2 Scientific Scores and Musical Ears: Sound Diagrams in Field Recording

Musical Scintillations

It is a mad, reckless song-fantasia, an outbreak of pent-up, irrepressible glee. He begins bravely enough with a number of well-sustained tones, but presently he accelerates his time, loses track of his motive, and goes to pieces in a burst of musical scintillations. (Mathews 1904, 49)

When writing this in 1904, naturalist Ferdinand S. Mathews was not reviewing an artistic composition. In fact, he was describing a motif of “musical fireworks” he heard produced by a bobolink, an American songbird. This was music, he explained, and in character easily comparable to some of Chopin’s musical fantasias. In his Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (1904), Mathews compiled detailed song transcripts along with descriptions of the nesting and range of almost 130 wild bird species native to the eastern United States. The author of previous, lavishly watercolored field books on American shrubs and wildflowers, he had transcribed all birdsongs by ear and rendered them in a conventional musical notation. Mathews was by no means the first to write of birdsongs in such exalted terms—bird “music” was a trope of much naturalist writing before him.¹ Nor was he the first to place them on a musical staff.² Unlike his predecessors, however, Mathews emphasized the scientific nature of his endeavor. Anticipating that critics would doubt the value of recording birdsongs in musical notation, he first dismissed the conventional representation in nonsensical, often onomatopoeic, syllables, and presented his own glossary and introduction in an effort to mollify the skepticism of those unable to read music easily.

In a twist of irony, the very parts of the bobolink song that had inspired Mathews’s powerful prose proved resistant to the musical approach he advocated: “I have never been able to ‘sort out’ the tones as they passed at this break-neck speed,” he explained, and “the difficulty in either describing or putting upon paper such music is insurmountable” (Mathews 1904, 49). Sketching the wildly bouncing notes to the best of his ability, he ultimately resorted to the transcription pictured in figure 2.1; its notes initially follow a traditional grid of quarter and eighth notes, but then oscillate quickly beyond the conventional dimensions of relative time and pitch, until they eventually recede—strangely—back in time. In all its unconventionality, his score might be read as an unsuspected precursor of postwar avant-garde notational experiments.³ But however evocative Mathews’s notation may appear to the present-day reader, to some of his contemporaries it suggested the inadequacy of musical notation for the accurate and intelligible representation of natural sounds.

Figure 2.1 Musical transcript of a bobolink song by Ferdinand S. Mathews.

Source: F. S. Mathews, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music: A Description of the Character and Music of Birds (New York: Putnam, 1904), 51.

Mathews’s stretching of the syntactic capacities of musical notation in fact marks the beginning of a particularly lively intellectual exchange during which ornithologists widely debated the problem of notation and listening as methods of scientific study. At the turn of the twentieth century, interest in field observation of birds surged. Scientific ornithology long centered on armchair taxonomic and systematic study of stuffed specimens in museum collections. The study of living birds’ habits, in contrast, had become the province of amateur naturalists—natural historians in the civic realm of schoolteachers, civil servants, writers, and pastors—along with a growing group of bourgeois birdwatchers.⁴ That division blurred in the first decades of the new century, when, under influence of a new generation of professional ornithologists, fieldworkers increasingly sought to grant their investigations the status of scientific study. But while birds’ migration patterns, nesting rituals, or food preferences seemed readily amenable to systematic scientific description, the specific qualities of birds’ vocal repertoires proved more elusive and difficult to convey. Naturalists had traditionally been content with verbal descriptions and syllabic or onomatopoeic renditions, but between 1900 and 1930, field observers came to reconsider such methods and began instead to experiment with highly innovative musical transcriptions and graphic diagrams.

This methodological tangle gave rise to a debate regarding the variable boundaries of an emerging community of field listeners. As amateur and professional ornithologists sought to standardize a technology for representing natural sounds and to calibrate listening practices, they also came to define what it meant to listen to birdsong and to record it (that is, transform it into script) as scientists. Who should be allowed to listen with authority, and what kinds of professional literacy or perceptual skills could be expected of aspiring observers? A substantial strand of work in the history and sociology of science has shown that new forms of knowledge codification can be powerful factors in shaping and consolidating local scientific and technical communities.⁵ At the same time, it has become clear that before such research tools can be usefully applied, various forms of nontextual transfer of skills take place, often within highly localized training regimes.⁶ In the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, ways of listening to birdsong took shape between two competing forces: efforts to standardize sound recording into a scientific methodology, and efforts to accommodate the multiplicity of interests and variable competence levels of listeners in local contexts. This chapter traces how notations were devised to straddle that tension.

Examining their role as “paper tools” in the development of field ornithology and scientific listening, it shows how notations allowed their users to listen in different ways and with different intents.⁷ In the process of recording—that is, transcribing—on paper, these diagrammatic technologies order phenomena, by helping to eliminate “background” and electing certain features to foreground. That order is both epistemic and social. By their very syntax—“their visual form, rules of construction and maneuverability”—these schemata could thus be fitted to reify certain conceptions of bird vocalizations as, for instance, musical or expressive behavior, at the expense of alternative interpretations. But by their maneuverability and ease of application, such rules also help to negotiate a disciplinary authority or to construct a community of listeners. Understanding how listening and recording became a scientific technique in field biology, therefore, requires us to read these notations not just as inscriptions of birdsong, but as the outcome of a complex negotiation of conflicting demands for accessibility, accuracy, attractiveness, readability, and didactic potential.

The Attractions of the Field

In the half century between 1880 and 1930, the practices and interests of ornithologists shifted. Until the late nineteenth century, scientific ornithology had focused primarily on faunistic and taxonomic description and classification. Over the course of these fifty years, such interests—and the associated practices of shooting birds and collecting and conserving bird specimens, eggs, and skins for cabinet study—gradually began to give way to field studies and observations of behavior and ecology.⁸

In the historiography of ornithology, the shift has been framed as part of the professionalization of ornithology. That history has been traced by following disciplinary formation and conceptual transformations through the prism of several key protagonists.⁹ Yet the negotiation of a new and decidedly professional identity for ornithology did not concern academic zoologists alone: it also impacted the realm of amateur naturalist study. Much ornithological fieldwork arose at the margins of professional academic science, in the sphere of local natural history societies and schoolteaching, and increasingly also of birdwatching. Historians of ornithology and conservation have interpreted this late nineteenth-century turn to the field as part of a profound change in attitudes toward nature.¹⁰ Generally, the American and British middle classes began promoting a less exploitative and more harmonious relationship with nature. Urbanization and industrialization had made the presence of unexploited nature less self-evident than ever before, and the field study of live exemplars for pleasure seemed to provide an answer to a new yearning.¹¹ Changing leisure patterns for the middle class, too, had created a void to be filled with meaningful recreation, while the wider availability of bicycles and automobiles increased the mobility of new country dwellers and their ability to penetrate farther into the countryside. These changing attitudes found expression in the successive emergence of several bird protection movements in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Allen 1976). In elite Victorian culture, birdwatching was co-opted to advance the cause of conservation and organized to form a respectable hobby.

The history of these protection movements and related changes in conceptions of nature go a long way toward explaining the attractions of the field for a large group of naturalists. As environmental historian Mark V. Barrow Jr. points out in his history of American scientific ornithology, these changing attitudes toward nature put an increasing strain on the traditional division of labor between professional specialists and a growing community of diversely motivated amateur bird enthusiasts (Barrow 1998, 17). By the early 1880s, scientific ornithologists had begun to foster a professional disciplinary identity of their own by clustering various local bird clubs into specialized national societies—such as the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft, the British Ornithologists’ Union, and the American Ornithologists’ Union—and by organizing annual meetings and publishing periodicals.¹² In that process, scientific ornithologists were also beginning to differentiate themselves from the motley array of teachers, foresters, clergymen, and schoolboys who collected skins and eggs in their spare time. In principle, the societies’ journals were open to any kind of contribution, but in the United States, for instance, the AOU’s restrictive membership policy and its focus on technical discussions of nomenclature or faunistic description in practice kept amateur contributors at bay (Barrow 1998, 67–73).

In the 1880s and 1890s, the emerging bird protection movement achieved stricter regulation of bird shooting. The movement identified common practices such as hunting and commercial millinery as the main culprits for the rapid decline and possible extinction of several populations, but, importantly, they also blamed the collecting practices of professional ornithologists and their counterparts in the civic realm (Barrow 1998; Moss 2004; Orr 1992). In fact, ornithological societies such as the AOU themselves advocated stricter permit policies to protect their objects of study from careless shooting, but to protect their own collecting privileges they tried to exempt “proper scientific work” from more restrictive legislation—effectively denying the amateur birdwatcher, collector, and dealer a role in professional ornithological practice (Barrow 1998, 134–140; Davis 1994, 8–11). Faced with declining opportunities to collect and study actual specimens, naturalists instead published their observations of species they encountered in the wild (Barrow 1998, 172–175; Burkhardt 2005). These records comprised extensive descriptions of breeding habits, migration patterns, and mating or singing behavior, and even discussions of their implications for problems in Darwinian evolution (Barrow 1998). In the last decades of the nineteenth century, field ornithology and technical (taxonomic) contributions had been equally well represented in American ornithological publications, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, field reports began to dominate significantly (Battalio 1998, 94–110). In Britain, too, the fascination of birdwatchers shifted to detailed studies of the habits and life histories of common birds (Burkhardt 2005).

