Virginia Woolf learned about the danger of reverence from her father's memoir, its tendency to turn flesh and blood into a marmoreal object. What concerned her was not the proper attitude to the dead but their individual identity as it might be recovered in the most random memories. In "Reminiscences," the first of her formal memoirs (MOB, 28-59), Woolf reflects: "What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful re, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. 'Come children,' she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, 'Quick, quick'." Such precise visual and aural recall, Woolf hopes, may come closer to resurrecting the dead than "those sincere but conventional phrases . . . the noble lamentations" of "The Mausoleum Book," in which words "drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life" (MOB, 36-37). In her "Reminiscences," the generic sculpted draperies give way to the identifiable long shabby cloak. The statue moves, talks, is palpably alive.
Yet reverence was hard to expunge, especially in memorial writing, because its absence indirectly challenged the classical injunction de mortuis nil nisi bonum. When the young Virginia was asked to contribute a brief personal reminiscence for Frederic Maitland's 1906 official biography of her father, she limited herself to the qualities she could praise unreservedly—their shared love of reading, their passion for literature. He read countless novels aloud to his children or recited poetry from memory, and she sums up the effect on her: "many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief." As with her mother, she needed to fix the sound of her father's voice. No family conflicts can be recorded in such a public document, of course; so in her account the children are generally referred to as "we" or "us" or "one of us." And sometimes the plural pronoun includes her father as well: "there was a perfectly equal companionship between us" (LLLS, 474). Maitland also celebrates this generational concord in his own summary of Leslie Stephen's family life after Julia's death: "All went better every year. His daughters grew up, his sons went to public schools and then to Cambridge, and the love that he had bestowed and was bestowing was amply returned" (LLLS, 477). It would take over three decades for Woolf to challenge this bland, sentimental vision in a more complex account that separated and distinguished the siblings from each other and that made room for her rage against her father as well as for her love.
Her inhibition was rooted in the common practice of writing for the family, which came with the territory of the family memoir as a distinct form of autobiography. Woolf's first sense of audience goes back as far as the Hyde Park Gate News, produced in collaboration with her siblings between 1891 and 1895 and suspended forever on her mother's death. The surviving issues are housed in the British Library manuscripts division and have still not been published, though they are as interesting as the juvenilia of the Brontë siblings. The three- or four-page weekly paper appeared every Monday, like some village organ, its columns filled with family and neighborhood gossip, miscellaneous notices, anecdotes, riddles, poems, "love letters," and installments of longer fictions "to be continued next time." It is not always clear which sibling was responsible for which entry, and the sense of an anonymous generational voice is sometimes used strategically. Yet "Miss Virginia Stephen" seems disproportionately present as author or subject, and rivals to her authority are swiftly disposed of. When the younger brother Adrian plans a competitive publication, the impersonal editorial voice opines, "We hope that Master Adrian Stephen will take the advice of his parent and give up the 'Talland Gazette' altogether" (HPGN, 27 June 1892). 17 The complicity of daughter and parent suggested here is typical. The parents were editorial board, audience and judge in one, and everything in the paper was designed to win their approval. Far from being the voice of independent youth, the journal exaggerated the Olympian language (and the benevolent condescension) of the grownups. It showed off a precociously adult vocabulary even at the risk of spelling mishaps: equestrian, benignant, equanimity; but also "ignaramus," "Roomitism." And the children regularly refer to themselves as "the aforementioned juveniles" whose actions demonstrate qualities like "the elasticity of youth" (HPGN, 8 and 15 February 1892). The aim is to amuse, to delight. They sit in anticipation of their mother's reception of an April Fool's letter: "The anxious infants awaited her burst of laughter. And at last it came 'Ha ha ha he he he' laughed she with all the good-natured vehemence of her nature" (HPGN, 4 April 1892).
What hope did a child with such a firm literary vocation have of finding a voice of her own if she was so desperate to please the res of authority in her world? It may seem absurd to ask such a question about a writer who has not even reached adolescence. Yet the Hyde Park Gate News actually supplies an answer. Mimicry is not replication; it is mockery. From her earliest years Virginia Stephen used ironic detachment as a weapon, as Vanessa noted with some bitterness in her own later memoir of her sister: "How did she know that to label me 'The Saint' was far more effective [than abuse], quickly reducing me to the misery of sarcasm from the grown-ups as well as the nursery world?" (ABGR, 332). The tone of Virginia's house organ mocked everything it described—the children's "achievements" (their merit badges from the educational establishments), their distinguished father's awards (two honorary doctorates in 1895 are duly recorded), the triumphs and disappointments of the marriage market, which is seen primarily as a fiercely competitive economic arena. Their cousin Millicent Vaughan has visited her married sister in Canada, the paper reports; and editorializes: "We hope that no pangs of jealousy crowd her mind when she sees her sister so comfortably settled with a husband when she herself is searching the wide world in quest of matrimony" (HPGN, 14 March 1892). Such passages recall the young Austen at her most malicious and anticipate the wide-eyed bitchiness of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters. Marriage is a major subject of the Hyde Park Gate News, and the heterodox picture of that institution it presents is not pretty: estranged couples, resented babies, retreats into spinsterhood, cynical mixtures of calculation and high romance are everywhere in the journal, described with just enough of a sense of absurdity to avoid tripping the alarm. A proposal letter in one of the stories treads a fine line: "I wish you to be my partner in life my star with which to grope up life's dim road!! I must now turn to vulgar matters such as Pounds Shillings and Pence I have plenty of all three and so I hope have you but it does not matter to me what your dowry may be as long as I have you oh most divine of divine creatures" (HPGN, 13 June 1893).
It is the mock-newspaper's anonymous voice that makes such experimental satire possible. Woolf can protect her identity and retreat behind a whole anthology of other voices—those of her siblings, the reports of "our correspondent," the male narrator of the fictional serial "A Cockney's Farming Experiences" and its sequel "The Experiences of a Pater-familias," "Extracts from the Diary of Miss Sarah Morgan," recording a life of marginal gentility and embittered spinsterhood in the depths of the country (HPGN, 22 August—26 September 1892, 10 October—19 December 1892, January—February 1895). 18 And everywhere we hear the pseudo-parental speech of the adults mock-heroicizing the doings of the juveniles. By patronizing herself and her siblings, Woolf anticipates and trumps her parents' generational patronage: "Are you 'amused' by us?" it seems to say; "We find ouselves absurdly amusing too!" The only casualty in this battle of wits (calculated, accepted, absorbed) is the authorial "I." In one of the last issues of the journal (written during the mother's final illness and published a few weeks before her death) there is a fictional account of a character named "the Author." She is being encouraged by others to write poetry but contemptuously dismisses the whole genre: "Poetry she considered an indelicate exhibition of your innards" (HPGN, 8 April 1895). By suppressing the lyric voice, working through layers of irony, donning the mask of objective reporting and taking on the cool authority of the editorial "we," Virginia Stephen was making an early bid to construct an authoritative family memoir in the newspaper of record. That the paper ceased publication on the eve of her mother's death suggests the limits of what it could report.
The project of writing directly and exclusively for family members did not end with its demise. Woolf's next important autobiographical project, and the first to be included in the collection Moments of Being, was an attempt to assess the impact of that death in a memoir for a clearly conceived but not yet visible family audience. She began "Reminiscences" in 1907, when Vanessa was pregnant with her first child. It was in fact finished only after Julian's birth but maintains the fiction that the ungendered "you" who is directly addressed is still in the womb. The firstborn is in any case a generational representative and can serve as a stand-in for those to come. The addressee is no more than a convenient fiction, since the most urgently courted audience of the memoir is the new couple Clive and Vanessa Bell. Virginia Stephen's claim to be writing her sister's biography for the benefit of the unborn child is a way of inserting herself into the new marriage and making sure that the Stephen name and family history (which stand under threat of erasure) will survive in a version she can author as well as edit. It will be in prose rather than verse, but it will come several steps closer to revealing the "innards" the earlier versions of the family history had tightly concealed.
Woolf always had an acute sense of her reader's shaping power: "To know whom to write for is to know how to write," she concludes in a 1924 essay; "in a very subtle and insidious way" the audience becomes "the instigator and inspirer of what is written." 19 This sense of her reader affects most aspects of "Reminiscences"—its tone, its sense of what has to be explained and what can be taken for granted, its tactics of presentation. Yet the clearly identifiable audience of Woolf's first formal memoir, though minuscule, was difficult to address as a unit. Vanessa was of course her intimate ally, the sibling whose sympathetic understanding she could almost take for granted; but her new husband was for Virginia a virtual unknown, a potential threat, and a powerful rival for Vanessa's affection. He needed to be wooed and convinced that he would never understand his wife without becoming aware of the sisters' shared family history and the unbreakable bond between them; and the unborn children had to be indoctrinated in the lore of the Stephen sect, though they would bear a different surname. It was a more difficult task than either Woolf's great-grandfather or her father had faced in writing their memoirs for the exclusive audience of their own children. 20 But like her male predecessors' works, it remained in the family and was kept out of the hands of strangers: it seems in fact to have survived in only one copy. 21 And like the memoirs of the earlier Stephens, it followed (though it did not announce) an agenda.
"Reminiscences" is a tightly structured tale of an unwilled matrilineal succession, in which the family office of housekeeper and mother must be occupied by someone no matter at what cost. Julia Stephen died at forty-nine and left a gaping hole not only in the hearts of those who mourned her but in the structure of the home she had managed, which served the needs of an exacting husband, eight children from three different marriages, a wide circle of relations, friends and professional associates, and a large staff of servants under her authority. She was mourned indefinitely; but more pressingly, her death created a vacancy to be filled, and apparently from within the family. Her eldest daughter Stella Duckworth was pressed into service at the age of twenty-six, surrendering much of what remained of her youth and freedom to the requirements of the job, and having eventually to negotiate terms with her stepfather Leslie Stephen in order to marry her long-time suitor and set up a nominally separate establishment virtually next door. Stella's own appalling death a mere two years after her mother's reopened the position. And the next recruit was her half-sister Vanessa, only eighteen at the time, but required to assume these domestic responsibilities, a post she took up with much greater resentment and dismay. But she appeared to have no choice: "She fulfilled the duties which Stella had but lately fulfilled," Woolf writes; and people "acclaimed her now the divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues" (MOB, 53, 55). The Housekeeper is dead! Long live the Housekeeper! "Reminiscences" is shaped by Woolf's grim conclusion that "our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this one is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated" (MOB, 30). In such a family system we are all structurally defined, and the idea of individual liberty, choice, or even character is barely more than notional.
Woolf is relentless in patterning the memoir to illustrate this thesis: Julia replaced by Stella replaced by Vanessa is the narrative's plot, and at the climactic moment the father is seen as a kind of Bluebeard, in words that no appropriately reverent family memoir would have dared to use: "he was quite prepared to take Vanessa for his next victim," Woolf writes; "it was not strange that an uncompromising anger took possession of her. We made him the type of all that we hated in our lives; he was the tyrant of inconceivable selfishness, who had replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness and gloom." These are startling words from someone who had written just a few years earlier, for her father's biographer, that "there was a perfectly equal companionship between us." Yet the later image is not much less of a distortion than the earlier one, and Woolf's summarizing judgment clearly does not satisfy her. It moves too seamlessly from Vanessa's feelings to her own, and—in order to please her immediate audience—plays down her own ambiguous response by translating her sister's fury into "our" hatred. "We made him the type" suggests both distortion and opportunism, and Woolf is quick to modify her critique: "We were bitter, harsh, and to a great extent, unjust; but even now it seems to me that there was some truth in our complaint" (MOB, 56). Other parts of the memoir focus not on the sisters' outrage but on Woolf's sense of the beauty of her parents' relationship: "it was a triumphant life, consistently aiming at high things" (MOB, 34).
