ames 2003 sound of evolution

The Sound of Evolution

Ames, Eric.

Modernism/modernity, Volume 10, Number 2, April 2003, pp. 297-325(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mod.2003.0030

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AMES / the sound of evolution297

MODERNISM / modernity

VOLUME TEN, NUMBER

TWO, PP 297–325.

© 2003 THE JOHNS

HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Sound of Evolution

Eric Ames

A Report to the Academy

“What is to be gained, someone will surely ask, by having aHottentot sing into the phonograph, then taking this dubiouswork of art and dissecting it with a tonometer and a metronomeinto its atomic parts?”1 In his 1905 address “The Problems ofComparative Musicology,” presented to the International Soci-ety for Musicology in Vienna, Erich Moritz von Hornbostelreframed what was already an old question in strikingly newterms. By the turn of the century, the Western fascination withnon-Western music had an extensive history, documented innumerous accounts by travelers, missionaries, merchants, andscientists.2 These written accounts remind us that the unexpectedcomponent of Hornbostel’s experiment was not the Hottentot,but the phonograph. The study of music had previously reliedon source criticism, texts including hand-written scores and pub-lished manuscripts, whereas comparative musicology—a precur-sor to ethnomusicology—would become the first discipline basedon sound recordings.3 Though Edison’s “talking machine” com-monly denoted pleasure, leisure, entertainment, and consump-tion, this device would now serve to establish the empirical basisfor a comparative science of music. Thus the phonograph lureda new generation of scientists to revisit a familiar topos, the“primitive,” embodied by the Hottentot.

Hornbostel phrased his question as a joke for an audiencepresumably familiar with the figure of Saartjie Baartman, a Sanwoman who was exhibited in the early nineteenth century as the“Hottentot Venus.” Her stage name itself was intended ironi-cally, for, as Bernth Lindfors explains, “in physique she little re-

Eric Ames is an

assistant professor of

German at the University

of Washington. He is

currently at work on a

book about exoticism

and early mass culture

in Germany, with

particular focus on the

entertainments of Carl

Hagenbeck.

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public.press.jhu.edu

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

298 sembled any European notion of classic beauty. Like many San women, she had ste-atopygia, a greatly enlarged rump, which appears to have been the single feature ofher anatomy sensational enough to bring out crowds to see her.”4 Spectators in Lon-don, where Baartman was displayed from 1810 to 1811, described her performance asa kind of animal act, invoking and thereby reinforcing the idea of a biological con-tinuum between humans and animals that organized her stage performance.5 TheFrench naturalist Georges Cuvier conferred scientific authority upon this idea by com-paring Baartman’s physique to that of an orangutan. In this instance, as Sander Gilmanhas shown, what was deemed extraordinary corporeality implied racial and sexual de-generacy.6 When Baartman died in 1815, her body parts were dissected, dipped inwax, and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. From the London stage to theParis museum, the Hottentot Venus confirms that human displays occupied a tenuousspace between the embodied and the disembodied, the living and the dead.7

Hornbostel proposed a new approach to this figure, one that simultaneously in-verted certain conventions of her stage performance and elaborated the logic of ana-tomical display. Rather than exhibit the Hottentot’s physicality, he recorded her music,preserved it in wax, and dissected her song into its minutest parts. The phonographoffered a means of hearing, examining, and representing the primitive in a new modeof disembodiment, as a sound recording. Moreover, its capacity to inscribe sound in apermanent and reproducible form—a wax cylinder or phonogram—granted access toan acoustic realm that had previously resisted perception.

This attempt to explore the imperceptible world by mechanical means was one ofmany in the late nineteenth century. The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Mareyhad already used a battery of graphic, photographic, and cinematographic devices forreproducing what the eye could not see, recording the instantaneous movements ofphysical functions such as muscle contractions, and analyzing their changes over time.8

Hornbostel distinguished his project from Marey’s in two important ways: first, by hisuse of sound technology, and second, by his preoccupation with the so-called primi-tive. This second point of distinction also led Hornbostel, unlike Marey, to plot tempo-ral change along an evolutionary axis, charting the morphological and historical trans-formations of music across the sweep of time and space. Even while scrutinizing thetiniest fractions of a moment, as had Marey, Hornbostel imagined himself traversingextended intervals of time: “We wish to uncover the darkest and most distant past, topeel off the timeless and the elemental from the fullness of the present; in other words,we want to understand the evolution and the aesthetic foundation of music” (“PM,”56). This programmatic statement inadvertently evokes the experience of time at thecusp of the twentieth century—an experience that the phonograph and the cinemahelped transform. These inventions, as the historian Stephen Kern has shown, “broughtthe past into the present more than ever before,” thereby expanding the present andgiving it density.9 The thickened present offered Hornbostel a uniquely modern ter-rain for excavating the primitive past, and the phonograph served as his requisite toolfor digging. By means of recording, he sought to extract from the Hottentot’s song “theprimal origins of music” (die Uranfänge der Musik).10

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AMES / the sound of evolution299If the Hottentot Venus remains a familiar icon, the sound of her voice has faded

from memory. As modernists, our shared interest in the visual has led us to overlookthe historical impact of a discipline, indeed a discourse, based on and dedicated to thepreservation of sound.11 Yet this phenomenon should be of interest to us, not onlybecause it emphasizes the specificity of sound (which reminds us that problems ofrepresenting evolution are not restricted to vision), but also because it raises new ques-tions about the formation of scientific discourse in the context of modern technology.This essay investigates the role of phonography in the nascent discipline of compara-tive musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft).12 In particular, it demonstrateshow phonography could be imagined and employed as a discursive technique for ren-dering evolution audible—a technique, that is, for dissecting “primitive” songs andrebuilding them into evolutionary narratives. Sound technology helped transform musicinto information that could be used and distributed in a variety of ways. This essaytherefore explores how listening becomes a scientific pursuit.

In examining the initial experiments of Hornbostel and his colleagues, we accesswhat Bruno Latour calls “science in action,” in this case, the making of ethnomusicologybefore the “field” even existed.13 We gain too a more nuanced understanding of howscientists shape their practice retroactively according to their use of new tools andtechniques. Comparative musicologists found their own voice by experimenting withthe phonograph and its popular discourse. Phonography helped create the necessaryconditions for the ascent of comparative musicology, even while broadcasting the os-tensible decline of that discipline’s unique object of study, the loss of “original” music.By appropriating and modifying phonography for the purpose of conducting experi-mental research, comparative musicology reorganized scientific modes of representa-tion; more importantly, though, it spoke on behalf of an entirely new principle of notseeing science—but hearing it. As I argue, Hornbostel and his colleagues representedtheir object of study as well as their ideas about it in acoustic terms, as a form ofphonographic discourse. Today, if not in turn-of-the-century Germany, what was oncea loud and audible fact threatens to fall on deaf ears. There was a moment when theear had a purchase that the eye did not. As modernists, we need to listen to the soundof evolution: that of our own. Whether we think of ourselves as living in the informa-tion age or under the sign of globalization, the problems we confront in using newtechnologies to stake out interdisciplinary areas of scholarship are still linked to “theproblems of comparative musicology” that Hornbostel addressed nearly a century ago.

Institutions of the Audible

In his Vienna lecture of 1905, Hornbostel spoke as the newly appointed director ofthe Berlin Phonogram Archive (das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv).14 Founded in 1900by Carl Stumpf, the archive was initially housed in the Psychology Institute, whichStumpf directed, at the Berlin University. A private institution funded largely byHornbostel’s estate and the few donations he and Stumpf could solicit, the phonogramarchive was the first of its kind in Germany, although not the first in the world. In 1899

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300 Sigmund Exner had established the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy ofSciences (das Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften)in Vienna. A scant year later, presumably in response to its new competition, Exnerwould assert: “The collection of musical performances of savage peoples may prove tobe especially fruitful for a comparative musicology, which would probably be madepossible in this way.”15 Nevertheless, he set a Eurocentric agenda for the Vienna archive,concentrating on European languages and dialects, Western music, and on the voicesof famous personalities, in that order of priority.16 Thus the Berlin Phonogram Archivemade a name for itself by specializing in the collection of “exotic melodies” (exotischeMelodien).

Stumpf and Hornbostel would later be recognized as the “founding fathers” of theso-called Berlin School of Comparative Musicology, but the historiographical empha-sis on fathers and schools misses the point. On one level, it locates Stumpf and hisassistants retrospectively in a disciplinary position that they never occupied. None hadchairs in comparative musicology (or for that matter in musicology). Trained in phi-losophy, Stumpf held posts in psychology at Würzburg, Prague, Halle, and Munich,where he specialized in “psychoacoustics,” before landing at the Berlin University. Hisfirst full-time assistant in the phonogram archive, Otto Abraham, was a successfulBerlin physician, while Hornbostel earned his doctorate in chemistry at the Universityof Vienna.17 Each scholar initially worked outside of the boundaries that presumablycircumscribed comparative musicology. Their peripheral position urges us to treat thisproject as interdisciplinary from the outset. Indeed, the question that Hornbostel andhis coworkers asked of their object was “inextricably tied to the most general questionsof musical history, ethnography, and psychology; its solution could only be approachedthrough the cooperation of these sciences” (“BPM,” 225).

On another level, school-driven approaches to comparative musicology give shortshrift to the sound archive as a “hearing institution” (or Höranstalt), as Hornbostelwould call it. Mark Sandberg’s analysis of the folk museum and the cinema as “institu-tions of the visible” is here instructive, emphasizing as it does the notion of “the insti-tution as discursive formation” in order to elicit the historical as well as the metaphori-cal links between seemingly disparate visual attractions.18 An analogous accent on thephonograph and the sound archive as “institutions of the audible” not only amplifiestheir discursive cross talk; it also demonstrates how they participated together in alarger economy of circulation.19

In 1908, when the Berlin Phonogram Archive had collected nearly one thousandwax cylinders, Stumpf enumerated the various sources from which they derived:

They have come, first, from our own recordings of occasional performances by exoticguests in the German Imperial capital; second, from recordings made by traveling re-searchers, many of whom we equipped with phonographs and instructions; third, fromthe exchange of copies with other archives abroad; and fourth, from donations by thelarge phonographic companies (Deutsche Grammophon, Favorit, Beka Records), whichproduce nearly flawless recordings in the farthest reaches of the world for commercialpurposes.20

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AMES / the sound of evolution301Each of these sources—exhibitions, travelers, archives, and record companies—rep-

resents but one channel in an emerging network of circulation based on the mobilityof recorded sound. Taken together, they offer a glimpse of the vast infrastructure thatStumpf and his assistants required for their collection project. “This work is at oncenational and international [völkerverknüpfend], for it requires the cooperation of re-searchers from all civilized nations in the service of common knowledge.”21 By 1918,the archive would amass more than ten thousand recordings, making it the world’slargest phonogram collection and the hub of a global exchange network. As Stumpfproclaimed a decade earlier, “If the center of such an undertaking is to exist anywherein the world, then it must be in Berlin” (“BP,” 83).

