Ames, E. 2003. The Sound of Evolution. Modernism Modernity

The Sound of Evolution
Eric Ames
Modernism/modernity, Volume 10, Number 2, April 2003, pp. 297-325 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2003.0030
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/42429
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AMES / the sound of evolution
297
The Sound of Evolution
Eric Ames
A Report to the Academy

MODERNISM / modernity
“What is to be gained, someone will surely ask, by having a VOLUME TEN, NUMBER
Hottentot sing into the phonograph, then taking this dubious TWO, PP 297–325.
work of art and dissecting it with a tonometer and a metronome © 2003 THE JOHNS
into its atomic parts?”1 In his 1905 address “The Problems of HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Comparative Musicology,” presented to the International Soci-

ety for Musicology in Vienna, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel
reframed what was already an old question in strikingly new
terms. By the turn of the century, the Western fascination with
non-Western music had an extensive history, documented in
numerous accounts by travelers, missionaries, merchants, and
scientists.2 These written accounts remind us that the unexpected
component of Hornbostel’s experiment was not the Hottentot,
but the phonograph. The study of music had previously relied
on source criticism, texts including hand-written scores and pub-
lished manuscripts, whereas comparative musicology—a precur-
sor to ethnomusicology—would become the first discipline based
on sound recordings.3 Though Edison’s “talking machine” com-
monly denoted pleasure, leisure, entertainment, and consump- Eric Ames is an
tion, this device would now serve to establish the empirical basis assistant professor of
for a comparative science of music. Thus the phonograph lured German at the University
a new generation of scientists to revisit a familiar topos, the of Washington. He is
currently at work on a
“primitive,” embodied by the Hottentot.
book about exoticism
Hornbostel phrased his question as a joke for an audience
and early mass culture
presumably familiar with the figure of Saartjie Baartman, a San in Germany, with
woman who was exhibited in the early nineteenth century as the particular focus on the
“Hottentot Venus.” Her stage name itself was intended ironi- entertainments of Carl
cally, for, as Bernth Lindfors explains, “in physique she little re- Hagenbeck.
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M O D E R N I S M / modernity
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 of
her 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 as
a 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 The
French 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 Gilman
has shown, what was deemed extraordinary corporeality implied racial and sexual de-
generacy.6 When Baartman died in 1815, her body parts were dissected, dipped in
wax, and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. From the London stage to the
Paris museum, the Hottentot Venus confirms that human displays occupied a tenuous
space 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 phonograph
offered a means of hearing, examining, and representing the primitive in a new mode
of disembodiment, as a sound recording. Moreover, its capacity to inscribe sound in a
permanent and reproducible form—a wax cylinder or phonogram—granted access to
an acoustic realm that had previously resisted perception.
This attempt to explore the imperceptible world by mechanical means was one of
many in the late nineteenth century. The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey
had already used a battery of graphic, photographic, and cinematographic devices for
reproducing what the eye could not see, recording the instantaneous movements of
physical 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 his
use 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 the
tiniest fractions of a moment, as had Marey, Hornbostel imagined himself traversing
extended intervals of time: “We wish to uncover the darkest and most distant past, to
peel 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 the
cusp of the twentieth century—an experience that the phonograph and the cinema
helped transform. These inventions, as the historian Stephen Kern has shown, “brought
the past into the present more than ever before,” thereby expanding the present and
giving 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 tool
for digging. By means of recording, he sought to extract from the Hottentot’s song “the
primal origins of music” (die Uranfänge der Musik).10
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If the Hottentot Venus remains a familiar icon, the sound of her voice has faded 299
from memory. As modernists, our shared interest in the visual has led us to overlook
the historical impact of a discipline, indeed a discourse, based on and dedicated to the
preservation of sound.11 Yet this phenomenon should be of interest to us, not only
because it emphasizes the specificity of sound (which reminds us that problems of
representing 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 demonstrates
how phonography could be imagined and employed as a discursive technique for ren-
dering evolution audible—a technique, that is, for dissecting “primitive” songs and
rebuilding them into evolutionary narratives. Sound technology helped transform music
into information that could be used and distributed in a variety of ways. This essay
therefore explores how listening becomes a scientific pursuit.
In examining the initial experiments of Hornbostel and his colleagues, we access
what Bruno Latour calls “science in action,” in this case, the making of ethnomusicology
before the “field” even existed.13 We gain too a more nuanced understanding of how
scientists shape their practice retroactively according to their use of new tools and
techniques. Comparative musicologists found their own voice by experimenting with
the phonograph and its popular discourse. Phonography helped create the necessary
conditions 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 not
seeing science—but hearing it. As I argue, Hornbostel and his colleagues represented
their object of study as well as their ideas about it in acoustic terms, as a form of
phonographic discourse. Today, if not in turn-of-the-century Germany, what was once
a loud and audible fact threatens to fall on deaf ears. There was a moment when the
ear had a purchase that the eye did not. As modernists, we need to listen to the sound
of 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 new
technologies to stake out interdisciplinary areas of scholarship are still linked to “the
problems 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 of
the Berlin Phonogram Archive (das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv).14 Founded in 1900
by Carl Stumpf, the archive was initially housed in the Psychology Institute, which
Stumpf directed, at the Berlin University. A private institution funded largely by
Hornbostel’s estate and the few donations he and Stumpf could solicit, the phonogram
archive 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 of
Sciences (das Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften)
in Vienna. A scant year later, presumably in response to its new competition, Exner
would assert: “The collection of musical performances of savage peoples may prove to
be especially fruitful for a comparative musicology, which would probably be made
possible 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 voices
of famous personalities, in that order of priority.16 Thus the Berlin Phonogram Archive
made a name for itself by specializing in the collection of “exotic melodies” (exotische
Melodien).
Stumpf and Hornbostel would later be recognized as the “founding fathers” of the
so-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 his
assistants retrospectively in a disciplinary position that they never occupied. None had
chairs 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. His
first full-time assistant in the phonogram archive, Otto Abraham, was a successful
Berlin physician, while Hornbostel earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University
of Vienna.17 Each scholar initially worked outside of the boundaries that presumably
circumscribed comparative musicology. Their peripheral position urges us to treat this
project as interdisciplinary from the outset. Indeed, the question that Hornbostel and
his coworkers asked of their object was “inextricably tied to the most general questions
of musical history, ethnography, and psychology; its solution could only be approached
through the cooperation of these sciences” (“BPM,” 225).
On another level, school-driven approaches to comparative musicology give short
shrift to the sound archive as a “hearing institution” (or Höranstalt), as Hornbostel
would 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 the
phonograph and the sound archive as “institutions of the audible” not only amplifies
their discursive cross talk; it also demonstrates how they participated together in a
larger economy of circulation.19
In 1908, when the Berlin Phonogram Archive had collected nearly one thousand
wax cylinders, Stumpf enumerated the various sources from which they derived:
They have come, first, from our own recordings of occasional performances by exotic
guests in the German Imperial capital; second, from recordings made by traveling re-
searchers, many of whom we equipped with phonographs and instructions; third, from
the exchange of copies with other archives abroad; and fourth, from donations by the
large phonographic companies (Deutsche Grammophon, Favorit, Beka Records), which
produce nearly flawless recordings in the farthest reaches of the world for commercial
purposes.20
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Each of these sources—exhibitions, travelers, archives, and record companies—rep- 301
resents but one channel in an emerging network of circulation based on the mobility
of recorded sound. Taken together, they offer a glimpse of the vast infrastructure that
Stumpf and his assistants required for their collection project. “This work is at once
national 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’s
largest phonogram collection and the hub of a global exchange network. As Stumpf
proclaimed a decade earlier, “If the center of such an undertaking is to exist anywhere
in 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 for
conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork avant la lettre. The Berlin Phonogram Archive
would 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 among
many 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 to
them. Live performances of non-Western music could be heard throughout Berlin,
where they played a key role in the burgeoning industry of leisure and entertainment
as 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. On
the contrary, live performances of foreign music were in at least one respect more
sensational than the visual displays that they accompanied: Europeans were already
familiar with images of cultural difference, brought to them through paintings and
illustrations, but ethnographic entertainments made the sounds of non-European life
available 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 troupes
from 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), among
other “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 recording
sessions took place at several venues, including the Zoological Garden and the Circus
Busch (where human and animal shows intermingled), the Central-Hotel and the
Wintergarten (upper-end variety theaters), the Passage-Panoptikum and Castan’s
Panoptikum (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 fairgrounds
of modern Berlin. Only from the viewpoint of the urban center could one construct a
comparative 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 Darwin
and Herbert Spencer.24 Framing their work in terms of music psychology was admit-
tedly problematic, for the distinctive claim of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory
was, as Thomas Richards has shown, to calculate all things and arrange them in series
of 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 challenge
to evolutionism (in the broadest sense) as an all-encompassing theory of origins. Though
he 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 research
and teaching. Darwin provides a key, that is, to Stumpf’s own professional evolution as
a 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 man
in 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 all
because Darwin addressed it as a question of reproduction. To be sure, music could
neither reproduce itself nor struggle for survival. “Nevertheless,” wrote Stumpf, “Dar-
win knew what to do. His answer could be summarized as follows: ‘In the beginning
was love.’”26 Darwin tried to resolve the predicament of music by inventing his own
origin 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 as
a “primitive” form of sexual selection, homologous to the colorful plumage of a bird.
That most birds “sing” rendered this homology doubly compelling, embodying and
thereby naturalizing the link between the existence of music and the principle of sexual
selection. “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 perfected
in relation to the propagation of the species. . . . Every one knows how much birds use
their vocal organs as a means of courtship; and some species may likewise perform
what may be called instrumental music” (DM, 875–6). By defining music as a kind of
sexual 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 in
The Origin of Species.
Darwin’s theory of music rested on two assumptions that Stumpf found equally
preposterous: namely, that birds could be seen as evolutionary ancestors of human
beings, and that the “intermediate stages” (Zwischenstufen) between man and his closest
relatives 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 not
actually found,” whereas a musical equivalent to the human ape or “missing link” was
10.2ames 302 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

