an intervention within the postmodern, postwar, posthuman construction of humanism and the humanities as spaces in which animality and other constructions of difference can be treated separately and ahistorically. By framing my history of music’s taxonomies as a counter-history of the present, I hope that my readers adopt an active role in reimagining music’s orders outside of established human/nonhuman, culture/nature, humanities/science dyads.
The first half of this book engages the period between 1871 and 1950 to show how metaphors of animal life and death framed a process of collecting, classifying, and analyzing songs as a measure of difference. I begin chapter 1 at the end of the nineteenth century, with a print war between Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer about the evolutionary origins of musical aesthetics. Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, proffered a controversial theory that aesthetics and music originated in artistic, skillful, and self-aware animal minds. The book sparked heated responses as thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries asked whether other animals, particularly birds, possessed the capacity for culture. In the ensuing comparisons between animal and human song, musical evolution became a means to debate the right to personhood.
The following three chapters follow the course of music’s place in hierarchies of difference through traditions of collecting, classifying, and analyzing songs. In chapter 2, I explore the introduction of collected songs into institutional collections as the musical equivalent of natural history specimens. These institutional song collections offer a revealing glimpse of the way biological models of identity and identification shaped beliefs about songs and those who produced them. In chapter 3, I turn to the experiences of the professional song collectors who made institutional collections possible. In this chapter I shift from institutional history to biographical narrative, in order to show how notions of identity and difference were intertwined with deeply personal experiences of inequality in the profession of song collecting. I focus in this chapter on the experiences of two collectors from the 1920s and ’30s, a psychologist and zoologist named Wallace Craig, and a music expert named Laura Craytor Boulton. Through their stories, I examine the way essentialized beliefs about bodily inequality became the conditions under which song collectors crafted both their collections and their careers.
Turning from the collection and classification of songs to a music laboratory in Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century, in chapter 4 I explore the ways that notions of musical data in the 1920s and ’30s were premised on a nineteenth-century ethics of vivisection, in which animal lives were traded for empirical knowledge, taking the form of graphic inscriptions made by the tools of the physiological laboratory such as the kymograph. Musical data, I therefore suggest, was the written result of this exchange of difference. Instead of answering the question posed by the tradition of animal vivisection—“Is knowledge worth killing for?”—I ask my readers to resist the premise of the original question, which posits that our job is to weigh the value of life against the value of knowledge.
Chapter 5 marks a turning point in my narrative, in which human identity was redefined after World War II through a separation of the spheres of biology and culture. The second half of my book explores this post-1950 period, starting with the crisis in scientific knowledge that laid the groundwork for this changing world. I show here how the dramatic rejection of racial comparison in evolutionary biology and the social sciences made it desirable for studies of music to become a separate topic from studies of evolutionary development. In chapter 5, I explore the reinvention of evolutionary theory through a distinction between genetic and cultural inheritance. Paying special attention to the rise of genetics at the laboratories of Cold Spring Harbor, I suggest in this chapter that the special status of the human after World War II—the division of culture from biology that defined postwar notions of the humanities—is the postmodern condition of race.
In chapter 6, I show how new audio technology offered a welcome pretext in this divided environment to replace the musicianship of the prewar “sonic specimen” with machines that would dramatically change perceptions of animal “music,” making it the mark of a neurological, rather than a cultural, capacity. As a result of this changing practice, being musical in the post–World War II world meant, by definition, being human, while studies of birdsong and other animal vocalizations fell under the rubric of a laboratory science divorced from conventional ideas of “music.” In this chapter, I trace that rupture of knowledge into the disparate worlds of human song studies and studies of birdsong that postdate 1950. The result is a dynamic difference in disciplinary standards for evidence, exemplified by the role of the objective graphic image, first explored in chapter 4 as the picture of vivisection.
The closing chapter of my book revisits traditions of the sonic specimen and aural identity in the context of audio field guides to birdsong. These are objects that both replicate and challenge the postmodern divorce between birdsong and human music. In this chapter, I focus on three exceptional cases, in which listening to other species is a guide toward alternate notions of the self located in exotic paradises. Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, Steven Feld’s Rainforest Soundwalks, and Miyoko Chu’s Birdscapes offer a shared yearning for something best described as the Garden of Eden. These cases conclude my book with three imagined paradises that respond to a world that has been partially determined by the restriction of things of the spirit to the human experience. I end the chapter with questions about how we might imagine paradise beyond the restrictions of the postwar, postmodern, posthuman division between human and nonhuman life.
In the course of these seven chapters, seven themes emerge that offer a foothold for rethinking the more-than-human conditions of culture that emerge from this history. In the conclusion of this book, I imagine these themes as the foundation of the practice I call the animanities, the more-than-human study of culture. I chart a path into the animanities through the stakes raised by each chapter—personhood, identity, difference, knowledge, postmodern humanity, subjectivity, and paradise—as they lay claim to this imagined field of inquiry. Neither quite posthuman nor merely animal, my mapping of the animanities closes with an assertion of the urgency of considering these stakes in a world where human identity itself is being remade at all levels, from our dependence on a rapidly changing environment to the medically altered molecules of our DNA.
The ties between culture, race, and species are of more interest today than they have been for many years. Since 2000, the emergence of brain imaging technology, the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, the discovery of Paleolithic bone flutes in 1995 and 2008, and the use of CRISPR technologies to edit human genes in 2013 have returned cultural evolutionism to the sphere of public inquiry. In the past fifteen years, science writers and music scholars including Steven Mithen, Aniruddh Patel, Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Ian Cross, Daniel Levitin, and Gary Tomlinson have published a wave of new texts on music’s evolution. These contributions come at a moment when the relatively strong funding available in the sciences incentivizes science-oriented readings of music. Yet the turn toward musical evolutionism reinscribes the notion that humanistic labor is inherent to a “normal” human body, and therefore needs neither resources nor support to persist, so long as the normal human body survives.
This return to evolutionary thought calls to mind Santayana’s admonition that we are condemned to repeat the past that we forget. For many, the events of the early twenty-first century echo the crises of nationalism, immigration, global violence, and technological change that shaped the first half of the twentieth century. Amid those echoes, the lives of animals point toward what we have forgotten: something about how constructions of difference are the mechanism of posthumanism
