Dogs and Phonographs

Parallax ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20 Dogs and Phonographs Shane Butler To cite this article: Shane Butler (2020) Dogs and Phonographs, Parallax, 26:2, 151-162, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2020.1766744 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2020.1766744 Published online: 14 Oct 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 45 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tpar20 parallax, 2020, Vol. 26, No. 2, 151–162, Ecological Soundings https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2020.1766744 Dogs and Phonographs Shane Butler Let us begin by conjuring the ghost of a specific nonhuman listener: Kleinzach, the beloved dog of composer Jacques Offenbach, evidently named for the dwarf in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, ‘Klein Zaches, gennant Zinnober’, ‘Little Zaches, Called Cinnabar’. (Offenbach’s dog was a borzoi, or Russian wolfhound; his large size would have made his name even more absurd.1) As the ailing Offenbach struggled to finish his final opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, which includes a song about Kleinzach the dwarf, the composer is reported to have addressed his canine companion with these words: ‘Alas, poor Kleinzach, I’d give all I have if you and I could be at the first performance’.2 But it was not to be. Offenbach died in 1880, leaving unfinished the magnum opus by which he hoped principally to be remembered. Completed and modified by others, including the composer’s own son, the opera premiered in 1881, a year after Offenbach’s death. Whether anyone bothered to take Kleinzach to opening night is not recorded. By 1914 one could purchase the opera’s already famous ‘barcarolle’ (that is, a song based on those of Venetian gondoliers) from the Victor Talking Machine Company, with another dog (more on him later) on its label.3 But Kleinzach, by then, had joined his master in the ^ nuit d’amour’. We shall return to Kleinzach great vocal beyond: ‘Belle nuit, o later. Meanwhile, we should let him enjoy some hard-earned rest. Offenbach’s barcarolle, from the words of which I have just quoted, has proven to be one of opera’s most successful melodies: you have heard it even if you do not know that you have.4 It belongs to the opera’s third act and takes the form of a duet between Hoffmann’s Muse, disguised as his friend Nicklausse, and the Venetian courtesan Giulietta. In cahoots with the villainous Dapertutto, the latter offers Hoffmann her love, on the condition that he first surrender to her his own reflection in her mirror: Ecoute, et ne ris pas de moi. Ce que je veux de toi c’est la fid ele image qui reproduit tes traits, ton regard, ton visage, ce reflet que tu vois sur le mien se pencher. … [I]l peut se detacher de la glace polie pour venir tout entier dans mon coeur se cacher. Listen, and don’t laugh at me. What I want from you is your faithful image # 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group parallax 151 which reproduces your features, your look, your visage. the reflection that you see above me bend. … It can disengage itself from the polished glass to come and hide complete in my heart.5 Every time these words have been sung, some listener surely has smiled, hearing in them a winking, anachronistic riddle for the photograph – very much real in 1881, but yet to be invented at the century’s beginning, when the opera notionally is set. The irony would have been keener still for audiences of the mid-century play on which Offenbach’s libretto is based, performed in a Paris awash with daguerreotypes, ‘polished’ mirrors that trapped reflections that all manner of lovers held close to their hearts. Rather like Hoffmann, however, we have just fallen into a trap, believing too soon that we know the meaning of words that fall so enchantingly from the lips of a courtesan. Both the play and the libretto were based on actual tales by Hoffmann, with the key substitution of Hoffmann himself into the role of the protagonist. The source of the third act is the final episode of ‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’ (‘Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht’), written in 1814 and published in 1816.6 Many details are different, including a setting in Florence rather than Venice, but the story’s centerpiece remains the same, lending the episode the subtitle, ‘The Story of the Lost Reflection’. Already in Hoffmann’s original, Giuletta (in his version, her name lacks an i) urges her would-be lover, called Erasmus, ‘“Leave me your reflection, my beloved; it will be mine and will remain with me forever”’. Contemplating their shared image in the mirror, Erasmus protests, ‘“How can you keep my reflection? It is part of me. It springs out to meet me from every clear body of water or polished surface”’. Giuletta then ‘stretched out her arms longingly to the mirror. Erasmus saw his image step forward independent of his movements, glide into Giuletta’s arms, and disappear with her in a strange vapor’.7 What we might learn from Erasmus’s mistake – which becomes Hoffmann’s own in the play