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Musical instruments are material objects. Material objects have social lives. The recognition that objects have agency drives much of the recent scholarship in anthropology, sociology, museum studies, and art history that falls under the umbrella “material culture studies.” Because of the complex relationship between people and the objects they use to create music and the robustness of the new discipline, material culture studies offers useful new ways for scholars to think about musical instruments. My intention here is to offer a sketch of the social life of perhaps the most culturally important modern musical instrument, the piano. I rely on nineteenth-century American source materials, and am therefore most interested in what the materiality of the piano can tell us about American musical and social life of this era. However, the piano’s particular history, its important involvement in the construction and maintenance of ideas about civilization, and the profound impact that America’s romance with the instrument had on the lives of people in other parts of the world require us to resituate the piano within a conflicted global economic and cultural context. In addition to its status as a technological marvel, the nineteenth-century piano depended on a colonial system that procured materials from around the world for assembly in Western metropoles. In turn, colonial ideology influenced the piano’s social world. Ivory was the most important of the piano’s materials extracted under colonialism, and the piano’s modern maturity was enabled by colonial exploitation.¹

Existing literature on the piano deals mainly with issues such as taxonomy, the corporate histories of piano makers, the evolution of musical technology, and the relationship between technological changes and the musical developments they enabled. Additionally, much attention has been paid to the social role of the piano. Domestic music making in the Victorian parlor—typified by the image of a woman or girl at the piano—has long interested social commentators, historians, and music scholars. Indeed, images of girls and women demonstrating their accomplishments at the piano saturate archives, and excellent scholarship explores the intersection of performances of music, class, and gender at the piano bench. The materiality of the piano, including the biographies of its component parts and their relationship to the social life of the instrument, has been largely overlooked. Moreover, the relationships between pianos and the people who play them are usually considered uncomplicated and self-evident. These lacunae obscure ways pianos can “provide an embodiment of social structures reflecting back the nature and form of our social world.”² Of course pianos and ivory do not have agency or sociality in the same way that people do, but musical instruments shape their players in deep and subtle ways, and attending to the relationship of pianos and their players sheds light on the subjective experience of musicians.

For most of the piano’s history, ebony and ivory have been the instrument’s defining materials. Ivory is also the most costly, culturally rich, and conflicted material of the piano’s many constituent parts. Elephant ivory’s complex relationship with Western consumers was freighted with cultural baggage associated with its origins: the ideological construction Patrick Brantlinger calls the “Myth of the Dark Continent.” At the same time, once ivory had been extracted, bleached, and transformed by human or machine, it embodied whiteness, purity, and opulence. David Shayt writes, “Even the untrained eye may appreciate the creamy, light-diffusing beauty and silky coolness of finished elephant ivory. For Europeans and Asians, its resemblance to skin is perhaps its greatest subliminal attribute—one that found limitless associations in the Victorian world, where whiteness of skin was an absolute measure of class and status.” Radano and Bohlman theorize in their introduction to Music and the Racial Imagination that race is constructed in part around the instruments people play. Selfness coalesces in interactions between people and musical instruments as well as through the consumption of print culture associated with particular instruments and bodies.³ The metonymic relationship between skin and piano keys makes racialization at the piano more apparent than most other musical instruments; it also led to the everyday use of “ebony and ivory” as racial shorthand. The connection between human player and ivory key is tactile, social, and ideological. It is also aesthetic: one need only point to the current fetishization of the creamy smoothness of ivory keys in our age of cold, hard plastic. Each time a musician sits at an ivory keyboard, she situates herself, consciously or not, in relation to the exotic material she touches to sound the notes. Ivory is the material that literally stands between the music we hear and the pianist.

Figure 2. Magazine Advertisement, Sohmer Piano Co., 1892.

