Orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages

Orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages For the student of music history the theme of orality and literacy has bearing both on specific historical problems and on our general outlook on the whole economy of music (I mean by that everything that has to do with the production of music through composition and performance; its transmission through performance, writing or print, and electronic media; and its reception). It is necessary to be guite emphatic about that. It is not just a matter of attributing the genesis of this or that musical object to oral or literate processes. The topic of transmission has surfaced suddenly in the study of medieval Western music, and it has provided an opening to what promises to be a richer and more comprehensive historical view than we have yet had. But what we learn from that perspective has implications of a wider scope. Questions about transmission remained trivial as long as the conception of the economy of music was conditioned by the paradigm of literacy. I mean by that the model of the composer producing finished works that circulate in stable form through closed written channels in scores that are replicas of one another and serve as blueprints for the performers who must read them in order to produce performances that are essentially identical from one time to the next. Under that paradigm the score represents the work uniquely and completely, and it is the criterion for what will pass as a performance of the work. And the study of music is, by and large, the study of musical objects. But we have been forced step by step to retreat from that way of thinking in the study of medieval music. Instead we are learning to think of our objects as being always in the process of construal and reconstrual, that is to think of them as objects in transmission, not just as objects. There will be a different sort of relationship among work, score, and performance to suggest after we have considered some examples. Quite unexpectedly, what we are coming to through manuscript studies is something very close to an aesthetic epistemology of the sort that is being described by philosophers and theorists of criticism, according to which the process through which something becomes an artwork only begins with its creation and notation by an artist and only achieves some termination in being received and interpreted by some community. This is as apt for the "absolute music" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it is for the "Gebrauchsmusik" of the Middle Ages. The bold claim of the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, that "Until we understand how oral transmission works, we won't know what music history is all about," also possesses this very broad validity, beyond the specific sense that it carried in the context in which it was originally made. 144 L. Treitler Serious attention to change in the economy of music and to the reality of oral traditions throughout the history of Western music has not been given easily from the vantage point of the literate mentality that is the natural endowment of the modern historian. But it has been forestalled in very specific ways by a succession of obstacles that have been generated quite naturally from this vantage point. The first is the assumption that music has always been conveyed in writing in the West. This may be explicit, as in the belief in a continuity of practice from the Hebrews, or the ancient Greeks, or the Byzantine Greeks; or it is tacit and unconscious, as in the habit of treating "composing" and "writing" as synonyms. (Paolo Ferretti, the author of one of the most influential twentieth century books of Gregorian Chant scholarship, spoke of the "Gregorian melody-writers", "melografi gregoriani", although he knew perfectly well that the oldest written sources for those melodies post-date their inventors by at least two centuries.)3 Such paradoxes are common in scholarly literature that concerns itself with the processes and products of oral cultures. Ong called attention to the paradox in the very expression "oral literature", and suggested a metaphor through which the phenomenon as a whole can be characterized...