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Introduction

In 1904, American naturalist Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews wrote that he heard a song sparrow perform “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s hit opera Rigoletto, complete with its own improvised cadenza.¹ This seems like high praise for a bird, but maybe it was not. It turns out that Verdi’s aria was the kind of song critics loved to hate. One begged for the opera to be dead and buried; another thought the song embodied the “obvious and insipid” sound of mandolins in Italian restaurants.² A nurse wrote in 1917 that it was the kind of tune she heard from the “ignorant peasants” she treated, farm laborers who had emigrated from Italy.³ To hear “La donna” in the song of a sparrow was to hear some or all of these references.

Other listeners have heard different kinds of musicality in the song sparrow’s voice. Their comparisons are symptoms of a strange and expansive musical taxonomy. A few years after Mathews’s comparison, another naturalist compared the sparrow’s tunes to the songs of ancient Greeks and medieval monks, cultural icons that, like Verdi, were heard with a mixture of reverence and condescension.⁴ In the 1930s an ornithologist searching for a more objective standard compared the bird to the winter wren, instead of to human singers.⁵ And in 1951, a well-known ornithologist named Aretas Saunders published the results of a study based on over eight hundred different examples of the bird’s song. His birds did not sing desiccated tunes from Rigoletto but the nineteenth-century American song “Reuben, I’ve Been Thinking.”⁶ Like “La donna,” “Reuben” was a melody of the mediocre, associated with lowbrow society and racial difference through its history of blackface minstrelsy and popular theater.⁷ Today, Verdi and blackface have been replaced with Beethoven in the sparrow’s taxonomy, for Wikipedia explains that the bird’s song resembles the opening of the Fifth Symphony.⁸ These strange appraisals of sparrow music span a century of birds, and over two thousand years of human music.

FIGURE I.1 Song sparrow singing “La donna è mobile.” Mathews, Field Book of Wild Birds.

To read these comparisons is to confront a host of questions. Who is valued when we evaluate musical difference? How are such evaluations performed? How are music’s categories conditioned by the broad divide between humans and other animals? What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy? How are assumptions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and other forms of difference tied to assumptions about species? What particular histories of love and violence are needed to place the song sparrow in conversation with Beethoven in the early twenty-first century? My book explores these questions through a history of the modern taxonomies of sonic knowledge that arise from the bodies and voices of animals.

The central argument of this book is that modern sonic culture is unthinkable without the lives of animals. Comparisons of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality have shaped Western music’s taxonomies since at least the seventeenth century. Since the advent of biological evolutionism in the late 1800s, animals’ bodies and voices have epitomized notions of natural difference in music discourse, particularly in the realm of song. Musical differences of style, genre, and type have been imagined against and through the radically varying accounts of natural difference given in the past century by geneticists, natural history museums, social activists, environmentalists, and others. Amid these varying accounts, the songs and lives of animals have been a recurring benchmark against which musical difference is measured.

I pick up these threads in the pages that follow to ask how animal lives have served to organize music, especially songs, in relation to broad notions of categorical difference. My story is set between the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871 and the present day, amid diverse studies of songs made by music scholars, biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. Their work took place in museums, laboratories, and the pages of scholarly publications located primarily in the United States and Europe. From these seemingly disparate points of origin, I trace a history in which music’s ordering has become entwined with attempts to categorize and classify songs in relation to animals. In the background of this story, the lives of animals emerge as a necessary condition for contemporary divisions between natural and cultural knowledge. My book threads those lives through a critical transition after World War II, when anxieties about racial comparison led scholars to reject comparisons between animal songs and human musicality. The resulting history raises questions about how the status of animals has been a formational element in music’s ethics, its categories, and its place in the humanities.

