Mambo Kings to West African Textiles

Abstract

Attracting scholars from a wide array of academic disciplines, popular music studies are burgeoning today. The excellence of the musical scholarship that is produced by anthropologists and literary critics demonstrates that the ability to read music and conduct musical analysis is by no means requisite for thinking about music. Coming from a performance background myself, however, I am often struck by the absence of attention to style and aesthetics in much academic writing about Latin and Caribbean music. This lack of attention, of course, issues at least partly from the fact that the techniques of music analysis and notation, allied with the study of Western art music, may seem irrelevant to the political, economic, and gender questions that dominate today’s humanistic discourse. Although in 1958, Charles Seeger warned against the assumption that a visual medium can represent aural experience, he did not advocate the dismissal of musical notation and analysis. Instead, he made the now-classic distinction between “prescriptive notation,” a system that facilitates musical performance, and “descriptive notation,” an analytical tool that translates sound into a visual medium (1977: 168–81).