Sohmer & Co. Records (349) Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Ivory, too, serves as a bridge between the West and its Other. A Civil War-era catalog cover from America’s most prominent ivory manufacturer, Julius Pratt & Company, illustrates the piano’s positioning at the nexus of the Victorian parlor and darkest Africa. The image of a scantily clad African man with a predatory gaze and phallic tusk is juxtaposed to an extravagantly dressed Victorian woman serenely making lace next to her piano (Figure 1). This “savage” black man is menacing; his body and gaze provoke familiar social anxieties surrounding the threat of black male sexuality to the purity of white womanhood. The man with his spear and elephant tusk was Pratt Read’s corporate signature until about 1880. And while American consumers shopping for pianos were unlikely to have seen the catalog, owners and employees of virtually every American piano-making company would likely be familiar with the logo and its message: playing the piano was a civilized and culturally uplifting activity. The tusk’s savage and the piano’s lady lay bare the entwined nature of Western constructions of savagery and civilization, and how dependent these constructions are on the contextualization and fetishization of a material object: ivory is the material that connects the two icons.

The nature and form of the social world presented by this image is colonialist and suggests new ways to contextualize nineteenth-century American domestic musical life.⁴ At the piano, ideologies of domesticity and empire converged.Figure 2, an advertisement created for the 1893 Columbian World’s Fair in which a Victorian woman mesmerizes exoticized people from around the world, demonstrates the durability of the juxtaposition of the Victorian woman at the piano and her Others. This is a concocted vision of the Columbian Exposition’s Midway in reverse: instead of performing for the enjoyment of “sophisticated” Americans, the “exotics” gather around the white woman at her piano. It is widely recognized that representations that juxtapose white and nonwhite, civilized and savage, and the unmarked and exotic are locations where race is constructed. Figures 1 and 2 suggest that the construction of whiteness went hand in hand with the conception of civility in the endlessly reproduced images of exclusively white Victorian girls and women seated at the piano demonstrating musical accomplishments.

The piano was vital to the cult of domesticity, as it was a place where the attributes of True Womanhood—“piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”— were cultivated. Scholars outside of music have begun to particularize “true womanhood” as “white womanhood,” insisting that race be added to gender and class as useful categories of cultural analysis. Even though the piano is widely recognized as central to nineteenth-century constructions of middle-class femininity, its role in the construction of race remains virtually unexplored despite the turn in American studies to question a monolithic womanhood.⁵

For music scholars, fiction has proven a useful resource for probing the social world of the piano. Literary representations that luxuriate in depictions of Victorian women’s skin, particularly their white hands at the keyboard, underscore the usually unacknowledged presence of race in the parlor. A typical Victorian courtship scene in Charles Bellamy’s 1888 novel The Breton Mills takes place at the piano:

Would she be angry, proud and reserved as she was! Philip shot a furtive glance at Bertha as she sat at the piano idly turning over the music sheets. But the girl might not have heard, not a shade of expression changed her face. It might as well have been the source of the Nile they were discussing so far as she was concerned…but as she pressed her white hand on the music sheet to keep it open, her lover’s eyes softened at the flash of their betrothal diamond. . . . He met Bertha’s blue wide eyes open in a new interest. She had half turned from the piano, but her sleeve was caught back on the edge of the keyboard, revealing that fair full contour of her arm, which glistened whiter than the ivory beneath it.”⁶

The quest to verify the source of the Nile inspired early Western explorers. In fact, explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley traveled frequently with ivory and slave traders, as they knew Africa’s interior areas the explorers were trying to map. Like Bertha’s sleeve catching at the edge of the keyboard, Bellamy’s prose reveals connections between whiteness, the piano, ivory, and Victorian constructions of Africa. Moreover, Bertha’s total lack of interest in the “source of the Nile” exposes the gendered division between two of ivory’s Western worlds: the “Darkest Africa” of male explorers and the feminine domain of the Victorian parlor. We might productively rethink of the piano in domestic fiction along the lines of Amy Kaplan, who writes, “While critics . . . have taught us how domestic novels represent women as model bourgeois subjects, my remapping would explore how domestic novels produce the racialized national subjectivity of the white middle-class woman in contested international spaces.”⁷

Figure 3 Advertising Card, Behr Piano Co., 1893.

