What is an Instrument? The Definition and Invention of Musical Instruments

This morning as I was putting my flute away, after working on a Locatelli flute sonata, I found myself thinking that the baroque period defined the flute in a certain way, meaning that baroque composers understand what the flute could do and asked performers to do it. Nineteenth and century composers like Doppler redefined the flute, demanding virtuosity and exploiting the capacity of the newly invented metal flute, and things have gone farther and farther (listen to Claire Chase).

Throughout the history of music, composers have redefined instruments, using them in new ways, and forcing players to go beyond what was expected of them. The makers of instruments keep improving them, in response to these demands, enabling musicians to do more easily what was close to impossible.

My insight, though, had less to do with the changes in the design of the flute, from the wooden baroque flute, with only one key, requiring the performer to use complex fingerings to produce sharps and flats, to the silver, gold, or platinum flutes of today, than it did with the conceptual invention of an instrument, the changes in its use by musicians.

This is easily seen in the history of jazz and the development of the saxophone as a major vehicle of jazz performance. Players grasped the expressive capacity of the instrument and kept pushing, getting more and more out of it. The physical invention of the saxophone in the mid-nineteenth century produced the tool that, in the hands of creative musicians, made music undreamed of by the makers of the instrument.