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TWO

Collecting Silence

The Sonic Specimen

On the reverse side of this book’s title page, below the publisher’s name and thematic information, there is a string of letters and numbers. This code tells you how the book is catalogued in the Library of Congress. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress seeks to acquire and preserve a universal collection of human knowledge.¹ Since its inception in 1800, the library has acquired nearly forty million books, each organized according to topic. This book, for example, will be coded ML3900 if it is deemed to be about the social politics of music; HV4700 if it is a book about animal rights; and BD140 if it is a philosophical book about the origins of knowledge.²

But imagine that instead of sending the book to the Library of Congress, we wanted to store it in a natural history museum, sending it across the Mall from the Library of Congress to the National Museum of Natural History. There the book would become a natural history specimen, an object representative of natural knowledge. Instead of being organized by topic, it would be organized by its evolutionary relationships. As a biological object, the book is a derivative form of plant matter and would best be sent to the museum’s Department of Botany. Its origin in North America suggests that it is probably made primarily of white pine pulp, Pinus glauca. The museum’s larger specimens, which include things like pinecones, are stored in cabinets with pull-out drawers. We might, somewhat hesitantly, suggest that the curator place this book in such a drawer, somewhere between a branch of hemlock and a loblolly pinecone. We could then rather shamefacedly affix to it the label “Pinus glauca pulpus.”

The imagined identification of a book in the botanical collection is not so different from the way specimens were represented when the National Museum of Natural History opened in 1910. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wealthy cities and individuals in the United States invested thousands of dollars to build lavish natural history museums decorated with crenelated turrets, columned facades, and delicate arcades in Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. Similar temples rose up in London, Vienna, and Paris, filling their halls with tens of thousands of specimens obtained on expeditions to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In these places were assembled large collections that gathered together diverse objects: insects, plants, birds, shells, and fossils were joined in museum storerooms by anthropological collections that included tribal artifacts and the detritus of violated tombs. These collections were the basis of a science of identification. Specimens became a way to know who fit and who didn’t, a map of nature that extended from animal skins to anthropological artifacts.

The music of humans and other animals had a place in these collections, with song collectors sending musical instruments, notated songs, and sound recordings to museums and other institutions of knowledge, where they became specimens within a sonic typology. Once institutionalized, songs became part of a broader natural typology, where they had to fit within the systematic habits of the library and the museum. Though new to most museums, musical recordings and instruments were welcomed into institutions. The majority of these musical artifacts were human songs, arranged to display racial and cultural development. Music historian Jann Pasler has shown, for example, how the Paris Conservatoire’s musical instrument collection was organized to meet colonial narratives of racial development, while in New York, the musical instrument collections at the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were similarly crafted to reflect ideas about the relations between culture and natural history.³ Occasionally the songs of animals, especially birds, were also arranged in collections; one archaeologist even suggested in 1914 that a museum of sound be built in the place of a traditional natural history museum, writing, “Bird songs are probably of as much interest to museum visitors as bird skins.”⁴

In this chapter, I examine the inclusion of songs within institutional collections of natural knowledge. For the first half of the twentieth century, the evolutionary theories of development discussed in chapter 1 enabled broad comparisons between species and cultures. In the midst of these comparisons, the specimen took on a central role in the determination of biological identity. As naturalists and biologists developed new models for identifying species based on the visual inspection of specimens, experts in music adopted new models of sonic identification based on the examination of songs. I call these new forms of sonic information the sonic specimen, the musical analogue of the stuffed bird skins and preserved beetles arrayed in the natural history museum’s specimen drawers. Like their biological counterparts, sonic specimens were compared in order to determine evolutionary relatedness, mapping development onto sound in the same way that naturalists mapped evolutionary change onto preserved animal bodies. As part of an institution of knowledge, song collections became elements of a broader narrative about evolutionary relationships between cultures, races, and species.⁵

Central to this practice was the challenge of understanding identity in terms of sound. The sonic specimen entailed the belief that sound, like its visual counterpart, could be used to determine identity. Identity and identification are recurring themes in this chapter, which explores the practice of aural identification within institutional contexts. What did identity mean to the museum curators, collectors, and librarians who imagined and built specimen collections in the early 1900s? How did those notions of identity relate to attempts to categorize music and music makers? How did attempts to order and organize musical identity reflect broader orderings of life?

