Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology

Abstract

Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson (bio) The literacy-orality problematic, which has been debated from Plato to Postman, has focused on how the visuality of the literary medium affects the aurality of the oral medium. Recent research by John Miles Foley has addressed the particular advantages in using the most modern technology of the Internet to simulate and explore the oldest technology of orality, thereby calling into question our continued reliance on textually based media in orality research when electronic media provide a more effective vehicle for scholarly investigations into oral forms.1 But how does this discussion relate specifically to the act of music-making? Is there an interface between a musical orality and a musical literacy? Musicologists have treated the question of the musical dimension of orality in such works as Yoshiko Tokumaru and Osamu Yamaguti's The Oral and the Literate in Music (1986), Stephen Erdely's research on the musical dimension of Bosnian epics (1995), Bruno Nettl's collection of cross cultural research on the topic of improvisation (1998), Karl Reichl's compilation of music research in a wide-ranging number of oral epic traditions (2000), and Paul Austerlitz's work on the "consciousness" of jazz (2005), but less attention has been given to the link between the visual technology of notation and its effect on the oral-aural processing of music.2 Scholars of medieval music have been at the forefront in addressing the connection between oral performance and the emergence of notation. Leo Treitler's work during the latter half of the twentieth century that considered the visual-aural link in medieval music was groundbreaking, culminating in the recent collection of seventeen of his foundational essays on medieval chant (Treitler 2003). Seminal works by Susan Boynton (2003), Kenneth Levy (1998), Peter Jeffery (1992), and other medievalists have also contributed considerably to the discussion of orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages. In addition, Anna Maria Busse Berger's recent book, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (2005), highlights the change in performance practice and composition with changes in medieval notation practices (250-51). Busse Berger asks why musicologists have been slow to address the role of memory and notation in music, and then follows with a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the interaction between literate and oral modes of communication as they functioned in medieval music, questioning previous assumptions about the performance practice and musical theory of the period. Particularly interesting from the point of view of the emerging role of visual notation in oral-aural performance practice are her conclusions about the ramifications of the rhythmic dimension of notation in the isorhythmic motets. She explains (idem): Rhythmic notation led to a new way of composition. It led to what Jack Goody would call "visual perception of musical phenomena" … just as writing led to word games and crossword puzzles, notation led to notational games.… Thus mensural notation ultimately resulted in what we would consider a modern artwork, a composition where the composer would determine the pitch and rhythm of every part, where he would develop a sense of ownership. Busse Berger's conclusions about the implications regarding visual notation on a musical performance tradition are significant because she pinpoints a change in performance practice and musical cognition that has continued to affect some of the basic conceptions we currently hold about music notation in Western European Art Music (WEAM) and the concept of "authorship"—ideas that are in many ways unique to the West. Her research highlights a shift in the representational aspect of decoding medieval notation whose earliest "prescriptive" features, using Charles Seeger's concept about music writing (1958), became increasingly more complex as visual documents, adding a visual component to musical performance. If, as Marshall McLuhan claims, a new medium typically does not displace or replace another as much as it complicates its operation (2003:xv), then what has been the significance of visual notation for the oral-aural aspects of music performance? This paper poses questions regarding the implications of mainstream orality-literacy research on musicological perspectives, and the relevance of musicological research for orality-literacy studies. First, why has...

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