unimaginable.27 In other words, a freak of nature may exist—indeed, it must for Dar- 303
win—but there was no such thing as a freak of music. Nevertheless, this shift in Stumpf’s
interest from the origins to the intermediate stages was entirely consistent with nine-
teenth-century evolutionary thinking. As Richards notes, “The project of Darwinian
morphology . . . fixed its sights on the grey areas between forms. It sought to verify the
existence 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 rendered
continuous. As we shall see, Stumpf and his assistants would take up this project by
locating the gaps between ancient, “primitive,” and modern music, and extrapolating
the forms that ostensibly connected them.
Stumpf’s critique of Darwin provided him with an occasion for redefining music in
the context of scientific positivism. What distinguished music from “the sounds emit-
ted by animals,” Stumpf argued, was its formal organization based on the interval, the
variable difference in pitch between two sounds. This had a number of important
consequences. First, the question of music became a specifically human one. The
production and the enjoyment of fixed intervals presupposed the capacity for abstract
thought, which was held to be uniquely human. Insofar as animal sounds resembled
musical intervals, that resemblance was coincidental, a fortuitous expression of “the
pleasure 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 the
origins 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 between
forms in order to fill them retrospectively, but the developmental sequence that it
aimed to reconstruct would encompass only humans. The leap across the perceived
divide between humans and animals was one that Stumpf himself refused to make.
Moreover, rather than calculate all things that ever existed, he would concentrate on
musical 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 science
of music.
On the most basic level, however, Darwin’s “lack of an empirical foundation” pointed
to 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 Rudolf
Virchow, made this same argument in their reviews of Darwin’s books as well as in
their famous dispute with Darwin’s German popularizer, Ernst Haeckel.28 Bastian and
Virchow took this as grounds for discarding evolution entirely, focusing instead on the
“elementary ideas” of humanity and the multiplicity of cultural forms that issued from
those ideas. What makes Stumpf’s 1885 review so remarkable, then, is that it begins
with 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 the
origins 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 agreed
that the historical development of culture could be directly apprehended through the
study 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 their
native 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 performers
originated, but in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and other German
cities. From 1885 to 1886, Carl Hagenbeck, the consummate showman of Imperial
Germany, exhibited his latest troupe of ethnographic performers not only for urban
crowds, but also for scientific experts. While the Bella Coola drew mixed reactions
from commercial audiences (for whom they looked “too European”), for Germany’s
scientific elite they were sensational in every sense of the word.29
In November of 1885, the troupe made a special appearance before the Institute
for Geography at the University of Halle (fig. 1). Here, Stumpf intended to conduct
his first experiment in the psychology of non-Western music, beginning the empirical
research needed to support an evolutionary theory of music.30 While his colleagues
watched the performers, Stumpf was poised to transcribe the music by hand. He would
fail. Stumpf describes his uneasy sense of drowning in the performance, “swimming”
in a turbulent sea of unfamiliar sounds.31 The spectacle wrenched this listener from
his position of cool detachment, immersing him in a sensory riot. “As the actors grew
more passionate,” he remarks, “the musical intervals, whose arrangement is in many
ways unfamiliar to our ears, became increasingly unintelligible” (“LBI,” 406). Though
Stumpf took Native American music seriously, its apparent inscrutability seemed to
corroborate the absolute distinction between European “art music” (Tonkunst) and
non-European “natural music” (natürliche Musik) that Eduard Hanslick had drawn in
1854: “When South Sea Islanders rattle wooden sticks rhythmically, while sounding
out an incomprehensible howl [ein unfaßliches Geheul], that is natural music, because
it is not music at all.”32 Stumpf’s initial impression of the Bella Coola gave him no
obvious reason to challenge this received idea; nor did his fragmentary transcriptions
of their music offer any evidence to the contrary.33 The ethnographic exhibition had
issued in a disorienting barrage of sensory stimuli that initially resisted transcription.
As a stenographer, Stumpf had tested his powers of hearing and notation, and failed
on both accounts.
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305
▲
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.
Yet the problems of aural perception and acoustic legibility only served to heighten
the scientist’s curiosity. After the performance, Stumpf gained permission from
Hagenbeck’s agents, Captain Johan Adrian Jacobsen and his brother Fillip, to have a
private audience with one of the singers, Nuskilusta (see fig. 1).34 They spent four
evenings together in the Institute, working for one to two hours at a time. While
Nuskilusta rehearsed the troupe’s various songs more than ten times each, Stumpf
plodded 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 of
consideration for me, but also because [the solo performance] lacked the same effect
that was produced by the collective singing and dancing” (“LBI,” 408). Problems of
this kind could be resolved by what he defined as precise means of measurement: “At
home, then, working from memory, I determined the tempo with a metronome, which
one can do with great reliability” (“LBI,” 408–9). During the day, he also attended the
Bella 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 pay
off, he observed, for “now I could hear more than mere howling; I could hear the
melodies just as Nuskilusta had sung them solo” (“LBI,” 408; italics in original). The
isolation and repetition of the individual singer’s voice allowed Stumpf to train and
adapt his aural response to the unfamiliar texture of Bella Coola music. If a melody
10.2ames 305 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