The growing confidence with which such field studies were carried out is exemplified by the Wilson Bulletin editor’s call to readers to “prove that the slur often aimed at amateur field work is not applicable in your case at least. Such work needs to be done” (Jones 1905, 22). In fact, that “slur” persisted well into the 1920s, premised on a distinction reiterated by the author of a specimen identification tome, Robert Ridgway, in 1901: “Popular ornithology is the more entertaining, with its savor of the wildwood, green fields, the riverside and seashore, birdsongs and the many fascinating things connected with out-of-door-Nature,” whereas “systematic ornithology, being a component part of biology—the science of life—is the more instructive and therefore more important.”¹³ Although professional ornithologists and amateur naturalists interacted more regularly than their counterparts in any other scientific discipline—the ornithological journal The Auk, for instance, contained a lengthy section of general notes where amateur ornithologists sent in their observations—the value of sight records and observations of living animals remained contested among professionals, especially when they had been recorded by amateur naturalists. For conservative professionals, unverifiable and often dubious identifications by inexperienced and potentially overzealous birdwatchers threatened to undercut the authority that their discipline had so carefully established. Some ornithologists still refused to accept sight records, especially those not substantiated by a preserved specimen, until the late 1920s. By that point, however, graduate training in ornithology at Cornell University and other institutions had begun to produce a new generation of professionals. These differed crucially from their technical predecessors of the 1890s, because they worked not only in museums but also in positions at universities and in state-organized biological surveys. Subject to different institutional and methodological demands than the typical nineteenth-century ornithologist, and with almost all species already described and mapped out, their methodological interests began to lean toward questions of ecology, population, and behavior, all of which required research on living birds.

As a result, they were increasingly willing to rely on their own field identifications and to accept observational records by others. In Britain, pioneering students of animal behavior such as amateur birdwatcher Frederick Kirkman and professional biologist Julian Huxley had begun to outline the contributions that field naturalists and birdwatchers could make toward the study of behavior, in gestures, singing, nest building, or migration, to resolve fundamental problems in biology (Burkhardt 2005, 98–126). What amateur naturalists needed, in their view, was knowledge of what to search for and a method to guide that search. Field observation, in other words, was a skill that could be learned. This point, that ornithology could profit from observations by field naturalists if only they were instructed correctly, was endorsed perhaps most explicitly by Ludlow Griscom. A graduate of one of the first ornithology programs, Griscom worked as the assistant curator of birds at the American Natural History Museum. At Cornell University, he had studied with the first professor of ornithology in the United States, Arthur A. Allen, and befriended the premier bird painter of the day, Luis Agassiz. Both were strongly committed to the popularization of their field. Although he was professionally concerned with systematics and bird distributions, Griscom—nicknamed the “Dean of the Birdwatchers”—repeatedly tried to strengthen relations between academic ornithology and hobbyist birdwatching (Davis 1994, 131–142).

He campaigned for the acceptance of field identifications by professional biologists, and his field guide Birds of the New York City Region (1923) introduced a new, more holistic method of attaining such identifications. Whereas the approach promoted in early field guides had been grafted onto the existing techniques of systematists, sorting primarily through color and visual pattern, Griscom instead advocated integrating knowledge of all the available information, such as locality, season, habitat, field marks, and also voice (Dunlap 2011, 72–82). To make their sightings and observations worthwhile, argued Griscom (1922, 39), students of field behavior required knowledge of such traits and above all a careful, scientific attitude: “If the bird student really wishes to make observations of scientific value, he must needs become a trained field ornithologist.” But “to attain these qualifications calls for no special gifts or capabilities,” and “granted no physical defects and some aptitude for the study, this is well within the reach of anyone” (Griscom 1922, 39–40). Based on his own field experience, Griscom concluded that only a very small portion of the apparent difficulties or inaccuracies of identification stemmed from what he termed “the human equation” and the range of possible variation in skill and aptitude among observers.¹⁴ Such problems included defects of the eye and ear, as well as a lack of training. But they were greatly outnumbered by those caused by a persistent lack of attention: care, dedication, and a scientific attitude mattered more than virtuosity.

By the 1910s, a growing group of amateur naturalists, birdwatchers, and professional ornithologists had become emancipated as students of living birds in the field, relying on visual and auditory observations. But whereas taxonomic study had long provided a recognized protocol for the validation of scientific claims, through systematic comparison with carefully preserved and annotated specimens, observational records remained in a gray zone as no perceptual standards existed yet by which visual and auditory observation could authoritatively substantiate scientific claims. Existing historical scholarship has extensively addressed the role of field guides, such as those by Griscom and others, in shaping new standards and methodologies for the visual recognition of birds.¹⁵ However, if ornithologists were to rely on their ears to locate, identify, and analyze bird behavior, listening too had to be learned. Just like problematic identifications based on sight alone, listeners’ scientific legitimacy would hinge on their success in adopting a shared repertoire of terminology and techniques for listening and recording what they heard.

Avian Melodies between Science and Sentiment

By the early 1900s, such a repertoire had already been in the making. Against the shifts into a new era in conservation history described above, birdsong had assumed powerful currency among the growing group of naturalists, conservationists, and civic bird enthusiasts that had taken to fieldwork. In contrast to the visual attractions of birds’ plumage and form, on display in scientific museums or as items of fashion, the melodious charm of their songs was celebrated as evidence of their beauty and an index of the pleasure and satisfaction that might be gleaned from studying living animals in their natural surroundings. In 1896 already, the American naturalist writer Charles Abbott (1896, 14–15) was glad to observe that “there is happily a wide-spread impression that birds are something more than mere ‘specimens’. … The woods, fields, mountain-sides and river-valleys tell another and a charming story.” The experience of hearing “the music of the fields and woodlands” was extolled by the British ornithologist Charles Dixon (1897, i) a year later as “one of the most gratifying pleasures of the country. The variety of these songs is great, their beauty a refreshing and perennial one. [They] attract the least sentimental among us, arouse our sympathies, and charm the majority of us to a degree unapproached by any other living form.” In fact, study of birdlife might not bring any material profit, the German teacher and amateur naturalist Ulrich Ramseyer (1908, 1) conceded, but “when I walk through field and forest, I am never alone. A little bird sings to me with inimitable joy its lovely luck.”¹⁶

These authors’ accounts of joyful encounters with singing birds during walks in the countryside tapped into a register that had become highly popular by the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1890s, the popular longing for a more vivid experience of nature was met by a growing market for nature essays, field guides, and bird books that encouraged readers to experience natural life firsthand. Their literary form often combined accurate naturalistic descriptions of animal life with a poetic style that centered on the authors’ own experience (Kohler 2006, 73–76, 82–86). For many naturalists and their audiences, close observation of nature, and birdsong in particular, promised a brief glimpse into the deep structures and meanings of nature, and at the very least an aesthetic appreciation. But while personal and aesthetic revelation was central to nature writing of the day, it was not an invitation to sentimentality and artifice. This is evidenced among other things by a literary controversy that erupted in 1903, when naturalist writer John Burroughs chastised the authors of a popular genre of realistic animal fiction for producing “sham natural history” and for casting animal life in anthropomorphic and moralistic terms (Burroughs 1903, 298; see Lutts 1990, 40). The controversy was widely publicized and invited even a final word by the well-known outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt, who famously denounced the contingent as “nature fakers” (Lutts 1990, 101). At stake was the reliability of nature writing; when the debate subsided around 1910, it had exposed the exploitation of nature description for sentimental purposes as deeply suspicious.

Against these broader literary discussions, much (popular) naturalist description took shape in what Robert Kohler (2006, 87) calls a symbiotic relationship between science and art. Around the turn of the twentieth century, then, “true” natural history writing purported to be both art and science: to provide emotional satisfaction through detailed observation and for scientific knowledge to enhance the aesthetic experience of nature (Kohler 2006, 74). The topic of birdsong and its recording thrived particularly well in this context. This is evident, first of all, from the surge in ornithological field guides such as Mathews’s Field Book that concerned themselves with birdsong. Operating in the same cultural and textual domain of naturalist writing, these field guides fed the appetite of a growing readership of naturegoers, who were hungry for guidance on what there was to see, experience, and hear in nature; they provided detailed description and promoted outdoor observation. And although their authors were keen to underline their recordings of birdsong as the result of exacting observation, they did not shy from romantic or aesthetic overtones. Imaginative descriptions, musical notations, and onomatopoeic renderings all helped to convey not just a detailed understanding of specific birdsongs, but also their “compositional” intricacies and aesthetic nature. Repeatedly, Mathews criticized the birds he discussed for not taking their motif further to a logical end from a compositional standpoint or juxtaposed their songs with references to contemporary nursery melodies or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Musical notation seemed to authenticate the anthropomorphization of nature. As we will see, for Mathews and many other naturalists of his time, it also provided a means of recording and discussing birdsong in a way that expressed both scientific and aesthetic aspirations.

Around 1910, however, birdsong did not just concern naturalist writers or aspiring field ornithologists—it also resonated in a wide-ranging cultural domain of music, pedagogy, and popular entertainment. Although across these settings, birdsong had primarily been of interest for its popular and aesthetic allure, here too, its practitioners recognized the symbiotic value of accuracy and reliability as they shared with their naturalist counterparts an approach to careful and detailed observation. For them, naturalist study made the art authentic.

