Like Stratton-Porter, the famed Hungarian song collector Béla Bartók was also a collector of moths. He was fond of insects, asking his son Peter to “send me at least a butterfly wing or beetle-thigh” when he traveled to Panama.69 Insects found their way into Bartók’s compositions as well, notably in “From the Diary of a Fly” in Mikrokosmos and the opening of “Musiques Nocturnes,” the fourth movement of the Out of Doors Suite for solo piano.70 But while Stratton-Porter lamented the literal deaths that had been institutionalized by the moth-impaling Naturalist, Bartók transferred this analogy of life and death to sound. A collector satisfied with mindlessly recording a song, he argued,
would be like the entomologist or lepidopterist who would be satisfied with the assembly and preparation of the different species of insects or butterflies. If his satisfaction rests there, then his collection is an inanimate material. The genuine, scientific naturalist, therefore, not only collects and prepares but also studies and describes, as far as possible, the most hidden moments of animal life…. Similar reasons direct the folk music collector to investigate in detail the conditions surrounding the real life of the melodies.71
Music historians have pondered Bartók’s representation of human bodies and races.72 As a collector, however, Bartók imagined musical knowledge through the space between the animal body, the field collector, and the institutionalization of the specimen.
In the next chapter, I move from the institution of the sonic specimen to the experiences of collectors in the field. Stratton-Porter approached the differences between institutional research and fieldwork from the perspective of a deeply committed conservationist. She urged scientists to choose the path of the Nature lover over mass collecting, and argued that specimens should be replaced with photography. Bartók, whose career played out in both institutions and the field, believed that vast numbers of specimens (and musical deaths) were valuable, but also recognized that the experiences of living people would be affected if musical identity was purged of its context. The views of Stratton-Porter and Bartók, which offer a brief glimpse of a large and complex practice, suggest the importance of the perceived oppositions between institutional collections and specimens in the field.
At stake in those oppositions were two very different kinds of identity. In institutional comparisons of specimens, nomenclature and typology served to purge sounds of their particularities in order to classify and organize identity as an aggregate, a group or a class. Such categorical identities relied on notions of species identification to function within larger narratives of biocultural evolution, which told stories of large-scale changes that occurred through and across groups, rather than individuals. Objectivity, generalization, and the need for massive numbers of specimens attended work in the museum, library, or laboratory.
These notions of identity, however, failed to account for the role of the specimen in the field. There, identity was constituted through particular experiences and interactions between collectors and the sounds or animals they collected. Collectors and their subjects formed relationships that were both mercenary and affectionate. Animals and songs were hunted, prized, possessed, and imagined on a singular basis that seemed at odds with typological comparison, for the particularities that were purged in typological research were often intensely relevant in the field. Context, detail, and emotional relationships attended these particularities amid radical inequalities between collectors and the bodies and artifacts they hunted. In the next chapter, I leave behind institutional notions of identity in order to attend more closely to the experiences and voices of collectors, whose lives in the field held stories that institutional collections alone would never fully explain.
THREE
Collecting Songs
Avian and African
The date is February 28, 1931. Somewhere in the heart of Angola, the search for biological identity is on a collision course with personal identity. Yesterday, a young woman discovered a new species of bird while out hunting specimens for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History with her husband. Together they shot two little warblers, a male and a female, who had been flitting four hundred feet apart on the slopes of Mount Moco. Today, as the woman packs away the birds’ preserved skins, she is preoccupied with another collection, her growing pile of recordings of African tribal songs. As the woman travels south that day and for the rest of the trip, her songs will occupy more and more of her time. As her dual collections of animal specimens and songs grow, so does the need for a decision about which of her own identities will come into focus: woman, wife, scientist, explorer, musician, or scholar. Who is she? Who will she become? Who can she become?
Seven thousand miles away, on the eastern coast of the United States, another collision between personal identity and institutional identification is brewing. There, in a medical laboratory at Harvard University, a middle-aged man in shabby clothes catalogues library books. Ten years ago, he was a brilliant young zoology professor with high hopes and aspirations. He authored the first and only study of passenger pigeon calls, wrote groundbreaking articles about avian vocal behavior, and corresponded with Europe’s leading animal behaviorists. Now, he is almost completely deaf, and his fortunes have shifted. With a string of part-time teaching jobs behind him, he does menial filing at Harvard with no clear plan for the future. Every day, he sees young Harvard students who will apply for the jobs he once hoped for, secure in their health, wealth, and friends. And who is he? Who will he become? Who can he become?
By the early twentieth century, the debates about musical identity that originated with Darwin and Spencer had become closely tied to notions of bodily difference rooted in biological specimens. But difference was just as present in the lives of those who collected and organized bodies and artifacts for the science of identity. For song collectors like the woman in Angola and the man at Harvard, difference was not a concept but a condition of life, the condition in which institutional science occurred. In that version of difference, animality was connected to lived experiences of gender, class, race, nationality, and other categories by material and discursive conditions. Entangled in those conditions, the work of biological and cultural identification was inseparable from the personal experiences of difference that determined who created musical knowledge, and how they did it. In this chapter, I turn from institutions to individuals, and to the ways their experiences became a mechanism of music’s taxonomies.
This chapter focuses on the careers of two of America’s first professional song collectors: music ethnographer Laura Craytor Boulton, and psychologist and zoologist Wallace Craig. My chosen protagonists are intellectual descendants of the zoology program at Harvard that produced Fewkes and the song collection at the Bureau of American Ethnology. Although other collectors such as Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Olive Dame Campbell, and Fewkes himself are better known, the careers of Wallace Craig and Laura Boulton bring together the conditions that connected human social politics, the status of animals, and the construction of musical identity. Although they did not know one another, these two individuals shared ties to important movements in zoology and eugenics that had far-reaching effects not only on their work, but on sonic taxonomies more broadly. They occupied a middle ground in science’s hierarchies, navigating flows of power that make their stories unique examples of scientific labor’s reliance on the measures of difference it purported to discern.
Music scholar Suzanne Cusick once wrote that there is no place for “persons” within a historiography of large-scale musical epochs, styles, and epic changes, no room for individuals whose stories are rooted in historically and culturally specific, gendered, classed experiences.1 This chapter is about specific persons and their experiences, about a kind of identity that is very different from biological or musical identity, and at the same time very closely related to its making. In this chapter I use names and stories to make space for the individual experiences that are unaccounted for by institutional