Dissertation

Senses of Value:
Sound and Circulation in Violin Crafting Communities

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of contemporary communities of makers and restorers (luthiers) of violins, violas, and cellos in Italy and the United States. It explores how the circulation of sensory expertise shapes the production of value in music economies. It is based on archival research and twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Cremona, Italy (a historic center for violin making), New York City (a center of the international violin market), and Boston (home to the only full-time violin making school on the East Coast). I follow luthiers from craft schools to workshops to industry events to trace how they forge livelihoods by learning to craft instruments that will one day produce music, including through specialized sensory techniques, affective labor, and linguistic strategies. I argue that the uneven circulation of intersensory skills contributes to the reproduction of the violin economy and violin sound in Western classical music. The dissertation’s argument for intersensory approaches to sound and value contributes to the intersections of economic anthropology, sensory anthropology, the anthropology of craft, semiotic anthropology, sound studies, timbre studies, and critical organology.

Chapter One draws on ethnographic research at a violin making school to argue for a counter-critique of vision in sound studies. Chapter Two examines how luthiers and institutions in Cremona claim authenticity by invoking the city’s Renaissance spacetimes, and by drawing on UNESCO and the “Made in Italy” campaign. Chapter Three considers how luthiers in the United States find meaning in craft through the places in which they live and work, and how the Violin Society of America has connected these luthiers across their disparate locations since the 1970s. Chapter Four examines how luthiers and musicians work together to improve instrumental acoustics, and shows that they co-produce sounding and listening through practices that are both material and affective. Chapter Five draws on philosophically pragmatist linguistic anthropology methods and concepts to demonstrate how communication about sound among luthiers and musicians unfolds in practice over the course of extended conversations and non-verbal interactions.