One way to gauge the ambition of Rachel Mundy's Animal Musicalities – in ethical and scholarly terms – is to begin with the conclusion. Here, in a little over a dozen pages, Mundy sketches the contours of what she terms ‘the animanities’. If the verbal logic (animals + humanities) seems simple enough, it's apparent by this stage in Mundy's study that her neologism is hinting at something more specific, more historical: she calls for ‘an intervention in the postwar, postmodern, posthuman condition of present-day humanism’ and adds that the ‘problems of musical knowledge described in this book are not answered by the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities’ (169). Mundy arrives at this claim via a combination of rigorous historical scholarship and a relentless focus on the intellectual and political functions of difference. The preceding chapters, which we'll come to presently, tell a series of rich, provocative stories that show how the collection, classification, and analysis of animals have conditioned the techniques and epistemologies of musical study from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In her conclusion, Mundy extrapolates from these stories to propose seven issues operating along the ‘fault lines at the edges of cultural life’ (172). Each of these keynotes of (what I suppose we should call) animanistic enquiry – personhood, identity, difference, knowledge, postmodern humanity, subjectivity, and paradise – is discussed at length elsewhere in the book. (The last of these seven terms, for instance, arises from the last of Mundy's seven chapters, which explores three ‘Edenic soundscapes’ by Olivier Messiaen, Steven Feld, and Miyoko Chu.) By stitching such familiar threads together into a newly minted disciplinary fabric, Mundy could easily come across as over-reaching, even self-serving, but that is far from the case. ‘I offer this book’, she writes in her closing sentence, ‘as a creative beginning, a start, and a question to which others must offer a more complete answer’ (181). I've no idea if the word animanities is going to catch on, but that's largely beside the point. What Mundy's book argues so eloquently is that notions of difference in music studies – whether understood in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, culture, intersectionality or more besides – are unthinkable without the bodies of animals, particularly those animals disciplined according to the tenets of professional science in the long wake of Darwin's evolutionary theories. This is the problem to which Mundy invites us to respond, and we can be grateful that she provides many fascinating points of entry into a complex and contested field of study.

At the beginning of the book we are presented with the cognitive dissonance of a song sparrow performing ‘La donna è mobile’. The curiosity of the observation is heightened by the inclusion of the bespoke notation made by American naturalist Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews for his 1904 Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (2). Mundy's first move is to ask what it meant to hear Italian opera emanating from a non-human source: ‘This seems like high praise for a bird, but maybe it was not’ (1). A later ornithologist, Aretas Saunders, likened the same bird's song in 1951 to ‘Reuben, I've Been Thinking’, a staple of the late-nineteenth-century North American stage. Like Verdi's hit tune, Mundy tells us, ‘Reuben’ was ‘a melody of the mediocre, associated with lowbrow society and racial difference through its history of blackface minstrelsy and popular theater’ (1). Other points of musical comparison for this sparrow – including ‘the songs of ancient Greeks and medieval monks’ and the opening of Beethoven's Fifth – are harder to gloss in derogatory terms. And when the bird reappears towards the end of Mundy's study, we learn that ‘Today, ornithologists describing the same species hear a loud clanking sound’ (168). Rather than forcing an abundance of comparative and taxonomic practice into a single narrative – about, say, the various attempts to plot a linear evolution of musical behaviours in which bird song overlaps with ‘primitive’ human expression – this book is admirable for its attempt to grapple with the messy business of comparison and taxonomy in both animal and musical studies.

Despite this complexity, the overall structure of the book is remarkably clear: following a general introduction and a chapter about historical answers to the question of why birds sing, there are three pre-Second World War studies exploring how the study of animal and musical difference converged at the level of institutions and individuals, then three post-Second World War studies tracing an anti-racist critique of human–animal comparisons and an epistemological divergence of cultural and natural history. The conclusion-cum-manifesto on animanities effectively brings us up to date and sets out how Mundy's work is less a contribution to the burgeoning field of post-humanist scholarship than a renewed and reimagined commitment to historicize the very notion of the human and the ways in which it has been instrumentalized to service asymmetries of (more-than-human) labour and power. Within this overarching structure, individual chapters are consistently cogent and concise. Readers are introduced to a large cast of characters, many of whom will be unfamiliar to music scholars. In each case, however, we are given a clear reason to care about the story unfolding. This is partly a consequence of framing each micro-history of professional practice in the context of a broader, high-stakes enquiry, but it is also a matter of texture and detail: in close to two hundred pages, Mundy's prose is never dull, and she has an enviable flair for eliciting sympathy, even when it comes to ostensibly extreme cases, such as considering the vivisectionist at work (chapter four).

