Nineteenth-Century Digital Music: Sociopolitical and Proto-Digital Implications of the Street Crank Organ in Europe

Project Information

NCDM

Grant agreement ID: 897393

DOI

10.3030/897393

Project closed

EC signature date 14 April 2020

Start date 24 August 2020

End date 1 January 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 175 572,48

EU contribution

€ 175 572,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NCDM (Nineteenth-Century Digital Music: Sociopolitical and Proto-Digital Implications of the Street Crank Organ in Europe)

Reporting period: 2020-08-24 to 2022-08-23

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

'Nineteenth Century Digital Music’ (NCDM, grant number 897393) aimed to look at mechanical music in a few different ways:

· as a pre-digital form that is comparable to digital media in terms of its potential to increase some kinds of accessibility, as well as (in some cases) a kind of devaluation - for example, the idea that it’s ‘too easy’;
· as a cultural form that is often associated with Europe and whiteness, but which has its roots in Arabic-Islamic engineering; which was long sustained in the global north by the success of Black musics and popular repertoire inspired by Black music; and which has in many ways and since its beginning exceeded the quite narrow cultural and aesthetic frame within which it is typically re-presented;
· as legitimate performance media (not only as a self-playing technology);
· and as a significant historical performance tradition led by real and often marginalised people (including many women), whose stories have not been widely told.

The project concluded that the potentials of mechanical music to be reinterpreted outside the narrow frames of global northern contexts, white/European inventors, male players and ‘robotic’ performances are significant.

During this project I researched ideas about connections between mechanical music programmes and digital technology, drawing on ideas in Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Stiegler’s Technics and Time to explore the significance of long-standing European philosophical convictions about the ‘natural’ qualities of speech and the ‘dead/artificial’ qualities of writing in order to cast light on attitudes towards automated/programmed music.

Another important subject was the non-European roots of, and later contributions to, mechanical music – I collected information about the musical-technological contributions of the 9th-century Banu Musa and 13th-century Al-Jazari; of Miguel Boom - a Haitian engineer who had the earliest patent for a disc-playing musical box but is rarely granted more than a sentence in published histories and usually considered secondary to the German inventor who arrived at a patent 2-4 years later; and more examples which begin to push back against the highly Eurocentric bent of many important sources on mechanical music. This collected data has been and will continue to be used in my position as a curator at Museum Speelklok, to try to shift the current narrative towards a more global story.

For one of the areas of primary-source research, I collected social-historical data in the form of stories about womens’ lives in and around organ grinder communities from 19th-century British newspapers. Geographical data was drawn from the same sources to create maps illustrating some of the paths travelled by organ grinders across Britain and Ireland.

A more empirical side of the project involved recording mechanical instrument (music box) performances and measuring fluctuations in beat length across different players/performances using Sonic Visualiser and Self Organising Maps, to arrive at a provisional answer to the question of whether mechanical instruments can be played ‘expressively’.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main project results so far comprise:

1. A preliminary conclusion that mechanical instruments can be played both idiomatically and ‘expressively’ (reflecting certain culturally contingent conventions)

2. A collection of stories about women in and around organ grinder communities and interpretations of issues they faced – such as the contradictions between the desire for free movement in middle class women’s liberation circles and the reactionary impulse among the same groups to limit the movement of poor itinerant or migrant women, sex workers and street entertainers; and the ambivalent nature of many women’s fascination with ‘exotic’ organ grinders.

3. Location data of organ grinder residences and other places where organ grinders are recorded as having been active - particularly outside of London, which is a focal point for many existing histories of street music in Britain (maps can be viewed here: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/claire.mcginn).

In terms of academic publications, outputs of this project include: one published article (Horizon 2020 research platform) awaiting peer review, plus two more articles pending publication – one submitted to Journal of the Royal Musical Association (currently under review) and one about to be submitted to Journal of Music Research Online, plus a conference proceedings article published by the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszczy (not open access; conference proceedings from ‘Transgression in Music’, and another conference publication article to be submitted in June (‘Colonized Objects and Bodies').

Other outputs were an article for the catalogue for Museum Speelklok’s exhibition Straatbeeld; a text for Museum Speelklok’s concert series on the mechanical fair organ ‘the Double Ruth’; and 12 Stories of Women Organ Grinders – an illustrated risograph zine in English and Dutch. This zine is being sold in the Museum Speelklok bookshop and has also been distributed at book exchange points in the city. It will be sold at the York Festival of Ideas 2023, has been shared with the education/presentations department and tour guides at Museum Speelklok, and is available online via the project website. I produced an informational video based on my research for Museum Speelklok, and a video lecture session for students on the University of Utrecht course ‘Music, Play and Performance’. Other work delivered for Museum Speelklok included cataloguing organ books.

Academic conferences, seminars and lectures at which I presented include: Congresso de Organologia, ‘ANIMUSIC’ (August 2021); ‘Women’s Work in Music’ (Bangor University, September 2021); ‘Transgression in Music’ (Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music, November 2021); ‘Colonized Objects and Bodies’ (University of Wurzburg, collaborative paper with Diantha Vliet, June 2022), the Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy colloquium (collaborative paper presented by Stan Erraught, July 2022); Museum Speelklok’s September 2022 Expert Meeting, a presentation for Utrecht University’s RMA research seminar series; a lecture as part of the Transmission in Motion research group seminar series; a paper at the Lorentz workshop ‘Music Beyond Fixity and Fluidity’ (Leiden University, September 2022); a lecture with Floris Schuiling for students on the course ‘Modern Music’ (November 2021); a guest lecture with Diantha Vliet for students on the course ‘Curating Arts & Society’ (December 2022), and a research presentation for the University of York’s Coding Collective (October 2020). Other communication events included themed museum tours.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project progressed beyond the state of the art in the following ways:

· Analysing mechanical music as a ‘serious’ performance medium using the tools that have been applied to more widely accepted kinds of instrumental performances.
· Focusing on the experiences of women in a social-historical study of organ grinders.
· Exploring the importance of locations outside London as destinations for organ grinder communities.

The ongoing impact of this project will be helped by my transition since March 2022 into a curator role at the partner institution, Museum Speelklok. Although the NCDM project is over, there are opportunities here to disseminate findings and conduct further related research.

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