This was the case, first of all, in musical composition, where birdsong was invoked to provide practicing composers with a rich set of materials. Amy Beach, for instance, one of the leading female composers in the United States at the turn of the century, drew extensively on birdsongs.¹⁷ Beach, in fact, transcribed birdsongs in musical notation herself, as she had been doing from an early age: as a young girl, she had been recruited by the poet and English professor Edgar Rowland Sill on account of her talent for absolute pitch and tonal memory. He took her to accompany him on a trip around Berkeley to collect birdsong notations for a friend at the University of California, who was writing a book on regional birdsongs. On a single day, they took down the melodies of twenty birds with pencil and paper (Tick and Beaudoin 2008, 326). In 1911, she was featured in a magazine essay titled “Bird Songs Noted in the Woods and Fields by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach for This Article,” in which Beach—whom the author described as having an extensive collection of bird melodies—was quoted describing the sounds of several common birds, such as the wood pewee, song sparrow, and thrush.

Such work formed the basis for several of Beach’s compositions, including two well-known pieces in 1921, “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.” She had transcribed the hermit thrush songs in her New Hampshire studio: “In the deep woods near by, the Hermit Thrushes sang all day long, so close to me that I could notate their songs and even amuse myself by imitating them on the piano and having them answer. The songs were so lovely and so consonant with our scales that I could weave them into piano pieces” (quoted in Woodward 1923, ix). The calls in these pieces, she insisted in a footnote, were exact notations, in the original keys but an octave lower. In fact, as musicologist Denise von Glahn points out, while Beach’s work is often taken to express a “religio-romantic ideology,” the importance she attaches to the precision, rigor, and accuracy in these transcriptions would align her equally with scientifically inclined recordists of birdsong such as Mathews (von Glahn 2013, 43–44).¹⁸

Musical transcriptions of birdsong were not just aesthetically pleasing—they were also utilized for pedagogical purposes, as is illustrated by William B. Olds’s Twenty-Five Bird Songs for Children (1914). Olds authored a series of songbooks based on natural history subjects, which, as he outlined in Bird Songs, Flower Songs in 1916, were meant specifically as a didactic resource. Building on recent developments in music teaching, which encouraged children to learn musical scales by associating each tone with a particular color, Olds set out to connect tones with actual birds of a similar color, whose stylized songs moreover corresponded to a particular tone.¹⁹ Its benefits, he insisted, would be threefold: first, training of the ear to recognize tone relationships; second, training of the eye to differentiate between colors; and third, the awakening of an interest in nature study and bird conservation. In his Twenty-Five Bird Songs for Children, Olds (1914, v) noted that by rendering birdsongs in musical notation, “the actual bird-melodies thus unconsciously absorbed should inevitably lead to a keener delight in the singing of birds, and a better understanding of their songs. A further result of this knowledge, I hope, will be the promotion of a deeper interest in the whole subject of bird-life, and the need of its preservation.”

This didactic premise bore the mark of the nature study movement, which reached its zenith in America and Germany between 1900 and 1920.²⁰ As a popular educational movement combining facets of science, aesthetic appreciation, conservation, and traditional pedagogy, nature study sought to enhance children’s individual learning through hands-on instruction using concrete objects and representations. Its aim was to stimulate an understanding of natural life in its own environmental context. As one of the movement’s spiritual leaders, Anna Botsford Comstock, laid out its philosophy in her influential essay “The Teaching of Nature-Study,” “Nature study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are. [It] cultivates in the child a love of the beautiful; it brings to him early a perception of color, form and music. He sees whatever there is in his environment. … Also, what there is of sound, he hears; he reads the music score of the bird orchestra, separating each part and knowing which bird sings it” (Comstock [1911] 1939, 1–2). For those seeking to cultivate in children a power of accurate observation, birdsong provided a particularly appealing approach to instruct them in the “deep structures of nature.” To be pedagogically effective, however, notations were to be both appealing and as accurate as possible. Complementing his own transcriptions with notations by Mathews and Cheney, Olds (1914, v) had therefore transposed the melodies to keys more suitable for a child’s voice, but insisted that the spirit and melodic intervals had been kept “absolutely true.” An endorsement by Henry Oldys, a former assistant biologist with the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture and an expert on birdsong, further commended Olds’s booklet for “preserving with exactness the bird themes he embodies in his songs” while harmonizing them so attractively (Olds 1914, iii). Just as Beach had for her musical scores, therefore, Olds had prepared his notations to be recognized both as an accurate transcription and as a helpful prescription for musical performance.

Henry Oldys was in fact perfectly situated to praise Olds’s birdsong “transcriptions.” He had been employed as a state ornithologist with the US biological survey for the Department of Agriculture, but later dedicated his full professional attention to lecturing and writing on the subject of bird music. While he continued to advertise his findings among ornithologists at professional meetings and in technical articles, he earned his living through a series of popular articles and well-attended popular lectures on bird protection and the musical nature of birdsong, performing occasionally on the Chautauqua circuit. The Chautauqua movement had originally started as a summer assembly of Sunday school teachers near Chautauqua Lake in New York in 1874, involving teacher-training classes, musical entertainment, lectures, and recreation. Within a few years, it had become overwhelmingly popular, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of adult education and uplift for a broad audience quickly changed into a commercial affair, with performers traveling the country (though mostly the rural Midwest) along established circuits. The standardized education and entertainment programs included public performances by teachers, preachers, politicians, musicians, orchestras, circus artists, magicians, and artistic whistlers. The popularity of the circuits peaked during the 1910s and 1920s; their demise was heralded by the Great Depression and the rise of the film industry in the late 1920s (Canning 2005; Tapia 1997).²¹

Oldys had personally collected notations of hundreds of songs, which he reproduced during his lectures, interspersed by humorous anecdotes and following “the exact notes uttered by the bird” as nearly as possible (Oldys 1904a, 2). Listeners reportedly delighted in his marvelously perfect imitations, even though Oldys billed himself as an interpreter, not an imitator of bird music.²² The audience could hardly be blamed for missing this subtle nuance, though. Whistled bird imitations, after all, were a fixture of popular entertainment. As Jacob Smith (2015) shows, the whistling genre had its roots on the vaudeville stage, but in the 1910s it was experiencing its golden age. Bird mimics added luster to educational initiatives and events sponsored by the bird protection movement, self-proclaimed artistic whistlers began performing in concert halls, and recordings of their acts proliferated in early phonograph catalogs.²³ Like Oldys, many such whistlers claimed to have based their act on extensive study and interaction with birds, and like his whistled interpretations, their performance often wedded popular entertainment with an ethical stance on conservation.

The genre was so popular, in fact, that in 1909 Agnes Woodward established the California School of Artistic Whistling, where (mostly female) students hoped to master the art of musical whistling. Although Woodward and her followers were careful to distinguish the art of whistling from plain, nonmusical bird mimicry, her teaching method too was grafted strongly on careful study of singing birds: like Beach, Woodward claimed to have developed her method for imitating birdcalls by spending time with the birds in a California hill cabin. To annotate and learn birdcalls, she had developed her own elaborate notation system; regular musical scores were annotated with syllables and a set of graphic symbols that sought to integrate the peculiarities of vocalizing birds into a prescriptive score for musical performance using the performer’s own voice. Outlining this notation and her method for teaching artistic whistling to the general public in her 1923 book Whistling as an Art, moreover, Woodward insisted that whistling was actually not just an art or a vocation—although many of her students would consider it such—but also an educational practice that developed in her students the power of observation and imitation, and would lead one to a closer study of birdlife and their habits. In fact, the notations presented in Whistling as an Art explicitly connected the series of whistling exercises to various existing birdcalls, which allowed students after just a few lessons to imitate the elaborate calls of species such as the whippoorwill or indeed the song sparrow.

Tracing musical notations of birdsong along this continuum of musical composition, education, and popular entertainment illustrates both the ubiquitous interest that existed in birdsong, well beyond the confines of popular ornithological study, and the attraction of the musical score as a preferred technology for recording and conveying its intricacies. Music fostered a shared repertoire of recording, listening to, and thinking about birdsong in a way that tried to be at the same time aesthetic and naturalist, popular and scientific in nature. Musical notation sourced birdsong for practical purposes, purposefully underlining its aesthetic and musical qualities. A record of birdsong could serve simultaneously as a didactic resource for teaching musical affinity or imitative skill, or for prescribing musical performance, just as it could be invoked to allure readers, drawing on its musical and aesthetic associations to reinforce an interest in birdlife and conservation ethics. And it was specifically the understanding that these notations had been derived through careful study of actual bird behavior that granted them a capacity to teach or allure. Musical notation therefore entailed an imitative, mimetic function—a way of recording birdsong accurately and precisely. When naturalists, birdwatchers, and professional ornithologists embraced musical notation to afford their aural observations of birdsong a new kind of witnessing authority, they invoked its currency as a medium for precise recording and its proven didactic potential. But in drawing on musical notation as a way of rendering their observations more scientific, they also came to share this textual and cultural domain with composers, teachers, and popular entertainers.

Naturalists, Musicians, Scientists

Aspiring field observers had already begun to cast listening as an approach for studying birds in the field, between the polar attributes of science and sentiment. As early as 1879, naturalist Xenos Clark observed that birdsong had “almost exclusively been treated of in the world of sentiment, where poet-naturalists and nature-poets have culled a wealth of fancies.” In contrast, he had attempted to compile notes on birdsong from the research literature and from his own and fellow naturalists’ observations to “make inductions of scientific value” (Clark 1879, 209). In the early 1900s, American naturalist J. J. Williams (1902, 12) returned to this plight, complaining that the common method of observing birdsongs “is to go into rhapsodies over the enchantment of some bird’s songs, the soul stirring melodies of others, or the sad sorrowful intonations of others, exactly as we do with human singers, … the writer securing his or her basis for such a treatise from a week’s visit to some neighbor’s country home.” The alternative, he explained—listening to the songs’ innumerable variations and functions—was “more thorough, a little more intricate” and, by implication, more scientific. But this, warned Williams (1902, 12), was hard work: “To listen to the ups and downs of a bird’s song is easy for anyone to do, but to mentally photograph all or any of these variations so that the mind can partially recall them later on, is a task for even a practiced observer.”