These responses are scarcely consistent, and despite its agenda "Reminiscences" is an unstable work. But it does firmly shift the ground of the family memoir from male achievement to women's labor—not their beauty or their virtues or their talents but what they actually manage to get done. In sharp contrast to The Memoirs of James Stephen or Leslie's biography of his brother Fitzjames or Maitland's account of Leslie, "Reminiscences" virtually eradicates the male career narrative. The record of Sir Leslie Stephen's achievements and honors, the story of the four sons in the family and where they are headed is here conspicuous by its absence. So, interestingly enough, is any description of the differing vocational ambitions of the women—each of whom would create some tension between her work outside the home and her "inherited" family role: Julia's professional interest in nursing, Vanessa's determination to paint, Virginia's to write. (That Stella Duckworth apparently had no such calling is treated as an anomaly, a lack.) The whole career trajectory, which if successful produces a public record, finds no place in "Reminiscences." Woolf is much more interested in recording the unceasing labor, as unwavering and continuous as the ticking of a clock, that keeps the family going, day after day, year after year, until the machine breaks down and must be replaced. This is the nature of "women's work," and Woolf would make it one of her essential subjects.
In order to undermine such assumptions of Victorian family life, she needed and eventually found allies; those she associated herself with crucially influenced her way of writing memoirs. The rebellion against nineteenth-century domestic ideology is of course a familiar subject, and many of the writers of Woolf's generation participated in it, including the Bloomsbury Group to which she is regularly linked. Their various experiments in finding alternatives, which included a critique of marital fidelity, of heterosexuality as an ideal or exclusive choice, of women's primarily domestic roles and their economic dependence on men, are part of a much larger cultural shift that has often been described. Much less well known is the conscious way in which the Group in general and Woolf in particular used autobiographical writing as an instrument and record of this transformation. Their sense of a gulf between their own lives and that of their parents was carefully nurtured by a group memorial effort. The vehicle for the creation of this communal identity was the Memoir Club, founded in 1920, eventually including all the members of the Group—the Woolfs, the Bells, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and others. They met several times a year for a dinner followed by the reading of formal memoirs written not for publication but for each other. 22 Two striking facts distinguish this memorial body from others like it: that at its founding the average age of the members was around forty (Virginia Woolf was thirty-eight), which seems early to embark on the work of retrospection; and that it continued to meet for four decades. In 1931, the Club held its hundredth meeting, which would have meant that by then some two hundred memoirs had been written and read. 23 Memory seemed a bottomless well, and of course as one aged it only got deeper.
It was an association of intimate friends; the meetings were social as well as intellectual occasions; the memoirs were as often hilarious as revelatory. But it is inaccurate to dismiss the Club as a mutual admiration society or as a form of light entertainment. Its members had from the start set themselves a group task: to produce a record of each individual life (and of their common lives) that told the truth without fear of offense or reprisal. Veneration was distrusted. De mortuis nil nisi bonum was certainly not a governing principle. Shame and reticence were seen as impediments rather than treated as inevitable. The critical sympathy of the group acted as a solvent for residual inhibitions. Here was the ideal audience to respond to an honest autobiography, and producing such a work in incremental stages was initially taken to be the goal for each member. Rather than lying or suppressing the facts or talking to yourself without hope of an empathetic response, you might write for a group that had shared your fate—co-conspirators, fellow "survivors," the family you had chosen rather than the one you had entered by biological accident. The inhibiting effect of writing for a familial audience could be dissipated by addressing kindred spirits rather than kin. That at least was the theory.
Three of the memoirs Woolf wrote for this group are included in Schulkind's Moments of Being—"22 Hyde Park Gate," "Old Bloomsbury," and "Am I a Snob?" (MOB, 164-77, 181-201, 204-20). Written between 1920 and 1936 they might be taken to form a linked sequence with the very early "Reminiscences" (1907-08) and the late "Sketch of the Past" (1939-40). If one adds to this the continuity (and sometimes the overlap) of subject matter between the three surviving Club contributions and the longer memoirs at either end of her career, it is tempting to treat the whole posthumous collection as a coherent autobiography with a plan of its own, and Schulkind argues for such a reading: "the fragments do arrange themselves into a meaningful order; a pattern emerges which expresses Virginia Woolf's view of the self generally, and herself in particular, in ways that a conventional autobiography could not have done." 24 When treated in this way, the large gaps can be taken to illustrate Woolf's doubts about the stability of individual identity and her sharp sense that our memory perpetually revises the past. It is an ingenious argument, but it makes the fortuitous seem like a deliberate plan and it minimizes the effect of addressing the very different audiences for which these pieces were actually written. As we will see, Woolf's contributions to the Group's collective autobiography have a distinct identity.
Her writings for the Memoir Club grasped the opportunity for effortless understanding that audience offered. But the Club was both enabling and disabling for Woolf's autobiographical venture, and her three surviving essays are more closely related to each other in ambition, tone, and effect than to the longer pieces that preceded or followed them. The atmosphere was decidedly liberating. No subject seemed off limits: family piety could be mocked; "sex permeated our conversation" (MOB, 195-96); even a brother's incestuous desire could be described. The Club's members were sophisticated and well-educated; they could recognize allusions and follow an argument without requiring tedious explanations. An observant, quick-witted, deeply read person like Virginia Woolf loved the intellectually rapid narratives and the lively discussion that followed. To be carefully attended to; to be able to take a great deal for granted; not to go step by step: the Club seemed like the ideal audience. And Woolf's diary entries about these meetings often express her interest and delight in what she heard: Maynard Keynes "very packed profound & impressive"; Duncan Grant "fantastic & tongue—not tied—tongue enchanted"; Leonard Woolf "objective & triumphant" (DOVW, 5:168, 12 September 1938; 2:23, 6 March 1920; 2:26, 18 March 1920). The last of these entries, however, continues: "I subjective & most unpleasantly discomfited." There was such a thing as a "Memoir Club memoir," and Woolf quickly learned its (unwritten) rule: be objective, even clinical, rather than exposing your "innards." Deep personal engagement was likely to be heard as sentimentality, even mawkishness, and suggested that one was still a prisoner of the past. The once threatening is now better seen as absurd and best treated as farce. What she calls the "uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males" that greeted one of her earliest contributions made her squirm: "What possessed me to lay bare my soul!" she asks herself (DOVW, 2:26, 18 March 1920). Of Forster's and Strachey's ventures she concludes "they say what they mean, very brilliantly; & leave the dark as it was before" (DOVW, 2:178, 23 June 1922). Despite the powerful imaginative and organizational contributions of the three women in the group, despite the absence of the paterfamilias and of the band of brothers, a male camaraderie set the tone.
Woolf learned to play the Club's game by these rules. Her memoirs for this audience are often shimmering and designed to tease, to shock, to entertain, to criticize the licensed satiric targets and to celebrate the enlightened work of the liberators. They re-describe the oppressive patriarchal atmosphere of the Stephen family dungeon at 22 Hyde Park Gate less as the prison house of women than as the lunatic asylum of men. The sexual threat of her half-brother George Duckworth is exposed, but in a mocking tone that covers over the details and consciously plays with the ambiguities of the word "lover." The memoir concludes: "Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also" (MOB, 177). Keynes was to call this memoir—much to Woolf's annoyance—"the best thing you ever did" (DOVW, 2:121, 26 May 1921). She also recorded the history of "Old Bloomsbury" and its break with the past, as the Cambridge-educated young men encouraged their sisters and lovers to share the atmosphere of candor and help dispel the post-Victorian gloom. Here too, Woolf's narrative unit is the amusing anecdote, as in Lytton Strachey's pretend-casual question to the just-married Vanessa Bell about the stain on her dress: "'Semen?' he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing" (MOB, 195). This has the tone of an oft-told tale in a complacent group narrative of liberation. Her final "we" is collective, not individual, designed to illustrate that "the old sentimental views of marriage in which we were brought up were revolutionized," in part through "our" agency; and Woolf concludes that "Old Bloomsbury still survives. If you seek a proof—look around" (MOB, 196, 201). The gaze is turned away from the past, away from the individual memoirist, to the now middle-aged audience beaming its recognition of their shared youth.
A great deal must be ignored or expunged to produce such contained, polished party pieces. The darker, more idiosyncratic private life is off limits. Although Woolf's Memoir Club narratives take us through the years of all the appalling Stephen deaths—mother, sister, father, and the adored older brother Thoby—they are barely mentioned.  The sexual revolution described here remains one of word rather than deed, and Woolf's long private history of sexual fear, confusion, exploration, and fruitful experiment continues to be taboo, for all the enlightenment on the subject the Club might legitimately claim. As in the Hyde Park Gate News and "Reminiscences," the individual, unrepresentative authorial "I" remains invisible or there only to be mocked, as in her final surviving contribution, "Am I a Snob?" The very question announces that she will focus on surfaces—reputations, titles, wealth. But she begins with a protest about what these entertaining pieces fail to explore: "the time has come when we . . . must turn that beam ['the lamp of memory'] inwards and describe ourselves." She calls the private self "this universe—which still to me seems as trackless and tiger-haunted as . . . Guatemala" (MOB, 204-5), an image which echoes her diary complaint years earlier that the male contributions to these meetings, though brilliant, "leave the dark as it was before."
Although Woolf's desire to change the rules was real and her need urgent there was something in the very nature of these occasions that made the exploratory task impossible. All those expectant faces asking to be entertained are increasingly like those at a family reunion; and the family, even the family of choice, is impatient with threats to its unity and harmony. Woolf was not the only member of the Club to question this dispensation. But when the internal critiques of the Group's complacency finally come, as in Keynes's searching memoir "My Early Beliefs," written on the eve of Munich, they take the form not of private exploration but of impersonal judgment. Despite the "my" of his title, Keynes writes with a commanding authority in the first person plural about the optimistic delusions of their youth, stressing the Group's unconscious arrogance: "We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully"; "We lacked reverence . . . for everything and everyone"; "we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own." 25 For all the devastating force of Keynes's critique, he keeps resolutely to the plural pronoun, as if to suggest that although "we" were once deluded, "we" can now see how unrealistic our inter-war optimism was. The strength of group vision is unchallenged, though subject to massive revision; and the judgmental confidence of the memoirist remains unshaken.
There is no room for the more tentative, introspective, experimental "I" in such a critique, and Woolf's commitment to exploring that uncharted territory would have to find another audience. The inability to imagine the particular human being whose actions are recorded in life narratives became for her the chief failing of the biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs she read so avidly; and she did not exempt her own earlier efforts. She grew more and more impatient with the erasure of individual or idiosyncratic consciousness in autobiographical writing. This is why she had to reconstruct her very first memories in writing "A Sketch of the Past," rather than building on what she had previously written. Her dissatisfaction with her own methods and that of most memoir writers focuses on the missing subject: "They leave out the person to whom things happened. . . . So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened." And so she begins again: "Who was I then?" (MOB, 65). In using the first person singular she deliberately rejects her earlier practice of effacing her own identity and merging it with those of her Stephen siblings: "This leads me to think that my—I would say 'our' if I knew enough about Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian—but how little we know even about brothers and sisters—this leads me to think that my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread" (MOB, 68). This remarkable, doubly-interrupted sentence might stand for the consistent effort Woolf makes in writing "A Sketch of the Past" to question the shortcuts and unconscious claims of her earlier autobiographical pieces and to interrogate her own methods of writing memoirs. An unremitting self-consciousness is put to work. She contests the complacencies of the genre almost word by word, constantly interrupting and questioning her strategies as she uses them. She needs to test every inch of the marshy ground in order to locate something resembling terra firma. And she isolates her own memory and experience as it might differ from those of others, even those living in the same household.