and opera – would be long to ponder. (The original story ends with him only beginning a journey around the world in search of his lost reflection.) But the lesson of our own hasty error about the relationship between technology and art is a fairly basic one. In a nutshell, new technologies have an uncanny habit of haunting us long before they are invented.8 Uncannily, I wrote this last sentence before Eyal Amiran reminded me that Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘The “Uncanny”’and Offenbach’s first act, which tells of Hoffmann’s love for an automaton who, at least when seen through specially designed spectacles, seems to be a woman of flesh and blood, were both inspired by the real-life Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’ (though Offenbach’s adaptation is considerably less grim than the original).9 Freud, to be clear, was more interested in the return of the repressed than in technological futures, though wider reading in Hoffmann reveals enticing kinships between the phonographic former, the automatic latter, and the drives behind both. (Fuller exploration of this enticing nexus would take us well beyond the bounds of this short essay.) Needless to say, erotic automata were no more Butler 152 than wishful forward thinking in Offenbach’s day – or Freud’s, soon to meet another robotic femme fatale in Fritz Lang’s 1927 moving picture, Metropolis – just as image-trapping glass had been for the real-life Hoffmann. Such wishes, nevertheless, were ancient ones: think of Pygmalion and his animated statue, or Narcissus and the pool whose reflection he tried in vain to still. It is Offenbach’s second act, however, that provides the opera’s real tour de force – so much so that the order of the second and third acts has often been switched for performance in order to allow the opera to end on an emotional and musical crescendo. The episode is based on Hoffmann’s story ‘Rat Krespel’, or ‘Councilor Krespel’, though its title is sometimes given in English as ‘The Cremona Violin’. Hoffmann’s original tells the story of Antonia, a young woman known to have a singing voice of incomparable beauty, who for mysterious reasons is the virtual prisoner of an older man, the eccentric but amiable Krespel, who forbids her to sing. The mystery is dispelled only at the end, when Antonia dies. Her mother, we learn, had been a famous singer but had died years before, and her father is none other than Krespel himself. Her own voice far surpassed that of her mother, but ‘an organic failure in the chest’ meant that any prolonged effort at singing would certainly be fatal, which leads to her acquiescence to her father’s prohibition. The basic plot is preserved in Offenbach’s opera, but new elements somewhat muddle things. Among other novelties, an opening conversation between Krespel and Antonia suggests that the latter has been told that an additional reason (or even the primary one) that she must not sing is that doing so will cause her father too much pain, because her voice exactly reproduces that of her dead mother: ANTONIA Ma mere s’etait en moi ranimee; mon coeur en chantant croyait l’ecouter. CRESPEL C’est la mon tourment. Ta mere cherie t’a legue sa voix, regrets superflus! Par toi je l’entends. Non … Non … je t’en prie. ANTONIA (tristement) Votre Antonia ne chantera plus! ANTONIA In me my mother lived again; my heart, while singing, fancied it heard her. KRESPEL There lies my torment. Thy dear mother left to thee her voice! Vain regrets! Through thee I hear her. No, no, I beg … parallax 153 ANTONIA (sadly) Your Antonia will sing no more.10 It would be all too easy to suppose that the new wrinkle of a vocal facsimile in the opera Offenbach left unfinished on his death in 1880 is nothing less than a ripple effect of the phonograph, invented by Edison in 1877 and almost invented (or, if you are a French patriot, simply invented) by the French poet Charles Cros slightly earlier that same year.11 But this seductive hypothesis is vitiated by the fact that Offenbach’s librettist, Jules Barbier, had evidently already introduced the change in the five-act stage play, also titled Les contes d’Hoffmann, that he and Michel Carre had debuted in 1851 and that provides the basis for his later libretto (which, furthermore, was originally drafted for another composer before 1877). One can perhaps attempt to salvage the suggestion by appeal, not to the phonograph itself, but to the various inventions that partly anticipated it, such as the ‘phonautograph’, patented in Paris in 1857, which transcribed sound as a line but could not reverse the process. But even this postdates Barbier and Carre’s play by several years. Indeed, any chicken-and-egg quest for origins takes us right back to Hoffmann’s original, which lacks this part of the story but includes another that Barbier discarded. Hoffmann’s Krespel collects violins, among which is one that, when played, makes a sound in which Antonia recognises something like her own voice: Scarcely had he drawn the first few notes from it than Antonia cried aloud with joy, ‘Why, that’s me! – now I shall sing again’. And, in truth, there was something