In the course of the 1910s, the contours of such a practiced, scientific observer became more precisely circumscribed. “Because of its difficulty,” ornithologist and public speaker Henry Oldys (1916, 20) suggested in a piece in The Auk, the study of bird notes “should be undertaken only by trained musicians.” Of course, he admitted, “much excellent work has been done by naturalists who lack musical training,” but “the final word must be spoken by the musician, whose education fits him to observe important features that are quite certain to escape the attention of one whose musical ear has never been cultivated.” His characterization of the ideal scientific observer as a trained musician echoed elsewhere, too. In Germany, the surgeon, leading entomologist, and amateur ornithologist Hans Stadler worked together with composer and reform educationist Cornel Schmitt to develop an “improved” musical notation, which they advertised in leading European ornithological journals as “a precise and scientific way of comparison” (Schmitt and Stadler 1913, 394). Similarly, Witmer Stone, the editor of the ornithological journal The Auk and a council member of the American Ornithologists’ Union, blamed the failure of birdsong studies to advance along truly scientific lines on a lack of basic musical knowledge. In his view, musical notations constituted the “specimens for this line of investigation,” and as such they were “absolutely essential, just as mathematics is essential in computing averages and percentages of error in bird migration, or chemical notation in recording the composition of pigments or other products of the bird’s structure.” Just like complex formulas, Stone explained, these notations might well be unintelligible to one who is ignorant of them, “but a knowledge of them is necessary to investigation” (Stone 1913, 473).

For self-declared musician-ornithologists like Stadler, Schmitt, and Stone, listening skill was not simply an extension of an acquired intimacy with species’ sounds—it was a distinctively scientific technique. They presented auditory observation as structured by convention—not by subjective and artistic judgment, but by the systematic attitude required for precise notation, comparable to accepted practices of ornithological study. Like other scientific practices, musical listening entailed considerable technique. For that reason, field guides sometimes provided guidelines for naturalists on how to listen to and record bird vocalizations musically. Mathews (1904, xxi) included a musical key, tellingly subtitled “extremely important to those who do not read music,” as the opening chapter of his Field Book (see plate 1). And a pamphlet that Schmitt and Stadler coauthored “for the recognition and investigation of birdsong” is probably one of the most explicit in its pedagogy. Its direct approach to addressing a lack of basic musical knowledge in the reader may be ascribed to Schmitt’s staunch advocacy of the nature study movement in Germany (Neumann 2005). Having developed the method for transcribing birdsong, he later published several handbooks and field guides in which transcription was extensively discussed, while Stadler (who reputedly had perfect pitch) was especially keen to establish this transcription system as a scientific method (Schmitt 1923, 1932). The pamphlet proceeded first through two substantive chapters of introduction to prospective listeners before arriving at a guide to species songs: first through a step-by-step explanation of the basic principles of musical notation culminating in a quick quiz, and second through a discussion of the components of bird vocalizations, each part—voice, song, call, rhythm—closing with an elaborate list of attention points and hypotheses with which the aspiring observer could commence their research (Schmitt and Stadler 1919). These instructions provide the observer with a framework that structures both the reader’s perception—“Now we want to attend to the accentuation! That is right, the second, deeper tone obtains the accent”—and attention (Schmitt and Stadler 1919, 6). They encouraged the naturalist to follow a specified routine of listening to, imitating, checking, and analyzing sounds, thus underlining the systematicity of musical listening.

Even with such basic introductions to musical syntax, it is doubtful that readers without prior musical knowledge will have picked up on its specifics. Moreover, even for those who, like Schmitt and Stadler, boasted that grasping these principles would take only a few hours, “reasonably good musical hearing” (1919, 1) remained an important precondition. For those who had that basis, however, musical listening could provide a standard lexicon and an interpretive frame that would enable them to coordinate and calibrate their aural experiences. Such systematicity, ornithologists like Schmitt and Stadler claimed, was what distinguished scientific from artistic listening. “The need of rigid accuracy and unbiased judgment must ever be kept in mind,” Witmer Stone (1913, 474) exhorted his readers, to “guard against the enthusiasm of the musician which like that of the artist is sometimes inclined to run away with him when dealing with such problems.” To that end, it was important to test musical records for their accuracy. Instead of being reconstructed from memory, valuable records “must be made by actual tests of each note with a graded pitch pipe, as is done by our best observers, while the time must be correctly gauged by some metronome contrivance” (Stone 1913, 474). The ideal of the scientist-musician made the field observer a methodical and detached listener—one who does not get involved in bird music emotionally or aesthetically as an artist would.

This reconfiguration of musical notation as an explicitly scientific technique for collecting and analyzing sound was an attempt to establish the scientific authority of aural field observations. Reference to a musically trained ear attributed to the field naturalist some form of competence in listening, suggesting what Thomas Porcello (2004, 734) has called “professional audition.” The term denotes the auditory artifacts, techniques, discourses, and expertise that establish its possessors and users as professionally competent members of a community.²⁴ In this context, it alerts us to the ways such technical-musical discourse helped to establish a body of shared terminology for listeners to draw on, enabling them to describe or interpret birds’ acoustic behavior efficiently and authoritatively in the field. At the same time, Porcello notes, such technical discourse may also have an exclusionary function for others who do not, or not yet, possess the knowledge or even the embodied experience implied by these codes. Just so, Oldys’s and Stone’s insistence on the importance and final authority of the trained musician in scientific discussions of birdsong excluded a large group of untrained listeners, whose ability to acquire a musical ear and sufficient competence for reading and writing musical notation, as we will see, was strongly contested. Nor was it clear exactly what musical listening as a scientific technique did include.

Interpreting Bird Music

Although its advocates promoted musical notation as a way to standardize birdsong notation, the musical score in fact gave its users a frame that was far less homogeneous than they acknowledged. Musical notation offered a versatile method. But differences in notation styles were not only formal, they also had far-reaching conceptual implications.

Although with musical notation a shared lexicon existed, it could not simply be applied “out of the box.” Just as Agnes Woodward had embellished her musical scores with a host of self-invented symbols to represent bird whistles, ornithologists typically made modifications to accommodate the specific acoustic qualities of animal sound. Schmitt and Stadler, for instance, developed their own symbols for nonmusical sounds or typical song elements such as the canary’s roller, added syllabic elements to represent timbre, and abolished the musical bar—thereby also abandoning the possibility of precise pitch notation (see figure 2.2). Others, like Robert Moore, adopted a more conventional approach to transcribing bird sound; they did fix the notes on a bar, thus suggesting that pitch could be fixed, and added an absolute, metronomic measure of tempo, sometimes even orchestrating the scores (see figure 2.3). German naturalist Alwin Voigt (1913) applied basic musical notation for simple songs, but found that it was completely unable to render more complex songs with small tone intervals. He thus complemented musical notation with a shorthand, Morse-like script for short, long, and vibrating tones, highlighting rhythm but dismissing other parameters. In what was probably one of the most original and dramatic revisions of musical notation, in the mid-1920s the British amateur naturalist Gladys Page-Wood developed a notation designed to achieve the greatest possible accuracy. She eliminated conventional key, time, and staff signatures and extended the five-line staff to represent microtones, on the presumption that birds’ musical scales were more detailed than those of their human transcriber. By far her most original idea was to represent timbre through syllabic wordings and colored pitch lines, with various shades representing the nuances of sound quality in different bird voices: shades of gray or brown for tones that could be imitated by the human singing voice, and various shades of blue for whistled notes (see Hold 1970, 112).

Figure 2.2 Adapted “scientific” musical notation by Hans Stadler and Cornel Schmitt.

Source: H. Stadler and C. Schmitt, “The Study of Bird-Notes,” British Birds 8 (1) (1914): 7. Reproduced with kind permission of British Birds.

Figure 2.3 Musical transcription of a fox sparrow song by Robert T. Moore.

Source: R. T. Moore, “The Fox Sparrow as a Songster,” Auk 30 (2) (1913): 178. Reproduced with kind permission of the American Ornithological Society.

In spite of the step-by-step instructions often provided in keys or introductory chapters, few of these proposed notations found application beyond the field notes of their original authors. New symbols were often burdensome for scholars to learn and for publishers to reproduce in print. Mutual understanding between field listeners was not only complicated by differences in the recordists’ grasp of the fundamentals of music, but also by differences in the way they chose to present their recordings. Such tinkering with the tools of musical notation might reflect practical concerns (such as the need to make recording in the field less complex and burdensome) or accommodate differing methodological emphases (to highlight certain parameters over others). A further reason for the persistence of this variety in musical notations, however, was the existence of differing theoretical premises. Henry Oldys, for instance, used musical notation to demonstrate that the thrush and veerie songs he observed had rhythmical arrangements that were particularly pleasing to the human listener. He considered this proof that there was a universal appeal to musical appreciation among both birds and humans: “The bird expresses itself in human music. The notes were sung with great accuracy of intonation—my ear is very keen to detect variations from the true pitch” (Oldys 1913, 541). This could not be coincidence, ran Oldys’s teleological argument: “Astonishing and revolutionary as it may seem, there is no escape from the conclusion that the evolution of bird music independently parallels the evolution of human music and that, therefore, such evolution in each case is not fortuitous, but tends inevitably toward a fixed ideal” (Oldys 1913, 541). In a comparable vein, German professor of ornithology Bernard Hoffmann adopted in Kunst und Vogelgesang (Art and Birdsong, 1908) what he called a “natural scientific-musical” approach.²⁵ By rendering the songs of talented individual birds in musical notation and syllables, he aimed to demonstrate that their song matched criteria for human music.