Despite the pervasive rhetoric of liberation, individual erotic experience had remained one of the taboo subjects in Bloomsbury memoirs. In fact, the group imperative of celebrating the new freedom creates its own form of censorship. When she decides, this time around, to record her first sexual encounter, she does not turn it into the teasing show-stopper that ended "22 Hyde Park Gate," with George Duckworth's ambiguous embrace. As she describes her other half-brother Gerald Duckworth (twelve years her senior) propping her childish body on a ledge outside the dining room, she vividly recalls the touch of his fingers working their way down her flesh: "I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too.  It must have been strong, since I still recall it." Woolf is trying to explain why she had always felt "ashamed or afraid of my own body" (MOB, 68-69). As she describes this incident in detail she avoids the temptation to interpret it. Did it "cause" her sense of fear and shame, her resistance to heterosexuality? She doesn't know, and she is even reluctant to identify her response: resent? dislike? Neither word seems adequate. More important than choosing the word or linking the experience to adult choices is the need to recall the exact shape of what happened then, the particular incident and her own body's response. It had occurred half a century earlier, but it must be brought vividly to life as though it were happening now. Woolf records her uncertainty about what she describes: "I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident; and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it." And yet, despite her dissatisfaction with what she has learned in recalling and recounting the story, she insists that life histories, whether memoirs or biographies, that ignore such intensely private moments—there were no witnesses and neither participant would have wanted to publicize the incident—can hardly be trusted. She protests that "in spite of all this, people write what they call 'lives' of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown" (MOB, 69).
As Woolf's complaint suggests, she was identifying a problem that affected both memoir writing and biography—not so much lack of information as reluctance to use what one knows. That she was writing "A Sketch of the Past" simultaneously with, and as a kind of antidote to, her biography Roger Fry made her hyper-aware of the parallels. 26 She had known Fry intimately: he had been a central re in Bloomsbury. Woolf thought he may at one point have saved Vanessa's life, and he certainly became her sister's lover. His papers, including their love letters, were at her disposal and she was surrounded by public and private sources of information—witnesses, participants, eager to help her record Fry's remarkable life. The Bloomsbury code of frankness presumably freed her to tell the truth, rather than encouraging her to produce the official biography of a venerable re. But Woolf quickly learned that this freedom was illusory. The Fry family objected to the inclusion of any account of the adulterous liaison, and Woolf soon found herself the victim, as Hermione Lee puts it, of "the Victorian censorship which had been one of her life-long subjects . . . and the book was full of what 'must be left unsaid'" (VW, 697). That "must" was Woolf's word, but it was learned not only from Fry's kinfolk but from her Memoir Club associates. By 1939 she felt she was living in a newly repressive atmosphere, a kind of post-post-Victoriansm, "surrounded by a circle of invisible censors" (DOVW, 5: 229, 7 August 1939). Keynes dismisses her Fry biography as "the official life" and tauntingly asks her, "why not write the real life for the Memoir Club?" (DOVW, 5:314, 2 September 1940). But we have already seen precisely how much freedom that audience encouraged. And when it came to describing sexual difficulties, rather than celebrating the new freedom, the license to speak frankly was revoked. This becomes clear in a diary record of an earlier conversation with Keynes: "About Roger. 'Can I mention erection?' I asked. . . . No you cant. I should mind your saying it. Such revelations have to be in key with their time. The time not come yet" (DOVW, 5:256, 6 January 1940).
Whether one wrote for the public audience or the intimate circle of friends, then, the message was the same: real candor was impossible—not here, not now. Woolf's intense frustration in writing Roger Fry, a book that was turning marmoreal under her touch when she had meant it to record her friend's unquenchable vitality and labile responsiveness, made her work on it feel like alienated labor. She later called it "an experiment in self-suppression" (LOVW, 6:456, 31 December 1940), by which she meant that the twin pressures of including the mass of primary documents and of excluding what might give offense ended by silencing her voice. Having agreed to write it, she was bound to finish. But she desperately needed a retreat, a text of her own. This is how "A Sketch of the Past" came to take the shape it did—open, hurried, interrupted, exploratory, unfixed. It was simultaneously an autobiographical record and a critique of the conventions of life writing. If she could not speak the truth about Roger Fry's life because both the kinfolk and the kindred spirits disapproved, perhaps she might at last be able to produce an honest memoir for a non-censorious audience of one—herself. The manuscript of "A Sketch of the Past" was produced fitfully in stolen days, with many interruptions, as an escape from what she thought of as "Fry facts." It did not record many facts, but it struggled to recuperate the impressions of her early childhood in sensuous detail. It was not so much a narrative as a re-enactment, as though she had found a way of reentering the past by sending her body back to it. At the same time, Woolf tried to keep her consciousness here, so that the two selves—what she calls "I now, I then" (MOB, 75)—would be able to carry on a continuous conversation across the decades. The audience was herself, or her selves, not another who needed to be mollified or entertained.
The task requires a great deal of methodological self-awareness, and Woolf perpetually monitors what she is doing as she is doing it, becoming a more detached participant in the proceedings. Her goal is to produce, sequentially if not simultaneously, as direct a record of the past as she can retrieve, an interpretation of what had happened as seen from her present-day vantage point, and a meta-account of her working methods as a memoir writer. 27 This was a tall order, virtually certain to produce discontinuities, but perhaps more interesting as a project than writing the full-dress memoir for which these were to be only the rough notes. There are many indications that she was deliberately cramming the page with a jumble of impressions, recording the kaleidoscopic shift of images that came to her when she tried to call up a scene. She lived among painters, and she did not use the word "sketch" idly. These were preliminary notations for a later, more discriminating eye to develop or discard. She hoped that the conscious artist she had always been would one day be able to use all this raw material to shape something much more final. In the meantime, as she puts it, "I will write down some of my distracted and disconnected thoughts; to serve, should the time come, for notes"(MOB, 95). The "Sketch" was intended to be no more than an aide-mémoire, and sometimes she despairs of ever being able to use it for that purpose. But that is her plan. After a long interruption during which she did no work on the project at all, she asks herself, "shall I ever finish these notes—let alone make a book from them?" (MOB, 100).
The answer, as anyone reading those words is aware, is no. But in a curious twist, the incompleteness becomes a strength. The extraordinary vitality and adventurousness of Woolf's "Sketch of the Past" is the product of her eagerness to record the contradictions and unresolved mysteries of what she remembered before they evaporated. She instinctively realized that instability was an essential element in the past she wanted to recapture. The lack of pattern was in fact the pattern: "Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood. . . . But somehow into that picture must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long" (MOB, 79). In order to convey this chronic instability—the constant stream of friends and relations, the moves back and forth between London and St. Ives, the transformative impact of Julia Stephen's death, of those serial deaths, the rapid growth of eight children under one roof each assuming a different shape—the narrative record must highlight process over product. There were always too many memories to sift through, no matter how long Woolf was given; and no revision should have expunged this sense of the rushing stream. When for example she describes St. Ives, the place itself more than what happened there, she produces a kind of memory flooding—"an incongruous, miscellaneous catalogue, little corks that mark a sunken net" (MOB, 135). The legitimized incoherence and inclusiveness of Woolf's method becomes a way out of the impasse of memoir writing, giving to a relatively minor genre the bourgeoning, uncensored vitality that more finished works of art had lost.
The freedom she felt to start anywhere, to include anything, merely monitoring the various methods she found herself using rather than selecting one from the beginning, worked to free her from the censor within. "A Sketch of the Past" survives in more than one draft, and her revision of the first allowed her to deal with subjects she was initially reluctant to touch. The discovery of the later version (now in the British Library, but published in the significantly revised second edition of Moments of Being in 1985) adds over twenty pages to the original printed text. In that section, Woolf allows herself to describe her father in terms that no Stephen family memoir of any generation would have permitted. She goes back to his raw grief after Julia's death and her own impotent anger at his tyrannous behavior, particularly in the weekly scenes in which he called the young Vanessa to account for not running the household as economically and efficiently as her mother had done. She describes his temper tantrums, his abuse of her sister, Vanessa's stoical response, and then voices her own suppressed fury by finally breaking the silence: "Never have I felt such rage and such frustration.  If instead of words he had used a whip, the brutality could have been no greater"(MOB, 144-45).
Writing such a description must have been cathartic, and she does not take back her words by calling them "bitter, harsh, unjust," as she had in "Reminiscences." But they were not final either. As she works on "A Sketch of the Past," she discovers a new formal possibility—to stand upon the "platform" of the present while viewing the past and "make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast" (MOB, 75). In practice this means giving equal weight to the recovered feelings of her original experience and to the more detached understanding she had managed to develop. A certain analytic distance had in fact always been a strong element in Woolf's nature, and some form of irony had characterized her writing as early as the Hyde Park Gate News. It might, however, be fostered, just as the attempt to recall the past in sensuously immediate detail could be trained. And so the later version of her memoir includes passages about her father and the whole system of socialization that had shaped him—the Victorian cult of male "genius" that licensed his eccentric behavior, the ritualization of grief, the power of the purse in the hands of the paterfamilias, the workings of what she calls "the great patriarchal machine" (MOB, 153) that molded all her male relations and stamped them into pre-existing shapes, and finally the huge gap between her father's generation and her own: "Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. The Victorian Age and the Edwardian Age. We were not his children; we were his grandchildren" (MOB, 147; Leslie was fifty in the year of Virginia's birth). And then there are the insights afforded by her own adult reading, with which she takes the full measure of her father's intellectual gifts and limitations or learns from Freud's work a term—ambivalence—that helps her to understand her simultaneous love for and hatred of him, a response more complex than her sister's (MOB, 115, 108).
All these historical or sociological or psychological insights came later in time, and they are not permitted to displace the "I then" of the memoir—the immediate, sensuous recall of her individual experience as though it were still in the process of happening. The abuses can now be explained but must not be explained away. She reminds herself in a diary entry that "if I read as a contemporary I shall lose my childs vision & so must stop" (DOVW, 5:345, 22 December 1940). But even during that childhood, Woolf insists, she was dimly aware of a separate being within herself who might one day understand what baffled her at the time: "There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision" (MOB, 154). Some of the notes were literally that; she had started keeping a formal journal as an adolescent, and she had always known it would be useful to her some day. Others were no more than inchoate impressions, imprinted on her psyche but originally incomprehensible. This "separate being" of childhood—detached, ironic, instinctively critical though initially at a loss for words—gradually gains verbal power and authority, yet must never be allowed simply to take over the record. All of these voices—of memory, dimly understood perception, contemporaneous records, and later analytic theorizing—might be juxtaposed in the text if only the memoir as a container were elastic enough to accommodate them. The problem was formal. This is why Woolf's attention in "A Sketch of the Past" is so often self-consciously directed toward the narrative and analytic methods she is actually using as she writes.
"A Sketch of the Past" is among other things a primer on how to write a family memoir, including a set of terms that identify the component parts. There is the "platform of time" (DOVW, 5:281, 25 April 1940) that offers the Olympian perspective of the present. There are the "moments of being" that Schulkind chooses as the title for her collection, though Woolf herself does not give the term such primacy. These moments are a more secular version of what Joyce called "epiphanies," but the focus is more consistently on the experiencing subject, not on the object perceived. 28 They can give to a private, seemingly random and ordinary incident in anyone's life the shock of permanent significance, even though it is not obvious to others that anything of consequence is happening. For example, Woolf recalls that she and Thoby were having a fistt, that she was winning it, when suddenly she stopped herself with the question "why hurt another person?"—just long enough to give her brother the edge and let him win. She never forgets her response to this seemingly trivial moment: "It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed" (MOB, 71). One could say (though Woolf does not) that this was a psychological milestone, in which the gender training of A. V. Stephen suddenly took hold of this "tomboy" and stayed his hand, turning him into a girl. But the interpretation matters less than the privacy of the incident. Probably no one else knew that something decisive had just happened; such "moments of being"—unlike the triumphs and disasters of the public record—often leave no readable sign. Only the individual memoirist has access to them.
