Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy
story about the institutional life of the sonic specimen.
The oldest of the museum’s recordings was its collection of Hopi songs and speech on old Edison wax cylinders, collected in the 1890s during the Hemenway Southwestern Archeological Expedition. The cylinders had been inscribed on this hot and dusty expedition before being sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC, in 1894. The bureau was devoted to pure anthropological research, with a sister institution focused on applied research in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.15 Though the cylinders probably served researchers in both divisions, in 1965 they were officially moved to the museum, as the bureau was incorporated into the department. There the bowls, arrowheads, and bracelets collected on the Hemenway Expedition still reside. But the cylinders are for the most part gone, except for a few copies: they moved again in the early 1970s, leaving the realm of natural history entirely for the Library of Congress, where they now reside in the American Folklife Center. Their life as specimens is (or, at least, is meant to be) over, for they serve a new tenure as part of the center’s commitment to “creative expressions.”16
In 1890, however, the cylinders were envisioned quite differently. Their collector, Jesse Walter Fewkes, wrote that year, “What specimens are to the naturalist in describing genera and species, or what sections are to the histologist in the study of cellular structure, the cylinders are to the student of language.”17 Fewkes was among the first to use the phonograph in ethnographic research, making the Hemenway cylinders a landmark in ethnology. Both complete specimens and the histological specimens prepared for microscope slides, called “sections,” were familiar to him from his work as a zoologist curating the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There he had worked as Alexander Agassiz’s assistant in the 1880s, overlapping slightly with Charles Otis Whitman and leaving just before Charles Davenport’s arrival.18 After a falling-out with Agassiz, Fewkes turned to ethnology and worked his way to the top of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology.19
Fewkes chose a fortuitous moment to champion the phonograph as the future of ethnography. He was a decade ahead of the collection of phonograph recordings begun by Carl Stumpf in Berlin in 1900, which became Europe’s preeminent ethnographic sound collection under the aegis of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (the subject of chapter 4). Over the next forty years, new song collections based on recorded sound included recordings of birdsong developed for research at Cornell University, the collection of non-Western music piled in the closets of the New School for Social Research by composer Henry Cowell, and the recordings of American folk songs made by the Lomax family in the late 1930s and 1940s.20
In a natural science dominated by the visual comparison of physical bodies, the phonograph provided a welcome “body” that, like a plant or animal, could be inspected with eyes as well as ears. In this context, recorded collections of sound can be profitably compared with photographs, for the two technologies had fundamentally different advantages from a research perspective. Photographs, unlike recordings, played a secondary, if valued, role in specimen collections. Museum dioramas of humans and animals served as models for photographs representing virtual images of nature that replaced uncaptured moments (and sometimes, as Aaron Glass points out, inspired the humans posing for diorama models to behave more “ethnically”).21 But from the perspective of dissection, morphology, and anatomy, replacing animal and cultural specimens with photographs meant a loss in information and the exchange of a primary source for a secondary one. Sound recording, in contrast, replaced in-the-field transcription with a perceived gain in information, exchanging secondary sources with something much more like a material artifact or “body.”
Collectors hailed the phonograph as a tool that would make song collections “a branch of science,” believing, like Fewkes, that this was music’s answer to visual culture.22 Historian Erica Brady has even suggested that the phonograph made possible the turn-of-the-century institutionalization of professional music ethnography.23 Yet collectors were often stymied by the practical drawbacks of this new technology. Pitch and rhythm changed depending on the speed of the playback machine, making it hard to know what a song really sounded like in its original performance—worst of all was an irregular machine, which altered the pitch in unpredictable ways.24 The British folk-song collector and composer Percy Grainger admitted that sometimes it was necessary to play a record hundreds of times to note down its details accurately, a process during which the record’s fragile wax body would have deteriorated.25
In many 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