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IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE

In the following three chapters, I examine the emergence of a professional study of songs founded on notions of animal life. Spanning the period between 1900 and 1945, chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the classification, collection, and analysis of songs to show how music became a measure of difference in the twentieth century. The intertwined prehistories of comparative zoology and experimental physiology that I described in the introduction to this book serve as the basis for notions of identity and difference in professional music scholarship during this period. Building on that prehistory, these chapters link problematic constructions of animal identity to the creation of modern sonic knowledge. Identity, difference, and knowledge are the subject of this history.