretboard, the other set of strings offer spaces that are linear, like a keyboard.
Moreover, when Metheny plays the instrument, his hands are independent, and
they combine activation and control. The right hand typically realizes the princi-
pal melody, while accompanied by the left. He keeps his left hand on the baritone-​
guitar neck, using hammer-​ons and pull-​offs exclusively. Meanwhile, the right
hand explores the other areas, plucking or strumming the strings with fingers or
a pick. This separation of hands, like Frith’s bimanual tapping, pulls apart gui-
taristic action schemas that are usually coordinated. That said, pianistic or tap-
ping hands are independent but develop effectively the same technique. With
the Pikasso guitar, by contrast, the hands serve different functional purposes.
This instrumental redesign, then, heightens the distinction between fretting and
picking hands. The disalignment of existing motor schemas, responding to the
instrument’s affordances, is the basis of what is claimed to be a “totally new guitar
technique” (Metheny 2000, 10).
Metheny’s preferred tuning for the Pikasso both differentiates and unites the
different sets of strings. The six strings on the fretboard are tuned as a baritone
guitar. That is, they transpose standard E tuning down a major third, producing
the notes C2, F2, B♭2, E♭3, G3, C4. The strings that are connected to the headstock
above the neck, which nearly parallel the fretboard, are tuned to a G-​minor pen-
tatonic collection (G, B♭, C, D, F); the zitherlike strings that cross the instrument’s
body, to an incomplete C natural-​minor or C Dorian scale (C, D, E♭, F, G, B♭). The
almost vertical strings connected to the top headstock are tuned to a G-​minor
triad (G, B♭, D). Since these pass beneath two other sets of strings, they function
mainly as sympathetic strings. Though each set of strings maps to a distinct set
of pitch classes, their collections overlap substantially. In fact, the forty-​two open
strings instantiate only six pitch classes, which form a segment from the cycle
104  T  Music at Hand

of fifths.22 This tuning strategy minimizes dissonances among the Pikasso’s open
strings. Metheny refers to the result as a “big C-​minor kind of sound” (Adelson
2002). With the Pikasso, as with the harmonica, there is a gap between scale and
macroharmony, and irregularity fosters the sense of a home key. Each set of open
strings offers a fixed tuning that can variously be understood as a chord or a
scale.23 Each involves its own subset of a C-​minor scale that is never presented
in full.
Metheny most often plays the Pikasso on tracks titled “Into the Dream,” and
I have consulted fifteen performances of the piece, ranging from 1997 to 2010.24
Melodic and rhythmic details vary widely across these versions. Nonetheless, “Into
the Dream” has a clear four-​part form:

Section A: During a slow introduction, Metheny develops a rhythmically free fin-

gerstyle dialogue between the two right-​hand areas. This starts with the zither-​like
strings and is accompanied by hammer-​on trills in the left hand. This section typi-
cally lasts around a minute and a half, although … it may vary from 44 seconds
(New  York, 1998)  to over two minutes (2006). The original 1997 version from
the CD involves this section only and does not follow the form established by
Metheny’s later live performances.
Section B1:  Next, while maintaining active right-​ hand plucking, Metheny
establishes the meter with sustained bass notes. Though the baritone-​guitar neck
can play all twelve pitch classes, the bass part only uses a C natural-​minor mode;
Metheny plays most of these notes with his left index finger, tending to move step-
wise. (On occasion, Metheny also taps on the body as part of this section.)
Section C: For a climactic third section, Metheny switches to a pick, alternately
strumming the two right-​hand sets of strings over a more active bass line. While
this section usually runs longer than a minute, Metheny keeps it to 30 seconds in a
2000 live recording and omits it in a 2009 performance.
Section B2:  Finally, he returns to the calmer fingerpicking texture of the sec-
ond section, using the bass to set up a final cadence. (This cadence is where he
most often strums the G-​minor sympathetic strings.) In the performances I have
examined, this recapitulation is never the longest section and its variation is least
pronounced, ranging from 44 seconds (New York, 1998) to 1 minute 23 seconds
(2010). (De Souza 2016a, 164–​65)

Overall, “Into the Dream” explores two oppositions: one between the C-​minor
and G-​pentatonic collections and another between fingerpicking and strumming

22. In set-​theoretic terms, this hexachord is a member of set class 6-​32 [024579]. Uniquely among
hexachord classes, it includes no instances of interval class 6 and only one instance of interval
class 1.
23. This conceptual crossover, like my discussion of instrumental “scales” in Chapter 3, resonates with
Tymoczko’s idea that “a scale is a large chord, and a chord is just a small scale” (2011, 153).
24. For many years, the exceptions here were duets:  “The Sound of Water” with the pianist Brad
Mehldau (on their 1996 album, Quartet) and “Cichy Zapada Zmrok (Here Comes the Silent Dusk)”
with the Polish singer Anna Maria Jopek (on their 2002 album, Upojenie). More recently, though,
Metheny used the Pikasso on What’s It All About (2011) to cover Paul Simon’s “The Sound of
Silence.”
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  105

with a pick. The first has to do with the Pikasso as musical technology; the sec-
ond, with Metheny’s playing technique. From this perspective, “Into the Dream”
is not a precomposed sequence of notes and harmonies. It is a series of idiomatic
performance strategies, a kind of improvisational template to be realized anew in
each performance.
Of course, while the Pikasso offers new sounds, it also constrains Metheny’s
improvisation. The fixed pitch collections cannot be changed in performance,
the pitches in the supplementary collections cannot be bent, and so on. Most of
Metheny’s compositions are not easily played on the Pikasso, since they involve
chromatic shifts that exceed its tonal affordances. (While they could be played on
the baritone-​guitar neck, the sympathetic resonance from the overlapping strings
and the bulk of the instrument make this less than feasible.) This particular instru-
mental redesign, then, becomes so specialized that in the end it feels less flexible
than a regular guitar. For all its complexity, it almost seems that Metheny’s Pikasso II,
like a purpose-​built music box, can play just one piece.
This kind of constraint, however, points to the Pikasso’s influence on its play-
ers’ perception. Where Rosenwinkel’s retuned guitar skewed expected associations
between action and sound and where Frith’s prepared guitar reduced auditory
expectations by rendering pitches doubled and indistinct, Metheny’s redesigned
guitar refocuses his musical imagination by splitting apart performance tech-
niques and fixing—​or radically reducing—​tonal possibilities. This instrument does
not afford the performative or conceptual habits associated with the performance
of jazz compositions with wide-​ranging chromaticism. As Metheny puts it, “You
have to learn to think like the instrument you’re playing” (Webb 1985). Since most
of the Pikasso’s strings are fixed and its macroharmony (overall pitch collection) is
consonant, it is possible to stop thinking about particular notes and focus on ges-
ture, density, and so on. As the instrument neutralizes harmonic movement—​or
achieves a kind of tonal stasis—​it redirects attention to the instrument’s timbre
and the player’s physical actions; it engenders particular modes of performance
and perception. In terms of sound, technique, and visual spectacle, the Pikasso II
guitar creates a piece that stands apart from Metheny’s other playing, a kind of
musical breakdown.

Conclusions

This chapter’s analyses show three ways that alteration can change an instrument’s
affordances. Retuned instruments produce unexpected pitches; prepared instru-
ments produce unexpected sounds; redesigned instruments reconfigure a familiar
interface. Instrument, technique, and sound coevolve, as elements of each are pre-
served or adjusted. There are, of course, countless other idiosyncratic extensions
of instrumental resources—​from J. S. Bach’s five-​string violoncello piccolo to Tod
Machover’s “hypercello” (Ledbetter 2009, 43–​45; Rothstein 1991). Still, the music
of Rosenwinkel, Frith, and Metheny has highlighted some broad connections
between altered instruments, performance, and perception. Whether retuned,
106  T  Music at Hand

prepared, or redesigned, altered instruments offer new possibilities in terms of

harmony, timbre, texture, and so on. But at the same time, they play with habitual
connections between action and sound, between performers’ auditory and motor
perception. They create new opportunities to relearn my instrument, moments
when I become conscious of my bodily engagement with it, when I begin to listen
to and think about and feel the sound differently. Changing the instrument, then,
changes the player. Alteration illuminates everyday experiences of instruments,
even as it disrupts them.
By way of conclusion, I  wish to briefly relate these musical examples to
some problems in phenomenological theory, problems around the opposi-
tion of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit. “When we discover its unusability,”
says Heidegger (2010, 72), “the thing becomes conspicuous.” But this con-
spicuous presence, he suggests, is temporary: “Mere objective presence makes
itself known in the useful thing only to withdraw again into … handiness.”
On one level, this fits with my dynamic account of perception and action
(for example, I  get used to my guitar’s alternate tuning). Yet this dismissal
of “mere” presence has been critiqued even by Heidegger’s supporters (e.g.,
Stiegler 1998, 245; Harman 2002, 3–​4). And the philosopher himself aban-
doned the dialectic of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit after Being and Time.
The post-​Heideggerian phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas shows that
handiness and presence are not simply opposed—​rather, they coexist (see
Harman 2009). This refines the philosophical framework underpinning the
book’s earlier chapters and interacts suggestively with the cases of instrumen-
tal alteration discussed here.
Recall how Rosenwinkel plays a chord on his radically retuned guitar but
claims not to know what it is. In the moment, he cannot name it or place it in a
theoretical system. He cannot reduce its sensual qualities—​its felt shape, its sonic
color, even its specific pitches—​to an internal idea. Levinas associates this sort of
“deconceptualization” with music (1989, 133). But more generally, this irreduc-
ibility is also crucial to his phenomenology of enjoyment, a mode of intentional-
ity that supplements handiness. Levinas argues that tools’ materiality produces
a kind of sensory contact that goes beyond their usefulness (1969, 133).25 From
this perspective, my relationship to the guitar is not simply “instrumental” (that
is, directed toward some purpose); it is also aesthetic. The instrument never fully
disappears in its practical functioning: it is also savored like wine, caressed like a
lover. Here the grooves of “Zhivago” or Metheny’s interaction with the Pikasso can
be understood in terms of the pleasures of repetition or the sensual interplay of
the erotic.
Where earlier chapters explored instrumental extension, then, this one high-
lights instrumental exteriority. For Levinas, touch always encounters something
exterior, something outside of myself:  “In contact itself the touching and the

25. Likewise, where Merleau-​Ponty focuses on bodies’ competence, Levinas highlights bodies’ sensible
or sensual exposure to things.
 Voluntary Self-Sabotage  T  107

touched separate, as though the touched moved off, was always already other,
did not have anything in common with me” (1981, 86). Touch, both literal and
figurative, depends on separation, otherness.26 This alterity is central to Levinas’s
ethics—​and also his aesthetics. I never totally know another person, just as I never
totally know a favorite piece.27 Earlier I  broached this topic through Frith’s dis-
cussion of improvisation as conversation, a responsible practice of listening
and responding to another musician. In this regard Simon Critchley’s summary
of Levinasian ethics seems to echo Frith: “In speaking or calling or listening to
the other, I am not reflecting upon the other, but I am actively and existentially
engaged in a non-​subsumptive relation, where I focus on the particular individual
in front of me. I am not contemplating; I am conversing” (2002, 12). Frith’s conver-
sational attitude, extended to instruments, again goes beyond the transparency of
Zuhandenheit. Playing an altered instrument, like being with the Other, is a prac-
tice of co-​presence where two touch without fusing, without losing their mutual
strangeness.
“Hello Music” and “Into the Dream” show how such practices unfold in time.
I have suggested that they might be understood as gestures or strategies for inter-
action, as object-​centered processes rather than musical work-​objects themselves.
A template for improvisation, Levinas might say, is a how, not a what. In fact, when
the philosopher wishes to emphasize temporal aspects of presence, he turns to
musical instruments:

Music, for example in Xenakis’ “Nomos Alpha for Unaccompanied Cello,” bends
the quality of the notes emitted into adverbs. Every quiddity becomes a modal-
ity, the strings and wood turn into sonority…. The cello is a cello in the sonority
that vibrates in its strings and its wood, even if it is already reverting into notes,
into identities that settle into their natural places in gamuts from the acute to the
grave, according to the different pitches. Thus the essence of the cello, a modality of
essence, is temporalized in the work. (1981, 41, emphasis in original)

The sound of the instrument may “revert” to notes. It may return to the zuhanden,
withdrawing into melody or harmony. But this never exhausts its sonority, its sen-
sible presence. Here Levinas’s work points toward a phenomenology of listening,
to experiences of music’s materialization, a line of thought that will be developed
more fully in Chapter 6.
Though this chapter highlights the flexibility of technology and technique,
it nonetheless focuses on individual, isolated instruments. In truth, however,
instrumental alteration takes place within social networks that include players,
instrument builders, listeners, and so on, as well as with other instruments, other

26. This underlies the paradoxes of self-​touch explored by Merleau-​Ponty (1968, 133). When I touch my
left hand with my right, I find myself both inside and outside of my body, both touching and touched.
27. Against claims that art expresses something “more real than reality,” Levinas asks, “Does not the
function of art lie in not understanding? … Will we then say that the artist knows and expresses
the very obscurity of the real?” (1989, 131, emphasis added). On the relation between ethics and
aesthetics in Levinas, see Harman (2007).
108  T  Music at Hand

machines, other technologies. Note, for example, how Metheny describes the
Pikasso II in terms of the piano, how Frith’s idea of prepared guitar responds
to Cage’s prepared piano, or how Cage and Lachenmann describe their new
approaches to the piano in terms of percussion instruments. The following
chapter explores relations among instruments in the music of Johann Sebastian
Bach. Yet in theorizing such connections, it cannot avoid practices of musical
writing—​which is to say, it must consider the relation between instruments and
composition.
CHAPTER 
Five
Compositional Instruments

When Johann Sebastian Bach died, he owned eight harpsichords. And this
was only part of a larger collection. The composer also had two violins
plus a piccolo violin, three violas, two cellos, a lute, a viola da gamba, and a
five-​string viola pomposa (NBR, 251–​52).1 Bach rented and sold instruments.
He was an expert in organ building and, of course, a renowned keyboard
virtuoso. The man, by any standard, was deeply involved with instrumental
technology.
Nonetheless, Bach’s counterpoint is sometimes envisioned as a kind of compo-
sition without instrumentation. The Art of Fugue, for example, is transcribed for
countless instrumental combinations but belongs exclusively to none. Related to this
is the notion that The Art of Fugue was intended purely for contemplation, that it
need not be played or heard. Though such idealist views are rare among musicolo-
gists today, they linger in popular discourse. This interpretive tradition—​to quote
Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel—​imagines the composer as “a true
disembodied spirit, who soars above everything mortal” (NBR, 438). It understands
his counterpoint as abstract rather than concrete, music of the mind and soul, not
the body.
This is, again, a metaphysics of presence related to the nineteenth-​century
aesthetics of absolute music. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it too quickly,
for it uncovers interesting tensions between performance and composition,
between instrumental technics and a technics of musical writing.2 A  com-
position is realized only through some musical medium, where seemingly
self-​sufficient tonal patterns may be supplemented by layers of corporeal or
instrumental organization. But at the same time, the composition cannot be
reduced to the means of its realization. How, then, might composers respond to
instruments? And how do instruments relate to each other? This chapter pur-
sues such questions by analyzing varied instrumental resources in Bach’s music,
from clavier to violin to lute.

1. Throughout this chapter, I  use the abbreviation NBR for The New Bach Reader, edited by David,
Mendel, and Wolff (1998).
2. In a way, such tensions define the modern conception of composer and composition, which emerged
in the late fifteenth century as part of a shift from improvised counterpoint toward written counter-
point (Wegman 1996). That said, impressive feats of oral counterpoint continued throughout the
Renaissance (Canguilhem 2011).
Figure 5.1  Johann Sebastian Bach, excerpts from the Canon at the Twelfth from
The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: (a) mm. 1–​11 (note the fleeting imitation in m. 9);
(b) mm. 34–​45 (note return to the opening in the left hand, m. 42).
 Compositional Instruments  T  111

Figure 5.2  Two networks for invertible counterpoint at the twelfth, which use
numbers to represent generic intervals: (a) a mod-​12 mapping indicates that
unisons become twelfths (and vice versa), thirds become tenths (and vice versa),
and so forth; (b) a mod-​7 mapping gives the same practical results but asserts
octave equivalence (e.g., octaves are reduced to unisons, ninths to seconds, tenths
to thirds, and so on).
(a) (b)
12 7
11 1
6 1
10 2

9 3
5 2
8 4
7 5 4 3
6

Contrapuntal Hands

A canon is a kind of self-​referential music. For the comes (or follower) is not an indepen-
dent line, but a reflection, an echo of the dux (leader). With the canons from The Art of
Fugue, such reflections proliferate as in a hall of mirrors. In the Canon at the Twelfth, for
example, the comes enters after eight measures (see Figure 5.1a). But Bach introduces addi-
tional, fleeting resemblances at a half-​measure distance (m. 9, mm. 34–​35, mm. 66–​71). In
this contrapuntal funhouse, it is sometimes hard to tell the copy from the original. When
the opening subject returns in m. 42, it is no longer the leader in a canon at the twelfth but
the follower in a canon at the octave (see Figure 5.1b). Bach, it turns out, has written two
canons in one. Just as comes follows dux, the second canon derives systematically from the
first: the lower line moves to the top, with the intervals between parts transformed accord-
ing to the well-​known formula for invertible counterpoint at the twelfth, a form of “double
counterpoint.”3 Though the composer and his contemporaries represented these interval-
lic exchanges in numerical tables, they can equally be understood via modular arithmetic,
as a self-​mapping of the cyclic groups ℤ12 or ℤ7 (see Figure 5.2).
Other exchanges are possible with triple invertible counterpoint. Bach’s
Sinfonia in D major (BWV 789), for example, has a main subject (A)  and two
countersubjects—​one with slower syncopations (B)  and one with running six-
teenth notes (C). Each of these lines can serve as top, middle, or bass part (see
Figure 5.3). Following Daniel Harrison (1988), I use ordered letters to represent
arrangements of these melodies. The arrangement ABC would have theme A in
the highest part, B in the middle, and C in the bass. Harrison’s group-​theoretic
analysis shows how the D-​major Sinfonia explores these arrangements (31–​37).4

3. Invertible counterpoint is a technique whereby parts in a polyphonic texture exchange registral posi-
tions (for example, the bass becomes the melody, while the melody becomes the bass). For a more
detailed analysis of the Art of Fugue’s Canon at the Twelfth, see Yearsley (2002, 190–​201).
4. The simplified analysis presented here departs from Harrison’s in two ways. First, it uses Edward
Gollin’s revised labeling of parts, which names the opening subject A  (2000, 328–​34). Second,
Figure 5.3  Johann Sebastian Bach, Sinfonia in D major, BWV 789.
Figure 5.3  Continued
114  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.4  Transformation network for registral arrangements in Bach’s D-​major

Sinfonia. The operation R and its inverse R–​1 rotate the parts, whereas F flips the
position of the middle and bass parts.

