Thesis ID: CBB001567178

Nature's Music: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening in the Twentieth Century (2010)

unapi

Mundy, Rachel (Author)


Cusick, Suzanne
Hoffman, Elizabeth
New York University
Beckerman, Michael
Boorman, Stanley
Hoffman, Elizabeth
Stanyek, Jason
Beckerman, Michael
Boorman, Stanley
Stanyek, Jason


Publication Date: 2010
Edition Details: Advisor: Cusick, Suzanne; Committee Members: Beckerman, Michael, Boorman, Stanley, Hoffman, Elizabeth, Stanyek, Jason.
Physical Details: 321 pp.
Language: English

In 1913, ornithologist Henry Oldys explained a metaphor of music's history that brought birdsong together with human music through a shared model of evolutionary change: "there is no escape from the conclusion that the evolution of bird music independently parallels the evolution of human music." Such evolutionary thinking linking species difference to stylistic change was also a part of music scholarship, borrowed by founding figures including Erich Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, George Herzog, Guido Adler, and Otto Kinkeldey. Birds were often the transition allowing species development to slip into racial narratives of style; as Daniel Mason wrote, "the songs of the singing birds are very notable examples of 'natural music' ... Man, in his upward and wonderful course from barbarian to civilization, has but cunningly combined these elements [of natural music]." Despite the power such claims had to make musical difference heard in terms of biological evolution, today's scholarship on twentieth-century music relies almost entirely on constructions of "otherness" that are imagined outside of the context of evolutionary developments. My dissertation addresses this lacuna by exploring the repercussions of musical evolutionism for twentieth-century concepts of musical difference, tracing the growing tension between "cultural" and "objective" criteria for sonic data that developed at the center of parallel listening practices that were used, on the one hand, to classify human music, and on the other, in the ornithological identification of birdsong. Initially, these listening practices grew up around a common tradition of collecting recorded and transcribed sounds as though they were biological specimens, with the two fields diverging in mid-century as evolutionary biology became a standardized discipline, while music scholars began to question the value of specimens in inquiries related to human culture. This history laid the groundwork for what manifests today as an opposition between the objective research of birdsong studies, and the cultural knowledge of music scholarship. The relation of these opposed listening practices to a changing evolutionary science provides a historical lineage for the posthumanities' study of human/nonhuman relations, inviting a re-evaluation of musicological thought on modernist tropes of difference and their relation to the scientific claims of early twentieth-century Musikwissenschaft .

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/01, Jul 2011. Proquest Document ID: 815405480.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567178/

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Authors & Contributors
Liu, Yaya
Carpenter, Alexander
Wolff, Barbara
Wilson, Preston S.
Roy, Ronald A.
Rieger, Matthias
Concepts
Science and music
Music theory
Music
Science and culture
Acoustics
Harmony (music theory)
Time Periods
20th century, early
17th century
19th century
Ancient
16th century
Early modern
Places
Greece
Germany
France
United States
Netherlands
Italy
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