In the pages that follow, I ask what we can learn by attending carefully to the institutional fate of avian and anthropological song collections as they became classified and categorized, particularly within the United States. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, insects, birds, shells, plants, and fossils were joined in museum storerooms by musical instruments, phonograph recordings, and collections of musical notation. Once they became part of an institutional collection, these sonic specimens were organized and classified in order to serve scholars as research objects, much as the books in a library serve readers. As researchers adopted this approach, the way comparisons were made between animal and human songs also took on new forms. Instead of comparing the songs of animals and human beings directly, musical “specimens” introduced a new comparison between the songs of humans and the bodies of animals. This was a meaningful change, for it meant that instead of comparing sound to sound, intellectuals began to weigh the value of different lives against the value of musical difference.

I begin my chapter by looking to the development of the “type specimen,” a special kind of specimen designed in the early 1900s to serve as a new standard for the determination of biological identity. From that starting point, I turn to the fate of the wax cylinder recordings made by Jesse Walter Fewkes at the turn of the century. I use Fewkes’s connections to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and its director Alexander Agassiz as a point of departure for a broader examination of the translation of specimen-based identity to sound, where the singular type of biology had to be adapted to a more generalized notion of musical character in the examples I call “sonic specimens.” Finally, I turn to the notion of the musical type, which drew on the biological precedent of the type specimen to suggest essential connections between species, race, and the classification of musical style. Within these interconnected histories, songs moved from museums to libraries and back as their meanings shifted from specimen to cultural artifact.

In the course of this chapter’s investigation of the sonic specimen, I am also hoping to trace new contours on the surface of an otherwise familiar notion of identity. Today, identity plays an important role in many legislative and social constructions of difference through categories of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and species. By turning to a history in which songs served as a means through which such categories could be discovered, I seek a meaningful context for considering the ways in which contemporary tropes of identity and identification are connected to much older attempts to evaluate difference, and to value different kinds of lives.

IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION

Dictionaries of the early 1900s agreed that identity was a kind of sameness, the resemblance that made what could have been a misshapen pile of difference fit together as a single whole.⁶ A year after the opening of the National Museum of Natural History, the 1911 Concise Oxford Dictionary defined identity as “absolute sameness; individuality, personality,” and difference as “being different, dissimilarity, non-identity.”⁷ Identity was, speaking broadly, the likeness that made two things the same, and the differences that made likeness visible.

By the end of the 1800s, some biologists had adopted this marriage of sameness and difference as the definition of species. Biological species was nothing more than “an assemblage of individuals which agree with one another, and differ from the rest of the living world,” as Darwin’s defender Thomas Huxley put it.⁸ But this was a very loose definition. How could a biologist tell whether a particular animal agreed with or differed from other similar-looking animals? And what, exactly, counted as an “individual” in the cloudy mist of the living world? One of Huxley’s contemporaries explained with some exasperation that such broad definitions made it hard to avoid arbitrary categories: “For in every perception and judgment, and indeed in every sensation, the object reveals a twofold play of identity and difference. No two things are so much the same as to be indistinguishable in respect of somewhat, and that somewhat, even though it be only numerical, is a difference.”⁹

In this amorphous garden of identity and difference, debates about biological identity flourished. Between 1900 and 1935, scores of articles were published that shared the opening title “The Identity of …” as they questioned existing species boundaries.¹⁰ Species that were accepted in the sciences had, of course, a written history, often made up of descriptions dating back to the Renaissance and extending into the nineteenth century. These descriptions were considered an authoritative source, and were included in any article contesting the way a plant or animal was classified. Biologists began “Identity of” articles with textual exegesis, delving deeply and long into the textual history of a species. But when they applied these historical descriptions to actual examples, they often found that text alone did not tell them whether two living things were the same or not. Confronted by seeming discrepancies between authoritative texts and the creatures they purported to describe, biologists turned to a new authority: the physical body.

