Not only jazz performers, but classical ones, too, copy the performances of famous artists from recordings
as part of their learning process (or as part of a less openly admitted process of appropriation). All of this
is just as “oral” a means of transmission as anything that may have happened in Rome to produce the
Gregorian chant before its migration northward.
The great difference, of course, is that when a work within a partly literate tradition is completed, it
need not be committed to memory in order to go on in some sense existing. It is the sense that an art work
may exist independently of those who make it up and remember it that is distinctive of literate cultures.
(As we shall see, it is that sense that allows us even to have the notion of a “work of art.”) And another
difference is that having works of music, however large their scale, in written form encourages us to
imagine or conceptualize them as objects, which is to say as “wholes,” with an overall shape that is more
than the sum of its parts. Concepts of artistic unity in works of performing art, and, conversely, an
awareness of the function of the parts within the whole in such works (what we call an analytical
awareness), is thus distinctive of literate cultures. Since the performance of such works must unfold in
time, but the written artifacts that represent them are objects that occupy space, one can think of literate
cultures as cultures that tend conceptually to substitute space for time—that is, to spatialize the temporal.
This is an important idea, one that we shall have many occasions to refer to in the course of our survey of
Western music in history.
FIG. 1-7 Original sheet music for the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a waltz song composed in 1908 by Albert Von
Tilzer to words by Jack Norworth. Very few people remember these facts about the song’s provenance, and virtually nobody