century. Much of this book is about the way that today’s standards of objectivity were once based on the disposability of animal life, and later came to be transferred to studies of music along with specific ethics and values that transferred with those techniques. I begin, therefore, with a brief turn toward two places in which the transition from animal to musical measurement began, where the “grandfathers” of my story taught young scientists how to make knowledge out of animal bodies.
The first of these places is the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a building in which animal bodies were arrayed in a kind of natural panopticon in the late 1800s. The museum’s director at the time, Alexander Agassiz, is the first of two grandfathers in my family history. Alexander built on his father Louis’s vision of a museum that would allow scientists to compare nature’s diversity firsthand, expanding the collections and introducing a new experimental laboratory for research. Alexander Agassiz was also a successful teacher, and his students became important figures in comparative science.
Agassiz’s students from the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s included several scholars that figure in my book as teachers or mentors who made significant shifts from comparative zoology to cultural studies. Two especially notable students are Charles Davenport and Jesse Walter Fewkes. Davenport received his doctorate from Harvard’s zoology program in 1892, and taught and researched there until 1899. By the early 1900s, however, his interests had shifted from zoology to eugenics, and he founded the Eugenics Records Office at his laboratories in Cold Spring Harbor. The Eugenics Records Office became an important center for American eugenics research in the 1920s, and served as a site at which animal and cultural comparison interconnected. Davenport was a mentor for some of the central characters in this book, including song collector Laura Boulton and ethologist Wallace Craig.
Another Agassiz student, Jesse Walter Fewkes, worked with Agassiz at Harvard from 1878 until 1886, when he left his position as Agassiz’s assistant in order to work as an ethnographer on a trip to the American Southwest. On that trip, Fewkes recorded songs that became the foundation of a shift in his career toward musical, instead of zoological, comparison. He became a central figure in comparative song studies in the United States, founding what eventually became the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of folk and ethnic songs. Fewkes, too, plays a central role in the lineage of my book’s stories, and is a well-known figure in the history of music anthropology. Although other stories about the place of song in comparative zoology offer more canonic histories of science, the stories that emerge from the Harvard Museum’s genealogy outline otherwise unknown connections between animal life and cultural evaluation.9 They also recuperate a history of racial comparison that has long been submerged beneath uncomfortable silences that surround the rise of American genetics.
Agassiz’s work at the Harvard Museum was inspired in part by the second site of my prehistory, a branch of experimental physiology developed at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the mid-1800s. Johannes Müller, the other grandfather of my book, taught anatomy and physiology at the university during the mid-nineteenth century. While he was in Berlin, Müller developed new techniques in experimental science that made it possible to observe the motions inside an animal’s body in the moments before it died, using a practice called vivisection. His innovations in experimental physiology allowed scientists to understand the body’s working, through evidence based on direct observation of animals’ organs. The result was a new model of quantitative laboratory knowledge, inspired by the startling possibility of quantifying invisible vibrations of hearts, lungs, and nerves through a complex series of mechanical tools in the laboratory that transformed moving bodies into graphic images. Müller’s students (who included Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Carl Ludwig, and Ernst Haeckel) adapted the tools of physiology to ask new questions in psychology, investigating the workings of nerves, ears, eyes, and even of beauty itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tools of Berlin physiology had been appropriated into a host of new applications that included comparative studies of music.
While the genealogy of Agassiz is a lineage of people, my book’s genealogy of Müller is a lineage of devices. Existing histories of audio technology describe the phonograph’s emergence from studies of the human voice conducted in the late 1800s.10 This book maps the ethics and practices of those studies backward, into the valuation of animal bodies in the 1850s. The same tools that were originally used to transform vibrations from within the bodies of dying laboratory animals into images were adapted over time to transform the vibrations of sound into graphic inscriptions in studies of music. The devices borrowed from vivisection ranged from the ear phonautograph that Edison built in 1874 using a human ear to the sound spectrograph developed in the 1950s, a tool that is still used today in scientific studies of animal vocalizations.11 Considered together, these tools and the graphic scores they create took a set of standards that were originally developed in response to the practice of animal vivisection, and exported those standards into the study of sound as the criteria for objectivity. Today, such graphic tools continue to tie constructions of sonic knowledge to the ethics and practices of animal laboratory research, constructing “sonic” objectivity.
The importance of European laboratory science to music’s culture has been well documented in studies that draw connections between scientific thought and twentieth-century music. Historians have shown the impact of acoustic physics, phenomenology, and aesthetic philosophies on the musical epistemologies of the twentieth century.12 In my book, I turn from those histories of ideas to a history of bodies, in order to consider more closely how tools that were developed in response to the bodies of animals came to be appropriated for the objective study of sound. This tradition is an important prehistory for the material I present in my chapters, where I will argue that the valuation of animals in science served as the foundation upon which later evaluations of sonic culture were built. This approach connects music’s epistemologies to an overlooked history of bodily evaluations, in which the classification of different types of music was interwoven with the exclusionary culture in which knowledge was built upon a privileged relationship between European scientists, animals, and other “others.”
This is not just a story about music scholarship’s relation to scientific methods, but about the centrality of animal bodies and voices to an empirical ethics that was applied to music-making bodies of every kind, and that continues to surface today in the standards that affect how music is classified and catalogued. The scientific traditions I explore in this book are often exclusionary, dependent on colonial, gendered, and racial economies that privileged white European masculinity while relying on the labor and lives of those who fell within a catchall of difference. The work of white women, nonnormative white men, nonwhite people, and nonhuman animals was often marked within these traditions as menial or illegible. In cases where exclusion was central to the process of scientific research, it also affected the way questions about music were asked and answered. The protagonists of my chapters operate within the borderlands of this tradition, and their personal lives and careers were conditioned by the structures of this unequal economy. Within those structures lie many nuances. Privileged individuals can be victims as well as perpetrators, and good science can reveal real truths that emerge as fiction within the confines of interpretation. The trajectory of my book is defined by the quandaries that these individuals discovered, described, or repressed within this exclusionary history as they confronted the conditions in which animals represented broader categorical differences that included races, nations, genders, and cultures as well as species.
The histories of musical comparison and evaluation that emerge from these two traditions raise important questions about the broader genesis of “the humanities” as we know them. My book’s narrative implicates the category of “the animal” as a point of departure for turn-of-the-century musicological research that was not strictly humanistic, but relied on perceived connections between the status of the animal and race, gender, and other forms of naturalized difference. On the surface, today’s construction of music as a humanistic endeavor seems unrelated to these older categories. In this book, however, I argue that contemporary humanism developed as a corrective measure amid a backlash against racial evolutionism that occurred after World War II. While comparisons between animals
