Anna Yu Wang
[This post is the lightly adapted version of a lightening talk I presented at the 2022 Business Meeting of the History of Music Theory Interest/Study Group.]
Translation will likely play a hugely important role in global projects of history of music theory. Translation can help us shorten the distance between theorists from far-flung places, rendering their ideas more accessible across language boundaries. It can also stimulate reflection around the relationship between diverse musical theoretical traditions (e.g. in deciding whether to express a concept from the source language using existing terminology in the target language—emphasizing a conceptual link between traditions—or to coin a new term or leave a concept untranslated—emphasizing their distinctness). More fundamentally, translation offers a concrete way of recognizing that music theory indeed exists in communities that have been conventionally excluded from societies like the SMT and the AMS.
These were the kinds of ideals my collaborators and I pursued when we envisioned a new volume of translations, titled Music Theory in the Plural, which would make music theoretical sources from historically marginalized languages and communities available in English.[i] We planned for the project to embrace a variety of source materials including archived texts, ethnographic interviews, and oral histories in order to capaciously reimagine what music theory has meant to people across sociocultural contexts. And to promote further global connections, we planned to commission scholarly commentaries that would bring the contents of each translated source into conversation with music theory from a different time or place.[ii]
This initial course we had charted for Music Theory in the Plural was diverted when I was invited to speak on issues of translation at the business meeting of this interest/study group. While preparing my remarks, I realized that my collaborators and I had not paused long enough on some of the more ethically charged questions associated with our desire to translate. Who would this translation project most serve? What kind of globalization would it promote? Would this project set an ethical precedent for future work in the genre of global history of music theory—one that benefits all its parties?
These provocations led to a series of reflections and realizations. The rest of this post surveys these in no particular order.
First, a question. Is it an inherently colonizing act to translate materials from a minoritized language into a dominant language—that is, English? The present ubiquity of the English language is a direct result of colonial and imperialist projects of the British Empire. Does an English-language volume of global source materials perform complacency to this history? Does the volume’s aim to promote global awareness and connection justify its participation in this global hegemony?
Even if we momentarily table the discussion on the English language, any culture of translation that elevates a single target language will surely create an uneven and exclusionary terrain for those who happen to be trained in other linguistic contexts. There is a deep irony here. How can we call a discourse truly global while at the same time erecting barriers to entry on the basis of where scholars live and the languages they think in?
Our initial publication design was ethically shortsighted in another way as well. Does a new volume of translated material truly encourage relationship building with people across our global community? Perhaps for many translators, the answer is yes. After all, in the act of creating a translation, the translator will have taken significant time to learn about the author’s musical life, professional activities, and worldview, presumably using vocabulary and turns of phrase in the author’s home language. And through this process, the translator forges a relationship of some substance with the music theorist behind the source material, even if indirectly. But for the consumer of the translation, the hard, involved work of relationship building is largely bypassed. Indeed, a volume that aims to collate highly readable, well-researched, and immediately accessible translations is arguably counterproductive to the process of relationship building, because it enables readers to proceed directly to harvesting an author’s ideas.
My opinion is that until we turn from a principally idea-centered economy of thought towards one that is grounded in people, the project of translation remains ethically problematic. Ethics demands intimate engagement with people out of respect for their existence, and not just with the fruits of their physical, emotional and intellectual labor. By attending primarily to the value of ideas while leaving behind the people who produce them, we risk losing touch with something of great worth in humanistic inquiry: the opportunity to critically relate to one another.
On this note, we cannot forget that even if the author of the translated material has passed, there are likely communities who will continue to identify with the source material. An ethics of translation should be cognizant of how the products of translative activities intersect with the lives of living people, especially if there is a historical power difference between the people doing the studying and the people being studied. On this topic, I find the following passage by the forensic anthropologist Aja Lans insightful:
Looking for answers in the distant past is an easier path to an academic publication—at least if you are a forensic anthropologist—but it leaves us continuing a process of scientific objectification. Instead, the path less taken runs to our living ethical stakeholders, the people who are directly implicated in the topics and categories of our research projects .
(2022, 12)
Following Lans, I believe it is necessary for translators to consider who those living ethical stakeholders are, and what our translations will mean for them.
Clearly, there is a minefield of issues to think through when undertaking a translation project, which can be paralyzing for scholars. How do we proceed when it is so difficult—perhaps impossible—to comprehensively anticipate the ethical fallout of an action? I would like to propose that we keep a steady gaze on the ideal we hope to achieve in doing global history of music theory in the first place, and that we measure up any proposed course of research by its degree of resonance or interference with that ideal. Of course, this entails knowing what the mission of global history of music theory is, and our opinions on this matter may well differ. While I offer my own take here, I would be eager to learn in the comment section what you hold to be the purpose of this enterprise.
