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