Historian of science Lorraine Daston situates natural history specimens in the field of botany at the center of this shift away from textual descriptions and toward a unique body called a “type specimen” or holotype. Daston shows how American botanists pushed to make the first recognized or discovered example of a species a new kind of specimen, the type specimen.¹¹ The type specimen or holotype was a single plant or animal body chosen to serve as the definitive reference for the identification of an entire species. Whenever possible, the type specimen would be the first known example of the new species, and the honor of naming it fell to its discoverer. The species’ name was literally (with a label) and metaphorically (with nomenclature) attached to this individual body. Although some biologists believed that no single specimen should serve to resolve debates or questions about species identity, those who favored type specimens over texts dominated the debate in the United States and Europe by the early 1900s. With the adoption of the American Code of Botanical Nomenclature in 1907, the specimen became the central object of research in natural history, and the comparison of specimens was the single most important element in determinations of species identity. After 1907, the code was adapted for research in paleontology, zoology, and entomology, and other fields in the natural sciences. As one American entomologist wrote in the 1920s, the type specimen had become “the court of last resort in settling questions of identity.”¹²

Type specimens brought together the visual display of the body, the twofold play of sameness and difference, and the systematic classification of typology. With the rise of the specimen came a shift in the way identity was understood, away from conceptual categories and toward specific, individual plant and animal bodies. Typology was no longer the ordering of ideas, but the ordering of specimens, with the type specimen serving as an exemplary case of the practice. “The specimen is, after all, the main thing,” wrote one high school biology teacher in New York in 1907, the same year the Code of Botanical Nomenclature was adopted.¹³

With the adoption of the type specimen, the centrality of viewing pointed out thirty years ago by Donna Haraway and Mieke Bal became a critical element in the traditions that shaped not only biological specimens, but their sonic counterparts.¹⁴ The visual tradition of specimen collecting contrasted with the challenges of quantifying and measuring sonic information, engaging attempts to apply this “court of identity” to sound in the differences between sound’s mutability and the apparently stable nature of visual information. In reality, the specimen itself resolved a similar problem in biological science by substituting a preserved corpse for a living animal, exchanging information about behavior and its context for fixed information about morphology and anatomy. In the context of sound, the analogous solution was the inscription and transcription of sound in wax cylinders and on paper, making “living” sound a fixed object that could be measured. This solution, however, engaged scholars in two related practices that had considerable impact on the way sonic data was formulated: first, methods of recording and listening to sound were developed in response to criteria for data derived from the biological specimen tradition; and second, this tradition engaged scholars in a conflicted rhetorical opposition of life and death, sound and silence.

SOUND IN THE MUSEUM

Moving from the National Museum of Natural History’s botany collections to the shelves of artifacts in the Department of Anthropology, one finds a new set of bodies whose forms reveal identity and identification. Among the bowls and arrowheads are the ghosts of the wax cylinder recordings that once resided here, moved in the 1970s from natural history to the American Folklife Center, a division of the Library of Congress. The move was a retrograde of our imaginary deposit of Pinus glauca pulpus, in which sound left the museum for a library, instead of leaving a library for the museum. If we shift the clock into backward motion, the recordings tell one part of a much larger story about the institutional life of the sonic specimen.

The oldest of the museum’s recordings was its collection of Hopi songs and speech on old Edison wax cylinders, collected in the 1890s during the Hemenway Southwestern Archeological Expedition. The cylinders had been inscribed on this hot and dusty expedition before being sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC, in 1894. The bureau was devoted to pure anthropological research, with a sister institution focused on applied research in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.¹⁵ Though the cylinders probably served researchers in both divisions, in 1965 they were officially moved to the museum, as the bureau was incorporated into the department. There the bowls, arrowheads, and bracelets collected on the Hemenway Expedition still reside. But the cylinders are for the most part gone, except for a few copies: they moved again in the early 1970s, leaving the realm of natural history entirely for the Library of Congress, where they now reside in the American Folklife Center. Their life as specimens is (or, at least, is meant to be) over, for they serve a new tenure as part of the center’s commitment to “creative expressions.”¹⁶

In 1890, however, the cylinders were envisioned quite differently. Their collector, Jesse Walter Fewkes, wrote that year, “What specimens are to the naturalist in describing genera and species, or what sections are to the histologist in the study of cellular structure, the cylinders are to the student of language.”¹⁷ Fewkes was among the first to use the phonograph in ethnographic research, making the Hemenway cylinders a landmark in ethnology. Both complete specimens and the histological specimens prepared for microscope slides, called “sections,” were familiar to him from his work as a zoologist curating the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There he had worked as Alexander Agassiz’s assistant in the 1880s, overlapping slightly with Charles Otis Whitman and leaving just before Charles Davenport’s arrival.¹⁸ After a falling-out with Agassiz, Fewkes turned to ethnology and worked his way to the top of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology.¹⁹

