Oral/Aural Culture in Late Modern Society?: Traditional Singing as Professionalized Genre and Oral-Derived Expression

This article discusses some expressions and elements of orality and aurality in late modern society, and the roles, functions, and limitations of these expressions. Traditional song of different cultural origin has been the subject of much analysis and scholarship within the areas of orality studies, ballad studies, and several other related fields. However, songs and singing are in many cases analyzed chiefly as verbal art and verbal performance, while less attention is given to the closely interwoven texture of words, music, rhythm, and timbre, or to the balance between verbal and music-related sides of orality. I think more frequent discussions between scholars within the disciplines of folkloristics, literature, linguistics, and ethnomusicology might be fruitful. Initiatives of this kind are continuously taken in conferences and publications, and a couple of interesting texts on musical aspects have recently been published in Oral Tradition itself.¹

My own discipline is ethnomusicology, and my topic is traditional singing (or vocal folk music) in a Northern European and especially Swedish/Scandinavian context, viewed as a contemporary cultural—verbal and musical—expression, and partly as an established sub-genre within the genre or field that is today labeled "folk music" or "folk and world music." There are reasons to ask, in the early twenty-first century, what the consequences are for oral-derived singing and music-making in an era of accelerating professionalization, institutionalization, and formalization. Which elements and expressions of orality function in a cultural environment characterized by fast changes, access to innumerable cultural items, and music as a mediatized, processed, and often digitized phenomenon? And what are the consequences for affinity-centered and long-term qualities of oral tradition, such as learning songs across the kitchen table and performing and developing one's repertory during a lifetime?

This essay is based on my studies of the Swedish/Scandinavian contemporary folk music scene with some references to earlier periods of time and other European/Western music cultures. It is my belief that, despite these geographic and cultural limitations, several of my observations are relevant in the wider context of the tension fields² traditional—revival—post-revival as well as oral/aural—literate/mediated in a transnational and transcultural perspective. The larger research project with which the current essay is associated focuses on music-making as an activity and meaning-making phenomenon at small-scale events, where the modes of performance may shift to and fro between the participatory and the presentational.³ This approach is in contrast to the strongly dominant discourse on music—and other cultural expressions—as products that are made by the few for the reception and consumption of the many. Thus the project includes what might be called contemporary expressions of oral/aural tradition in late modern mediatized society.⁴

Traditional singing in the Scandinavian cultural area includes ballads and other narrative songs, lyric songs, jocular songs, lullabies, work songs, hymns and religious songs, and short ditties of several kinds. The vocal tradition also comprehends two wordless types: the one is diddled dance tunes and the other is herding calls that are performed outdoors with the use of a special voice technique. Both of these wordless types, as well as singing, have played an important role in the establishment of vocal folk music as a "genre" in the post-revival sense. Diddling, or trall, in the Scandinavian/Nordic area shows some likeness to the Celtic and British tradition of "mouth music." Non-semantic syllables are used in a rhythmical fashion that imitates the movements of the bow on the strings of a fiddle. The technique has been used for the accompaniment of dancers as well as for transmission of tunes; today it is performed as dance music or at concerts. Herding calls, which likewise are used at concerts and in musical arrangements, have been performed chiefly by women (and children) since cattle herding belonged to the feminine sphere of earlier rural society as a result of the gendered division of labor. There is more documentation of men having sung, for example, military songs or shanties and of women having sung...