In the piece’s exposition, Bach repeatedly rotates the melodies through the three
registral positions: BAC becomes CBA, then ACB (see Figure 5.4 and Video 5.1 ).
The slower countersubject, which first appears in the highest part, ultimately ends
up in the bass. In the recapitulation, the rotations reverse: the bass’s material goes
to the middle voice, the middle part’s to the top, and the top’s to the bass. This sec-
ond set of rotations is flipped relative to the first set—​that is, the first element stays
in place while the others swap positions. With its final rotation, the piece exhausts
all the possible arrangements of these three melodic elements in a process that
combines musical and mathematical constraints.
And physical constraints too. These pieces are both performable (meaning that
they fit a keyboardist’s hands) and also performative (meaning that they are showy,
full of rhetorical flourishes).5 As David Yearsley argues, “Canonic artifice and vir-
tuosic display [in The Art of Fugue] are equally audible, and indeed are insepa-
rable” (2002, 189). The contrapuntal exchanges in the Canon at the Twelfth, then,
are also manual exchanges, a kind of choreography. If the hands, in this metaphor,
form a dancing couple, then the left hand plays Ginger to the right hand’s Fred.6
It does all the same things, only backward. Much keyboard music—​even the lay-
out of the keyboard itself, with the higher notes on the right—​is designed for a
right-​handed player. But Bach’s keyboard canons balance the parts, challenging
the player to overcome the nondominant hand’s resistance. They demand not just
dexterity but ambidexterity.7

whereas Harrison and Gollin approach triple counterpoint via the symmetric group S3 (the group
of permutations on a set with three elements), I  approach it through the dihedral group D6 (the
group of symmetries of an equilateral triangle). The groups S3 and D6 are isomorphic. Note, however,
that Harrison’s permutation transformations act on thematic elements—​for example, the permuta-
tion (ABC) takes A to B, B to C, and C to A, regardless of the starting arrangement—​whereas my
approach, based on the rotations and flips of an equilateral triangle, highlights registral positions—​
for example, R always takes the first position to the second, the second to the third, and the third to
the first. For further discussion, see Harrison (1988, 48n12).
5. Here I am thinking of Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as “showing doing” (2013, 28).
6. According to an often quoted line by the cartoonist Bob Thaves, “Ginger Rogers did everything [Fred
Astaire] did … backwards and in high heels.”
7. With claviers with multiple manuals, the hands may even play on separate keyboards. Certain
moments in Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for example, are composed for two manuals. Their difficulty
 Compositional Instruments  T  115

Matthew Hall notes this correspondence between double counterpoint and

ambidexterity. But he further argues that the effects of two-​handedness are clearer
in triple counterpoint, where one hand must realize two lines at the same time
(2015, 96). For Hall, then, the arrangement ABC is either [AB]C, with two higher
parts in the right hand and a lower one in the left, or A[BC], with one in the right
and two in the left. Drawing on historical thoroughbass pedagogy (and, certainly,
his own expertise as a keyboardist), Hall links triple counterpoint with three key-
board techniques (103):

(1) With a “contrapuntal inversion,” the hands exchange material ([AB]C

becomes C[AB]).
(2) With a “thoroughbass inversion,” the two parts in the same hand trade
places, and the other hand is unaffected ([AB]C becomes [BA]C).
(3) With a “voice transfer,” the middle part switches hands ([AB]C becomes
A[BC]).

Hall is dissatisfied with descriptions of triple counterpoint that emphasize “abstract

permutational structure” and “disembodied, purely conceptual operations” (88),
and he critiques Harrison’s essay at length (92–​95). Yet Hall’s keyboard gestures are
easily formalized and integrated into a transformational model of triple invertible
counterpoint.
To do so, I  use ordered pairs that combine letter arrangements discussed
earlier with the +/​–​system used for harmonica breathing in Chapter 3.8 Pairs
with a + sign have two parts in the right hand, and pairs with a –​sign have two
in the left. That is, (ABC, +) is the same as [AB]C, and (ABC, –​) the same as
A[BC]. As such, I will continue to use this more compact notation. Note that
this doubles the number of arrangements, giving twelve possibilities instead of
six. Ordered pairs can also serve as transformations. The operation (R, +), for
example, would rotate the parts while maintaining their distribution between
the hands. This, in fact, models the first move in the D-​major Sinfonia, taking
[BA]C to [CB]A.
Hall’s keyboard operations can fit into the model too. For convenience,
I label each one with a letter: X for contrapuntal inversion between hands, Y for
the thoroughbass inversion within one hand, and Z for the voice transfer involv-
ing the middle part. The operations X and Z change the sign, while Y preserves
it. In the ordered-​pair notation, Z is equivalent to (e, –​), where e is the identity
element. Technically speaking, each of these actions is an involution—​an opera-
tion that is its own inversion. Like flicking a light switch, repeating an involu-
tion undoes it. Figure 5.5 maps these routes between the twelve elements in the
system, giving three isographic visualizations of the same structure. Alternating
between any two of the three operations produces a cycle. For present purposes,

is compounded when both hands share the same keyboard. For a reflection on the challenges of
ambidexterity in Bach, see Kramer (1995, 232–​42).
8. In other words, this has the structure of a direct product group, D6 × ℤ2.
116  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.5  Three isographic maps of the space created by Hall’s keyboard

operations, emphasizing (a) XY cycles, (b) XZ cycles, and (c) the YZ cycle. Note
that there are three XY cycles (with four elements each), two XZ cycles (with six
elements each), and a single twelve-​element YZ cycle.
(a) Z

[AB]C C[AB] [CA]B B[CA] [BC]A A[BC]

X Z X Z X
Y

[BA]C C[BA] [AC]B B[AC] [CB]A A[CB]

X X X
Z

(b) Z

[AB]C C[AB] [CA]B B[CA] [BC]A A[BC]

X Z X Z X
Y

[CB]A A[CB] [AC]B B[AC] [BA]C C[BA]

X Z X Z X
Z

(c) Y [AB]C Z
[BA]C A[BC]
Z Y

B[AC] A[CB]
X
Y Z

B[CA] [AC]B

Z Y

[BC]A [CA]B

Y Z
[CB]A C[AB]
Z C[BA] Y

I  am most interested in XZ cycles, produced by the combination of contra-

puntal inversions and voice transfers. There are two such cycles. Each has six
elements, and they are analogous to the hexatonic cycles used to study triadic
transformations.9

9. Each of these XZ cycles corresponds to one of Harrison’s “conjugations” (1988, 31). For an introduc-
tion to hexatonic cycles, see Cohn (2012, ch. 2). A simple exercise can give a sense of these cycles.
Play any triad at the keyboard, with a single note in one hand and two in the other. Performing one of
Hall’s keyboard operations will give a new voicing of the chord, and repeatedly alternating between
any two of them will eventually bring you back to your starting arrangement.
 Compositional Instruments  T  117

Figure 5.6  Transformation networks for contrapuntal-​manual arrangements

in Bach’s D-​major Sinfonia: (a) an interpretation using ordered-​pair
transformations; (b) an interpretation using Hall’s keyboard operations. (The
versions in mm. 19 and 21 can be linked by either XZX or ZXZ.)

These operations and cycles offer new perspectives on the D-​major Sinfonia.
The two transformation networks in Figure 5.6 analyze the piece using ordered-​
pair operations and Hall’s keyboard operations. (The contents of the networks’
nodes are identical. Video 5.2 animates the analysis based on XZ cycles.) Its
first arrangement, [BA]C, has two parts in the right hand. The “rotation” into the
second arrangement [CB]A can be understood as (R, +), or the compound trans-
formation XZ.10 In the third arrangement, A[CB], the left hand takes two parts.
It might be approached as a rotation with change of sign (R,  –​) or as a single
contrapuntal inversion X. Either way, this keeps the subject A in a hand by itself
and maintains the relative position of the countermelodies. Note that, from Hall’s
perspective, the second and third arrangements are “closer” to each other than the
first and second are.11
The recapitulation begins with [BC]A, again keeping A on its own.12 Thus
far, each presentation of the themes has corresponded to a single element
within the system. But the version in mm. 21–​23 splits in two:  the subject’s
head and tail are separated by a voice transfer, which takes C[AB] to [CA]B.
And these brief parallel thirds are the only time in the piece that A and C—​the
more active lines—​are grouped in the same hand. The concluding arrange-
ment, [AB]C, can be understood as the thoroughbass inversion (Y) of the first.

10. Note that these operations do not commute: XZ does not give the same result as ZX (in fact, XZ is
the inverse of ZX).
11. The first and third arrangements, [BA]C and A[CB], are as far away from each other as two ele-
ments in the cycle can be. In other words, they resemble hexatonic poles. Though Hall does not
examine these cycles, he notes this distance between two configurations in the A♭-​major Fugue
from The Well-​Tempered Clavier, Book I (2015, 104).
12. In m. 19, Bach adjusts the parts to avoid a voice crossing in the right hand (Hall 2015, 104–​5). Hall
suggests that the arrangement here derives from m. 6, via thoroughbass inversion (Y).
118  T  Music at Hand

But it is also interesting to note that the ordered-​pair transformations combine

both R and R–​1 with + and  –​exactly once. Both contrapuntal and manual
operations repeat, but their repetitions do not align, increasing transforma-
tional variety.
This interpretation addresses aspects of the sinfonia’s physical organiza-
tion that may be felt by performers but not necessarily heard by listeners.13
Yet this in no way invalidates the earlier, sonic analysis. The two analyses
simply address different levels, and the relation between these levels can
begin to explain how instrumentation participates in composition. To illus-
trate the concept of levels, Merleau-​Ponty uses a linguistic analogy (1963, 91–​
92). A word has a motoric level, a sonic level, and a semiotic level. It can be
approached as bodily action, sound, or meaning. Concentrating on a certain
level may cause the others to withdraw temporarily. (If I say a word again and
again and again, it seems to lose its meaning, turning weirdly into a sound
my mouth makes.) Yet these levels are not opposed. Instead, they fit together.
They harmonize.
It is likely that the semiotic level itself includes a similar kind of harmonization.
Bidirectional influences between the motor system and language comprehension
have been demonstrated in both behavioral and neuroscientific experiments, even
with abstract language (Aravena et al. 2010; Guan et al., 2013). Arthur Glenberg,
a psychologist who has made important contributions in this area, describes this
interplay in terms of “mesh.” In human cognition, he proposes, affordances in the
environment are meshed with invisible properties, known through prior experience.
Through this process, “the path becomes the path home and the cup becomes my
cup” (Glenberg 1997, 4).14 The perceived object is meshed with concepts, memories,
or goals.
A similar integration is involved in composition, for music, too, has motoric,
sonic, and semiotic features. In this view, composition is not just about put-
ting together notes. It is also about putting together these different levels. In the
D-​major Sinfonia, Bach negotiates contrapuntal, corporeal, and instrumental
constraints. He avoids combinations that would be tonally but not physically
viable (for example, keeping A and C in separate hands). The relation between
these levels is not fixed or deterministic. Composers often use notation to work
through ideas, and there are always possibilities for alternate fingerings and
so forth. Still, a piece can be performed only if it has been adequately “instru-
mented.” From this perspective, instrumentation is not a mere adjunct to com-
position. Instrumentation is, instead, a fundamental part of composition, for
just as counterpoint coordinates melody and harmony, instrumentation coordi-
nates tonal and performative patterns.

13. Where my interpretation focuses on the disposition of hands, Bungert (2015) focuses on fingering
in the Corrente from Bach’s Keyboard Partita in E minor.
14. Here Glenberg emphasizes different modes of experience: I may attend to patterns in the environ-
ment, or I may also consciously suppress them (1997, 3).
 Compositional Instruments  T  119

Transcription and Instrumental Ensembles

But what about transcription? Here the composer and the arranger are often dif-
ferent people. In such cases, it seems that composition precedes instrumentation,
that the instrumental level changes without affecting a piece’s identity. This kind
of faithful transcription, however, requires particular technical conditions. It is
possible because instruments are not isolated, but joined in a larger technological
ecosystem.
For Heidegger, such coordination characterizes “useful things” in general.
“Strictly speaking,” he writes, “there ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing” (2010, 68).
A utensil is encountered not on its own, but in some context. This is a context of
use—​since by definition I take up a useful thing in order to do something with it—​
and it is also a context of other utensils. “Useful things,” the philosopher contin-
ues, “always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing utensils,
pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room” (68).
Heidegger figures this “in order to” and this “in terms of ” as a kind of reference.
Pen and paper “refer” to each other, to their own materials, and to the activity of
writing. All of this is readily translated into musical terms. My violin, bow, shoul-
der rest, rosin, mute, case—​they belong or refer to each other, as do various parts
of the violin itself (tuning pegs, strings, nut, bridge, tailpiece, fine tuners). I use the
violin in order to play fiddle tunes while my daughters dance, to sight-​read a string
quartet with friends, to perform in an orchestra or a band.
Among other things, then, the violin alludes to other violins, to violas and cel-
los. It refers to other instruments that it plays with, to a greater ensemble. At the
beginning of an orchestra concert, it is possible to hear varied instruments being
calibrated to the same standard. Players adjust their instruments to the oboe’s
A440, while also checking characteristic notes or patterns (such as open strings).
Here it is worth noting that mutual tuning of instruments precedes the standard-
ization of pitch and that tuning to a unison is just one way of “sounding together.”
For example, consider the ocarina duets played by the Venda people of southern
Africa, analyzed by John Blacking (1959). The tshipotoliyo ocarina, made from
fruit shells, is used to produce four tones, but the exact notes are unpredictable.
A single ocarina’s pitches change over time and are easily adjusted by the embou-
chure, and multiple ocarinas generally produce different notes. In fact, for players
of these duets, ocarinas with the same pitches do not “sound well together” (17).
They find this musically uninteresting (19). Keeping that in mind, standard tuning
should not be naturalized. This kind of tuning is, rather, a musical technology that
affords unison playing and the transfer of pitch patterns from one instrument to
another.
Notation plays a role here too. Many keyboard instruments even have built-​in
music stands, which refer clearly to scores. For Bach and his contemporaries, the
keyboard correlated with various kinds of notation, both German keyboard tab-
lature and “Italian tablature” (that is, staff notation). German tablature involves
a one-​to-​one relation between symbols and keys on the instrument, since it
120  T  Music at Hand

differentiates among octaves but not enharmonically equivalent pitches. C♯4 and
D♭4, for example, are represented by the same sign, since both are played on the
black key between C4 and D4. While staff notation distinguishes between C♯s and
D♭s, it involves an opposition of natural and accidental notes that generally maps
onto the instrumental opposition of white and black keys. With few exceptions,
notes bearing flats and sharps fall on black keys, and the resulting key signa-
tures frame different tonal keys as inflected deviations from a white-​note mode.
Bach often used German tablature for compositional sketches, including parts for
non-​keyboard instruments (Marshall 1972, 141). And staff notation, of course,
was used for diverse vocal and instrumental parts. Both forms of notation, then,
were situated in a broader technical context, referring to notes and to instru-
ments. In this view, notation achieves a quasi-​abstract representation of tones
not by eliminating instrumental references but by multiplying them. A  shared
notational system, like a shared tuning, makes it easier for multi-​instrumentalists
like Bach to realize violin or vocal parts on the keyboard, to translate among
performance media.
Yet such translations are rarely exact. They require shared pitch affordances,
involving scale, range, and texture. It would be difficult to transcribe Bach’s
D-​major Sinfonia for a solo violin, though it works well for a string trio. (Zoltán
Kodály boldly transcribed Bach’s BWV 903 Chromatic Fantasy for a solo viola, but
that piece does not combine independent contrapuntal lines.) Even closely related
instruments, though, may diverge in significant ways.
Compare the organ, harpsichord, and clavichord.15 Their keyboards support
very similar actions in performance. Still, their ranges vary, from the smallest
spinet to the largest pipe organ. And this involves not only the length of the key-
board but also the number of keyboards. Organs and pedal harpsichords include
keyboards for the feet, and pieces like the Goldberg Variations exploit multiple
manuals (without them, the hands run over each other).16 Variations in timbre and
loudness relate to the instruments’ social affordances or musical environments: the
organ’s sonic power makes it arguably the most public of keyboards (except per-
haps the carillon); the harpsichord’s cutting tone suits its continuo role in large
ensembles; and the clavichord’s softness fits more intimate settings. Further differ-
ences involve action-​to-​sound conversion. With organ or harpsichord, the force of
the player’s fingers is not reflected in the dynamics. On these instruments, in con-
trast to clavichord, the player does not require an even or expressive touch. Thus
C. P. E. Bach states, “A good clavichordist makes an accomplished harpsichordist,
but not the reverse” (1949, 37–​38). The clavichord also affords modification of
the tone during play: the player can raise the pitch to create a kind of vibrato, or

15. Though I consider the clavichord here, there were no references during Bach’s lifetime to his play-
ing clavichord. As David Ledbetter explains, the first such reference was made by Johann Friedrich
Agricola in 1775 (2002, 18–​19). In 1802, Bach’s biographer J. N. Forkel claimed that the clavichord
was the composer’s favorite clavier—​but this statement is tied up with anti-​French nationalism,
since he considered the clavichord more expressive and, therefore, more “German.”
16. Of course, temperament was also not standardized in Bach’s day, meaning that not all instruments
were suited to the keys the composer explored in his Well-​Tempered Clavier.
 Compositional Instruments  T  121

Figure 5.7  Comparison of Bach’s transcriptions of Concerto in C by Johann

Ernst, Prince of Saxe-​Weimar, for clavier (BWV 984) and for organ (BWV 595),
mm. 1–​6.