Fewkes chose a fortuitous moment to champion the phonograph as the future of ethnography. He was a decade ahead of the collection of phonograph recordings begun by Carl Stumpf in Berlin in 1900, which became Europe’s preeminent ethnographic sound collection under the aegis of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (the subject of chapter 4). Over the next forty years, new song collections based on recorded sound included recordings of birdsong developed for research at Cornell University, the collection of non-Western music piled in the closets of the New School for Social Research by composer Henry Cowell, and the recordings of American folk songs made by the Lomax family in the late 1930s and 1940s.²⁰

In a natural science dominated by the visual comparison of physical bodies, the phonograph provided a welcome “body” that, like a plant or animal, could be inspected with eyes as well as ears. In this context, recorded collections of sound can be profitably compared with photographs, for the two technologies had fundamentally different advantages from a research perspective. Photographs, unlike recordings, played a secondary, if valued, role in specimen collections. Museum dioramas of humans and animals served as models for photographs representing virtual images of nature that replaced uncaptured moments (and sometimes, as Aaron Glass points out, inspired the humans posing for diorama models to behave more “ethnically”).²¹ But from the perspective of dissection, morphology, and anatomy, replacing animal and cultural specimens with photographs meant a loss in information and the exchange of a primary source for a secondary one. Sound recording, in contrast, replaced in-the-field transcription with a perceived gain in information, exchanging secondary sources with something much more like a material artifact or “body.”

Collectors hailed the phonograph as a tool that would make song collections “a branch of science,” believing, like Fewkes, that this was music’s answer to visual culture.²² Historian Erica Brady has even suggested that the phonograph made possible the turn-of-the-century institutionalization of professional music ethnography.²³ Yet collectors were often stymied by the practical drawbacks of this new technology. Pitch and rhythm changed depending on the speed of the playback machine, making it hard to know what a song really sounded like in its original performance—worst of all was an irregular machine, which altered the pitch in unpredictable ways.²⁴ The British folk-song collector and composer Percy Grainger admitted that sometimes it was necessary to play a record hundreds of times to note down its details accurately, a process during which the record’s fragile wax body would have deteriorated.²⁵

In many ways, the ideal sonic body for ethnographers was the musical instrument, which had a literal body that could be treated like the body of a specimen. About a decade before Fewkes’s phonographs found their way to the Smithsonian, many private collections of musical instruments migrated to museums, finding institutional homes in New York, Berlin, London, and Paris.²⁶ Their classification and display was grounded in the visual emphasis of the natural sciences, often resulting in large groups of beautiful or interesting instruments of dubious sound quality.²⁷ For many years the Crosby-Brown collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, had several faux instruments that included a Mexican chocolate stirrer mistaken for a rattle.²⁸ Looking over this array of visual display, a curator in Paris wrote rather wryly that his collection of historical pianos and harpsichords reminded him of the taxidermical specimens of natural history, seeing “giraffe-pianos” stretching their frozen necks behind the glass wall as he passed their cases.²⁹ The author, Curt Sachs, had recently invented a classification system for musical instruments inspired in part by biological species classification, working with Erich Moritz von Hornbostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.³⁰ Similar classification systems for instruments in France likewise relied on parallels between natural history and social history, organizing hierarchies between nations, colonies, and races through a parade of musical instruments.³¹

Neither wax cylinder recordings nor musical instruments were ideal sonic specimens. In lieu of better options, the object that was often used during the first half of the twentieth century for sonic display and comparison was musical notation. Before Fewkes’s collection of Hopi songs, collectors had routinely relied on musical notation to gather together nature’s music. Scores made good sonic bodies: they were flat, portable, and printable, and could be placed side by side for comparison. Unlike musical instruments, scores conveyed melodies; unlike the grooves of the wax cylinder, they made visual sense to a trained reader.