Oldys’s and Hoffmann’s work was by no means unique. On the contrary, it exemplifies a rich and multifaceted discourse on the evolution of music that had developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This found initial support in Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). Darwin paid a great deal of attention to instances of nonhuman music, which he considered to have derived from the courtship display of birds. Their music, Darwin proposed, was not idle—it served a purpose of sexual selection of the fittest exemplars and ultimately the preservation of the species. By locating aesthetic sensibility in a fundamental mechanism of evolution, Darwin implied that birds and other animals (including humans) developed their disposition toward music early on the evolutionary scale, even before the development of language.²⁶ This position, however, was not universally shared. In Britain, Herbert Spencer had placed musical capacities last on his scala natura, a hierarchy in the advancement of mental capacities from animal to human: music had evolved from language and communication, and had progressed from simple tribal chants to complex Western polyphony. But such investigations into the evolution of animal and human music were not confined to biology alone; historians of music have recently shown that this discourse also had a broad appeal in turn-of-the-century comparative musicological and anthropological scholarship (for example, Ames 2003; Mundy, forthcoming; Rehding 2000; Zon 2007). Carl Stumpf’s Die Anfänge der Musik (The Origins of Music) in 1911, for instance, revived the assumption that music evolved from signal calls.

Such musicological explorations of a common source for “primitive” folk music and “advanced” Western polyphony are in many ways analogous to naturalists’ promotion of the study of birdsong as an exploration of the origins of human music. The British professor of zoology Walter Garstang (1922, 16–17), for example, concluded that “birds, aesthetically, are probably somewhere near the level of primitive man, and … by the study of bird-song we may be enabled to retrace some of the steps by which the primitive emotional cries were transformed into the beginnings of artistic music.” Pursuing this thesis, Garstang complemented his academic discussion on the mechanisms of evolution in birdsong with his own hand-drawn musical renditions and poetic interpretations. Some of these approaches may strike the contemporary reader as tautological, anthropomorphic, or speculative, but the same was not necessarily true of a turn-of-the-century naturalist audience. As Eileen Crist (1999) shows, naturalists since Darwin have assumed a conceptual continuity between the behavior of animals and of humans, often conceiving of this shared behavior as conscious or meaningful to the animal subject itself.²⁷ That only began to change profoundly in the late 1920s, when the pioneers of classical ethology, such as Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, developed a technical and objectifying idiom for observing and describing animal behavior that conceptualized it as compulsive, functional, and automatic (see Burkhardt 2005). This ethological perspective left little room for animal subjectivity and notions of “aesthetic consciousness.” At least until the 1930s, however, the idea that musical sensibilities could be observed in animal behavior formed part of a broad spectrum of behavioral interpretations that seemed to be reconcilable with evolutionary thought.

This is illustrated by several exchanges in the ornithological literature. In the years after 1910, several prominent British naturalists quarreled over the precise behavioral role of birdsong, debating whether it was a factor in sexual selection, a mere instinctive ebullition of superfluous energy, or a matter of singing (as one ornithologist phrased it) “to please himself” (Kirkman 1910, 121). This comment provoked another ornithologist to declare that “it is surely going too far to grant aesthetic tastes to birds when the most generous of us cannot allow them in by far the greater number of our own species” (Stubbs 1910, 156). In the United States, comparable discussions on the evolution of birdsong unfolded, weighing the explanatory power of sexual selection against alternative explanations of imitation or simply enjoyment. Again, some ornithologists brought the factor of aesthetics into the equation: “How can we escape imputing the origin and development of this beauty in bird-song to an aesthetic sense in the birds themselves?” (Allen 1919, 531). Along similar lines, Richard Hunt, collector and assistant curator at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in California, advocated taking musical taste seriously as a factor in evolution. He had observed that birds seemed to want to “improve” their song, clearly preferring those sounds that the human observer had found “absolutely superior.” Musical taste had a universal appeal. Hunt (1922, 196) concluded: “I believe that herein lies the explanation of the evolution of birdsong. The songster is an esthete.”

If birdsong was inherently aesthetic according to Western musical standards, it was also to be represented as such. Students of birdsong could use musical notation simultaneously as a technique for recording songs in a technical and structured way and as an interpretive frame, assigning it a more literal role in their theories of behavior. Although the two uses often overlapped, they could also be applied independently of one another. Such versatility assured musical notation its currency in field studies of birdsong at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the “professional jurisdiction” and explanatory power that self-declared scientist-musicians claimed were not unequivocally accepted by all their peers (Abbott 1998, 56). In the 1910s and 1920s, the application of musical notation for the recording of birdsong was received with growing reservations, both for its apparent lack of documentary precision in representing birdsong and for its manifest inaccessibility to people not trained in music or literate with musical notation.

Singing Out of Key

Criticism and polemics concerning the adequacy of musical notation to frame the study of birdsong found expression in several handbooks and journal contributions between 1900 and 1930, but it may be easiest to clarify the positions by zooming in on a brief but fierce controversy in 1915, when Aretas Saunders—a Yale graduate, former US forester, and beginning biology teacher—openly dismissed the scientific relevance of musical notation:²⁸

[Musical notation] has been made primarily for the recording and rendering of human music and birds do not usually sing according to such standards. … Its standards of time do not allow the record of a song that does not follow the rhythmic beat of its measures. Do birds sing in any given key? Do they recognize any fundamental notes? Can one beat time to a bird’s song? In the majority of cases these questions must be answered in the negative. … The great majority of birds sing in a free, non-mechanical, natural manner that cannot be recorded on the musical scale with the exactness that it deserves. (Saunders 1915, 173–174)

Saunders was not new to music (he had learned to play various instruments at an early age), but his attempts to record birdsong on the traditional musical scales had been unsuccessful. To remedy this problem, he devised a new graphic method for recording birdsong, plotting values for pitch and duration on the coordinates of a vertical and horizontal axis. This, he believed, was “much simpler, and much more easily used and mastered” (Saunders 1915, 176) (figure 2.4 shows an example of his work). Like Stone, he had made a habit of using a small tuning fork or pitch pipe in the field to approximate the first note on the musical scale, and he also recommended using a stopwatch. Taken together, he believed, this would ensure both accuracy and simplicity. This does not mean Saunders dismissed everything musical. Though the absolute fidelity of musical notation was to be distrusted, he valued the skill of musical listening and the presence of a musical ear.

Figure 2.4 Graphic transcription of a field sparrow song by Aretas A. Saunders.

Source: A. A. Saunders, “Some Suggestions for Better Methods of Recording and Studying Birdsongs,” Auk 32 (2) (1915): 175. Reproduced with kind permission of the American Ornithological Society.

Saunders’s initial ridicule of the musical method prompted a bitter public exchange of correspondence with Robert T. Moore. Moore, like Saunders, was an amateur associate of the American Ornithologists’ Union. His primary engagement was with systematic ornithology, which became evident in an important collection of Mexican specimens he assembled. But he had recently been recording birdsongs too, using musical notation, and he took it on himself to defend this method against Saunders’s allegations (see figure 2.3 for an example of his work).²⁹ Moore (1915, 538) criticized Saunders’s proposal to replace a “splendid system of symbols, which has been evolved and improved by ages of use and is now better known to the public than any system of notation, used in the other departments of bird work,” as simply a retrograde movement.

Moore’s objections were not to a graphic method of representing birdsong as such, however—in fact, he insisted that musical notation was just as graphic as the alternative Saunders proposed. What he took issue with was the implication of Saunders’s scheme: a reclassification of the features that ornithologists should aim to record in order to study birdsong. Saunders (1915, 535–538) had listed five features he deemed worthwhile recording: pitch, for which the unit of measurement was “of course the octave,” divided into twelve half tones to show “their true relations”; duration, for which he proposed to record time in seconds; relative intensity, which in his method was represented by thickening the line; and pronunciation, represented by various wavy and zigzag lines (Saunders did concede that although tone quality or timbre was an important parameter, like most scores, his scheme did not record this dimension satisfactorily). Saunders’s terminology contrasted with that employed by musical transcribers like Moore, who insisted that “pitch, time, intensity and quality” were the only worthwhile parameters. Moore (1915, 535) found fault with, among other things, Saunders’s concept of duration, which obscured elements of time that were essential to the study of birdsong, such as meter and “the extremely important factor of ‘rhythm.’” Saunders (1915, 177) had introduced the second as his measure, a “unit that is uniform and unchanging, and thoroughly understood both by musicians and by the uninitiated,” to replace adagios, allegros, and metronome indications from which absolute duration first needed to be calculated. As a result, Moore (1916, 537) objected, the durations that Saunders had recorded had “as much value as the length of the white on the outer primary of a Junco. What we want to know about color is its arrangement or the relative proportion of the various colors on a bird.”

Drawing on different idioms, the two men’s exchange shuttled misunderstandings back and forth. In a last bid to convince Moore and the readers, Saunders (1916b, 103–105) wrote: “We must realize that it is our intention to study birdsongs, not from the standpoint of a musician but from that of a scientist, … shall we change such a song in order to make it fit our method? Is such a proceeding scientific accuracy? Or is it the conception of a musician, so trained in the rules and necessities of human music that he is unable to conceive of music that is not rhythmic?”

