Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 37 in highly literate communities.” 3 It is easy to assume that the days where oral and written communication went hand in hand are long gone; however, that is far from true. Ruth Finnegan asserts that “One needs only mention the continuing significance of oral communication in the modern world, or the increasing distribution of books and newspapers, to give the lie to facile predictions that radio and television would inevitably bring the end of book reading [for] in practice people switch from oral to written to electronic communication and back and from personally generated to mass-media forms, without any sense that there is some radical change involved or that they are somehow thereby moving in different kinds of ‘social space.’” 4 Today’s society easily moves between written and aural communication as illustrated by Finnegan above, and today’s children are in a unique position where they have equal opportunities to learn music by note and by rote. If music was originally transmitted orally and then switched to notation, folk music (which mostly proceeds from an oral tradition) should therefore be a great starting point for music education. As children learns aurally, they should slowly and naturally begin to increase in their music literacy (in addition to their social, cultural, and historical literacy), similar to the Middle Ages. For many young music learners studying in choirs and some general music programs, however, sometimes even folk music is notated. Typically, only young students are told to listen to a piece and mimic what they hear. Instead, more often, students learn by ear and by note simultaneously, relying mostly on the ear at the beginning. As they grow musically, especially in middle and high school, they begin to rely more and more strongly on written notation. This is exactly how the oral tradition can impact music literacy, something Albert Lord spent much time studying as he observed the impact of oral musical tradition in Yugoslavia. In his well-known book, The Singer of Tales , Lord states that “the use of writing in setting down oral texts does not per se have any effect on oral tradition [for] it is a means of recording [and] the texts thus obtained are in a sense special…they are purely oral.” 5 This supports the theory that even if a song is now notated, it does not change the fact that it is deeply rooted in oral tradition and is therefore a great springboard for teaching music and cultural literacy in the music education classroom. Folk songs and Nursery Rhymes One of the best resources for teaching children music that was originally transmitted in oral form is the use of folk music, nursery rhymes, and traditional songs. Many of those songs were passed on from one generation to another simply by being sung around a 3 Susan Boynton, "Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of the Office Hymns," Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 1 (2003): 100, doi: 10.1525/jams.2003.56.1.99. 4 Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication, (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 143. 5 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 129.