Songs on the Dissecting Table: Ethnomusicology and the German Laboratory Tradition

“Songs on the Dissecting Table: Ethnomusicology and the German Laboratory Tradition”, Rachel Mundy, University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

A reader scanning music journals from the 1920s and ‘30s discovers the recurrence of a gruesome metaphor, one that compares snatches of melody to the broken body of a vivisected laboratory animal. This talk explores the role of the German physiological laboratory in early ethnomusicology, tracing the empirical tradition that tied together physical bodies and musical ones. I argue that visual traditions of knowledge in the laboratory framed music as a “body” that could be cut into and examined. Moving from the inscriptions of nineteenth-century laboratory instruments to the scratches of the stylus in early wax cylinders, I show how laboratory traditions instrumentalized this approach. But while this musical “laboratory” legitimized the study of non-Western music, it also imposed an impossible conflict between acquiring greater knowledge about foreign cultures, and expressing greater sympathy for them.