Autoharps, Chord Organs, and MIDI Packs: Easy-Playing Instruments, Gender, and Classes of Musical Participation

This chapter focuses on the category within audio software of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) chord and loop packs—software instruments largely marketed to amateur producers and engineers working in the genres of pop, hip hop, and R&B—to examine the politics of amateurism, skill-building, and masculinity in digital music production environments. Instead of treating these software as completely novel musical tools, the chapter situates software chord packs as part of a history of “ease-of-use” chord-creating instruments that can be traced through the autoharp, which was patented in the U.S. in 1882 and came into prominence in the late 1940s; and the chord organ, introduced as an easy-playing electronic home organ by the Hammond Company in 1950. They, too, offered their own pathways to musical participation. Over the last century, however, the dreams of active musical leisure that the autoharp and chord organ marketed have given way to fantasies of professionalized “progress.” I argue that each instrument, in its historical moment, makes promises of creativity and ease that act as surreptitious promises of class mobility and inclusion, but that the easy-playing software instruments push the logic into twenty-first-century economies of production: with it, the user might transcend the professional and epistemic barrier of “music theory” to create music on one’s own time, but still sound like, and even possibly become, a professional. In fact, the manufacturers claim, by simply working in the software environment to begin with, the user is already on his way. The chapter makes a case for listening closely to amateur musical practices and instruments to hear logics of musical value and valued labor, and suggests that instruments made to ease work invite us to productively reconsider instrumental ontologies.