Creatures of the Air

“Erudite and virtuosic, this beautifully written book changes our understanding of the European nineteenth century in significant ways by exploring how cultural reveries about atmosphere, breath, and air were allied to musical aesthetics, performance, and sound making. Davies’s work addresses environments and their impact on humans, the global transmission of cultural artifacts, and colonialism’s legacy. What emerges is no less than a seismic shift in our understanding of Western art music.” * Carolyn Abbate, Harvard University *
“With Creatures of the Air, Davies offers a sweeping, multicontinent analysis of air as a matrix for nineteenth-century European colonial genealogies of music, which he argues were fundamentally biopolitical and entangled with racial capitalism. ‘Music’—in contrast with earlier European paradigms like aria—emerges in Davies’s account as an artful sounding abstracted from its potentially dangerous source elements and environments. This extractivist impulse, he shows, required intensive management of sound production and built sound environs from Gabon to New York, Amazonia, and industrial Britain. Elegantly written and replete with fascinating case studies, Creatures of the Air makes a major contribution to ecomusicology, nineteenth-century cultural history, and European music studies, and it will undoubtedly be read and assigned for years to come.” * Olivia Bloechl, University of Pittsburgh *
“Creatures of the Air is also a history of things heard, touched, breathed, and felt. Piercing the nineteenth century’s vacuum-packed conception of music, Davies spins each self-contained chapter out of a network of sounding objects, from climate-controlled performance halls and bell jars to possessive spirits and wax cylinders. Linking them all is the airy realm of music, a field of (disavowed) materiality that is alternatively haunting and life-giving.” * Critical Inquiry *
"Davies’s voice wields a sophisticated blend of elegy, frustration, and spoof. Indeed, the text excels as an anthology of beautifully narrated “stories, all the way down”. . . . Creatures of the Air is at its best when upholding a historiography that is aware of how it constructs the “materials of the archive itself.” Readers will appreciate the assemblage of a “delicate trail” (to use Bruno Latour’s analogy) within chapters, and sometimes across them. This is a trail that we can traverse from person to person (family, friend, associate, loved and feared stranger), building, boat, instrument, diary, teaching manual, and so much more." * Journal of the American Musicological Society *
"Davies describes this book as 'an anthology of stories' . . . . Together the stories provide, very roughly, a particular view of 19th-century European music in light of its propagation through the 'Atlantic' world. The thematic driver is air, not air as metaphor or as dumb medium but air as music's reifying element. The perspective, global and environmental, calls into play a vast range of scholarly threads. . . . The book may become a classic, and should sit in every comprehensive music collection." * Choice *