"The Elephant in the Piano: Music, Ecology, Empire"

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the piano was ubiquitous across the world and diverse segments of societies. Drawing on recent approaches to the global circulation of the instrument, my talk expands these discussions by tracing the connections embedded in the piano’s materials—specifically ivory, one of the prime materials for the construction of piano keyboards. I show that this commodity mediated a series of encounters between environment and music cultures, as well as between East Africa, Europe, and the United States. From the warehouses of European and American traders in Zanzibar to ivory auction houses at London and Antwerp, and from these sites to US keyboard factories and consumers’ homes, pianos’ ivory enabled differentiated experiences of a globalizing world, revealing hitherto unexamined entanglements between music, ecology, and empire. All in all, my talk shows the value of material approaches to instruments for a “remapping” of music and sound studies, and the reciprocal benefit of global and postcolonial perspectives for eco-musicological conversations.

Fanny Gribenski is Assistant Professor of Music at New York University. She is the author of L’Église comme lieu de concert (2019) and Tuning the World (2023). Her current research examines the relations between musical instruments, ecology, and empire. Recent articles have appeared in Past and Present, ISIS, Journal of Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Sound Studies, History of the Humanities, Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances, and the Revue de musicologie. She is currently co-editing two books: Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes (with Viktoria Tkaczyk and David Pantalony), and New Methods and New Challenges in Empirical Musicology (with Clément Canonne).