The Musical Instrument Museum is currently running an exhibition featuring stringed instruments played by some of the most famous jazz, folk and bluegrass artists in American history. It's open through Sunday.
MIM curator Rich Walter recently spoke with The Show to talk about the exhibit.
I was a film studies minor in college, which wasn’t the most practical choice. But there is this one idea from one of my film classes that’s always stuck with me. It’s something cinematographers talk about called “indexical signs.”
An indexical sign is a concrete object that proves the existence of something that would otherwise be hard to define. The example I remember my professor giving is a weathervane. A weathervane is an indexical sign for wind.
“Think about it,” she said. “Can you describe what wind is? No. But we know it exists because of weathervanes.”
A couple weeks ago, at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, I took a tour of an exhibition called Acoustic America: Iconic Guitars, Mandolins and Banjos. And I found myself thinking about weathervanes.
"People certainly see the tangible musical instruments, but we really strongly believe that that’s our way of introducing people to human beings from around the world. So they stand for the people," said Rich Walter, the curator of the exhibition.
He’s leading me through a gallery full of guitars, mandolins, and banjos that were once played by artists like Earl Scruggs, David Grisman and Mississippi John Hurt. And for a show about music, the gallery is oddly quiet. Just a series of stringed instruments mounted on walls and platforms. But the whole thing is mesmerizing.
I ask if a John Sebastian guitar on display has a setlist attached to it.
"It does. We’ve got a couple instruments like that where we still have the handwritten set lists on the sides of the guitars. So these are Peter, Paul and Mary, this is Peter Yarrow’s guitar. And again, one of these handwritten setlists. These are hard working guitars that have been on stages and under stage lights," Walter said.
They didn’t close with “Jet Plane.” I would’ve closed with “Jet Plane.”
Standing in the otherwise silent gallery, I hear the opening strains of "Jet Plane" in my head, and my eyes get misty. I remember a dream I had when I was 17, about being married to a girl I had a crush on. In the dream, she tells me that she loves me, but she doesn’t think our marriage is working for her anymore. And then, as if to underscore the point, she pulls out a guitar and starts playing "Jet Plane" on the guitar.
I haven’t been able to listen to that song since. Literally. I’ve burst into tears in the middle of crowded concerts and had to leave the room when people cover it. Now I’m staring at the guitar that Peter Yarrow used to play it on. It’s an indexical sign of unrequited love.
"Musical instruments at their core are filled with potential. And so there’s a lot of room for imagination, imagining what you might do with it," Walter said.
One of the other things that sticks out is that by and large the materials are wood, negative space, and in the case of the banjo, skin. From these very earthly materials comes this transcendent sound.
"I think all of that is special. The organic nature of it. It’s fingertips, you’re holding things in your lap, it’s intimate. These wooden vibrating things that you use with your hands and your fingertips, it’s just such a direct human connection," Walter said.
I’ve never been much of a guitarist, but I’m obsessed with microphones. There’s something about the way the human voice sounds on the radio. It’s godlike, somehow — detached from the limitations of the physical plane, floating in the air.
But it’s also so familiar. Someone else’s voice somehow feels like your voice, in your own head. The story they’re telling becomes a part of your story. The conversation they’re having feels like you’re having it, too. It’s hard to explain — but that’s why I love microphones. They’re indexical signs of whatever that is.
When I first got into recording, I wanted to figure out what microphone I needed to talk into to get that sound. I did some research and found out that a lot of radio stations use a microphone called an ElectroVoice RE20. I watched every single YouTube video I could find that showed people speaking into RE20s. I spent hours listening to stuff like this.
CLIP: This is an Electrovoice RE20, I’m speaking about 10 inches away from it. It is going into my usual preamp, a Requisite Pal Plus Mark 3. “See Slap Happy the Chimp and his monkey-time pals, all this week on Nickelodeon!”
When I discovered the RE20, I thought, “There it is! That big, round, silky sound!” So I saved up all my money and bought an RE20. And I’ll never forget the moment when I plugged it in for the first time, put on my headphones, and started talking. I sounded nothing like the voices on the radio. That was fifteen years ago — and I’m still chasing that sound.
But that day in the gallery with Rich, staring at the guitars that made some of the sweetest sounds ever recorded, I start to wonder what, exactly, I’ve been chasing.
They’re just wooden objects on stands. Which to me highlights the specific relationship that each of them would have to the person who plays them. You know, part of me when I walked in, truthfully, thought, it would be nice to hear them played in this room. But it feels like part of what you’re after is, they don’t have a sound. They sound different when different people play them.
"They don’t have one sound available to them. They’ve been selected because they stand for very particular people, " Walter said. "It has this presence. It’s as close as we can be — in some cases these artists have passed away — there it is. There's something powerful. The finish was worn off by the hands of this great person. You’re looking at this thing that bears witness to days and nights and practice and use. You’re seeing the evidence of these people holding them and animating them."
Here on The Show recently, I talked to one of my favorite musicians, Joshua Redman, about his relationship with his instrument. And he said this sort of mystical thing..:
"I think ultimately what I’m striving for, and what a lot of us are striving for, is for the instrument to disappear," Redman aid.
I think that’s what feels so spiritual about staring at the instruments at MIM. It’s not what they are, or how they’re made — it’s that they’re there at all. Because in the hands of the people who played them, they disappeared. They’re artifacts of the uncanny.
When I sat down to record this piece, I got an idea. I pulled out my old RE20, and talked into it for the first time since I started working here at KJZZ. You’re hearing it right now. And as I speak these words, I still don’t know if I’ll ever sound like the radio voice I have in my head. I’m still not sure what I’m chasing. But thanks to Walter, I’m starting to understand why.
"You’re remembering a sound. I think as humans, we’re so conditioned — our brains are so conditioned to direct sounds," Walter said. "The sound of a parent’s voice, the sound of weather coming through the air. We’re sensitive to direct, natural sounds. And I think a lot of these instruments do that. It’s the way a human being gets that string vibrating that can be very powerful and very direct, and leave very powerful emotional impressions."