remarkably striking about the clear, silvery, bell-like tones of the violin; they seemed to have been engendered in the human soul. Krespel’s heart was deeply moved; he played, too, better than ever. As he ran up and down the scale, playing bold passages with consummate power and expression, she clapped her hands together and cried with delight, ‘I did that well! I did that well’. From this time onwards her life was filled with peace and cheerfulness. She often said to the Councillor, ‘I should like to sing something, father’. Then Krespel would take his violin down from the wall and play her most beautiful songs, and her heart was glad and happy.12 In other words, the idea of a machine that replicates and substitutes for a human original (so much so that Krespel feels compelled to bury the violin with Antonia) has been in this tale from the start. But where does that leave us vis-a-vis (or oreille a oreille) Edison’s (or Cros’s) phonograph? There are, I would suggest, two basic ways in which we might go about writing a history of the phonograph that begins well before and extends well Butler 154 beyond this or that nineteenth-century machine. One we might call epistemic, to borrow a term from Foucauldian historiography. An epistemic perspective would detect an intensification of what we might call something like ‘phonographic desire’ beginning at least by the end of the eighteenth century, fueled by, among other factors, the poetic and musical preoccupations that converge in Hoffmann, for example. The intensification of this desire sets the stage for its realisation (and reification) in the phonograph proper. (One cannot help noticing that the timeline of this phonographic e piste me closely corresponds to that of the Foucauldian historical object par excellence, sexuality, punctuated by the invention of terms like ‘homosexual’ in the mid- to late nineteenth century, paralleled by phonoautographs, phonographs, and other similarly classicising coinages.) There is much to say for this epistemic view, which, broadly speaking, is that widely adopted by media theorists and media historians in the wake of Friedrich Kittler. Indeed, it is a view much in evidence in Kittler’s own exploration of phonographic technologies in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, even if his focus is primarily drawn to what comes after the emergence of the machine, and only partly to what came before. Nevertheless, I would argue that epistemic views must always be supplemented by wide-ranging surveys of the longue dure e. To illustrate this point somewhat hyperbolically, let us quickly take a very long view indeed, telescoping back, across the retrospectively constructed fictive continuity of the socalled classical tradition, to Ancient Greece, home to la belle He le ne (to invoke the title of another of Offenbach’s operas) and so many other characters destined for future careers on the operatic stage. Classical myth persistently haunts the history of “Western music” and of its associated technologies: think, to name just one frequent figure, of Echo. More specifically, the idea that a musical instrument can imitate the sound of the voice (human, superhuman, or semihuman) is at least as old as the the myth that the goddess Athena invented the aulos, the wind instrument that accompanied the sung parts of Greek tragedy, in order to replicate the wailing of the sisters of Medusa, after she was beheaded by Perseus.13 More broadly, one might recall the many ways in which Greek thought, most famously as expressed by Aristotle, predicated all art on an innate human capacity for mimesis. The phonograph, let us say, is a mimetic machine, but so too, for Aristotle, was the Greek theater. In the end, it just is not clear that the phonographic desires of the Ancient Greeks, which I have explored at length elsewhere,14 were any less intense than those of eighteenth-century Germans like Hoffmann – although, to give the epistemic view its due, it may not be a coincidence that Hoffmann’s contemporaries were extremely fond of styling themselves precisely as latter-day Greeks. With these longer perspectives in mind, the time has come to rouse our friend Kleinzach. To reward his good behaviour while our thoughts have been elsewhere, let’s take him to that great dog park in the sky, or perhaps the one in the Underworld’s Elysian Fields, where he can cavort with other parallax 155 similarly faithful canine listeners. His species, in fact, occupies a curiously privileged position in thought about the voice’s power. Anyone with an interest in the phonograph knows Nipper, for example, who stares perplexed into the amplifying cone of a gramophone in the famously adorable trademark for His Master’s Voice, which we briefly encountered before. But long before Nipper, there was Argos, who in Homer recognizes the voice of his master Odysseus after twenty years’ absence – and thereupon dies, content.15 Notice that both dogs are themselves phonographs of a sort, in that each has faithfully recorded ‘his master’s voice’ in his own canine memory. Argos, in fact, is a high-fidelity recorder: he appears at this point in the story