University of California, Berkeley
Network Analogies: The Keyboard as Field of Imperial Play
This paper links the island of Java with metropolitan London and rural South Africa via a fantastical liberal-utopian “keyboard network.” It invokes visions of a so-called “global nineteenth century” in order to present a critical archeology both of modern concepts of “sonic transport” and of “network analogies” in social theory. That is, it explores the imperial ancestry of the wired worlds/digital networks that characterize global built environments today.
The focus, in other words, is on geographic fantasies of empire, and nineteenth-century keyboard instruments conceived to achieve that space, or to “annihilate distance,” notably in the work of Charles Wheatstone, music-instrument inventor extraordinaire. In experimental philosophies such as his, sound itself was configured as an enigmatic force for propagation: a way of collapsing space – extolled as an annihilator, or (more benignly) as a political force for cross-cultural communication and understanding. Not all of Wheatstone’s keyboard instruments conducted sound telegraphically through wires, though many, among them his free-reed harmoniums and so-called “concertina,” became transportable technologies heard and played at the outer reaches of “the known world.” The paper draws connections between Wheatstone’s experiments on sound conductance, his telegraphic/telephonic fantasies, popular science, and the liberal-humanitarian search for a truly universal keyboard instrument – one tuned to the so-called “scale of nature” and capable of “speaking” a truly universal musical language.
The pan-European anti-pianoforte movement irradiated Wheatstone’s work by expanding on this quest for a Keyboard of Keyboards. It was a movement formed against the tyranny of “scalic” piano layouts; it agitated in favor of “reformed” or graduated keyboard arrangements, purportedly suited to wider conveyances and “more equilibrial” distributions of power. In other words, keyboard instruments tout court are theorized in this paper, not as so-called “non-human actants” or playful co-creators in musical performance, but as the at once technical and political means by which humans attempt to articulate, distribute, or insinuate their natures into the world. The paper thus treats keyboard instruments as a class of communication technology, or rather the other way around: communication technologies as a class of keyboard instrument. It explores the ways in which land, physical landscape, might be materially emplaced or configured by and through the active use of instruments.
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James Q. Davies is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance (University of California Press, 2014), and co-editor with Ellen Lockhart of Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789-1851 (forthcoming with University of Chicago Press). James grew up in Johannesburg. Before landing in California, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Music at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. He wrote his dissertation on the year “1829” while at the same college. Articles and chapters appear in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2011), Keyboard Perspectives (2010), Opera Quarterly (2012 and 2006), Royal Musical Association (2006), Cambridge Opera Journal (2005 and forthcoming), and 19th-Century Music (2003). Short essays on vocal belonging and objectivity appear in recent issues of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Representations.