anyone seen the need for it.
After a thousand years of diastematic notation, five hundred years of printing, and a generation of
cheap photocopying, Western “art-musicians” and music students (especially those with academic
educations) have become so dependent on texts that they (or rather, we) can hardly imagine minds that
could really use their memories—not just to store melodies by the thousand, but to create them as well.
By now, we have all to some degree fallen prey to the danger about which Plato was already warning his
contemporaries some two and a half millennia ago: “If men learn writing, it will implant forgetfulness in
their souls” (Phaedrus, 275a). So it is no wonder that “classical” musicians habitually—and very
wrongly—tend to equate musical composition in an oral context with improvisation.
Improvisation—making things up as you go along in “real time”—is a performance art. It implies an
ephemeral, impermanent product. But while some forms of orally transmitted music (jazz, for example) do
enlist the spontaneous creative faculty in real time, there have always been musicians (today’s rock bands,
for example) who work out compositions without notation yet meticulously, in detail, and in advance.
They fix their work in memory in the very act of creating it, so that it will be permanent. Every
performance is expected to resemble every other one (which of course need not preclude retouching or
improvement over time, or even spontaneously). Their work, while “oral,” is not improvisatory. The
creative and re-creative acts have been differentiated.
And that is how Gregorian chant seems to have been created over a period spanning half a millennium
at least. It was the exigencies of migration northward that made notation desirable as a fixative, but the
nature of the early written sources (tiny books, for the most part) suggests that notation was at first not the
primary means of transmission but only a mnemonic device (that is, a reference tool to refresh memory),
or an arbiter of disputes, or even a status symbol. (If the Mass celebrants—the priests and deacons—had
their little books, why not the cantors?) So it is important to remember that literacy did not suddenly
replace “orality” as a means of musical transmission but gradually joined it. Since the time of the earliest
Carolingian neumated antiphoners, the two means of transmission have coexisted in the West in a
complex, ever-evolving symbiosis. There are plenty of familiar tunes that are still transmitted within our
culture almost exclusively by oral means: national anthems, patriotic and holiday songs (“America,”
“Jingle Bells”), songs for occasional use (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “Happy Birthday to You”),
folk songs (“Home on the Range,” “Swanee River”), as well as a vast repertory of children’s songs—or
songs that have become children’s songs—in transmitting which adults rarely play a part (“It’s raining,
it’s pouring,” “Oh they don’t wear pants in the sunny south of France”).
Almost all of these songs, many of them composed by literate musicians (like Stephen Foster, author
of “Swanee River” and many other songs that now live mainly in oral tradition), have been published and
even copyrighted in written form. Yet while almost every reader of this book will be able to sing them by
heart, very few will have ever seen their “sheet music.” They are generally encountered “in situ”—in the
places and on the appropriate occasions of their use. Some of them, especially patriotic and religious
songs, are formally taught by rote in schools or churches or synagogues; many others, perhaps most, are
simply “picked up” the way a language is by its native speakers.
At the same time, the Western music most likely to be thought of as belonging exclusively to the
literate tradition—sonatas, symphonies, “classical music” generally—actually relies for its transmission
on a great deal of oral mediation. Teachers demonstrate to their pupils by aural example many crucial
aspects of performance—nuances of dynamics, articulation, phrasing, even rhythmic execution—that are
not conveyed, or are inadequately conveyed, by even the most detailed notation; and the pupils learn
directly to imitate what they have been shown (or better, to emulate it, which implies an effort to surpass).
Conductors communicate their “interpretations” to orchestras and choruses by singing, shouting, grunting,
gesticulating. Earlier, the composer may have sung, shouted, grunted, and gesticulated at the conductor.