306 could be picked out from the “howling,” then the strict separation between European
art music and natural music must be, Stumpf reasoned, at once willed and tenuous. “With
respect 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” for
Stumpf. On the contrary, it shook his faith in travelogues and scientific studies that
relied on acoustic evidence gathered abroad.37 Claiming the authority of having “been
there,” travelers often presented full scores of non-European music, but consistently
elided any mention of the methodological problems of transcription. While some had
little 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 to
double-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 listening
habits were not merely subjective, but culturally conditioned. Nineteenth-century
audiences in Germany (and elsewhere) heard non-Western music in many and some-
times conflicting ways. Listeners such as Hanslick dismissed “natural music” as “not
music at all”; on the opposite end of the spectrum, others failed to apprehend its status
as 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 This
tendency was of particular concern for the stenographer, whose predicament Stumpf
described by way of a visual analogy:
When one leafs through old, illustrated travelogues, one is amazed at the Europeanized
facial features of “savages,” as they used to be called (despite the exaggerated family
resemblance 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 pencil
is guided not by the eye, but by the brain, in which the accustomed facial features leave a
lasting impression. [“BP,” 65–6]
The creation of residual images, he suggested, had an acoustic corollary in what we

might call residual sounds, echoes of harmony that faintly ring in “European ears.” If
this 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 such
habits,” Hornbostel stated in his 1905 report, “requires a special practice, a training ad
hoc” (“PM,” 50). Researchers would have to attune themselves (literally) to musical
alterity, while casting away more familiar ways of listening. Insofar as aural training
depended 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 making
repeated visits to local, urban entertainments, where scientists could simultaneously
recalibrate their sense of hearing and develop a corresponding method of “objective”
representation (“TMS,” 170).
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Rather than speculate on the significance of Bella Coola songs, Stumpf set out to 307
transcribe them: “It was our intention to provide only phonographic reproductions of
the 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 the
idea of nonarbitrary writing, or “phonography,” as it was understood in the mid-nine-
teenth century. As James Lastra notes, “the very term ‘phonography’ initially referred
to a stenographic system developed by Isaac Pitman in 1837, which, by transcribing
sounds instead of words, was expected to offer a more direct, almost analogical form of
writing.”40 Though Stumpf would use a conventional form of musical notation, Pitman’s
system appealed to him as an ideal mode of acoustic representation and shaped his
own discourse on non-Western music. The search for an objective means of recording,
unmediated by the presence of the stenographer, would propel Stumpf throughout
his 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 Nuskilusta
employed a coherent “tone system” based on a five-step musical scale, which “must
have been the result of a cultural development [eine geistige Entwicklung].” Not only
did 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 manifest
importance for music psychology, it led Stumpf to assert his project’s ethnographic
potential: “In time, such studies will also acquire anthropological significance, beyond
their musicological value, inasmuch as they identify new traits [Kennzeichen] for es-
tablishing the relationship or interaction between different tribes” (“LBI,” 405). Most
importantly, this conclusion brought European and non-European music into calcu-
lable proximity. Radical new comparisons could now be made and even verified. One
evening, after listening to Nuskilusta, Stumpf attended a recital of Bach’s High Mass,
where he experienced an epiphany indeed: Perhaps the “expansion” (Ausdehnung) of
different evolutionary stages could be charted in terms of musical intervals, he pro-
posed, by “measuring the distance between Bach and Nuskilusta” (“LBI,” 426). Thus
Stumpf imagined a much larger and more ambitious project, an evolutionary science
of music.
This evolutionary imaginary, it must be stressed, was entirely a function of
spectatorship, for Hagenbeck’s display made no attempt to construe evolution visually.
On the contrary, the Bella Coola show, like so many of Hagenbeck’s ethnographic
exhibitions, was modeled on the variety program, with its “montage” of dance num-
bers, magic acts, and musical performances. Rather than organize human displays as
visual corollaries of Darwinian narratives, Hagenbeck choreographed a diverse series
of kinetic and multisensory attractions. He further distinguished himself as an ethno-
graphic showman by representing “typical” scenes of everyday life in foreign lands. In
the 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” appealed
to an elite group of anthropologists (led by Bastian and Virchow), whose approval
Hagenbeck needed in order to legitimate his own ethnographic enterprise. However
the 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 brought
with him a different set of goals and expectations, would hear the performances as
living evidence of evolution.
Stumpf’s “first encounter” with the Bella Coola offers a preview of what it would
take 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, how
listening functions as a scientific technique. In order to render the Bella Coola’s music
legible 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. In
their place, Stumpf constructed a new performance context, one specially designed
for inscribing sounds in isolation. But which sounds counted as music, and which ones
as noise? Distinguishing a melody from “mere howling” required still other acts of
acoustic 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 the
other 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 solo
singer repeating particular notes or passages upon request—could the stenographer
produce the effects of acoustic legibility and “objectivity” that he would claim for his
transcriptions. Acoustic objectivity was therefore a function not of the distance be-
tween science and entertainment, but of the power to choreograph. As “participant
observer,” the scientist became a kind of impresario in his own right.
In 1887, Stumpf ran a similar experiment at Hagenbeck’s Ceylon Exhibition in
Berlin. Not until 1900, when he and his new assistants at the Psychology Institute
equipped themselves with a phonograph, would they find a writing system that met
the standards of a science committed to positivism. By that time, the crisis of legibility
had 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 1884
and 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 people
and places closer together than ever before.43 At the same time, the global logic of
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access and connectedness gave rise to new anxieties about the consequences of too 309
much proximity. Throughout their writings, Stumpf and Hornbostel would take turns
lamenting 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 musicologists
assailed 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] if
not also their carriers to the brink of extinction, the more it is time to collect and study
them” (“TMS,” 167). The conquest of space rendered time of the essence. That was
precisely the logic that Adolf Bastian had employed in his 1881 call for an ethnological
museum 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 them
are concerned. The moment that they meet us, the angel of death is upon them. From
then on, struck by the angel, they carry the seed of decline within them.”44 Bastian’s
apocalyptic vision of “first contact” invokes the notion of biological contagion; colo-
nialism was the virus within the bloodstream of native peoples.45 Thus Bastian and
Stumpf each prescribed the antidote of immediate collection and preservation. They
understood collection not as a protest against colonialism, but as a reflection of
Germany’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 modern
systems of circulation. In 1908, Stumpf predicted that music “will in the future belong
to the indispensable signs that will inform us about contacts among the peoples and
tribes of the earth—their relationships, migrations, and trade connections—provided
that we do not wait until the expansion of world traffic [Weltverkehr] has obscured all
of their characteristic differences” (“BP,” 75–6). Reports from abroad seemed to verify
what Stumpf had surmised in Berlin, where the networks of circulation had already
transformed urban experience in tangible ways. Shortly before the outbreak of World
War I, for instance, Albert Schweitzer wrote a letter to Stumpf in which he described
the scene in Gabon, Africa: “Motorboats are increasingly replacing rowboats, as the
foreign trading posts prefer them. In the foreseeable future there will no longer be
any day-long journeys by rowboat, with twenty men in a canoe standing one behind
the 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 “natural
rhythms” of native life, leaving in its wake traditional means of transportation and their
corresponding forms of cultural expression. The doctor’s letter not only confirmed
Stumpf’s own diagnosis; it conveyed urgency to comparative musicology as a salvage
operation. 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 Song
of Little Cohn in the South Seas.”48 The last vestiges of “original” music had to be
collected and preserved, he declared, before new technologies of transportation and
communication 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 European
church 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 popular
hits. But what, we ask, gets lost along the way?” (“EM,” 91). Part of the problem, he
and his colleagues believed, was that “primitive peoples have a remarkable talent for
imitation and assimilation.”49 This penchant for mimicry, so the argument ran, made
colonized 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 the
word. They posed a threat to the order of things—the evolution of music—at precisely
the moment when comparative musicologists began to chart it. Unless drastic mea-
sures were taken to preserve non-European music in its “original” form, went the
logic, it would rapidly and irreversibly mutate beyond recognition. The solution was
not simply to deploy one mobility system (sound technology) against others (planes,
trains, and automobiles), for the circulation of “canned” music only exacerbated this
crisis of originality. From the beginning, Emil Berliner’s gramophone was primarily
designed for playback rather than recording. Therefore, while sound technology os-
tensibly offered a solution, its prime instrument, the gramophone, promoted mimicry
and in so doing threw “originality” back into question. The circulation of gramophone
records in the colonies was simply too effective. In such a context, the Deutsche
Grammophon Company’s famous trademark, “The Recording Angel,” represented no
longer 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 phonograph
participated in the very crisis that comparative musicologists considered a threat to
music’s existence. In at once lamenting and requiring them, Stumpf and Hornbostel
held 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 the
phonograph but do otherwise?
Unlike the gramophone, Edison’s invention permitted every user to record sound
as well as to reproduce it. In his 1878 article “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edison
