Table Of ContentAnimal Musicalities
Rachel Mundy
A N I M A L M U S I C A L I T I E S
Birds, Beasts, and
Evolutionary Listening
Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2018 Rachel Mundy
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Minion Pro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mundy, Rachel, author.
Title: Animal musicalities : birds, beasts,
and evolutionary listening / Rachel Mundy.
Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press,
[2018] | Series: Music/culture | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018002992 (print) | LCCN 2018010580 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780819578082 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819578068 (hardcovder)
Subjects: LCSH: Animal sounds. | Birdsongs.
Classification: LCC QL765 (ebook) | LCC QL765 .M86 2018 (print) |
DDC 591.59/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002992
5 4 3 2 1
Cover illustration: "Great Carolina Wren and Dwarf Bick-eye,"
John James Audubon. From Audubon's Birds of America, originally
published as a series between 1827 and 1838.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
PERSONHOOD
ONE Why Do Birds Sing? And Other Tales 17
IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE
TWO Collecting Silence: The Sonic Specimen 41
THREE Collecting Songs: Avian and African 60
FOUR Songs on the Dissecting Table 84
POSTMODERN HUMANITY,
SUBJECTIVITY, AND PARADISE
FIVE Postmodern Humanity 109
SIX Listening for Objectivity 125
SEVEN The Rose Garden 146
Conclusion: The Animanities 168
Notes 183
Bibliography 229
Index 253
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have benefitted greatly from the help of many generous and thoughtful people
while writing this book. Many mentors, colleagues, friends, and generous strang-
ers have encouraged me to think about human and nonhuman animals during
the time between my dissertation and the book you are reading now. I am par-
ticularly grateful for Suzanne Cusick’s mentorship, guidance, and inspiration
concerning my questions about the relationships we build with other “others.”
Jason Stanyek’s encouragement and fabulous reading recommendations gave
me the confidence to get started, and to keep on writing about animals. Michael
Beckerman, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Stanley Boorman provided thoughtful feed-
back and much-needed cheerleading during my dissertation and beyond it. Judy
Tsou, Una Chaudhuri, Ana Maria Ochoa, Martin Daughtry, and Judah Cohen
were generous with their time, teaching, and conversation, and helped me work
through important ideas about animals, gender, historiography, and race. I have
been especially fortunate in having colleagues and friends whose conversation,
ideas, and critical eyes helped this project develop and grow. I especially thank
Daniel Asen, Robert Fallon, Gregory Radick, David Rothenberg, Tes Slominski,
Nicol Hammond, Anna Nisnevich, Emily Zazulia, and Gavin Steingo for their
thoughtful and supportive readings of portions of this text. I am also indebted
to my fabulous editor at Wesleyan University Press, Marla Zubel, whose insights
and support were invaluable, and to the entire staff at the press for their incred-
ible expertise, help, and high standards.
I am grateful for the institutional support that made the space this book
needed to grow. Henry Martin, Lewis Porter, Ian Watson, and Dean Jan Lewis
at Rutgers University–Newark made possible a crucial research leave in the fall
of 2015. I benefitted tremendously, and am still benefitting, from the exchange
of ideas and questions at the 2016 Wesleyan Race and Animals Summer Insti-
tute, and I especially thank Lori Gruen for her work hosting and organizing
the institute. I am likewise indebted to Karin Bijsterveld, Joeri Bruyninckx, and
the Sonic Skills Group at the University of Maastricht in 2012 and 2014, whose
ideas and shared conversations helped me think through key questions about
the transcription of sound. Many thanks to Deane Root, James Cassaro, Paolo
Palmieri, Andrew Weintraub, and other friends and faculty at the University of
Pittsburgh for their support and encouragement. This project owes so much to the
enthusiasm and support of the music faculty at Columbia University during my
postdoctoral fellowship in 2010–2012, and I am grateful as well for the American
Musicological Society’s Eugene K. Wolf Travel Grant, which allowed me to read
my way through French ornithology journals while waiting for archival boxes
at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2010. Finally, the lively ideas and
conversation of members of the American Musicological Society’s ecocriticism
study group gave further depth to my questions and ideas.
I am indebted in so many ways to the patience and generosity of librarians,
and to the availability of collections under their care. My thanks to Suzanne
McLaren and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History; to Suzanne Mudge at
Indiana University’s Archives for Traditional Music; to Mai Reitmeyer and the
special collections staff at the American Museum of Natural History’s research
library; and to the archivists at the American Philosophical Society Library, the
New York State Archives, the New York Public Library, Yale University’s Ster-
ling Memorial Library Manuscripts and Archives, and the Western Michigan
University Archives and Regional History Collections. And it is hardly possible
to properly thank historian Dr. Richard Burkhardt, who responded to my cold-
call inquiry about Wallace Craig’s correspondence by sending me a cardboard
box that contained his own careful photocopies of Craig’s letters. Thank you so
much, Dr. Burkhardt!
I am grateful to the students and colleagues whose conversations and ideas
have helped me continue to discover which questions I care about, and to learn
what research brings me humor, growth, and joy. Thanks to Dave Novak for
his generous and thoughtful ideas about mechanical transcription, and to Ellie
Hisama and Emily Wilbourne’s Women, Music, Power conference in 2015. I am
especially indebted to my students. Their questions, ideas, and perspectives are
an ongoing part of the work I care about. The students in my elective seminars
in 2015 at the University of Pittsburgh had an especially important place in the
making of this book: Kevin O’Brien, Lu-Han Li, Danny Rosenmund, Julie Van
viii Acknowledgments
Gyzen, Juan Velasquez, Xinyang Wang, Hety Wong, Chris Capizzi, John Petru-
celli, and Jonathan Shold. Thank you all.
This book tells a story and asks questions that I care about and believe in. As
you read it, I hope you’ll discover a new perspective on history and the people
(of many sorts) we share it with. But like most scholars, I worry about all the
mistakes I made. Did I misread a source? Fail to credit another author’s work?
Ignore a significant event, person, or place? Translate another language badly?
Make it seem like this story is the only story? Whatever they are, any mistakes,
errors, or shortcomings in this book are entirely mine. I hope you will be patient
with them as you discover them, and learn from the things this book does best.
Last but hardly least, I am grateful for the support and love of my family.
Many thanks to my siblings for their constant love and support; to my close
friends; and especially to my mother, who read me nature stories when I was a
child and gave me bird guides and animal books after I became an adult. Finally,
I am grateful to Climber, the blue-tongued skink who has lived with me for the
past seven years. He will not care about acknowledgments in a book (I gave him
an egg instead), but I would be remiss not to include his silent, cool, and scaly
support in my thanks.
Acknowledgments ix
