The Fragmented Library of the Sounding Box
Résumé
The appeal of the genre of 'hidden writing' (writings in tombs, on talismans, and so on) has endured for a long time. Concealed to the sight of most readers, such writings have a paradoxical relationship to the most common role of writing as a communication tool. Among these writings, this article aims to reveal the existence of the textual contents found in musical instruments as a specific subgenre of hidden writing. String musical instruments such as guitars, lutes, citterns, viola da gamba, and violins are constituted on a similar structure: a neck is fitted to a sounding box (or 'resonator'), strings are fitted on this structure, put in tension and tuned. The strings are then put in vibration by plucking (guitar, lute, cittern) or rubbing with a bow (violin, viola da gamba). The sounding box of such instruments, when made between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, sometimes used strips of waste materials to reinforce their structure. Various types of materials were used, from thinly cut wood pieces to fabrics, and included waste paper and parchment with writing. This makes of the sounding!box a container for material texts. This article considers the technical, historical and anthropological implications of the presence of those texts within the sounding boxes of musical instruments. These implications will be introduced and discussed using a series of studies of seven musical instruments now in the collection of the musée de la Musique in Paris: a sixteenth-century vihuela de mano (an instrument shaped like a guitar but tuned like a lute); two theorbos (lute-type instruments) respectively made by Georg Aman in Regensburg in 1739 and by Matteo Sellas in Venice in 1626; a bass violin made by Andrea Amati in Cremona in 1572 and later restored in France; an anonymous seventeenth-century Italian colachon, (a lute-type instrument); a guitar made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona c.1680; and a lute made in Bologna by the maker Laux Maler between 1526 and 1552.
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