foresaw “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—the
principle of recording and reproduction would indeed resound. On the most basic
level, the phonograph’s dual function enabled Hornbostel and his colleagues to distin-
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guish conceptually between playback and recording: Whereas mass reproduction threat- 311
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 it
technologically and discursively.
To understand how the phonograph could be mobilized “ethnographically,” we must
acknowledge its difference as a medium. In one sense, phonography had a greater
impact on late-nineteenth-century audiences than photography, for the latter medium
could 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 space
and time was a common enough phenomenon. But in phonography, the displacement
of 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, Edison
rented the earliest models of his talking machine to professional entertainers, who
demonstrated its wonders at traveling shows and world’s fairs.53 Like Hagenbeck’s
ethnographic exhibition, Edison’s invention teetered between science and sensation,
and too, in order to be refunctionalized for ethnography, the phonograph, like the
ethnographic exhibition, would have to be stripped of its sensational qualities. By the
turn of the century, its novelty had waned, to be replaced by new modes of curiosity. In
1896, the inaugural issue of The Phonoscope would predicate its own novelty on the
fact that its subject matter was now passé, and therefore interesting at a previously
unimagined level:
The Talking Machines have long since passed the point of novelty, occupying today a
foremost place among the standard inventions of this progressive age. . . . The curiosity of
hearing a machine talk has given way to a more serious consideration, and today the
general 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 into
many institutions, where it is used for educational and scientific purposes.54
Though the phonograph’s social function had indeed undergone transformation, this
claim to its universal acceptance was premature. Stumpf and Hornbostel still had to
assure their audiences—spanning popular lectures, newspaper articles, and official
correspondences—that they used the device as not a mass-cultural source of aesthetic
pleasure, but a scientific instrument.55 A German advertisement maintained as late as
1896 that “the best display object is and remains a good phonograph.”56 Just as the
talking machine was leaving the fairground and entering the bourgeois household,
where it would be domesticated as a piece of furniture, comparative musicologists
tried to move it into the scientific laboratory.
Retooling the phonograph for the study of “exotic melodies” required a series of
discursive maneuvers, for the talking machine was initially intended not for music, but
the human voice. The late-nineteenth-century discourse on the phonograph revolved
around 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 a
little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren or
posterity 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 of
the body for the benefit of future generations. Thus conceived, it functioned as a kind
of time capsule, preserving the voices of famous individuals like Gladstone, Bismarck,
and other “immortals.” Vienna’s Phonogram Archive intended, for instance, to “bottle
up 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 family
record: “For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of
the dying member of a family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably
outrank the photograph.”59 In 1900, The Phonoscope would concur: “Death has lost
some 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 than
concentrate on the individual voices of distinguished men or loved ones, comparative
musicologists gathered the “collective” sounds of non-European music. In so doing,
they employed the metonymic logic of ethnographic exhibition, where the individual
body of the performer represented the larger, absent whole (or “people”). By virtue of
metonymy, “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 put
off for decades or even years. As we know, the last Athapaskan or the last Pueblo
Indian 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 mimetic
urgency unmatched by anthropology. “The tangible products of non-European cul-
tures are collected in ethnological museums, as completely as is possible today. But
just as rapidly as these products disappear—indeed, more rapidly—word and sound
fade 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 scholar
Guido 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 its
structural nature is examined.”62 The first step in this procedure is to establish the
chronological origin of a musical piece, as a natural scientist would determine the age
of a fossil record or a geological stratum. Adler goes on to describe each subsequent
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step in anatomical and evolutionary terms. “His style-critical method begins with an 313
anatomical dissection of a work of art in order to ascertain its species, and his framing
of 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 itself
was, as Hornbostel noted, a “general method” adapted from anatomy, zoology, and
linguistics in order to create a new area of study. “The comparative method came late
to 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 other
songs, and thereby extrapolate the morphological development of music around the
world (“PM,” 42, 56). In comparative musicology, the evolution of music would take
shape 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 sought
to construct. Phonography allowed them to speak of a body of music, and to shape it
discursively into various forms.
To speak of a body of music was, in this context, to assert its solidity. Recording
technology granted new materiality to sound, allowing “exotic melodies” to be handled
in Hornbostel’s words as “tangible products.” In so doing, phonography brought music
into the realm of material culture. In acquiring the status of an object, non-Western
music could be collected, transported, exchanged, and stored as never before. It seemed
too, at least for a moment, that music itself would warrant—and indeed be capable of
occupying—a space of display. In 1903, the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan
proposed that the Royal Museum of Ethnology, where he served as head curator of
the Africa and Oceania sections, install phonographs next to showcases of musical
instruments. Recorded music, he claimed, should supplement visual displays, ampli-
fying objects that would otherwise remain mute, and thereby enhancing the museum’s
sensory 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 standing
before the museum showcase, in which instruments are preserved silent as the grave,
full of wonder but empty of understanding” (“BP,” 67). The uncanny little machine
would transform the displayed instruments by bringing them back to life. However
much 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 had
little 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), Luschan
presumed 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 sound
archive 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 into
the surface of a rotating cylinder, endowing it with depth as well as solidity. Scientific
interest 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, the
phonograph registered the physical impressions of sound vibrations. Rather than in-
scribe sound in terms of language or symbolic notation, its stylus etched lines and
points 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 the
phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic
order and linguistic meaning.”66 For Stumpf, the device offered a seemingly impartial
method of gathering “raw data,” unfiltered by “European ears” and unmediated by
musical notation, thereby fulfilling the search for a nonarbitrary writing system he had
begun in 1885.
By the same token, its indexical quality made the phonograph an ideal technique
for recording the music of oral cultures in particular, for this music had never been set
to writing. The absence of documentation had already served German anthropology
as a key criterion for defining its object as “peoples without writing” (schriftlose
Völker).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 tribal
artifacts, 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 the
discipline’s initial emphasis on recording as opposed to source criticism, for the latter
method (advocated by Adler) presupposed the availability of musical “compositions.”69
Sound technology rendered the history of non-Western music apprehensible not by
supplying the missing manuscripts, but by producing a body of music that could be
analyzed and measured as a physiological fact of the acoustic world. Stumpf and his
assistants believed that evidence of evolution was hidden in the structure of “exotic
melodies,” which included—and depended upon—that of contemporary performances.
A temporal medium par excellence, the phonograph offered a means of accessing the
past 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 and
analyzed (“BPM,” 229). Retooled for the laboratory, the phonograph served as a kind
of surgical instrument. Hornbostel made no bones about it: “By carefully segmenting
and dissecting the melodic strand with a scalpel [Seziermesser]—some people funda-
mentally condemn such vivisection—we make the flow clot. The living event must be
fixed as a motionless corpse, and only thus is it possible to recognize the now visible
architecture of the whole.”70 To listen with the aid of a phonograph was to see a body
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of music, just as a doctor would observe a cadaver, splayed and flayed, its internal 315
structure exposed.71 Here was a technique for locating and extracting what Hornbostel
called the primal origins of music. Controlling the flow of sound allowed him to examine
it 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 device
that 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 be
quantified, calculated, and compared. This surgical operation made it possible to survey
a body of music in its entirety, to identify resemblances and differences with other “exotic
melodies,” and thus to establish a discourse of comparative musicology—a discourse
that extended beyond morphology to posit larger, cultural and historical connections.
For all its promise, the phonograph could not speak for itself.73 Hornbostel and his
fellow 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 meet
the demands of scientific positivism, yet malleable enough to substantiate a diversity
of theoretical claims.
Stumpf’s 1909 public lecture series The Origins of Music offers a case in point. In
the first part, a reprise of his earlier article on British evolutionism, Stumpf offers up
his 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 the
creative act of sending signals (Signalgebung). In order to make this hypothesis, he
posits the existence of “pre-historic humans” (Urmenschen). “How did they come to
employ 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, only
one combination produces an effect that could be taken for a single, unified tone: the
octave. The original chorus must have noticed this apparent unity and eventually come
to prefer it. Stumpf goes on to posit the stepwise development of other consonant
intervals, beginning with the smallest and least complex, fourths and fifths, which he
attributes 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 show
how this theory plays out, Stumpf organized his subsequent lectures around a series of
phonogram demonstrations, offering the public a rare chance to hear recordings from
the 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 trajectory