The theory of "moments of being" is related to what Woolf calls her habit of "scene-making," her "natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged, representative" (MOB, 142). In writing narrative, she thinks not discursively but in images and incidents; and she has learned from experience that such kernels will contain and eventually reveal their own meaning without the help of an impatient decoder. Far from apologizing, as her father had done, for "dropping into narrative," she nurtures the impulse to record particulars. Surfaces are not despised but cherished. She packs her descriptions with dense synaesthetic detail and trusts the reader (if there ever is a reader) to unpack them, as in this crammed single-sentence impression of St. Ives: "It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shell fish clustered on a grey wall together" (MOB, 128). Her goal is less to interpret the past than to see, hear, touch, smell, and feel it. She imagines an invention that would some day allow us to reenter the experiences stored within us, permitting us to become time travelers in our own history: "it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start" (MOB, 67). Of course she had been reading Proust; but she was also perfecting her own devices.
Not all her methods were so close to mystical. Woolf was a learned and disciplined thinker, despite her complaints about her lack of formal academic training, and her memoirs were as much the product of her wide reading and conscious reflection as of imaginative recall. And so she isolates another essential component of life-writing, the sense of the "invisible presences" that shape our responses: "Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes" (MOB, 80). Such external pressures may be impalpable but powerfully shape each of us, no matter how resistant or rebellious we are. In "A Sketch of the Past," she analyzes several of these impersonal forces—ideological, institutional, historical—with a keen understanding of how they shaped her and those around her: the Victorian courtship rituals that made the relations between the sexes as formal as "relations between countries are now—with ambassadors and treaties"; the tea table as "the centre of Victorian family life"; the career-crunching machinery of the professional class that processed every male in her circle from the age of ten and made sure he "emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college" (MOB, 99, 118, 153). Each of these examples suggests how much interpretive distance Woolf had put between her girlhood and her mature identity. And she thought that the modern habit of analyzing unconscious motives had clarified much that the Victorians were incapable of understanding about themselves. Yet a girl or a boy being shaped around 1940 rather than 1890 was just as subject to a new set of "invisible presences" as her own generation had been. This is how her account of the past differs from the liberationist rhetoric of her fellow post-Victorians in the Memoir Club and elsewhere. She needs to view individual lives simultaneously from the moment when the "invisible presences" have at last become visible, and from inside the dark capsule of the past, in part because she is not convinced that the modernist enlightenment is real, or will last. She is, after all, writing as a new worldwide catastrophe begins.
There is evidence that she was planning to deal with various significant subjects untouched in the final surviving draft, and that "A Sketch of the Past" is not merely unfinished but only partially developed. Aside from the two long versions, the Woolf archive at the University of Sussex includes significant deletions, notes to herself, and partially drafted passages that reveal important pieces of the puzzle not included in the published text. We are right to think that Woolf's final memoir is less inhibited and self-censoring than her earlier experiments in life-writing. But there were several subjects she clearly wanted to deal with that she could not yet manage to include even here: for example, her mental breakdowns; her sense that the idolized Thoby was in league with the repressive males in the family; the causes of her mother's death. Her first mental illness is described in clinical detail in one of the drafts but not included in the last surviving version. Her mother's death, coming in the "amorphous time" of her adolescence, "brought on, naturally, my first 'breakdown'. It was found that I had a pulse that raced. It beat so quick I could hardly bear it. No lessons, no excitement: open air, simple life. So I lived the two years between my mother's death and Stella's in a state of physical distress." In fact the whole rich and complex subject of her illnesses does not appear in her memoirs, though nothing would have more perfectly illustrated the connections between "the body and the mind" that interested her so much. 29 And although there is a long section about Thoby in Moments of Being (MOB, 136-40), it is essentially uncritical and valedictory in tone. But some of the Sussex manuscripts suggest a more complex response to be developed: "His authority. His natural rule . . . . Father's pride in him. Kings of men. . . . His manliness. . . . Relation to father. To George. Men dont mind these things (of G. staying or going)." 30 These hints reveal a critical perspective on this male inheritor or budding patriarch that is not developed in "A Sketch of the Past." It is in effect self-censored. So is an accusatory section about the causes of her mother's death. In this manuscript passage, Woolf recounts Stella's "doglike devotion to my mother: her perpetual worry about her health . . . It was not foolish; for during those years, the strain must have been very great; and the illness from which she died, came no doubt from the incessant activity—the perpetual hurry [?reading uncertain], looking after, doing too much. Stella must have feared what was the truth—my mother was worn out, I daresay unnecessarily—so that when she fell ill, her heart failed." 31 No account of Julia's final illness so squarely linking it to her exhausting domestic labor appears in the published draft. Though one can only speculate on why this might be so, the reflex reticence of the Stephen family memoir may have survived, even in Woolf's revisionist account.
The truth is that we do not know exactly what in these notes and
drafts would have been developed or cut in the final version Woolf
envisioned. Nor are there any indications of a teleology, of where
the manuscript was headed and how it might end. It is all in flux, and
Woolf's last diary entries on the subject make it clear how dissatisfied
she was with the version that survives and yet how confident she seemed
that she could make of it, finally, a work to stand with the others she
had completed. "Then dipped into my memoirs," reads one of them; "too
circuitous & unrelated: too many splutters: as it stands. A real
life has no crisis: hence nothing to tighten. It must lack centre. It
must amble on. All the same, I can weave a very thick pattern, one of
these days, out of that pattern of detail"(DOVW, 5:335, 1 November
1940). Her words suggest that she was trying to invent a narrative form
that fused the random and accidental "pattern" of real life with the more
consciously constructed "pattern" of a work of art. Her wide reading of,
and many attempts to write, family memoirs had given her a sharp sense of
the difficulties and opportunities the form offered. And the long Stephen
tradition of producing them was worth carrying on if it could be radically
altered. That revision was a lifelong undertaking, far from completed at
the time of Woolf's death. There would never be a new master narrative,
in part because of her distrust of the very concept. But the discoveries
along the way—of unexplored subjects, of new methods, of the layered
nature of "the self"—had taken her far beyond the family archive,
including her own earliest attempts to contribute to it. Unfinished as it
is, Woolf's career-long experiment in autobiographical narrative might
serve later generations of writers who understood that this relatively
new literary form is rich in opportunities. Her interrupted life history,
even in its messy, permanently fragmented state, constitutes a legacy
of enduring interest to readers well beyond the particular family in
which it had its birth.
Alex Zwerdling is the author of Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London and Virginia Woolf and the Real World . His essay is part of a projected book on the roots of the contemporary memoir. He recently retired from Berkeley.
I would like to thank my colleague Elizabeth Abel for calling this particular parallel to my attention, and for her unfailingly helpful suggestions for the revision of this essay.
1. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth, 1975-80), 6:453, 24 December 1940. Hereafter abbreviated as LOVW.
2. Hyde Park Gate News, British Library Additional MSS 70725 and 70726; hereafter abbreviated as HPGN. Quotations from this and other manuscript sources are published by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, second edition, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985); hereafter abbreviated as MOB.
3. Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 281.
4. Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
5. Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 16, 126. See also Sidonie Smith's interpretation of Woolf's narrator in "A Sketch of the Past" as a "communalized subjectivity" in her Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 100. Jeanne Costello presents a more critical view of gendered identity in "Taking the 'Woman' Out of Women's Autobiography: The Perils and Potentials of Theorizing Female Subjectivities," diacritics 21 (summer-fall 1991): 124-34.
6. Avrom Fleishman, res of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 464.
7. Daniel Albright, "Virginia Woolf as Autobiographer," Kenyon Review 6 (fall 1984): 1.
8. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1977-84), 5: 331, 332, 20 and 22 October 1940; hereafter abbreviated as DOVW.
9. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996; New York: Vintage, 1999), 19. Hereafter abbreviated as VW.
10. For Woolf's use of the earlier Stephen memoirs, see Christopher C. Dahl, "Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being and Autobiographical Tradition in the Stephen Family," Journal of Modern Literature 10 : 175-96.
11. James Stephen, The Memoirs of James Stephen Written by Himself for the Use of His Children, ed. Merle M. Bevington (London: Hogarth, 1954). Hereafter abbreviated as TMOJS.
12. Leslie Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977); hereafter abbreviated as SLSMB. Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (London: Smith Elder, 1895).
13. Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 474; hereafter abbreviated as LLLS.
14. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London: Hogarth, 1964); Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth, 1967); The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969 (London: Hogarth, 1969).
15. Vanessa Bell, Notes on Virginia's Childhood: A Memoir, ed. Richard J. Schaubeck, Jr. (New York: Frank Hallman, 1974), reprinted in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 331-35; hereafter abbreviated as ABGR. Frances Spalding quotes extensively from the unpublished memoirs in her Vanessa Bell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).
16. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, revised edition (London: Pimlico, 1996); hereafter abbreviated as VWAB; Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984).
17. Panthea Reid offers a detailed account of the newspaper in her Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29-36. She sees Virginia Stephen as the presiding genius, noting that an identification of her as "Editor" is crossed out and replaced by "Author"; she also records that Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell saw Vanessa and Thoby Stephen as major forces in its creation (see Art and Affection, 30, 483, n.39). Vanessa herself claims that "Virginia wrote most of it" (see Vanessa Bell in ABGR, 335).
18. For "A Cockney's Farming Experiences" and "The Experiences of a Pater-familias," see A Cockney's Farming Experiences, ed. Suzanne Henig (San Diego: State University Press, 1972).
19. Virginia Woolf, "The Patron and the Crocus," in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 4:214, 212.
20. Hermione Lee notes the link to the "patriarchal tradition of the autobiography written as a letter to one's children" and calls attention to the difficult fit between that form and Woolf's critique of patriarchy (VW, 18).
21. Now at the University of Sussex: manuscript MH/A.6. This and other Woolf manuscripts hereafter abbreviated as MH are among the Monks House Papers, Special Collections, University of Sussex Library.
22. The classic account of the Club's founding is in Leonard Woolf's Downhill All the Way, 114. For its gradual expansion to include the next generation, see Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1991), 298-99.
23. Elizabeth French Boyd, Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), 111.
24. Jeanne Schulkind, "Introduction," in MOB, 12. A 1933 Memoir Club contribution that has apparently not survived, an account of the five years between Vanessa's marriage and Virginia's own, would have partially filled out the chronological pattern. See DOVW, 4: 170, 180 n.12, 184.
25. John Maynard Keynes, "My Early Beliefs," in his Two Memoirs (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 97, 99, 100. This essay appears on pages 78-103.
26. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1940).
27. On Woolf's methodological self-awareness in "A Sketch of the Past," see Panthea Reid Broughton, "The Attenuated Self and Meta-Memoir," Review 10 : 125-36.
28. James Joyce, "Epiphanies," in Poems and Shorter Writings, eds. Richard Ellmann, A Walton Litz and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber, 1991), 155-200.
29. Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," draft MH/A.5c, ts 5.
30. Virginia Woolf, Outline for "the HPG [Hyde Park Gate] chapter," draft MH/A.13a, ts 2; Woolf's ellipses.
31. Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," draft MH/A.5b, ts 3. Such transgressive thoughts, though censored here, have of course been given voice in Woolf's fiction, for example in Lily Briscoe's outraged sense of Mrs. Ramsay's death: "Giving, giving, giving, she had died": Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1967), 232. The myriad connections (and distinctions) between Woolf's autobiographical and fictional writing remains a rich but separate subject, far too complex to develop here.
"What is to be gained, someone will surely ask, by having a Hottentot sing into the phonograph, then taking this dubious work of art and dissecting it with a tonometer and a metronome into its atomic parts?"1 In his 1905 address "The Problems of Comparative Musicology," presented to the International Society for Musicology in Vienna, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel reframed what was already an old question in strikingly new terms. By the turn of the century, the Western fascination with non-Western music had an extensive history, documented in numerous accounts by travelers, missionaries, merchants, and scientists. 2 These written accounts remind us that the unexpected component of Hornbostel's experiment was not the Hottentot, but the phonograph. The study of music had previously relied on source criticism, texts including hand-written scores and published manuscripts, whereas comparative musicology—a precursor to ethnomusicology—would become the first discipline based on sound recordings. 3 Though Edison's "talking machine" commonly denoted pleasure, leisure, entertainment, and consumption, this device would now serve to establish the empirical basis for a comparative science of music. Thus the phonograph lured a new generation of scientists to revisit a familiar topos, the "primitive," embodied by the Hottentot.