If the city was the inevitable location for an archive, it was also the primary site forconducting ethnomusicological fieldwork avant la lettre. The Berlin Phonogram Archivewould rapidly expand its collections with the rise of professional fieldwork, to be sure.At the turn of the century, however, “traveling researchers” provided only one amongmany sources of acoustic evidence. Generally, Stumpf and his assistants did not them-selves travel abroad. Between 1900 and 1912, they made their earliest and most im-portant recordings not in the colonies—but in the metropolis. The music came tothem. Live performances of non-Western music could be heard throughout Berlin,where they played a key role in the burgeoning industry of leisure and entertainmentas stock features of cabaret programs, circus shows, and ethnographic exhibitions.Though the literature on nineteenth-century visual culture maintains an awkward si-lence on issues of sound, music did not merely supplement these entertainments. Onthe contrary, live performances of foreign music were in at least one respect moresensational than the visual displays that they accompanied: Europeans were alreadyfamiliar with images of cultural difference, brought to them through paintings andillustrations, but ethnographic entertainments made the sounds of non-European lifeavailable to mass audiences for the very first time.

Equipped with a phonograph, Stumpf and his assistants visited many of the itiner-ant shows that came to Berlin. Here they recorded the music of performing troupesfrom Thailand (1900), Japan (1901, 1909), India (1902), Togo (1904), Tunisia (1904),the Hopi pueblo (1906), Sri Lanka (1907), Cameroon (1909), Sudan (1909), Samoa(1910), Senegambia (1910), Somalia (1910), and northern Scandinavia (1911), amongother “exotic” locales. The Berlin records were labeled “archive recordings”(Archivaufnahmen), thus designating their status as the earliest collections in the Ber-lin Phonogram Archive and the material basis for its establishment. The recordingsessions took place at several venues, including the Zoological Garden and the CircusBusch (where human and animal shows intermingled), the Central-Hotel and theWintergarten (upper-end variety theaters), the Passage-Panoptikum and Castan’sPanoptikum (wax museums), the Velodrome (a bicycle track that doubled as an out-door exhibition site) and Luna Park (an amusement park on the outskirts of the city).22

In Hornbostel’s words, “the primal origins of music” were excavated in the fairgroundsof modern Berlin. Only from the viewpoint of the urban center could one construct acomparative taxonomy of cultures or an evolutionary history of origins.23

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302 The Descent of Music

German comparative musicology took its opening cue from British evolutionism.In 1885, Stumpf published the first German review of “Music Psychology in England,”a survey of the various theories of music advanced by, among others, Charles Darwinand Herbert Spencer.24 Framing their work in terms of music psychology was admit-tedly problematic, for the distinctive claim of nineteenth-century evolutionary theorywas, as Thomas Richards has shown, to calculate all things and arrange them in seriesof lineal development (IA, 48). At the same time, precisely because of its comprehen-sive scope, evolutionary theory had to explain the emergence of music or at least ac-count for it in some way. Stumpf’s review therefore concentrated on music’s challengeto evolutionism (in the broadest sense) as an all-encompassing theory of origins. Thoughhe surveyed a number of competing theories, Stumpf’s use of Darwin is both impor-tant and indicative, for it served as a touchstone throughout his subsequent researchand teaching. Darwin provides a key, that is, to Stumpf’s own professional evolution asa comparative musicologist.

In The Descent of Man (1871, German translation 1875), Darwin initially desig-nated the existence of music as an evolutionary conundrum: “As neither the enjoy-ment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to manin reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysteri-ous with which he is endowed.”25 Music seemed to defy explanation not least of allbecause Darwin addressed it as a question of reproduction. To be sure, music couldneither reproduce itself nor struggle for survival. “Nevertheless,” wrote Stumpf, “Dar-win knew what to do. His answer could be summarized as follows: ‘In the beginningwas love.’”26 Darwin tried to resolve the predicament of music by inventing his ownorigin myth, one that referred back (tautologically) to the creative principle of de-scent. Music first appeared in the animal kingdom, he argued, where it functioned asa “primitive” form of sexual selection, homologous to the colorful plumage of a bird.That most birds “sing” rendered this homology doubly compelling, embodying andthereby naturalizing the link between the existence of music and the principle of sexualselection. “Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes,a strong case can be made out that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfectedin relation to the propagation of the species. . . . Every one knows how much birds usetheir vocal organs as a means of courtship; and some species may likewise performwhat may be called instrumental music” (DM, 875–6). By defining music as a kind ofsexual lure, Darwin incorporated it into the more familiar laws of selection and inher-itance that governed his own thesis of “descent by modification” first elaborated inThe Origin of Species.

Darwin’s theory of music rested on two assumptions that Stumpf found equallypreposterous: namely, that birds could be seen as evolutionary ancestors of humanbeings, and that the “intermediate stages” (Zwischenstufen) between man and his closestrelatives could also be found in music (“ME,” 309). As Stumpf commented in a subse-quent lecture: “The much sought-after human ape can at least be imagined, if notactually found,” whereas a musical equivalent to the human ape or “missing link” was

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AMES / the sound of evolution303unimaginable.27 In other words, a freak of nature may exist—indeed, it must for Dar-

win—but there was no such thing as a freak of music. Nevertheless, this shift in Stumpf’sinterest from the origins to the intermediate stages was entirely consistent with nine-teenth-century evolutionary thinking. As Richards notes, “The project of Darwinianmorphology . . . fixed its sights on the grey areas between forms. It sought to verify theexistence of forms between forms” (IA, 55). Once these liminal spaces were identi-fied, the gaps in an evolutionary sequence could be filled, and the sequence renderedcontinuous. As we shall see, Stumpf and his assistants would take up this project bylocating the gaps between ancient, “primitive,” and modern music, and extrapolatingthe forms that ostensibly connected them.

Stumpf’s critique of Darwin provided him with an occasion for redefining music inthe context of scientific positivism. What distinguished music from “the sounds emit-ted by animals,” Stumpf argued, was its formal organization based on the interval, thevariable difference in pitch between two sounds. This had a number of importantconsequences. First, the question of music became a specifically human one. Theproduction and the enjoyment of fixed intervals presupposed the capacity for abstractthought, which was held to be uniquely human. Insofar as animal sounds resembledmusical intervals, that resemblance was coincidental, a fortuitous expression of “thepleasure in sound as such, not the pleasure in musical intervals” (“ME,” 312–3). Sec-ond, the search for the origins of music became synonymous with the search for theorigins of musical intervals. “Somewhere, somehow, intervals must have been invented(even by the mysterious human ape, if you like), and thus began music” (“ME,” 313–4). This new exploration would still involve identifying the existence of gaps betweenforms in order to fill them retrospectively, but the developmental sequence that itaimed to reconstruct would encompass only humans. The leap across the perceiveddivide between humans and animals was one that Stumpf himself refused to make.Moreover, rather than calculate all things that ever existed, he would concentrate onmusical forms in particular. In so doing, Stumpf established a modified notion of evo-lution, one that maintained a strict separation between humans and animals. His ap-propriation of the discourse of evolution redefined its parameters for an exact scienceof music.

On the most basic level, however, Darwin’s “lack of an empirical foundation” pointedto a gap in the discourse itself (“ME,” 308). Stumpf was not alone in his objection.Throughout the 1870s, Germany’s leading anthropologists, Adolf Bastian and RudolfVirchow, made this same argument in their reviews of Darwin’s books as well as intheir famous dispute with Darwin’s German popularizer, Ernst Haeckel.28 Bastian andVirchow took this as grounds for discarding evolution entirely, focusing instead on the“elementary ideas” of humanity and the multiplicity of cultural forms that issued fromthose ideas. What makes Stumpf’s 1885 review so remarkable, then, is that it beginswith a typically German critique of British science, but arrives at an unexpected con-clusion: Rather than dismiss Darwin’s claims in toto, Stumpf would adopt the evolu-tionary assumption, while concentrating his own efforts on gathering “facts” about theorigins of music in order to rectify the dearth of empirical research.

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304 Countering Darwin’s conjectures with hard evidence demanded wide-scale record-ing, collecting, and cataloging. It called, in other words, for the building of an archive.However Stumpf differed from anti-Darwinists in German anthropology, all agreedthat the historical development of culture could be directly apprehended through thestudy of “primitive” peoples. As Darwin himself noted, “We see the musical faculties,which are not wholly deficient in any race, are capable of prompt and high develop-ment, for Hottentots and Negroes have become excellent musicians, although in theirnative countries they rarely practice anything that we should consider music” (DM,878–9). Stumpf set out to find his own informants.