ANIMAL KNOWLEDGE: A PREHISTORY

What does it mean to say that modern sonic culture cannot be fully told without the lives of animals? To ask this question is to ask how scientific and social valuations of animal life have become intertwined with the cultural evaluation of music. Most of the examples I use in this book examine studies of animals or songs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But before laying out the stakes of that history, I turn here in my introduction to a prehistory to those examples drawn from specific places and people in nineteenth-century science that used animal bodies to define what difference meant, and how it should be measured. Just as animals’ voices have been a benchmark of natural difference in evaluations of culture, their bodies became a standard of objective measurement in the nineteenth century. Much of this book is about the way that today’s standards of objectivity were once based on the disposability of animal life, and later came to be transferred to studies of music along with specific ethics and values that transferred with those techniques. I begin, therefore, with a brief turn toward two places in which the transition from animal to musical measurement began, where the “grandfathers” of my story taught young scientists how to make knowledge out of animal bodies.

The first of these places is the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a building in which animal bodies were arrayed in a kind of natural panopticon in the late 1800s. The museum’s director at the time, Alexander Agassiz, is the first of two grandfathers in my family history. Alexander built on his father Louis’s vision of a museum that would allow scientists to compare nature’s diversity firsthand, expanding the collections and introducing a new experimental laboratory for research. Alexander Agassiz was also a successful teacher, and his students became important figures in comparative science.

Agassiz’s students from the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s included several scholars that figure in my book as teachers or mentors who made significant shifts from comparative zoology to cultural studies. Two especially notable students are Charles Davenport and Jesse Walter Fewkes. Davenport received his doctorate from Harvard’s zoology program in 1892, and taught and researched there until 1899. By the early 1900s, however, his interests had shifted from zoology to eugenics, and he founded the Eugenics Records Office at his laboratories in Cold Spring Harbor. The Eugenics Records Office became an important center for American eugenics research in the 1920s, and served as a site at which animal and cultural comparison interconnected. Davenport was a mentor for some of the central characters in this book, including song collector Laura Boulton and ethologist Wallace Craig.

Another Agassiz student, Jesse Walter Fewkes, worked with Agassiz at Harvard from 1878 until 1886, when he left his position as Agassiz’s assistant in order to work as an ethnographer on a trip to the American Southwest. On that trip, Fewkes recorded songs that became the foundation of a shift in his career toward musical, instead of zoological, comparison. He became a central figure in comparative song studies in the United States, founding what eventually became the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of folk and ethnic songs. Fewkes, too, plays a central role in the lineage of my book’s stories, and is a well-known figure in the history of music anthropology. Although other stories about the place of song in comparative zoology offer more canonic histories of science, the stories that emerge from the Harvard Museum’s genealogy outline otherwise unknown connections between animal life and cultural evaluation.⁹ They also recuperate a history of racial comparison that has long been submerged beneath uncomfortable silences that surround the rise of American genetics.

Agassiz’s work at the Harvard Museum was inspired in part by the second site of my prehistory, a branch of experimental physiology developed at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the mid-1800s. Johannes Müller, the other grandfather of my book, taught anatomy and physiology at the university during the mid-nineteenth century. While he was in Berlin, Müller developed new techniques in experimental science that made it possible to observe the motions inside an animal’s body in the moments before it died, using a practice called vivisection. His innovations in experimental physiology allowed scientists to understand the body’s working, through evidence based on direct observation of animals’ organs. The result was a new model of quantitative laboratory knowledge, inspired by the startling possibility of quantifying invisible vibrations of hearts, lungs, and nerves through a complex series of mechanical tools in the laboratory that transformed moving bodies into graphic images. Müller’s students (who included Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Carl Ludwig, and Ernst Haeckel) adapted the tools of physiology to ask new questions in psychology, investigating the workings of nerves, ears, eyes, and even of beauty itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tools of Berlin physiology had been appropriated into a host of new applications that included comparative studies of music.