Saunders’s questioning of the documentary fidelity of musical notation paralleled a debate that was ongoing in the fields of comparative musicology and anthropology at the time. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologist Franz Boas had argued that ethnographic observers were unable to listen to the sounds of other cultural groups without filtering them through their own cultured set of perceptual biases (see Hochman 2010). By the turn of the twentieth century, ethnographers in the United States and Europe had increasingly come to acknowledge what they saw as a problem of perception and the incongruence between aural perception and its representation as written text. Ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, for instance, repeated Boas’s concern in an 1911 article titled “Musikpsychologische Bemerkungen über Vogelgesang” (Music-Psychological Remarks on Birdsong), in which he invited his colleagues to consider the musicological interrelations between human and bird music. Musical notation, he wrote, risked “the most dangerous possibility of deception, to which even the most practiced musical observer falls prey time and again: intervals of the memory, that is, the familiar intervals of our music, which our ears add to [hineinhören in] the objectively given tone steps, even when these deviate considerably from them” (Hornbostel 1911, 119).³⁰ In response to this problem, Hornbostel (1911, 120) had turned to phonographic recordings, which “might, incidentally, also benefit the study of birdsong.”³¹ At the time Hornbostel was writing, actual phonographic reproductions of birdsongs in the field were still a relatively distant promise. Ethnologists, comparative musicologists, and zoologists began to incorporate phonographic recording techniques in the 1880s, but ornithological practice turned to phonographs only much later (Ames 2003; Brady 1999; Radick 2007; Shelemay 1991). This was mostly due to the limited mechanical possibilities of preelectric phonographs for amplifying the signals of wild (and mobile) animals. Birds could not be made to sit still as human subjects could. As chapter 3 will show, it was not until the 1930s that the phonographic ear began to surpass the musically skilled ears of Saunders’s contemporaries. A new group of professional ornithologists and recording engineers pitted the gramophone, as an embodiment of faithful and objective reproduction, against the subjective, physically flawed perception of the field ornithologist.

In the 1910s and 1920s, however, such concerns with Western musical score’s perceptual biases resonated with field ornithologists. But many were less radical in their departure from musical structures or traditional syllables. More than a decade after Saunders’s comments, when amateur ornithologist Lucy Coffin (1928, 97, 99) realized that “the natural scale and rhythm of the bird is not the tempered scale of the piano nor the conventional rhythm of our written music,” she wondered whether “perhaps a new system of musical notation may be necessary—possibly the Chinese, with its center ‘four-square,’ with four inter-notes or the Gregorian five-tone scale.” Only then did Coffin suggest that her peers look into the possibilities of the electrified phonograph. In fact, even when naturalists and ornithologists considered the possibilities of phonographic recordings, musical notation remained their default reference point. When Ferdinand Mathews announced in 1904 that to take down the bobolink’s song accurately, ornithologists would have to “wait for some interpreter with the sound-catching skill of a ‘Blind Tom’ and the phonograph combined” (Mathews 1904, 49), he did not expect his musical notation work to be replaced by the joint effort of an exceptional listener and a phonograph, but simply to have it facilitated by mechanical means.³² Instead, these ornithologists anticipated that notation and the phonograph would simply complement each other: repeating and slowing down the phonographic record would enable listening to be more systematic and thus render their written notations more accurate.³³ Saunders himself, despite his obvious dissatisfaction with musical notation, does not seem to have considered the phonograph as a tool for ornithological study until 1929, and then only in the vaguest sense. That Saunders invested so little time in exploring the possibilities of the phonograph may seem surprising today. But his advocacy of graphic notation had been inspired by more than a need for greater documentary fidelity. It also represented ornithologists’ attempts to make their recordings more comparable and accessible.

Comparing and Communicating Birdsongs

If graphic notation could replace a biased Western musical scheme, Saunders also identified greater comprehensiveness and simplicity as key to his new method. Graphic notation, he averred, “records the song simply and naturally, and so graphically that anyone can see its meaning at a glance” (Saunders 1916b; emphasis added). In contrast to musical notation—whose relation to a sound was clearly symbolic (the shape and position of a note on a staff determined its value)—the “simple” graphic line did not seem to require an extensive key or glossary. For Saunders and his contemporaries, this syntactic difference accorded distinct epistemic and didactic advantages.

First, if one could grasp the representation of a bird’s song “at a glance,” a different way of understanding the song became possible. Graphic notation had impressed Saunders by reflecting the variability of the songs he was studying—variability both among and within the songs produced by individual birds. He illustrated the benefits of his method with the results of a preliminary analysis of twenty-seven records of the field sparrow collected in this way (1922). Musical notations had typically been used to record individual songs—the ornithologist-musician would either cast individual song fragments as representative of a species (as in early field guides such as those by Mathews, Cheney, and others mentioned above) or approach the songs as highly localized performances that merited attention on their own (as in Oldys’s spectacularly musical veerie songs). Rarely, however, did they present the songs comparatively, alongside those of other individuals of the species. Although field naturalists had long been occupied with tabulating variations in birds’ singing behavior, they had focused almost exclusively on average song seasons when particular species would burst into song. Now, based on a synoptic reading of his graphic records, Saunders began to determine the ranges of variation for these birds’ actual songs: their duration, their pitch, common characteristics, and the composition of long notes and short, repeated notes. Once a good number of records had been produced, he surmised, such features would enable conclusions to be drawn concerning “the” field sparrow song, but these records would also raise new questions about the conditions of variation in that song.

In the ensuing decades, Saunders developed an extensive portfolio of graphic records—by 1929, he had assembled nearly three hundred records for the field sparrow alone and at least five hundred fifty records for the song sparrow (Saunders 1924). His contemporaries were also putting graphic notation to similar uses. In 1924, for instance, John T. Nichols of the American Museum of Natural History processed almost two hundred recordings of song sparrow songs that had been made by a naturalist named William Wheeler. Wheeler and Nichols’s explicit aim was to study variation. They declared musical notation to be “almost out of the question” as a means of capturing such variation, because it “does not clearly show the construction of the songs” (1924, 444). Instead, they explained, they had used a very simple graphic scheme consisting of dots, trills, and upward or downward lines to indicate slurs (see figure 2.5). Although the scheme largely disregarded many elements (time, quality) that ornithologists conventionally used to distinguish birdsongs, Wheeler and Nichols argued that a simple graphic form usefully allowed comparison of different songs, by bringing out discrete variations and irregularities in their typical “construction” (p. 446).³⁴ To advocates of graphic notation like Wheeler and Nichols, the lack of detail and the symbolic annotations typically provided by musical notation were precisely what enabled sounds to be grasped instantaneously and compared synoptically. This was a valuable advantage when sorting through hundreds of records to compare selected song “types.”

Figure 2.5 Graphic transcription of a song sparrow song by Wheeler and Nichols.

Source: Wheeler, W. C., and J. T. Nichols. 1924. The song of the song sparrow. Auk 41 (3): 446. Reproduced with kind permission of the American Ornithological Society.

Wheeler and Nichols regarded their graphic notation as particularly conducive to studying types and their variations, more so than to the intricacies of the virtuoso feathered performer. As paper tools, therefore, musical and graphic notations gave new shape to their objects of investigation. The syntax of the graphic line resided primarily in its visual form, an ascending, descending, continuous, discontinuous, or wavy line that captured the temporal development of pitch synoptically and thus arrested it in time. By reducing an acoustic event to the shape of a line, the intuitive symbolism of Saunders’s graphic notation allowed a straightforward comparison of individual songs along these parameters. In contrast, the syntax of musical notation—equally symbolic, but more extensive and specifically defined—enabled sounds to be represented with a greater resolution of detail in the shadings of pitch, attack, or rhythmic inflection. Although this ensured a fine-grained detail, musical notations were less conducive to synoptic reading. Even for competent readers, representation of sound as a sequence of musical symbols required scores to be read in time, which complicated their synoptic comparison.

The representation of birdsong to be understood “at a glance” had other advantages. Saunders (1915, 183) felt that his graphic notation was not only less constraining and more accurate than musical notation, but also “intelligible to musicians, and a little less ‘like Greek’ to those whose knowledge of written music is slight.” In fact, such worries about intelligibility were widespread among students of birdsong. In the same issue of The Auk where Saunders and Moore exchanged their last correspondence, naturalist Ewing Summers (1916, 79) complained that “but few people, one in a hundred or more, perhaps, are musicians far enough advanced to be able to perceive clearly what would be meant by some of the characters that would have to be employed, even when explained at length.” Other ornithologists, amateur and professional, claimed to have developed effective teaching and recording methods that did not require any musical proficiency at all.³⁵ Many of these notations were effective tools to communicate and teach birdsongs to as wide an audience as possible, yet that advantage often had to be traded off against the accuracy that ornithologists expected of their recordings.

