Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy
types in the song of the field sparrow (Spizella pusilla), and five for the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia).55 Ornithologists at Cornell University managed to outfit a truck with film recording equipment in the 1930s, translating the songs of wild birds into the visible lines scrawled across the soundtrack, images they then compared under a microscope in their own search for avian song types.56 The collector who financed that expedition, Albert Brand, sent some of the resulting recordings to a music ethnographer named Laura Craytor Boulton (one of the protagonists of chapter 3) for inspection.57 Ethnographers working with the Bureau of American Ethnology on Native Americans worked especially hard to identify song types.58 Before 1918, Frances Densmore plotted her collection of six hundred Sioux songs in tables and charts to determine five song types whose contours exemplified the Sioux tradition, while her colleague Helen Roberts borrowed Densmore’s method to identify a type for the songs used in the Pawnee Skull Bundle Ceremony.59
Like biological types, song types navigated the disparity between ideals and thorny reality. Ideals in the case of music were closely tied to preexisting racial and national typologies. Music specialists often took for granted the “decisive leaning towards rhythm” of the French, the “innocent minds” of Italian melodists, and the “strenuous thought” of German musicians, hearing their own expectations in the songs of various nations.60 British collectors Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson explained early in the century how a sufficiently large collection of songs could be used to scientifically demonstrate these associations, and eventually prove that “the scheme of a tune … develops racial traits [in time], just as the country has developed racial traits in the music of speech.”61 By the 1920s and 1930s, such empirical aspirations had reached into the laboratory, with experimental psychologists such as Carl Seashore suggesting that quantitative measurements of sonic specimens would “take us into the field of genetic studies of inheritance … and studies of racial types and the evolution of music in primitive peoples.”62
Song typologies thus occupied the center of a three-part process in which songs were institutionalized and analyzed as objects of scientific research. First, collectors gathered them in the field. Collections were then assimilated into institutions and organized through typological practices. In the final and aspirational step of this process, song types were confirmed and analyzed in laboratory settings like Seashore’s. Just as the lives of collectors shaped the songs they collected, the central step in this process of institutionalized classifications of music was also shaped by life’s ambiguities.
The gap between real and ideal in the search for song types was particularly affected by problems of notation. Many of the specialists invested in song typing expressed concern that Westernized notations were making it difficult or impossible to study songs properly.63 But those worries were often simultaneously framed by a desire that alternatives to Western scores reflect not a song’s particular details, but its ideal typological form. As one collector of Russian folk songs explained, scholars needed to reduce songs “to their simplest form and, by omitting melodic ornamentation dependent upon the individual taste of the leader, preserve only the foundation of the melody.”64 It is worth reading closely the words of Helen Roberts, as she described the problems facing sonic typology in 1922 amid her research at the Bureau of American Ethnology:
Not only is it difficult to seize upon and designate the peculiarities which distinguish certain types, upon hearing the song, but in reading over the notation they are not all equally clear to a musician, who must needs reduce the music to some simple formulae covering the structure, etc., in order to have them clearly in mind. Such a reduction is even more necessary for those whose unfamiliarity with the symbolism of printed music renders the subject still more complex. For the sake of obtaining the bald outline of the tune and the design which it formed, structurally, it seemed best for the time being in analyzing different songs to eliminate key signatures, musical notes, with their different values, all pitches less than whole step intervals, all measure bars and accents, all expression marks, in fact everything that might be considered to belong to the realm of color in music.65
Roberts suggests that although the collected song had to be accurately notated, its 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