Acoustic Selection

Here is a primal scene of comparative musicology: Nine Bella Coola Indians per-form a “Cannibal Dance” before a long-pole lodge. They sing while beating drums,shaking rattles, and rhythmically stomping their feet. A group of scientists, seated be-fore them, watches and listens. This scene—and its audience is part of the spectacle—would be repeated numerous times not in British Columbia, where the performersoriginated, but in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and other Germancities. From 1885 to 1886, Carl Hagenbeck, the consummate showman of ImperialGermany, exhibited his latest troupe of ethnographic performers not only for urbancrowds, but also for scientific experts. While the Bella Coola drew mixed reactionsfrom commercial audiences (for whom they looked “too European”), for Germany’sscientific elite they were sensational in every sense of the word.29

In November of 1885, the troupe made a special appearance before the Institutefor Geography at the University of Halle (fig. 1). Here, Stumpf intended to conducthis first experiment in the psychology of non-Western music, beginning the empiricalresearch needed to support an evolutionary theory of music.30 While his colleagueswatched the performers, Stumpf was poised to transcribe the music by hand. He wouldfail. Stumpf describes his uneasy sense of drowning in the performance, “swimming”in a turbulent sea of unfamiliar sounds.31 The spectacle wrenched this listener fromhis position of cool detachment, immersing him in a sensory riot. “As the actors grewmore passionate,” he remarks, “the musical intervals, whose arrangement is in manyways unfamiliar to our ears, became increasingly unintelligible” (“LBI,” 406). ThoughStumpf took Native American music seriously, its apparent inscrutability seemed tocorroborate the absolute distinction between European “art music” (Tonkunst) andnon-European “natural music” (natürliche Musik) that Eduard Hanslick had drawn in1854: “When South Sea Islanders rattle wooden sticks rhythmically, while soundingout an incomprehensible howl [ein unfaßliches Geheul], that is natural music, becauseit is not music at all.”32 Stumpf’s initial impression of the Bella Coola gave him noobvious reason to challenge this received idea; nor did his fragmentary transcriptionsof their music offer any evidence to the contrary.33 The ethnographic exhibition hadissued in a disorienting barrage of sensory stimuli that initially resisted transcription.As a stenographer, Stumpf had tested his powers of hearing and notation, and failedon both accounts.

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AMES / the sound of evolution305

Yet the problems of aural perception and acoustic legibility only served to heightenthe scientist’s curiosity. After the performance, Stumpf gained permission fromHagenbeck’s agents, Captain Johan Adrian Jacobsen and his brother Fillip, to have aprivate audience with one of the singers, Nuskilusta (see fig. 1).34 They spent fourevenings together in the Institute, working for one to two hours at a time. WhileNuskilusta rehearsed the troupe’s various songs more than ten times each, Stumpfplodded ahead with his hand-written scores (“LBI,” 407). These private recitals dif-fered in important ways from the public exhibitions; as Stumpf noted in his report,“Nuskilusta stopped rattling a piece of wood in his hand when he noticed that it dis-turbed me” (“LBI,” 409). Such modifications could, he acknowledged, potentially dis-tort the results of his experiment. “Nuskilusta kept the tempo slow, perhaps out ofconsideration for me, but also because [the solo performance] lacked the same effectthat was produced by the collective singing and dancing” (“LBI,” 408). Problems ofthis kind could be resolved by what he defined as precise means of measurement: “Athome, then, working from memory, I determined the tempo with a metronome, whichone can do with great reliability” (“LBI,” 408–9). During the day, he also attended theBella Coola’s public shows at a local beer garden, where he checked his revised tran-scriptions against the choral performances.35 Hours of intensive listening began to payoff, he observed, for “now I could hear more than mere howling; I could hear themelodies just as Nuskilusta had sung them solo” (“LBI,” 408; italics in original). Theisolation and repetition of the individual singer’s voice allowed Stumpf to train andadapt his aural response to the unfamiliar texture of Bella Coola music. If a melody

Fig. 1. Carl Günther, Carl Hagenbeck’s Bella Coola Indians, 1885/86. The original legend reads: “Nuskilusta

[seated, left], hamatsa [standing, second from left], chief [seated, center], trickster [seated, right], the second

singer [standing, far right].” Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum.

�

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306 could be picked out from the “howling,” then the strict separation between Europeanart music and natural music must be, Stumpf reasoned, at once willed and tenuous. “Withrespect to music, we should not speak too offhandedly of ‘wild, uncultivated’ peoples.”36

The blatant staginess of Hagenbeck’s show did not undermine its “authenticity” forStumpf. On the contrary, it shook his faith in travelogues and scientific studies thatrelied on acoustic evidence gathered abroad.37 Claiming the authority of having “beenthere,” travelers often presented full scores of non-European music, but consistentlyelided any mention of the methodological problems of transcription. While some hadlittle or no training in musical notation, even the most gifted or meticulous stenogra-phers, as travelers who were merely “passing through,” had virtually no opportunity todouble-check their work. Ironically, ethnographic exhibitions chipped away at the le-gitimacy of travelogues, poking holes in their facade of completeness.

For an expert in psychoacoustics, Stumpf’s experiment confirmed that listeninghabits were not merely subjective, but culturally conditioned. Nineteenth-centuryaudiences in Germany (and elsewhere) heard non-Western music in many and some-times conflicting ways. Listeners such as Hanslick dismissed “natural music” as “notmusic at all”; on the opposite end of the spectrum, others failed to apprehend its statusas non-Western. Stumpf and his assistants repeatedly cautioned against what they un-derstood as the common tendency “to hear with European ears,” that is, to treat non-European music as though it were based on familiar structures of harmony.38 Thistendency was of particular concern for the stenographer, whose predicament Stumpfdescribed by way of a visual analogy:

When one leafs through old, illustrated travelogues, one is amazed at the Europeanizedfacial features of “savages,” as they used to be called (despite the exaggerated familyresemblance to Europeans). It was simply not possible for draftsmen to see objectively;and, for all of their naturalism, it remains impossible for them to do so today. The pencilis guided not by the eye, but by the brain, in which the accustomed facial features leave alasting impression. [“BP,” 65–6]

The creation of residual images, he suggested, had an acoustic corollary in what wemight call residual sounds, echoes of harmony that faintly ring in “European ears.” Ifthis penchant for hearing diatonically was an inadvertent effect of subjective percep-tion, however, it was also a problem that one could correct. “To free oneself from suchhabits,” Hornbostel stated in his 1905 report, “requires a special practice, a training adhoc” (“PM,” 50). Researchers would have to attune themselves (literally) to musicalalterity, while casting away more familiar ways of listening. Insofar as aural trainingdepended not on source criticism (e.g., musical transcription), but on extensive expo-sure to live music, it also required an unprecedented degree of access to non-Euro-pean peoples.39 Around 1900, access and availability provided a rationale for makingrepeated visits to local, urban entertainments, where scientists could simultaneouslyrecalibrate their sense of hearing and develop a corresponding method of “objective”representation (“TMS,” 170).

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AMES / the sound of evolution307Rather than speculate on the significance of Bella Coola songs, Stumpf set out to

transcribe them: “It was our intention to provide only phonographic reproductions ofthe audible [phonographische Nachbildungen des Gehörten], so to speak, not theo-retical observations” (“LBI,” 424). In this instance, “phonographic reproductions” al-luded not to Edison’s talking machine (which Stumpf had yet to employ), but to theidea of nonarbitrary writing, or “phonography,” as it was understood in the mid-nine-teenth century. As James Lastra notes, “the very term ‘phonography’ initially referredto a stenographic system developed by Isaac Pitman in 1837, which, by transcribingsounds instead of words, was expected to offer a more direct, almost analogical form ofwriting.”40 Though Stumpf would use a conventional form of musical notation, Pitman’ssystem appealed to him as an ideal mode of acoustic representation and shaped hisown discourse on non-Western music. The search for an objective means of recording,unmediated by the presence of the stenographer, would propel Stumpf throughouthis career.

The results of this first experiment augured well for the success of future research.The ethnographic exhibition provided ample resources for analyzing the rhythmic or-ganization and melodic texture of Bella Coola music. Stumpf concluded that Nuskilustaemployed a coherent “tone system” based on a five-step musical scale, which “musthave been the result of a cultural development [eine geistige Entwicklung].” Not onlydid this suggest that the Bella Coola possessed a concept of musical intervals—a claim,as we have seen, that supported his critique of Darwin. In addition to its manifestimportance for music psychology, it led Stumpf to assert his project’s ethnographicpotential: “In time, such studies will also acquire anthropological significance, beyondtheir musicological value, inasmuch as they identify new traits [Kennzeichen] for es-tablishing the relationship or interaction between different tribes” (“LBI,” 405). Mostimportantly, this conclusion brought European and non-European music into calcu-lable proximity. Radical new comparisons could now be made and even verified. Oneevening, after listening to Nuskilusta, Stumpf attended a recital of Bach’s High Mass,where he experienced an epiphany indeed: Perhaps the “expansion” (Ausdehnung) ofdifferent evolutionary stages could be charted in terms of musical intervals, he pro-posed, by “measuring the distance between Bach and Nuskilusta” (“LBI,” 426). ThusStumpf imagined a much larger and more ambitious project, an evolutionary scienceof music.

This evolutionary imaginary, it must be stressed, was entirely a function ofspectatorship, for Hagenbeck’s display made no attempt to construe evolution visually.On the contrary, the Bella Coola show, like so many of Hagenbeck’s ethnographicexhibitions, was modeled on the variety program, with its “montage” of dance num-bers, magic acts, and musical performances. Rather than organize human displays asvisual corollaries of Darwinian narratives, Hagenbeck choreographed a diverse seriesof kinetic and multisensory attractions. He further distinguished himself as an ethno-graphic showman by representing “typical” scenes of everyday life in foreign lands. Inthe context of urban entertainment, Hagenbeck’s practice of hyperbolic collection—importing vast numbers of humans, animals, plants, objects, and entire buildings, all

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308 for the purpose of display—served mainly to render the exotic accessible to mass audi-ences.41 At the same time, his insistence on the “authentic” and the “typical” appealedto an elite group of anthropologists (led by Bastian and Virchow), whose approvalHagenbeck needed in order to legitimate his own ethnographic enterprise. Howeverthe entrepreneur excelled at “managing” an entire network of discourses on the ex-otic, these discourses would exceed his control. A spectator such as Stumpf, who broughtwith him a different set of goals and expectations, would hear the performances asliving evidence of evolution.

Stumpf’s “first encounter” with the Bella Coola offers a preview of what it wouldtake to render evolution audible with the aid of a phonograph (and a productive anal-ogy to what would later be known as fieldwork).42 It demonstrates, in particular, howlistening functions as a scientific technique. In order to render the Bella Coola’s musiclegible and comprehensible, Stumpf had to reduce the ensemble to a solo singer. Fur-ther, the props and stage settings of Hagenbeck’s show—the elements that the impre-sario had used to create a convincing expression of exotic space and to immerse spec-tators in the depicted scene—were deliberately screened out of the private recitals. Intheir place, Stumpf constructed a new performance context, one specially designedfor inscribing sounds in isolation. But which sounds counted as music, and which onesas noise? Distinguishing a melody from “mere howling” required still other acts ofacoustic reduction and selection. On the one hand, noises that “disturbed” the stenog-rapher (the shaking of rattles and stomping of feet) needed to be eliminated. On theother hand, the musical rudiments that intrigued him (melody, rhythm, and intona-tion) had to be identified, amplified, and repeated. Only by restaging the musical per-formance in its entirety and manipulating the terms of its occasion—now with the solosinger repeating particular notes or passages upon request—could the stenographerproduce the effects of acoustic legibility and “objectivity” that he would claim for histranscriptions. Acoustic objectivity was therefore a function not of the distance be-tween science and entertainment, but of the power to choreograph. As “participantobserver,” the scientist became a kind of impresario in his own right.

