Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy

of feminist and nonwhite scholars for many decades.³ By structuring my contribution to that tradition through detailed descriptions of the flows of power that defined the practical work of song collecting, I ask my reader to imagine what it is like to be another person: a song collector, a colonial subject, or an animal.

      The broader context of song collecting was one in which personal experiences of gender, race, nation, and species mattered acutely. Between 1900 and 1935, over one hundred collections of folk songs and exotic tunes, and over thirty gatherings of birdsong or insect chirps were published in English, French, and German.⁴ Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály alone collected over ten thousand folk songs in Eastern Europe, while similar song collections were made of animal and “folk” cultures in the United States, Russia, Britain, Japan, Germany, and France.⁵ These collections depended on long-standing relationships between Western governments and the resources and peoples within colonial economies. In the twentieth century, as song collecting shifted from amateur practice to full or part-time occupations, the economy of collecting remained strongly shaped by these economies of gender, race, and nation. Animals occupied a central role in the way that song collectors imagined and experienced these economies. Collectors called themselves “music hunters” or “song catchers,” and spoke both of killing songs and of preserving them from endangerment and extinction.⁶ In this world, how did songs-as-animals connect personal experiences of being different to the institutions and practices that positioned animals, women, nonwhites, and other “others” as placeholders in scientific taxonomies?