Jennifer Roth-Gordon

Forum on Transcription

Introduction Fifty years ago, in September 1964, the journal of a young Society for Ethnomusicology published the ‘Symposium on Transcription and Analysis: A Hukwe Song with Musical Bow’, a text that has since become a cornerstone within the ethnomusicological corpus. Drawn from a session organized by Nicholas M. England for SEM’s November 1963 annual conference, the Symposium was built from what England called the ‘devoted labors’ of Robert Garfias, Mieczyslaw Kolinski, George List, and Willard Rhodes, four key figures in the emerging discipline, each of whom contributed an idiosyncratic transcription of a performance by a San bow player named Kafulo that England had recorded in September 1959 in what is now northeastern Namibia. Charles Seeger served as the ‘Chairman-Moderator’ and provided a report that included a ‘synoptic view’ of the four transcriptions. [See Figure 1.] The Symposium stands as a monument to musical transcription – or what Seeger in his report calls, pertinently (though somewhat reductively), the ‘visual documentation of sound-recording’. It throws into relief perspectives that, fifty years on, are still relevant – almost axiomatically so – for scholars who produce and analyse transcriptions of musical and sonic events. Amongst these perspectives are the following: total accuracy is impossible (Garfias: ‘No system of transcription, mechanical or otherwise, can preserve all of a musical example accurately’); the sonic is recalcitrant to inscription (Rhodes: ‘I was keenly conscious of the minute variations of pitch, dynamics, and rhythm of both the bow and the voice, but I found them so small as to elude accurate notation with our present means’); a transcription can be full or partial (Kolinski: ‘[whether the recording] should be transcribed in extenso or whether it suffices to select a representative portion of it’); transcription is contingent (List: ‘In transcribing a musical fabric as complex as the one under consideration I should probably change my opinion concerning certain details on almost

Critical Whiteness Studies and the antiracist imagination

In their provocative contribution to the relatively new field of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), Ware and Back attempt to destabilise whiteness through an exploration of white people at racial borders. Rejecting racial categories outright, and any attempt to reconstruct or redefine them, the authors seek to shatter notions of racial purity. They draw on historical sources and contemporary interviews to explain how white people can successfully challenge not only racism but the very concept of race as well, through popular culture, practices of representation, and mass media. The result is an intriguing collection of case studies that helps peel back the multiple layers of whiteness. In Out of Whiteness, the authors successfully push us to understand whiteness as relational, situational, and constantly under construction as they follow it through different time periods, across national and local borders, and into diverse contexts. This journey into whiteness at the borders is at its most fulfilling when Ware and Back take up the topics of white antiracism and white supremacy. Ware’s own contributions to the volume highlight ambitious antiracist whites who have found creative ways to join the fight against white supremacy. She revisits the work of John Howard Griffin, whose book Black Like Me is the best-known example of cross-racial experimentation. Delving into this genre of racial curiosity, Ware explores how whites have engaged in a tradition of blurring racial borders in order to challenge white power and privilege. In the most inspiring chapter of the collection, ‘Mothers of Invention: Good Hearts, Intelligent Minds, and Subversive Acts’, Ware seeks to answer the famous question repeatedly asked of Malcolm X: ‘What can a sincere white person do?’ She sets out to document white traditions of resistance by compiling examples of cross-racial alliances in the histories of abolitionism and anticolonial struggle. Ware’s extended discussion of southern writer/activist Lillian Smith and her 1942 ‘Address to Intelligent White Southerners’ offers a heartfelt and pragmatic call to action for white antiracist activists today. Comparing Smith’s address to the advice of Malcolm X, Ware remains critical of white activism that upholds racial segregation: ‘When he exhorted white supporters to “work among your own kind,” in conjunction with but separately from black people, he reinforced the principle of segregation by color and undervalued the power of dialogue and social exchange between groups fighting the same enemy’ (159). Seeking