Vol 1 Instrumental

[Jen Ondrey]

Aninstrument is a tool, something used to construct. It's often a tool for making music. A musical saw happens to be a carpenter's tool that can be played with a violin bow (though you probably wouldn't want to play a wrench or a pair of pliers). The musical meanings of instrumental, as in "It starts with an instrumental piece" or "a jazz instrumental", are common. But the meanings "helpful", "useful", and "essential", as in "He was instrumental in getting my book published", are just as common.

An instrumental or instrumental song is music normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instrumentals.[1][2][3] The music is primarily or exclusively produced using musical instruments. An instrumental can exist in music notation, after it is written by a composer; in the mind of the composer (especially in cases where the composer themselves will perform the piece, as in the case of a blues solo guitarist or a folk music fiddle player); as a piece that is performed live by a single instrumentalist or a musical ensemble, which could range in components from a duo or trio to a large big band, concert band or orchestra.

In a song that is otherwise sung, a section that is not sung but which is played by instruments can be called an instrumental interlude, or, if it occurs at the beginning of the song, before the singer starts to sing, an instrumental introduction. If the instrumental section highlights the skill, musicality, and often the virtuosity of a particular performer (or group of performers), the section may be called a "solo" (e.g., the guitar solo that is a key section of heavy metal music and hard rock songs). If the instruments are percussion instruments, the interlude can be called a percussion interlude or "percussion break". These interludes are a form of break in the song.

In commercial popular music, instrumental tracks are sometimes renderings, remixes of a corresponding release that features vocals, but they may also be compositions originally conceived without vocals. One example of a genre in which both vocal/instrumental and solely instrumental songs are produced is blues. A blues band often uses mostly songs that have lyrics that are sung, but during the band's show, they may also perform instrumental songs which only include electric guitar, harmonica, upright bass/electric bass and drum kit.

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We describe an econometric technique, instrumental variables, that can be useful in estimating the effectiveness of clinical treatments in situations when a controlled trial has not or cannot be done. This technique relies upon the existence of one or more variables that induce substantial variation in the treatment variable but have no direct effect on the outcome variable of interest. We illustrate the use of the technique with an application to aggressive treatment of acute myocardial infarction in the elderly.

But literary descriptions of these photographs fail to explain how their meaning relates to the ways they have been used, or how meaning and use have shifted together over time. To what discourse, or discourses, can these nearly mute pictures be attached?1

AFTER THE WAR, reconnaissance photographs ended up in scrap heaps, in military archives, in personal collections of war memorabilia, in institutional collections of military and technological artifacts, and so on. Aside from the scrap heaps, each of these could be thought of as a discourse situation in which the photograph takes on a certain synecdochal or metonymic significance, standing for some larger and inclusive or contextually related object or event. The photograph becomes a truth-conferring relic in a range of narratives, some of which possess an institutional authority and some of which carry only the authority of anecdotally rendered personal experience. Anything from the opinions of experts, the history of a battle, the history of photographic techniques, the history of flight, dissertations on the role of air power in the First World War, to digressions on the French countryside and tales from the trenches might be expected. The fact that these are photographs is, in a sense, trivial; their artifactual presence is such that they share a generic space with old uniforms, insignia, rebuilt airplanes, and convincing replicas of the original atom bombs. On the other hand, the folklore of photography also grants a pseudoartifactual existence to the thing depicted. One consumes both the picture and its object, the tarnished medium and the historical instant. To the extent that the particular arena has little or nothing to do with photography in itself, the historical instant takes precedence over the medium.

The art-marketing system provides these aerial photographs with a new order of instrumentality, with a straightforward economic value that can be mobilized to secure more value. For the dealer, the prints represent movable stock; for the buyer, they stand for invested capital. To call attention to these meanings, which may or may not be significant in any given situation, is to risk being considered vulgar. After all, these are rather low-priced items by art-world standards. Nevertheless, the logic of the commodity constitutes a framing condition for all material transactions conducted within the market arena. So much for the obvious.

Suppose that, quite hypothetically, I attempt to promote a number of aerial photographs as esthetic objects. But, by constructing a range of valorizing readings of these prints, I will be engaging in a kind of metapromotion, supplying an abundance of possibilities. Although only a single photograph may be at issue, I might want to mobilize the entire ensemble of available images, thereby subduing the arbitrary appearance of the solitary picture with a sense of an oeuvre, with a cryptic narrative of a purposeful esthetic journey through the skies with a camera. The tendency of a given image toward a certain arena of meaning can be balanced, redirected, or reinforced through reference to other images. The promoter engages in improvisational montage. Therefore, the immediate range of visual or formal possibilities offered by these particular aerial photographs should be acknowledged. Separated in terms of camera position, or point of view, the available pictures tend toward two extremes: high verticals and low obliques. High verticals were taken with the camera perpendicular to the surface of the earth at altitudes of several thousand feet or more; low obliques were taken with an off-axis camera at altitudes as low as several hundred feet. Each of the two types gravitates toward a different kind of estheticized reading; one tends to deny the other to acknowledge the referential properties of the image.

The promoter could boldly assert that Steichen must have had a premonition, or coevolving dream, of Mondrian, Malevich and so on. But the promoter should know that Steichen had this, and as far as I can tell, only this, to say about the esthetic properties of aerial photographs in the period immediately following the war:

The average vertical aerial photographic print is upon first acquaintance as uninteresting and unimpressive a picture as can be imagined. . . . The oblique aerial picture, especially when taken from a low altitude, is more readily comprehended, and sometimes striking pictorial effects are produced. The vertical photographs made by the day bombing squadrons occasionally present a spectacular and dramatic interest in addition to their value as a record of the bomb raid.5

air war from his mind when he praised the new technology for its esthetic potential. But although abstraction may try to excuse itself from any ideological stance in relation to its sources, it remains implicated by the very act of denial. One abstracts these photographs at the expense of all other meanings, including the use to which they were originally put.

When it occurs, the human presence is peculiarly marked in these photographs. This markedness derives from a conflict between scale and desire; the human figure has to be searched out, dragged out, of the image. The anonymity of combatants and civilians teeters on the edge of invisibility. A cratered landscape is littered with tiny, upright figures, some grouped in trenches, some exposed on open ground. Only the most equivocal narrative can be constructed. Are they enemies? Is this a battle? The human content of the event is valued for both humane and voyeuristic reasons, and yet this content is virtually unknowable. Herein lies the pathos of one sort of estheticized reading. The image consumer experiences a kind of cognitive dissonance in having been caught between the false power and the impotence of the pornographic spectator. On the one hand, the aerial viewpoint contributes to an illusion of power and knowledge; on the other, little can be known and whatever happened has happened.

To Colonel Edward J. Steichen, painter of nocturnes and faces, camera engraver of glints and moments, listener to blue evening winds and new yellow roses, dreamer and finder, rider of great mornings in gardens, valleys, battles.12

This narrative suggests that the aerial photographs provided the inspiration for modernist redefinition of the medium. The cup-and-saucer experiment was a compulsive and thorough search for technical means within the boundaries of sharp-focus, nonpainterly representation. As such, it could be seen as an almost therapeutic rerun of the problems encountered in aerial reconnaissance work. But this time the operation occurred on a domestic, auteurist scale. An arena of personal esthetic control was recovered from under the shadow of military-industrial realism.

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