In 1887, Stumpf ran a similar experiment at Hagenbeck’s Ceylon Exhibition inBerlin. Not until 1900, when he and his new assistants at the Psychology Instituteequipped themselves with a phonograph, would they find a writing system that metthe standards of a science committed to positivism. By that time, the crisis of legibilityhad acquired new meaning in the context of imperialism and mass culture. The expan-sion of the German empire, and particularly its acquisition of colonies between 1884and 1900, posed an immediate threat to the existence of indigenous music. The ques-tion now was whether sound technology would preserve such music or, conversely,hasten its demise.

Voices of the Dead

Early mass culture and new technology commonly promised to bring distant peopleand places closer together than ever before.43 At the same time, the global logic of

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AMES / the sound of evolution309access and connectedness gave rise to new anxieties about the consequences of too

much proximity. Throughout their writings, Stumpf and Hornbostel would take turnslamenting the “annihilation,” “homogenization,” and “modernization” of non-Euro-pean music. They consistently emphasized two interrelated forces of transformation,namely, colonialism and circulation. In so doing, however, comparative musicologistsassailed the infrastructure that made possible not only the ethnographic exhibition—their initial source of data—but also their own still nascent discipline.

Paradoxically, Stumpf and his assistants advocated the wide-scale collection of non-European music in reaction to imperialist expansion. “The more relentlessly Euro-pean culture invades foreign parts of the earth and drives declining forms [of music] ifnot also their carriers to the brink of extinction, the more it is time to collect and studythem” (“TMS,” 167). The conquest of space rendered time of the essence. That wasprecisely the logic that Adolf Bastian had employed in his 1881 call for an ethnologicalmuseum in Berlin: “The existence of natural peoples is for us only ephemeral; that is,they exist for us only insofar as our knowledge of them and our relationships to themare concerned. The moment that they meet us, the angel of death is upon them. Fromthen on, struck by the angel, they carry the seed of decline within them.”44 Bastian’sapocalyptic vision of “first contact” invokes the notion of biological contagion; colo-nialism was the virus within the bloodstream of native peoples.45 Thus Bastian andStumpf each prescribed the antidote of immediate collection and preservation. Theyunderstood collection not as a protest against colonialism, but as a reflection ofGermany’s imperial power, a commitment to the stewardship of its colonies and re-sources. Imperial prestige and custodianship here meant, above all, funding and main-taining urban institutions, from the Royal Museum of Ethnology, which was estab-lished in 1886, to the Berlin Phonogram Archive.46

Comparative musicologists reacted in equally paradoxical fashion against modernsystems of circulation. In 1908, Stumpf predicted that music “will in the future belongto the indispensable signs that will inform us about contacts among the peoples andtribes of the earth—their relationships, migrations, and trade connections—providedthat we do not wait until the expansion of world traffic [Weltverkehr] has obscured allof their characteristic differences” (“BP,” 75–6). Reports from abroad seemed to verifywhat Stumpf had surmised in Berlin, where the networks of circulation had alreadytransformed urban experience in tangible ways. Shortly before the outbreak of WorldWar I, for instance, Albert Schweitzer wrote a letter to Stumpf in which he describedthe scene in Gabon, Africa: “Motorboats are increasingly replacing rowboats, as theforeign trading posts prefer them. In the foreseeable future there will no longer beany day-long journeys by rowboat, with twenty men in a canoe standing one behindthe other, singing in order to keep time in their rowing, i.e. end of the rowing song.”47

For Schweitzer it seemed that the motor of modernity would overpower the “naturalrhythms” of native life, leaving in its wake traditional means of transportation and theircorresponding forms of cultural expression. The doctor’s letter not only confirmedStumpf’s own diagnosis; it conveyed urgency to comparative musicology as a salvageoperation. As Hornbostel quipped in his Vienna lecture: “We must rescue what there

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310 is left to rescue, before the airship reaches the automobile and the electric speed-train, before we hear Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-É in all of Africa and The Beautiful Songof Little Cohn in the South Seas.”48 The last vestiges of “original” music had to becollected and preserved, he declared, before new technologies of transportation andcommunication delivered mass culture to the colonies.

As the sardonic references to popular Western music were meant to suggest,Hornbostel feared that the dissemination of gramophone records in the colonies would“contaminate” his data at the source. “The coming of Christianity spreads Europeanchurch songs everywhere, the introduction of school lessons our folk songs, the colo-nial troops our military marches, and the gramophones of the colonials our worst popularhits. But what, we ask, gets lost along the way?” (“EM,” 91). Part of the problem, heand his colleagues believed, was that “primitive peoples have a remarkable talent forimitation and assimilation.”49 This penchant for mimicry, so the argument ran, madecolonized peoples especially susceptible to losing their own traditions. Paradoxically,then, non-European music had to be rescued from the people who created it. Imita-tion and assimilation represented more than a loss of “originality,” in all senses of theword. They posed a threat to the order of things—the evolution of music—at preciselythe moment when comparative musicologists began to chart it. Unless drastic mea-sures were taken to preserve non-European music in its “original” form, went thelogic, it would rapidly and irreversibly mutate beyond recognition. The solution wasnot simply to deploy one mobility system (sound technology) against others (planes,trains, and automobiles), for the circulation of “canned” music only exacerbated thiscrisis of originality. From the beginning, Emil Berliner’s gramophone was primarilydesigned for playback rather than recording. Therefore, while sound technology os-tensibly offered a solution, its prime instrument, the gramophone, promoted mimicryand in so doing threw “originality” back into question. The circulation of gramophonerecords in the colonies was simply too effective. In such a context, the DeutscheGrammophon Company’s famous trademark, “The Recording Angel,” represented nolonger a modern form of transcendence, but in Bastian’s terms a new “angel of death.”

As key forms of technology and mass culture, the gramophone and the phonographparticipated in the very crisis that comparative musicologists considered a threat tomusic’s existence. In at once lamenting and requiring them, Stumpf and Hornbostelheld deeply ambivalent attitudes toward modern techniques of circulation. These atti-tudes shaped their project in crucial ways, beginning with their choice of sound tech-nology. If the gramophone potentially garbled the sound of evolution, how could thephonograph but do otherwise?

Unlike the gramophone, Edison’s invention permitted every user to record soundas well as to reproduce it. In his 1878 article “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edisonforesaw “the almost universal applicability of the [machine’s] foundation principle,namely, the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their repro-duction at will.”50 In comparative musicology—a context unavailable to Edison—theprinciple of recording and reproduction would indeed resound. On the most basiclevel, the phonograph’s dual function enabled Hornbostel and his colleagues to distin-

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AMES / the sound of evolution311guish conceptually between playback and recording: Whereas mass reproduction threat-

ened to “homogenize” non-European music, recording promised to “fix” or “capture”that music in all its particularity. Thus phonography offered a unique means of pre-serving the alterity of “exotic melodies,” which is to say, a means of constructing ittechnologically and discursively.

To understand how the phonograph could be mobilized “ethnographically,” we mustacknowledge its difference as a medium. In one sense, phonography had a greaterimpact on late-nineteenth-century audiences than photography, for the latter mediumcould be seen, as Mark Sandberg suggests, “as a refinement of realistic trends in paint-ing and illustration, in which the displacement of the visually depicted object in spaceand time was a common enough phenomenon. But in phonography, the displacementof the acoustic world through recording technology was truly astounding and unprec-edented.”51 To be sure, its novelty made Edison’s invention a source of public fascina-tion, if not an instant commercial success.52 From 1878 through the late 1880s, Edisonrented the earliest models of his talking machine to professional entertainers, whodemonstrated its wonders at traveling shows and world’s fairs.53 Like Hagenbeck’sethnographic exhibition, Edison’s invention teetered between science and sensation,and too, in order to be refunctionalized for ethnography, the phonograph, like theethnographic exhibition, would have to be stripped of its sensational qualities. By theturn of the century, its novelty had waned, to be replaced by new modes of curiosity. In1896, the inaugural issue of The Phonoscope would predicate its own novelty on thefact that its subject matter was now passé, and therefore interesting at a previouslyunimagined level:

The Talking Machines have long since passed the point of novelty, occupying today aforemost place among the standard inventions of this progressive age. . . . The curiosity ofhearing a machine talk has given way to a more serious consideration, and today thegeneral public is convinced of its great possibilities, and is prepared to welcome its en-trance into practical utility in almost any sphere. The Phonograph has made its way intomany institutions, where it is used for educational and scientific purposes.54

Though the phonograph’s social function had indeed undergone transformation, thisclaim to its universal acceptance was premature. Stumpf and Hornbostel still had toassure their audiences—spanning popular lectures, newspaper articles, and officialcorrespondences—that they used the device as not a mass-cultural source of aestheticpleasure, but a scientific instrument.55 A German advertisement maintained as late as1896 that “the best display object is and remains a good phonograph.”56 Just as thetalking machine was leaving the fairground and entering the bourgeois household,where it would be domesticated as a piece of furniture, comparative musicologiststried to move it into the scientific laboratory.

