The Units of Transmission

The oral transmission of folk music depends on memory and the mnemonic devices that facilitate it. A singer learns a song by recognizing markers that he or she has used previously. Audiences also expect to encounter markers they have experienced in other songs. These markers may be small—coupling a word with a motif of a few notes—or as extensive as an entire piece. The density of these markers may be so great that accurate performance results in exact repetition of a song as the singer first experienced it; their musical function may be such that they encourage new phrase combinations or improvisation. Each repertory and each genre may have some mnemonic devices unique to it and others almost universal in distribution. Some mnemonic aids require rather sophisticated specialization, whereas others need no more than naive repetition. Taken as a whole, these memory markers become the units of transmission that make oral tradition possible.

Music is itself one of the most effective mnemonic devices in oral tradition (Vansina 1985:46). The rhythm and syntax of melody can reinforce those of a text. Melodic closure may occur simultaneously with textual closure. The form of a musical stanza will very often conform to a textual stanza. If text and movement have particular ritual functions, music can elaborate and stylize those functions, thereby heightening the participatory possibilities for an entire community. The mnemonic effectiveness of music is perhaps best illustrated by the difficulty experienced by anyone trying to recall the words of a favorite song divorced from its melody; at best, only a severely compromised version results. Music abounds in those parameters that animate oral tradition. Rhythm, because of its biological basis, is one of the clearest examples of such a parameter (Ong 1982:35), but its potential for symmetry and even mimesis may even serve to enhance oral tradition.

The largest unit in the oral transmission of folk music is the piece—the song, the dance, that musical entity to which a culture ascribes a specific name. The piece of music usually contains internal mnenomic devices, but its total form also serves as a unit in transmission. Not least among the ways it serves transmission is its definition of performance or its summary and closure of narrative. Pieces contrast in structure, function, and length in different genres or cultures. A ballad reconstructs a discrete narrative by means of fairly repetitive stanzas; the larger narrative drama of epic is punctuated by numerous small episodes with continual reshaping by formulaic and improvisatory structures. But the performance of each constitutes a piece. The narrative of both lends itself to identification with a name, and the music likewise lends itself to analysis of formal unity.

Smaller elements give rise to the structural integrity of a piece. The relative centrality of these elements in different traditions also contributes to such factors as stability, change, and distribution within a culture. If the units of transmission are relatively large, change often proceeds more slowly than in a genre with numerous small units. Iterative form, such as stanzaic or stichic (line-by-line) composition, relies on the memorization of textual units with repetitive rhythmic and metric patterns, frequently combined with other poetic devices, such as rhyme. The musical organization of the stanza and line also stabilizes their transmission. Musical organization usually enhances textual patterns. The more the patterns of music and text complement each other, the more a song’s form facilitates memory (Vansina 1985:16).

In some genres of folk music, the musical and textual markers operate at a much smaller level. The general designation for such markers is formula, but one also encounters such terms as convention, motif, or phrase with roughly equivalent usages. Formulae appear in most genres of folk music, although in some they are primarily responsible for the generation of overall form. Of varying sizes, formulae are larger than the smallest structural units in folk music (Ong 1982:36). They usually combine several smaller units to create a larger one that is thereby more memorable. In Anglo-American ballads, “hand” becomes a formula when preceded by “lily-white,” and names become formulaic when appended to a qualifier—for example, “Sweet William.” Textual and musical formulae often initiate and close stanzas or lines, thus acting as framing devices to articulate overall form (Abrahams and Foss 1968:33). Formulae may have an integrity quite separate from that of the individual piece. They may, for example, appear in different pieces or in the folk music of different cultures. They may behave like entire tunes with regard to change and transmission, but they are not performed in isolation outside the context of the larger piece of which they are one formulaic component (Nettl 1983:111).

In some oral traditions, formula has acquired a considerable degree of integrity itself, perhaps more than entire songs. That may be the case in Yugoslav epics, whose intensive study by Milman Perry, Albert B. Lord, and others has yielded the oral-formulaic theory. This theory recognizes tremendous stability in small formulae, with wide-ranging variation and creativity in the performance of the entire epic. The “piece,” then, is really the composite of many performances, and one could not properly speak of the transmission of an entire piece as a discrete entity (Lord 1960:125). The long Yugoslav epics—sometimes containing thousands of lines—are an extreme example of formula, but they illustrate the dual role formula plays as a mnemonic device and a catalyst for creativity. So important is this role that some scholars measure the extent of orality in a folk music tradition by the prevalence of formulaic structures (ibid.:130, and Kleeman 1985-86:21).

Does the piece then constitute a unit for analysis? Is it a text that we can subject to critical examination? Just what does a recording of “Es klappert die Mühle am rauschenden Bach” (The mill wheel splashes in the rushing stream) from the rural Midwest represent? Both indigenous and critical responses suggest that it is appropriate to treat the piece as a text, but one inseparable from a context of performance and tradition. Thus, analysis of a single song stands not just to proffer a hermeneutic explanation of its form or the meaning of its text, but to illumine its relation to the entire tradition of which it is a part. The text exists only within a context of performance and tradition, and it is one task of the student of folk song to understand how text, performance, and tradition interrelate (cf. Vansina 1985:33-34).

