I know that some avant garde musicians will find all sorts of junk they can bash or rattle to make a noise, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
I mean something that is genuinely being used by professional musicians as a recognised new instrument.
The theremin is a famous example of something very new, and of course the synthesiser and subsequent electronic tones created on a computer are probably the only place where real progress is made. But they aren’t really new instruments.
I do not see a difference between these two. I’m not sure that appealing to an arbitrary authority to decide what is ‘real’ music is philosophically rigorous.
I think that the last major new instrument was the electronic synthesizer, unless you count the turntable as an instrument, which apparently some people do.
What happens if you don’t ‘play’ music, but assemble it on a computer? Is an instrument involved?
The theremin was invented in 1919 which means it is hardly new.
Steel drums were I believed invented in the 20th century too. The Hammond organ too.
Then of course there’s analogue and digtal synthesisers, drum machines et al. Lots of other instruments were invented in the 20th century that are hardly popular, such as the Ondes Martinot, the Optigan, although most of the ones I’ve seen are based on some sort of keyboard.
I give you the Tenori-On, one of the coolest new things I’ve seen in years. Here’s the Wikipedia page on it, and here’s the official page, where you can buy your own for $1,200.
Well, if you count almost 90 years oldas very new. It’s newish compared to, say, the harpsichord, but it’s older than the electronic organ, electric guitar, electric piano and, as you mentioned, the myriad different kinds of synthesizers invented in the last 50 years.
As is the solid-body electric guitar (~1948), and that’s as mainstream as instruments get.
There are constant innovations in acoustic instrument design. There are instruments that may not seem new because they are variations on existing concepts, such as the batajon and the tamboa.
However, the 20th century was without a doubt the age of electricity and most new instruments were electric, electronic or digital. Nowadays, most resolutely new research involves in some way or other electronics and computers. A lot of it is presented at this conference, and if you browse the proceedings, you can get an idea of what people are working on. Now, most of this will never be commercialized, but some of the ideas to make their way into new products.
With the electronic age, and even more so in the digital age, the definition of what constitutes an instrument is somewhat blurry. A modular analog synth allows you to create a very wide range of sounds. Is the synth the instrument, or is it a particular patch (one way in which the modules are wired together)? Nowadays, it has become standard to have a distinction between the interface and the sound generator. Is a MIDI keyboard or breath controller that cannot make any sound by itself an instrument? Is a computer program an instrument? There’s no way really to answer the question meaningfully, because it’s essentially semantic.
What you could say is that yes, probably more than ever, there are a lot of people working on new ways to make musical sounds. There are people working on new ways to produce sounds, and people working on new ways to control sound. There are even people working on new ways to build and design instruments.
The tough part about answering your question is determining how to judge an instrument becoming established. The inventor/developer clearly has some new sound colour or playing technique in mind, but it’s anybody’s guess if anyone other than the inventor sees a need for that innovation. We live in an age when people are working very hard to rediscover the instruments that the composer would have heard, and to determine the exact nature of the sounds the composer would have preferred. Just because it’s a harpsichord doesn’t mean that the instrument plays itself in the style required. So I wouldn’t say that a ‘new’ instrument’s capability to play music written before is necessarily a criterion for judging an instrument’s acceptance.
And world music has opened up whole new vistas of instruments previously unheard in Western music being used to provide a new colour…
There’s also things like the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, using the accelerometers & touchpads & key entry + software to make an instrument, though you might not consider that the same thing - it’s more like DJ’s and a turntable I suppose.
Jazz great Eddie Harris is responsible for the reed trumpet, the saxobone and the guitorgan. I once saw him play the saxophone without blowing into it. Just played percussion on the keypads. He also invented the eponymous “Eddie Harris Attachment” for the saxophone. He could actually *sing *through that thing! The man was a genius.
I’m not sure that appealing to an arbitrary authority to decide what is ‘real’ music is philosophically rigorous.