Call for Dossier Articles: Transcription in Music Studies: Practices, Pragmatics, Pitfalls
Coordination
Dr. Chris Stover (Griffith University, Australia)
Dr. Paulo Tiné (State University of Campinas, Brazil)
“If human ears were able to perceive all of the acoustic contents of a musical utterance, and if the human mind could retain all of what had been perceived, then analysis of what is heard would be preferable. Reduction of music to notation on paper is at best imperfect, for either a type of notation must select from the acoustic phenomena those which the notator considers most essential, or it will be so complex that it itself will be too difficult to perceive.” (Nettl 1964, 98)
Transcription—rendering musical sounds into visual form—has been an important tool for many musicologists, music theorists, ethnomusicologists (Garfias 1964; Ellingson 1992), and practitioners (Berliner 1994; Tucker and Kernfield [2002] 2016). Issues around transcription have been debated in great detail (England et al. 1964; Stanyek et al. 2014; Rusch, Salley, and Stover 2016), including different orientations and rationales for transcribing (Seeger 1958; Austerlitz 2003), its representational or epistemological limits (List 1974; Dunaway 1984), ethical consideration around appropriateness and power (Winkler 1997; Agawu 2003), and much more. Some of these issues have involved the appropriateness of Western staff notation for music stemming from oral/aural traditions, and have proposed alternative visual systems (Koetting 1970; Hood 1982; Stewart 1982) or modifications of staff notation (Arom 1991). It seems clear that transcription, while for many a necessary tool for closely engaging musical details, brings with it many challenges and concerns.
For this special issue of Música Popular em Revista, we are soliciting articles on transcription and musical representation from all corners of music studies. We are especially interested in work that itself incorporates transcription in meaningful or even original ways, including approaches to transcription itself that extends the practice. We are also interested in work that challenges transcription along any of several fronts, including strategies that contest the apparent binary suggested in the citation of Nettl above and appeals to analytic methods that focus on aural experience rather than visual representation.
Some themes that might be considered:
- The limits of transcription - what is notation able to ‘capture’? what is its ‘remainder’ (Adorno 2000)?
- Ethics of transcription - when is it inappropriate to render musical sound into visual form? What kinds of visual representations are appropriate for what kinds of music?
- Politics of transcription – institutional capital and the possibility of de-centering Western notated-music forms and procedures (Agawu 2003).
- Navigating ‘descriptive’ versus ‘prescriptive’ orientations.
- Navigating ‘emic’ versus ‘etic’ approaches.
- The efficacy of staff notation versus other forms of visual representation.
- Creative or experimental approaches to transcription.
- Pedagogical implications of transcription.
- The relationship of transcription to individual and/or collective memory
SUBMITION LINK: Submissões | Música Popular em Revista
DEADLINE: 15th August 2024