Channels, Spring 2017

Page 36 Long • Promoting Public Interest communicate verbally and in writing as well as knowing history and the world of the past and the present and an understanding societal norms and values. The oral tradition is comprised of two primary things: music and words. Indeed, words are powerful, and words used well are rarely forgotten. Great thinkers and speakers of centuries past have penned and uttered words that have withstood the test of time and that continue to echo in the minds of humanity long after the ones who constructed those words are gone. The opening phrase to Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” is unforgettably iconic and is easily recognized within the first few words of the speech. Those words shaped the framework of our country and are embedded in the minds of many citizens. That same literacy that cements the words of Lincoln’s iconic speeches into the minds of Americans is the same literacy that extends to music. Like historical and iconic words, many traditional and folk songs are similarly interwoven into the tapestry of our country’s history which bleeds into the present. Most children can sing “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain”, and many adults instantly recognize the tune just as easily as they remember the iconic opening words of Lincoln’s speech at the battlefield in Gettysburg. The question then becomes twofold: is there a connection between literacy and orality in the realm of music, and, if so, how does that correlate to folk songs and children’s music? The term “literacy” encompasses a few different ideas. Literacy, in one context, can refer to how the oral transmission of music changed and evolved into a notational process. It is commonly thought that in the early Middle Ages all music was transmitted orally from one person to another. All music was most likely taught and preserved aurally instead of being written down for there is no record of any standardized form of musical notation during that period. As time progressed, music notation entered the scene and allowed for the preservation of music in an exact form, leading to the point where almost all music in the Western, twenty-first century world is in notational form. In her article “Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology,” Francesca Lawson notes that the “concepts of literacy have changed over the centuries, showing us how deeply our contemporary ideas about memory, oral delivery, literacy, and creativity are rooted in a fundamentally different paradigm than they were in the Middle Ages.” 2 Today, most assume that oral music transmission and written music transmission are seemingly at odds with each other, and notational music forms most assuredly have the upper hand. However, that is most certainly not the case today or in ages past as “historians have reached a broad consensus that oral and written traditions complemented one other to varying degrees from the ninth through the twelfth centuries [where] written documents supported or reinforced ongoing oral traditions without replacing them, and oral communication played a central role even 2 Francesca R. S. Lawson, "Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology," Oral Tradition 25, no. 2 (2010): 437, doi: 10.1353/ort.2010.0021.