Last month I took on one of my favourite commissions: an article about the similarity between musical instruments and the human body. The hook was this exhibition at The Met in New York, which explored this very topic through instruments of all types and hailing from all parts of the world. But the scope was wider than I had initially envisaged. Through conversations with two curators and a luthier, I explored the relationships between music and Renaissance art, Jane Austen, evolution and sex, circling back to the fundamental question: why do we feel the need to assign human qualities to the tools of music?
It was a fun piece to write, and you can read it here, if you’d like to. But one of my most exciting discoveries, which only got a passing mention, was the work of the Edinburgh-based luthier Steve Burnett. Reflecting on his own tendency to personify instruments, he drew my attention to a series of violin that he had sculpted in tribute to historic figures including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Ernest Shackleton, using materials in some way tied to their lives. You can hear more about this project in the recording above.