A notation devised by the Canadian amateur ornithologist William Rowan is a good example. Rowan, a gifted amateur musician who was just embarking on his career as an experimental zoologist, complained in a review in British Birds that near-accurate methods for recording birdsong such as musical notation had severe limitations. Even in the case of adapted musical notation such as that of the naturalist Stadler and the educationist Schmitt, who had claimed simplicity, Rowan (1925, 14) found that it was “confined entirely to musicians,” and was “therefore ruled out for the layman.” And since even “trained musicians” were often not able to judge an interval correctly, musical notation was of little use anyway. In fact, it appeared to him that “an accurate rendering of bird-calls, with the means at present at our disposal, is entirely impossible” (Rowan 1925, 15). His alternative, a shorthand script that combined traditional phonetic syllables and graphic lines to suggest accentuation and relative pitch, therefore surrendered accuracy completely in favor of intelligibility (figure 2.6): “A graphic indication of the kind suggested here, expressing nothing more than relative values, would be far more useful for field-work than a more accurate musical version that only a small percentage of observers could hope to employ. Its scientific value may be nil, but its practical value is very great” (Rowan 1925, 18). The script, in Rowan’s words, had the advantages of “simplicity, plasticity and adaptability” and especially that “everyone can read it but write it as well” (Rowan 1925, 14, 16). With this emphasis on readability, Rowan abandoned a claim for the accuracy of recording—the point of his graphic description was that “a song once heard and put down can be recollected quite clearly years after” (Rowan 1925, 18). Rowan was part of a growing group of ornithologists who came to dismiss musical knowledge as a recording technology, finding it too complex, exclusive, and unintelligible to be of use for the practical purposes of identification and observation by a broader population of ornithologists, amateur naturalists, and birdwatchers. Like Saunders, Rowan relied on the graphic line to convey key features of a song “at a glance.” The combination of phonetic terms and graphics, moreover, was flexible enough to adapt to different kinds of sounds without having to annotate the score endlessly with new symbols and terms.

Figure 2.6 Graphic-syllabic rendering of a curlew call by William M. Rowan.

Source: W. M. Rowan, “A Practical Method of Recording Bird-Calls,” British Birds 18 (1) (1925): 18. Reproduced with kind permission of British Birds.

Like musical notation, then, these various versions of graphic notation (along with their syntactic constraints and affordances) were instrumentalized in a particular approach to studying and understanding birdsong—but simultaneously, they were also implicated in the configuration of a very heterogeneous group of aspiring field observers. Different notations presupposed different competencies and technical skills. As such, these paper tools not only mediated standards of accuracy and precision, but also questioned the claims to professional jurisdiction made by self-styled “scientist-musicians.” Such denunciations of musical knowledge should not, of course, obscure the fact that listening remained an essential skill in the field observer’s toolkit, regardless of the notation that was used. But while musical notation gradually disappeared from public awareness after 1930, for a long time disparate graphic, syllabic, or phonetic recording schemes remained the only instruments for field observers as they learned to study birds. The standard paper tool that ornithologists had sought in the first decades of the twentieth century did not come about until at least 1950, when the sound spectrograph seemed to provide a universal language for recording and analyzing bird vocalizations. However, as chapter 5 will show, even then some ornithologists remained deeply dissatisfied with the balance between objective analysis, efficiency, and intelligibility offered by the instrument.

Multiple Functions

Ornithologists at the turn of the century experimented with a host of different transcription techniques and combinations thereof—verbal description, musical notation, syllabics, onomatopoeia, phonetics, and graphic lines—and their proponents could not be neatly divided into opposing camps, each pursuing its own contained agenda. Rather, they covered a spectrum that, as laid out above, reached from the self-proclaimed scientist-musician’s calculative and systematic method to the musical layman’s accessibility and intuitive understanding. Caught between these different needs, fieldworkers struggled to devise a notation that could be both, at the same time. In accommodating such diverse interests and goals, these notations served not just as “inscriptive devices,” but also functioned as “conscriptive devices.”³⁶ If inscriptions may be understood as visual instantiations of knowledge that represent and package information through processes of refining, filtering, coding, comparing, and mathematizing in order to “harden” claims in a cascade of ever more refined representations, the notion of conscription highlights the other social functions that such inscriptions may be accorded in a social process. Thus understood, notations and diagrams serve as rhetorical objects that establish the credibility of their authors’ claims, and equally as symbolic places that, in Wolff-Michael Roth’s words, “bring together and engage collectivities to construct and interpret them.” They provide “the material grounds over and about which sustained interactions occur, and which serve in part to coordinate these interactions” (Roth 2003, 18). Although the interactions facilitated by conscription devices have typically been observed between users in close proximity, the notations and diagrams described in this chapter also aimed to sustain interaction in a dispersed group of recordists. For their authors, they were often a means to calibrate, enact, and focus prevailing listening practices, to forms of implicit knowledge explicit, and to solicit the participation of individuals with diverse interests and intents. The notion of the conscription device thus alerts us to the multiplicity of functions that notations assumed in the practice of ornithological field recording.

There are numerous historical examples of scientific representations taking on different functions for different users. Based in part on this literature, the examples described in this chapter may be categorized as mnemonic, mimetic, didactic, or alluring (or as combinations of these categories). As David Kaiser (2005a) has shown, the Feynman diagram originated as a convenient mnemonic tool in physics, but acquired a new and initially unintended mimetic sense for a later generation of academic users.³⁷ Likewise, the transcriptions discussed above took on both mimetic and mnemonic roles. As mimetic records, in the minds of their users, notations implied a direct connection with the sound phenomena to which they referred and articulated a heightened sense of realism. This type of notation, especially musical scores, was predicated on the assertion that its writing conventions stood in as icons for the real thing, even though it could evidently do so to very different degrees: a musical lexicon could at the same time serve as the most accurate visual representation of a sound event and as concrete evidence of a musical sensibility in birds. As mnemonic devices, on the other hand, notations did not necessarily make such claims to realism. They emerged as part of an often highly individual and ad hoc scheme of perceptual signposts, and as such were not intended for analysis but for recognition, memorization, and self-instruction. Mathews’s bobolink recording, for instance, would most likely have been unintelligible to those who did not have any prior notion of the actual sound, but could have considerable value for those who did.

Moreover, notations not only helped recordists orient themselves in the field, but also served to teach birdsong to others—lay readers—as in Rowan’s graphic script. As didactic devices, such representations were often guided by similar demands for ease of use and intelligibility. But as an aid to printed instruction and the standardization of naturalists’ auditory perception, they required a codification that was more fixed and rule-based than intuitive. Like mnemonic devices, however, didactically oriented recording systems depended on recognizability rather than detail. As Saunders explained, without the defining axes of time and pitch, his system would lose much of its precision but might still be used for teaching field students birds’ acoustic signatures. Finally, as part of popular field guides as well as song or poetry books and educational handbooks, notations of birdsong also had a subtly alluring element for their various readerships. Anne Secord’s work on nineteenth-century British botany is instructive in this regard (Secord 2002). She demonstrates that as botany turned to engage the amateur participant, expert naturalists began to see botanical plates no longer exclusively as a means to convey scientific truths to a specialist audience. The aesthetic and cultural appeal of the illustrations enabled them to be deployed as a way of teaching middle-class novices and recruiting them to extend their participation in scientific botany. Appealing to popular notions of pleasure and entertainment, in short, the notations’ initial mimetic functions were complemented by didactic and alluring elements.

To appreciate how a community of practice might begin to gravitate to and cluster around ways of listening to birdsong in the field, then, we must attend to more than their scientific functionality alone. The diagrams and descriptions used by naturalists and professional ornithologists often followed similar visual schemata (such as musical notation or syllabic onomatopoeia) that rendered birdsong in similar forms across academic papers, birdwatchers’ field guides, musical scores, poetic reinterpretations, or popularizing nature books. Their visual form and syntax placed these diagrams within a continuous series of scientific and popular records, allowing them to embody a variety of functions for very different audiences. It is this multiplicity that may help us to understand how a dispersed and heterogeneous community of listeners—of budding birdwatchers, amateur naturalists, pioneering ethologists, and museum ornithologists, all of different feathers—began to coalesce around birdsong. But that multiplicity also crippled the many attempts to establish a single, comprehensive diagrammatic form for recording birdsongs in the field. Demands of accessibility, flexibility, accuracy, readability, and didactic potential sometimes proved contradictory and were often difficult to integrate into a standardized and optically consistent scheme. Although from 1930 onward, electrical recording instruments would promise to solve such tensions, these tensions continued to shape how biologists and their collaborators engaged with birdsong.

Notes

1. The literary genre of the nature essay, an invention of John Burroughs in the 1860s, became wildly popular in the 1890s, especially in the United States. Following in the footsteps of Thoreau, Whitman, and Burroughs, nature writers wrote of excursions to fields and woods and about birds and wildlife in people’s own farms and yards, thus familiarizing an increasingly urbanized readership with the natural landscape (see Lutts 1990). Since the 1880s, notable nature writers such as Charles C. Abbott (1896) and Bradford Torrey (1885) had devoted considerable space to exalted discussions of the birdsongs they observed on their ramblings. Mathews considered Torrey’s novel to be of inestimable value to the study of bird music, more than all nature writings (Mathews 1904, x). Novelist Gene Stratton-Porter experimented with the genre in her novel The Song of the Cardinal (1903) as an extension of her naturalist work. The novel follows the fictional life of a cardinal, and was reputedly written in response to sport hunting. Her naturalist studies found a reflection, among others, in her book Music of the Wild: With Reproductions of the Performers, Their Instruments and Festival Halls (1910). Divided into sections such as “The Chorus of the Forest” and “Music of the Marsh,” it calls on the reader to appreciate nature’s music.

2. The use of musical notations to record birdsongs goes back at least to the notations of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who famously transcribed a nightingale song along with the voices of common fowl in his Misurgia universalis around 1650. This found an echo in the recorder notations collected in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight of 1717, which were designed to teach birds to sing. For a brief survey of birdsong studies before 1850, see Rothenberg 2005, 19–22. However, Mathews took his cue not from these precedents but from two publications in the 1890s. Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music by the music teacher Simeon Pease Cheney, posthumously published in 1892, used simple Western musical scores to document birdsongs (while also hinting at the musicality even of inanimate things). These notations were among the first to be collected systematically: having approached two hundred ornithologists and librarians in the United States and Europe, Cheney found only a few scattered antecedents to his craft, such as Hermann Landois’s (1874) Thierstimmen and the German periodical Gefiederte Welt, which was published from 1872 onward (Cheney 1892, viii). In Britain, naturalist Charles A. Witchell documented his extensive study on the evolution of birdsong in an appendix with simple musical notations for three common birds (Witchell 1896).