in large part so that his recognition of Odysseus can contrast with the failure of the hero’s friends and family to do the same – until an old servant, bathing her long absent master, feels beneath her fingers a familiar scar. We make at least two mistakes, I would suggest, when we try to understand nineteenth century phonographs as the first technologies to record the human voice. One mistake regards the simple fact that writing itself had long been understood to be just such a technology, which is why the very name of the phonograph analogises its work to that of the pen. The second mistake regards the too easy assumption that the phonograph’s importance lies in the records it generates. For before a phonograph can transfer sound across time and space, it must first listen in the here and now. Listen carefully to early accounts of the new machine, and you will hear a rapid but unmistakable slippage between the sounds the phonograph makes and the sounds to which it has attended: This little instrument records the utterance of the human voice, and like a faithless confidante repeats every secret confided to it whenever requested to do so. It will talk, sing, whistle, cough, sneeze, or perform any other acoustic feat. With charming impartiality it will express itself in the divine strains of a lyric goddess, or use the startling vernacular of a street Arab.16 One may ‘express’ oneself with, let us say, versatility; ‘impartiality’ is instead the virtue of a listener. So too does the phonograph’s ‘faithless’ repetition depend precisely on faithful listening to ‘every secret’ in earshot. In other words, the phonograph itself models the very kind of promiscuous (and orientalising) listening it makes available to subsequent auditors. The record as such is elided, at least in the way in which this particular reviewer celebrates things: to listen to the phonograph is to eavesdrop on an ever-present world. And so the new machine raises, with sudden urgency, a question that long predates its invention and that applies just as well to unmediated listening as it does to vocal media both new and old: namely, what in the world should we really be listening to? Secrets? Songs? Sneezes? Streets? All of these? Or something else entirely? Amidst all this sonic multiplication, it is easy to miss that the reviewer narrows the phonograph’s attention to a single category of acoustical objects: ‘utterance of the human voice’. So too is Nipper’s attention directed to a Butler 156 human voice, even though the device at which he marvels could just as easily have barked out a canine greeting or threat, had it first listened to one. In time, of course, the phonograph would not entirely ignore ‘the great animal orchestra’, to borrow a title phrase from Bernie Krause.17 But let’s face it: the industry to which Nipper lent a logo would not make its millions off animal sounds, human coughs and sneezes, whispered secrets, or street talk at home or abroad. Regarding the last of these, one should perhaps note that artful oratory was instead an important if now somewhat forgotten commodity for the recording industry in its early decades. But it soon became clear where the real money lay: ‘in the divine strains of a lyric goddess’. Such a phrase takes us not just to the opera houses and concert halls of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but back to the Muses of Ancient Greece. Indeed, it takes us right back to Argos, whose story, once upon a time, would have reached the ears of a faithful audience from the resonant body of a traveling singer, accompanied by the lyre. This, of course, was well before the invention of that other famous phonograph, the written word, the widespread adoption of which by the Greeks, according to some scholars, was partly or even primarily motivated by a desire to record the songs of Homer. One way or another, it is no accident that the history of technologies for writing the voice, ancient and far more recent, is tangled in the history of the vocal arts. For both histories – which we might even go so far as to regard as a single history – are driven by questions like these: What is the voice, why does it move us, why may it sometimes hold us in its thrall, even making itself our ‘master’? Might these old dogs, therefore, be able to teach us some new tricks? With a little imagination, this canine crew may be said to anticipate several key insights of contemporary theorists of the voice. Argos, for example, directs our attention to the single, signature voice, just as Adriana Cavarero argues that each voice is ‘a unique voice that signifies nothing but itself’ and so embodies ‘the vital and unrepeatable uniqueness of every human being’.18 Nipper sides instead with Stephen Connor, who observes, ‘Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies’. Accordingly, ‘the fact that an unassigned voice must always imply a body means that it will always partly supply it as well’.19 And what of Kleinzach? His deepest lessons perhaps perished with his best friend. But let us imagine him listening patiently, day in, day out, sometimes late into the night. Let us go so far as to imagine