Bebung.17 Finally, the organ’s unlimited sustaining capacities contrast with the oth-
ers’ rapidly decaying percussive sound.
Such differences are evident in J.  S. Bach’s two transcriptions of a concerto
by Johann Ernst, Prince of Saxe-​Weimar—​one for organ (BWV 595) and one for
clavier (BWV 984). The piece begins with a two-​measure subject that moves from
tonic to dominant, which alternates with episodic sequences. To be sure, the dif-
ferences between the two versions go beyond instrumentation. The organ version,
for example, is longer, having more iterations of the subject. Yet the instruments’
distinct affordances are also immediately apparent. From the start, the organ ped-
als add a bass part that constitutes its own rhythmic-​metric layer in a tiered poly-
phonic texture (see Figure 5.7).18 In the first sequential episode, the hands move

17. For a discussion of this idiomatic clavichord technique, see Brauchli (1998, 267–​74).
18. Auerbach (2008) theorizes different kinds of tiered polyphony, with analytical applications to
Brahms’s piano music.
122  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.8  Sequential episode from BWV 984, mm. 14–​17, and BWV 595, mm.
20–​23. Note the organ’s alternation between Oberwerk and Rückpositiv.

in parallel, alternating at the half-​measure between more widely and more closely
spaced consonances (mm. 3–​6). On the clavier, this division is based on the oppo-
sition of tenths and sixths. On the organ, however, Bach also switches between
manuals, setting the Oberwerk (the main manual or “great organ”) against the sec-
ondary Rückpositiv (the department at the player’s back, typically used for soloistic
or coloristic effects). The organ thus offers a timbral, spatial, and kinesthetic juxta-
position that the composer exploits throughout BWV 595.
In the second sequential episode, Bach interpolates solo moments on the
Rückpositiv (see Figure 5.8). As his beaming shows, this instrumental shift sug-
gests an antiphonal texture that is not necessarily apparent in the clavier version.19
A later variant of this sequence introduces a canon at the fifth below over a new
bass line (see Figure 5.9). On the clavier, the left hand takes the bass while the right

19. For a discussion of instrumentation and perceived textural organization, see De Souza (2015).
Bach’s repetition of the bass figure here also clarifies the similarity between this descending fifths
sequence and the first.
Figure 5.9  Variation on the previous figure’s sequence from BWV 984, mm.
43–​46, and BWV 595, mm. 58–​61, with a canon in the organ manuals.

Figure 5.10  Organ trio texture in BWV 595, mm. 52–​57.

124  T  Music at Hand

has both parts of the canon; on the organ, the feet cover the bass, and each upper
part is given to a single hand in a busier Rückpositiv passage. While both versions
offer a three-​part texture here, the performative realization is distinct.
The independence of the organist’s hands and feet is perhaps even clearer in
the preceding section (mm. 52–​57), which has no counterpart in the clavier ver-
sion (see Figure 5.10). Such passages recall a Germanic “organ trio” tradition, in
which three lines are mapped onto three keyboards, realized by the organist’s two
hands and feet. “It is as if each part of the body must have a mind of its own,” says
Yearsley (2012, 50). “Anyone who has played a trio at the organ … knows what
thinking this way feels like in the body.”
This is not to say that Bach’s clavier version is a lesser imitation of the organ
work. The clavier’s unique passages often highlight the linear dimension of the
keyboard instead of the contrast between multiple manuals. The sweeping con-
trary motion of mm. 26–​29 indexes both the spatiality of the instrument and the
symmetry of the player’s body (see Figure 5.11). While the melodic material of the
organ version partially overlaps with this passage, its texture is wholly different
(continuing the interplay of Oberwerk and Rückpositiv).
Obviously these pieces are closely related, just as the instruments are closely
related. Yet subtle differences between the versions also show the limits of transla-
tion, which are often more immediate for performers. Parallel passages in Figure 5.9
may sound similar but feel different. This kinesthetic element of the music,
which is ultimately grounded in particular instrumental spaces, is often “lost in
translation.”
Bach’s transcriptions, then, show him attending to instrumental affordances.
Thanks to connections among instruments, he is able to reproduce the piece in
another medium. Yet adjustments at the instrumental level affect tonal organiza-
tion too. In this sense, the instruments might be understood as tools for investigat-
ing a piece. As Christoph Wolff puts it, “organ and clavier [served] as indispensable
pieces of equipment in Bach’s experimental musical laboratory” (2000, 8). The anal-
ogy is worth pursuing, since scientific instruments, like musical ones, are found
in ensembles. For a laboratory’s results to be directly comparable, its scientific
instruments must be calibrated to each other; for its experiments to be repeated
consistently in other labs, the instruments must also be standardized. Likewise
ensembles of musical instruments are tuned to each other and standardized, so
that they can consistently reproduce particular compositions. For the historian of
science Peter Galison (2005), material culture thus supports theoretical culture;
instrumental conditions facilitate generalization. Yet he argues that generalization
does not simply involve “translation” of preexisting meanings. Generalization, for
Galison, is fundamentally a form of delocalization. It involves negotiations, chang-
ing contexts, communication through pidgins (that is, “exchange languages” that
are both hybrid and simplified). In brief, transcription both preserves and trans-
forms. And this suggests, again, that composition and instrumentation are not
opposed but entwined.
Figure 5.11  Comparison of BWV 984, mm. 25–​30, and BWV 595, mm. 38–​43.
Note contrary motion in the clavier.
126  T  Music at Hand

The Violin as Compositional Instrument

Two passages from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reveal his father’s engagement with
possibilities on both contrapuntal and instrumental levels:

When he listened to a rich and many-​voiced fugue, he could soon say, after the first
entries of the subjects, what contrapuntal devices it would be possible to apply, and
which of them the composer by rights ought to apply, and on such occasions, when
I was standing next to him, and he had voiced his surmises to me, he would joyfully
nudge me when his expectations were fulfilled. (NBR, 397)

In a fugal exposition, the elder Bach heard possibilities, or almost obligations.

He sensed immediately whether a subject could (or should) be combined with
itself in stretto, whether a subject-​countersubject pair could (or should) be
inverted at the octave or twelfth. Bach, in other words, was attuned to contra-
puntal affordances. Here, again, expertise “appears in the way the world shows
up” (Dreyfus 2002, 373). To write the rest of the fugue, then, the contrapuntist
pursues tendencies that seem latent in the material. The subject constrains a
composer, just as the instrument constrains an improviser—​shaping but never
determining the music.
Yet C. P. E. Bach also suggests that his father’s ability to play various instru-
ments informed his compositional practice:

In his youth, and until the approach of old age, he played the violin cleanly and
penetratingly, and thus kept the orchestra in better order than he could have done
with the harpsichord. He understood to perfection the possibilities of all stringed
instruments. This is evidenced by his solos for the violin and for the violoncello with-
out bass. (NBR, 397)

These solos are difficult but highly idiomatic. Through open strings, multiple
stops, and string crossing, Bach creates rich polyphonic textures with a single
violin. This is particularly notable in fugues and in movements where a continu-
ous bass line supports an upper melody (such as the Andante from the Second
Sonata or the Adagio from the Third Sonata). If the pieces are transposed into
other keys, many of these instrumental features are obscured, and certain pas-
sages become impracticable. Figure 5.12, for example, presents two versions of an
excerpt from the Second Sonata’s Fugue. In the original key of A minor, my left
hand stays in first position throughout. The three contrapuntal voices map onto
the three strings in play (the only exception is the brief G-​sharp neighbor note
in m. 6).20 Transposing the passage down to F minor introduces uncomfortable
leaps: since it is impossible to simultaneously play E♭4 and G4 on the D string,
I  must jump to third position for the second half of m.  5, then back again; to

20. Throughout this fugue, the descending chromatic figure introduced in mm. 5–​7 never crosses
strings. Its semitones always move along the string. This is also true of the figure’s inversion, which
first appears at m. 239. In terms of the transformational model of fretboard space developed earlier
in the book, this figure’s falling semitones are always of the form (0, –​1), not (–​1, +6).
 Compositional Instruments  T  127

Figure 5.12  Johann Sebastian Bach, Fugue from Sonata no. 2 in A minor for
Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1003, mm. 5–​9. The original key stays in first
position, with each contrapuntal voice effectively staying on a single string.
Transposed to F minor, however, the passage demands frequent position changes
and difficult triple stops. (The use of arrows to indicate position changes follows
Argent [2000, 19].)

catch the high entry of the subject in m. 7, I must either shift positions again or
skip the bow over the A string. Using open strings does not make the passage
easier. While not impossible, the F-​minor version is significantly less idiomatic,
less satisfying in my hands.
Bach’s solo string music, then, goes beyond competent instrumentation. In
these compositions, Bach responds to instrumental affordances as much as con-
trapuntal ones. He investigates musical possibilities that are specific to the interac-
tions between four strings, four fingers, and a bow. The instrument, then, seems
not to express preexisting ideas but to reveal new ones. It shapes both the inven-
tion of musical material and its disposition throughout a piece.21
Consider the Prelude from the Third Partita in E major for Unaccompanied
Violin (BWV 1006). After a two-​measure introductory gesture, the piece launches
into the running sixteenth notes that will continue until the dominant of the final
cadence (mm. 134–​35; see Video 5.3 ). Bach then juxtaposes two figures that
form the inventio of the movement: a figure with a repeated pedal note in mm. 3
and 5 and a scalar figure in mm. 4 and 6 (see Figure 5.13). In the pedaling figure,
by contrast, the left hand is anchored: my index finger stops two strings at the same
location, forming a perfect-​fifth frame. This creates the repeated B4 on the A string,

21. I borrow this distinction between invention and disposition from Laurence Dreyfus’s Bach and the
Patterns of Invention (1996).
128  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.13  Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude from Partita no. 3 in E major for
Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1006, mm. 1–​6. The opposition of string crossing
and scalar motion in mm. 3–​6 forms the basic material for the movement.

Figure 5.14  Motion-​capture images tracing bow-​hand movement in the Prelude

from BWV 1006: (a) string crossing in m. 3; (b) scalar figure in m. 4.

(a) (b)

as the second through fourth fingers walk up and down the D string.22 Meanwhile
my bow moves in a simple string-​crossing routine, pulling down on the D string
and pushing up on the A string. As the motion capture in Video 5.4 shows, my
bow hand moves in a circle (traced in white; see Figure 5.14a). In the scales, mobile
fingers form a single melody, descending along the string with linear fingering (4–​
3–​2–​1).23 Here the bowing, traced in red on the video, involves more of a back-​and-​
forth motion, shifting down with the change of string (Figure 5.14b).
Bach focuses on string crossing in mm. 13–​28 (see Figure 5.15).24 The tech-
nical term for such bowing patterns, which combine open and stopped strings,

22. This movement resembles the contextual operation K in the analysis of Rosenwinkel’s “Zhivago” in
Chapter 4, in which notes in a higher position were held constant while other fingers moved along
a lower string.
23. Here I use violinists’ numbering of fingers (which, of course, differs from pianists’): the index finger
is 1; the middle finger, 2; the ring finger, 3; the little finger, 4.
24. Uniquely, the higher variation on this figure in mm. 9–​12 does not necessarily involve string cross-
ing: if it is played exclusively on the E string, though, it introduces an open-​string pedal that will be
important in the following section.
 Compositional Instruments  T  129

Figure 5.15  Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude from Partita no. 3 in E major for
Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1006, mm. 13–​28.

is “bariolage” (from the French, meaning “odd mixture of colors”). First, in

mm. 13–​16, he explores the instrumental gesture established in m.  3:  cross-
ing back and forth between two strings with movement along the lower string
(see Videos 5.5–​5.6 ). Bach is careful to indicate the string crossing, notat-
ing two melodic strands with opposed beaming. Note, however, that most of
the pitches on the lower A string sound higher than the open E-​string pedal!
Basic bowing and fingerboard schemas repeat; the pitch relationship between
melodic strands does not. Throughout this passage, I  play the “same” E5 in
two different places, a clear instance of the violin’s many-​to-​one place-​to-​pitch
mapping.
In m. 17, Bach adds a third string to the pattern (see Video 5.7 ). Down
bows stay on the A string, but up bows alternate between the E and D strings.
In accordance with the method of numbering strings introduced in Chapter 3
(which labels the highest string as 1), this pattern of strings is represented as
2–​1–​2–​3.25 The transformational graphs in Figure 5.16 isolate moves in cross-​
string space: they show how Bach expands the bariolage by taking the original
two-​string pattern (–​1, +1) and adding on its inversion (+1, −1). The central

25. To be clear, the E string = 1, the A string = 2, the D string = 3, and the G string = 4. These num-
bers are conventionally used by violinists, though they typically write string numbers in Roman
numerals.
130  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.16  Transformational graphs for cross-​string moves in the Prelude from

BWV 1006. The first graph (a) represents the crossing introduced in m. 3 on the
D and A strings (and repeated in mm. 13–​16 on the A and E strings): it moves
up one string (–​1), then back down (+1). A second graph (b) expands this to the
three-​string bariolage from mm. 17–​28. The bowing pattern starts in the middle
node of the graph (on the A string): the first loop (–​1, +1), on the right, doubles
the smaller graph (moving up to the E string and back), while the second (+1, –​1),
on the left, inverts it (moving down to the D string and back).
(a) –1 (b) –1 –1

+1 +1 start +1

Figure 5.17  Motion-​capture image tracing bow-​hand movement in the three-​

string bariolage pattern from the BWV 1006 Prelude, mm. 17–​28.

string in the pattern—​here the A  string—​forms a balance point, from which

I  reach up and down. This means that that the bow hand moves in a figure
eight (see Video 5.8 and Figure 5.17), doubling the loops shown Videos 5.4
and 5.6.
At first the three-​string bariolage sounds a repeated third—​the pitch E5 is
alternately presented on the open E string and high on the D string. Then, continu-
ing the established instrumental strategy, the position on the lowest string moves
while those on the upper strings remain constant (mm. 17–​19). This downward
motion spreads to the A string in the following chain of 7–​6 suspensions (mm.
20–​28). Two-​measure-​long “links” in this chain repeat fingerboard movement
exactly—​the A-​string note moves down, then the D-​string note—​but because the
open-​string pedal never moves, they are not pitch transpositions of each other
 Compositional Instruments  T  131

Figure 5.18  Transformational network for the Prelude from BWV 1006, mm.
21–​28, showing movement in fingerboard space. Lines without arrowheads
correspond to the identity element (0, 0). The lower two strings alternately
descend one step while the top string remains open.

E 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1 0, 1
(–1,0) (–1,0) (–1,0) (–1,0)
A 7, 2 6, 2 6, 2 5, 2 5, 2 4, 2 4, 2 3, 2
(–1,0) (–1,0) (–1,0)
D 5, 3 5, 3 4, 3 4, 3 3, 3 3, 3 2, 3 2, 3

mm. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Figure 5.19  Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude from Partita no. 3 in E major for
Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1006, mm. 43–​50.