While the genealogy of Agassiz is a lineage of people, my book’s genealogy of Müller is a lineage of devices. Existing histories of audio technology describe the phonograph’s emergence from studies of the human voice conducted in the late 1800s.¹⁰ This book maps the ethics and practices of those studies backward, into the valuation of animal bodies in the 1850s. The same tools that were originally used to transform vibrations from within the bodies of dying laboratory animals into images were adapted over time to transform the vibrations of sound into graphic inscriptions in studies of music. The devices borrowed from vivisection ranged from the ear phonautograph that Edison built in 1874 using a human ear to the sound spectrograph developed in the 1950s, a tool that is still used today in scientific studies of animal vocalizations.¹¹ Considered together, these tools and the graphic scores they create took a set of standards that were originally developed in response to the practice of animal vivisection, and exported those standards into the study of sound as the criteria for objectivity. Today, such graphic tools continue to tie constructions of sonic knowledge to the ethics and practices of animal laboratory research, constructing “sonic” objectivity.

The importance of European laboratory science to music’s culture has been well documented in studies that draw connections between scientific thought and twentieth-century music. Historians have shown the impact of acoustic physics, phenomenology, and aesthetic philosophies on the musical epistemologies of the twentieth century.¹² In my book, I turn from those histories of ideas to a history of bodies, in order to consider more closely how tools that were developed in response to the bodies of animals came to be appropriated for the objective study of sound. This tradition is an important prehistory for the material I present in my chapters, where I will argue that the valuation of animals in science served as the foundation upon which later evaluations of sonic culture were built. This approach connects music’s epistemologies to an overlooked history of bodily evaluations, in which the classification of different types of music was interwoven with the exclusionary culture in which knowledge was built upon a privileged relationship between European scientists, animals, and other “others.”

This is not just a story about music scholarship’s relation to scientific methods, but about the centrality of animal bodies and voices to an empirical ethics that was applied to music-making bodies of every kind, and that continues to surface today in the standards that affect how music is classified and catalogued. The scientific traditions I explore in this book are often exclusionary, dependent on colonial, gendered, and racial economies that privileged white European masculinity while relying on the labor and lives of those who fell within a catchall of difference. The work of white women, nonnormative white men, nonwhite people, and nonhuman animals was often marked within these traditions as menial or illegible. In cases where exclusion was central to the process of scientific research, it also affected the way questions about music were asked and answered. The protagonists of my chapters operate within the borderlands of this tradition, and their personal lives and careers were conditioned by the structures of this unequal economy. Within those structures lie many nuances. Privileged individuals can be victims as well as perpetrators, and good science can reveal real truths that emerge as fiction within the confines of interpretation. The trajectory of my book is defined by the quandaries that these individuals discovered, described, or repressed within this exclusionary history as they confronted the conditions in which animals represented broader categorical differences that included races, nations, genders, and cultures as well as species.

The histories of musical comparison and evaluation that emerge from these two traditions raise important questions about the broader genesis of “the humanities” as we know them. My book’s narrative implicates the category of “the animal” as a point of departure for turn-of-the-century musicological research that was not strictly humanistic, but relied on perceived connections between the status of the animal and race, gender, and other forms of naturalized difference. On the surface, today’s construction of music as a humanistic endeavor seems unrelated to these older categories. In this book, however, I argue that contemporary humanism developed as a corrective measure amid a backlash against racial evolutionism that occurred after World War II. While comparisons between animals and human races were rejected in the aftermath of the war, the category of “the animal” itself remained unchanged, and the capacity of the animal to facilitate universalizing categories of difference remained unexamined. The postwar construction of the humanities as divided from science and species has only intensified the singularity of “the animal” as a foundational category of difference. In the pages of my book, I focus on stories in which animals have constructed modern sonic culture. But I also seek to make present, through these stories, the missing histories of race and difference that underpin the modern construction of the humanities as we know them.

A TASTE FOR RUPTURE

By placing the divisions between humans and other animals at the center of my narrative, I want this book to be an intervention in the kinds of questions we ask of humanism and the humanities. What is an anti-speciesist history of music? What is the singular of the plural entity called the humanities, and what is its purpose? What happens if you believe, as I do, that the question “What is a humanity?” is inseparable from histories of difference? How does one use the disciplinary engine of knowledge we call the humanities when that engine is predicated on deeply unequal relationships between categories of difference such as race, gender, culture, or species? This intervention is not a posthumanist one, for posthumanism is tied to the history I explore. Instead, two questions guide my study of music’s taxonomies:

What is difference?

