Summoning The Future — Making Your Own Instruments

Making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys. Indeed, to make an instrument is in some strong sense to summon the future. …. Almost no pleasure is to be compared with the first tones, tests and perfections of an instrument one has just made. Nor are all instruments invented and over with, so to speak. The world is rich with models — but innumerable forms, tones and powers await their summons from the mind and hand. Make an instrument — you will learn more in this way than you can imagine.

Lou Harrison’s Music Primer (quoted in Banek & Scoville, “Sound Designs”).

I remember reading somewhere that a natural ecosystem that had taken thousands of years to develop can be destroyed in ten minutes by a guy driving a bulldozer. That seems true enough; horrifying and depressing, but true. All evolution’s gradual work, building a wonderfully complex interdependent structure — turned into undifferentiated rubble in less time than it takes to read a blog post (yeah, I know, mine run on the long side, but anyway).

Think about ecosystems as analogies for the ways human beings relate to one another. Traditional societies are rich in ritual frameworks, cross-generational relationships, nuanced interactions with the natural world and shared cultural narratives — another “wonderfully complex interdependent structure” that can be trashed appallingly quickly by the bulldozer of Western consumer culture.

Singing enabled individuals to create and express certain aspects of self, it established and sustained a feeling of euphoria characteristic of ceremonies, and it related the present to the powerful and transformative past. The Suya would sing because through song they could both re-establish the good and beautiful in the world and also relate themselves to it.

Anthony Seeger — “Why Suya Sing,” p. 128

If we are to reclaim our humanity, we’ll need to sing. We’ll need to make music ourselves rather than buying it from someone else.

And one of the most meaningful ways to get started with that process is to make an instrument. Or two. Or three.

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