(see Figure 5.18).26 Here the piece comes closest to chordal figuration preludes like
the Prelude in C major from the first book of The Well-​Tempered Clavier. The pas-
sage from mm. 13–​28 will reappear, transposed down a fifth—​that is, down one
string (0, +1)—​in mm. 63–​78. Here the pedal note is an open A string.27
Before that, though, Bach turns the bariolage patterns inside out (mm. 43–​50;
see Figure 5.19). Mobile and fixed strings are flipped: the lowest string, not the
highest, holds the pedal note; the note on the D string generally moves each bar;

26. The transformational model of fingerboard space underlying this network is isomorphic to the fret-
board-​space model discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. However, unlike the fully chromatic steps of
guitar frets, here I represent steps on the violin’s fingerboard in terms of diatonic “positions.” For
example, “second position” (2, x) is found two letter names above the open string, regardless of acci-
dentals. (Second position on the A string, then, would involve either C♮ or C♯.) While this approach
involves some ambiguity (which could be problematic in highly chromatic situations), it has the
benefit of following an important way that violinists conceptualize space on their instrument. Bow
direction could easily be added to this model, through the +/​–​system used for harmonica breathing.
27. As Joel Lester discusses, this cross-​string transposition strategy appears elsewhere in Bach’s oeuvre
for solo violin, as in opening movements from the G-​minor and A-​minor Sonatas (1999, 52).
132  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.20  Transformational networks for three-​string bariolage patterns

in the Prelude from BWV 1006. Numbers in the nodes refer to strings (1 = E
string, 2 = A string, 3 = D string, 4 = G string), and labels on arrows represent
cross-​string transformations. In (a), the formation on the right (for mm. 43–​50)
reverses the ordering from the left (for mm. 17–​28). The spatial network in
(b) shows “prime forms” of three-​string bariolage patterns with four elements
and adjacent string motion. Bach uses the patterns on the left side of the
network, which have similar contours in string space. Both move to higher
strings, then lower ones. (Ret stands for retrograde, and I for inversion.)

the A string, each beat. Each measure’s initial four-​note group reverses the three-​
string bowing pattern, while the remaining groups reverse the two-​string pattern.
The transformation networks in Figure 5.20 help clarify this reversal in cross-​
string space. The string sequence 4–​3–​2–​3 is a backward, one-​string-​down ver-
sion of 2–​1–​2–​3 (see Figure 5.20a). Again the pattern orbits a central string. But
with down bows on the outer strings, it feels as though I am reaching in to the
repeated string, instead of reaching out from it.28 Now I move across three strings
at the beginning of the pattern rather than the end. Yet as the spatial network of
Figure 5.20b shows, this reversed string sequence (unlike its unused inversions)
preserves the string-​space contour of the original:  both cross to higher strings,
then come back down. Video 5.9 shows how my bow hand again moves through
a figure eight—​but with the direction reversed, relative to the pattern in Video
5.8—​then cycles between the two higher strings (see Figure 5.21).
Throughout, these extended string-​crossing passages are interposed with more
linear sections based on the scalar figure that first appeared in m. 4. Without going
into more detail, I will note that bariolage recurs near the end of the piece—​for exam-
ple, between mm. 109–​12 and leading up to the chords of the final cadence (mm.
130–​33). Here again the notes on the A string ascend above the open E5.
In this prelude, Bach treats string-​crossing patterns the way that he often treats
melodic or contrapuntal themes: repeating, extending, inverting them. This persis-
tent development of an instrumental gesture, though, involves constantly varied pitch
material. As abstract sequences of notes, these passages seem to have little in com-
mon; as I play them on the violin, they feel wonderfully connected.
Of course, it is impossible to know how Bach used the instrument in compos-
ing this piece. He might have generated ideas by improvising, then worked them
out on paper. He might have composed on paper but tested out finished passages

28. While some editions add slurs to this pattern, these are not present in the autograph manuscript
(unlike, say, the slurs in the string crossing that leads to the final cadence).
 Compositional Instruments  T  133

Figure 5.21  Motion-​capture image tracing bow-​hand movement in the three-​

string bariolage pattern from the BWV 1006 Prelude, mm. 43–​50.

on the instrument. C. P. E. Bach remembered his father using both strategies (NBR,
399). On another level, though, such details are unimportant: either way, Bach cer-
tainly drew on his embodied know-​how as a violinist. Just as instrumental practice
may drive improvisation, such know-​how becomes a resource for composition.29
The composer’s instrument-​specific habits and auditory-​motor connections reveal
certain possibilities, shaping the way that musical affordances show up. This goes
beyond instrumental composition—​that is, writing music that is playable or idi-
omatic. The violin here functions as a conceptual tool and a source of material; it
becomes a compositional instrument.

Idiomatic Translations

Bach’s student Johann Friedrich Agricola reported that the composer often played
his solo violin pieces on the keyboard, filling out the harmony as needed (David
and Mendel 1945, 447). An autograph manuscript from the 1730s presents a
suggestive record of this practice:  here Bach recasts the E-​major Partita, trans-
posing it down an octave and adding a bass line. The range and texture of this
arrangement—​which is cataloged as BWV 1006a—​suggest the lute, and it is often
played on this instrument. The composer also arranged the Partita’s Prelude for
organ and orchestra as part of his civic cantata Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken
dir (BWV 29). With the two versions of the C-​major Concerto, Bach translates
between instruments with similar interfaces, much as one might translate a text
from French to Spanish, drawing frequently on cognates. With his arrangements
of the violin piece, though, the instruments involved are less similar. The bariolage

29. This aligns with the computational model created by Huron and Berec (2009), which suggested that
composers who can play the trumpet write more idiomatically for the instrument.
134  T  Music at Hand

passages from the original, in particular, serve to illustrate sonic and physical
translations.
Playing the prelude on the lute brings out similarities to the violin. With both,
a tiered array allows for the juxtaposition of strings, the elaboration of held, shift-
ing chordal shapes. The left-​hand fingers stop the strings, while the right hand
activates the sound. Yet there is an important difference in this action-​to-​sound
conversion: the difference between the violinist’s bow and the lutenist’s fingertips.
The bow is a tense line of horsehair drawn down or pushed up, sustaining sound
as it rubs against the string. As a single surface, this allows for the activation of
multiple strings—​but they must be adjacent. This unity of the bow contributes to a
concept of string crossing that seems less important with the lute, where each right-​
hand finger can independently activate a string. These plucking fingers, unlike the
scraping bow, make momentary, percussive contact with the string. They can also
move up or down—​as in strumming—​but lutenists’ fingers (like classical guitar-
ists’), typically pluck upward. The difference between the violinist’s bow hand and
the lutenist’s plucking hand can be summed up by a distinction, articulated by the
philosopher Raymond Tallis (2003), between the brachiochiral hand—​the hand at
the end of the arm, which reaches and gestures—​and the chirodigital hand—​the
hand with fingers that can tie knots, that can count, that can play the flute.
This flexibility in plucking correlates with two other differences. The first is
the addition of bass notes, played with the thumb. These may add to the original
melody (see Figure 5.22a) or be pulled out from the original in an idiomatic fin-
gerpicking routine (mm. 43–​50, see Figure 5.22b).
A second, subtler difference involves the instruments’ contrasting sizes. Given
the lute’s longer neck (and string length), the span of my hand covers fewer semi-
tones. On the violin, I can easily reach an octave from my index finger to my little
finger on the string above. On the lute, this is not possible: for example, I cannot
set up the chain of 7–​6 suspensions in mm. 20–​28 on adjacent strings. Clearly this
also relates to differences in tuning. Because the violin is tuned in fifths, the repeat
in mm. 63–​78 involves physical transposition—​down one string (–​1, 0)—​as well as
pitch transposition (down a perfect fifth). On the lute, this repeated passage involves
new fingering, since the instrument was typically tuned to a D-​minor chord—​to
(A2, D3, F3, A3, D4, F4)—​above unfingered diapason courses. BWV 1006a is typi-
cally played in F major to take advantage of the open-​string 1̂ and 3.̂ Even so, it is less
idiomatic under the lutenist’s hands—​like most of Bach’s lute works, it needs creative
adjustments to work. (Though Bach owned a lute, he was not a skilled lutenist.)
Obviously these two versions have much in common—​bariolage patterns
change to fingerpicking patterns. At the same time, the lower register and bass
make it sound typical of the lute. Toccata-​like chord patterns over ringing pedal
notes, for example, are particularly characteristic of this instrument. And David
Ledbetter notes the prelude’s resemblance to an undated caprice, possibly by Bach’s
lutenist friend Silvius Leopold Weiss (2009, 53–​54) (see Figure 5.23).
In his BWV 29 cantata, Bach transcribes the piece for an ensemble. The fea-
tured organ part, however, is an idiomatic keyboard version of the piece. Here
Bach changes the key—​down a step to D major—​to accommodate his three nat-
ural trumpets. And he emphasizes the original opposition between scalar and
 Compositional Instruments  T  135

Figure 5.22  Johann Sebastian Bach, excerpts from BWV 1006a Prelude for
Lute: (a) mm. 125–​30, with thumbed bass notes added to the violin’s original
melody; (b) mm. 43–​50, with bass notes extracted from the violin’s original
melody.

string-​crossing material by setting the former as tuttis and the latter as solos (see
Figure 5.24).
The “string-​crossing” pattern, however, works differently in the linear space of
the keyboard: it becomes a back-​and-​forth turning of the hand that is anchored by
a boundary digit, either thumb or little finger. In mm. 13–​16, the same directed-​
stem notation Bach used to indicate string crossing, in this context, denotes the
disposition of the keyboardist’s hands (see Figure 5.25).30 Instead of a single hand

30. Peter Williams (1994) discusses notation and hand distribution in the music of Bach and his
contemporaries.
136  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.23  Silvius Leopold Weiss (?), Caprice for Lute (from Ledbetter
2009, 54).

moving along the strings (connected to a neighboring string by the movement of

bow or plucking), the organist’s hands intertwine in a kind of bimanual hocketing.
With this passage, the keyboard—​with its one-​to-​one place-to-pitch mapping—​
offers greater congruence between instrumental and sonic spaces. The repeated
D5s occur in only one location.
From mm. 17–​28, Bach makes more free translation to the organ idiom. Without
the complication of the three-​string bariolage pattern, m. 17 would simply present
alternating thirds. Instead the composer refigures this passage. The chromatic pass-
ing tone (from the violin’s D string) is lost as Bach introduces a more expansive dip-
ping gesture, which resembles the original’s triple-​string-​crossing movement more
than its sound (see Figure 5.25). The following chain of suspensions (mm. 20–​28)
turns into Alberti-​bass-​like broken chords over a pulsing bass pedal.
While this section is translated more freely, the sinfonia as a whole bears traces
of its violinistic origins. I find the solo organ part thrilling—​with its constant lin-
ear motion, skipping across the keyboard—​but it is hardly a typical texture for the
instrument. It almost treats the organ as a monophonic instrument.31 The perform-
er’s right hand plays no simultaneities, not even at the final cadence, where the violin

31. This resembles the BWV 964 keyboard arrangement of the Allegro from Bach’s Second Sonata for
Unaccompanied Violin in A minor (BWV 1003). Here the distribution of the melody between the
hands would seem to affect performers’ sense of grouping (if not listeners’).
Figure 5.24  Johann Sebastian Bach, Sinfonia from Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir (BWV 29), mm. 1–​7. String-​crossing
passages from BWV 1006 become organ solos, while scalar passages become tutti passages.
138  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.25  Comparison of Prelude from BWV 1006 and organ part from
Sinfonia BWV 29, mm. 13–​29. In mm. 13–​16, string crossing maps onto
bimanual interlocking. After that, Bach writes an idiomatic keyboard figure for
the organ.

breaks into multiple stops (mm. 134–​35). A texture that is idiomatic to one instru-
ment seems unusual on another.32 Transcribed into another context of instrumental
affordances and physical habits, the “same” notes may take on different resonances.
Certainly it makes sense to hear Bach’s arrangements of the BWV 1006 prelude
as three versions of the “same piece.”33 Yet this analysis also highlights moments
of delocalization, negotiation, and changing contexts—​much like the processes of
scientific generalization discussed by Galison. Sometimes Bach preserves aspects

32. Williams, for example, suggests that the famous Toccata in D minor (BWV 565) may reflect traces
of another interface: “All the oddities one might hear in the piece disappear as soon as it is seen that
the D minor Toccata may be a transcription of something else. The opening octaves, for instance,
could well be a transcriber’s way of making more rhetorical and effective on the organ a series of
opening gestures that would have been solo on a melodic instrument (say viola da gamba, flute,
or violin)” (1981, 335). Other authors suggest different sources, such as five-​string cello (Argent
2000) or lute (Altschuler 2005).
33. Another notable version is created by Robert Schumann’s piano accompaniment. Lester compares
this arrangement to Bach’s orchestra and organ version, emphasizing their different rhythmic pro-
files (1999, 117–​22).
 Compositional Instruments  T  139

of body-​instrument interaction, whether heard or felt. Listening to these arrange-

ments together, for example, brings out similarities between affordances of the
violin and lute and differences from the organ.34 Other times Bach overwrites the
original, engaging the unique affordances of the new medium—​adding bass notes,
changing figuration, and so on. With the lute version, the adjustments continue
with performers, since Bach’s version is not entirely idiomatic to the instrument.
The largest change here is the shift in key from E major to F major. In fact, because
E major clashes with the most common D-​minor lute tuning, some believe that
BWV 1006a is not a lute arrangement but a lute-​inspired keyboard arrangement.
Continuing along these lines, it has been suggested that this is Bach’s only surviv-
ing work for the lute clavier, or Lautenwerk (Burguéte 1977, 52).

Playing Lute at the Keyboard

The Lautenwerk shows that Bach did not simply use existing instruments; he also
helped develop new ones. According to Agricola, Bach designed a “lute harp-
sichord” (Lautenclavicymbel), which was built by the organ builder Zacharias
Hildebrandt. This may have been one of the two lute claviers that Bach owned at
the time of his death. The composer had been an early adopter of this experimen-
tal keyboard instrument. He facilitated the purchase of a Lautenwerk made by his
elder cousin Johann Nicolaus Bach as early as 1715, only a few years after the first
documented reference to the instrument.35
J. N. Bach’s student Jacob Adlung claimed that “after the organ, the lute harp-
sichord is the most beautiful of the keyboard instruments” ([1768] 2011, 133).
Yet Lautenwerke were never widely built or played, and no specimens survive.
Organological details, however, are available from contemporaneous sources,
including Adlung’s Musica mechanica organoedi (Musical Mechanics for the
Organist). The Lautenwerk was an undamped instrument, a clavier with ringing
strings. To control this resonance it was equipped with a buff stop, which might
be understood as the functional opposite of a piano’s sustain pedal. Like lutes,
Lautenwerke were strung with gut strings, with courses doubled at the octave in
the lower range, doubled at the unison above that, and single courses in the high-
est register. (J. S. Bach’s model, additionally, had single-​strung theorbo-​style bass
strings made of brass.) J. N. Bach’s Lautenwerk also offered dynamic and timbral
variation through three manuals, each of which plucked strings at a different

34. Huron and Berec also note unexpected similarities between the violin’s and the organ’s affor-
dances: “Bach’s organ transcriptions of Vivaldi violin concertos reflect certain affinities between
the organ and violin that are not immediately apparent—​especially when compared to (say) hypo-
thetical transcriptions of these same concertos for flute. Vivaldi’s long melodic lines would leave
a flautist struggling for air. Moreover, Vivaldi’s frequent alternating figures (including unisons)
between two violin strings are readily replicated using two organ manuals” (2009, 104).
35. Incidentally, this instrument was bought by Duke Ernst August of Saxe-​Weimar, whose younger
brother Johann Ernst composed the concerto discussed earlier in this chapter (Ledbetter 2002, 28;
Williams 2004, 151).
140  T  Music at Hand

distance from the nut. It is unclear how many manuals J. S. Bach’s had, though it
evidently included several stops (Ledbetter 2002, 29).
Peter Williams wonders about this instrument:  “What the advantage of the
Lautenwerk was other than a pretty sound is unclear: easier to tune or voice or
restring, less sensitive to climate, less loud, good for accompanying?” (2004, 151).
In my view, this “advantage” seems clear: the sound of the Lautenwerk refers to
another instrument.36 After all, it seems difficult to conceive of this instrument in
isolation, to describe it—​even to name it—​without noting its organological hybrid-
ity. As the Lautenwerk combines the harpsichord’s interface and basic mechanism
with the lute’s strings, it links playing techniques of the former and sonic textures
of the latter. As Adlung puts it, the Lautenwerk makes it “possible to play the lute
from a keyboard” (2011, 135).
Agricola reports that J. S. Bach’s Lautenwerk sounded very much like a real lute:

It is true that in its regular setting (that is, when only one stop was drawn) it
sounded more like the theorbo than like the lute. But when the stop that on harp-
sichords is called the Lute stop … was drawn with the Cornet stop, it was almost
possible to deceive even professional lute players. (NBR, 366)

Adlung’s comments go further, recounting how Bach’s cousin employed the

instrument:

Mr. J. N. Bach, in playing this instrument out of sight, [was able to] deceive the
finest lutenist; one would have sworn that it was a regular lute. But it is necessary
to keep playing rapidly and in arpeggios, as skilled lutenists are accustomed to
play. It is also necessary to stay in the same key; any modulation will immediately
be noticeable, since one cannot depart from the key on a lute without retuning it.
(Adlung 2011, 137)