What is a humanity?

What is difference? To paraphrase animal studies scholar Una Chaudhuri, thinking about animals is reshaping the way we approach cultural categories in every corner of academic discourse: gender, class, race, nation, age, profession, sexual orientation, marital status, and, of course, species.¹³ Today a growing literature addresses the intersection of animality with historical categories of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation.¹⁴ That intersection of human and animal difference is one I find particularly salient in the modern history of Western music, where divisions between genres and styles have become intertwined with narratives of cultivated identity.

The measure of difference that compares a sparrow’s song to a Beethoven symphony is also, I argue, a practice that preconditions our present experience of culture, race, and biology. Within the context of my book, I treat difference as a particular heritage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has affected the politics and structure of music’s orderings in the early twenty-first century. In my book’s stories, difference was often treated by those who studied songs as if it were a unifying, natural principle that connected existing categories such as race, nation, or gender to a broader state. Within the lives of the actors that occupy my narrative, being a woman, or an immigrant, or an Italian, or a dog were all unique, particular experiences. But while such experiences have unique histories and contexts, the practice of comparing songs across racial, national, gendered, and species boundaries demanded a notion of difference as a foundational category premised on the belief that forms of difference exist in a shared state of diversification waiting to be compared, analyzed, and organized. In the cases that I explore, animals were the exemplar of that state. For those who have lived with and through this epistemology in which a sparrow and Beethoven sing on a shared musical taxonomic plane, to talk about birds is to talk about race, gender, sexuality, or class; and to talk about gender, race, or class is to talk about species.

This brings me to my second question, “What is a humanity?” For those who believe that modern epistemology has been shaped by the notion that all forms of difference implicate one another, to ask “What is a humanity?” is to ask about more than the divide between human and nonhuman actors. Scholars have had a taste for the rupture between the humanities and the sciences since the late twentieth century, when the divisions between humans and animals, laboratories and libraries, and genetic inheritance and cultural heritage captured their interest.¹⁵ In the twenty-first century, posthumanism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology have built on this foundation to bring forth rich theories about nonhuman agency and the interpretation of objects. My book’s exploration of musical taxonomy is a kind of counter-history of this movement toward the nonhuman. In that counter-history, I figure the question “What is a humanity?”—the act of recognizing the problematic division between the human and nonhuman—as an act that is impossible to perform without partial or full participation in the past century of taxonomic interventions that are always already raced, gendered, sexed, animaled, and otherwise ordered through difference.

What is this book not? It is not a comprehensive, consecutive history, but a speculative one. Its chapters are arranged chronologically and have substantial interconnections, but each chapter can be read independently. I have tried to fill these chapters with events and experiences that are inherently interesting and meaningful: a young woman’s discovery of a new species in Angola; a deaf naturalist obsessed with birdsong; a Berlin psychologist trying to perform vivisections on songs; a British biologist tracing pictures of animal music. The protagonists of these chapters are loosely related by their shared teachers, institutions, and disciplinary norms. The history that results is not a critique or rebuttal of the posthuman, but an alternative. That alternative is limited to about a century and a half, and it is within that period that I locate words such as “modern,” “humanity,” or “animal.” This book is also not in favor of dispensing with notions of difference or similarity, but seeks to provoke questions about how such ideas can be used responsibly. Songs have a unique place in this history, and I use them to suggest a much broader narrative than one book can truly contain.

My questions “What is difference?” and “What is a humanity?” are premised on the expectation that the unsustainable divide interrogated by posthumanism cannot be resolved without simultaneously addressing the question of how difference has been historically constructed in the twentieth century. I seek to make a beginning toward that effort in the pages that follow. In the conclusion of this book, I call those aspirations the “animanities,” an outgrowth of my experience with posthumanism and animal studies in their aesthetic and academic forms, situated in the study of culture as a more-than-human reality.