from Ceylon eastward to the South Seas, then to America, traversing it from South to
North, until we reach the Eskimos, and finally to Africa. Within the smaller, geographical
areas we will often observe progress in melodic formation. Yet it is impossible to create a
single, unambiguous series out of the collected musical achievements of humanity, for
progress has taken many different directions. Conversely, we will discover more and more
connections between geographically neighboring or ethnologically related peoples, and
thereby gain a broad, coherent picture of musical practice. [AM, 107]
While organized as such for a popular audience, this “musical journey around the
world” inadvertently demonstrates the archival aporia in representations of music’s
evolution (AM, 196). The archive embodies the dream of objectivity, which, by virtue
of the multiplicity of sounds that it contains, resists any attempt to construct a single
narrative of progress. Therefore, although Stumpf’s theory of origins is predicated on
the notion of lineal development, his phonogram demonstrations are organized geo-
graphically, illustrating that musical “progress” follows many and sometimes divergent
paths. To plot these trajectories did not necessarily mean to construct a linear model of
evolution (such as that posited by E. B. Tylor); in fact, evolutionary thought assumed
various 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 younger
colleagues would focus less on origins and more on the cultural connections among
seemingly dissonant musical forms. Rather than drawing schematic connections as
direct lines or developmental series, they preferred elliptical and discontinuous forms
such 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 of
exotic music as primitive, thus situating it parallel to earlier developmental stages of
European music, it would provide us with clues as to how music actually sounded in
antiquity” (“BPM,” 225). This Eurocentric proposal was based on a blatant, temporal
fallacy, one that fundamentally confused morphology with history. Stumpf too would
commit 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 not
only to work backwards and forwards in time, and thereby generate developmental
series, but also to move “diagonally” through space, in order to draw cultural parallels
or 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 of
the Japanese,” based on Berlin recordings of Kawakami Otijoro’s musical theater troupe
starring Sada Yakko. While recognizing that this troupe was an icon of Japanese mo-
10.2ames 316 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