The gentle invitation to put yourself in someone else's place is, of course, a deliberate strategy in a book that places personhood front and centre in the history of the study of song. Citing the German music historian Robert Lach, Mundy observes that at the turn of the twentieth century, ‘the question “Why do birds sing?” was seen by scholars of culture and science as “the key to the problem of the origin of language and music”’ (17). Few readers of this journal will need reminding that Victorian theories of natural selection were enrolled by contemporary and later writers on musical topics, often to elaborate some existing sense of social, racial, or species difference. Nevertheless, Mundy's gloss on the significance of song in Darwinian and Spencerian notions of evolution – Darwin understood song as a feature of mate selection in many animals, Spencer as an exclusively human expression of the boundary between reason and emotion (18) – is a useful point of reference, not least because it underscores Mundy's thesis about the centrality of song to debates about who (or what) has a claim to personhood. Mundy's book further emphasizes how the fields of enquiry we now know as musicology and ornithology share a similar history of formalization and professionalization: precisely at the point when evolutionary theory was acting as a universal donor to public debate and scientific study, a host of variously trained individuals laid the foundations for each of these enduring disciplines.

If, as Mundy suggests, music had earlier been described as ‘the language of the soul’, then it appears that ‘during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music's spiritual language increasingly took on an evolutionary tone, becoming integral to a growing discourse about biology's relationship to human culture and identity’ (22). This much is clear from the influential historiographies of well-known figures such as Guido Adler and Hubert Parry, but Mundy provides further examples from among Adler's students, including the aforementioned Lach, and from among the first generation of North American writers of general music histories, such as Daniel Gregory Mason (29). In many of these cases we find that animal musicality was most easily aligned with supposedly low forms of its human equivalent. Mundy cites North American comparisons between birdsong and Stephen Foster tunes (33–4); and, in a twist on Mathews hearing a song sparrow sing a barrel organ favourite, we read how British naturalist Charles Cornish experimented on the residents of Regent's Park Zoo in the 1890s by seeing how they responded to ‘The Keel Row’. Apparently Scottish airs could now be classed as ‘natural melodies’ in a scientific as well as a Romantic sense (20).

The many intersections of zoology, eugenics, ethnography, and song collection are apparent from early on in Mundy's book. Her introduction zeros in on the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (4–5), which turns out to be a training school for comparative musicology. By the same token, the techniques and instruments devised at Humboldt University to trace minute vibrations in animal organs (immediately prior to their deaths) were integral to the emerging science of song. We read how the ‘tools and the graphic scores’ of those who sought to analyse the world's music ‘took a set of standards that were originally developed in response to the practice of animal vivisection, and exported those standards into the study of sound as the criteria for objectivity’ (6). In the first of her three chapters addressing pre-Second World War case studies, Mundy digs deeper into this epistemological archaeology, elaborating on the idea of ‘sonic specimens, the musical analogue of the stuffed bird skins and preserved beetles arrayed in the natural history museum's specimen drawers’. Once again, practices of analysis and observation are inseparable from regimes of classification and difference: ‘The sonic specimen entailed the belief that sound, like its visual counterpart, could be used to determine identity’ (43). Historians of science have identified a shift, during the nineteenth century, from extended textual descriptions of flora and fauna to the selection and circulation of ‘type specimens’ (45). Mundy's argument is that sonic specimens were readymade for comparison. Assuming we are all familiar with museum collections of specimen beetles or butterflies, pinned and labelled behind glass, Mundy writes that ‘In the context of sound, the analogous solution was the inscription and transcription of sound in wax cylinders and on paper, making “living” sound a fixed object that could be measured’ (46).

It hardly seems remarkable to suggest that ‘song collections were used to categorize musical difference’ (51), but Mundy's work casts that truism in a new light by suggesting that difference-thinking, at least since Darwin, has been, at some level, about animals. At times this amounts to a similarity of method: ‘Song typologies’, we read, ‘occupied the center of a three-part process [roughly extraction, organization, description] in which songs were institutionalized and analyzed as objects of scientific research’ (55). At other times, as in the case of Laura Craytor Bolton's early 1930s trips to Angola, discussed with sensitivity and insight in chapter three, the opportunity for collecting anthropological data on African song, dance, and ritual came about because of an established interest in collecting (i.e., shooting) the bodies of ‘exotic’ birds. The following chapter provides perhaps the most explicit links between the dissection of animals and songs. At the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in 1920, ‘at the start of a brief and tenuous decade of good fortune’ for the city (84), we are introduced to Erich Moritz von Hornbostel: ‘When we laboriously dismember and disentangle the melodic thread with our scalpels’, writes Hornbostel with reference to his analyses of recordings of Thai songs, ‘we thus make the blood congeal; the living event must stiffen into an immobile corpse, at which it first becomes possible to identify the architecture of the now-intelligible whole’ (84). As the chapter continues, we encounter more direct comparisons of birdsong and visible organs (86) and, via a famous remark of Bartók's – ‘Data, data, and more data – by the hundreds of thousands!’ (92) – we are reminded of the scientific self-image of early twentieth-century song-hunters.

