INSTRUMENT


INSTRUMENT

Necessarily implicated in the screen of technical facility is the instrument. If "correct" technique has been formed in conjunction with possible positionings of the performer in relation to the instrument, so has the instrument become complicitous in its very materiality. It is literally composed and manufactured by culture and its possibilities are previously encoded to the degree that the instrument facilitates facility. Implicit in the instrument are techniques for playing it; the knowledge one can have on an instrument is mapped out progressively in terms of a training that allows the musician to move only a certain way and thereby forces the instrument to sound only a certain way. Contained in the very body of the instrument is the power/knowledge juncture capable of producing correct gesture. As a result, improvisors often divide into two groups regarding the question of technique/instrument: those who limit themselves to the instruments of culture and those who deface, deconstruct, and/or reconstruct them.

[Corbett 229-30]


Another variation? on a Post-Theme?


mlaffey@ucet.ufl.edu