The Culture Of Overexploitation And Disposability

We can marvel at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures. Trumpets and whistling jars from the precolonial South American Moche civilization reveal mastery of ceramics. Pipe organs were, for centuries, among the most complex machines in Western Europe. An Algerian rebab bowed lute and Ugandan ennanga harp show precise engineering of wood, skin, and string. In the twentieth century, industrial innovations appear, from electric guitars to plastic vuvuzela horns. Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context.

One Jump Ahead Of The Storm

Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music’s power to connect stretches far beyond its unifying effects on listeners in the present moment. Music making binds the ecological, creative, and technological histories of seemingly distant cultures. Ideas and materials have moved from one place to another since the dawn of instrumental music. The swans whose bones gave Paleolithic artisans material for flutes were not part of the fauna of the tundra around the caves. Transport or trade brought the swan’s wing bones into the places where they became musical instruments. Human desires have driven trade for instrument making ever since. Listeners seek sound that pleases and moves them. Musicians demand stability and consistency from their instruments.

How Can I Stop?

Our eyes delight in the form, hue, and surface ornamentation of instruments, a visual complement to sonic beauty. All these qualities demand the best materials, stimuli for trade. Ideas about the forms of instruments moved alongside materials used in instrument making. Lutes, drums, harps, and trumpets arrived in China from central and western Asia. When a modern orchestra, folk group, or rock band takes the stage, the air comes alive with the sounds of vibrating plant and animal parts, the voices of forests and fields reanimated through human art. But we also hear the legacy of forced occupation and resource extraction, now turned to modern globalized trade. Melodies soar from hollowed mpingo wood in oboes and clarinets, a voice from East African savannahs. Electric guitarists press their hips into the mahogany bodies of their instruments and slide their fingers over Madagascan rosewood fingerboards, playing with slices of giant rain forest trees. String players bow with horsehair tensioned by South American Pernambuco wood. Many bows are tipped with ivory or tortoiseshell. All of these European instruments had long precolonial histories, grounded in local soils and materials, but were transformed into their modern forms, in part, by the export to Europe of materials from colonized lands. The changes wrought by colonialism create striking visual differences among the European instruments of different ages in the Met galleries.

The Long Run

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dark tropical woods and abundant use of ivory replaced much of the lighter boxwood, maple, and brass of earlier European instruments. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as exotic woods and animal parts became more readily available. Calfskin topped tympani. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders. The industrial economy continues the same path, plucking materials and energy from around the world. Amplifiers are plugged into an electric grid powered by the incineration of mined coal, the flow of water through dammed rivers, or the decay of mined uranium rock. The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than 10 percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products. If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased. Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods.