ways, the ideal sonic body for ethnographers was the musical instrument, which had a literal body that could be treated like the body of a specimen. About a decade before Fewkes’s phonographs found their way to the Smithsonian, many private collections of musical instruments migrated to museums, finding institutional homes in New York, Berlin, London, and Paris.26 Their classification and display was grounded in the visual emphasis of the natural sciences, often resulting in large groups of beautiful or interesting instruments of dubious sound quality.27 For many years the Crosby-Brown collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, had several faux instruments that included a Mexican chocolate stirrer mistaken for a rattle.28 Looking over this array of visual display, a curator in Paris wrote rather wryly that his collection of historical pianos and harpsichords reminded him of the taxidermical specimens of natural history, seeing “giraffe-pianos” stretching their frozen necks behind the glass wall as he passed their cases.29 The author, Curt Sachs, had recently invented a classification system for musical instruments inspired in part by biological species classification, working with Erich Moritz von Hornbostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.30 Similar classification systems for instruments in France likewise relied on parallels between natural history and social history, organizing hierarchies between nations, colonies, and races through a parade of musical instruments.31
Neither wax cylinder recordings nor musical instruments were ideal sonic specimens. In lieu of better options, the object that was often used during the first half of the twentieth century for sonic display and comparison was musical notation. Before Fewkes’s collection of Hopi songs, collectors had routinely relied on musical notation to gather together nature’s music. Scores made good sonic bodies: they were flat, portable, and printable, and could be placed side by side for comparison. Unlike musical instruments, scores conveyed melodies; unlike the grooves of the wax cylinder, they made visual sense to a trained reader.
Early song collections in the nineteenth century were often made without reference to a sound recording, and were created by private individuals. The result was often unabashedly Westernized: collectors harmonized Native American songs like church hymns, and one guide to birdsong even introduced “natural” music with a hundred and seven notes of a dripping faucet in B-flat major.32 By the twentieth century, similar collections were being published by institutions like the Bureau of American Ethnology, and often reflected institutional phonograph collections. The rhetoric of notation became a discourse preoccupied with science.33 Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews explained that music notation was the best “scientific preservation” available for examples like his notation of a robin in four-part harmony (the result, with the robin singing along to a piano accompaniment, sounds very like a Bach chorale).34 Privately, Mathews worried that his notations would be “hashed” in reviews by unsympathetic critics.35 Another ornithologist working in the 1920s suggested that improved notation would require both alternate scales, like those in Gregorian chant or Chinese music, and a “battery of other instruments” beyond the piano to represent timbre, including the xylophone, banjo, zither, bassoon, and piccolo.36 Still others hoped to replace or supplement musical notation with graphic scores and other symbolic images.37 Even naturalists who hoped to replace musical notes with graphs or other images found musical references too useful to eschew entirely, often using images like a piano keyboard to map out the pitch and vocal register of various birds.38
Ethnographers, too, had energetic discussions about the musical bodies they constructed. In Berlin, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham argued in 1909 that scholars should systematize a series of symbols to adapt Western scores to non-Western sounds.39 Many American collectors seem to have followed suit; Frances Densmore, for example, used many of the German notations in her transcriptions of Chippewa songs published by the Bureau of American Ethnography.40
One of the most intriguing collections was Benjamin Ives Gilman’s transcriptions of Hopi songs, published in 1908 and based on Fewkes’s recordings. Gilman’s transcriptions created a hybrid between graphic and traditional notation, drawing the curving lines of performed slides atop fixed noteheads that represented exact pitches on an expanded staff. Fewkes, who had a tinny ear and struggled with music notation, had published extensively on the artifacts from the expedition but had done little with his phonograph records. He sought help from Gilman, a trained art historian with music literacy working with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gilman had an interest in music’s evolution and agreed to transcribe the songs to create a more professional research object for the bureau. In a nod to the history of the American type specimen, Gilman called the collection his “hortus siccus,” the insider’s name for a botanical specimen collection.41
AUDIOTYPING
As researchers struggled to find musical substitutes for physical bodies, they also faced the problem of developing a methodological analogue for natural history’s systems of classification. Sonic specimens were adapted versions of biological type specimens, bodies whose interpretations were constantly redefined and debated as scholars struggled to accommodate the challenges of constructing a musical “body.” How, then, did the biological identity made tangible in the type specimen translate into the musical identity of the sonic specimen? How should researchers categorize music? And how were their musical examples connected to biology’s categories of race and species? Music scholars worried over these questions in the early decades of the twentieth century as they attempted to use song collections to classify musical difference. For answers, they turned to the same model that had allowed biologists to redefine the classification of species identity at the turn of the century: the type.
Figure 2.1 Benjamin Ives Gilman’s “phonographic transcription” of Hopi song. Gilman, Hopi Songs, 100.
The backdrop for this discourse was an unstable history of biological classification marked by the transition from metaphorical typology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth-century type specimen. Specimen collections trace their origins to the age of seventeenth-century explorers and their ships’ holds of exotica, when expeditions were motivated largely by the promise of selling valuable rarities. As the following century delineated the limits of the world, private and princely collectors built taxonomies of exotic objects in curio cabinets filled with large collections of preserved plants, animals, and insects. During the rise of the great colonial powers in the 1800s, these collections came to represent a country’s imperial reach (sometimes in obvious ways: many nineteenth-century catalogues of Indian ornithological collections represent birds hunted by the British officers who authored the catalogue, but feature illustrations made by local Indian artists hired to do the time-consuming work of painting the figures).42 Such collections offered research material for the growing interest in natural taxonomy that took definite shape during the late 1800s in an attempt to trace evolutionary relationships between species. By the early twentieth century, museums and individuals routinely arranged, displayed, and stored specimens in evolutionary ranks of species and subspecies, in drawers and “living” dioramas. By arranging species in order of relatedness, their viewers had immediate access to a visual taxonomy that educated and offered a highly organized frame for morphological research (study based on visual characteristics), making possible the comparison of large numbers of species.43 For many twentieth-century biologists, the primary tool for scientific classification was the visual comparison and subsequent grouping and naming of different specimens.44 The cornerstone of this project was, of course, the type specimen.
Like the textual descriptions that were superseded by type specimens, types also came from a literary tradition. Typology originated in biblical exegesis of the early 1600s, when theologians imagined patriarchs like Adam as “types” whose presence in the Old Testament prefigured the identity of Christ.45 While explorers sailed to the world’s far reaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collecting exotic curiosities, biblical typology was adapted to secular applications, and developed a