I would like to see global history of music theory be grounded in the mission of being “global” not merely in its ideas, but in its participants and relationships. But a monolingual translated volume like the one I initially outlined would not go far, I reckon, in preparing the community to attract authors who are as ethnically, geographically, and institutionally diverse as our source materials will no doubt become. Much to the contrary, a volume that primarily enriches the intellectual resources of an already resource-rich demographic may perpetuate the very systems of exclusion and Othering that global history of music theory aspires to dismantle.
Supposing that the project of global history of music theory is not only about diversifying our ideas, but about diversifying the relationships formed between music thinkers, how can we structure the practice of translation so that it is conducive to that aim?
I would like to look to Dylan Robinson’s (2020) Hungry Listening for leadership in this realm. Although not a dedicated work of translation, Hungry Listening leverages translation to enact the refusal of colonizing modes of listening. Its central concept, “hungry listening,” stems from the Halq’eméylem words xwelítem “settler” or “starving person” and xwélalà:m “listening” and is used by Robinson to reference a consumptive listening practice. By now a widely circulated term among Anglo-American music scholars, “hungry listening” facilitates the inspection of our own listener dispositions for extractive, colonizing tendencies. Robinson’s work thus models how translation can put into motion more equitable and globally conscious kinds of music theorizing.
There is also much to learn from the way Robinson structures his book to visibly signal to the living and agential presence of Halq’eméylem speakers and readers—the language of the Stó:lō community, a group of First Nations peoples whose ancestral lands are located on the southwest coast of British Columbia, Canada. Robinson leaves certain passages untranslated, which prompts Anglophone readers to recognize that this work is not only for them, but for the Stó:lō community. These untranslated portions allow Robinson to reorder usual distributions of power. For a moment, Halq’eméylem readers no longer need to be “invited” into the discursive space, because they have been drawn into its very center. Halq’eméylem readers now set the terms of a space in which English readers have become the guests.
Though the untranslated portions of Robinson’s text deliberately decenter English readers, it would be too simplistic to read them as gestures of exclusion.[iii] Robinson makes explicit his wish that, in the future, there will be more people who are equipped to read the Halq’eméylem passages of his book. In this sense, he invites his readership into the work of learning (and translating for themselves) the Halq’eméylem language, an act that would generate a deeper relationship with the Stó:lō community than any consumption of a ready-made translation can allow. As Robinson describes, “My words gather; together, they are an act of gathering, of gathering strength and acknowledging Indigenous voices and bodies, rather than acting as a container of Indigenous content” (25). Translation and its strategic withholding are instrumental in this process of gathering and acknowledging the people behind the ideas.
Needless to say, Robinson’s approach, along with the other issues discussed here, inspired the editorial team of Music Theory in the Plural to reconceptualize the publication’s design. It has been substantially altered (and complicated) to better capture the spirit of relationship building.[iv]
I will end this post by bringing back two questions from this post to serve as fodder for further discussion on the ethics of translation in a global context:
What do you perceive to be the ultimate mandate of global history of music theory and how do you envision translation serving that aim? (Will global history of music theory be anchored by one or two or three dominant, shared languages? Will it be a space filled with translations in every kind of language, some of which we will and will not understand?)
How can we structure and publish translations to promote the work of building relationships with people, and not just ideas?
Works Cited:
Garneau, David. 2016. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Martin Keavy, 21–42. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Lans, Aja. 2022. “Provenance Research.” In Steering Committee Report on Human Remains in University Museum Collections, 11–12. https://provost.harvard.edu/files/provost/files/harvard_university-_human_remains_report_fall_2022.pdf?m=1663090982.
Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[i] This project is currently being led by Edwin K.C. Li, Chris Stover, and myself.
[ii] Music Theory in the Plural is still under preparation. I invite you to write to musictheoryintheplural@gmail.com if you would like to contribute a translation or commentary to this project.
[iii] That being said, Robinson draws on David Garneau’s (2016) work on “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality” (27) to defend the merits of discussion venues where participation is restricted on the basis of identity. This practice allows members of a group a space to digest and negotiate identity-related issues away from the gaze of non-members.
[iv] The editors have decided to shift from a physical volume to an interactive, digitally based resource that would be freely accessible to readers globally. The larger capacity of a digital venue will allow the publication to accept scholarship translated from and to any language, and ideally to host multiple translations of a single source. We plan to build in a venue for vernacular global music theorizing in the form of an online forum where users may annotate and hold text-based dialogue over the site’s resources with the aid of translation software. Music Theory in the Plural will thus be an iterative, living document that continuously grows in its range of source and target languages, networks of hyperlinked media, and layers of contemporary commentary and interaction.
History of Music Theory 