If, by this point, any readers are still waiting for the figurative smoking gun to clinch the connection between animal and song research in this period, they need look no further than the apparatus of sound recording. Mundy explains that historians ‘have traced Edison's machine to [Édouard-Léon] Scott's phonoautograph. But’, she continues, ‘Hornbostel appears to have noticed something self-evident to his contemporaries that historians have missed: the cylinder-and-needle combination of the early phonograph is an extension of the kymograph's technology’ (95). The kymograph, effectively a revolving paper-covered drum, was used to record patterns of motion or pressure, especially during vivisection. One American psychologist, Carl Seashore, even attached a phonograph to a kymograph, ‘a process that reversed the lost inscription that the phonograph had incurred’ (100). In addition to the commonalities of professional tools, Mundy also highlights the shared obsession, among natural and cultural historians, with techniques of notation. This went well beyond the graphing accomplished by specialist machines to include multistage and multiskilled human analyses of melodies. Take the example of American naturalist Sydney Ingraham working on the eve of the Second World War: ‘First plotting the bird's cries on a graph, Ingraham proceeded to extract an arithmetic scale from the melody of the bird's cry. He then compared that cry to the slurred cries of primitive human music, situating the bird within a map of music history that extended from the thrasher to the well-tempered scale of Bach's day’ (100). And with that we reach something of a high-water mark in Mundy's account. In the second half of the book we learn about the increasing separation of the studies of animals and humans, largely as a result of anti-racist objections to notions of ‘primitive’ human music-making.

One particularly striking observation about this new, post-war era concerns the reconceptualization of music as a subject unto itself. With special reference to Grout's still-familiar textbook of style history, Mundy observes how, ‘In this world of gently fading masterpieces, a line began to be drawn between the study of music and the study of evolutionary science’ (113). For those who remained interested in processes of selection and transmission, there was a newly stark choice to be made when it came to disciplinary allegiance: ‘Second-wave evolutionists adopted a hard dividing line’, Mundy explains, ‘separating genetically transmitted inheritance in biology from the anthropological study of socially transmitted traditions’ (119). This story plays out in microcosm in the book's sixth chapter, where we find two figures researching birdsong and folksong. Both the British naturalist William Thorpe and the North American conductor and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger were drawn to the promise of objective listening ushered in by the ready availability of sound recording technology and, no less importantly, tools such as the spectrograph and melograph, which converted sound into a visible, analysable text. This chapter contains some of Mundy's most striking illustrations, including three representations of a short passage of chaffinch song using (in chronological order) mnemonics, music notation, and spectrography (129). Where earlier generations of ornithologists had devised complex processes of notation and interpretation, often analysing extended songs deemed the most ‘musically’ interesting, the era of the spectrogram necessitated a more atomized approach, largely because the technology was best suited to picturing only a few seconds of sound at a time. Something similar is seen in the case of the melogram, where we find an image of just a single phrase from a recording of Irish singer Kitty Gallagher performing ‘An Maighdean Mhara’ (134). If post-war zoologists have largely accepted the shift to a mode of descriptive analysis that radically restricts the inference of musicality in favour of an objective-seeming visuality, musicologists have moved in the opposite direction. Even Seeger and his associates became disillusioned with the claims to melogrammatic objectivity (141) and the title of the publication containing the image of Gallagher's vocality – ‘Toward a Universal Sound-Writing for Musicology’ – now seems hopelessly outdated. As Mundy concludes, ‘Today, ethnomusicology and animal vocalization research are unrelated disciplines’ (142).

In the final chapter of Animal Musicalities, Mundy turns her attention to sonic field guides as well as compositions that engage closely with birdsong. Here we find a partial reassembling of the book's broken halves, not under the sign of the type or specimen, but in a more creative and holistic mode – even to the point of invoking the garden of Eden (146). Mundy discusses well-known works by Messiaen (Catalogue d'oiseaux, 1956–58) and Feld (Rainforest Soundwalks, 2001) alongside a unique publication by Miyoko Chu (Birdscapes, 2008). In each case there is a greater interest in habitat and ecology than appears elsewhere in her study, which is indicative of a shift in our understanding of the ‘natural’ world and the actions of human animals within it. Whatever the aesthetic pleasures of audible plenitude, however, Mundy reminds us that ‘for the past several decades, avian biodiversity has become a measure of environmental distress’ (166). Clearly all is not well, and no amount of imaginative soundscapes can remedy that. But, thankfully, Mundy's book is not an exercise in repackaging familiar facts about species loss. It is, instead, an open call to think differently about difference, to recall the roles of animal voices and bodies in the classification of human song. With that in mind I am tempted to end this review by rolling the credits and naming the hitherto unsung stars: Hespie the mouse performing her ‘Wheel Song’ (20–1), the Axis deer photographed attending to ‘The Keel Row’ at London Zoo (21), a sloth with the ability to sing a hexachord (22), and the blue-tongued skink whose ‘silent, cool, and scaly support’ gets pride of place in Mundy's acknowledgements. The problem is that the same roll-call must include the person behind the specimen of Kitty Gallagher's voice, the Thai musicians recorded for Hornbostel's lurid dissection, and the Hopi people identified by the grooves in wax cylinders placed in the Department of Anthropology of the (United States) National Museum of National History (47). This tension is at the heart of Mundy's project, which does not aim to praise animal musicalities, but rather to grapple with the consequences of rethinking the past century and a half of musical study in relation to a species-savvy sense of difference. I confess I'm not yet sure what that means, but this book has convinced me that it's worth finding out.