Hornbostel phrased his question as a joke for an audience presumably familiar with the re of Saartjie Baartman, a San woman who was exhibited in the early nineteenth century as the "Hottentot Venus." Her stage name itself was intended ironically, for, as Bernth Lindfors explains, "in physique she little resembled any European notion of classic beauty. Like many San women, she had steatopygia, a greatly enlarged rump, which appears to have been the single feature of her anatomy sensational enough to bring out crowds to see her." 4 Spectators in London, where Baartman was displayed from 1810 to 1811, described her performance as a kind of animal act, invoking and thereby reinforcing the idea of a biological continuum between humans and animals that organized her stage performance. 5 The French naturalist Georges Cuvier conferred scientific authority upon this idea by comparing Baartman's physique to that of an orangutan. In this instance, as Sander Gilman has shown, what was deemed extraordinary corporeality implied racial and sexual degeneracy. 6 When Baartman died in 1815, her body parts were dissected, dipped in wax, and exhibited at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. From the London stage to the Paris museum, the Hottentot Venus confirms that human displays occupied a tenuous space between the embodied and the disembodied, the living and the dead. 7
Hornbostel proposed a new approach to this re, one that simultaneously inverted certain conventions of her stage performance and elaborated the logic of anatomical display. Rather than exhibit the Hottentot's physicality, he recorded her music, preserved it in wax, and dissected her song into its minutest parts. The phonograph offered a means of hearing, examining, and representing the primitive in a new mode of disembodiment, as a sound recording. Moreover, its capacity to inscribe sound in a permanent and reproducible form—a wax cylinder or phonogram—granted access to an acoustic realm that had previously resisted perception.
This attempt to explore the imperceptible world by mechanical means was one of many in the late nineteenth century. The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey had already used a battery of graphic, photographic, and cinematographic devices for reproducing what the eye could not see, recording the instantaneous movements of physical functions such as muscle contractions, and analyzing their changes over time. 8 Hornbostel distinguished his project from Marey's in two important ways: first, by his use of sound technology, and second, by his preoccupation with the so-called primitive. This second point of distinction also led Hornbostel, unlike Marey, to plot temporal change along an evolutionary axis, charting the morphological and historical transformations of music across the sweep of time and space. Even while scrutinizing the tiniest fractions of a moment, as had Marey, Hornbostel imagined himself traversing extended intervals of time: "We wish to uncover the darkest and most distant past, to peel off the timeless and the elemental from the fullness of the present; in other words, we want to understand the evolution and the aesthetic foundation of music" ("PM," 56). This programmatic statement inadvertently evokes the experience of time at the cusp of the twentieth century—an experience that the phonograph and the cinema helped transform. These inventions, as the historian Stephen Kern has shown, "brought the past into the present more than ever before," thereby expanding the present and giving it density. 9 The thickened present offered Hornbostel a uniquely modern terrain for excavating the primitive past, and the phonograph served as his requisite tool for digging. By means of recording, he sought to extract from the Hottentot's song "the primal origins of music" (die Uranfänge der Musik). 10
If the Hottentot Venus remains a familiar icon, the sound of her voice has faded from memory. As modernists, our shared interest in the visual has led us to overlook the historical impact of a discipline, indeed a discourse, based on and dedicated to the preservation of sound. 11 Yet this phenomenon should be of interest to us, not only because it emphasizes the specificity of sound (which reminds us that problems of representing evolution are not restricted to vision), but also because it raises new questions about the formation of scientific discourse in the context of modern technology. This essay investigates the role of phonography in the nascent discipline of comparative musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). 12 In particular, it demonstrates how phonography could be imagined and employed as a discursive technique for rendering evolution audible—a technique, that is, for dissecting "primitive" songs and rebuilding them into evolutionary narratives. Sound technology helped transform music into information that could be used and distributed in a variety of ways. This essay therefore explores how listening becomes a scientific pursuit.
In examining the initial experiments of Hornbostel and his colleagues, we access what Bruno Latour calls "science in action," in this case, the making of ethnomusicology before the "field" even existed. 13 We gain too a more nuanced understanding of how scientists shape their practice retroactively according to their use of new tools and techniques. Comparative musicologists found their own voice by experimenting with the phonograph and its popular discourse. Phonography helped create the necessary conditions for the ascent of comparative musicology, even while broadcasting the ostensible decline of that discipline's unique object of study, the loss of "original" music. By appropriating and modifying phonography for the purpose of conducting experimental research, comparative musicology reorganized scientific modes of representation; more importantly, though, it spoke on behalf of an entirely new principle of not seeing science—but hearing it. As I argue, Hornbostel and his colleagues represented their object of study as well as their ideas about it in acoustic terms, as a form of phonographic discourse. Today, if not in turn-of-the-century Germany, what was once a loud and audible fact threatens to fall on deaf ears. There was a moment when the ear had a purchase that the eye did not. As modernists, we need to listen to the sound of evolution: that of our own. Whether we think of ourselves as living in the information age or under the sign of globalization, the problems we confront in using new technologies to stake out interdisciplinary areas of scholarship are still linked to "the problems of comparative musicology" that Hornbostel addressed nearly a century ago.
In his Vienna lecture of 1905, Hornbostel spoke as the newly appointed director of the Berlin Phonogram Archive (das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv). 14 Founded in 1900 by Carl Stumpf, the archive was initially housed in the Psychology Institute, which Stumpf directed, at the Berlin University. A private institution funded largely by Hornbostel's estate and the few donations he and Stumpf could solicit, the phonogram archive was the first of its kind in Germany, although not the first in the world. In 1899 Sigmund Exner had established the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (das Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften) in Vienna. A scant year later, presumably in response to its new competition, Exner would assert: "The collection of musical performances of savage peoples may prove to be especially fruitful for a comparative musicology, which would probably be made possible in this way." 15 Nevertheless, he set a Eurocentric agenda for the Vienna archive, concentrating on European languages and dialects, Western music, and on the voices of famous personalities, in that order of priority. 16 Thus the Berlin Phonogram Archive made a name for itself by specializing in the collection of "exotic melodies" (exotische Melodien).
Stumpf and Hornbostel would later be recognized as the "founding fathers" of the so-called Berlin School of Comparative Musicology, but the historiographical emphasis on fathers and schools misses the point. On one level, it locates Stumpf and his assistants retrospectively in a disciplinary position that they never occupied. None had chairs in comparative musicology (or for that matter in musicology). Trained in philosophy, Stumpf held posts in psychology at Würzburg, Prague, Halle, and Munich, where he specialized in "psychoacoustics," before landing at the Berlin University. His first full-time assistant in the phonogram archive, Otto Abraham, was a successful Berlin physician, while Hornbostel earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna. 17 Each scholar initially worked outside of the boundaries that presumably circumscribed comparative musicology. Their peripheral position urges us to treat this project as interdisciplinary from the outset. Indeed, the question that Hornbostel and his coworkers asked of their object was "inextricably tied to the most general questions of musical history, ethnography, and psychology; its solution could only be approached through the cooperation of these sciences" ("BPM," 225).
On another level, school-driven approaches to comparative musicology give short shrift to the sound archive as a "hearing institution" (or Höranstalt), as Hornbostel would call it. Mark Sandberg's analysis of the folk museum and the cinema as "institutions of the visible" is here instructive, emphasizing as it does the notion of "the institution as discursive formation" in order to elicit the historical as well as the metaphorical links between seemingly disparate visual attractions. 18 An analogous accent on the phonograph and the sound archive as "institutions of the audible" not only amplifies their discursive cross talk; it also demonstrates how they participated together in a larger economy of circulation. 19
In 1908, when the Berlin Phonogram Archive had collected nearly one thousand wax cylinders, Stumpf enumerated the various sources from which they derived:
They have come, first, from our own recordings of occasional performances by exotic guests in the German Imperial capital; second, from recordings made by traveling researchers, many of whom we equipped with phonographs and instructions; third, from the exchange of copies with other archives abroad; and fourth, from donations by the large phonographic companies (Deutsche Grammophon, Favorit, Beka Records), which produce nearly flawless recordings in the farthest reaches of the world for commercial purposes. 20
Each of these sources—exhibitions, travelers, archives, and record companies—represents but one channel in an emerging network of circulation based on the mobility of recorded sound. Taken together, they offer a glimpse of the vast infrastructure that Stumpf and his assistants required for their collection project. "This work is at once national and international [völkerverknüpfend], for it requires the cooperation of researchers from all civilized nations in the service of common knowledge." 21 By 1918, the archive would amass more than ten thousand recordings, making it the world's largest phonogram collection and the hub of a global exchange network. As Stumpf proclaimed a decade earlier, "If the center of such an undertaking is to exist anywhere in the world, then it must be in Berlin" ("BP," 83).
If the city was the inevitable location for an archive, it was also the primary site for conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork avant la lettre. The Berlin Phonogram Archive would rapidly expand its collections with the rise of professional fieldwork, to be sure. At the turn of the century, however, "traveling researchers" provided only one among many sources of acoustic evidence. Generally, Stumpf and his assistants did not themselves travel abroad. Between 1900 and 1912, they made their earliest and most important recordings not in the colonies—but in the metropolis. The music came to them. Live performances of non-Western music could be heard throughout Berlin, where they played a key role in the burgeoning industry of leisure and entertainment as stock features of cabaret programs, circus shows, and ethnographic exhibitions. Though the literature on nineteenth-century visual culture maintains an awkward silence on issues of sound, music did not merely supplement these entertainments. On the contrary, live performances of foreign music were in at least one respect more sensational than the visual displays that they accompanied: Europeans were already familiar with images of cultural difference, brought to them through paintings and illustrations, but ethnographic entertainments made the sounds of non-European life available to mass audiences for the very first time.
Equipped with a phonograph, Stumpf and his assistants visited many of the itinerant shows that came to Berlin. Here they recorded the music of performing troupes from Thailand , Japan (1901, 1909), India , Togo , Tunisia , the Hopi pueblo , Sri Lanka , Cameroon , Sudan , Samoa , Senegambia , Somalia , and northern Scandinavia , among other "exotic" locales. The Berlin records were labeled "archive recordings" (Archivaufnahmen), thus designating their status as the earliest collections in the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the material basis for its establishment. The recording sessions took place at several venues, including the Zoological Garden and the Circus Busch (where human and animal shows intermingled), the Central-Hotel and the Wintergarten (upper-end variety theaters), the Passage-Panoptikum and Castan's Panoptikum (wax museums), the Velodrome (a bicycle track that doubled as an outdoor exhibition site) and Luna Park (an amusement park on the outskirts of the city). 22 In Hornbostel's words, "the primal origins of music" were excavated in the fairgrounds of modern Berlin. Only from the viewpoint of the urban center could one construct a comparative taxonomy of cultures or an evolutionary history of origins. 23
German comparative musicology took its opening cue from British evolutionism. In 1885, Stumpf published the first German review of "Music Psychology in England," a survey of the various theories of music advanced by, among others, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. 24 Framing their work in terms of music psychology was admittedly problematic, for the distinctive claim of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory was, as Thomas Richards has shown, to calculate all things and arrange them in series of lineal development (IA, 48). At the same time, precisely because of its comprehensive scope, evolutionary theory had to explain the emergence of music or at least account for it in some way. Stumpf's review therefore concentrated on music's challenge to evolutionism (in the broadest sense) as an all-encompassing theory of origins. Though he surveyed a number of competing theories, Stumpf's use of Darwin is both important and indicative, for it served as a touchstone throughout his subsequent research and teaching. Darwin provides a key, that is, to Stumpf's own professional evolution as a comparative musicologist.