Retooling the phonograph for the study of “exotic melodies” required a series ofdiscursive maneuvers, for the talking machine was initially intended not for music, butthe human voice. The late-nineteenth-century discourse on the phonograph revolvedaround the medium’s claim to give voice to the dead. As Edison’s coworker and publi-

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312 cist Edward H. Johnson famously stated, “A strip of indented paper travels through alittle machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren orposterity centuries hence hear us as plainly as if we were present. Speech has become,as it were, immortal.”57 The phonograph promised to overcome the ephemerality ofthe body for the benefit of future generations. Thus conceived, it functioned as a kindof time capsule, preserving the voices of famous individuals like Gladstone, Bismarck,and other “immortals.” Vienna’s Phonogram Archive intended, for instance, to “bottleup all the noise of the century” by securing “personal statements of distinguished men.”58

This fascination with speaking across generations extended into the domestic house-hold, fulfilling Edison’s prediction that the apparatus would become a unique familyrecord: “For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words ofthe dying member of a family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionablyoutrank the photograph.”59 In 1900, The Phonoscope would concur: “Death has lostsome of its sting since we are able to forever retain the voices of the dead.”60

This discourse on the phonograph deeply resonated with Stumpf and Hornbostel,who selectively modified its key tropes and inflected them ethnologically. Rather thanconcentrate on the individual voices of distinguished men or loved ones, comparativemusicologists gathered the “collective” sounds of non-European music. In so doing,they employed the metonymic logic of ethnographic exhibition, where the individualbody of the performer represented the larger, absent whole (or “people”). By virtue ofmetonymy, “voices of the dead” came to describe the songs of entire, allegedly vanish-ing, populations. “Unlike physics or literary history, archaeology or polar research,”wrote Hornbostel, “studies whose object are so-called natural peoples cannot be putoff for decades or even years. As we know, the last Athapaskan or the last PuebloIndian will soon have followed the last of the Mohicans to the eternal hunting grounds”(“EM,” 90–1). Music’s ephemeral quality compounded the problem of studying non-Western peoples. Comparative musicology was thus endowed with a sense of mimeticurgency unmatched by anthropology. “The tangible products of non-European cul-tures are collected in ethnological museums, as completely as is possible today. Butjust as rapidly as these products disappear—indeed, more rapidly—word and soundfade away.”61 Hornbostel and his fellow archivists sought the advantages of phonogra-phy in order to rescue the doubly fugitive: the fleeting sounds of vanishing peoples.

The Shape of Evolution

In his 1885 essay “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology,” the German scholarGuido Adler explains the new discipline’s analytical approach in archaeological terms:“When a work of art is under consideration, it must first of all be defined palaeologically.If it is not written in our notation, it must be transcribed. Already in this process sig-nificant criteria for determining the work’s time of origin may be gained. Then itsstructural nature is examined.”62 The first step in this procedure is to establish thechronological origin of a musical piece, as a natural scientist would determine the ageof a fossil record or a geological stratum. Adler goes on to describe each subsequent

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AMES / the sound of evolution313step in anatomical and evolutionary terms. “His style-critical method begins with an

anatomical dissection of a work of art in order to ascertain its species, and his framingof stylistic laws can, in a sense, be equated with determining the laws of musical ‘natu-ral selection.’”63 In his own programmatic statement on “The Problems of Compara-tive Musicology,” Hornbostel studiously employs the metaphors of archaeology,anatomy, and evolution that Adler had used earlier. The comparative orientation itselfwas, as Hornbostel noted, a “general method” adapted from anatomy, zoology, andlinguistics in order to create a new area of study. “The comparative method came lateto musicology, because its object, in contrast to that of all other fields, had been rela-tively difficult to collect” (“PM,” 41). That changed with the introduction of the pho-nograph. Now one could not merely collect non-Western music en masse, but “dis-sect” a particular song, “lay bare” its inner structure, compare it with that of othersongs, and thereby extrapolate the morphological development of music around theworld (“PM,” 42, 56). In comparative musicology, the evolution of music would takeshape in and take its shape from the act of recording. Its specific configuration de-pended, however, upon the kind of narrative that Hornbostel and his colleagues soughtto construct. Phonography allowed them to speak of a body of music, and to shape itdiscursively into various forms.

To speak of a body of music was, in this context, to assert its solidity. Recordingtechnology granted new materiality to sound, allowing “exotic melodies” to be handledin Hornbostel’s words as “tangible products.” In so doing, phonography brought musicinto the realm of material culture. In acquiring the status of an object, non-Westernmusic could be collected, transported, exchanged, and stored as never before. It seemedtoo, at least for a moment, that music itself would warrant—and indeed be capable ofoccupying—a space of display. In 1903, the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschanproposed that the Royal Museum of Ethnology, where he served as head curator ofthe Africa and Oceania sections, install phonographs next to showcases of musicalinstruments. Recorded music, he claimed, should supplement visual displays, ampli-fying objects that would otherwise remain mute, and thereby enhancing the museum’ssensory appeal to audiences.64 Stumpf voiced the same idea in his 1908 plea for dona-tions to the sound archive: “Without the help of the phonograph, we are left standingbefore the museum showcase, in which instruments are preserved silent as the grave,full of wonder but empty of understanding” (“BP,” 67). The uncanny little machinewould transform the displayed instruments by bringing them back to life. Howevermuch this idea may have fascinated the public, Stumpf’s call for support went un-heeded. In contrast to the ethnological museum, the phonogram archive was not dedi-cated to the exhibition of things; rather, it was a laboratory and a storehouse that hadlittle to do with the public sphere and everything to do with the scientific commu-nity.65 Even if recorded music were given a place in the museum (it was not), Luschanpresumed that its content would immediately dissolve into the showcase, to be con-tained by the visual display of instruments (the center of attention). Only at the soundarchive would the phonogram be handled as a material object in its own right.

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314 The materiality of the phonogram consisted of grooves engraved in a wax cylinder.Edison’s patented “hill-and-dale recording” technique inscribed sound vertically intothe surface of a rotating cylinder, endowing it with depth as well as solidity. Scientificinterest in phonographic inscriptions noted their indexical quality, the embodied rela-tionship between the sound emitted and its material trace. Unlike earlier talking ma-chines, such as P. T. Barnum’s Euphonia, which simulated speech mechanically, thephonograph registered the physical impressions of sound vibrations. Rather than in-scribe sound in terms of language or symbolic notation, its stylus etched lines andpoints into wax; that is, it did not translate, but transcribe. Edison’s device was distin-guished from other “writing systems,” as Friedrich Kittler puts it, in that “only thephonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semioticorder and linguistic meaning.”66 For Stumpf, the device offered a seemingly impartialmethod of gathering “raw data,” unfiltered by “European ears” and unmediated bymusical notation, thereby fulfilling the search for a nonarbitrary writing system he hadbegun in 1885.

By the same token, its indexical quality made the phonograph an ideal techniquefor recording the music of oral cultures in particular, for this music had never been setto writing. The absence of documentation had already served German anthropologyas a key criterion for defining its object as “peoples without writing” (schriftloseVölker).67 The history of oral cultures could not, of course, be found in written sources.Instead, anthropologists assumed it was embedded in the material traces, such as tribalartifacts, that “peoples without writing” did in fact produce.68 Comparative musicolo-gists made the same assumption of their own object of study. That some non-Euro-pean cultures apparently had no system of musical notation only served to justify thediscipline’s initial emphasis on recording as opposed to source criticism, for the lattermethod (advocated by Adler) presupposed the availability of musical “compositions.”69

Sound technology rendered the history of non-Western music apprehensible not bysupplying the missing manuscripts, but by producing a body of music that could beanalyzed and measured as a physiological fact of the acoustic world. Stumpf and hisassistants believed that evidence of evolution was hidden in the structure of “exoticmelodies,” which included—and depended upon—that of contemporary performances.A temporal medium par excellence, the phonograph offered a means of accessing thepast through the sound of the present.

Abraham and Hornbostel correctly identified the phonograph’s “special advantage”as its capacity to manipulate sound as a function of time. Upon playback, a record—indeed a single note—could be slowed down, sped up, and endlessly repeated; a frag-ment of music could thus be isolated, divided into its constituent parts, measured andanalyzed (“BPM,” 229). Retooled for the laboratory, the phonograph served as a kindof surgical instrument. Hornbostel made no bones about it: “By carefully segmentingand dissecting the melodic strand with a scalpel [Seziermesser]—some people funda-mentally condemn such vivisection—we make the flow clot. The living event must befixed as a motionless corpse, and only thus is it possible to recognize the now visiblearchitecture of the whole.”70 To listen with the aid of a phonograph was to see a body

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AMES / the sound of evolution315of music, just as a doctor would observe a cadaver, splayed and flayed, its internal

structure exposed.71 Here was a technique for locating and extracting what Hornbostelcalled the primal origins of music. Controlling the flow of sound allowed him to examineit in depth.72 As a result of recording, that is, the phonograph rendered musical perfor-mance available to other “physical-acoustic methods” such as the tonometer, a devicethat measured the frequency of an individual pitch in “cents” or hundredths of a semitone.In combining analogue and digital technologies (the phonograph and the tonometer,respectively), Abraham and Hornbostel demonstrated how recorded music could bequantified, calculated, and compared. This surgical operation made it possible to surveya body of music in its entirety, to identify resemblances and differences with other “exoticmelodies,” and thus to establish a discourse of comparative musicology—a discoursethat extended beyond morphology to posit larger, cultural and historical connections.

For all its promise, the phonograph could not speak for itself.73 Hornbostel and hisfellow archivists amassed thousands of records, none of which articulated the inter-pretation of the music it contained. Once dissected, the body of music had to be reas-sembled discursively. Representing the evolution of music required comparative mu-sicologists to reconfigure their object once again, now in terms of narrative.74 As a“physical-acoustic method,” phonography established an object solid enough to meetthe demands of scientific positivism, yet malleable enough to substantiate a diversityof theoretical claims.