that he was taken to the premier. The opera’s title character begins to sing of ‘a little monster called Kleinzach’, whose ‘legs went click-clack’. The chorus joins in: Clic clac! Clic clac! Clic clac! Clic clac! Voila, voila Kleinzach! Unable to control himself, the little monster in the audience barks. Has he simply recognised his own name? Or is it that his master had once delighted in trying out on him this very song? Those happy days were only a few months before – a far cry from the twenty years Argos had to wait to hear his parallax 157 master again. Kleinzach’s master has not really returned, you say? On the contrary, let us listen again: Krak! Krak! Krakerakrak! Das ist ja der Jack von Offenback! I fear I have just played a trick on you, gentle reader, for these lines come not from Offenbach himself but, rather, from an obscure farce written in 1870 by none other than Richard Wagner, mocking a style that, to Offenbach’s critics, sounded less suitable for an opera house than for a dancehall.20 (The actual can-can in his 1858 Orpheus in the Underworld was only the most obvious evidence they adduced to justify their scorn.) It seems quite possible that, in click-clacking Kleinzach, Offenbach echoes and embraces this very mockery and the phonographic creativity at which it was aimed. In any case, for friend or foe, and perhaps even for man or dog, Offenbach’s can-can style was and is instantly recognisable. And this musical signature, like so many others, does two seemingly opposite things. On the one hand, it reveals the way in which art can occupy and lavishly amplify what we might well be inclined to call, with Cavarero, ‘the vital and unrepeatable uniqueness of every human being’. On the other hand, it seemingly evacuates from the objects of our aural attention the very object to which we have just applied Cavarero’s phrase: the voice. Listening to Offenbach’s opera, we do not encounter one jot of sound from the composer’s own flesh (that is, from the body that is the seeming source of someone’s voice in ordinary conversation): what we hear as his unique sonic signature comes instead from violins and all the other instruments, including those embedded in the bodies of the performers on the stage. Furthermore, this ensemble gives us not merely sounds that the composer, in one way or another, ‘made’, but also sounds that he himself had heard – in the dancehalls of Paris or along the canals of Venice. ‘I hear Offenbach’. So Kleinzach might have thought when sounds reached his pricked ears signifying that his master was approaching the front door after a visit to the Op era, or perhaps to the physician’s. Or if that is too anthropomorphising, let us place the same words in the mind and mouth of a chambermaid set to look after the dog in her employer’s absence. For the purposes of this recognition, it would not much matter whether the identified sounds were spoken, sung, or sneezed – or even if they resided instead in the composer’s jaunty steps, in which too, with a little imagination, one could hear a bit of the can-can. The same sentence, however, could also be uttered by someone walking by the open doors of an opera house at a moment when one of the composer’s works was being rehearsed or performed. Nor would the sentence need to be any different if this flaneur were walking by the open window of an apartment in which the same music was being emitted instead by a phonograph or radio. ‘I hear Offenbach’, in other words, is a declaration one can comfortably make about an astonishing variety of sound objects. Not all are voices; neither are they all music. They are not even all human, unless we count the radio and phonograph as such, to say nothing of the violin. And yet we call all of them ‘Offenbach’.21 Butler 158 Why we do so, I would suggest by way of conclusion, is a question as old as Homer. That is to say, it is a question as old as the ascription of the extraordinary aesthetic ensemble that greeted the most ancient audiences of what we call the Iliad and the Odyssey to a single, blind poet who may never even have existed. Pressed, however, to give us a definitive answer to the question, ‘To whom are you listening?’, the most attentive members of that audience would probably have answered with the name neither of Homer, or of the singer in front of them, or of Achilles or Odysseus or any of the other characters Homer and his singers animated with their songs. Rather, they would had told us they were listening to the Muse, invoked (and envoiced) in the Iliad’s first line: ‘Sing, Muse, of the wrath … ’. This is why Plato, in the Ion, has Socrates compare poetic inspiration to a chain of magnets, in which Homer and his singers (Socrates’ interlocutor Ion is one of the latter) are only intermediate points in a line of force that originates with the gods: I do see, Ion, and in fact will proceed to show you what to my mind it betokens. As I just now have said, this gift you have of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine, impelling you like the power in the stone Euripides calls the magnet, which most call ‘stone of Heraclea’. This stone does not simply attract