This effect, then, did not rely simply on the instrument’s timbre but on idi-
omatic musical figures. It depends on evoking the lute’s tonal affordances
and manner of performance. While the Lautenwerk’s resonance would surely
enhance this reference, its timbre can be separated from these other idiomatic
features.
In fact, there was a long tradition of “playing lute at the keyboard.” Harpsichord
transcriptions from seventeenth-​century France highlight the lute’s characteris-
tic features: low tessitura, broken or strummed chords, bass pedals, thin texture,
irregular figuration, loose imitation, held notes (tenues), campanella (repeat-
ing note) figures.37 Marin Mersenne recommended that keyboardists play such
transcriptions “in order to transfer the beauties and riches of the lute to other
instruments” (quoted in Ledbetter 1987, 30). Mersenne specifically links this to
instrumental differences in action-​sound coupling:  the lute’s dynamics reflect a

36. Of course, the organ contains such instrumental references too, with stops named for trumpet,
oboe, viola da gamba, vox humana, and so on (see Yearsley 2012, 69–​70).
37. This style is often referred to as the “style brisé” (broken style). Yet Buch (1985) shows that this term
emerged in the twentieth century.
 Compositional Instruments  T  141

player’s force of touch, where the harpsichord is insensitive to this aspect of per-
formance. Keyboardists adopted such textural devices as a means to approach the
lute’s expressivity on the harpsichord (Ledbetter 1987, 26). This is to say that the
lute clavier, before its invention as a material object, existed as a conceptual blend.
It is hardly surprising, then, that such keyboard arrangements of lute music led
to new, original keyboard pieces in lute style. This hybrid style uses the means of
the keyboard to imitate the sonority of the lute. Here the lute functions as a com-
positional instrument. It is not used to perform such works (say, lute-​style pieces
by François Couperin). Instead, the lute becomes a source of ideas. Its affordances
inform composition for other instrumental means.38
In cognitive terms, this involves meshing or cross-​domain mapping. Cross-​
domain mapping is a kind of conceptual metaphor, like the linking of pitch and
vertical position discussed in Chapter 1. As Lawrence Zbikowski explains, “Cross-​
domain mapping is a process through which we structure our understanding of
one domain (which is typically unfamiliar or abstract) in terms of another (which
is most often familiar and concrete)” (2002, 13). Whereas Zbikowski illuminates
mappings between musical and nonmusical domains—​ for example, between
musical and bodily movement or between musical and poetic imagery—​the lute
style represents an “intra-​musical” mapping, from one instrument to another.
Like all metaphor, cross-​domain mappings depend on some enabling similarity
between source and target domains. This also shows how mappings are selective,
partial. Lute and clavier share the standardized pitch materials of Western tonal
culture; both afford polyphonic textures with bass, chords, and melody, played
solo or in the continuo. Yet the mapping breaks down in terms of timbre and
action-​to-​sound relationships: the lute has resonance and dynamic range, while
the harpsichord has more piercing tone, allows for fuller chord voicings, and so on.
If auditory-​motor integration grounds modes of perception, my hearing of
Bach’s E-​major prelude is colored by my experience as a violinist. I  listen with
my hands. The experiment by Drost, Rieger, and Prinz (2007), discussed at the
beginning of Chapter  3, suggests that this is interface-​specific, automatically
activated through bottom-​up processes. But the lute style further suggests that
this may be driven from the top down: in other words, musicians may creatively
apply this hands-​on style of listening to instruments that they themselves do not
play. Indeed, these complementary possibilities are central to Glenberg’s theory
of mesh: embodied conceptualization can respond to the environment, subcon-
sciously integrating memories with perceived affordances; yet such conceptualiza-
tion might also be consciously directed (1997, 10–​11). I can distance myself from
my current situation, contemplating objects or actions that are not present. When
Bach listened to his friend Weiss improvise on the lute, for example, he could have
imagined playing along on the keyboard.

38. Ledbetter notes an interesting conflict between these elements in Bach’s Suite in E minor (BWV
996): “Paradoxically, it is the ‘lute-​like’ low tessitura that makes for too much business on the dia-
pason courses and is one of the main problems for playing this suite on the lute” (2009, 246). In a
sense, the suite is more lutelike than actual lute music. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Johann
Tobias Krebs marked this manuscript aufs Lauten Werk.
142  T  Music at Hand

Figure 5.26  Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in E♭ major, The Well-​Tempered

Clavier, Book II, mm. 1–​8.

Weiss’s influence might be heard in Bach’s Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E♭

(BWV 998)—​whose autograph score is marked “for lute or keyboard”—​but also in
the Prelude in E♭-​major from The Well-​Tempered Clavier, Book II (see Figure 5.26).
The two pieces’ similarities go beyond their shared key and compound meter: the
keyboard prelude’s arpeggiando style (with sustained, broken chords, mm. 25–​28),
pedaling bass (mm. 5–​8, 13–​16), and open-​voiced chords all recall the lute piece.
Such instrumental strategies can be found throughout Bach’s work.39 For
example, the Prelude in E♭ major from the first book of The Well-​Tempered
Clavier recalls an organ style—​with long sustained pedal, extensive ties, and so
on—​though it was unlikely to have been played on organ. (The C-​major prelude
from the second book shares such features.) More generally, this may help explain
the stylistic blending and contrast that marks The Well-​Tempered Clavier, with
its alternation between preludes and fugues. The fugues exploit the keyboard’s
polyphonic affordances, often obscuring patterns of the hand by distributing
independent voices among the fingers. The preludes, by contrast, may reference
various genres, through dance forms or instrumental effects:  these include the
famous broken-​chord preludes whose heritage can be traced back to the toccatas
of seventeenth-​century lutenist Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger. From this per-
spective, the interplay of Bach’s preludes and fugues represents a negotiation of
instrumental and contrapuntal elements, which are never fully separate but never
identical.

Conclusions

Bach’s compositional achievements, in sum, cannot be divorced from his activi-

ties as a keyboardist, transcriber, violinist, instrument designer, and so forth.

39. Ledbetter (2002) argues that this strategy of evoking one medium in terms of another is particu-
larly prevalent in the second book of The Well-​Tempered Clavier.
 Compositional Instruments  T  143

His music is grounded in embodied know-​how, though not determined by it.

Bach draws flexibly on instrumental idioms—​with an original instrument, tran-
scribed to another, or explored metaphorically in a process of cross-​domain
mapping. Examining these compositional strategies can help differentiate
instruments’ affordances, while also highlighting connections or references
among instruments (and other musical technologies). Throughout Bach’s music,
instrumental and tonal levels mingle like the parts in The Art of Fugue’s Canon
at the Twelfth, alternately leading or following, coupled or free, woven together
in a larger whole.
Though this chapter has focused on Bach, “compositional instruments” appear in
other milieus as well. For example, Jonathan Goldman has documented the influence
of free-​reed instruments—​specifically, accordion and bandoneon (a large concertina
associated with Argentinean tango)—​on several twentieth-​century composers. The
Argentinean German composer Mauricio Kagel, who played bandoneon, exploited
physical patterns on the instrument in his Pandorasbox (1960). The piece includes dis-
junct atonal lines, which move through adjacent buttons in the bandoneon’s irregu-
lar interface (Goldman 2012, 34–​35). The American pianist David Tudor, to whom
Pandorasbox is dedicated, also used the bandoneon as he transitioned from performing
to composing. His first public composition was the 1966 multimedia piece Bandoneon!
(a combine), which extended the instrument electronically. For Tudor, this collapsed
the distinction between composition and instrumentation. “Bandoneon! (a combine)
uses no composing means,” he wrote, “since when activated it composes itself out of its
own composite instrumental nature” (quoted in Goldman 2012, 54). Goldman (forth-
coming) also shows how the music of the spectralist composer Gérard Grisey employs
gestures associated with his first instrument, the accordion, as when multiple instru-
mental parts share an exact dynamic contour. (As mentioned in Chapter 2, simultane-
ously played notes on the accordion have the same dynamic because they are activated
by the same bellows.) This would involve a kind of metaphorical transcription, almost
treating the ensemble as a virtual accordion. Despite considerable historical distance
from Bach, then, these composers respond to instruments in similar ways, taking
them as sources of material, as compositional tools.
It is a small step, of course, from compositional instruments to theoretical
ones. Though instruments like the monochord are used primarily for theoreti-
cal investigation rather than performance, I would suggest that any instrument
may inform theoretical understanding. Historical examples here are numer-
ous. When the medieval keyboard with its one-​to-​one place-​to-​pitch mapping
gained prominence around 1500, Western theories of pitch shifted from a con-
textual model, based in the hexachord system, to an absolute model, where a
note’s name represented a measurable pitch (Bent 1984). Likewise, the popu-
larity of strummed guitar music in seventeenth-​century Europe contributed to
emergent tonal thinking, since these guitarists (like many of their counterparts
today) treated chords as objects, with little concern for issues of inversion and
counterpoint so important for keyboardists (Christensen 1992). In fact, one of
the most important concepts of tonal theory, the circle of fifths that is used to
explain relations among keys and chords, first appeared in a 1596 guitar manual.
It uses a kind of tablature that linked fretboard positions, finger placement, and
144  T  Music at Hand

sounding chords. Any musical instrument, then, can function as a theoretical

instrument, an “epistemic tool.”40
Even as I  highlight instruments, I  do not wish to overlook the significance
of notation here. Just as writing lets language appear in the absence of a living
speaker, notation productively distances music from its performance.41 This sug-
gests that any score is open to many possible realizations, that transcribability is
built into notation from the start. Notation, then, is not simply a written copy
of performance. After all, it is possible to write things that have never been per-
formed and even things that are unplayable.42 At the same time, insofar as consis-
tent instruments facilitate musical repetition (as prostheses or artifacts of external
memory), they represent a kind of proto-​notation or proto-​recording. And this
repeatability, rather than notation itself, seems essential for the sense of musical
objects in theory or composition.
Composers, like performers, are involved in poiesis. They make music. But
what about listeners who neither perform nor write music? How might they relate
to Bach’s violinistic string crossing or his lutelike keyboard pieces? How, more
generally, might instrumental technologies condition their musical perception
and understanding? Such questions demand an account of musical listening that
differentiates listeners from performers and composers—​but also differentiates
among lay listeners themselves. Such questions, in other words, require a musical
aesthetics that is sensitive to musical technics.

40. While Magnusson (2009) discusses digital instruments as “epistemic tools,” I take a broader view.
Similarly, Lewin suggests that musical instruments with stable pitch affordances might make it
possible to link pitch intervals “with res extensae, that is, with visible and tangible spatial distances
outside the body-​mind complex of the singer—​distances between holes in a pipe, between points
along a bow-​string, between shorter and longer pipe lengths, etc.” (1977, 234).
41. This compressed treatment of musical notation is inspired by Derrida’s classic investigation of
speech and writing. As Derrida puts it, “Writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not
being its ‘image’ or its ‘symbol,’ and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing”
(1976, 46).
42. Of course, there is also music that can be played but not notated, that does not fit the symbolic
representations of notation. As Friedrich Kittler argues, Western notation puts sound through an
alphabetic filter, whereas phonography inscribes traces of sonic events that include noise (1999,
3–​4, 23).
CHAPTER 
Six
Horns To Be Heard

The finale of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 73 starts with a jaunty tune played by
the whole orchestra. Fast, loud, and rhythmically active, the music rushes, races
ahead, and arrives at the dominant (mm. 26–​29; see Figure 6.1). Then, a break.
A  pause. The silence defuses the rhythmic energy of the opening, and like the
famous subito forte from Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, it demands my attention.
How should I describe what happens next? In mm. 30–​37, I hear two melodic lines
moving together; dyads that reassert the home key; a blend of sound colors, one
brash, the other bright. Yes, I can hear these textural, tonal, and timbral features.
But I might also say that I hear a pair of horns, doubled by oboes.
These alternative descriptions reflect different modes of listening—​that is, dif-
ferent ways of experiencing or relating to sound. Where the first highlights sonic
features, the second identifies sources of sound in the world. For some authors,
there is a categorical difference between these modes (e.g., Jonas 1966; Gaver 1993,
1–​2; Scruton 1997, 221). The former would represent “musical listening,” and the
latter ecological or everyday listening. One would be aestheticized, the other
mundane. The philosopher Hans Jonas, for example, claims that musical hearing
“refers not to an object other than the sensory contents but to their own order and
interconnection” (1966, 138). This opposition, then, tends toward a metaphysics
of listening in which musical experience would supposedly be cleansed of instru-
mental traces.
Yet instruments are not so easily hidden. They constantly reappear in experi-
ence, supplementing pure sound and revealing an interplay of musical and eco-
logical listening strategies. The French composer Pierre Schaeffer refers to this
interplay in terms of an “instrumental paradox” (1966, 43). “The musical phenom-
enon … has two correlative aspects,” he writes, “a tendency to abstraction, insofar
as play releases structures; and the adherence to the concrete, insofar as it remains
attached to instrumental possibilities” (46).1 For instrumentalists, the concrete
aspect is bound up with their own bodily actions. But how does this paradox affect
listening? How, in other words, do listeners relate to instruments they cannot play,
instruments they never touch?
With these questions, the book turns from music-​makers to audiences, from
poiesis to aesthesis. Haydn’s horn music forms a useful case study here, and not

1. “Le phénomène musical a donc deux aspects corrélatifs: une tendance à l’abstraction, dans la mesure
où le jeu dégage des structures; l’adhérence au concret, dans la mesure où il reste attaché aux pos-
sibilités instrumentales.” Translations from Schaeffer are my own.
Figure 6.1  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 73 in D major, “La chasse,” mvt. iv, mm. 26–​37.
148  T  Music at Hand

Figure 6.2  Open notes of the natural horn. (Note the microtonal inflections at
harmonics 7, 11, 13, and 14.)

only because of the composer’s contributions to modern orchestration. The horns

in Haydn’s ensemble, like other instruments discussed in this book, have a distinc-
tive idiom. By deploying this idiom in varied contexts, Haydn’s music suggests
several ways that contemporaneous audiences responded to horns. Ultimately, it
shows how instrumental invariance shapes perception and understanding for lis-
teners, much as it does for players. At certain points, this investigation will return
to theories of grounded cognition and phenomenology, discussed in Chapter 1.
But first it will be helpful to review the horn’s affordances and its role in eighteenth-​
century European culture.

Haydn’s Horns

In the aforementioned passage from Haydn’s Symphony no. 73, the horn functions
as a compositional instrument. That is, Haydn’s melodic and harmonic choices are
tied to his decision to feature the horns. Such connections are common in Haydn’s
music. As Emily Dolan has shown, his orchestration contributed to emerging dis-
courses of instrumental character, by which each member of the orchestra was
typecast in particular musical and expressive roles (2013, 148–​68). Still, instru-
mentation and tonal design are especially entwined with the horns because of
their distinctive pitch affordances.
Brass instruments—​that is, wind instruments played with vibrating lips—​
afford a harmonic series above a fundamental pitch (see Figure 6.2).2 Players
move through the series by varying lip tension. Note that this overtone space is
“irregular,” as defined in Chapter 3. Its pitch collection may be reckoned in terms
of a diatonic or chromatic scale, yet either way, there are both missing notes and
added notes (such as the “out-​of-​tune” seventh partial). A  “step” in this instru-
mental space corresponds to various pitch intervals, which become smaller as the
player ascends through the series. The valves on a modern French horn expand the
instrument’s pitch affordances: pressing a valve (or a combination of valves) modi-
fies the functional length of the instrument and thereby changes the fundamental.