What is difference, and what is a humanity? The stakes of these questions range from the issue of who does interdisciplinary work and how, to the financial pressure to leverage cultural inquiry into scientific funding sources in the twenty-first century. But knowledge is also at stake, and I will argue in the chapters to come that how we make knowledge about culture and music is intricately tied up with the question of how we evaluate difference, and how that evaluation is also a valuation of different lives.

AMNESIA

If humanism does not answer the needs of this book, what does? George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”¹⁶ To remember the past is very much the project of this book. I begin that process of remembrance by remembering the birds’ voices that gave the original context to Santayana’s words: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness … when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it … Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”¹⁷ Santayana’s The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress, published in 1905, shared his generation’s conviction that animal nature had much to reveal about the capacity to speak and, therefore, to be heard. The chirping bird that occupies the lowest place in Santayana’s taxonomy of memory was put into print only a year after Mathews compared the song sparrow to Verdi’s “La donna è mobile,” and was followed by many more such comparisons.

In the intervening century, the history that connects music’s taxonomies to the status of animals has largely faded and been forgotten. Yet interconnections between the lives of animals and today’s constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of difference have been thoroughly demonstrated by recent scholars within animal studies.¹⁸ By recuperating the history that connects animal lives to measures of musical difference, my book is meant as an intervention within the postmodern, postwar, posthuman construction of humanism and the humanities as spaces in which animality and other constructions of difference can be treated separately and ahistorically. By framing my history of music’s taxonomies as a counter-history of the present, I hope that my readers adopt an active role in reimagining music’s orders outside of established human/nonhuman, culture/nature, humanities/science dyads.

The first half of this book engages the period between 1871 and 1950 to show how metaphors of animal life and death framed a process of collecting, classifying, and analyzing songs as a measure of difference. I begin chapter 1 at the end of the nineteenth century, with a print war between Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer about the evolutionary origins of musical aesthetics. Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, proffered a controversial theory that aesthetics and music originated in artistic, skillful, and self-aware animal minds. The book sparked heated responses as thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries asked whether other animals, particularly birds, possessed the capacity for culture. In the ensuing comparisons between animal and human song, musical evolution became a means to debate the right to personhood.

The following three chapters follow the course of music’s place in hierarchies of difference through traditions of collecting, classifying, and analyzing songs. In chapter 2, I explore the introduction of collected songs into institutional collections as the musical equivalent of natural history specimens. These institutional song collections offer a revealing glimpse of the way biological models of identity and identification shaped beliefs about songs and those who produced them. In chapter 3, I turn to the experiences of the professional song collectors who made institutional collections possible. In this chapter I shift from institutional history to biographical narrative, in order to show how notions of identity and difference were intertwined with deeply personal experiences of inequality in the profession of song collecting. I focus in this chapter on the experiences of two collectors from the 1920s and ’30s, a psychologist and zoologist named Wallace Craig, and a music expert named Laura Craytor Boulton. Through their stories, I examine the way essentialized beliefs about bodily inequality became the conditions under which song collectors crafted both their collections and their careers.

Turning from the collection and classification of songs to a music laboratory in Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century, in chapter 4 I explore the ways that notions of musical data in the 1920s and ’30s were premised on a nineteenth-century ethics of vivisection, in which animal lives were traded for empirical knowledge, taking the form of graphic inscriptions made by the tools of the physiological laboratory such as the kymograph. Musical data, I therefore suggest, was the written result of this exchange of difference. Instead of answering the question posed by the tradition of animal vivisection—“Is knowledge worth killing for?”—I ask my readers to resist the premise of the original question, which posits that our job is to weigh the value of life against the value of knowledge.

Chapter 5 marks a turning point in my narrative, in which human identity was redefined after World War II through a separation of the spheres of biology and culture. The second half of my book explores this post-1950 period, starting with the crisis in scientific knowledge that laid the groundwork for this changing world. I show here how the dramatic rejection of racial comparison in evolutionary biology and the social sciences made it desirable for studies of music to become a separate topic from studies of evolutionary development. In chapter 5, I explore the reinvention of evolutionary theory through a distinction between genetic and cultural inheritance. Paying special attention to the rise of genetics at the laboratories of Cold Spring Harbor, I suggest in this chapter that the special status of the human after World War II—the division of culture from biology that defined postwar notions of the humanities—is the postmodern condition of race.