Stumpf’s 1909 public lecture series The Origins of Music offers a case in point. Inthe first part, a reprise of his earlier article on British evolutionism, Stumpf offers uphis own, characteristically “German” theory of origins. With a nod to Goethe’s Faust,he proclaims: “In the beginning was the deed.” Music began, in other words, with thecreative act of sending signals (Signalgebung). In order to make this hypothesis, heposits the existence of “pre-historic humans” (Urmenschen). “How did they come toemploy a fixed musical interval?” When a single voice failed to be heard, Stumpf specu-lated, many voices must have joined in, thereby amplifying the sound and inadvert-ently creating the first experience of consonance. While the chorus of voices presum-ably included a range of pitches, creating any number of possible combinations, onlyone combination produces an effect that could be taken for a single, unified tone: theoctave. The original chorus must have noticed this apparent unity and eventually cometo prefer it. Stumpf goes on to posit the stepwise development of other consonantintervals, beginning with the smallest and least complex, fourths and fifths, which heattributes to non-Western music in particular. “Even in civilized Europe one can ob-serve that natural peoples produce fifths when they try to sing in unison.”75 To showhow this theory plays out, Stumpf organized his subsequent lectures around a series ofphonogram demonstrations, offering the public a rare chance to hear recordings fromthe Berlin Phonogram Archive. His introduction is worth quoting at length, for it com-plicates the evolutionary assumption on which his theory rested:

We begin the series with the most primitive songs that are available and known to us,those of the Vedda in Ceylon. We will order what follows, however, not according to the

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316 principle of progressive development. Instead, we will pursue a geographical trajectoryfrom Ceylon eastward to the South Seas, then to America, traversing it from South toNorth, until we reach the Eskimos, and finally to Africa. Within the smaller, geographicalareas we will often observe progress in melodic formation. Yet it is impossible to create asingle, unambiguous series out of the collected musical achievements of humanity, forprogress has taken many different directions. Conversely, we will discover more and moreconnections between geographically neighboring or ethnologically related peoples, andthereby gain a broad, coherent picture of musical practice. [AM, 107]

While organized as such for a popular audience, this “musical journey around theworld” inadvertently demonstrates the archival aporia in representations of music’sevolution (AM, 196). The archive embodies the dream of objectivity, which, by virtueof the multiplicity of sounds that it contains, resists any attempt to construct a singlenarrative of progress. Therefore, although Stumpf’s theory of origins is predicated onthe notion of lineal development, his phonogram demonstrations are organized geo-graphically, illustrating that musical “progress” follows many and sometimes divergentpaths. To plot these trajectories did not necessarily mean to construct a linear model ofevolution (such as that posited by E. B. Tylor); in fact, evolutionary thought assumedvarious forms.76 Stumpf’s lecture thus made no claims to linearity, continuity, or com-pleteness, even as it continued to emphasize evolution.

In the course of their own professional development, Hornbostel and his youngercolleagues would focus less on origins and more on the cultural connections amongseemingly dissonant musical forms. Rather than drawing schematic connections asdirect lines or developmental series, they preferred elliptical and discontinuous formssuch as parallels and circles.77 In their 1903 address to the Berlin Society for Anthro-pology, for example, Abraham and Hornbostel suggested that “If we may conceive ofexotic music as primitive, thus situating it parallel to earlier developmental stages ofEuropean music, it would provide us with clues as to how music actually sounded inantiquity” (“BPM,” 225). This Eurocentric proposal was based on a blatant, temporalfallacy, one that fundamentally confused morphology with history. Stumpf too wouldcommit this fallacy in The Origins of Music, conflating the appearance of formal sim-plicity in “primitive songs” with the chronological beginnings of music itself. Evolu-tionary thinking made this idea compelling, allowing comparative musicologists notonly to work backwards and forwards in time, and thereby generate developmentalseries, but also to move “diagonally” through space, in order to draw cultural parallelsor analogies. The temporal fallacy was therefore based on the notion of the primitive,but not restricted to it. Phonography, in fact, established an object that could be imag-ined as occupying any number of intermediate stages on an evolutionary timeline,positioned at select intervals between the origins of music and its “modern” manifesta-tions. Abraham and Hornbostel thus located “exotic music” not as a point of origin,but “parallel to earlier stages of European music.”

Here they were referring to their own “Studies on the Tone System and Music ofthe Japanese,” based on Berlin recordings of Kawakami Otijoro’s musical theater troupestarring Sada Yakko. While recognizing that this troupe was an icon of Japanese mo-

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AMES / the sound of evolution317dernity, Abraham and Hornbostel interpreted its music in terms of Westernization,

deploring the Japanese government’s efforts to import songs, instruments, and orches-trations from Europe and the United States.78 Here, again, they understood the priceof modernization to be the loss of “charming originality,” which the phonograph wouldnevertheless allow them to isolate, extract, and preserve for analysis (“TMJ,” 67). Morespecifically, as a result of their studies, Abraham and Hornbostel identified “pure tun-ing [reine Stimmung] as the essential basis of contemporary Japanese music” (“TMJ,”33–4). This term referred back to Pythagorean intonation, a tuning of the scale inwhich all fourths and fifths are “pure” (untempered), thus making thirds sound out oftune to the modern ear. In locating a Pythagorean “root” of modern Japanese music,Abraham and Hornbostel felt permitted to posit a historical link to ancient Greekmelody. This link, in turn, provided a basis for comparison by analogy: “It is safe toassume the common derivation of modern Europe’s harmonic music and modern Japan’snon-harmonic music; they are late fruits from the same tree” (“TMJ,” 34–5). AsHornbostel would aver, now with conviction, “Exotic music offers astounding analo-gies to earlier forms of our own music, which we know only through a tradition thathas gaping holes in it. We gain a better idea of how ancient Greek music must havesounded by listening to, say, Japanese musicians, than by reading the works of Classi-cal authors” (“EM,” 93).

At the turn of the century, the phonograph seemed uniquely equipped to makeevolution audible. The evolution of music would be heard not by reading old manu-scripts, but by listening to contemporary recordings of exotic melodies. To listen inthis way was to travel not simply across generations, as Edison had imagined the use ofhis device, but across the greater expanse of history and geography. In its function as ascientific instrument, the phonograph established a tangible body of music that couldbe dissected, like the figure of the Hottentot Venus, and reconstructed in a variety offorms. It shaped and reshaped the discourse of comparative musicology, informing asuccession of scientific narratives. In this context, phonography came to serve at onceas a representational strategy for constructing the evolution of music, and a system fortraversing it. Just as the discipline of comparative musicology would take shape byrecasting the terms of evolution, its prime instrument would render newly materialevolution’s sound.

Notes1. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft” (1905),

in Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze zur Musikethnologie und Musikpsychologie, ed. Christian Kaden andErich Stockmann (Leipzig: Reclam, 1986), 40; hereafter abbreviated as “PM.” Unless otherwise indi-cated, all translations are my own. An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Die Großstadtund das ‘Primitive’: Text, Politik und Repräsentation,” a symposium held at the IFK – InternationalesForschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (October 2001). I am immensely grateful toJessica Burstein for her advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this essay. Special thanksgo to Jennifer Bean, Tony Bennett, Glenn Penny, and Pamela Potter for their helpful comments andquestions. I also wish to thank Artur Simon for access to the Phonogram Archive at the EthnologicalMuseum in Berlin, Susanne Ziegler for her generous research assistance there, and Peter Bolz (Cu-rator of Native American Ethnology) for making the photograph available to me for reproduction.

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318 2. See Frank Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observationc. 1550–1800, Source Materials and Studies in Ethnomusicology, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Knuf, 1973);Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c. 1780–1890,” Yearbook for Tra-ditional Music 20 (1988): 51–73; Philip V. Bohlman, “Missionaries, Magical Muses, and MagnificentMenageries: Image and Imagination in the Early History of Ethnomusicology,” The World of Music33, no. 3 (1988): 5–27.

3. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung des Phonographen fürvergleichende Musikwissenschaft” (1903), Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 36 (1904): 225; hereafter abbre-viated as “BPM.”

4. Bernth Lindfors, “Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent,” in Freakery:Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: NewYork University Press, 1996), 208.

5. Ibid.6. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 85–8.7. See on this point Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and

Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 35.8. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992).9. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1983), 38.10. “PM,” 57; italics in original. Alexander Rehding has recently traced the search for origins in

German musicology around 1900 through the context of the philosophy of origins(Ursprungsphilosophie). He argues that origins should be understood not as a chronological category,but rather as an “ontological” one, from which the temporal aspect has been evacuated (pace MartinHeidegger). Yet these categories were never so neatly separated as Rehding would seem to suggest. Awholly appropriate emphasis on essentialism and ontology cannot adequately account for the empiri-cal methods and evolutionary theories of comparative musicologists in particular. Nor can it explainthe crucial role that a temporal medium like the phonograph played as a scientific instrument for thestudy of non-European music. At the turn of the century, comparative musicology co-opted the searchfor origins in the context of scientific positivism, and transformed it with the tools of modernity. Thistransformation can only be seen if we veer from the center of academic musicology and explore itsperiphery—that is, the discursive contexts in which non-Western music circulated around 1900. Thesecontexts frame comparative musicology as a historical project that I understand as an attempt torender evolution audible. See Alexander Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in GermanyCirca 1900,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 2 (2000): 345–85; hereafter abbre-viated as “QO.”

11. While film historians have recently begun to analyze the dynamic interaction of anthropologyand early cinema, they have thus far paid relatively little attention to ethnomusicology and earlysound technology. (That project has been undertaken, I hasten to add, by scholars of folklore andethnomusicology, though mainly in a conventional mode of disciplinary history.) Facile distinctionsbetween the visual and the acoustic do not suffice to explain this disparity in film studies, especially inlight of recent attempts to reconceptualize the history of early cinema in terms of sound technology.Ironically, when seen against the backdrop of Anglo-American anthropology and its vexed relationshipto the moving image, the case of German comparative musicology appears extremely compelling.There are at least three reasons for this: First, comparative musicologists held recording technologyto be a necessary condition for the possibility of conducting their research. Second, this technologywas crucial to the rise of comparative musicology as an institution, evinced by the Berlin School andits phonogram archive, which I will discuss in detail. Third, comparative musicologists commonlyaffirmed the epistemological status of the phonographic record as “acoustic evidence.” Each of thesepoints suggests that, in contrast to early cinema’s peripheral (if fascinating) relationship to anthropol-ogy, the phonograph occupied a central position in comparative musicology. Even while engaging theconnections between Anglo-American anthropology and the moving image, Alison Griffiths’ important

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AMES / the sound of evolution319study demonstrates the elision I here address. See Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and

Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For more on an-thropology and early cinema, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethno-graphic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primi-tive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Onethnomusicology’s relationship to the phonograph, see Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Recording Technol-ogy, the Record Industry, and Ethnomusicological Scholarship,” in Comparative Musicology andAnthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V.Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 277–92; Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How thePhonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). On sound andearly cinema, see especially Rick Altman, “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4(winter 1996): 648–718; Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies,1895–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); James Lastra, Sound Technology and theAmerican Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press,2000); hereafter abbreviated as ST; Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

12. Comparative musicology had, of course, a diversity of theoretical and methodological con-cerns, addressing as it did questions of perception, cognition, ethnology, transcription, and analysis; italso encompassed the study of musical instruments (organology). For a concise overview of its histori-cal emergence, see Albrecht Schneider, “Germany and Austria,” in Ethnomusicology: Historical andRegional Studies, ed. Helen Meyers (New York: Norton, 1993), 77–96; hereafter abbreviated as “GA.”

13. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society(1987; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

14. On the archive’s history, see Susanne Ziegler, “‘Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Klang’:Zur Geschichte und Erschließung der historischen Tondokumente des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs,”Jahrbuch Preußisches Kulturbesitz 31 (1995): 153–67. In English, see Artur Simon, ed., Das BerlinerPhonogramm-Archiv 1900–2000: Sammlungen der traditionellen Musik der Welt (The BerlinPhonogramm-Archiv 1900–2000: Collections of Traditional Music of the World) (Berlin: Verlag fürWissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), 25–46. This dual-language volume includes a catalogue of thearchive’s holdings, a rich selection of previously unpublished materials, and an extensive bibliographyof archival publications.

15. Quoted in H[einrich] Pudor, “Das Phonogramm-Archiv der Wiener Akademie derWissenschaften,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 2 (1901): 60.

16. Leo Hajek, Das Phonogrammarchiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien von seinerGründung bis zur Neueinrichtung im Jahre 1927 (Vienna: Hölker-Pichler-Tempsky, 1928), 10. InEnglish, see Walter Graf, “The Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaftenin Vienna,” The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 4 (winter 1962): 1, 5–6. Between 1901 and1914, phonogram institutes of various kinds would be established in cities across the West, includingBudapest, Cambridge, Chicago, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Lübeck, Paris, Rome, St.Petersburg, Washington, and Zurich.

17. For more on Hornbostel’s intellectual and professional life, see the essays and documents in“Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns”: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivarund Musikwissenschaftler: Studien und Dokumente, ed. Sebastian Klotz (Berlin: Schibri, 1998).

18. See Mark B. Sandberg, “Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century FolkMuseum,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 320–61.

19. This analogy is intended to suggest neither that the audible and the visible were interchange-able, nor that their institutions were disconnected from one another. In fact, the sound archive needsto be located adjacent to the museum, the cinema, and even the department store, for each of theseinstitutions shaped the practical as well as the imaginary work of comparative musicologists.

20. Stumpf acknowledges the problematic nature of commercial recordings: “many betray a clearlyEuropean influence.” Carl Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv” (1908), trans. Rosee Riggs, inSimon, ed., Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 69; hereafter abbreviated as “BP”; trans. rev. throughout.

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320 21. “BP,” 83. In another context, Thomas Richards has argued that “the imperial archive was afantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire.” Indeed, Stumpf envis-aged the Berlin Phonogram Archive as uniting disparate imperial agents and activities: “The newempire is proud of its colonies and does everything in its power to exploit them materially. It is ourduty to combine that with scientific exploitation, i.e. with research on the nature and the indigenousculture of the new territories. Other colonial empires have not neglected this nobile officium. We toohave made an excellent start, but wherever the culture of indigenous peoples is to be describedexactly, comprehensively, and scientifically in scholarly works, phonographic records should not belacking. And what then? Should they be squandered and destroyed? No, they must of course becollected and stored. Such an institution is a necessary corollary of our colonial aspirations in thehighest sense.” Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Lon-don: Verso, 1993), 6; hereafter abbreviated as IA; “BP,” 83–4. On the imbrication of technology andempire, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in theNineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

22. The names, dates, and locations indicated here come from various sources, including phono-gram labels, correspondence papers, program brochures, newspaper and journal articles. Of particu-lar importance is a 6 June 1910 letter from Hornbostel to an impresario by the name of E. Holz,which can be found in the papers of the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Ethnographical Museum inBerlin (“Archiv Somali,” Wahlsammlungen des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs, MusikethnologischeAbteilung, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin).

23. The comparative method and its rich tradition in the German sciences surely help explain whyStumpf and his assistants conducted their research in Berlin, whereas their American colleaguesmore often recorded music “on location” (e.g., at Indian pueblos). At the same time, I would suggest,the proliferation of ethnographic entertainments in Berlin represents another (mass-cultural) contextin which this preference for comparison should be understood. On the comparative method, seePhilip V. Bohlman, “Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History ofEthnomusicology,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 26–42.

24. Carl Stumpf, “Musikpsychologie in England: Betrachtungen über Herleitung der Musik ausder Sprache und aus dem thierischen Entwicklungsproceß, über Empirismus und Nativismus in derMusiktheorie,” Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885): 261–349; hereafter abbreviated as“ME.” Alexander J. Ellis’ pioneering study from the same year, “On the Musical Scales of VariousNations,” is generally acknowledged as the starting point of comparative musicology because of itsexemplary empirical method (tonometric analysis) and its influential assumption that many non-West-ern scales exhibit equal temperament. Stumpf made this study accessible to German-speaking scien-tists by publishing a review of it in Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2 (1886): 511–24. But itwas his earlier survey of “Music Psychology in England” that helped establish evolutionism as a theo-retical framework for ethnomusicology. Here it is worth noting that Georg Simmel had already of-fered his own theory of the origins of music based on a critique of Darwin. Simmel’s study is alsoprescient in that it combines psychological and ethnological approaches, anticipating the interdisci-plinary strategy of comparative musicology. If Stumpf was aware of Simmel’s precedent, he did notrefer to it. See Georg Simmel, “Psychologische und ethnologische Studien über Musik,” Zeitschriftfür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 13 (1882): 261–305.

25. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, The Modern Library (NewYork: Random House, n.d.), 878; hereafter abbreviated as DM.

26. In 1909, Stumpf distilled the major elements from this critique and recast them in a popularidiom for a series of public lectures on “The Origins of Music,” an abridged version of which was firstpublished in Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 3, no. 51 (18 Decem-ber 1909): 1593–616; the lectures were later reprinted in full as a monograph. I here quote this lattersource and simply note the corresponding page number from the earlier, 1885 review: Carl Stumpf,Die Anfänge der Musik (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 9; hereafter abbreviated as AM; cf. “ME,” 300. Rehdingseems to present this conceit (“In the beginning . . . ”) as if it were his own, then proceeds to rehearseStumpf’s review of the literature without giving him due credit. See “QO,” 350–1; cf. AM, 9–21.

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AMES / the sound of evolution32127. Carl Stumpf, “Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie” (1899), in Leib

und Seele: Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Barth, 1903),57.

28. See Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991), 91–4; hereafter abbreviated as PSC; Andreas W. Daum,Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildungund die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 65–71.

29. For extensive documentation of this troupe and its reception, see Wolfgang Haberland, “NineBella Coolas in Germany,” in Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed.Christian Feest (Aachen: Rader, 1987), 337–74.

30. Working in the tradition of Hermann von Helmholtz, Stumpf understood human perceptionto be embodied, and therefore subject to measurement and control, but also deeply subjective andcontingent. He was particularly fascinated with the organization of psychology around sound, withthe ways in which sound is saturated with psychological data. His 1883 monograph Tonpsychologietraces the impact of sound waves on psychological functions in terms of aural perception, judgment,and attention. On psychology and its relationship to early ethnomusicology, see Carl Stumpf andErich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für diePsychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst,” in Bericht über den 4. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologiein Innsbruck 1910 (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 256–69; for a more recent account in English, see AlbrechtSchneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” in Comparative Musicology andAnthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Brunno Nettl and Philip V.Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 293–317. On attention theory, see especiallyJonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

31. Carl Stumpf, “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer,” Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2 (1886):406; revised and reprinted in vol. 1 of Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, ed. CarlStumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (Berlin: Drei Masken, 1922), 87–104; hereafter abbrevi-ated as “LBI.” The reprint includes the photo that I reproduce here (fig. 1). An English translation ofStumpf’s original essay can be found in Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ed., A Century of EthnomusicologicalThought, The Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology, vol. 7 (New York: Garland, 1990),45–61.

32. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst(1854; reprint, Leipzig: Barth, 1902), 183–4; italics in original.

33. As Albrecht Schneider has commented on Hanslick, “Without comparative research, and froma strictly European point of view, such music had to be incomprehensible as there was no methodol-ogy available to properly analyze and understand them” (“GA,” 79–80).

34. “LBI,” 406. The singer’s name is typed on the troupe’s employment contract (reproduced inHaberland, “Nine Bella Coolas,” 339) as “Isk-Ka-lusta.” A studio portrait of Isk-Ka-lusta, wearing asuit and tie, and his German girlfriend is also reproduced in Haberland, “Nine Bella Coolas,” 365.

35. In 1886, Stumpf received further confirmation of his transcription from the young FranzBoas, who attended the same troupe’s performance in Berlin, transcribed two of their songs by hand,and published his own linguistic studies of the Bella Coola. In 1893, Boas made the first field record-ings of Kwakiutl Indians—recordings that he would later deposit at the Berlin Phonogram Archive.Boas became, of course, the preeminent scholar of Northwest Coast Indians and one of the foundersof cultural anthropology in the United States. See “LBI,” 408–9; Ira Jacknis, “The EthnographicObject and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas,” in Volksgeist as Method andEthic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W.Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 185–214.

36. “LBI,” 426. Stumpf and his assistants would employ such terms as “wild” and “uncivilized” ina self-conscious, strategic manner. Sometimes they offset the word “primitive” in quotation marks soas to restrict the range of its meaning. More often they used the (no less problematic) term “exotic” inorder to describe non-Europeans as well as their musical productions (as in exotische Melodien). In sodoing, comparative musicologists were not quibbling over terminology, but making an argument about

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322 the legitimacy of their emergent discipline. Their use of “exotic” was meant to counter the receivedidea that non-European music was “primitive” (a term which had recently taken on such pejorativeconnotations as “childlike” and “backward”), while stressing the complexity and confirming the alterityof their object of study. They likewise retained the term “natural peoples,” but inflected it to denotenon-Western peoples in a historical sense. See, for example, Hornbostel’s dictionary entry on the“Musik der Naturvölker,” in the annual supplement to vol. 24 of Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon,6th ed. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1911/12), 639–43.