Warshaw Collection of Business Americana (60) Archives Center, National Museum of American History,

Smithsonian Institution

In his widely read travel writings, the explorer and missionary David Livingstone helped the West imagine Africa, describing the conjoined ivory and slave trades in East and Central Africa and the bloody massacres perpetrated by ivory traders against both elephants and people. Human porters or slaves carried elephant tusks to the coast, sometimes over a thousand miles, a practice which kept costs low. Livingstone sought to free the ivory trade from its connection to slavery by bringing modern transportation along with “civilization” to Africa—steamships and railroads, he believed, would make slave porterage obsolete. Livingstone claimed an average seventy pound elephant tusk (which would yield about fifty full-size piano keyboards) could be exchanged in the interior for a musket worth a tiny fraction of the amount the tooth would fetch on the coastal market. The guns expedited the slaughter of more elephants, and people. Livingstone’s “object was to open up the path whereby they might, by getting merchandise for ivory, avoid the guilt of selling their children.”⁸ He dreamed of creating a viable economy where Africans could avoid the exigency of selling their own. Perhaps Livingstone’s most influential legacy was his success in tying the eradication of the interior slave trade in Africa (mainly blamed on Arab traders) to the advocacy of European colonization and missionary work. The famous explorer died in 1874, but Western acceptance of his argument paved the way for the massive European colonization known as the “Race for Africa” just a few years later.

The association with exploitation and brutality was probably not what the Steinway Company had in mind when it referred to its pianos as, “A civilizing treasure within the reach of the modest income . . . [it] is a thrilling bit of civilization that will develop your children’s talents; but it is also a distinguished decoration that will cast the glamour of its history and its associations over your living room.” The purported civilizing effects of the piano are structured by colonial ideology. “If the exotic objects that filled American households could speak, the rooms would reverberate with stories of empire.” Piano manufacturers clearly understood the appeal of the instrument’s material presence and its relationship to an ideology that placed Western classical music at the top of a global hierarchy. Well into the twentieth century, the piano was understood to be the “universal” musical instrument, and was therefore marketed as “completely suitable for any type of music—music of all lands and of all ages.” The piano had become for Americans, in the words of historian Cynthia Adams Hoover, “more than a household object. It took on the aura of an icon, an altar to respectability and culture, a treasured possession that was given a place of honor in the parlor—the Victorian era’s domestic chapel. The acquisition of such an important household necessity was not to be taken lightly, and most piano manufacturers promoted their instruments as symbols of a morally superior lifestyle.” Hoover assumes the parlor to be a separate sphere; what I mean to show is how “the Victorian era’s domestic chapel” was intimately tied to colonialism. As Figure 3 demonstrates, pianos were not for everyone. This cheeky advertisement depicts a stereotyped Native American wildly banging his fists on a Sohmer piano acquired in a recent train heist. The image displays what Amy Kaplan calls “the imperial reach of domesticity and its relation to the foreign.”⁹

Unlike most other musical instruments, the piano was an important actor on the world stage. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, craftsmen manufactured ivory mainly into relatively small luxury items such as combs and other toiletries, but by the end of the century the Western ivory trade was dominated by mass produced piano keys. As the piano exploded in popularity, it became an increasingly important driver of the ivory market. Yet Westerners for the most part failed to recognize this fact and instead imagined ivory’s material history along with “Darkest Africa.” In 1856, the New Hampshire newspaper The Farmer’s Cabinet reported,

Few of our lady readers, while they peep so bewitchingly over the tips of their ivory fans, or play their fingers so nimbly and gracefully over the white keys of the piano, are wont to cast a thought towards the manner in which this material is procured, the quantities of which are annually needed, and the number of noble animals which are yearly slain for the purpose of supplying the constantly increasing demand.¹⁰