In The Descent of Man (1871, German translation 1875), Darwin initially designated the existence of music as an evolutionary conundrum: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed." 25 Music seemed to defy explanation not least of all because Darwin addressed it as a question of reproduction. To be sure, music could neither reproduce itself nor struggle for survival. "Nevertheless," wrote Stumpf, "Darwin knew what to do. His answer could be summarized as follows: 'In the beginning was love.'" 26 Darwin tried to resolve the predicament of music by inventing his own origin myth, one that referred back (tautologically) to the creative principle of descent. Music first appeared in the animal kingdom, he argued, where it functioned as a "primitive" form of sexual selection, homologous to the colorful plumage of a bird. That most birds "sing" rendered this homology doubly compelling, embodying and thereby naturalizing the link between the existence of music and the principle of sexual selection. "Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species. . . . Every one knows how much birds use their vocal organs as a means of courtship; and some species may likewise perform what may be called instrumental music" (DM, 875-6). By defining music as a kind of sexual lure, Darwin incorporated it into the more familiar laws of selection and inheritance that governed his own thesis of "descent by modification" first elaborated in The Origin of Species.
Darwin's theory of music rested on two assumptions that Stumpf found equally preposterous: namely, that birds could be seen as evolutionary ancestors of human beings, and that the "intermediate stages" (Zwischenstufen) between man and his closest relatives could also be found in music ("ME," 309). As Stumpf commented in a subsequent lecture: "The much sought-after human ape can at least be imagined, if not actually found," whereas a musical equivalent to the human ape or "missing link" was unimaginable. 27 In other words, a freak of nature may exist—indeed, it must for Darwin—but there was no such thing as a freak of music. Nevertheless, this shift in Stumpf's interest from the origins to the intermediate stages was entirely consistent with nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking. As Richards notes, "The project of Darwinian morphology . . . fixed its sights on the grey areas between forms. It sought to verify the existence of forms between forms" (IA, 55). Once these liminal spaces were identified, the gaps in an evolutionary sequence could be filled, and the sequence rendered continuous. As we shall see, Stumpf and his assistants would take up this project by locating the gaps between ancient, "primitive," and modern music, and extrapolating the forms that ostensibly connected them.
Stumpf's critique of Darwin provided him with an occasion for redefining music in the context of scientific positivism. What distinguished music from "the sounds emitted by animals," Stumpf argued, was its formal organization based on the interval, the variable difference in pitch between two sounds. This had a number of important consequences. First, the question of music became a specifically human one. The production and the enjoyment of fixed intervals presupposed the capacity for abstract thought, which was held to be uniquely human. Insofar as animal sounds resembled musical intervals, that resemblance was coincidental, a fortuitous expression of "the pleasure in sound as such, not the pleasure in musical intervals" ("ME," 312-3). Second, the search for the origins of music became synonymous with the search for the origins of musical intervals. "Somewhere, somehow, intervals must have been invented (even by the mysterious human ape, if you like), and thus began music" ("ME," 313-4). This new exploration would still involve identifying the existence of gaps between forms in order to fill them retrospectively, but the developmental sequence that it aimed to reconstruct would encompass only humans. The leap across the perceived divide between humans and animals was one that Stumpf himself refused to make. Moreover, rather than calculate all things that ever existed, he would concentrate on musical forms in particular. In so doing, Stumpf established a modified notion of evolution, one that maintained a strict separation between humans and animals. His appropriation of the discourse of evolution redefined its parameters for an exact science of music.
On the most basic level, however, Darwin's "lack of an empirical foundation" pointed to a gap in the discourse itself ("ME," 308). Stumpf was not alone in his objection. Throughout the 1870s, Germany's leading anthropologists, Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, made this same argument in their reviews of Darwin's books as well as in their famous dispute with Darwin's German popularizer, Ernst Haeckel. 28 Bastian and Virchow took this as grounds for discarding evolution entirely, focusing instead on the "elementary ideas" of humanity and the multiplicity of cultural forms that issued from those ideas. What makes Stumpf's 1885 review so remarkable, then, is that it begins with a typically German critique of British science, but arrives at an unexpected conclusion: Rather than dismiss Darwin's claims in toto, Stumpf would adopt the evolutionary assumption, while concentrating his own efforts on gathering "facts" about the origins of music in order to rectify the dearth of empirical research.
Countering Darwin's conjectures with hard evidence demanded wide-scale recording, collecting, and cataloging. It called, in other words, for the building of an archive. However Stumpf differed from anti-Darwinists in German anthropology, all agreed that the historical development of culture could be directly apprehended through the study of "primitive" peoples. As Darwin himself noted, "We see the musical faculties, which are not wholly deficient in any race, are capable of prompt and high development, for Hottentots and Negroes have become excellent musicians, although in their native countries they rarely practice anything that we should consider music" (DM, 878-9). Stumpf set out to find his own informants.
Here is a primal scene of comparative musicology: Nine Bella Coola Indians perform a "Cannibal Dance" before a long-pole lodge. They sing while beating drums, shaking rattles, and rhythmically stomping their feet. A group of scientists, seated before them, watches and listens. This scene—and its audience is part of the spectacle—would be repeated numerous times not in British Columbia, where the performers originated, but in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and other German cities. From 1885 to 1886, Carl Hagenbeck, the consummate showman of Imperial Germany, exhibited his latest troupe of ethnographic performers not only for urban crowds, but also for scientific experts. While the Bella Coola drew mixed reactions from commercial audiences (for whom they looked "too European"), for Germany's scientific elite they were sensational in every sense of the word. 29
In November of 1885, the troupe made a special appearance before the Institute for Geography at the University of Halle ( 1). Here, Stumpf intended to conduct his first experiment in the psychology of non-Western music, beginning the empirical research needed to support an evolutionary theory of music. 30 While his colleagues watched the performers, Stumpf was poised to transcribe the music by hand. He would fail. Stumpf describes his uneasy sense of drowning in the performance, "swimming" in a turbulent sea of unfamiliar sounds. 31 The spectacle wrenched this listener from his position of cool detachment, immersing him in a sensory riot. "As the actors grew more passionate," he remarks, "the musical intervals, whose arrangement is in many ways unfamiliar to our ears, became increasingly unintelligible" ("LBI," 406). Though Stumpf took Native American music seriously, its apparent inscrutability seemed to corroborate the absolute distinction between European "art music" (Tonkunst) and non-European "natural music" (natürliche Musik) that Eduard Hanslick had drawn in 1854: "When South Sea Islanders rattle wooden sticks rhythmically, while sounding out an incomprehensible howl [ein unfaßliches Geheul], that is natural music, because it is not music at all." 32 Stumpf's initial impression of the Bella Coola gave him no obvious reason to challenge this received idea; nor did his fragmentary transcriptions of their music offer any evidence to the contrary. 33 The ethnographic exhibition had issued in a disorienting barrage of sensory stimuli that initially resisted transcription. As a stenographer, Stumpf had tested his powers of hearing and notation, and failed on both accounts.
Yet the problems of aural perception and acoustic legibility only served to heighten the scientist's curiosity. After the performance, Stumpf gained permission from Hagenbeck's agents, Captain Johan Adrian Jacobsen and his brother Fillip, to have a private audience with one of the singers, Nuskilusta (see 1). 34 They spent four evenings together in the Institute, working for one to two hours at a time. While Nuskilusta rehearsed the troupe's various songs more than ten times each, Stumpf plodded ahead with his hand-written scores ("LBI," 407). These private recitals differed in important ways from the public exhibitions; as Stumpf noted in his report, "Nuskilusta stopped rattling a piece of wood in his hand when he noticed that it disturbed me" ("LBI," 409). Such modifications could, he acknowledged, potentially distort the results of his experiment. "Nuskilusta kept the tempo slow, perhaps out of consideration for me, but also because [the solo performance] lacked the same effect that was produced by the collective singing and dancing" ("LBI," 408). Problems of this kind could be resolved by what he defined as precise means of measurement: "At home, then, working from memory, I determined the tempo with a metronome, which one can do with great reliability" ("LBI," 408-9). During the day, he also attended the Bella Coola's public shows at a local beer garden, where he checked his revised transcriptions against the choral performances. 35 Hours of intensive listening began to pay off, he observed, for "now I could hear more than mere howling; I could hear the melodies just as Nuskilusta had sung them solo" ("LBI," 408; italics in original). The isolation and repetition of the individual singer's voice allowed Stumpf to train and adapt his aural response to the unfamiliar texture of Bella Coola music. If a melody could be picked out from the "howling," then the strict separation between European art music and natural music must be, Stumpf reasoned, at once willed and tenuous. "With respect to music, we should not speak too offhandedly of 'wild, uncultivated' peoples." 36
The blatant staginess of Hagenbeck's show did not undermine its "authenticity" for Stumpf. On the contrary, it shook his faith in travelogues and scientific studies that relied on acoustic evidence gathered abroad. 37 Claiming the authority of having "been there," travelers often presented full scores of non-European music, but consistently elided any mention of the methodological problems of transcription. While some had little or no training in musical notation, even the most gifted or meticulous stenographers, as travelers who were merely "passing through," had virtually no opportunity to double-check their work. Ironically, ethnographic exhibitions chipped away at the legitimacy of travelogues, poking holes in their facade of completeness.
For an expert in psychoacoustics, Stumpf's experiment confirmed that listening habits were not merely subjective, but culturally conditioned. Nineteenth-century audiences in Germany (and elsewhere) heard non-Western music in many and sometimes conflicting ways. Listeners such as Hanslick dismissed "natural music" as "not music at all"; on the opposite end of the spectrum, others failed to apprehend its status as non-Western. Stumpf and his assistants repeatedly cautioned against what they understood as the common tendency "to hear with European ears," that is, to treat non-European music as though it were based on familiar structures of harmony. 38 This tendency was of particular concern for the stenographer, whose predicament Stumpf described by way of a visual analogy:
When one leafs through old, illustrated travelogues, one is amazed at the Europeanized facial features of "savages," as they used to be called (despite the exaggerated family resemblance to Europeans). It was simply not possible for draftsmen to see objectively; and, for all of their naturalism, it remains impossible for them to do so today. The pencil is guided not by the eye, but by the brain, in which the accustomed facial features leave a lasting impression. ["BP," 65-6]
The creation of residual images, he suggested, had an acoustic corollary in what we might call residual sounds, echoes of harmony that faintly ring in "European ears." If this penchant for hearing diatonically was an inadvertent effect of subjective perception, however, it was also a problem that one could correct. "To free oneself from such habits," Hornbostel stated in his 1905 report, "requires a special practice, a training ad hoc" ("PM," 50). Researchers would have to attune themselves (literally) to musical alterity, while casting away more familiar ways of listening. Insofar as aural training depended not on source criticism (e.g., musical transcription), but on extensive exposure to live music, it also required an unprecedented degree of access to non-European peoples. 39 Around 1900, access and availability provided a rationale for making repeated visits to local, urban entertainments, where scientists could simultaneously recalibrate their sense of hearing and develop a corresponding method of "objective" representation ("TMS," 170).
Rather than speculate on the significance of Bella Coola songs, Stumpf set out to transcribe them: "It was our intention to provide only phonographic reproductions of the audible [phonographische Nachbildungen des Gehörten], so to speak, not theoretical observations" ("LBI," 424). In this instance, "phonographic reproductions" alluded not to Edison's talking machine (which Stumpf had yet to employ), but to the idea of nonarbitrary writing, or "phonography," as it was understood in the mid-nineteenth century. As James Lastra notes, "the very term 'phonography' initially referred to a stenographic system developed by Isaac Pitman in 1837, which, by transcribing sounds instead of words, was expected to offer a more direct, almost analogical form of writing." 40 Though Stumpf would use a conventional form of musical notation, Pitman's system appealed to him as an ideal mode of acoustic representation and shaped his own discourse on non-Western music. The search for an objective means of recording, unmediated by the presence of the stenographer, would propel Stumpf throughout his career.