the iron rings, just by themselves: it also imparts to the rings a force enabling them to do the same thing as the stone itself, that is, to attract another ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed, quite a long one, of iron rings, suspended from one another. For all of them, however, their power depends upon that loadstone. Just so the Muse. She first makes men inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed, for the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence, not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems.22 If Plato’s view sounds like a quaintly ancient idea, then call to mind ‘the divine strains of a lyric goddess’ heard from the first phonographs, and from many since. One could argue, in fact, the phonograph simply shortens Plato’s chain, leaving intact the intuition that what we hear is simultaneously human and superhuman. Nor do things change much if our ‘phonograph’ (i.e., that which ‘writes the voice’) is simply a book, such as a copy of Homer, whether read aloud or merely ‘heard in our heads’. What we hear, one way or another, is still ‘music’, at least in the classical Greek sense, in which mousike comprises any and all arts over which the Muses (whence the name) preside, such as epic, the domain of the Muse Calliope. ‘Why are there nine Muses?’ asks classicist James Porter; his answer, in part, is that all art, regardless of the primary mode of expression that assigns it to this or that Muse, is fundamentally synesthetic, multi-media, and generically hybrid.23 ‘Homer’, ‘epic’, ‘Offenbach’ all comprise acoustical ensembles that we distinguish through complex forces of habit. For Kleinzach, a cynic parallax 159 might say, ‘Offenbach’ is simply the set of sounds that come from the man who feeds me and takes me for walks. But our own responses are not really much less Pavlovian: ‘Homer’ is what we have read with books with that name on the cover; ‘epic’ is what we were trained in school to recognise from its meter, or its heroic subject-matter, or some such thing; ‘Offenbach’, snarls Wagner, is something that sounds like this: ‘Krak! Krak! Krakerakrak!’ Not all of identifications are this reductive or petulant, but each must simplify in one way or another. If art, on its own terms, without any paratext or frame, were able to declare, uncontroversially, even something as simple as the identity of its artist, then art connoisseurs would not reguarly rip one another apart over the attribution of a newly discovered painting to this or that old master, for example. Identification is relatively straightforward only when it is re-cognition: ‘I again know who you are’. And even then we are not always entirely sure. Dogs, we suppose, are better at this than we are. Think of Argos, recognising Odysseus after all those many years. But what corresponding human behaviour is being modeled here, for the listener? As we already have noted, an ancient audience was primarily inclined to ‘recognize’ here ‘the divine strains of a lyric goddess’ – or, rather, of an epic one, though the fact that Homer’s poems were originally accompanied by the lyre reminds us just how confusing artistic categories have always been. Perhaps, indeed, the story of Argos provides not so much a lesson for the listener as an echo of the sometimes narcissistic thought-world of the artist, exclaiming, like Antonia at the sound of a violin resembling her own voice, ‘Why, that’s me!’ One way or another, such scenes are tangled in deep questions about human mediation and reproducibility. Do violins have voices? Is a poem a person? In other words, are our frequently stymied attempts to identify recorded sounds (who’s there?) merely one part of the far more remarkable leap of faith by which we assume that someone is there, even though we, like Nipper, cannot see them? It is into this timeless tale (or at least, this tale that begins even before the invention of writing, during the oral composition of ‘Homer’, if not earlier still) that texts and scores, instruments and orchestras, faithful dogs and ‘faithless’ phonographs must be inserted. Indeed, identifying the source of a sound is a survival skill of such obvious importance – friend or foe? predator or prey? in front of me or behind me? moving away or coming closer? – that we must suppose aspects of it to be ‘recorded’ (and replayed) by our DNA. This should not lead us to suppose that identification is sound’s raison d’etre, especially in art, but it does caution against assuming that the reception of music can really be free of the drive to identify. This remains true even if we attempt to segregate art proper from processes of identification we might be inclined to regard as external to artmaking itself, such as bibliography (who wrote what?), commerce (ticket sales, record sales, etc.), the arbitration of taste, and so on. Rather, it would be better to say that identification – successful or stymied – is part of the toolkit by which art commands our seemingly instinctive attention. It is, in other words, a very old trick, one that every new recording technology has quickly mastered. No Butler 160 less than ‘poor