dernity, Abraham and Hornbostel interpreted its music in terms of Westernization, 317
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 price
of modernization to be the loss of “charming originality,” which the phonograph would
nevertheless allow them to isolate, extract, and preserve for analysis (“TMJ,” 67). More
specifically, 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 in
which all fourths and fifths are “pure” (untempered), thus making thirds sound out of
tune 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 Greek
melody. This link, in turn, provided a basis for comparison by analogy: “It is safe to
assume the common derivation of modern Europe’s harmonic music and modern Japan’s
non-harmonic music; they are late fruits from the same tree” (“TMJ,” 34–5). As
Hornbostel 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 that
has gaping holes in it. We gain a better idea of how ancient Greek music must have
sounded 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 make
evolution 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 in
this way was to travel not simply across generations, as Edison had imagined the use of
his device, but across the greater expanse of history and geography. In its function as a
scientific instrument, the phonograph established a tangible body of music that could
be dissected, like the figure of the Hottentot Venus, and reconstructed in a variety of
forms. It shaped and reshaped the discourse of comparative musicology, informing a
succession of scientific narratives. In this context, phonography came to serve at once
as a representational strategy for constructing the evolution of music, and a system for
traversing it. Just as the discipline of comparative musicology would take shape by
recasting the terms of evolution, its prime instrument would render newly material
evolution’s sound.
Notes
1. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft” (1905),
in Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze zur Musikethnologie und Musikpsychologie, ed. Christian Kaden and
Erich 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 Großstadt
und das ‘Primitive’: Text, Politik und Repräsentation,” a symposium held at the IFK – Internationales
Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (October 2001). I am immensely grateful to
Jessica Burstein for her advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this essay. Special thanks
go to Jennifer Bean, Tony Bennett, Glenn Penny, and Pamela Potter for their helpful comments and
questions. I also wish to thank Artur Simon for access to the Phonogram Archive at the Ethnological
Museum 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.
10.2ames 317 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

