Where’s Wanda?

Abstract

Our project faces the basic questions of any instrument design: What kind of new instruments do we want to make and why? What sound-producing mechanisms will they use? How will they be played? It also involves a curatorial challenge: to take the parts of meaningful broken instruments and build new instruments using those parts in a way that can preserve, interrogate, and re-animate them. Our exploration mirrors Landowka’s own experimentations creating new instruments based on past relics: a key innovator in “historical performance” informed by archives, Landowska actually commissioned “mutant harpsichords” that transformed their distinguishing features by extending their dynamics and decay.

Our new hybrid instruments will emulate the primary action of the harpsichord–pushing and plucking as harpsichords do, to create sound. The three of us (Cara, Adam, Akiva) will build one instrument using the parts of the Landowska Harpsichord. Rather than re-assembling an existing instrument, ours will take the form of an assemblage connected by wires and amplified by contact mics. We have asked our collaborators to similarly find “relics” (like the Landowka Harpsichord itself) within their studios: cast-aways, left-overs, bits of older, broken instruments revalued and repositioned—and use these to create new sound-making objects. In this way, their new instruments will engage with materials and the mechanical action of the Landowska Harpsichord—in particular, the notion of acoustic and cultural decay— as part of a reflection of their understanding of instrument collections in South Africa, their legacies, and futures.

Having built our instruments, our trio will prepare a new performance piece, “Where’s Wanda?”, around notions of decay as an acoustic and cultural force in opposition to resonance. The concept of acoustic resonance is often used by scholars as a metaphor for the endurance or transmission of meaning and ideas. From a musical perspective, we observe that a thing which is “resonant” attains, at least for a time, a form of dominance over things which decay. Countering the allure of resonance, we intend to explore how the fading of one sound is necessary for others to be heard. Through a process of instrument building, research, and re-sampling, we propose creative interventions in organology as a way of rethinking the nature of musical instruments and how they interact with pasts and futures. Our international performance-research collaboration engages decaying objects that tell stories about critical trajectories of global music history transformed and redirected in South Africa, using decay as both subject and source for music performance. We would be thrilled to coalesce at Stellenbosch and to advance this work at the ‘Decay Without Mourning’ conference.