Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy
What is difference?
What is a humanity?
What is difference? To paraphrase animal studies scholar Una Chaudhuri, thinking about animals is reshaping the way we approach cultural categories in every corner of academic discourse: gender, class, race, nation, age, profession, sexual orientation, marital status, and, of course, species.13 Today a growing literature addresses the intersection of animality with historical categories of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation.14 That intersection of human and animal difference is one I find particularly salient in the modern history of Western music, where divisions between genres and styles have become intertwined with narratives of cultivated identity.
The measure of difference that compares a sparrow’s song to a Beethoven symphony is also, I argue, a practice that preconditions our present experience of culture, race, and biology. Within the context of my book, I treat difference as a particular heritage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has affected the politics and structure of music’s orderings in the early twenty-first century. In my book’s stories, difference was often treated by those who studied songs as if it were a unifying, natural principle that connected existing categories such as race, nation, or gender to a broader state. Within the lives of the actors that occupy my narrative, being a woman, or an immigrant, or an Italian, or a dog were all unique, particular experiences. But while such experiences have unique histories and contexts, the practice of comparing songs across racial, national, gendered, and species boundaries demanded a notion of difference as a foundational category premised on the belief that forms of difference exist in a shared state of diversification waiting to be compared, analyzed, and organized. In the cases that I explore, animals were the exemplar of that state. For those who have lived with and through this epistemology in which a sparrow and Beethoven sing on a shared musical taxonomic plane, to talk about birds is to talk about race, gender, sexuality, or class; and to talk about gender, race, or class is to talk about species.
This brings me to my second question, “What is a humanity?” For those who believe that modern epistemology has been shaped by the notion that all forms of difference implicate one another, to ask “What is a humanity?” is to ask about more than the divide between human and nonhuman actors. Scholars have had a taste for the rupture between the humanities and the sciences since the late twentieth century, when the divisions between humans and animals, laboratories and libraries, and genetic inheritance and cultural heritage captured their interest.15 In the twenty-first century, posthumanism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology have built on this foundation to bring forth rich theories about nonhuman agency and the interpretation of objects. My book’s exploration of musical taxonomy is a kind of counter-history of this movement toward the nonhuman. In that counter-history, I figure the question “What is a humanity?”—the act of recognizing the problematic division between the human and nonhuman—as an act that is impossible to perform without partial or full participation in the past century of taxonomic interventions that are always already raced, gendered, sexed, animaled, and otherwise ordered through difference.
What is this book not? It is not a comprehensive, consecutive history, but a speculative one. Its chapters are arranged chronologically and have substantial interconnections, but each chapter can be read independently. I have tried to fill these chapters with events and experiences that are inherently interesting and meaningful: a young woman’s discovery of a new species in Angola; a deaf naturalist obsessed with birdsong; a Berlin psychologist trying to perform vivisections on songs; a British biologist tracing pictures of animal music. The protagonists of these chapters are loosely related by their shared teachers, institutions, and disciplinary norms. The history that results is not a critique or rebuttal of the posthuman, but an alternative. That alternative is limited to about a century and a half, and it is within that period that I locate words such as “modern,” “humanity,” or “animal.” This book is also not in favor of dispensing with notions of difference or similarity, but seeks to provoke questions about how such ideas can be used responsibly. Songs have a unique place in this history, and I use them to suggest a much broader narrative than one book can truly contain.
My questions “What is difference?” and “What is a humanity?” are premised on the expectation that the unsustainable divide interrogated by posthumanism cannot be resolved without simultaneously addressing the question of how difference has been historically constructed in the twentieth century. I seek to make a beginning toward that effort in the pages that follow. In the conclusion of this book, I call those aspirations the “animanities,” an outgrowth of my experience with posthumanism and animal studies in their aesthetic and academic forms, situated in the study of culture as a more-than-human reality.
What is difference, and what is a humanity? The stakes of these questions range from the issue of who does interdisciplinary work and how, to the financial pressure to leverage cultural inquiry into scientific funding sources in the twenty-first century. But knowledge is also at stake, and I will argue in the chapters to come that how we make knowledge about culture and music is intricately tied up with the question of how we evaluate difference, and how that evaluation is also a valuation of different lives.
AMNESIA
If humanism does not answer the needs of this book, what does? George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”16 To remember the past is very much the project of this book. I begin that process of remembrance by remembering the birds’ voices that gave the original context to Santayana’s words: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness … when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it … Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”17 Santayana’s The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress, published in 1905, shared his generation’s conviction that animal nature had much to reveal about the capacity to speak and, therefore, to be heard. The chirping bird that occupies the lowest place in Santayana’s taxonomy of memory was put into print only a year after Mathews compared the song sparrow to Verdi’s “La donna è mobile,” and was followed by many more such comparisons.
In the intervening century, the history that connects music’s taxonomies to the status of animals has largely faded and been forgotten. Yet interconnections between the lives of animals and today’s constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of difference have been thoroughly demonstrated by recent scholars within animal studies.18 By recuperating the history that connects animal lives to measures of musical difference, my book is meant as 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