humor, growth, and joy. Thanks to Dave Novak for his generous and thoughtful ideas about mechanical transcription, and to Ellie Hisama and Emily Wilbourne’s Women, Music, Power conference in 2015. I am especially indebted to my students. Their questions, ideas, and perspectives are an ongoing part of the work I care about. The students in my elective seminars in 2015 at the University of Pittsburgh had an especially important place in the making of this book: Kevin O’Brien, Lu-Han Li, Danny Rosenmund, Julie Van Gyzen, Juan Velasquez, Xinyang Wang, Hety Wong, Chris Capizzi, John Petrucelli, and Jonathan Shold. Thank you all.
This book tells a story and asks questions that I care about and believe in. As you read it, I hope you’ll discover a new perspective on history and the people (of many sorts) we share it with. But like most scholars, I worry about all the mistakes I made. Did I misread a source? Fail to credit another author’s work? Ignore a significant event, person, or place? Translate another language badly? Make it seem like this story is the only story? Whatever they are, any mistakes, errors, or shortcomings in this book are entirely mine. I hope you will be patient with them as you discover them, and learn from the things this book does best.
Last but hardly least, I am grateful for the support and love of my family. Many thanks to my siblings for their constant love and support; to my close friends; and especially to my mother, who read me nature stories when I was a child and gave me bird guides and animal books after I became an adult. Finally, I am grateful to Climber, the blue-tongued skink who has lived with me for the past seven years. He will not care about acknowledgments in a book (I gave him an egg instead), but I would be remiss not to include his silent, cool, and scaly support in my thanks.
Animal Musicalities
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