37. See AM, 64–72.38. See Carl Stumpf, “Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen” (1901); reprinted in vol. 1 of

Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, ed. Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel(Berlin: Drei Masken, 1922), 129; hereafter abbreviated as “TMS”; “BPM,” 227; AM, 70.

39. See on this point Carl Stumpf, “Phonographirte Indianermelodien,” Vierteljahrsschrift fürMusikwissenschaft 8 (1892): 143.

40. ST, 29; italics in original. For more on the discourse of phonography, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts,Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press, 1999).

41. For an account of Hagenbeck’s foreign people shows, see my “From the Exotic to the Every-day: The Ethnographic Exhibition in Germany,” in Modernity and the Nineteenth Century: A VisualCulture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, forth-coming). See also Hilke Thode-Arora, Für fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die HagenbeckschenVölkerschauen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989).

42. On the historical emergence of fieldwork, see Henrika Kuklick, “After Ishmael: The Field-work Tradition and Its Future,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a FieldScience, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47–65;James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997), 52–91.

43. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space inthe 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Carolyn Marvin, When Old Tech-nologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culturein Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

44. Adolf Bastian, Die Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 64.45. See Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sci-

ence, and Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).46. In a 1911 newspaper article on “The Preservation of Unwritten Music,” Hornbostel claimed

that donating money to the Berlin Phonogram Archive was a “national debt of honor,” the price thatGermany should be willing to pay for the eradication of colonial peoples. Erich Mortiz von Hornbostel,“Die Erhaltung ungeschriebener Musik” (1911), trans. Rosee Riggs, in Simon, ed., BerlinerPhonogramm-Archiv, 91; hereafter abbreviated as “EM”; trans. rev. throughout. For an account ofthe ethnological museum and its role in the changing context of the public sphere around 1900, seeH. Glenn Penny, “Bastian’s Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of Ger-man Ethnology,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. H. GlennPenny and Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

47. Albert Schweitzer to Carl Stumpf, 4 April 1914, trans. Michael Wells, in Simon, ed., BerlinerPhonogramm-Archiv, 55, trans. rev.

48. “PM,” 57. “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-É” was a popular song written by Henry J. Sayers and copy-righted in 1891. “The Beautiful Song of Little Cohn” presumably refers to a popular German record-ing, which Hornbostel imagines being played in the German colonies (“in the South Seas”). James J.Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk, 3d ed. (New York: Dover,1985), 570–1.

49. “PM,” 51. For a wider account of this “problem” in anthropology, see Michael Taussig, Mime-sis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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AMES / the sound of evolution32350. Thomas Alva Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” The North American Review 262

(May–June 1878): 527.51. Mark Bennion Sandberg, “Missing Persons: Spectacle and Narrative in Late Nineteenth-Cen-

tury Scandinavia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1991), 20.52. Though Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, it would not become available to consumers

until 1888. See Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan,1977); Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph(Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1977).

53. Cheryl Bauer and Randy McNutt, Talking Machine Madness: The Story of America’s EarlyPhonograph Shows (Fairfield, Ohio: Hamilton Hobby, 1985).

54. The Phonoscope 1, no. 1 (November 1896): 10.55. Together with the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan, Stumpf made several attempts to

convince expert audiences of the phonograph’s scientific potential. They apparently succeeded withmembers of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but failed to convince those of the Prussian Ministryof Culture. Felix Luschan to Carl Stumpf, 15 February 1905, Inv. Nr. 308, Acta betreffendphonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 – 31 December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl.; 30 November1906, Inv. Nr. 1301, item 14, Acta betreffend phonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 – 31December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl., Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin.

56. Non plus ultra Phonograph by W. Bahre, advertisement, Der Kurier 6, no. 17 (22 February1896): 297.

57. Edward H. Johnson, “A Wonderful Invention: Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition FromAutomatic Records,” Scientific American 37, no. 20 (17 November 1877): 304.

58. “Wonders of the Graphophone: Proposition to Preserve Accurate Records of Nineteenth Cen-tury Life,” The Phonoscope 4, no. 4 (April 1900): 6. In the early 1900s, the discourse on the gramophone,a medium primarily concerned with music, would similarly concentrate on famous individuals, e.g.,celebrities like Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso.

59. Edison, “Phonograph,” 533–4; italics in original. This notion of a family record also appears inthe first German manual on the Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines (1902). See FriedrichA. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1986;Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 55.

60. “Voices of the Dead,” The Phonoscope 1, no. 1 (15 November 1896): 5. For more on thephonograph as a kind of technological hedge against death, see Tom Gunning, “Doing for the EyeWhat the Phonograph Does for the Ear,” in Abel and Altman, eds., Sounds of Early Cinema, 13–31.

61. “EM,” 91. This idea circulated internationally, throughout the early discourse ofethnomusicology. See, e.g., Jesse Walter Fewkes, “On the Use of the Phonograph in the Study of theLanguages of American Indians,” Science 15, no. 378 (2 May 1890): 267; Charles S. Myers, “TheEthnological Study of Music,” in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honourof his 75th Birthday, October 2, 1907, ed. H. Balfour, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 235; BenjaminIves Gilman, “The Science of Exotic Music,” Science n.s. 30, no. 772 (15 October 1909): 535.

62. Quoted in Erica Mugglestone, “Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology’(1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary,” Yearbook for TraditionalMusic 13 (1981): 6, trans. rev.

63. Ibid., 4.64. Felix von Luschan, “Einige türkische Volkslieder aus Nordsyrien und die Bedeutung phono-

graphischer Aufnahmen für die Völkerkunde” (1903), Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 36 (1904): 177.65. In 1931, the Berlin Phonogram Archive issued its first commercial record collection, Musik

des Orients, compiled and edited by Hornbostel. It was re-issued in 1963 by Kurt Reinhard andGeorge List as The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv on 2 LPs, Ethnic Folkways Library, FE 4175. This set includes four tracks recorded at ethno-graphic exhibitions in Berlin: “Siam II” (1900), “Japan” (1901), “India” (1902), “Pueblos” [Hopi] (1906),“Samoyed” (1911). Some of these tracks, along with more recent digital recordings, were released in2000 on a 4-CD anniversary set, titled Music! 100 Recordings – 100 Years of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900–2000, Wergo SM 1701 2.

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324 66. Kittler, Gramophone, 16.67. See, for example, AM, 103.68. I here take issue with the view expressed in Andrew Zimmerman’s Anthropology and Antihu-

manism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Cf. PSC, 109–11.69. In fact, comparative musicologists acknowledged that “cultural lands” (Kulturländer) such as

India, China, and the Middle East had their own musical documents (e.g., histories, theories, nota-tion systems) and experts (such as the Indian scholar S. M. Tagore). Yet even as Hornbostel and hiscolleagues consulted some of these sources, they reaffirmed the priority of phonographic recordingsby stressing the methodological difference between a “philological-literary study” and a “musicalstudy,” such as their own, based on sound recordings. This emphasis on recording was clearly an-nounced by a series of articles, each of which was titled “Phonographed [non-Western] Melodies.”See, e.g., Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Phonographierte indische Melodien”(1904), trans. Bonnie Wade, in vol. 1 of Hornbostel Opera Omnia, ed. Klaus P. Wachsmann, DieterChristensen, and Hans-Peter Reinecke (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 115–82; Erich Moritz vonHornbostel, “Phonographierte tunesische Melodien” (1906), trans. Israel Katz, in Wachsmann et al.,eds., Hornbostel Opera Omnia, 1:323–80.

70. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Formanalysen an siamesischen Orchesterstücken,” Archiv fürMusikwissenschaft 2, no. 2 (April 1920): 320.

71. This “medical” mode of perception emerged in comparative musicology against the backdropof physical anthropology, which was a medical science in nineteenth-century Germany. The founderof that discipline, Rudolf Virchow, was an ardent opponent of evolutionism, as mentioned earlier. IfAbraham and Hornbostel (the one a practicing physician, the other a trained natural scientist) tooktheir perceptual model from medical science, they transformed it not only for music, but also for anevolutionist paradigm of comparative musicology. For more on Virchow and medical science, seePSC, 51–5; Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern RaceTheories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method, 79–154. For a wider ac-count of medical discourse and perception, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archae-ology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1994).

72. Here too the affinities with modern medicine and visual technologies are notable. See LisaCartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1995), 22–46.

73. For this reason (among others), it is important not to assign too much power to recordingtechnologies like the phonograph. See on this point Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” Octo-ber 39 (winter 1986): 9, 16.

74. Darwin was keenly aware of the problems that vision and narrative posed to representingevolution. See James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Na-ture in Post-Darwinian Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Tony Bennett has re-cently explored such problems in the context of evolutionary museums. “Evolution and the Politics ofVision” (paper presented at the symposium “Die Großstadt und das ‘Primitive’: Text, Politik undRepräsentation,” IFK - Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, October2001).

75. AM, 26–30, 33. Stumpf’s theory of origins was based on his original notion of “tone fusion”(Tonverschmelzung). See “QO,” 352–3.

76. See on this point Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthro-pology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George W. Stocking, After Tylor:British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

77. The key context here was, of course, the “theory of cultural circles” (or Kulturkreislehre). At a1904 meeting of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, the young museum curators Fritz Graebner andBernhard Ankermann publicly challenged the discipline’s elder statesmen, Bastian and Virchow, byadvocating a “culture-historical method” based no longer on the “universal” foundations of humanity,but on particular differences between cultures. The so-called theory of cultural circles aimed to chartthe “diffusion” of particular “cultural traits” as people migrated across the globe and intermixed with

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AMES / the sound of evolution325other groups of people. It also allowed curators such as Graebner and Ankermann to introduce evo-

lutionary narratives into German museum exhibits. Woodruff D. Smith has analyzed this shift inGerman anthropology as “the diffusionist revolt” (see PSC, 140–61). I would argue that comparativemusicologists also heralded this scientific revolution, while attempting to ride into the university onthe coattails of anthropology. See Albrecht Schneider, Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: ZurMethodik und Geschichte der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (Bonn: Verlag für systematischeMusikwissenschaft, 1976); for a brief summary in English, see “GA,” 88–91.

78. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Studien über das Tonsystem und die Musikder Japaner” (1903), trans. Gertrud Kurath, and reprinted in Wachsmann et al., eds., HornbostelOpera Omnia, 1:54; hereafter abbreviated as “TMJ”; trans. rev. throughout.

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