Transcription as labor
Many who have reflected on their process of transcription have described it in terms of the labor involved. Peter Winkler recounts the time he invested in his transcriptions of Aretha Franklin: “The process of making transcriptions turned out to be far less straightforward than I had anticipated. It took hours to get a single phrase down; transcribing an entire record took days. Every time I listened to the music I found more problems with what I had written down” (Winkler 170). Tara Browner recalls: “It took a long time, it was arduous. And getting Finale [the popular music notation program] to do what I needed it to do was so difficult because you’re going against the grain of what it wants to do for you.” (Stanyek, Browner and Tenzer 112; emphasis in original). Browner’s battles with the popular music-notation program represent an additional layer of work that needs to be accounted for at present: something similar can be said about the use of waveform analysis programs, which I will return to toward the end of the paper. In his introduction to the forum on transcription, Stanyek summarizes the views of a couple of his predecessors, writing: “It is a form of ‘devoted labor,’ as Nicholas England named it in 1964, calling attention to the fact that transcription is often conceptualized as hard work that involves an almost ritualistic form of repetition, a heightened devotional relation to music as sound. In Representing African Music, Kofi Agawu, for example, links transcription explicitly to work, suggesting that ‘[t]he archive of African music would be greatly impoverished without the labors of these workers.’” (Stanyek 108).
There are two important dynamics that need to be acknowledged about the labor involved in transcription; namely, the transcriber is not the only person doing labor: both the original performers (and composers, as applicable) and the reader are also engaged in forms of labor (Stanyek 108). Schuiling theorizes that notation mediates musical interactions among people. This is most easily imagined in terms of a composer writing down a piece to be given to a performer who will translate the notation into sound, but the idea can easily be extended to the transcriber’s relationship to the performance they are notating. Those who transcribe could argue that the process of transcription adds value by virtue of validating the music and bringing it into academic discourse. It follows, then that the person who eventually reads and/or tries to make use of the transcription is also doing a kind of labor as they try to convert the notation to sound. I would contend that there was more labor involved on this side of the process before recordings became so widely available, but the reader is doing work even through the process of comparing a transcription with a recording or trying to realize the notation in performance.
Through their labor the transcription acquires value and becomes property of the transcriber. I want to quote at some length what I believe to be Stanyek’s most important observation about transcription:
In many senses, the ‘devotional labor’ described above is inextricably linked to the disciplinary politics of the academy; as Peter Winkler puts it, transcription is very much about ‘the production of items of exchange in the academic economy’. Bruno Nettl looks at transcription from a related angle, pointing out that ‘a good many ethnomusicologists are emotionally tied to the sound of music and get much pleasure in their work from transcribing; and having made a transcription gives them a certain sense of direct ownership and control over the music that they have laboriously reduced to notation’. A transcription is indeed a ware, one that individual scholars can use, entrepreneurially, to manifest credibility and bolster claims over particular parcels of academic real estate.
In short, Stanyek argues that the labor of transcription creates something of value that is a commodity in academic circles: note how much of the language in this passage is rooted in economics. I wish to go a step further and argue as far as the study of rap music is concerned, it is important to acknowledge that there is a racialized dimension to this labor; specifically, those laboring on the front end to create the music are predominantly people of color but those who are doing the work of transcribing—who are in some sense creating an object of value based on work originally done by people of color—historically have been white. Leong proposes the idea of “racial capitalism,” which she defines as: “the process of deriving social or economic value from the racial identity of another person. […] in which a white individual or a predominantly white institution derives social or economic value from associating with individuals with nonwhite racial identities” (Leong 2153-4).
Here's another lengthy excerpt from Stanyek’s introduction:
The functionality of transcription is disciplinary in a broader sense, too; transcription is one of the primary methods through which a particular brand of music studies—one that is at home within the specialist environments of academic music departments—is rendered distinct from the myriad other existing music studies which are thriving across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields. That is, the great portion of scholars of music who engage with transcription are employed by departments of music, where they are tethered to reproductive curricular structures that place enormous value on the techniques and pedagogies (ear training, sight singing, score analysis) required to create, read, and interpret documents containing Western staff notation. Within this disciplinary locus, transcription is an absolutely curricular tactic for evincing and performing a direct connection with sound (Stanyek 109).
Here too I want to go a step beyond what Stanyek is arguing and how this specific kind of music literacy has been used to gatekeep people out of music programs. As I stated out the outset, rap music grows from Black oral traditions and something about the artform changes when it is committed to paper. In some of the first examples that we’ll see here in a moment, using western staff notation to render musical elements of rap music effectively excludes anyone who is not fluent in that notation from participating in the conversation: arguably, this is a feature, not a bug, of the system. By and large schools of music are exclusionary in that they only accept people who play certain “recognized” or “approved” instruments, who read staff notation (or if they can’t read it, they will be taught to), and who will develop the kinds of musical skills that these transcriptions reify. But what exactly do musicians who are trained in this very specific way to deal with a very specific repertoire of music do when they see, say, “Fight the Power” rendered in full score staff notation?
Ultimately transcription tells us more about the values and ideologies of who is transcribing than it does the music that it purports to represent. As with any recorded popular music, rap comes to us as a heavily mediated commercial product—a recording. We could argue that the ease with which we can access these recordings has all but eliminated the need for transcription. For those who do undertake transcriptions, the choice of transcription system reveals the researcher’s biases, in part because it has the potential to hide as much about the music as it does to reveal anything about it. The process of transcription further removes the object of study from the circumstances of its creation and reinscribes it as a different kind of commodity, one that the researcher can use as professional capital. The labor involved in transcription is often extractive and racialized, making the practice even more problematic. But in an age of streaming media, when songs could be uploaded, removed, edited, and re-uploaded, is some kind of written documentation of the original source valuable beyond its appearance in an academic publication? And to whom is it valuable?