Oral and Written

Oral memory and written page, two ways of carrying music that shaped each other.

Related

MedievalModernMelodyViolin

The question

Oral music lives in memory, the body and a community. It allows ornament, dialect and improvisation, and depends on apprenticeship. Writing can fix a melodic frame, yet often leaves ornament, timbre and tempo outside the page. Every transcription is a choice.

Historical arc

Gregorian chant was first carried by oral teaching and later written into chant books with neumes. Writing fixed the melodic frame while ornament stayed in singers' mouths. In the nineteenth century, collectors took notebooks and wax cylinders into the countryside, turning oral melody into scores and recordings. Bartók and Grainger saved peasant tunes and recast them as concert works. In the twentieth century, jazz ran on records and oral teaching at once, while Irish traditional music kept moving through ABC notation and recordings online.

The turning point

The first turn was collecting. Notators turned oral music into fixed versions, pressing variants into standard tunes. The second turn was recording. Cylinders and tape preserved timbre, ornament and dialect, making audible what notation left out. The third turn was return flow. Recordings and networks gave oral traditions new authority, and learners could study directly with a lineage of recordings.

What to listen for

Begin with the repeats and ornaments of the Irish reel Cooley's, and notice that no repetition is the same. Then hear Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, where peasant melody is fitted to metre and harmony. Finally hear versions of Amazing Grace, the same song taking different shapes in different settings. The library versions are synthesised, so follow the frame and its ornaments.

Related

This line runs from Medieval to Modern, with Melody and Violin.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Oral tradition" — terms checked, not quoted
• Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press) — oral-formulaic theory checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.