Abstract
The relationship between musicians and their instruments in performance has been characterized in a variety of ways that tend to describe the instrument either as an entity inseparable from the musician or as an entity with relative autonomy. Through the trope of ventriloquism, Philip Auslander looks at how two musicians working in very different genre contexts construct their respective relationships to instruments in performance. Both blues guitarist and singer B.B. King and classical violinist Mari Kimura treat instruments as entities separate from themselves and performers in their own right: King by naming his guitar Lucille and constructing a narrative around his relationship with her, and Kimura through her interaction with GuitarBot, a digital musical instrument. By dramatizing the ventriloquial relationship between player and instrument and creating the impression that an instrument possesses an identity and agency, both King and Kimura enact the fantasy of instrumental autonomy that underlies the ventriloquial relationship between performer and instrument. But because the digital technology Kimura employs allows GuitarBot a greater degree of (apparent) autonomy than Lucille, who is always under King’s visible, physical control, it enables her to push the enactment of this fantasy further toward the uncanny to show us what it might look like for a performer to interact with a genuinely autonomous musical instrument.
Authorized reprint of the article “Lucille Meets GuitarBot: Instrumentality, Agency, and Technology in Musical Performance” (Theatre Journal 61, 603–616. Johns Hopkins University Press 2010).
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- 1.
It is important to note that Godlovitch takes the classical solo recitalist as the model of musical performance on which to base his philosophical inquiry.
- 2.
A number of celebrated guitarists in the blues/rock tradition have named their guitars: Eric Clapton had a guitar called Blackie; Roy Buchanan had one called Nancy; Keith Richards has called a guitar “Micawber”; George Harrison played Rocky and Lucy; Steve Vai has guitars named Evo and Flo; and the list goes on. The Bad Dog Café section of The Telecaster Guitar Forum, the online bulletin board that is my source for this information, also features entries by many lesser-known musicians listing the names they have given their instruments. This thread, which began on 27 March 2009, is available at the tdpri forum (2009).
- 3.
B.B. King, quoted by Kerekes and O’Neill (1996).
- 4.
B. B. King, “Lucille,” in Lucille, MCA Records, 1968.
- 5.
King, quoted by Kerekes and O’Neill (1996).
- 6.
It is important to stipulate, however, that Lucille is not a specific instrument; there have been many Lucilles over the course of King’s career, though they have all been of the same model, the Gibson ES-355. But the fact that Lucille is not a particular guitar reinforces the distinction between object (it) and persona (she) that King implies in talking about her: Lucille’s identity persists across multiple physical incarnations.
- 7.
These observations are based on King’s performance of several songs on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual television show in May 1968 on the National Educational Television network. Clips of this program are available on YouTube (Jazz Casual 1968). It was also published as a DVD by Rhino/WEA in 2002.
- 8.
Some of my description of GuitarBotana here repeats material that appeared originally in Auslander 2008, where I discuss Kimura and her performance in a different context.
- 9.
These and subsequent observations about Kimura’s performance with GuitarBot are based on video by Liubo Borrisov of Kimura and Guitarbot performing GuitarBotana (Borrisov 2004).
- 10.
In his article “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,” David Z. Saltz makes a useful taxonomic distinction between instrumental media, in which “interactive technology is used to create new kinds of instruments,” and virtual puppetry: “The difference is that while an instrument is an extension of the performer, a kind of expressive prosthesis, a virtual puppet functions as the performer’s double. In other words, instruments are something performers use to express themselves …; a puppet is a virtual performer in its own right.” See Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001), p. 126. Kimura uses GuitarBot as a virtual puppet that is ultimately under her control, but appears to the audience as a “performer in its own right”.
- 11.
An index to the differences between the cultural contexts in which Kimura and King operate is that whereas it is possible that the more experimentally inclined part of the audience for art music might be open to the idea of a robotic musician, it is unimaginable that the blues audience, which subscribes to an ideology of folk authenticity, would be equally accepting.
- 12.
Mari Kimura, GuitarBotana, © 2005. The score was provided to me by the composer.
- 13.
John Daintith defines MOO, which is an “acronym for multiuser object oriented,” as “a system that has been developed from the early text-based multiuser adventure games, and offers a purely text-based environment allowing multiple users to … interact with other users and with end-user systems”; see A Dictionary of Computing (2004). In MOOs, users create characters, spaces, and objects and perform actions by typing commands.
- 14.
For an essay discussing the need for transparency in human–machine interactions in musical performance, see Schloss (2003). For a discussion of the issue in more general terms, see Wechsler 2006, p. 72. See also Stuart 2003. Stuart argues that listeners to laptop music should surrender the desire for a visually verifiable relationship between the performative in itself and therefore as the proper object of their attention.
- 15.
Quoted in Popper (2007).
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Auslander, P. (2017). Lucille Meets GuitarBot: Instrumentality, Agency, and Technology in Musical Performance. In: Bovermann, T., de Campo, A., Egermann, H., Hardjowirogo, SI., Weinzierl, S. (eds) Musical Instruments in the 21st Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_19
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