3. At least in form, Mathews’s notation presents an intriguing similarity to a graphic notation that Stravinsky doodled at the request of director Robert Craft to “draw his own music.” The notation is mentioned in Craft and Stravinsky 1952, 120, but it can also be admired on the covers of the journal Perspectives of Music. Musicologists tend to situate the age of revolution in musical notation in the postwar era, with experiments by John Cage and Earle Brown. The first half of the twentieth century, however, witnessed its own string of innovations in musical notation that originated not in the world of Western music but in scientific fields such as experimental psychology, ornithology, and comparative musicology. For an overview of graphic experimentation in musical scores, see among others Pryer 2002; Randel 2003; Sauer 2009; Taruskin 2005.

4. For a detailed portrait of such naturalists and an analysis of the kind of observations they collected, see Crist 1996. The term civic realm draws on Lynn Nyhart’s (1998) analysis of Karl Möbius’s scientific activity in the context of the civic culture of the German Bürgertum in the late nineteenth century.

5. See, for instance, Lachmund 1999, which shows how the codification and interpretation of lung sounds by means of auscultation remained subject to controversy throughout the mid-nineteenth century. French- and German-speaking medicine’s attempts to standardize perception by various means were clearly shaped by, and themselves shaped, the local context in which these attempts took place. In his study of Feynman diagrams, David Kaiser (2005a, 2005b) has shown that the diagrams, along with the calculation techniques they enabled, spread through personal contacts between postdocs, but were also appropriated within their local contexts for new purposes and imbued with new meanings. For further discussion of the various ways instruments and tools bring together communities, see Clarke and Fujimura 1992 and Mody 2011.

6. See, for instance, Collins 2001; Kaiser 2005a, 2005b; Kohler 1994; Warwick 2003.

7. I take the notion of paper tools from Klein 2001. It highlights the role of diagrams not only in illustrating and expressing knowledge post hoc, but—like a laboratory tool—also helping to mold it. As such, the term prompts us to ask how the syntactic and semantic affordances of such tools meet particular epistemic needs.

8. For a history of these practices, see Barrow 1998; Bircham 2007; Burkhardt 2005; Mearns and Mearns 1998.

9. For instance by Burkhardt (2005), Haffer (2001, 2008), and Junker (2003).

10. See Doughty 1975; Kohler 2006; Lutts 1990; Orr 1992; Ritvo 1989.

11. For an early and detailed exploration of the “back-to-nature” movement, see Schmitt [1969] 1990. On the motives of field collectors and their relationship with leisure and outdoor recreation, see Kohler 2006.

12. The societies were established in 1850, 1858, and 1883 respectively. The Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft appears to have been mainly a society for museum collectors (though its objectives were never so obviously stated) (Haffer 2007).

13. Quoted in Birkhead 2011, 205. For a close study of Ridgway as a representative of scientific ornithology in the late nineteenth century, see Lewis 2012.

14. Griscom’s own experience may have been a misleading benchmark here. Reputedly, he had the advantage of unusually acute hearing. On military duty during World War I, he is said to have become something of an “exhibition piece” for army doctors interested in the sensitivity of his hearing. His musical memory and critical ear certainly served him well in assessing the subtleties of birdsong. See Peterson [1934] 1965, 599. The issue of the “human” or “personal equation” was experienced more widely in the sciences; for a great discussion of the “personal equation” in astronomy, see Schaffer 1988.

15. For an excellent history of the ornithological field guide, see Dunlap 2011. For a critical analysis of the genre’s ideological implications, see Schaffner 2011. On professional discussions regarding the epistemic value of sight records at the American Ornithologists’ Union, see Barrow 1998, 154–180. On the construction of observation as a modern technique in new British ornithology from the 1920s onward, see MacDonald 2002 and Toogood 2011. For an ethnographic account of visual skilling in naturalist training, see Ellis 2011.

16. “Wenn ich aber durch Feld und Wald wandre, bin ich nie alleine. Da verkündet mir ein Vöglein mit unnachahmlichen Jubel seiner Liebe Glück.” Here and throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

17. In fact, Beach’s compositions provide a remarkable predecessor to Olivier Messiaen who, as von Glahn (2013) notes, is celebrated for pioneering the use of accurate transcriptions in his compositions in the 1940s and 1950s.

18. Mathews, for his part, was highly appreciative of any compositional references to birdsong. His discussions are laced with musical quotes of well-known compositions that referenced specific birdsongs and stayed true to their theme, whether in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or in nursery melodies by his contemporaries. He refers for instance to Cuckoo! Cherry-Tree by the contemporary English musician Joseph S. Moorat. Musical notation allowed such popular tunes to be juxtaposed with the recordings of actual birds (Mathews 1904, 20–21).

19. For the relation between tone and color in music pedagogy, see, for instance, Batchellor 1913, 45.

20. The movement was strongly linked to aims for preservation and conservation and its advocates promoted basic natural history, such as plant identification or animal life histories, in nature or school gardens, as both a hands-on antidote to and a way of promoting the skills necessary to succeed in modern industrial life. By 1907, nature study had been incorporated in many school curricula. For detailed histories of the nature study movement in the United States, see Kohlstedt 2010 and Armitage 2009. For an early history of natural history teaching in Germany, in conjunction with moral instruction and show-and-tell or Anschauungsunterricht (and its methods of hands-on instruction outdoors), see Nyhart 2009.

21. Lectures on natural history subjects were a popular element of the Chautauqua circuit. A collection of promotional materials from the Redpath Chautauqua circuit that included Oldys’s lectures shows several advertisements for descriptive lectures on wildlife, often accompanied by motion picture materials or whistled reproductions.

22. As with many other bird whistlers, his vocal caprioles were recorded and published on record by Victor in 1913.

23. For a discussion of bird mimics and phonographic whistlers as a popular form, combining entertainment with a conservation ethic, see Smith 2015.

24. Porcello is concerned with the linguistic practices of professional studio engineers, showing that their status as professionals was closely tied to their competent use of linguistic (as well as other, more tacitly embodied) resources.

25. “Vom naturwissenschaftlich-musikalischen Standpunkte.” For a detailed discussion of Hoffmann’s premises, see Kursell 2003.

26. For an accessible explanation of Darwin’s take on the function of birdsong, see Birkhead 2011, 266–267. The importance of Darwin’s work for the study of animal music, and conversely, the relevance of the study of birdsong to the origins of melody, were made explicit early on (see Kivy 1959, 42–48). Oldys’s remark that his observations of hermit thrush music might seem revolutionary should be considered against the background of this debate, which was revived by a critical commentary by Spencer in 1890, and its continued discussion, for instance, in Wallaschek 1893 and Stumpf 1911.

27. A good example of this in terms of the study of birdlife is Royal Dixon’s (1917, xii) comment: “This is the secret of all worth-while nature study. We must look upon a bird as we do upon a man—not merely to learn the Latin names of bones and muscles, but to study its disposition, character, emotions, and thought processes. In other words, we must treat a bird as a friend and not as a scientific specimen.”

28. For an overview of Saunders’s life and works, see Joseph Brauner’s “In Memoriam” (1979).

29. On Moore’s life and works, see Friedmann 1964.

30. “Die gefährlichste Möglichkeit der Täuschung, der auch der geübteste musikalische Beobachter immer wieder zum Opfer fällt: die Gedächtnisintervalle, d.h. die gewohnten Intervalle unserer Musik, die wir in die objektiv gegebenen Tonschritte hineinhören, auch wenn diese von jenen sehr erheblich abweichen.”

31. “Möchten übrigens auch dem Studium des Vogelgesangs zugute kommen.”

32. The same point was made by the pioneering anthropologist Jesse Fewkes in 1890, when he arranged for his phonograph recordings to be transcribed for analysis in musical notation, incidentally by another skilled amateur bird recordist, Simon Cheney. “Blind Tom” refers to an African American musical savant who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this context, he exemplifies the exceptionally skilled listener. See Brady 1999 and also Cheney 1892, 49.

33. This was also the case in comparative anthropology. See particularly Hochman 2010.

34. Musicologist Rachel Mundy (2010) has explored the currency of metaphors of dissection in ethnomusicological work in the first decades of the twentieth century. She finds that in rendering their recordings of exotic music as “specimens” whose features could be exposed through sustained analysis, the authors draw on the legitimacy of the laboratory and traditions of morphological and anatomical study in the natural sciences. I have not found any overt reference to this metaphor in ornithology. Yet if the work and claims to authority of scientist-musicians may be understood to follow a similar strategy of authentication, by affiliating their methods with systematist and faunists’ concern with meticulous measurement and description, the graphic notations presented here, which abandon the accuracy of individual parameters in favor of a holistic concern with “structure” and instant recognition, may have been more likely to affiliate their work with the methodologies of fieldwork advocated by Ludlow Griscom and his followers.

35. See, for instance, Strong 1918 or Wheeler and Nichols 1924.

36. See Latour 1986. The term conscription device was developed by sociologist Kathryn Henderson (1991) to accentuate how drawings (such as engineering plans) may serve as network-organizing devices, enabling participants to engage each other and enlisting their participation.

37. See also Klein 2001; Cambrosio, Jacobi, and Keating 1993; Rudwick 1976.