The Materializing Rhetorics of Early Music

Ever since Pierre Schaeffer’s admonition in his Traité des objets musicaux of 1966 to avoid “preoccupations about how things are made” by “turning our backs on the instrument” and “listening to sound objects with their instrumental causes hidden,” materially oriented studies of sound have attended increasingly to sound objects and to ontologies of sound broadly, often turning away from considerations of the tactile materiality of sound sources. Deviating from this trend, this study focuses squarely on sound source materiality, and on our motivations for either foregrounding or dismissing it in our verbal, visual, and sonic rhetorics. As a case study, I turn to the Early Music movement, understood here as a constellation of cultures invested in the consumption and historically informed production of mostly European music written before c.1750. Seeking to distance themselves from the classical music mainstream, this movement’s participants have often adopted rhetorical stances that foreground and celebrate the materiality of sound sources, particularly instruments and their constituent parts. Rooted partly in the assumption that instruments may act as material conduits to imagined historical soundscapes, these materializing rhetorics are also born out of affinities among producers and consumers of Early Music for musical works whose poetics are themselves bound up in materiality—and in turn, for particular instruments whose sounds tend to animate such poetics. Selected theories of Michel Chion, Roland Barthes, and others are invoked in an effort to situate the verbal, visual, and sonic materializing rhetorics of Early Music cultures within broader discussions of sound source materiality.