Early song collections in the nineteenth century were often made without reference to a sound recording, and were created by private individuals. The result was often unabashedly Westernized: collectors harmonized Native American songs like church hymns, and one guide to birdsong even introduced “natural” music with a hundred and seven notes of a dripping faucet in B-flat major.³² By the twentieth century, similar collections were being published by institutions like the Bureau of American Ethnology, and often reflected institutional phonograph collections. The rhetoric of notation became a discourse preoccupied with science.³³ Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews explained that music notation was the best “scientific preservation” available for examples like his notation of a robin in four-part harmony (the result, with the robin singing along to a piano accompaniment, sounds very like a Bach chorale).³⁴ Privately, Mathews worried that his notations would be “hashed” in reviews by unsympathetic critics.³⁵ Another ornithologist working in the 1920s suggested that improved notation would require both alternate scales, like those in Gregorian chant or Chinese music, and a “battery of other instruments” beyond the piano to represent timbre, including the xylophone, banjo, zither, bassoon, and piccolo.³⁶ Still others hoped to replace or supplement musical notation with graphic scores and other symbolic images.³⁷ Even naturalists who hoped to replace musical notes with graphs or other images found musical references too useful to eschew entirely, often using images like a piano keyboard to map out the pitch and vocal register of various birds.³⁸

Ethnographers, too, had energetic discussions about the musical bodies they constructed. In Berlin, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham argued in 1909 that scholars should systematize a series of symbols to adapt Western scores to non-Western sounds.³⁹ Many American collectors seem to have followed suit; Frances Densmore, for example, used many of the German notations in her transcriptions of Chippewa songs published by the Bureau of American Ethnography.⁴⁰

One of the most intriguing collections was Benjamin Ives Gilman’s transcriptions of Hopi songs, published in 1908 and based on Fewkes’s recordings. Gilman’s transcriptions created a hybrid between graphic and traditional notation, drawing the curving lines of performed slides atop fixed noteheads that represented exact pitches on an expanded staff. Fewkes, who had a tinny ear and struggled with music notation, had published extensively on the artifacts from the expedition but had done little with his phonograph records. He sought help from Gilman, a trained art historian with music literacy working with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gilman had an interest in music’s evolution and agreed to transcribe the songs to create a more professional research object for the bureau. In a nod to the history of the American type specimen, Gilman called the collection his “hortus siccus,” the insider’s name for a botanical specimen collection.⁴¹

AUDIOTYPING

As researchers struggled to find musical substitutes for physical bodies, they also faced the problem of developing a methodological analogue for natural history’s systems of classification. Sonic specimens were adapted versions of biological type specimens, bodies whose interpretations were constantly redefined and debated as scholars struggled to accommodate the challenges of constructing a musical “body.” How, then, did the biological identity made tangible in the type specimen translate into the musical identity of the sonic specimen? How should researchers categorize music? And how were their musical examples connected to biology’s categories of race and species? Music scholars worried over these questions in the early decades of the twentieth century as they attempted to use song collections to classify musical difference. For answers, they turned to the same model that had allowed biologists to redefine the classification of species identity at the turn of the century: the type.

Figure 2.1 Benjamin Ives Gilman’s “phonographic transcription” of Hopi song. Gilman, Hopi Songs, 100.

The backdrop for this discourse was an unstable history of biological classification marked by the transition from metaphorical typology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth-century type specimen. Specimen collections trace their origins to the age of seventeenth-century explorers and their ships’ holds of exotica, when expeditions were motivated largely by the promise of selling valuable rarities. As the following century delineated the limits of the world, private and princely collectors built taxonomies of exotic objects in curio cabinets filled with large collections of preserved plants, animals, and insects. During the rise of the great colonial powers in the 1800s, these collections came to represent a country’s imperial reach (sometimes in obvious ways: many nineteenth-century catalogues of Indian ornithological collections represent birds hunted by the British officers who authored the catalogue, but feature illustrations made by local Indian artists hired to do the time-consuming work of painting the figures).⁴² Such collections offered research material for the growing interest in natural taxonomy that took definite shape during the late 1800s in an attempt to trace evolutionary relationships between species. By the early twentieth century, museums and individuals routinely arranged, displayed, and stored specimens in evolutionary ranks of species and subspecies, in drawers and “living” dioramas. By arranging species in order of relatedness, their viewers had immediate access to a visual taxonomy that educated and offered a highly organized frame for morphological research (study based on visual characteristics), making possible the comparison of large numbers of species.⁴³ For many twentieth-century biologists, the primary tool for scientific classification was the visual comparison and subsequent grouping and naming of different specimens.⁴⁴ The cornerstone of this project was, of course, the type specimen.

Like the textual descriptions that were superseded by type specimens, types also came from a literary tradition. Typology originated in biblical exegesis of the early 1600s, when theologians imagined patriarchs like Adam as “types” whose presence in the Old Testament prefigured the identity of Christ.⁴⁵ While explorers sailed to the world’s far reaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collecting exotic curiosities, biblical typology was adapted to secular applications, and developed a broad reach in fields as far-ranging as biology, ethnography, music, and literary studies.⁴⁶ In the field of printing, the prophetic types of Moses and Ezekiel gave way to a different fixed form, the wood and metal block that held the form of a letter.