2. Specific pitches vary from instrument to instrument and do not exactly match the mathematical
harmonic series. The fundamental itself is generally weak. Of course, “brass” instruments need not
be made out of metal. Indeed, the word “horn” indicates that such instruments have long been made
from animal horns.
 Horns To Be Heard  T  149

Haydn himself was indirectly involved in such technical developments: in 1796,

he wrote a concerto for an experimental “keyed” trumpet. But the horns in his
ensemble, valveless or “natural” horns, were more closely tied to the pattern of
overtones.
That is not to say that hornists of the time could not play other notes. On
the contrary, they developed techniques to bend pitches with the embouchure
(“lipping”) or putting a hand into the horn’s bell (“stopping”). They also used
these methods to adjust the “out-​of-​tune” harmonics. Still, stopping could be dif-
ficult, and it altered the instrument’s timbre. While horn soloists were expected
to master such techniques, orchestral horn parts typically stayed within the har-
monic series.3 The seventh harmonic’s too-​flat B♭ was usually avoided; the bright
F-​quarter-​sharp, often accepted as is.
In many ways, the problems facing early horn players resemble those of
harmonica players examined in Chapter  3:  their instruments offer diatonic
pitch collections with gaps, gaps that can be filled by the development of new
techniques or alteration of the instrument. Where harmonica players carry an
instrument in each key, horn players would have interchangeable crooks, each
of which would set the instrument for a particular key. Just as the jazz har-
monica player Howard Levy always thinks in C major, natural horn music was
always notated in this key. Some of the technical solutions to these problems
are strikingly similar. Much like the chromatic harmonica, the chromatic horn
invented by John Clagget in 1788 effectively couples two instruments tuned a
semitone apart, which are played through a single mouthpiece (Tuckwell 2002,
35). Another approach, closer to cross-​harp harmonica playing, was the early-​
nineteenth-​century cor mixte approach: here a hornist carried crooks only for F,
E, E♭, and D, using them for closely related keys and faking or cutting the outside
notes (Humphries 2000, 19–​20). Neither of these approaches to the horn was
very satisfactory, though, and neither caught on. Many preferred the sound of
the natural horn long after its valved counterpart was widespread, particularly
in France.4
The valveless horn’s affordances gave rise to certain idiomatic figures, such as
melodies that outline a major triad. Three examples of this phenomenon, taken
from Haydn’s symphonies, appear in Figures  6.3–​6.5. In the first movement of
his Symphony no. 6, the composer starts the cheery main theme with an unac-
companied horn, moments before the flute and strings initiate the recapitulation
proper (see Figure 6.3).5 Horns help create a different mood at the beginning of
Haydn’s Symphony no. 22, nicknamed “The Philosopher.” As shown in Figure 6.4,
this somber adagio begins with horns in octaves, moving in half notes against the
muted strings’ steady eighth notes (mm. 1–​2). Symphony no. 31 also begins with

3. Composers typically used horns in pairs, where one player was a specialist in high-​register playing
(cor alto) and the other was a specialist in the lower register (cor basse).
4. The highly developed French tradition of valveless horn playing led to the instrument’s common
English name, the “French” horn (Tuckwell 2002, 17).
5. This moment, then, is a precedent for the famous “early” horn entry in Beethoven’s “Eroica”
Symphony.
150  T  Music at Hand

Figure 6.3  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 6 in D major, “Le matin,” mvt. i,

mm. 85–​90.

Figure 6.4  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 22 in E♭ major, “The Philosopher,” mvt.

i, mm. 1–​4.

horns and strings—​but its quicker tempo and rearticulated notes create a thrilling
sense of momentum (see Figure 6.5). Although these excerpts are stylistically and
affectively distinct, each of them prominently uses horns to outline the tonic triad.
In the latter two examples, the horns double each other at the unison or
octave. The duet from Symphony no. 73 involves another kind of doubling. The
 Horns To Be Heard  T  151

Figure 6.5  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 31 in D major, “Hornsignal,” mvt. i,

mm. 1–​5.

Figure 6.6  Transformation network for the horn duet from Haydn’s “La chasse”
symphony, mvt. iv, mm. 30–​31. The two horns make similar moves, above the
same fundamental.
H
Horn 1 D1, 6 D1, 8 H D1, 9 H D1, 10 H D1, 11 H D1, 12

Horn 2 D1, 6 D1, 5 D1, 6 D1, 8 D1, 9 D1, 10

H–1
m6 P5 M3 m3 m3

horns start on different harmonics, then make similar moves through the instru-
mental “scale” presented in Figure 6.2.6 This motion can be represented via Kris
Shaffer’s transformational model of natural horn music. Shaffer (n.d.) represents
the instrument’s “overtone space” in terms of ordered pairs of the form (f, p),
where f is the fundamental pitch and p is a numbered partial. For example, the
first note of the horn duet would be (D1, 6), sounding as A3. Given the habitual
avoidance of the seventh partial, it might make sense to define an operation H
that skips this out-​of-​tune note. This can be achieved (somewhat artificially) by
mapping 6 to 8, 7 to itself, and any other number x to x + 1. From this perspective,
the horn duet would involve parallel motion in the instrumental space—​even
though the pitch intervals between the parts vary (see Figure 6.6).
In terms of pitches, the most distinctive part of this pattern is the similar-​motion
approach to the perfect fifth. This move, forbidden by contrapuntal tradition,

6. Again, Haydn avoids the seventh partial. This note, in fact, appears in only four of his symphonies
(Bryan 1975, 214).
152  T  Music at Hand

Figure 6.7  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 103 in E♭ major, “Drumroll,” mvt. iv,

mm. 1–​4. (No other instruments play at this moment.)

Figure 6.8  Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 31 in D major, “Hornsignal,” mvt. iii,

mm. 41–​44.

represents a clash between instrumental and tonal idioms. Haydn’s corrections on

students’ exercises and annotations in his copy of Gradus ad Parnassum show that
the composer’s attitude toward “hidden” or “direct” fifths was even stricter than
that of the textbook’s author, Johann Joseph Fux (Mann 1970, 719). Yet these
fifths are ubiquitous in Haydn’s horn parts. As shown in Figure 6.7, unaccompa-
nied horn fifths start the final movement of Symphony no. 103. They may also be
woven into a thicker orchestral texture: for example, they accompany melodies
in the oboes and strings throughout the trio from Symphony no. 31 (Figure 6.8).
These two-​part figures have roots in an earlier tradition: hunters often played
cors de chasse in pairs. Such duets appear in the first published collection of hunt-
ing calls, Jean de Serré de Rieux’s Les dons des enfans de Latone: La musique et la
chasse du cerf of 1734 (Monelle 2006, 51). Paired horns, then, recall the instru-
ment’s use outside of the concert hall. They reference the horn as communication
technology. The instrument, in fact, was required equipment for hunters. A 1719
hunting manual notes that “by law every mounted member of a Parforce-​hunt
must wear his Parforce-​horn round his neck, otherwise he will not be admitted to
the field” (quoted in Fitzpatrick 1970, 18n2). Such practices were very much part
of Haydn’s world. His patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy was an avid huntsman: he
built the Esterháza summer palace at the remote site of his old hunting lodge and
 Horns To Be Heard  T  153

Figure 6.9  “La sourcillade,” as recorded by Serré de Rieux (1734).

founded a forestry school at Eisenstadt where all students learned how to play the
horn (Fitzpatrick 1970, 18n2).
This tradition gives Symphony no. 73 its nickname, “La chasse.” Though Haydn
often writes in a generalized hunt style, the reference here is more precise. In mm.
30–​37, the horns play an actual hunting call: the “sourcillade” or “vue,” sounded
when the quarry is first sighted (Ringer 1953, 150–​51; Monelle 2006, 89–​90).
While Haydn likely knew the call from the hunting of his aristocratic patrons, his
version is close to Serré de Rieux’s, published nearly half a century earlier (see
Figure 6.9).7 This consistency across temporal and geographic distance speaks to
the hunting tradition’s strength—​which relies on the horn itself, as an object of
external memory.
This cultural significance made horns attractive for opera composers—​who
were the first to use the instruments orchestrally. In 1639, Francesco Cavalli added
them for hunting scenes in his Le Nozze di Teti e di Peleo (Tuckwell 2002, 13).
Horns here represented a kind of diegetic music—​even diegetic sound or noise.
The finale from Symphony no.  73 also derives from this theatrical tradition:  it
originated as the overture to Haydn’s 1780 opera, La fedeltà premiata, which opens
with a mythical hunt dedicated to the goddess Diana. At the same time, the hunt
itself was highly aestheticized, and Raymond Monelle argues that the horn may
have been borrowed from the theater:  “The baroque hunting horn was poised
between musical expression and practical utility. Less effective than the oxhorn
as a signaling tool, it was more evocative of the splendor and exhilaration of the
hunt. Thus, the signifier of the hunt topic was already halfway to being its own sig-
nified…. It may well have originated as a theatrical instrument. Such was baroque
culture; the world was a stage” (2006, 41).
Haydn expected his audience to recognize common hunting calls—​and to
understand their meaning.8 As Daniel Heartz puts it, hunting calls “came as
close to universality as any musical language of the time” (1976, 529). The com-
poser dramatizes this in no. 26 from his oratorio The Seasons. Here horn signals

7. Both versions are in D, which was associated with French hunting horns. German hunting horns
were typically in E♭ (Monelle 2006, 42). Note that all of the horn solos cited in this section (plus the
horn concertos attributed to Haydn) are written in one of those keys—​and the hunting scene in The
Seasons shifts from one to the other.
8. This recognition was not limited to human listeners: a German hunting manual published in 1783
(one year after the premiere of Symphony no. 73) notes that “the dogs must understand the calls as
well as the huntsmen, and indeed they do understand them perfectly with some experience” (quoted
in Heartz 1976, 526).
154  T  Music at Hand

act out each stage of a hunt—​from the “queste,” which gathers the hunting
party, to the “halili,” which celebrates their victory. As the hunters and country-
folk comment on the action, they repeatedly direct attention to the instrument
itself:

Hört! hört das laute Getön, Hark! Hear the loud noise
Das dort im Walde klinget! that rings there in the woods!
Welch’ ein lautes Getön What a loud noise
Durchklingt den ganzen Wald! rings through all the wood!
Es ist der gellenden Hörner Schall … It is the shrill sound of the horn …

Hearing Things, Hearing Tones

When Haydn’s hunters and countryfolk hear the horns, they recognize them
instantly. And their first word—​the imperative “Hark!”—​is an invitation to join
in that hearing. The scene, then, stages a particular mode of listening. Heidegger
calls this mode “hearkening.” In it, I attend not to sounds themselves but to mean-
ingful things, which the sounds reveal. “ ‘Initially’ we never hear noises and com-
plexes of sound,” the philosopher writes, “but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle.
We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the
crackling fire” (2010, 158). Hearkening to things in the world, Heidegger argues,
is more primordial than “hearing” bits of sonic sense data. This argument situ-
ates aural perception in an environment from the start. As such, it resonates with
work in ecological acoustics (discussed in Chapter 2), which examines sonic infor-
mation about objects and events. It also fits with the results of an open-​ended
empirical study by Nicola Dibben (2001). In it, participants were asked to describe
various audio clips, some musical and some nonmusical. Overall, the responses
were diverse, mentioning the sounds’ acoustic qualities and their associations
with musical genres, emotions, or social contexts. Many descriptions, moreover,
reflected an individual respondent’s cultural and educational background. But by
far the most common type of description—​by participants with and without musi-
cal training—​referred to physical sources of sound. As Figure 6.10 shows, more
than 1,000 responses named a physical source, whereas fewer than 150 mentioned
sonic characteristics.9
Of course, this does not mean that it is impossible to experience sound as sound,
just that such an approach involves particular learned techniques. As Heidegger

9. Some ethnomusicologists have come to related conclusions through fieldwork. For example, Greg
Downey explores such issues in an essay on capoeira, the Brazilian martial art–​dance form: “When
practitioners describe the berimbau’s sound, they … do not say that they hear a changed pitch, for
example, but that they hear the coin pressing on the string” (2002, 496). The berimbau is a kind of
musical bow that accompanies capoeira. (See also Baily 1996, 172.)
 Horns To Be Heard  T  155

Figure 6.10  Frequencies of sound-​description categories from Dibben

(2001, 179).
Physical source 1,126
Genre 438
Acoustic characteristics 147
Emotion 103
Function 70
Social context 50
Physical proximity 20
Physical space 8
Performance skill 3
0 250 500 750 1,000 1,250

writes, “It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to ‘hear’ a ‘pure
noise’ ” (2010, 153). This type of attitude might be found in the science of acoustics,
where the horn’s sound can be described in terms of resonance peaks and input
impedance in a pressure-​response curve (see Benade 1973). In light of Heidegger’s
ideas about technics (1977), it becomes clear that this acoustic description is made
possible by scientific instruments, by a kind of technological enframing. For Pierre
Schaeffer, radios and record players may perform a similar function.10 Concealing
sonic sources, he claims, can help reveal the sounds themselves.
In his Traité des objets musicaux (1966, 104), Schaeffer goes beyond the oppo-
sition of hearkening and hearing to propose four modes of listening:

(1) Écouter (listening), corresponding to hearkening, attends to a sound’s

source. For example, in the horn call, I hear an index of the instrument or
the player’s action.
(2) Ouïr (passive aural sensation) receives the sound unconsciously or indi-
rectly. While I am in the car, driving and chatting with my wife, a horn
might play quietly on the radio. Strictly speaking, I hear the sound (and
this background music might even affect my mood), but I am not con-
sciously aware of it.
(3) Entendre (hearing) focuses exclusively on sonic morphology. Here I would
experience the horn call as a sound object out of context, as a particular
timbre, rhythm, or pitch structure.
(4) Comprendre (understanding) interprets a sound’s meaning. The horn call,
at this level, is a symbol that might say, “The quarry has been sighted.”

Each of Schaeffer’s modes requires some kind of withdrawal. With écouter or

comprendre, I  do not listen to the sound. Instead, I  listen through it to a physi-
cal source or a message. Like a written word, the horn call feels “transparent”;
like a hammer, it is handy (zuhanden). With entendre, by contrast, I contemplate

10. Carlos Palombini (1998) draws parallels between Heidegger’s and Schaeffer’s approaches to tech-
nology, with particular attention to enframing (Ge-​stell).
156  T  Music at Hand

sounding patterns, while source and meaning withdraw. I seem to be concerned

not with the instrument but with “the music itself.”11
Though Schaeffer explores various tensions and relations among the four
modes, he ultimately valorizes entendre. “All music,” he proclaims, “is made to
be heard” (1966, 133).12 This resolves the instrumental paradox in favor of musi-
cal abstraction. For while écouter reveals things that can be seen or touched,
entendre supposedly deals with sound alone. Here, Brian Kane (2014) has dem-
onstrated, the composer faithfully employs Husserlian reduction techniques.
Entendre, then, is often referred to as a “reduced listening.” Setting aside the
differences between sounds heard and sounds imagined, Schaeffer envisions
an experience of pure hearing, of pure sound objects freed from their worldly
origins. This accords with Husserl’s own thoughts on music. “However much
[Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata] itself consists of sounds, it is an ideal unity,”
Husserl writes, “and its constituent sounds are no less ideal. They are obvi-
ously not the sounds dealt with in physics; nor are they the sounds pertaining
to sensuous acoustic perception, the sounds that come from things pertaining
to the senses” (1969, 21; quoted in Schaeffer 1966, 132).13 This is a radical view
of musical autonomy, detaching music not only from its social function but
even from its real existence as vibration. Moreover, if the sound object is to be
constituted as an unchanging, self-​grounded essence, then any trace of media-
tion or exteriority—​any trace of technics—​must be excluded.14 Separating
écouter from entendre, then, would theoretically sever the instrument from
its sound.
Yet Heidegger’s tool analysis teaches that withdrawal cannot always be sus-
tained. When the horns’ limited pitch affordances differentiate them from their
orchestral companions, when they play direct fifths or a slightly sharp 4̂, when
a performer of this notoriously difficult instrument botches a note—​then horns
become “present-​to-​hand” (vorhanden). Such disruptions draw attention to the
instrument, shifting from entendre to écouter. (That pause in Haydn’s Symphony
no.  73 creates a similar effect. In it, Haydn orchestrates a moment of break-
down, directing attention to the horn call that follows.) Moreover, as discussed
in Chapter 4, Levinas would emphasize that withdrawal is never complete, that
handiness does not preclude enjoyment. From this perspective, Schaeffer’s modes
of listening are unstable at best. Each one may be dispelled by unfulfilled expec-
tations; each one depends on a certain kind of habit or habituation. This con-
nects listening, like the development of performance expertise, to instrumental
invariance.
Listen again to the horn call. The melody emerges from pitch and rhythmic
variance (which correlate, too, with a player’s actions). The timbre, meanwhile, is

11. With ouïr, the sound would withdraw from consciousness more or less completely.
12. “Toute musique est faite pour être entendre” (emphasis in original). Similar arguments appear in
other Husserlian treatments of sound and music, such as those of Jonas (1966) and Scruton (1997).
13. On the role of hearing—​and, particularly, “hearing-​oneself-​speak”—​in Husserl’s metaphysics, see
Derrida (2011).
14. For further discussion, see Gallope (2011, 59) and Kane (2014, ch. 4).
 Horns To Be Heard  T  157

relatively stable, implying that these varied notes are produced by the same source.
Because of this consistency, I may become habituated to the sound of the instru-
ment, which facilitates its withdrawal. But instrumental timbre also affects the way
that instrumental parts are grouped or divided (Bregman 1990, ch. 5; De Souza
2015). In other words, changing the instrumentation can change the music’s per-
ceived organization. Curiously, it seems that both timbral variance and timbral
invariance may highlight the tension between structure and source. With Haydn’s
re-​orchestration of repeated themes, the melody is more stable than its instrumen-
tal presentation. According to Dolan (2013, 134), this contributed to the idea of
an abstract theme that transcends any single manifestation. Meanwhile, Thomas
Christensen argues that four-​hand piano transcriptions of orchestral music, by
erasing differences in instrumental color, played into the nineteenth-​century aes-
thetics of absolute music (1999, 290). The piano reduction, like a phenomenologi-
cal reduction, was thought to reveal pure tone structures or spiritual essences.
As transcriptions changed performance medium and context—​transforming
an orchestral work, played in public, into a pianistic one, played at home—​they
blurred distinctions between genres. And this, too, could affect the perception of
tonal structure. Research in music cognition indicates that tonal expectations are
situated, contextual. Listeners develop different schemas—​that is, different sets
of expectations—​for particular musical genres.15 Even without formal musical
training, they tune in to a genre’s statistical regularities. So just as instrumental
consistency grounds hand-​ear connections for players, tonal consistency grounds
style-​specific expectations for listeners. Yet genre identification is so rapid that it
must rely on timbre rather than harmonic information (Perrott and Gjerdingen
2008). In this case, instruments, whether heard or seen, may provide contextual
cues, priming particular expectations or helping listeners learn new schemas
(Huron 2006, 204–​5). That is to say, Haydn’s eighteenth-​century audiences—​and,
to some extent, classical-​music fans today—​would be attuned to the relation
between the horn’s timbre and its idiomatic figures. Horn parts are far more pre-
dictable than, say, violin parts. As soon as I hear the horns’ sixth at the opening of
the “Drumroll” Symphony, I am primed for the possibility of direct motion to a
perfect fifth. Here source identification informs tonal expectation. Écouter guides
entendre.
For an experienced listener, the horn call might be heard to “sound good,”
imbued with a positive affect that rewards successful prediction.16 But the
instrumental-​tonal expectations at play may be even clearer when they are
denied. Carl Maria von Weber’s 1821 opera, Der Freischütz, provides a strik-
ing example. The opera centers on hunting culture. Its protagonist, Max, is
a gamekeeper, and the horn, as a tool of his trade, is an essential part of the
opera’s sound world. Desperate to win a shooting contest, Max decides to cast
seven magic bullets in the Wolf ’s Glen at midnight—​and unwittingly becomes
involved in a demonic pact. Each bullet’s production is accompanied by some

