typological analysis was actually a generalization based on the removal of detail. Institutionalized studies of songs and their types in the laboratory are discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, but Roberts’s words say much about the ways that visual representation, typology, and the sonic specimen were affected by the tension between real and ideal experiences of songs.
IN THE FIELD
And what of the collector, the hunter in field and village who gathered songs alongside birds and bees? As I draw this chapter to a close, I move from the museum to the field, where the professional song collector provided a slightly different perspective on the work of institutional typology. In the museum, specimens were compared side by side in a space that stripped them of their original context. Typology, the final step in this process, allowed researchers to generalize about the characteristics that made up a body or artifact’s identity by removing it from its original environment. This work of generalization was highly respected in studies of musical, as well as biological, difference. But in the field, identity was shaped by specific contexts, events, and relationships. Even scholars such as Roberts, who did both kinds of work, had to navigate the differences between locating specimens in the field and analyzing them in the museum. These differences were complicated by the fact that the work of collecting specimens was not as valued as the work of analyzing them. The specimens that were supposed to structure identity were themselves structured by the social hierarchies of science.
In the specimen’s admission to institutions of knowledge, the work of collecting often came to seem less important and less prestigious than the comparisons that went on once animals and artifacts were in the hands of universities and natural history museums. Experiences of specimens in the field, be they animal or musical, were generally treated with less seriousness than their organization and identification within museum storerooms or laboratories. And curators and professors who worked with specimens in museums and libraries came to view collecting as clerical work, something that was done by junior scholars and, very often, by women.66
To some collectors, it seemed as if this mania for typology undervalued both the collector and the real, lived identities that he or she encountered in the field. Consider the following summary of one collector’s five-page comparison of the institutional scientist and the field collector:
NATURALIST (institutional scientist)
Traces family, subfamily, genus, and species
Deals in Latin and Greek terms of resounding and disheartening combinations
Loses anatomy and markings in scientific jargon
Impales moths and dissects, magnifies, and locates brain, heart, and nerves
Neglects essential details and is not always rightly informed
NATURE LOVER (field collector)
Goes afield for rest and recreation
Appreciates the common things of life as they appeal to the senses
Identifies based on behavior and habits rather than species or anatomy
Does not care for Latin and Greek terms
Pronounces large silk moths to be exquisite creations
I compiled this resentful typology from the writings of Gene Stratton-Porter, a nature lover, lepidopterist, and novelist whose books include Moths of the Limberlost and Music of the Wild, the two books in which the Nature lover and the Naturalist were explained.67 For Stratton-Porter, the rise of institutional collections marked the loss of natural knowledge based on living behaviors, valorizing instead the inspection of the dead. She used sound to drive home her point, explaining that only in the field would an experienced and dedicated collector hear the sound of a luna moth emerging from its cocoon. “There is a faint noise of tearing as the inner case is broken and the tough cocoon cut for emergence,” explained Stratton-Porter, completing the sequence with silence: “Once in the air and light, if those exquisite wings make a sound it is too faint for mortal ears to hear.”68
Like Stratton-Porter, the famed Hungarian song collector Béla Bartók was also a collector of moths. He was fond of insects, asking his son Peter to “send me at least a butterfly wing or beetle-thigh” when he traveled to Panama.69 Insects found their way into Bartók’s compositions as well, notably in “From the Diary of a Fly” in Mikrokosmos and the opening of “Musiques Nocturnes,” the fourth movement of the Out of Doors Suite for solo piano.70 But while Stratton-Porter lamented the literal deaths that had been institutionalized by the moth-impaling Naturalist, Bartók transferred this analogy of life and death to sound. A collector satisfied with mindlessly recording a song, he argued,
would be like the entomologist or lepidopterist who would be satisfied with the assembly and preparation of the different species of insects or butterflies. If his satisfaction rests there, then his collection is an inanimate material. The genuine, scientific naturalist, therefore, not only collects and prepares but also studies and describes, as far as possible, the most hidden moments of animal life…. Similar reasons direct the folk music collector to investigate in detail the conditions surrounding the real life of the melodies.71
Music historians have pondered Bartók’s representation of human bodies and races.72 As a collector, however, Bartók imagined musical knowledge through the space between the animal body, the field collector, and the institutionalization of the specimen.
In the next chapter, I move from the institution of the sonic specimen to the experiences of collectors in the field. Stratton-Porter approached the differences between institutional research and fieldwork from the perspective of a deeply committed conservationist. She urged scientists to choose the path of the Nature lover over mass collecting, and argued that specimens should be replaced with photography. Bartók, whose career played out in both institutions and the field, believed that vast numbers of specimens (and musical deaths) were valuable, but also recognized that the experiences of living people would be affected if musical identity was purged of its context. The views of Stratton-Porter and Bartók, which offer a brief glimpse of a large and complex practice, suggest the importance of the perceived oppositions between institutional collections and specimens in the field.
At stake in those oppositions were two very different kinds of identity. In institutional comparisons of specimens, nomenclature and typology served to purge sounds of their particularities in order to classify and organize identity as an aggregate, a group or a class. Such categorical identities relied on notions of species identification to function within larger narratives of biocultural evolution, which told stories of large-scale changes that occurred through and across groups, rather than individuals. Objectivity, generalization, and the need for massive numbers of specimens attended work in the museum, library, or laboratory.
These notions of identity, however, failed to account for the role of the specimen in the field. There, identity was constituted through particular experiences and interactions between collectors and the sounds or animals they collected. Collectors and their subjects formed relationships that were both mercenary and affectionate. Animals and songs were hunted, prized, possessed, and imagined on a singular basis that seemed at odds with typological comparison, for the particularities that were purged in typological research were often intensely relevant in the field. Context, detail, and emotional relationships attended these particularities amid radical inequalities between collectors and the bodies and artifacts they hunted. In the next chapter, I leave behind institutional notions of identity in order to attend more closely to the experiences and voices of collectors, whose lives in the field held stories that institutional collections alone would never