Typology entered natural history in the 1830s, when the famous naturalist Georges Cuvier adopted the notion of the type from the printing press to describe his new classification system, which would later be used as an adaptation of the Linnaean system.⁴⁷ Cuvier’s types, unlike printers’ blocks, were meant to arrange nature in a definite hierarchy in which lesser animals were represented by species that served as examplars (or types) of their particular genre. This was a typology of synecdoche, in which a strategically chosen part had the power to represent the greater whole. The many varieties of oblong fish who had hard scales, spiny gills, and toothy jaws were best represented by the perch, their type; while the leaf-cutter ant Formica cephalotes of South America, famous for its large colonies and social behavior, proudly stood as the type for the entire ant genus.⁴⁸ Historian Edward Eigen suggests that it was with rather coy self-awareness that Cuvier used different print types to show conceptual types, deploying various typefaces in Le Règne Animal to rank the categories in his prose from more to less general ideas.⁴⁹

Over half a century later, when Cuvier’s types gave way to type specimens, naturalists retained their mania for connecting words, bodies, and categories by synecdoche. They made up new words, like paratype, prototype, and holotype, for different kinds of specimens. One of the first articles in The Auk, the organ of the American Ornithologists’ Union, suggested a long list of new words to be used in species nomenclature that included neologisms like “chironym” (for species names that had not yet been published) and “onymizer” (the person who successfully finds and names a species).⁵⁰ Several years later, paleontologist Charles Schuchert even suggested that biologists adopt words like “protolog” for the first written description of a specimen and “protograph” for the first known picture of a specimen.⁵¹

The bodies that these words represented reflected the tension between ideals and reality that was embedded in the notion of the type. Like Cuvier’s types, specimens were supposed to represent an entire category of bodies. It was a heavy burden to place on the preserved remains of plants and animals, and naturalists carefully culled through their options to cultivate specimens that, they felt, met the ideal of a species. The modern museum preparator was expected to be a naturalist, sculptor, and artist, crafting what biology editor Frank Thone rhapsodically called “the exact form of the animal’s lithe grace, its smooth waves of muscle, every vibrant detail that existed under its skin while it was still breathing and moving.”⁵² The story of the process through which such specimens were selected for display in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of African Mammals, as told by Donna Haraway, shows just how important this interplay was between taxonomic practice and idealizations of the body.⁵³ Haraway’s story demonstrates that the type specimen of a species was almost always male, and that display specimens were carefully curated to represent idealized postures and attributes ascribed to a given species.

This process of preparing and ordering specimens was just as important for those who collected and curated sonic bodies in the early twentieth century. But what was a musical “type”? Unlike an animal body, a song changed every time it was sung, and the recordings and transcriptions that served as sonic specimens were records of transient, singular experiences that had fundamental differences from the biological type specimen. A musical type was revealed by a whole collection of specimen melodies, not a single example—there was rarely a musical “type specimen.” Instead, the cowboy “type” was found in the melodic pattern of American ballads for one scholar, while the English “type” was discovered by another in simple uses of church modes.⁵⁴ Naturalists, not to be outdone, compared hundreds of birdsongs to determine species types in the first half of the century. Aretas Saunders identified seven types in the song of the field sparrow (Spizella pusilla), and five for the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia).⁵⁵ Ornithologists at Cornell University managed to outfit a truck with film recording equipment in the 1930s, translating the songs of wild birds into the visible lines scrawled across the soundtrack, images they then compared under a microscope in their own search for avian song types.⁵⁶ The collector who financed that expedition, Albert Brand, sent some of the resulting recordings to a music ethnographer named Laura Craytor Boulton (one of the protagonists of chapter 3) for inspection.⁵⁷ Ethnographers working with the Bureau of American Ethnology on Native Americans worked especially hard to identify song types.⁵⁸ Before 1918, Frances Densmore plotted her collection of six hundred Sioux songs in tables and charts to determine five song types whose contours exemplified the Sioux tradition, while her colleague Helen Roberts borrowed Densmore’s method to identify a type for the songs used in the Pawnee Skull Bundle Ceremony.⁵⁹

