The universalizing, yet individualizing, tendencies that evolved out of Myers’s synthesis of evolutionism and individual differences culminate in the work of A. H. Fox Strangways, and in particular his magnum opus The Music of Hindostan (1914). Indeed, there is evidence that the two exchanged ideas and offered one another advice. Where Myers, however, derived his sense of individualizing universalism principally from the intellectual landscape of anthropology and psychology, Fox Strangways drew upon the fertile and largely unploughed field of translation. Where this is most evident is in Fox Strangways’s approach to transcription.

When Martin Clayton discusses Fox Strangways’s The Music of Hindostan he shows considerable disquiet over the transcriptions for which there are phonograph recordings. The source of disagreement is at times somewhat technical, concerning incorrect placement of beats and barlines, wrongly situated pitches, and so forth. At other times the criticisms are more broadly systemic. On the one hand, he refers to problems that are essentially objective—manifestly wrong notes, rhythms, and the like—and on the other hand, he cites interpretational problems that clearly exceed this kind of consideration. More important, however, Clayton delves into the notion of subjectivity where it is found to impinge on the technical (or perhaps more objective) data of transcription. Fox Strangways’s illustration of a “Panjabi ghazal” is a case in point, in which the transcription derives “from thesubjectivity of transcription as well as the problems resulting from insufficiently intensive fieldwork.”

Clayton does not stop at illuminating difference between the actuality that period phonograph recordings present and the transcriptions that Fox Strangways provides in conjunction with them. He also debates the origin of what he sees as his frequently subjective interpretations, and here proposes a number of reasons for the form of Fox Strangways’s transcriptions. In instances where Fox Strangways could not identify meter, for example, as in a particular lullaby, he imposes meter nonetheless—albeit compromised by expression indications such as fermatas or rallentando signs—because, in his typical Edwardian way, he could not imagine song without meter, or felt his readership could not. Clayton suggests that this may be due to the possibility that “the invention of metre was a strategy for assigning higher status to a piece.”