15. For example, a series of experiments by Bryn Hughes (2011) examines Western listeners’ different
harmonic expectations for classical music and the blues.
16. On musical expectation and emotion, see Huron (2006, 7–​15).
158  T  Music at Hand

disturbing supernatural event:  nightbirds gather, a hurricane bends the trees,

and wheels of fire cross the stage. After the fifth bullet has been cast, horns her-
ald the imminent arrival of the devil Samiel (see Figure 6.11). But these horns
outline a dissonant diminished-​seventh chord rather than a consonant major

Figure 6.11  Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischütz, no. 10 (Act II Finale), mm.
336–​46.
 Horns To Be Heard  T  159

triad.17 They sound an augmented fourth in place of a perfect fourth, and minor
thirds in place of major thirds. Moreover, the timbre makes it clear that none of
the notes are stopped. That is, these horns appear to violate the laws of physics
that ground the instrument’s overtone space. They are not natural horns, then;
they seem to be unnatural horns. Weber creates this illusion by combining horns
in multiple keys:  two in E, one in F, and one in B♭. In itself, this is not a new
technique. It is particularly common in minor-​mode works, such as Mozart’s
Symphony no. 40 in G minor, K. 550. Yet in the Wolf ’s Glen scene, the consis-
tent timbre and aligned temporal attacks make it sound as though notes from
multiple instruments come from a single, fictional source. The moment engages
several modes of listening at once: the sound’s source, its dissonant sonority, and
its dramatic significance are all interrelated.
This example from Weber also suggests how instrumental sources may con-
tribute to musical meaning. As I  listen to the beginning of Haydn’s Symphony
no. 22 (see Figure 6.4), the horns might withdraw. I might be more aware of the
piece’s solemn, somewhat archaic character, its nickname “The Philosopher,” or
traditional interpretations that hear it as a dialogue between God and a sinner
(Landon 1976, 566). But imagine how such experiences would change if the horns
were replaced by electric guitars or kazoos.18 Here, again, écouter, entendre, and
comprendre are profoundly interconnected.

Phantom Horns

Let me return to Symphony no.  73, to an earlier section that has nothing to
do with the hunt. In the second movement, Haydn’s song “Gegenliebe” (Hob.
XXVI:16) forms the refrain in a rondo-​variation form.19 Recognizing the
song—​or even its songlike character—​represents another instance of handi-
ness (Zuhandenheit). That is, the strings might be heard as relatively “neutral”
instruments realizing the voice and piano parts from the original lied (see
Figure 6.12a).
The rondo’s first episode begins in m. 25. It presents the main theme in the
parallel minor, G minor, then modulates to B♭ major. When the theme appears in
this new key, though, I experience a moment of presence-​to-​hand (mm. 36–​37; see
Figure 6.12b). Something sticks out. As it happens, the upper strings have momen-
tarily broken with their usual style of voice leading to accompany the tune with
a horn-​fifths figure. The actual horns in the ensemble are silent throughout this

17. The dramatic effect engages the diminished-​seventh chord’s inherent dissonance, as well as asso-
ciations between the tritone and devils in Western art music generally and throughout this opera
in particular. But, in my view, the distortion of the expected horn idiom is crucial here. The dis-
sonance is more unpredictable, because of its instrumental context.
18. For an empirical study of instrumental affordances and emotion, see Schutz et al. (2008).
19. In Haydn and the Classical Variation, Elaine Sisman distinguishes between “rondo-​variation” (vari-
ation form with contrasting periods) and “variation-​rondo” (rondo form with incidental changes
to the refrain) (1993, 72). She lists this movement as an instance of the former (268).
Figure 6.12  Joseph Haydn, excerpts from Symphony no. 73 in D major, “La
chasse,” mvt. ii.
 Horns To Be Heard  T  161

Figure 6.12  Continued

episode, since its distance from the movement’s home key makes it poorly suited to
their tonal affordances. After the music returns to G major, though, the horns join
the main theme for the first time, playing the direct fifth that the strings had intro-
duced (mm. 55–​56; see Figure 6.12c). And after another episode, at the main theme’s
final occurrence, the horns triumphantly take the complete tune (mm. 96–​97;
see Figure  6.12d). Now their distinctive fifths, doubled by the second violins,
have become fully integrated into the theme. This movement, then, enacts a tech-
nique that is common in Haydn’s slow movements—​what Dolan calls “developing
orchestration” (2013, 115). It seems that the strings in m. 36 were foreshadowing
the horns’ final arrival and the instrumental transformation of Haydn’s song.
This horn-​specific process of developing orchestration is found with other com-
posers too. Monelle collects a few examples of this “hidden-​reference” strategy, in
which an idiomatic horn figure is presented initially by other instruments (2006,
100). Indeed, I briefly showed one earlier: the excerpt from Haydn’s “Le matin”
Symphony, where a solo horn anticipated the recapitulation (see Figure 6.3). In
that movement, the triadic theme first appeared as a flute solo. Such pieces seem
to emphasize other instruments’ imitations of horns.
Yet horn idioms often appear without such confirmation. The most obvi-
ous examples reference the hunt, combining horn motion with lilting equestrian
162  T  Music at Hand

rhythms in six-​eight time. For example, Haydn’s first string quartet begins with a
unison horn call, leading to its nickname, “La chasse” (see Figure 6.13). But imag-
ined horns appear in other stylistic contexts too. In the “Emperor Hymn” from his
String Quartet no. 62, Haydn harmonizes the first three notes of the melody with a
triad in the second violin to create horn motion in the upper parts (see Figure 6.14).
Whether the composer had horns or trumpets in mind, the direct fifth certainly
echoes ceremonial brass and contributes to the music’s stately character. Here, as
in Bach’s imitations of the lute style, Haydn puts an instrumental idiom in a new
performative context.
In the nineteenth century, as valved brass instruments became more com-
mon, references to the natural horn took on new connotations, epitomized by
the nostalgic horn fifths in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no.  26 in E♭ major, “Les
adieux,” and the slow movement from Johannes Brahms’s 1865 Horn Trio, op. 40
(mvt. iii, mm. 59–​65). Instruments like horns and bells—​that is, instruments
that can be heard far away—​were particularly important for a Romantic aesthet-
ics obsessed with distance, absence, and interiority (Hoeckner 1997, 61; Beller-​
McKenna 2005). All of this speaks to the historical significance of the horn topic,
to the representation of an instrument that is not just distant, but actually absent.
Such representations diverged from actual horn writing. The natural horn part
for Brahms’s trio goes beyond the instrument’s open notes, requiring extensive
stopping.20 Passages evoking the horn, however, are more stereotypical, more
schematic (for example, see the opening of Brahms’s String Quartet in B♭-​major
in Figure 6.15).
This trend continues in the twentieth century with György Ligeti. His
Hamburg Concerto (1998–​2002) features four natural horns, using the “out-​of-​
tune” upper harmonics that earlier composers avoided. These parts keep much
from earlier horn idioms, even as they trade a triadic-​diatonic profile for a spec-
tral one. In the second movement, for example, Ligeti replicates the instrumental
logic behind horn fifths: as two horns make parallel moves through the overtone
series, the sounding intervals vary constantly (Shaffer, n.d.; see Figure 6.16).
Yet in his piano étude “Fanfares,” the composer uses a standard horn-​fifths
motif.21 The imagined horns pop out of the texture, even in this nontonal
context.
From Haydn to Ligeti, I have barely skimmed this tradition of instrumental
reference. In these examples, horns seem to be simultaneously present and absent,
real and ideal. They might thus be understood as virtual instruments, as phan-
toms haunting the music or its listeners.22 Further examples could be provided
ad nauseam, including examples that do not engage a conventionalized musical

20. Examining Brahms’s manuscript, Peter Jost (2001) concludes that the part was originally written
for valved horn, then modified.
21. This prelude is closely related to the manic second movement of Ligeti’s Horn Trio (1982). Note,
also, that the trio’s final movement alludes to the horn fifths from Beethoven’s “Les adieux” Sonata.
(For an analysis, see Cuciurean 2000, 155–​61.)
22. Here I would note that “phantom” and “phenomenon” both derive from the Greek verb phanein
(to show).
Figure 6.13  Joseph Haydn, String Quartet no. 1 in B♭ major, “La chasse,” mvt. i,
mm. 1–​4.

Figure 6.14  Joseph Haydn, String Quartet no. 62 in C major, “Emperor,” mvt. ii,
mm. 1–​2.

Figure 6.15  Johannes Brahms, String Quartet no. 3 in B♭ major, op. 67, mvt. i,

mm. 1–​4.
164  T  Music at Hand

Figure 6.16  Transformation network for György Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto,

mvt. ii, m. 9 (adapted from Shaffer, n.d., figs. 4–​6). Parallel moves in overtone
space give rise to varied sonorities. (100c is equivalent to one equal-​tempered
semitone.)

Solo Horn F1, 10 F1, 9 F1, 8 F1, 7 F1, 6 F1, 5

Horn 4 D1, 9 D1, 8 D1, 7 D1, 6 D1, 5 D1, 4
485c 500c 530c 570c 615c 685c

Figure 6.17  Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky, Album for the Young, op. 39, no. 13.

topic. Briefly consider a short piano piece from Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky’s
1878 Album for the Young (see Figure 6.17). The piece is texturally and ton-
ally constrained: right and left hands always move in the same rhythm, often
doubling each other at the octave, and the harmonies simply alternate between
 Horns To Be Heard  T  165

close-​position tonic and dominant chords. Here, again, the music is governed
by a phantom source. Tchaikovsky is treating the piano as a virtual harmonica.23
Even without such examples, though, this section’s survey provides enough
context to launch a new set of questions. What do these phantom instruments pre-
suppose, psychologically speaking? Which listeners can perceive them? And what
might they show about the ways that audiences relate to instruments?

Instrumental Schemas

Since ecological listening responds to the physics of sound production, it is, to some
degree, cross-​cultural. For example, American listeners—​including children—​
with no prior experience of Chinese music can hear how Chinese orchestral instru-
ments are played and successfully group them into families (Palmer et al. 1989).
And identifying sound sources often relies on visual cues.24 Yet in these respects, a
piano’s “horn call” differs from a real horn call. Recognition of the absent instru-
ment cannot rely on its timbre or its visual appearance. Instead, it depends on links
between culturally situated sensorimotor experience and musical imagination.
Here I  return to Lawrence Barsalou’s theory of perceptual symbol systems.
Recall how players’ brains develop patterns of auditory-​motor coactivation. Though
listeners without instrumental training will not acquire these specific patterns,
their engagement with music also combines multiple neural systems. Auditory
perception coincides with vision, bodily states, emotions, and so on. And even a
single note has various qualities—​such as pitch, timbre, and loudness—​that can
stimulate distinct areas in the brain. Listening to music, then, cultivates sensory
representations that are separate on the neural level but also dynamically interre-
lated. Once developed, such connections can be reactivated through bottom-​up or
top-​down cognitive processes. Because these connections are bidirectional, horns
can cue certain tonal schemas, and these same tonal schemas can evoke horns.
To paraphrase Lawrence Zbikowski, references to the horn reactivate some of the
same neural structures associated with actually listening to horn music, giving rise
to an imperfect but still vivid simulation of that experience (2010, 48).25

23. Without the octave doubling, Tchaikovsky’s piece is fairly easy to play on a harmonica, since it
sticks to the tonal affordances presented in Figure  3.8. The final section of the piece does not
require movement along the comb, only rhythmic breathing in and out (mm. 13–​22). (In this
respect, it resembles Bob Dylan’s huffing and puffing, discussed in Chapter 3.) The last four bars of
Tchaikovsky’s piece might be the most taxing for a harmonica player, though, because they demand
constant inhalation. That would explain the gradual diminuendo—​the harmonica player is tiring,
filling up with air. Although this breathing problem is foreign to the manual interface of the piano,
it might be evoked in a pianist’s interpretation.
24. Visual cues may shape listening in various ways. Jane Davidson (1993) has shown how performers’
bodily movements visually communicate expressive features. Michael Schutz further shows how
such gestures can affect perceived note duration (see Schutz and Manning 2012).
25. Zbikowski draws on perceptual symbol systems theory in an analysis of musical analogy in Louis
Moreau Gottschalk’s 1853 piano piece, “The Banjo,” op. 15 (2010, 44–​48).
166  T  Music at Hand

Barsalou is careful to distinguish between conscious experience and its neu-

ral underpinnings (1999, 581–​84). In experience, I encounter meaningful things
situated in an environment.26 But perceptual components, though integrated in
conscious imagery, are processed and stored separately. Perceptual symbols are
not holistic but componential and schematic. And this allows for the production
of novel images and concepts:

Productivity in perceptual symbol systems is approximately the symbol formation

process run in reverse. During symbol formation, large amounts of information
are filtered out of perceptual representations to form a schematic representation of
a selected aspect. During productivity, small amounts of the information filtered
out are added back. Thus, schematicity makes productivity possible. (Barsalou
1999, 593)

The horn call’s tonal features can thus be separated from other sonic aspects,
filled in with a different timbre. This allows me to recognize horn calls played
by other instruments and also to imagine things that I  have never heard
(like the opening horn parts of Haydn’s “Philosopher” Symphony played on
kazoos). Because components are separate at the neural level, different musi-
cal elements—​tone and timbre, source and meaning—​are mutually irreducible;
because they connect within and across modalities, they are also never fully
autonomous.
Previous listening experience makes it possible for me to hear phantom
horns, just as Beethoven’s performing experience helped him hear phantasmal
tones. The ability to notice horn calls thus depends on personal history, on an
individual’s immersion in a consistent cultural environment. This view, along
with Barsalou’s framework more generally, resonates with perspectives on his-
torical modes of listening from musical schema theory (cf. Gjerdingen 2007a;
Byros 2012). Indeed, idiomatic horn figures are readily interpreted as schemas.
They are musical “constructions,” pairing form and function, that appear at the
musical surface (Gjerdingen and Bourne 2015). One of schema theory’s main
premises, derived from Leonard Meyer (1956, 60–​62), is that the schemas that
orient listening are acquired through social experience. As Meyer’s bicycling
analogy shows, this treats musical listening as a kind of know-​how, habit, or
skill. I cannot train my ears to notice horn fifths simply by reading a book about
the cultural history of hunting in Europe. Instead, I learn to hear them though
repeated listening. This perspective supplements a semiotic approach that
would treat the string quartet’s horn calls as signs representing some object.
Instead it emphasizes how listeners attune to instrumental invariance, how
instrumental idioms shape perceptual capacities. This is to say that listening,
in its own way, is technical. Like performing, it is embodied, ecological, and
historically specific.

