[MUSIC] Do our instruments have feelings? Or even social lives? 🎸

Most musicians have a somewhat weird relationship with their instruments: we love them and hate them, we spend a lot of time with them, and often we even name them (my double bass is called Buttery Biscuit Bass). But is this a one sided or two-sided relationship? Could your instrument have agency?

Considering the instrument itself is a subject within music called Organologies. Usually, organologies focuses on the science of musical instruments, but recently the field has entered into what Maria Sonevytsky calls ‘new critical organology’ which includes many slightly wackier ideas such as this one, with focus on the social implications of instruments, rather than just the science behind how they work.

Elliot Bates in The Social Life of Musical Instruments argues that these supposedly inanimate objects actually aren’t inanimate at all. He considers instruments to be ‘protagonists of stories that ‘facilitate, prevent, or mediate social interactions’. However, they still need musicians to breathe life into them (in the case of wind and brass players you quite literally breathe life into your instruments). When instruments don’t have musicians to play them (e.g. musical instruments displayed in museums) they are described by Bates as ‘dead instruments’ with their ‘dead instrument bodies for preservation and display’. Hopefully, the things to consider below will make this all sound a bit less weird.

💡 Things to Consider

• The history of instruments: Often we aren’t the first person to play our instruments, they have had a life of previous owners. With the instruments remaining constant, and musicians changing over time could an instrument have more expertise than those playing it? After all they’ve had more practice! Furthermore, is it ethical to play all instruments when we think about their previous owners? Mussolini’s violin sold for over £150,000, but is it ethical to play the instrument of a man who instigated so much violence, or did the violin have nothing to do with it?

• Instrumentalist stereotypes: We can all think of stereotypes that comes with playing certain instruments: the egotistical trumpets, the competitive violins, the disruptive lower brass etc. But where do these stereotypes come from? Do people with certain personalities pick instruments to match, or do the instruments themselves have some way of shaping our identity? Can all guitar players from across the world find something in common because of their shared instrument?

• Composing for specific instruments: We often praise composers or performers for creating new works, but should we be thanking instruments instead? Would the virtuosic jazz trumpet Giant Steps by John Coltrane be possible on the 1750 trumpet which had no valves? Would Beethoven still be famous for sonatas without a piano the iron frame added in 1825 that allowed for greater dynamics and pitch ranges? Should we be celebrating the instrument more than the musician?

🔎 Find out more

1. For a basic overview of organologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organology

2. How do the instruments also help create social bonds in this example: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_ways_music_strengthens_social_bonds

3. Do these instruments in a museum seem dead?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi0uxjcuDvk

4. References

   • Bates, E. (2012). The Social Life of Musical Instruments. Ethnomusicology, 56(3), 363–395.

   • Sonevytsky, M. (2008). The Accordion and Ethnic Whiteness: Toward a New Critical Organology. The World of Music, 50(3),

[ENGLISH] To Be Hamlet, or Not To Be Hamlet: The Hamlet ‘Bad Quarto’ 📖

The opening lines of Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’ speech in Shakespeare’s renowned play are some of the most quoted lines in theatre today. But did you know that one version of this play has a speech that is almost entirely different?

Like many plays in Shakespeare’s time, Hamlet was published in quarto, a format of a book made up of four ‘leaves’ or pages. In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a Hamlet quarto that was vastly different to other editions of the play. For example, in the famous ‘To Be or Not to Be’ speech, Hamlet doesn’t declare ‘That is the question’; instead, the next lines are ‘Ay, there’s the point’. The plot of this ‘Hamlet’ is also ordered differently, there are fewer characters on stage in lots of the scenes, and the speeches are frequently shorter, or lines are added that are inconsistent with the rest of the play. Because of this, scholars have dubbed this version of Hamlet the ‘bad quarto’.

💡 Things to Consider

• Authorship and Ownership: There are various different theories about how this Hamlet quarto came into being. Some scholars believe that it was recorded in short hand by audience members and then written up in full, while other believe that it was reconstructed from memory by an actor who performed in this version of the play, and sold to a publisher. So who wrote this version of Hamlet, and who owns it? Can we really attribute it to Shakespeare, if he probably didn’t write it? Does the author of a text matter?

• Text and Performance: All of the theories of why this version of Hamlet exists originate from So how do we define Hamlet? Is it the performed play, or is it the written text? How does performance change a play? Can you still call a text a play if it is never performed?

• Value Judgements: This version of Hamlet has been labelled ‘bad’ because of its textual differences. But should we place value judgements on plays? Is it wrong, or does it help us to understand why Hamlet is ‘good’?

🔎 Find out more

• Bad quarto of Hamlet, 1603, also known as the first quarto of Hamlet

[CHEMISTRY] Drug testing in sport 🚴

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in elite sports has been exposed by developments in drug testing, revealing major scandals in the sporting world. For example, seven-time Tour De France winner Lance Armstrong was exposed for doping and accusations of Russian state-sponsored doping ahead of the Olympics.

Drug testing in sports identifies athletes who are using performance-enhancing drugs through a combination of analytical techniques. These techniques involve both spectrometry and spectroscopic approaches such as mass spectrometry, gas chromatography, infrared spectroscopy, and NMR spectroscopy.

💡 Things to Consider

• Mass spectrometry: Mass spectrometry identifies molecules by the molecular mass of molecules in a sample. This produces a spectrum with the molecular masses of the molecules shown on the spectrum. Consider how this can be used to identify the presence of certain molecules in the sample. How does this help identify the presence of performance-enhancing drugs in a sample of an athlete's blood or urine? What level of certainty can the results of mass spectrometry determine if an athlete is doping?

• Infrared spectroscopy: Infrared spectroscopy produces a spectrum based on the bond frequency between atoms in a functional group. This produces specific frequencies corresponding to certain functional groups to help identify the structure of molecules. Evaluate the uses of infrared spectroscopy in drug testing. Derive the equation for bond frequency and explain any assumptions made.

• Combined techniques: Drug testing requires a combination of analytical techniques to determine the presence and identity of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Explore how each analytical technique listed above offers different information about a molecule. Reflect on how these analytical techniques can be used collectively to determine the identity of an unknown molecule in a sample. Assess how athletes have made efforts to evade these drug tests and how future innovations can improve the certainty of drug testing.

🔎 Find out more

• Hacking your body: Lance Armstrong and the science of doping

• What is Mass Spectrometry?

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• 11-13th September - Fitzwilliam College Cambridge Application Webinars

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