About the project

This project focuses on the historical connection between musicology and the human–animal divide. Musicologists conventionally limit their inquiry to human music, but why does the discipline exclude animal song? Why do we understand music exclusively as a human art form? How does the conventional definition of “music” relate to our notion of the “human,” as opposed to the “animal”?

During the second half of the nineteenth century, while Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenged rigid distinctions between human and animal, musicology was developing into a human-centered discipline. At that time, the connection between music and humanity was highly contested, both in the natural sciences and in music scholarship. Yet in the early development of musicology, the discipline gradually established a firm distinction between human music and animal vocalizations. Through a historical discourse analysis, I investigate how founding musicologists like Edward Hanslick – appointed in 1870 as the first full professor in music history and aesthetics – defined autonomous music in opposition to functional animal song.

Both nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and musicology developed alongside the height of European colonial expansion, when human identity and difference also formed a central concern. The colonial discourse of cultural distinction shaped a Eurocentric musical hierarchy that, I suggest, also structured debates about the musical distinction between human and animal. By foregrounding this historical connection between evolutionary theory, colonial thought, the human–animal divide, and music, I examine how early musicology contributed to an underlying discourse of human–animal othering. Drawing on critical perspectives from human-animal studies, postcolonial studies, and the history of the humanities, this project challenges the conventionally accepted assumption that humans are musically distinct from other species.

About the researcher

From 2023 to 2025, I conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Göttingen (NWO Rubicon) on music and human–animal boundaries in twentieth-century popular culture. Articles from this project appeared in Textual Practice (on Orwell), Locus, and Music and the Moving Image (on Disney). This Vossius Fellowship enables me to begin investigating the historical development of the connection between music and human exceptionalism. In 2021, I completed my doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam on Edward Said’s music-related work. Based on this research, I edited Said’s posthumously published Said on Opera (2024) and wrote a monograph on Said, forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2027.