ABSTRACT
African music presents a notational paradox. Africans transmitted most of their musics orally, without indigenous forms of written representation, but their musical traditions stand among those most frequently sampled for transcription in foreign notational systems. Scholarly discussion of African musical styles has usually relied on systems of music writing to capture aural phenomena otherwise resistant to analysis, whether or not the discussion has explicitly acknowledged the centrality of the process of transcription. Any notational discussion of African musical traditions must therefore consider two distinct, yet related, subjects: the indigenous technologies Africans employed to transmit and convey their own musics, and the ways African musics have been transmitted and notated, primarily by outsiders, both within Africa, and to a broader world.