The results of this first experiment augured well for the success of future research. The ethnographic exhibition provided ample resources for analyzing the rhythmic organization and melodic texture of Bella Coola music. Stumpf concluded that Nuskilusta employed a coherent "tone system" based on a five-step musical scale, which "must have been the result of a cultural development [eine geistige Entwicklung]." Not only did this suggest that the Bella Coola possessed a concept of musical intervals—a claim, as we have seen, that supported his critique of Darwin. In addition to its manifest importance for music psychology, it led Stumpf to assert his project's ethnographic potential: "In time, such studies will also acquire anthropological significance, beyond their musicological value, inasmuch as they identify new traits [Kennzeichen] for establishing the relationship or interaction between different tribes" ("LBI," 405). Most importantly, this conclusion brought European and non-European music into calculable proximity. Radical new comparisons could now be made and even verified. One evening, after listening to Nuskilusta, Stumpf attended a recital of Bach's High Mass, where he experienced an epiphany indeed: Perhaps the "expansion" (Ausdehnung) of different evolutionary stages could be charted in terms of musical intervals, he proposed, by "measuring the distance between Bach and Nuskilusta" ("LBI," 426). Thus Stumpf imagined a much larger and more ambitious project, an evolutionary science of music.
This evolutionary imaginary, it must be stressed, was entirely a function of spectatorship, for Hagenbeck's display made no attempt to construe evolution visually. On the contrary, the Bella Coola show, like so many of Hagenbeck's ethnographic exhibitions, was modeled on the variety program, with its "montage" of dance numbers, magic acts, and musical performances. Rather than organize human displays as visual corollaries of Darwinian narratives, Hagenbeck choreographed a diverse series of kinetic and multisensory attractions. He further distinguished himself as an ethnographic showman by representing "typical" scenes of everyday life in foreign lands. In the context of urban entertainment, Hagenbeck's practice of hyperbolic collection—importing vast numbers of humans, animals, plants, objects, and entire buildings, all for the purpose of display—served mainly to render the exotic accessible to mass audiences. 41 At the same time, his insistence on the "authentic" and the "typical" appealed to an elite group of anthropologists (led by Bastian and Virchow), whose approval Hagenbeck needed in order to legitimate his own ethnographic enterprise. However the entrepreneur excelled at "managing" an entire network of discourses on the exotic, these discourses would exceed his control. A spectator such as Stumpf, who brought with him a different set of goals and expectations, would hear the performances as living evidence of evolution.
Stumpf's "first encounter" with the Bella Coola offers a preview of what it would take to render evolution audible with the aid of a phonograph (and a productive analogy to what would later be known as fieldwork). 42 It demonstrates, in particular, how listening functions as a scientific technique. In order to render the Bella Coola's music legible and comprehensible, Stumpf had to reduce the ensemble to a solo singer. Further, the props and stage settings of Hagenbeck's show—the elements that the impresario had used to create a convincing expression of exotic space and to immerse spectators in the depicted scene—were deliberately screened out of the private recitals. In their place, Stumpf constructed a new performance context, one specially designed for inscribing sounds in isolation. But which sounds counted as music, and which ones as noise? Distinguishing a melody from "mere howling" required still other acts of acoustic reduction and selection. On the one hand, noises that "disturbed" the stenographer (the shaking of rattles and stomping of feet) needed to be eliminated. On the other hand, the musical rudiments that intrigued him (melody, rhythm, and intonation) had to be identified, amplified, and repeated. Only by restaging the musical performance in its entirety and manipulating the terms of its occasion—now with the solo singer repeating particular notes or passages upon request—could the stenographer produce the effects of acoustic legibility and "objectivity" that he would claim for his transcriptions. Acoustic objectivity was therefore a function not of the distance between science and entertainment, but of the power to choreograph. As "participant observer," the scientist became a kind of impresario in his own right.
In 1887, Stumpf ran a similar experiment at Hagenbeck's Ceylon Exhibition in Berlin. Not until 1900, when he and his new assistants at the Psychology Institute equipped themselves with a phonograph, would they find a writing system that met the standards of a science committed to positivism. By that time, the crisis of legibility had acquired new meaning in the context of imperialism and mass culture. The expansion of the German empire, and particularly its acquisition of colonies between 1884 and 1900, posed an immediate threat to the existence of indigenous music. The question now was whether sound technology would preserve such music or, conversely, hasten its demise.
Early mass culture and new technology commonly promised to bring distant people and places closer together than ever before. 43 At the same time, the global logic of access and connectedness gave rise to new anxieties about the consequences of too much proximity. Throughout their writings, Stumpf and Hornbostel would take turns lamenting the "annihilation," "homogenization," and "modernization" of non-European music. They consistently emphasized two interrelated forces of transformation, namely, colonialism and circulation. In so doing, however, comparative musicologists assailed the infrastructure that made possible not only the ethnographic exhibition—their initial source of data—but also their own still nascent discipline.
Paradoxically, Stumpf and his assistants advocated the wide-scale collection of non-European music in reaction to imperialist expansion. "The more relentlessly European culture invades foreign parts of the earth and drives declining forms [of music] if not also their carriers to the brink of extinction, the more it is time to collect and study them" ("TMS," 167). The conquest of space rendered time of the essence. That was precisely the logic that Adolf Bastian had employed in his 1881 call for an ethnological museum in Berlin: "The existence of natural peoples is for us only ephemeral; that is, they exist for us only insofar as our knowledge of them and our relationships to them are concerned. The moment that they meet us, the angel of death is upon them. From then on, struck by the angel, they carry the seed of decline within them." 44 Bastian's apocalyptic vision of "first contact" invokes the notion of biological contagion; colonialism was the virus within the bloodstream of native peoples. 45 Thus Bastian and Stumpf each prescribed the antidote of immediate collection and preservation. They understood collection not as a protest against colonialism, but as a reflection of Germany's imperial power, a commitment to the stewardship of its colonies and resources. Imperial prestige and custodianship here meant, above all, funding and maintaining urban institutions, from the Royal Museum of Ethnology, which was established in 1886, to the Berlin Phonogram Archive. 46
Comparative musicologists reacted in equally paradoxical fashion against modern systems of circulation. In 1908, Stumpf predicted that music "will in the future belong to the indispensable signs that will inform us about contacts among the peoples and tribes of the earth—their relationships, migrations, and trade connections—provided that we do not wait until the expansion of world traffic [Weltverkehr] has obscured all of their characteristic differences" ("BP," 75-6). Reports from abroad seemed to verify what Stumpf had surmised in Berlin, where the networks of circulation had already transformed urban experience in tangible ways. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, for instance, Albert Schweitzer wrote a letter to Stumpf in which he described the scene in Gabon, Africa: "Motorboats are increasingly replacing rowboats, as the foreign trading posts prefer them. In the foreseeable future there will no longer be any day-long journeys by rowboat, with twenty men in a canoe standing one behind the other, singing in order to keep time in their rowing, i.e. end of the rowing song." 47 For Schweitzer it seemed that the motor of modernity would overpower the "natural rhythms" of native life, leaving in its wake traditional means of transportation and their corresponding forms of cultural expression. The doctor's letter not only confirmed Stumpf's own diagnosis; it conveyed urgency to comparative musicology as a salvage operation. As Hornbostel quipped in his Vienna lecture: "We must rescue what there is left to rescue, before the airship reaches the automobile and the electric speed-train, before we hear Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-É in all of Africa and The Beautiful Song of Little Cohn in the South Seas." 48 The last vestiges of "original" music had to be collected and preserved, he declared, before new technologies of transportation and communication delivered mass culture to the colonies.
As the sardonic references to popular Western music were meant to suggest, Hornbostel feared that the dissemination of gramophone records in the colonies would "contaminate" his data at the source. "The coming of Christianity spreads European church songs everywhere, the introduction of school lessons our folk songs, the colonial troops our military marches, and the gramophones of the colonials our worst popular hits. But what, we ask, gets lost along the way?" ("EM," 91). Part of the problem, he and his colleagues believed, was that "primitive peoples have a remarkable talent for imitation and assimilation." 49 This penchant for mimicry, so the argument ran, made colonized peoples especially susceptible to losing their own traditions. Paradoxically, then, non-European music had to be rescued from the people who created it. Imitation and assimilation represented more than a loss of "originality," in all senses of the word. They posed a threat to the order of things—the evolution of music—at precisely the moment when comparative musicologists began to chart it. Unless drastic measures were taken to preserve non-European music in its "original" form, went the logic, it would rapidly and irreversibly mutate beyond recognition. The solution was not simply to deploy one mobility system (sound technology) against others (planes, trains, and automobiles), for the circulation of "canned" music only exacerbated this crisis of originality. From the beginning, Emil Berliner's gramophone was primarily designed for playback rather than recording. Therefore, while sound technology ostensibly offered a solution, its prime instrument, the gramophone, promoted mimicry and in so doing threw "originality" back into question. The circulation of gramophone records in the colonies was simply too effective. In such a context, the Deutsche Grammophon Company's famous trademark, "The Recording Angel," represented no longer a modern form of transcendence, but in Bastian's terms a new "angel of death."
As key forms of technology and mass culture, the gramophone and the phonograph participated in the very crisis that comparative musicologists considered a threat to music's existence. In at once lamenting and requiring them, Stumpf and Hornbostel held deeply ambivalent attitudes toward modern techniques of circulation. These attitudes shaped their project in crucial ways, beginning with their choice of sound technology. If the gramophone potentially garbled the sound of evolution, how could the phonograph but do otherwise?
Unlike the gramophone, Edison's invention permitted every user to record sound as well as to reproduce it. In his 1878 article "The Phonograph and Its Future," Edison foresaw "the almost universal applicability of the [machine's] foundation principle, namely, the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will." 50 In comparative musicology—a context unavailable to Edison—the principle of recording and reproduction would indeed resound. On the most basic level, the phonograph's dual function enabled Hornbostel and his colleagues to distinguish conceptually between playback and recording: Whereas mass reproduction threatened to "homogenize" non-European music, recording promised to "fix" or "capture" that music in all its particularity. Thus phonography offered a unique means of preserving the alterity of "exotic melodies," which is to say, a means of constructing it technologically and discursively.
To understand how the phonograph could be mobilized "ethnographically," we must acknowledge its difference as a medium. In one sense, phonography had a greater impact on late-nineteenth-century audiences than photography, for the latter medium could be seen, as Mark Sandberg suggests, "as a refinement of realistic trends in painting and illustration, in which the displacement of the visually depicted object in space and time was a common enough phenomenon. But in phonography, the displacement of the acoustic world through recording technology was truly astounding and unprecedented." 51 To be sure, its novelty made Edison's invention a source of public fascination, if not an instant commercial success. 52 From 1878 through the late 1880s, Edison rented the earliest models of his talking machine to professional entertainers, who demonstrated its wonders at traveling shows and world's fairs. 53 Like Hagenbeck's ethnographic exhibition, Edison's invention teetered between science and sensation, and too, in order to be refunctionalized for ethnography, the phonograph, like the ethnographic exhibition, would have to be stripped of its sensational qualities. By the turn of the century, its novelty had waned, to be replaced by new modes of curiosity. In 1896, the inaugural issue of The Phonoscope would predicate its own novelty on the fact that its subject matter was now passé, and therefore interesting at a previously unimagined level:
The Talking Machines have long since passed the point of novelty, occupying today a foremost place among the standard inventions of this progressive age. . . . The curiosity of hearing a machine talk has given way to a more serious consideration, and today the general public is convinced of its great possibilities, and is prepared to welcome its entrance into practical utility in almost any sphere. The Phonograph has made its way into many institutions, where it is used for educational and scientific purposes. 54
Though the phonograph's social function had indeed undergone transformation, this claim to its universal acceptance was premature. Stumpf and Hornbostel still had to assure their audiences—spanning popular lectures, newspaper articles, and official correspondences—that they used the device as not a mass-cultural source of aesthetic pleasure, but a scientific instrument. 55 A German advertisement maintained as late as 1896 that "the best display object is and remains a good phonograph." 56 Just as the talking machine was leaving the fairground and entering the bourgeois household, where it would be domesticated as a piece of furniture, comparative musicologists tried to move it into the scientific laboratory.