318 2. See Frank Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation
c. 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 Magnificent
Menageries: Image and Imagination in the Early History of Ethnomusicology,” The World of Music
33, no. 3 (1988): 5–27.
3. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung des Phonographen für
vergleichende 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: New
York 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 Martin
Heidegger). Yet these categories were never so neatly separated as Rehding would seem to suggest. A
wholly 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 explain
the crucial role that a temporal medium like the phonograph played as a scientific instrument for the
study of non-European music. At the turn of the century, comparative musicology co-opted the search
for origins in the context of scientific positivism, and transformed it with the tools of modernity. This
transformation can only be seen if we veer from the center of academic musicology and explore its
periphery—that is, the discursive contexts in which non-Western music circulated around 1900. These
contexts frame comparative musicology as a historical project that I understand as an attempt to
render evolution audible. See Alexander Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany
Circa 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 anthropology
and early cinema, they have thus far paid relatively little attention to ethnomusicology and early
sound technology. (That project has been undertaken, I hasten to add, by scholars of folklore and
ethnomusicology, though mainly in a conventional mode of disciplinary history.) Facile distinctions
between the visual and the acoustic do not suffice to explain this disparity in film studies, especially in
light 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 relationship
to 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 technology
to be a necessary condition for the possibility of conducting their research. Second, this technology
was crucial to the rise of comparative musicology as an institution, evinced by the Berlin School and
its phonogram archive, which I will discuss in detail. Third, comparative musicologists commonly
affirmed the epistemological status of the phonographic record as “acoustic evidence.” Each of these
points 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 the
connections between Anglo-American anthropology and the moving image, Alison Griffiths’ important
10.2ames 318 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

study demonstrates the elision I here address. See Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and 319
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). On
ethnomusicology’s relationship to the phonograph, see Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Recording Technol-
ogy, the Record Industry, and Ethnomusicological Scholarship,” in Comparative Musicology and
Anthropology 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 the
Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). On sound and
early 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 the
American 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; it
also 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 and
Regional 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 Berliner
Phonogramm-Archiv 1900–2000: Sammlungen der traditionellen Musik der Welt (The Berlin
Phonogramm-Archiv 1900–2000: Collections of Traditional Music of the World) (Berlin: Verlag für
Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), 25–46. This dual-language volume includes a catalogue of the
archive’s holdings, a rich selection of previously unpublished materials, and an extensive bibliography
of archival publications.
15. Quoted in H[einrich] Pudor, “Das Phonogramm-Archiv der Wiener Akademie der
Wissenschaften,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 2 (1901): 60.
16. Leo Hajek, Das Phonogrammarchiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien von seiner
Gründung bis zur Neueinrichtung im Jahre 1927 (Vienna: Hölker-Pichler-Tempsky, 1928), 10. In
English, see Walter Graf, “The Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
in Vienna,” The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 4 (winter 1962): 1, 5–6. Between 1901 and
1914, phonogram institutes of various kinds would be established in cities across the West, including
Budapest, 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, Archivar
und Musikwissenschaftler: Studien und Dokumente, ed. Sebastian Klotz (Berlin: Schibri, 1998).
18. See Mark B. Sandberg, “Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk
Museum,” 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 needs
to be located adjacent to the museum, the cinema, and even the department store, for each of these
institutions shaped the practical as well as the imaginary work of comparative musicologists.
20. Stumpf acknowledges the problematic nature of commercial recordings: “many betray a clearly
European influence.” Carl Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv” (1908), trans. Rosee Riggs, in
Simon, ed., Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 69; hereafter abbreviated as “BP”; trans. rev. throughout.
10.2ames 319 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

320 21. “BP,” 83. In another context, Thomas Richards has argued that “the imperial archive was a
fantasy 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 new
empire is proud of its colonies and does everything in its power to exploit them materially. It is our
duty to combine that with scientific exploitation, i.e. with research on the nature and the indigenous
culture of the new territories. Other colonial empires have not neglected this nobile officium. We too
have made an excellent start, but wherever the culture of indigenous peoples is to be described
exactly, comprehensively, and scientifically in scholarly works, phonographic records should not be
lacking. And what then? Should they be squandered and destroyed? No, they must of course be
collected and stored. Such an institution is a necessary corollary of our colonial aspirations in the
highest 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 and
empire, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the
Nineteenth 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 in
Berlin (“Archiv Somali,” Wahlsammlungen des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs, Musikethnologische
Abteilung, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin).
23. The comparative method and its rich tradition in the German sciences surely help explain why
Stumpf and his assistants conducted their research in Berlin, whereas their American colleagues
more 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) context
in which this preference for comparison should be understood. On the comparative method, see
Philip V. Bohlman, “Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of
Ethnomusicology,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 26–42.
24. Carl Stumpf, “Musikpsychologie in England: Betrachtungen über Herleitung der Musik aus
der Sprache und aus dem thierischen Entwicklungsproceß, über Empirismus und Nativismus in der
Musiktheorie,” 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 Various
Nations,” is generally acknowledged as the starting point of comparative musicology because of its
exemplary 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 it
was 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 also
prescient 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 not
refer to it. See Georg Simmel, “Psychologische und ethnologische Studien über Musik,” Zeitschrift
für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 13 (1882): 261–305.
25. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, The Modern Library (New
York: 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 popular
idiom for a series of public lectures on “The Origins of Music,” an abridged version of which was first
published 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 latter
source 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. Rehding
seems to present this conceit (“In the beginning . . . ”) as if it were his own, then proceeds to rehearse
Stumpf’s review of the literature without giving him due credit. See “QO,” 350–1; cf. AM, 9–21.
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27. Carl Stumpf, “Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie” (1899), in Leib 321
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 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 91–4; hereafter abbreviated as PSC; Andreas W. Daum,
Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung
und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 65–71.
29. For extensive documentation of this troupe and its reception, see Wolfgang Haberland, “Nine
Bella 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 perception
to be embodied, and therefore subject to measurement and control, but also deeply subjective and
contingent. He was particularly fascinated with the organization of psychology around sound, with
the ways in which sound is saturated with psychological data. His 1883 monograph Tonpsychologie
traces 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 and
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die
Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst,” in Bericht über den 4. Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie
in Innsbruck 1910 (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 256–69; for a more recent account in English, see Albrecht
Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” in Comparative Musicology and
Anthropology 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 especially
Jonathan 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. Carl
Stumpf 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 of
Stumpf’s original essay can be found in Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ed., A Century of Ethnomusicological
Thought, 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 from
a 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 in
Haberland, “Nine Bella Coolas,” 339) as “Isk-Ka-lusta.” A studio portrait of Isk-Ka-lusta, wearing a
suit 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 Franz
Boas, 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 founders
of cultural anthropology in the United States. See “LBI,” 408–9; Ira Jacknis, “The Ethnographic
Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas,” in Volksgeist as Method and
Ethic: 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” in
a self-conscious, strategic manner. Sometimes they offset the word “primitive” in quotation marks so
as to restrict the range of its meaning. More often they used the (no less problematic) term “exotic” in
order to describe non-Europeans as well as their musical productions (as in exotische Melodien). In so
doing, comparative musicologists were not quibbling over terminology, but making an argument about
10.2ames 321 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