Kleinzach’, we too have been trained to listen. But to what exactly? I like Offenbach. On how many exceptionalisms does this sentence seem to depend? I train my human ears on the sounds of a single, named human – a famous artist, no less. But listen closer: I am hardly alone; my liking is not exclusively human (woof!); and the object of my listening is not anything as simple or singular as Offenbach, but, instead, the can-can his music reproduces, the singers whose bodies are not his own, the violins whose bodies are not human (whether or not they sound like Antonia), the acoustics of the opera house or recording studio, the record that is made of vinyl or electrons, the acoustics of the room in which I listen to it. What is this noisy ensemble? The Ancient Greeks called it music. To its composers they gave names like ‘Homer’ and ‘Orpheus’; its instruments comprised all the bodies the Muse made resonate, including that of the listener. Arguably we have yet to invent a more faithful way to listen. Voila, voila Kleinzach! 12 Notes 1 Faris, Jacques Offenbach, 192. Downes, Lure of Music, 172. Faris, Jacques Offenbach, 192, gives a slightly different version. 3 Offenbach, “Barcarolle – Tales of Hoffmann”. The barcarolle’s 6/8 meter mimics the gondolier’s stroke. 4 Offenbach borrowed the barcarolle’s music from the “Elves’ Song” of an earlier, unsuccessful opera, Die Rheinnixen. 5 Barbier and Offenbach, Les contes d’Hoffmann, 30. 6 Hoffmann, Best Tales of Hoffmann, xxii. 7 Ibid., 121–2. 8 As Sterne, Audible Past, 1, observes, “Many of the practices, ideas, and constructs associated with sound-reproduction technologies predated the machines themselves”. Such a view is broadly associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler, on whom see below. 9 Hoffmann, Best Tales, 183–214. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, 217–52. 10 Barbier and Offenbach, Les contes d’Hoffmann, 34. 11 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 21–2. 2 Hoffmann, Weird Tales, 30–1. Pindar, Pythian Odes, 12.11–21. 14 Butler, Ancient Phonograph. 15 Homer, Odyssey 17.290–327. 16 “The Phonograph”, 249d. Similar feats (including the transmission of coughs) were celebrated for the telephone, on which see Connor, Dumbstruck, 380–2. 17 Krause, Great Animal Orchestra. 18 Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 5, 7. For some cautions, however, see Butler, Ancient Phonograph, 17–18, and Pettman, Sonic Intimacy, 34–43. 19 Connor, Dumbstruck, 35–6. 20 Wagner, Eine Kapitulation, 44. 21 Compare, of course, Foucault, “What Is an Author?”. But I explore differences between Foucault’s “author-function” and what I instead call the “voice-function” in Butler, Ancient Phonograph, 75. 22 Plato, Ion 533c-e, trans. Lane Cooper, quoted from The Collected Dialogues, 219–20. 23 Porter, “Why Are There Nine Muses?”, 9–26. 13 Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). ORCID Shane Butler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4357-885X parallax 161 Bibliography Barbier, Jules, and Jacques Offenbach. Les contes d’Hoffmann (The tales of Hoffmann): Fantastic opera in four acts. Translated by Louis Bazin. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1908. Butler, Shane. The Ancient Phonograph. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Faris, Alexander. Jacques Offenbach. London: Faber & Faber, 1980. Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is an Author?’ In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 113–38. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The “Uncanny”.’ In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Hoffmann, E. T. A. The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1967. Hoffmann, E. T. W. [sic]. Weird Tales. Translated by J. T. Bealby. London: John C. Nimmo, 1885. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Offenbach, ‘Barcarolle – Tales of Hoffmann’, Maude Powell (violin), recorded 25 June 25 1914, Camden, NJ, Victor 64457, www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/ detail/id/3968/. ‘Phonograph, The’. Harper’s Weekly, March 30, 1878. Pettman, Dominic. Sonic Intimacy: Voices, Species, Technics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Porter, James I. ‘Why Are There Nine Muses?’ In Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves, 9–26. Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2013. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Wagner, Richard. ‘Eine Kapitulation: Lustspiel in antiker Manier.’ In Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 9:5–50. Lepizig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1873. Shane Butler is Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, 113 Gilman Hall, Baltimore, Maryland 21218. His recent work on sound includes a mongraph, The Ancient Phonograph (New York: Zone Books, 2015), and a volume co-edited with Sarah Nooter, Sound and the Ancient Senses (London: Routledge, 2019), in which his own chapter is on “Principles of Sound Reading” (233–55). Recent articles include “What Was the Voice?”, in Nina Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3–18. Email: shane.butler@jhu.edu Butler 162