Elephants in the Music Room

In this introduction to the forum Quirk Historicism, the editors describe the recent tendency of music scholars, in the wake of New Historicism, to avail themselves of objets trouvés and historical micronarratives for interpretation. Representations 132. Fall 2015 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 61–78. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p1⁄4reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2015.132.3.61. 61 dyads (‘‘music and . . . ’’) were welcome and necessary excuses to talk about music—even instrumental music, symphonies and the like—in relation to categories such as gender, race, and nation, whose admission into musicological thought was long overdue. Once musicologists began to take notice of New Historicism, any such tidy or schematic versions of history quickly fell by the wayside. New Historicism’s trademark deployment of the anecdote upended the apparent clarity and coherence of context and blurred the distinction between texts and contexts, dispersing both into more complex discursive constellations. The kinds of historical material potentially available to the music scholar thus became nearly endless, the relevance of any particular detail depending mainly on the ingenuity and persuasive gifts of the writer. Such a précis could, with a few adjustments, apply to almost any humanistic discipline in the 1990s and 2000s. But in musicology, the objets trouvés and historical micronarratives that once obediently fell into contextual patterns or acted as isolated anecdotes have staged a kind of mutiny, multiplying in the service of a narrative logic that overwhelms and even supplants any larger critical goals. It is this tendency that we are calling quirk historicism. In 1798, a pair of Ceylonese elephants recently arrived at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris were treated to a concert—or, really, an experiment to measure natural responses to music on these animals, whose capacities for sentiment were believed to be close to those of humans. An orchestra and chorus from the Conservatoire de Musique performed various types of music for the elephants, who had been given the names Hanz and Marguerite, while a naturalist recorded their reactions. Selections by Gluck, Rousseau, Monsigny, Haydn, and Rameau elicited rhythmic trunk movements matched to the prevailing mood of each piece. The liveliest response was provoked by the revolutionary song ‘‘Ça ira,’’ at which the beasts began to behave amorously—an exciting development, since elephants were thought never to mate in captivity. Hanz and Marguerite made their entrée into musicology in the mid 1990s, when the cultural historian James Johnson mentioned the concert in his account of the rise of silent listening in the nineteenth century. For Johnson the episode illustrated a key phase in post-revolutionary thought about music, a successful test of the conviction that music could civilize and regulate behavior, in humans and in elephants, if only both listeners and music were natural, pure, uncorrupted by monarchic oppression. Around the same time, the musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg mobilized the elephants, in trademarked New Historicist style, as an opening anecdote in his study of ‘‘convergences of music and sex around 1800.’’ Kallberg luxuriated in details from the original account, noting especially the creatures’ sensitivity