322 the legitimacy of their emergent discipline. Their use of “exotic” was meant to counter the received
idea that non-European music was “primitive” (a term which had recently taken on such pejorative
connotations as “childlike” and “backward”), while stressing the complexity and confirming the alterity
of their object of study. They likewise retained the term “natural peoples,” but inflected it to denote
non-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 für
Musikwissenschaft 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.: Stanford
University 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 Visual
Culture 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 Hagenbeckschen
Völkerschauen (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 Field
Science, 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 in
the 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 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture
in 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 that
Germany 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., Berliner
Phonogramm-Archiv, 91; hereafter abbreviated as “EM”; trans. rev. throughout. For an account of
the ethnological museum and its role in the changing context of the public sphere around 1900, see
H. 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. Glenn
Penny 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., Berliner
Phonogramm-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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50. Thomas Alva Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” The North American Review 262 323
(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 Early
Phonograph 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 with
members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but failed to convince those of the Prussian Ministry
of Culture. Felix Luschan to Carl Stumpf, 15 February 1905, Inv. Nr. 308, Acta betreffend
phonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 – 31 December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl.; 30 November
1906, Inv. Nr. 1301, item 14, Acta betreffend phonographisches Material, vol. 1 (20 June 1903 – 31
December 1906), Pars I.B.Cl., Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin.
56. Non plus ultra Phonograph by W. Bahre, advertisement, Der Kurier 6, no. 17 (22 February
1896): 297.
57. Edward H. Johnson, “A Wonderful Invention: Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition From
Automatic 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 in
the first German manual on the Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines (1902). See Friedrich
A. 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 the
phonograph as a kind of technological hedge against death, see Tom Gunning, “Doing for the Eye
What 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 of
ethnomusicology. See, e.g., Jesse Walter Fewkes, “On the Use of the Phonograph in the Study of the
Languages of American Indians,” Science 15, no. 378 (2 May 1890): 267; Charles S. Myers, “The
Ethnological Study of Music,” in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour
of his 75th Birthday, October 2, 1907, ed. H. Balfour, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 235; Benjamin
Ives 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 Traditional
Music 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 and
George 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 in
2000 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 his
colleagues consulted some of these sources, they reaffirmed the priority of phonographic recordings
by stressing the methodological difference between a “philological-literary study” and a “musical
study,” 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, Dieter
Christensen, and Hans-Peter Reinecke (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 115–82; Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel, “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 für
Musikwissenschaft 2, no. 2 (April 1920): 320.
71. This “medical” mode of perception emerged in comparative musicology against the backdrop
of physical anthropology, which was a medical science in nineteenth-century Germany. The founder
of that discipline, Rudolf Virchow, was an ardent opponent of evolutionism, as mentioned earlier. If
Abraham and Hornbostel (the one a practicing physician, the other a trained natural scientist) took
their perceptual model from medical science, they transformed it not only for music, but also for an
evolutionist paradigm of comparative musicology. For more on Virchow and medical science, see
PSC, 51–5; Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race
Theories’ 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 Lisa
Cartwright, 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 recording
technologies 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 representing
evolution. 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 of
Vision” (paper presented at the symposium “Die Großstadt und das ‘Primitive’: Text, Politik und
Repräsentation,” IFK - Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, October
2001).
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 a
1904 meeting of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, the young museum curators Fritz Graebner and
Bernhard Ankermann publicly challenged the discipline’s elder statesmen, Bastian and Virchow, by
advocating 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 chart
the “diffusion” of particular “cultural traits” as people migrated across the globe and intermixed with
10.2ames 324 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

other groups of people. It also allowed curators such as Graebner and Ankermann to introduce evo- 325
lutionary narratives into German museum exhibits. Woodruff D. Smith has analyzed this shift in
German anthropology as “the diffusionist revolt” (see PSC, 140–61). I would argue that comparative
musicologists also heralded this scientific revolution, while attempting to ride into the university on
the coattails of anthropology. See Albrecht Schneider, Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: Zur
Methodik und Geschichte der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (Bonn: Verlag für systematische
Musikwissenschaft, 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 Musik
der Japaner” (1903), trans. Gertrud Kurath, and reprinted in Wachsmann et al., eds., Hornbostel
Opera Omnia, 1:54; hereafter abbreviated as “TMJ”; trans. rev. throughout.
10.2ames 325 4/22/03, 11:27 AM

Ames, E. 2003. The Sound of Evolution. Modernism Modernity

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The Sound of Evolution

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

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

The Sound of Evolution

A Report to the Academy

Comparative Musicology,” presented to the International Soci-

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Institutions of the Audible

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302 The Descent of Music

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The creation of residual images, he suggested, had an acoustic corollary in what we

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Voices of the Dead

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The Shape of Evolution

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316 principle of progressive development. Instead, we will pursue a geographical trajectory

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324 66. Kittler, Gramophone, 16.

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