more clear than in the contested sphere of the female’s capacity to listen. Darwinian sexual selection and Spencerian social evolutionism located aesthetic capacity in the virility of men.111 In the United States and Europe, theories of evolution that often represented women’s primary role as reproductive coincided with polarized public debates about women’s suffrage, rights, and roles outside the home.112
In a revealing episode, American ornithologist Chauncey Hawkins outraged his peers in 1918 with an article whose subtexts—published while Congress was attempting to ratify women’s right to vote in the United States—reflected human politics a bit too clearly.113 Claiming that song’s primary function was to frighten rival males and break down the female’s resistance to sex, Hawkins argued that sexual selection assumed an animal consciousness that could more easily be explained by the lively hormones of males. Males and females did not relate through musical aesthetics, he wrote, but through the brutal persistence and force that males needed to break down the “coy” reluctance of the female, a coyness he believed was nature’s necessary counterbalance to the female’s otherwise uncontrollable sexual impulses.114 Song, he argued, wasn’t about beauty or pleasure but about the fundamental differences between the sexes. “The male sings more vigorously because he is a male,” he wrote, explaining that vigor was part of the male’s necessary world.115
Although the article made some salient points about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theory, its mechanistic approach and gender politics drew a rapid response. Aretas Saunders quickly wrote to The Auk to criticize Hawkins for his inability to tell calls from songs, as well as for Hawkins’s claim that instances of female birdsong were aberrations caused by a hormonal imbalance, while Francis Allen mocked Hawkins for his naïve assumptions about “female constancy” and his inability to attribute agency to either gender.116 “Shall we deny an equal appreciation of [song] to the female?” asked Allen, adding, “and if the female appreciates the beauty of the male’s song, why should she not discriminate between the songs she hears and succumb most readily to the ardor of the finest singer?”117
Saunders, for his part, left his readers with a particularly striking description of courtship that represented male and female alike as sensitive and considerate listeners: “The Robin (Planestictus migratorius), in the late days of April when mating is in progress, may be found singing with its bill closed, the notes hardly audible for more than a hundred feet. At such times its mate is nearly always to be found in the same tree, evidently listening with pleasure to this whispered song, which is apparently sung for its benefit only.”118 It was a sound, he said, that he had heard frequently, and in both eastern and western robins; but neither in print nor in anecdote had he ever heard his experience corroborated, though birders today call this the “whisper song” and, just like Saunders, look for the listening female when they hear it.119
The listening robin, and her attentive mate, brought the questions of social evolutionism to a head. Were birds people? Was it foolish, or realistic, to imagine that a creature like a female robin could be such a discerning listener? Were artistic birds comparable to primitive humans, or to other kinds of people? Did naturalized notions of identity such as gender or savagery help scholars organize and interpret musical behavior within evolution’s social order? Over the next several decades, such questions began to take shape as questions of practice rather than theory. The musical evolutionism that began as a print war developed into a viable profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For intellectuals who worked in this profession, differing perspectives on the status, rights, and dignity of nonhuman musicians and other “others” had important implications for the way music was heard and studied.
In the chapters to come, I examine the role of this professional practice inside the spheres of museum work, fieldwork, and laboratory research. Although the contents and form of questions about animal musicality shifted depending on the changing circumstances and context of each of these locations, the question of animal personhood remained a backdrop to the way studies of music were performed. In those studies, music became a tool that could reveal who was capable of listening, and, in many cases, who was capable of being heard.
IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE
In the following three chapters, I examine the emergence of a professional study of songs founded on notions of animal life. Spanning the period between 1900 and 1945, chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the classification, collection, and analysis of songs to show how music became a measure of difference in the twentieth century. The intertwined prehistories of comparative zoology and experimental physiology that I described in the introduction to this book serve as the basis for notions of identity and difference in professional music scholarship during this period. Building on that prehistory, these chapters link problematic constructions of animal identity to the creation of modern sonic knowledge. Identity, difference, and knowledge are the subject of this history.
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