Like biological types, song types navigated the disparity between ideals and thorny reality. Ideals in the case of music were closely tied to preexisting racial and national typologies. Music specialists often took for granted the “decisive leaning towards rhythm” of the French, the “innocent minds” of Italian melodists, and the “strenuous thought” of German musicians, hearing their own expectations in the songs of various nations.⁶⁰ British collectors Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson explained early in the century how a sufficiently large collection of songs could be used to scientifically demonstrate these associations, and eventually prove that “the scheme of a tune … develops racial traits [in time], just as the country has developed racial traits in the music of speech.”⁶¹ By the 1920s and 1930s, such empirical aspirations had reached into the laboratory, with experimental psychologists such as Carl Seashore suggesting that quantitative measurements of sonic specimens would “take us into the field of genetic studies of inheritance … and studies of racial types and the evolution of music in primitive peoples.”⁶²

Song typologies thus occupied the center of a three-part process in which songs were institutionalized and analyzed as objects of scientific research. First, collectors gathered them in the field. Collections were then assimilated into institutions and organized through typological practices. In the final and aspirational step of this process, song types were confirmed and analyzed in laboratory settings like Seashore’s. Just as the lives of collectors shaped the songs they collected, the central step in this process of institutionalized classifications of music was also shaped by life’s ambiguities.

The gap between real and ideal in the search for song types was particularly affected by problems of notation. Many of the specialists invested in song typing expressed concern that Westernized notations were making it difficult or impossible to study songs properly.⁶³ But those worries were often simultaneously framed by a desire that alternatives to Western scores reflect not a song’s particular details, but its ideal typological form. As one collector of Russian folk songs explained, scholars needed to reduce songs “to their simplest form and, by omitting melodic ornamentation dependent upon the individual taste of the leader, preserve only the foundation of the melody.”⁶⁴ It is worth reading closely the words of Helen Roberts, as she described the problems facing sonic typology in 1922 amid her research at the Bureau of American Ethnology:

Not only is it difficult to seize upon and designate the peculiarities which distinguish certain types, upon hearing the song, but in reading over the notation they are not all equally clear to a musician, who must needs reduce the music to some simple formulae covering the structure, etc., in order to have them clearly in mind. Such a reduction is even more necessary for those whose unfamiliarity with the symbolism of printed music renders the subject still more complex. For the sake of obtaining the bald outline of the tune and the design which it formed, structurally, it seemed best for the time being in analyzing different songs to eliminate key signatures, musical notes, with their different values, all pitches less than whole step intervals, all measure bars and accents, all expression marks, in fact everything that might be considered to belong to the realm of color in music.⁶⁵

Roberts suggests that although the collected song had to be accurately notated, its typological analysis was actually a generalization based on the removal of detail. Institutionalized studies of songs and their types in the laboratory are discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, but Roberts’s words say much about the ways that visual representation, typology, and the sonic specimen were affected by the tension between real and ideal experiences of songs.

IN THE FIELD

And what of the collector, the hunter in field and village who gathered songs alongside birds and bees? As I draw this chapter to a close, I move from the museum to the field, where the professional song collector provided a slightly different perspective on the work of institutional typology. In the museum, specimens were compared side by side in a space that stripped them of their original context. Typology, the final step in this process, allowed researchers to generalize about the characteristics that made up a body or artifact’s identity by removing it from its original environment. This work of generalization was highly respected in studies of musical, as well as biological, difference. But in the field, identity was shaped by specific contexts, events, and relationships. Even scholars such as Roberts, who did both kinds of work, had to navigate the differences between locating specimens in the field and analyzing them in the museum. These differences were complicated by the fact that the work of collecting specimens was not as valued as the work of analyzing them. The specimens that were supposed to structure identity were themselves structured by the social hierarchies of science.

