Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy

      By the early twentieth century, the debates about musical identity that originated with Darwin and Spencer had become closely tied to notions of bodily difference rooted in biological specimens. But difference was just as present in the lives of those who collected and organized bodies and artifacts for the science of identity. For song collectors like the woman in Angola and the man at Harvard, difference was not a concept but a condition of life, the condition in which institutional science occurred. In that version of difference, animality was connected to lived experiences of gender, class, race, nationality, and other categories by material and discursive conditions. Entangled in those conditions, the work of biological and cultural identification was inseparable from the personal experiences of difference that determined who created musical knowledge, and how they did it. In this chapter, I turn from institutions to individuals, and to the ways their experiences became a mechanism of music’s taxonomies.

      This chapter focuses on the careers of two of America’s first professional song collectors: music ethnographer Laura Craytor Boulton, and psychologist and zoologist Wallace Craig. My chosen protagonists are intellectual descendants of the zoology program at Harvard that produced Fewkes and the song collection at the Bureau of American Ethnology. Although other collectors such as Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Olive Dame Campbell, and Fewkes himself are better known, the careers of Wallace Craig and Laura Boulton bring together the conditions that connected human social politics, the status of animals, and the construction of musical identity. Although they did not know one another, these two individuals shared ties to important movements in zoology and eugenics that had far-reaching effects not only on their work, but on sonic taxonomies more broadly. They occupied a middle ground in science’s hierarchies, navigating flows of power that make their stories unique examples of scientific labor’s reliance on the measures of difference it purported to discern.

      Music scholar Suzanne Cusick once wrote that there is no place for “persons” within a historiography of large-scale musical epochs, styles, and epic changes, no room for individuals whose stories are rooted in historically and culturally specific, gendered, classed experiences.¹ This chapter is about specific persons and their experiences, about a kind of identity that is very different from biological or musical identity, and at the same time very closely related to its making. In this chapter I use names and stories to make space for the individual experiences that are unaccounted for by institutional history. Feminist historians like Cusick have sometimes used biographical writing not only to recuperate women’s histories, but to endorse experiential values and alternative notions of selfhood.² As anthropologist Ruth Behar has pointed out, speculative biographies have served the needs of feminist and nonwhite scholars for many decades.³ By structuring my contribution to that tradition through detailed descriptions of the flows of power that defined the practical work of song collecting, I ask my reader to imagine what it is like to be another person: a song collector, a colonial subject, or an animal.

      The broader context of song collecting was one in which personal experiences of gender, race, nation, and species mattered acutely. Between 1900 and 1935, over one hundred collections of folk songs and exotic tunes, and over thirty gatherings of birdsong or insect chirps were published in English, French, and German.⁴ Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály alone collected over ten thousand folk songs in Eastern Europe, while similar song collections were made of animal and “folk” cultures in the United States, Russia, Britain, Japan, Germany, and France.⁵ These collections depended on long-standing relationships between Western governments and the resources and peoples within colonial economies. In the twentieth century, as song collecting shifted from amateur practice to full or part-time occupations, the economy of collecting remained strongly shaped by these economies of gender, race, and nation. Animals occupied a central role in the way that song collectors imagined and experienced these economies. Collectors called themselves “music hunters” or “song catchers,” and spoke both of killing songs and of preserving them from endangerment and extinction.⁶ In this world, how did songs-as-animals connect personal experiences of being different to the institutions and practices that positioned animals, women, nonwhites, and other “others” as placeholders in scientific taxonomies?