Anything can be an instrument. This thought came to me a couple weeks ago when I was drumming my fingers on my kitchen counter table while listening to an incredible tune. I realized that I could make a whole variety of sounds with just my hands and the granite of the countertop. By quickly rapping my fingers and knuckles against the counter, I could produce short staccato sounds. On the other hand, a gentle thud with the base of my fist could make a sound similar to that of a bass drum. And so, I had just made an instrument out of a stone cold granite countertop. Now this instrument is by no means practical for making music, but it technically is an instrument since it can be "played". This thought humored me as I imagined a granite top being played at a live show, but it also got me thinking...
What are the limits of instrumentation? In a musical sense, as my prior experience shows, there are no restrictions to the definition of an instrument. If you can physically produce a variety of sounds with an object, this object can be used as an instrument. As long as a person's musical knowledge can be adequately expressed by an object, it can be considered a dynamic instrument. Essentially, an instrument is a vehicle, a tool used to express pretty much anything.
With this definition of instruments, they can be seen in numerous fields of study besides music. For example, the human brain might be the most dynamic instrument of all. The brain can translate information, knowledge, and experience into numerous forms of expression such as a funny joke or actual music. You can "play" the brain in a million ways. As my musically impassioned friends would say, the brain has jam potential.
It are these facets of instrumentation that makes the topic so interesting. Every artists uses instruments for a reason. A writer uses instruments of language to craft characters and drive plots, a painter uses pallets and all the colors of the rainbow to paint a piece, and a drummer uses drum sticks and a drum set to lay down a foundation for a song. With the right artist, an instrument can be used in completely different ways to achieve diverse effects. As a musician that hopes to increase his scope of musical understanding and capability, this is extremely important to me.
In other words, instruments are key, so in this blog, I will be analyzing material with a focus on the instruments involved. What is the instrument? What are the range of "sounds" that the instrument can make? How was this instrument utilized to express the artist? Instruments run this world, and so I hope to learn how to play as many as I can get my hands on.
One blog post at a time.