26. Some of Barsalou’s experimental research shows that categories and objects are situated against a
background (see Yeh and Barsalou 2006; Wu and Barsalou 2009).
 Horns To Be Heard  T  167

Conclusions

As I  listen to Haydn’s Symphony no.  73, I  rely on previous experiences—​

hearing, studying, teaching, and playing classical music. What I have learned
appears in the way the symphony shows up. The horns’ entrance in the finale
cues certain tonal expectations; in the second movement, direct fifths cue
instrumental ones. In both cases, orchestration and tonal design are mutually
implicated.
In the end, musical experience cannot be contained by any single mode of
listening. Merleau-​Ponty’s assessment of Husserl thus applies to Schaeffer as
well: “The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a com-
plete reduction” (Merleau-​Ponty 2012, lxxvii). Instead of being associated with
one privileged mode, then, musical listening might be marked by the intertwin-
ing of écouter, entendre, and comprendre. Music, as Merleau-​Ponty claims, would
point to “an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its
dimensions” (1968, 152). That is, music would reveal ideas that cannot be disen-
tangled from their sensible appearances, that can be accessed only through the
lived body. From this perspective, Schaeffer’s instrumental paradox cannot be
resolved. A sound is never absolutely free of its source, yet never totally bound to
it, because audition is never absolutely free of other corporeal powers, yet never
reducible to them.
Even as an expert, I cannot recover the experiences of Haydn’s contemporaries.
My knowledge of the “sourcillade” is more declarative than procedural. I can only
imagine its significance to an eighteenth-​century hunter, for whom Haydn’s quo-
tation might summon memories of mornings in the woods, of animal sights and
smells, of adrenaline. For such a listener, the horn call would be a call to action
(“The quarry has been sighted,” roughly meaning “Let’s go!”). At best, I recognize
this meaning at a distance. Here I enjoy Haydn’s music without forgetting that it is
a music of the past.
As Kane observes, Schaeffer’s taxonomy includes no mode that can evalu-
ate the recorded character of recorded sounds (Kane 2014, 126). Similar modes
would be needed to register the symphony’s historical character and other forms
of mediation. If Haydn puts orchestral development “on display” (Dolan 2013,
135), this presumes a kind of listening that may reflect on that process. When the
string quartet “samples” a horn call, playing it back in a different medium, I hear
that the style is borrowed. Continuing along these lines, modes of listening would
proliferate endlessly as a function of musical technics.
Indeed, that might be the central thesis of this book:  Technics opens up
possibilities for musical action and cognition. As I  use instruments to make
music, they also make me a musician. I come to sense hands at the keyboard in
Beethoven’s sonata, Chopin’s prelude, or Lachenmann’s study; fingers on strings in
Rosenwinkel’s waltz or Bach’s partita; breath and reeds in Dylan’s or Williamson’s
solos. The instruments call not only to my ear but also to my body. They alter-
nately support and resist me, as partners or adversaries, implements or obsta-
cles. Through technology and technique, then, this fleeting art is made tangible;
through instruments, I come to encounter music at hand.
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18 7

INDEX

absolute music, 6, 109, 157 Partita no. 3 in E major for

accordion, 39–​40, 52, 53, 143. See also bayan Unaccompanied Violin, BWV
action-​sound coupling, 30–​31, 76–​77, 1006, 127–​33
120–​21, 134, 140–​41 Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV
and activation/​control, 37–​45, 53, 103 543, 40–​41
and instrumental systems, 33–​38 Sinfonia in D major, BWV 789, 111–​14,
Adler, Larry, 82 115, 117–​18, 120
Adlung, Jacob, 139–​40 Sonata no. 2 in A minor for
Adorno, Theodor W., 26 Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1003,
aeolian harp, 42, 43 126–​27
affordances, 12–​13, 20, 52, 78–​79, 118 The Well-​Tempered Clavier, BWV
contrapuntal, 126 846–​893, 117n11, 120n16, 131, 142
instrumental, 13–​17, 24–​25, 51, 76–​77 Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir,
and transcription, 120, 124, 138 BWV 29, 133, 135–​38
agency, 51–​52, 78–​81 Bailey, Derek, 101
Agricola, Johann Friedrich, 120n15, Baily, John, 54
133, 139–​40 bandoneon, 54, 143
Altenmüller, Eckart, 15–​16 Bangert, Marc, 15–​16
Ashby, Ross, 32 banjo, 55, 60, 61
auditory-​motor integration, 9–​11, 15–​17, Barrett, David, 68
84–​85, 88 Barsalou, Lawrence, 10, 15, 23, 47n42,
and composition, 98, 133, 141 165–​66. See also cognition: grounded
and non-​instrumentalists, 27, 44, 165 Barthes, Roland, 49
automata, musical, 38–​39, 42–​43, 102, 105 Bateson, Gregory, 37–​38
Baudrillard, Jean, 43
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 18, 120, 126, 133 bayan, 60–​61
Bach, Johann Nicolaus, 139–​40 Beatles, the
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1, 105, 109–​18, “Blackbird,” 93–​94
119–​43 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 16, 22–​23, 166
The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, 109–​11, 114 as improviser, 6–​7, 9–​11, 17, 25–​27, 85
Chromatic Fantasy, BWV 903, 120 Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor,
Concerto in C major, BWV 595/​BWV “Pathétique,” op. 13, 7, 13–​15, 18, 26
984, 121–​25 ‌Piano Sonata no. 26 in E♭ major, “Les
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, 114n7, 120 adieux,” op. 81a, 162
18

188  T  Index

Berec, Jonathon, 77, 139n34 dualism, mind/​body, 3, 11–​12, 18, 38n20,

Berliner, Paul, 85 109. See also metaphysics of presence
Blacking, John, 2n6, 119 dutār, 54
body image, 46–​47, 79n37 Dylan, Bob, 64–​68, 70–​71, 76, 78
body schema. See schemas: body
brain. See neuroscience ecological acoustics, 29–​31, 62, 85, 154, 165
Brahms, Johannes, 15n21, 18n25 ecological psychology, 12–​13, 52, 78. See
Horn Trio, op. 40, 162 also affordances; Gibson, James J.;
String Quartet no. 3 in B♭ major, invariance
op. 67, 162–​63 electronic dance music (EDM), 43–​44
breakdown, 80, 83, 86, 105, 156. See also Ellis, Rob, 79–​80
withdrawal enactive landscape, 52–​53, 63, 78, 81
Butler, Mark, 42, 43–​44
feedback, 45–​50
Cage, John, 97–​98, 101n16, 108 altered auditory, 80, 84–​85, 98
Cain, Kelli, 43 tactile, 45–​48, 106–​107
Cavalli, Francesco, 153 visual, 45, 47–​48, 79, 88
cello, 45, 62n20, 107 Finney, Steven, 84–​85, 87, 98
Chopin, Frédéric, 24–​25, 87 flute, 35–​38, 45
‌Étude in G♭ major, “Black Keys,” op. 10, Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 109, 120n15
no. 5, 25, 57 Foucault, Michel, 17
Christensen, Thomas, 157 Fresh, Doug E., 76n34
clarinet, 13, 46, 58, 86 Friedson, Steven, 85
clavichord, 120–​21 Frith, Fred, 97–​101, 103, 105, 107, 108
cognition, 12, 27, 118 Fux, Johann Joseph, 152
computationalist theories of, 3–​4, 10, 33
embodied, 3, 15 Galilei, Vincenzo, 62
distributed, 24–​25 Galison, Peter, 124, 138
grounded, 10, 15, 27, 84, 165–​66 Gaver, William, 29–​30, 68n27
compositional instruments, 126–​33, 141, Gestalt psychology, 52
143, 148 gesture, 2, 27n36, 42, 79, 134
concertina, 52, 60n17 Gibson, James J., 12–​13, 48, 52. See also
Couperin, François, 141 ecological psychology
cowbell, 29–​30, 34–​35, 38–​39, 46 Gjerdingen, Robert, 77
Cox, Arnie, 9, 30–​31 Glenberg, Arthur, 118, 141
Crabtree, Brian, 43 Goldman, Jonathan, 143
Critchley, Simon, 107 graph theory, 35–​37
Cusick, Suzanne, 1, 12n16 Grisey, Gérard, 143
cybernetics, 32–​38, 45 guitar, 13, 51, 58, 88–​105
Czerny, Carl, 16–​17, 87 electric, 44–​45, 83–​84, 159
and fretboard transformations,
Dahlhaus, Carl, 6 55–​56, 90–​96
dance, 11, 17n24, 27, 42 and tonal theory, 143–​44
Derrida, Jacques, 11, 144n41 and ukulele, 62n20
Dibben, Nicola, 154–​55 Guthrie, Woody, 78
digital instruments, 31, 42–​44, 144n40
Dolan, Emily, 148, 157, 161 habit, 17–​23, 28, 46–​47, 77, 88–​89
Dreyfus, Hubert, 21 and listening, 156, 166
drumming. See percussion and twentieth-​century music, 86–​88, 98
 189

  Index  T  189

Hall, Matthew, 115–​17 instrumental alteration, 82, 83–​84, 88–​108

handiness (Zuhandenheit), 12, 20, 83, invariance, 8, 12–​13, 20–​21, 52
106–​7, 155, 159 and listening, 156–​57, 166
harmonica, diatonic, 13, 45, 51–​57, and musical instruments, 13, 15–​17, 30
59–​76, 80–​82
compared with valveless horn, 149 Jacobs, Little Walter, 67
imitated by piano, 164–​65 Johnson, Mark, 8
harmonic function, 33–​34 Jonas, Hans, 145
harpsichord, 31, 109, 120, 140–​41
Harrison, Daniel, 111, 115 Kagel, Mauricio, 143
Haydn, Joseph, 145–​54, 156–​57, 159–​62, 167 Kane, Brian, 156, 167
The Seasons, 153–​54 kazoo, 32, 49n50, 159, 166
‌String Quartet no. 1 in B♭ major, “La keyboard, 9, 15, 22, 114–​18, 119–​20
chasse,” 162–​63 and fingering, 18–​20, 24
String Quartet no. 62 in C major, medieval, 143
“Emperor,” 162–​63 tablature, 119–​20
Symphony no. 6 in D major, “Le matin,” topology, 24–​25, 51, 57–​58, 60
149–​50, 161 See also clavichord; harpsichord;
Symphony no. 22 in E♭ major, “The Lautenwerk; organ; piano
Philosopher,” 149–​50, 159, 166 Kinks, the
Symphony no. 31 in D major, “All Day and All of the Night,” 55–​56
“Hornsignal,” 149–​51, 152 Kircher, Athanasius, 42
Symphony no. 73 in D major, “La chasse,” Kirsh, David, 52. See also enactive
145–​47, 150–​51, 153, 156, 159–​61, 167 landscape
Symphony no. 103 in E♭ major, know-​how, 28, 48, 133, 143, 166
“Drumroll,” 152, 157 Kodály, Zoltán, 120
Heartz, Daniel, 153 Koffka, Kurt, 52
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 26, 27 Kozak, Mariusz, 9n8
on hearkening, 154–​55
on technics, 23–​24, 155 Lachenmann, Helmut, 86–​88, 100, 108
on tools, 20, 83, 106, 119, 156 Lakoff, George, 8
See also breakdown; handiness; Lang, Lang, 25
withdrawal Lautenwerk, 29n2, 139–​40
hexatonic cycles, 116, 117n11 Ledbetter, David, 134
Heyde, Herbert, 32–​38, 45, 50, 55, 62n21 Lennon, John. See Beatles, the
Hook, Julian, 56n10, 57n12 Lerdahl, Fred, 3n7, 60
horn, valveless, 145–​67 Levinas, Emmanuel, 106–​7, 156
and hunting calls, 76, 152–​54, 167 Levy, Howard, 71–​76, 78, 81–​82, 149
pitch affordances of, 13, 148–​49 Lewin, David, 4, 36–​37, 55n9, 89, 144n40
Hornbostel, Erich von, 32, 33 Ligeti, György
Huron, David, 77, 139n34 Étude no. 4 for piano, “Fanfares,” 162
Husserl, Edmund, 3, 8–​9, 46, 156, 167 Hamburg Concerto, 162–​63
Hutchins, Edwin, 24–​25 Volumina, 40–​42
Lindemann, Jens, 48
idiomaticity, 63, 76–​81, 126–​27, 149–​52, 166 listening, 87–​88, 107, 165–​66
Ihde, Don, 21, 67–​68, 85 modes of, 29, 145, 154–​59, 167
improvisation, 10–​11, 26, 73, 77, 105 reduced, 6–​7, 156
as conversation, 101, 107 Little Walter. See Jacobs, Little Walter
Ingold, Tim, 78 lived body (Leib), 8–​9, 46, 48, 81, 167
190

190  T  Index

lute, 133–​36 perceptual symbol systems. See Barsalou,

lute clavier. See Lautenwerk Lawrence
percussion, 30, 33, 39–​40, 85. See also
Machover, Tod, 31, 105 cowbell; prepared instruments
Manzer, Linda, 102 Pfordresher, Peter, 85, 87, 89
Massenet, Jules phenomenology, 3–​4, 46n41, 106
“Meditation” from Thaïs, 83–​84 reduction techniques, 6, 156, 157, 167
mbira, 54, 85–​86 See also Heidegger, Martin; Husserl,
McCartney, Paul. See Beatles, the Edmund; Levinas, Emmanuel;
McLuhan, Marshall, 26, 52 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice
Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 4, 9, 12, 47, 118 piano, 13–​18, 23–​25, 46, 86–​87, 157
on habit, 20–​22, 48 pedagogy, 16–​17, 45
on ideality, 11n13, 167 prepared, 97–​98
on motor intentionality, 47–​48, 79 and sound production, 39, 43
on multisensory integration, 29, 46 tuning, 25, 62
on organ playing, 21–​22, 81 See also keyboard
on self-​touch, 46n38, 107n26 place-​to-​pitch mapping, 58–​63, 77,
Mersenne, Marin, 52n2, 140 81, 89
metaphor, conceptual, 8–​9, 141. See also many-​to-​one, 58, 61, 95, 129
schemas: image one-​to-​one, 58, 136, 143
metaphysics of presence, 11–​12, 18, 27, 109, 145 Plato, 24
definition of, 6–​7 poiesis, 23, 144, 145
Metheny, Pat, 101–​8 Power, Brendan, 82
Meyer, Leonard, 28, 166 prepared instruments, 97–​101
Meyer, Rosalee, 19–​20, 22 prostheticity, 23, 25–​26, 81, 144, 153
Miller, Alex “Rice.” See Williamson, Sonny
Boy, II Reed, Jimmy, 68n25, 78
Monelle, Raymond, 153, 161 recording, 2, 42, 144, 167
monochord, 143 Rings, Steven, 37
Monome, 43–​44, 48 Rockwell, Joti, 55, 58n14
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Rosenwinkel, Kurt, 88–​97, 105, 106
Symphony no. 40 in G minor, K. 550, 159 Rover, Christian, 88
multistability, 67–​68, 77, 85 rubāb, 54
rubber hand illusion, 47–​48, 80n37
Nahmias, Eddy, 80
Nattiez, Jean-​Jacques, 23 Sachs, Curt, 32, 33
neuroscience, 8n5, 9–​10, 15–​16, 22n31, 84, 118 saxophone, 15, 60, 62
notation, musical, 20–​21, 119–​20, 144 Schaeffer, Pierre, 7n2, 145, 155–​56, 167
transposing, 62, 149 schemas, 84, 166
body, 46–​49, 78–​79
ocarina, 119 image, 8–​9, 12, 15
orchestration, 148, 157, 161, 167 tonal, 11, 98, 157, 165–​66
organ motor, 80, 86, 98, 103, 129
barrel, 42 Schenker, Heinrich, 15, 18
pipe, 1, 21–​22, 40–​42, 58, 120–​25 Schenkerian analysis, 34
steam, 42 Schindler, Anton, 6, 27
organology, 31–​39 scientific instruments, 21, 38, 124, 155
Sebastian, John, 68
Pacherie, Elisabeth, 79 Serré de Rieux, Jean de, 152–​53
Palmer, Caroline, 19–​20, 22 Shaffer, Kris, 151
 19

  Index  T  191

Shannon, Claude, 32–​33, 37 Tudor, David, 143

singing. See voice tuning, 13, 25, 61–​62, 119, 134. See also
Socrates, 24 place-​to-​pitch mapping
sound production. See action-​sound coupling alternate, 82, 88–​90, 96–​97
space, 22, 28–​29, 81 Tymoczko, Dmitri, 54, 59, 104n23
instrumental, 53–​63, 72, 76–​77, 81–​82,
98, 148 Van Halen, Eddie, 45n35, 99
pitch, 7–​9, 51 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 38–​39
Spicer, Mark, 57 violin, 3, 10, 13, 119, 126–​34
Stiegler, Bernard, 26, 78 and differentiation of hands, 15, 40
Sudnow, David, 4 pedagogy, 16n23
string crossing, 76, 128–​34
Takemitsu, Toru, 89 tuning, 25, 61–​62
Tallis, Raymond, 134 violoncello. See cello
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’yich voice, 12n16, 26, 27, 49, 85n4
Album for the Young, op. 39, phantasmal, 11
no. 13, 164–​65 and tuning, 62
technics, 2, 23–​24, 43, 156, 167
and the body schema, 48 Weber, Carl Maria von
and culture, 26, 78 Der Freischütz, 157–​59
technological determinism, 52, 63, Weiss, Silvius Leopold, 134–​35, 141–​42
77–​78, 118 Wieck, Friedrich, 25
Temperley, David, 70 Williams, Peter, 140
timbre, 29–​30, 51, 105, 120, 156–​57 Williamson, Sonny Boy, II, 67–​70, 72, 76, 78
and idiom, 100, 140, 165–​66 withdrawal, 20–​22, 48, 106, 118, 155–​56.
transcription, 109, 119–​25, 157 See also breakdown
transformational theory, 36–​37, 55, Wolff, Christoph, 124
89, 111–​14 Wonder, Stevie, 57–​58, 82
and fretboard space, 55–​56,
91–​93, 131n26 Xenakis, Iannis, 107
and harmonica space, 54–​57, 60, 65,
69–​70, 72 Yearsley, David, 114, 124
and keyboard operations, 57–​58, 115–​18
and valveless horn, 151, 164 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 62
trumpet, 48, 56n10, 59, 77, 149 Zbikowski, Lawrence, 3n7, 7n3, 141, 165
Tucker, Mike, 79–​80 Zuhandenheit. See handiness
192
 193
194