Retooling the phonograph for the study of "exotic melodies" required a series of discursive maneuvers, for the talking machine was initially intended not for music, but the human voice. The late-nineteenth-century discourse on the phonograph revolved around the medium's claim to give voice to the dead. As Edison's coworker and publicist Edward H. Johnson famously stated, "A strip of indented paper travels through a little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren or posterity centuries hence hear us as plainly as if we were present. Speech has become, as it were, immortal." 57 The phonograph promised to overcome the ephemerality of the body for the benefit of future generations. Thus conceived, it functioned as a kind of time capsule, preserving the voices of famous individuals like Gladstone, Bismarck, and other "immortals." Vienna's Phonogram Archive intended, for instance, to "bottle up all the noise of the century" by securing "personal statements of distinguished men." 58 This fascination with speaking across generations extended into the domestic household, fulfilling Edison's prediction that the apparatus would become a unique family record: "For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of a family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph." 59 In 1900, The Phonoscope would concur: "Death has lost some of its sting since we are able to forever retain the voices of the dead." 60
This discourse on the phonograph deeply resonated with Stumpf and Hornbostel, who selectively modified its key tropes and inflected them ethnologically. Rather than concentrate on the individual voices of distinguished men or loved ones, comparative musicologists gathered the "collective" sounds of non-European music. In so doing, they employed the metonymic logic of ethnographic exhibition, where the individual body of the performer represented the larger, absent whole (or "people"). By virtue of metonymy, "voices of the dead" came to describe the songs of entire, allegedly vanishing, populations. "Unlike physics or literary history, archaeology or polar research," wrote Hornbostel, "studies whose object are so-called natural peoples cannot be put off for decades or even years. As we know, the last Athapaskan or the last Pueblo Indian will soon have followed the last of the Mohicans to the eternal hunting grounds" ("EM," 90-1). Music's ephemeral quality compounded the problem of studying non-Western peoples. Comparative musicology was thus endowed with a sense of mimetic urgency unmatched by anthropology. "The tangible products of non-European cultures are collected in ethnological museums, as completely as is possible today. But just as rapidly as these products disappear—indeed, more rapidly—word and sound fade away." 61 Hornbostel and his fellow archivists sought the advantages of phonography in order to rescue the doubly fugitive: the fleeting sounds of vanishing peoples.
In his 1885 essay "The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology," the German scholar Guido Adler explains the new discipline's analytical approach in archaeological terms: "When a work of art is under consideration, it must first of all be defined palaeologically. If it is not written in our notation, it must be transcribed. Already in this process significant criteria for determining the work's time of origin may be gained. Then its structural nature is examined." 62 The first step in this procedure is to establish the chronological origin of a musical piece, as a natural scientist would determine the age of a fossil record or a geological stratum. Adler goes on to describe each subsequent step in anatomical and evolutionary terms. "His style-critical method begins with an anatomical dissection of a work of art in order to ascertain its species, and his framing of stylistic laws can, in a sense, be equated with determining the laws of musical 'natural selection.'" 63 In his own programmatic statement on "The Problems of Comparative Musicology," Hornbostel studiously employs the metaphors of archaeology, anatomy, and evolution that Adler had used earlier. The comparative orientation itself was, as Hornbostel noted, a "general method" adapted from anatomy, zoology, and linguistics in order to create a new area of study. "The comparative method came late to musicology, because its object, in contrast to that of all other fields, had been relatively difficult to collect" ("PM," 41). That changed with the introduction of the phonograph. Now one could not merely collect non-Western music en masse, but "dissect" a particular song, "lay bare" its inner structure, compare it with that of other songs, and thereby extrapolate the morphological development of music around the world ("PM," 42, 56). In comparative musicology, the evolution of music would take shape in and take its shape from the act of recording. Its specific conration depended, however, upon the kind of narrative that Hornbostel and his colleagues sought to construct. Phonography allowed them to speak of a body of music, and to shape it discursively into various forms.
To speak of a body of music was, in this context, to assert its solidity. Recording technology granted new materiality to sound, allowing "exotic melodies" to be handled in Hornbostel's words as "tangible products." In so doing, phonography brought music into the realm of material culture. In acquiring the status of an object, non-Western music could be collected, transported, exchanged, and stored as never before. It seemed too, at least for a moment, that music itself would warrant—and indeed be capable of occupying—a space of display. In 1903, the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan proposed that the Royal Museum of Ethnology, where he served as head curator of the Africa and Oceania sections, install phonographs next to showcases of musical instruments. Recorded music, he claimed, should supplement visual displays, amplifying objects that would otherwise remain mute, and thereby enhancing the museum's sensory appeal to audiences. 64 Stumpf voiced the same idea in his 1908 plea for donations to the sound archive: "Without the help of the phonograph, we are left standing before the museum showcase, in which instruments are preserved silent as the grave, full of wonder but empty of understanding" ("BP," 67).  However much this idea may have fascinated the public, Stumpf's call for support went unheeded. In contrast to the ethnological museum, the phonogram archive was not dedicated to the exhibition of things; rather, it was a laboratory and a storehouse that had little to do with the public sphere and everything to do with the scientific community. 65 Even if recorded music were given a place in the museum (it was not), Luschan presumed that its content would immediately dissolve into the showcase, to be contained by the visual display of instruments (the center of attention). Only at the sound archive would the phonogram be handled as a material object in its own right.
The materiality of the phonogram consisted of grooves engraved in a wax cylinder. Edison's patented "hill-and-dale recording" technique inscribed sound vertically into the surface of a rotating cylinder, endowing it with depth as well as solidity. Scientific interest in phonographic inscriptions noted their indexical quality, the embodied relationship between the sound emitted and its material trace. Unlike earlier talking machines, such as P. T. Barnum's Euphonia, which simulated speech mechanically, the phonograph registered the physical impressions of sound vibrations. Rather than inscribe sound in terms of language or symbolic notation, its stylus etched lines and points into wax; that is, it did not translate, but transcribe. Edison's device was distinguished from other "writing systems," as Friedrich Kittler puts it, in that "only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning." 66 For Stumpf, the device offered a seemingly impartial method of gathering "raw data," unfiltered by "European ears" and unmediated by musical notation, thereby fulfilling the search for a nonarbitrary writing system he had begun in 1885.
By the same token, its indexical quality made the phonograph an ideal technique for recording the music of oral cultures in particular, for this music had never been set to writing. The absence of documentation had already served German anthropology as a key criterion for defining its object as "peoples without writing" (schriftlose Völker). 67 The history of oral cultures could not, of course, be found in written sources. Instead, anthropologists assumed it was embedded in the material traces, such as tribal artifacts, that "peoples without writing" did in fact produce. 68 Comparative musicologists made the same assumption of their own object of study. That some non-European cultures apparently had no system of musical notation only served to justify the discipline's initial emphasis on recording as opposed to source criticism, for the latter method (advocated by Adler) presupposed the availability of musical "compositions." 69 Sound technology rendered the history of non-Western music apprehensible not by supplying the missing manuscripts, but by producing a body of music that could be analyzed and measured as a physiological fact of the acoustic world. Stumpf and his assistants believed that evidence of evolution was hidden in the structure of "exotic melodies," which included—and depended upon—that of contemporary performances. A temporal medium par excellence, the phonograph offered a means of accessing the past through the sound of the present.
Abraham and Hornbostel correctly identified the phonograph's "special advantage" as its capacity to manipulate sound as a function of time. Upon playback, a record—indeed a single note—could be slowed down, sped up, and endlessly repeated; a fragment of music could thus be isolated, divided into its constituent parts, measured and analyzed ("BPM," 229). Retooled for the laboratory, the phonograph served as a kind of surgical instrument. Hornbostel made no bones about it: "By carefully segmenting and dissecting the melodic strand with a scalpel [Seziermesser]—some people fundamentally condemn such vivisection—we make the flow clot. The living event must be fixed as a motionless corpse, and only thus is it possible to recognize the now visible architecture of the whole." 70 To listen with the aid of a phonograph was to see a body of music, just as a doctor would observe a cadaver, splayed and flayed, its internal structure exposed. 71 Here was a technique for locating and extracting what Hornbostel called the primal origins of music. Controlling the flow of sound allowed him to examine it in depth. 72 As a result of recording, that is, the phonograph rendered musical performance available to other "physical-acoustic methods" such as the tonometer, a device that measured the frequency of an individual pitch in "cents" or hundredths of a semitone. In combining analogue and digital technologies (the phonograph and the tonometer, respectively), Abraham and Hornbostel demonstrated how recorded music could be quantified, calculated, and compared. This surgical operation made it possible to survey a body of music in its entirety, to identify resemblances and differences with other "exotic melodies," and thus to establish a discourse of comparative musicology—a discourse that extended beyond morphology to posit larger, cultural and historical connections.
For all its promise, the phonograph could not speak for itself. 73 Hornbostel and his fellow archivists amassed thousands of records, none of which articulated the interpretation of the music it contained. Once dissected, the body of music had to be reassembled discursively. Representing the evolution of music required comparative musicologists to reconre their object once again, now in terms of narrative. 74 As a "physical-acoustic method," phonography established an object solid enough to meet the demands of scientific positivism, yet malleable enough to substantiate a diversity of theoretical claims.
Stumpf's 1909 public lecture series The Origins of Music offers a case in point. In the first part, a reprise of his earlier article on British evolutionism, Stumpf offers up his own, characteristically "German" theory of origins. With a nod to Goethe's Faust, he proclaims: "In the beginning was the deed." Music began, in other words, with the creative act of sending signals (Signalgebung). In order to make this hypothesis, he posits the existence of "pre-historic humans" (Urmenschen). "How did they come to employ a fixed musical interval?" When a single voice failed to be heard, Stumpf speculated, many voices must have joined in, thereby amplifying the sound and inadvertently creating the first experience of consonance. While the chorus of voices presumably included a range of pitches, creating any number of possible combinations, only one combination produces an effect that could be taken for a single, unified tone: the octave. The original chorus must have noticed this apparent unity and eventually come to prefer it. Stumpf goes on to posit the stepwise development of other consonant intervals, beginning with the smallest and least complex, fourths and fifths, which he attributes to non-Western music in particular. "Even in civilized Europe one can observe that natural peoples produce fifths when they try to sing in unison." 75 To show how this theory plays out, Stumpf organized his subsequent lectures around a series of phonogram demonstrations, offering the public a rare chance to hear recordings from the Berlin Phonogram Archive. His introduction is worth quoting at length, for it complicates the evolutionary assumption on which his theory rested:
We begin the series with the most primitive songs that are available and known to us, those of the Vedda in Ceylon. We will order what follows, however, not according to the principle of progressive development. Instead, we will pursue a geographical trajectory from Ceylon eastward to the South Seas, then to America, traversing it from South to North, until we reach the Eskimos, and finally to Africa. Within the smaller, geographical areas we will often observe progress in melodic formation. Yet it is impossible to create a single, unambiguous series out of the collected musical achievements of humanity, for progress has taken many different directions. Conversely, we will discover more and more connections between geographically neighboring or ethnologically related peoples, and thereby gain a broad, coherent picture of musical practice. [AM, 107]
While organized as such for a popular audience, this "musical journey around the world" inadvertently demonstrates the archival aporia in representations of music's evolution (AM, 196). The archive embodies the dream of objectivity, which, by virtue of the multiplicity of sounds that it contains, resists any attempt to construct a single narrative of progress. Therefore, although Stumpf's theory of origins is predicated on the notion of lineal development, his phonogram demonstrations are organized geographically, illustrating that musical "progress" follows many and sometimes divergent paths. To plot these trajectories did not necessarily mean to construct a linear model of evolution (such as that posited by E. B. Tylor); in fact, evolutionary thought assumed various forms. 76 Stumpf's lecture thus made no claims to linearity, continuity, or completeness, even as it continued to emphasize evolution.