Literate westerners in the nineteenth century surely knew of the insatiable slaughter of elephants required to supply their ivory, as it was the subject of both news commentary and popular travel literature. Killing elephants was a necessary byproduct of harvesting their precious teeth; misgivings about the practice were exacerbated by elephants’ exceptional nobility, intelligence, ferocity, and elusive cunning. Anxiety sparked myths. Legends of troves of stockpiled ivory coexisted with the idea that ivory was so abundant it was lying on the ground for the taking. The story went like this: Africans, in their ignorance, were unaware of ivory’s value, so the tusks were simply there for the taking. Part of the cultural work of the myths that grew up around ivory was to cover up the human and environmental devastation associated with the ivory trade. Just as the violence surrounding ivory extraction was escalating in the 1880s, images of African people disappeared from the print material produced by American ivory companies, who from then on mainly focused on images of elephants. Perhaps Westerners displaced their anxiety about the human cost of the ivory trade onto elephants.

The methods used to extract ivory from Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth century included forced labor, slavery, theft, warfare, rape, and mass murder. To be sure, estimating the scope of the trade, both in tusks and slaves, is treacherous ground. Western travelers’ estimates of the death toll varied widely, ranging from a human life lost for each tusk extracted to a likely exaggerated one human lives lost for each pound of ivory brought to the Western market. Historian Edward Alpers argues that Westerners, most famously Livingstone, exaggerated the extent of the slave trade in East and Central Africa.¹¹

Figure 4. Magazine Advertisement,

Sohmer Piano Co., 1890.

Sohmer & Co. Records (349) Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Regardless of its scope, by the 1890s, much of the central African ivory trade had shifted west after Stanley mapped the Congo River and Belgium’s King Leopold instituted his brutal reign of terror in his Congo Free State. It is unlikely that scholars will ever agree on a reliable estimate of the human cost of its mania for the piano, but the horrors that occurred in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold’s rule are better documented and less contested than those that occurred earlier in the century. Adam Hochschild estimates that between 1880 and 1920 (roughly coterminous with the commodification and extensive mass marketing of the piano in the West) about ten million people were slaughtered or worked to death extracting rubber and ivory from the Congo (the majority of these deaths were probably associated with rubber extraction).¹² Given that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was about a trip up the Congo River for ivory, most of which would have been cut for piano keys, it is remarkable that the connection between the human cost of ivory extraction and the piano was not explicitly made, particularly by activists such as Mark Twain who worked to expose the routine atrocities committed in the Congo. However, economic data links the Congo with the production of the piano. Documents filed by American ivory companies with the United States government reveal that by 1913, virtually all of the ivory imported to the United States from Africa was manufactured into pianos, and two thirds of that ivory came from the Congo.¹³ It is not clear whether the relationship between the American piano industry and the Congo is representative of the piano industry worldwide, nor is it possible to extrapolate this data forward or back. However, American companies dominated the world piano market, and in an era when United States manufacturers churned out as many as a few hundred thousand instruments a year, it is safe to conclude that the American demand for pianos was devastating.

