It’s ironical that the man who conferred academic respectability on the art of song collecting, and on the science of its analysis, should have done so almost as an aside. For Franz Boas’s main claim to fame is as the father of American anthropology. But his life was long enough – 1858 to 1942 – to allow the pursuit of a remarkable range of intellectual objectives. To appreciate his musicological achievements, it helps to trace the serpentine journey by which he arrived at them, even though that journey may seem at times irrelevant to his musical work. If this chapter dwells heavily on his character, it’s because that character shaped his ideas.

He was brought up in the Prussian garrison town of Minden, where his father Meier was a textile merchant; his mother Sophie, who shared the utopian dream of Germany’s early Communists, was the dominant force in their assimilated Jewish household, imbuing in her children a love of learning, and of natural history in particular. Franz’s elder sister Toni became a professional pianist. He too learned the piano, but with humbler ambitions: ‘I want to learn the playing of music,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘only insofar as it allows me to appreciate it.’

Sophie had set up a Froebel kindergarten in which Franz was enrolled at four, where each pupil had to sow, water, and care for their own personal flower-bed. When he was six his favourite book was Robinson Crusoe, and although a sickly child he began to prepare himself for travels of his own: eating food he didn’t like to accustom himself to the imagined privations of Africa, and running in the snow to train for Arctic conditions.

As a teenager he immersed himself in mineralogy and the study of mosses, fungi, and ferns. ‘It became clear to me,’ he wrote, ‘that true science consists not in describing single plants, but in a knowledge of their structure and life, and in the comparison of all classes of plants with one another.’ When still in his teens he traced the geographical distribution of plants in the Minden region, and devised his own system of plant classification; dissatisfied with what he called ‘simple learning’, he strove to penetrate to the ‘fundamentals of things’.