Sumanth Gopinath

Reich in blackface: Oh Dem Watermelons and Radical Minstrelsy in the 1960s

This essay undertakes an examination of Steve Reichs music for Robert Nelsons film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), which was originally conceived as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupes controversial production A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel of the same year. Reichs long-neglected soundtrack deserves reconsideration for its formative role in the development of the composers musical style and quasi-liberationist aesthetic at the time, for its participation within what I term the “minstrel avant-garde” in the Bay Area during the mid-1960s and the postmodern revival of blackface minstrelsy more generally, and as a reference point in reflecting upon Reichs professional and political trajectory since its composition.

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