Maintaining traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries enforces a tidy separation between the piano, Western musical culture, colonialism, and atrocity, and one could argue that the historical record largely supports the maintenance of such boundaries. But the cost is high, as they obscure ways Western musical culture was influenced by colonialism and how Western cultural practices shaped other parts of the world. Because nineteenth-century commentators did not directly link the West’s insatiable urge for pianos with the widely known situation in Africa, connecting the slave and ivory trade in Africa to the piano industry is considered by some a proactive presentist move. This view is too narrow. Ivory’s well-known biography, both romantic and bloody, structured its relationship to Western piano players. It is the responsibility of scholars to consider the full range of ivory’s materiality. Besides, the ideological veneer of the historical record occasionally cracks. Figure 4 is an advertisement from 1890 for an ivory substitute. This image explicitly connects the plight of the slaves at the bottom of the image with finding a manufactured substitute for ivory. What is remarkable about the piano is its stark connection to exploitation in other parts of the world. Edward Said writes, “Most professional humanists . . . are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, and philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other.” Acknowledging ties between the piano, musical culture, and the appalling history of the ivory trade challenges what Philip Bohlman calls “musicology’s insistence on maintaining music as its value-free object of study.” In his preface to Arthur Loesser’s influential Men, Women, and Pianos, Jacques Barzun calls the piano “a perfect symbol of Western civilization in modern times.”¹⁴ Barzun was right, even if he did not acknowledge that it was the piano’s multifaceted role as Western cultural icon, agent of colonial oppression, and sustainer of racial hierarchies that makes it a perfect symbol. Only by looking at the material relationship between pianists and ivory in a global context can we begin to comprehend how colonial ideology so thoroughly penetrated Western life.

—CUNY Graduate Center

Notes

¹ For an overview of recent work, see Christopher Tilley, ed., the Handbook of Material Culture, (Sage, 2006). Arjun Appadurai edited an important early anthology, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). In music, see Allen Roda, “Toward a New Organology,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Columbus, Ohio, 2007.

² Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles (Open University Press, 1999), 2.

³ See Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1985), 185-222. David Shayt, “The Material Culture of Ivory Outside of Africa,” in Elephant: The Animal and its Ivory in African Culture, ed. Doran Ross (Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1992), 367. While our readings are different, I open and close this essay with the same images as does Shayt (Figures 1 and 4). Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, “Introduction, The Occlusion of Race in Music Studies,” in Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6.

⁴ My analysis of the piano is informed by scholarship that explores the relationship between Western domestic culture and colonial and imperial ideologies such as Anne McClintock, “Soft-Soaping the Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995), 207-231; Kristen Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865-1920,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (February 2002): 55-83; and Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 581-606.

⁵ Drawing on the work of Angela Davis and Hazel Carby, Sherrie Tucker recognizes how the whiteness implicit in demonstrations of musical accomplishments could exclude African American women in Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke University Press, 2001), 89-90. For a classic essay on cult of true womanhood, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” in The American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 151-174.

⁶ Charles J. Bellamy, “The Breton Mills,” serialized in the San Jose Mercury News, 14 April, 1888.

⁷ Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 600.

⁸ David Livingstone, Livingstone's Africa: Perilous Adventures and Extensive Discoveries in the Interior of Africa (Hubbard Brothers. 1872), 349.

⁹ Steinway advertisement, 2 February 1930, New York Times. Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity,” 69. WWII era advertisement, Gulbransen Company, Sohmer & Co. Records (349), Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Cynthia Adams Hoover, “The Great Piano War of the 1870s,” in A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock, eds. Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol Oja (University Of Michigan Press 1990), 133. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 600.

¹⁰ “Ivory,” The Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, New Hampshire) 54, no. 40, 8 May, 1856.

¹¹ For engaging essays on the American ivory industry and the piano, including the human cost, see Anne Farrow, “Plunder for Pianos,” in Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (Ballantine, 2005), 193-214; and Richard Conniff, “When the Music in Our Parlors Brought Death to Darkest Africa,” Audubon Magazine (July 1987): 76-93. Edward Alpers, “The Ivory Trade in Africa,” in Elephant: The Animal and its Ivory in African Culture, 356.

¹² Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 233.

¹³ Arnold Cheney & Co. to Senator F. M. Simmons, Chairman Finance Committee, U.S. Senate, 8 May 1913, in U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Finance. “Tarriff Schedules: Briefs and Statements Filed with the Committee on Finance, United States Senate” (U.S. GPO: 1913), 1673.

¹⁴ Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993), xiv. Philip Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” The Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 424. Jacques Barzun, “Preface” in Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: a Social History (Simon & Schuster, 1954), vii.

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