In the specimen’s admission to institutions of knowledge, the work of collecting often came to seem less important and less prestigious than the comparisons that went on once animals and artifacts were in the hands of universities and natural history museums. Experiences of specimens in the field, be they animal or musical, were generally treated with less seriousness than their organization and identification within museum storerooms or laboratories. And curators and professors who worked with specimens in museums and libraries came to view collecting as clerical work, something that was done by junior scholars and, very often, by women.⁶⁶

To some collectors, it seemed as if this mania for typology undervalued both the collector and the real, lived identities that he or she encountered in the field. Consider the following summary of one collector’s five-page comparison of the institutional scientist and the field collector:

NATURALIST (institutional scientist)

Traces family, subfamily, genus, and species

Deals in Latin and Greek terms of resounding and disheartening combinations

Loses anatomy and markings in scientific jargon

Impales moths and dissects, magnifies, and locates brain, heart, and nerves

Neglects essential details and is not always rightly informed

NATURE LOVER (field collector)

Goes afield for rest and recreation

Appreciates the common things of life as they appeal to the senses

Identifies based on behavior and habits rather than species or anatomy

Does not care for Latin and Greek terms

Pronounces large silk moths to be exquisite creations

I compiled this resentful typology from the writings of Gene Stratton-Porter, a nature lover, lepidopterist, and novelist whose books include Moths of the Limberlost and Music of the Wild, the two books in which the Nature lover and the Naturalist were explained.⁶⁷ For Stratton-Porter, the rise of institutional collections marked the loss of natural knowledge based on living behaviors, valorizing instead the inspection of the dead. She used sound to drive home her point, explaining that only in the field would an experienced and dedicated collector hear the sound of a luna moth emerging from its cocoon. “There is a faint noise of tearing as the inner case is broken and the tough cocoon cut for emergence,” explained Stratton-Porter, completing the sequence with silence: “Once in the air and light, if those exquisite wings make a sound it is too faint for mortal ears to hear.”⁶⁸

Like Stratton-Porter, the famed Hungarian song collector Béla Bartók was also a collector of moths. He was fond of insects, asking his son Peter to “send me at least a butterfly wing or beetle-thigh” when he traveled to Panama.⁶⁹ Insects found their way into Bartók’s compositions as well, notably in “From the Diary of a Fly” in Mikrokosmos and the opening of “Musiques Nocturnes,” the fourth movement of the Out of Doors Suite for solo piano.⁷⁰ But while Stratton-Porter lamented the literal deaths that had been institutionalized by the moth-impaling Naturalist, Bartók transferred this analogy of life and death to sound. A collector satisfied with mindlessly recording a song, he argued,

would be like the entomologist or lepidopterist who would be satisfied with the assembly and preparation of the different species of insects or butterflies. If his satisfaction rests there, then his collection is an inanimate material. The genuine, scientific naturalist, therefore, not only collects and prepares but also studies and describes, as far as possible, the most hidden moments of animal life…. Similar reasons direct the folk music collector to investigate in detail the conditions surrounding the real life of the melodies.⁷¹

Music historians have pondered Bartók’s representation of human bodies and races.⁷² As a collector, however, Bartók imagined musical knowledge through the space between the animal body, the field collector, and the institutionalization of the specimen.

In the next chapter, I move from the institution of the sonic specimen to the experiences of collectors in the field. Stratton-Porter approached the differences between institutional research and fieldwork from the perspective of a deeply committed conservationist. She urged scientists to choose the path of the Nature lover over mass collecting, and argued that specimens should be replaced with photography. Bartók, whose career played out in both institutions and the field, believed that vast numbers of specimens (and musical deaths) were valuable, but also recognized that the experiences of living people would be affected if musical identity was purged of its context. The views of Stratton-Porter and Bartók, which offer a brief glimpse of a large and complex practice, suggest the importance of the perceived oppositions between institutional collections and specimens in the field.

At stake in those oppositions were two very different kinds of identity. In institutional comparisons of specimens, nomenclature and typology served to purge sounds of their particularities in order to classify and organize identity as an aggregate, a group or a class. Such categorical identities relied on notions of species identification to function within larger narratives of biocultural evolution, which told stories of large-scale changes that occurred through and across groups, rather than individuals. Objectivity, generalization, and the need for massive numbers of specimens attended work in the museum, library, or laboratory.

These notions of identity, however, failed to account for the role of the specimen in the field. There, identity was constituted through particular experiences and interactions between collectors and the sounds or animals they collected. Collectors and their subjects formed relationships that were both mercenary and affectionate. Animals and songs were hunted, prized, possessed, and imagined on a singular basis that seemed at odds with typological comparison, for the particularities that were purged in typological research were often intensely relevant in the field. Context, detail, and emotional relationships attended these particularities amid radical inequalities between collectors and the bodies and artifacts they hunted. In the next chapter, I leave behind institutional notions of identity in order to attend more closely to the experiences and voices of collectors, whose lives in the field held stories that institutional collections alone would never fully explain.