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