Making Musical Instruments

How do the musical instruments we play come into being? In the Making Musical Instruments project, students in Elizabeth Clendinning’s Introduction to Music of World Cultures course worked together in the WFU WakerSpace to create tamboo bamboo (Trinidadian bamboo stamping tubes), Kalimba thumb pianos, and gourd rattles and resonators. The gourds used in this project were grown in the WFU Campus Gardens, and bamboo harvested from the Graylyn Estate. In this video, we describe the instrument-building process and how learning about instruments from a hands-on perspective enhances student learning. Finally, we discuss potential future directions for instrument-building and campus partnerships at Wake Forest.

Presenter Information

Elizabeth Clendinning

Associate Professor of Music, Wake Forest University

Elizabeth A. Clendinning is Associate Professor of Music at Wake Forest University and founder-director of the university’s Balinese dance and gamelan ensemble, Gamelan Giri Murti. She is a graduate of Florida State University (Ph.D. 2013, M.M. 2009) and the University of Chicago (B.A. 2007). She is the author of American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination (2020) and co-author of Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia, 3rd edition (with Henry Spiller; 2022). She has taught a version of the Introduction to Music of World Cultures course since 2009.