Musical Instruments as Material Culture: A Case Study of the Cretan Lyra

In this chapter, I explore how musical instrument makers relate to their primary materials and, in turn, how musical instruments connect music, nature, and society in particular cultural contexts. Discussion of musical instruments usually revolves around how they are shaped in the minds of those for whom they become emblematic and how makers create them. Here I argue that such debates must also involve the origins of the construction materials, to consider the physical impact and symbolic power of the materials themselves. For in these natural resources, ‘nature’ is given new life and form. Musical instruments thus become entangled with peoples and places, times and technologies; but they also have an intrinsic ability to reconnect us to the natural world through the wood, bone, skin, metals, and clay from which they are made. Musical instrument makers are literally ‘in touch’ with the material world. They are agents of a material reality that affects the construction of musical cultures at the most fundamental level.

Drawing on my own field research as well as recent literature, I discuss the multifaceted role that materials play in the process of making the Cretan lyra, in order to illustrate the fundamental relationship between nature and culture in making a musical instrument as well as the ways the materials are held in the hands of various makers.