In chapter 6, I show how new audio technology offered a welcome pretext in this divided environment to replace the musicianship of the prewar “sonic specimen” with machines that would dramatically change perceptions of animal “music,” making it the mark of a neurological, rather than a cultural, capacity. As a result of this changing practice, being musical in the post–World War II world meant, by definition, being human, while studies of birdsong and other animal vocalizations fell under the rubric of a laboratory science divorced from conventional ideas of “music.” In this chapter, I trace that rupture of knowledge into the disparate worlds of human song studies and studies of birdsong that postdate 1950. The result is a dynamic difference in disciplinary standards for evidence, exemplified by the role of the objective graphic image, first explored in chapter 4 as the picture of vivisection.

The closing chapter of my book revisits traditions of the sonic specimen and aural identity in the context of audio field guides to birdsong. These are objects that both replicate and challenge the postmodern divorce between birdsong and human music. In this chapter, I focus on three exceptional cases, in which listening to other species is a guide toward alternate notions of the self located in exotic paradises. Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, Steven Feld’s Rainforest Soundwalks, and Miyoko Chu’s Birdscapes offer a shared yearning for something best described as the Garden of Eden. These cases conclude my book with three imagined paradises that respond to a world that has been partially determined by the restriction of things of the spirit to the human experience. I end the chapter with questions about how we might imagine paradise beyond the restrictions of the postwar, postmodern, posthuman division between human and nonhuman life.

In the course of these seven chapters, seven themes emerge that offer a foothold for rethinking the more-than-human conditions of culture that emerge from this history. In the conclusion of this book, I imagine these themes as the foundation of the practice I call the animanities, the more-than-human study of culture. I chart a path into the animanities through the stakes raised by each chapter—personhood, identity, difference, knowledge, postmodern humanity, subjectivity, and paradise—as they lay claim to this imagined field of inquiry. Neither quite posthuman nor merely animal, my mapping of the animanities closes with an assertion of the urgency of considering these stakes in a world where human identity itself is being remade at all levels, from our dependence on a rapidly changing environment to the medically altered molecules of our DNA.

The ties between culture, race, and species are of more interest today than they have been for many years. Since 2000, the emergence of brain imaging technology, the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, the discovery of Paleolithic bone flutes in 1995 and 2008, and the use of CRISPR technologies to edit human genes in 2013 have returned cultural evolutionism to the sphere of public inquiry. In the past fifteen years, science writers and music scholars including Steven Mithen, Aniruddh Patel, Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Ian Cross, Daniel Levitin, and Gary Tomlinson have published a wave of new texts on music’s evolution. These contributions come at a moment when the relatively strong funding available in the sciences incentivizes science-oriented readings of music. Yet the turn toward musical evolutionism reinscribes the notion that humanistic labor is inherent to a “normal” human body, and therefore needs neither resources nor support to persist, so long as the normal human body survives.

This return to evolutionary thought calls to mind Santayana’s admonition that we are condemned to repeat the past that we forget. For many, the events of the early twenty-first century echo the crises of nationalism, immigration, global violence, and technological change that shaped the first half of the twentieth century. Amid those echoes, the lives of animals point toward what we have forgotten: something about how constructions of difference are the mechanism of posthumanism as well as its material; something about how music came to be removed from animal voices; something that we cannot quite remember about the nature and politics of hearing identity and difference.

To borrow from Santayana, I use the following pages to seek the empowerment offered by history’s memory. Though my book’s narrative begins at the end of the nineteenth century, its place is in the present, a moment at which musical classification, evolutionary science, and commercial metadata have converged. This project does not seek to erase, eradicate, or fully explain the differences between humanism and scientific inquiry. But it does seek to bridge those differences by articulating one of the historical causes that has restricted music to the human sphere: the persistent power of culture to categorize difference, and to determine who it is that counts as a person.