To think of the piece as somehow “authentic” or even archetypal is to treat it as a text in the most restricted sense, that is, as isolated from performance and tradition. A Midwestern version of “Es klappert die Mühle am rauschenden Bach” can be analyzed to elucidate form and structure, but if one fails to see beyond its text, one fails also to question why a German folk song should exist in oral tradition in the Midwest, or what community would maintain such a tradition and how it could do so. One fails to consider, moreover, what changes may have occurred in this tradition as the outside forces influencing it grew increasingly different from those in Germany or in other communities of immigrant Germans. These questions suggest the need always to compare and contrast the individual unit of transmission, the piece, with the processes of change that render any individual piece in myriad versions. This interrelation of product and process—of musical text and cultural change—generates a dialectic essential to the oral tradition of folk music.

The Process of Change

Earlier theories of folk music transmission often stressed its putative sameness and stability. A folk musician was thought to perform each song exactly as he or she had learned it. The predominant motivation of the performer was to replicate and reproduce, to minimize self-expression in order to let “the piece speak for itself” (Abrahams and Foss 1968:201). When such theories reckoned with change, it was frequently to account for the multiple variants that most collections or regions contained. Imperfect memory was the culprit: variants resulted not because of intentional creativity, but because nonliterate musicians introduced errors and alteration. Change thus resulted from “the tricks which memory will play” (Barry 1933:4).

This view of folk music transmission portrays a very conservative process of change. It is likely that there are cultures in which extreme replicability is the ultimate value motivating oral tradition, but there are few cultures in which some form of change is completely unacceptable. There are other oral cultures in which individual creativity is highly valued and society judges musicians on their ability to render each version of a song unique. Preservation for its own sake may be relatively unknown in such societies. Audiences may judge performances according to the novelty that they sense, rather than the accuracy of rendition.

Cultural attitudes toward stability and change differ vastly. In most cultures, stability and change coexist, one perhaps more prevalent but seldom pushing out the other. Attitudes differ, too, according to the particular aspects of oral tradition that become the foci of concerns about stability and change. Some groups—the Amish in North America, for example—equate change with encroachment from the outside; others identify a rather stable core, such as the corpus of motifs and modal concepts constituting the Persian radif, which, even when learned from printed forms, permits considerable variation and improvisation during performance (cf. Barkechli 1963, Massoudieh 1978, and Nettl and Foltin 1972).

The musical elements of different oral traditions also lend themselves to stability and change in multifarious ways. Those traditions that concentrate stability in small, formulaic units may allow considerable improvisation and creativity in larger units. The transmission of certain genres requires memorization of larger units, and there may be very little tolerance for change during performance. The level and density of memorization may retard or accelerate change. Some processes of memorization even function in a dynamic way, as in the process labeled “scanning” by Jan Vansina, whereby memory works “according to the sequence of accession” (1985:43). Thus, the sequence of events in a narrative genre of folk song must unfold along a logical timeline. A lapse in memory or a deleted phrase could jumble the story so that it ceased to make sense, signaling a collapse in narrative structure that might eventually transform the piece into a completely different genre, such as lyric folk song.

Even within a single musical culture there are pieces that change very little and others that spawn remarkably diverse variants. To describe the range and tolerance of change occurring within musical cultures in such a way that oral traditions might be examined comparatively, Bruno Nettl has proposed four models of the history through which individual pieces may pass (Nettl 1982:8-9). Stability predominates in his type I: “the composition, once created, may be carried on without change, more or less intact” (ibid. :8). Change in Nettl’s type II is fairly regular and produces variants according to alterations of a similar nature; change follows a more or less predictable path. Different quantities and degrees of change occur in type III; a single version may eventually produce many variants, some of them very similar to the original, others resembling it not at all. Type IV is not much different from type III, except in the propensity of pieces to absorb new material as they change; new versions rather quickly become unlike the original, even when absorption of external material assumes predictable patterns (ibid.:9).

Comparison of Nettl’s third and fourth types raises another question: How do a society’s concepts of similarity and difference affect the oral tradition of folk music? The processes of change in types III and IV are in essence the same. In type III, however, prolificacy results from internal alterations, whereas in type IV it comes from external borrowing. Do the variants in type III therefore demonstrate greater similarity than those in type IV just because the history of type III is more self-contained? Are the variants of type IV more different because of their external origin, perhaps leading some to insist that the variants are actually completely new pieces? Such questions may serve to confuse the issues that surround the identification of stability and change in oral tradition, for they clearly show that it is not easy to make an immediate claim for stability against change, or vice versa. They also illustrate the extent to which these issues are interrelated. Stability does not exist in a conceptual universe divorced from change. It is only through an understanding of a society’s own concepts of this dialectic of oral tradition that one can perceive the ways the units of folk music relate to or differ from each other.

A remarkable range of cultural, musical, and psychological factors animates and stems the processes of change in oral tradition. Whereas theories of folk music transmission stressing replication attribute change to flaws in perception or memory, it seems more likely that a number of factors combine to forge the direction of change. Psychological factors inevitably have ramifications in musical structure; cultural factors may lead to specific psychological attitudes toward change. Any typology of the processes of change in oral tradition can be only tentative, at least insofar as it isolates processes that function in a concerted rather than an isolated way. The typology that follows here is thus offered as a group of concepts that frequently characterize the musical change that folk music undergoes. Although a few processes have a propensity for operating with certain other processes, the typology intentionally lacks a hierarchy. The boundaries between processes, while hypothetically identifiable, are most often fluctuating and murky.

Both the positive and the negative impacts of memory on oral tradition are obvious in the processes designated here as repetition and forgetting. Repetition as a process depends on formulae, but when portrayed in the light of change, it is a good deal more complicated. Repetition also describes the replacement of one musical phrase with another, more memorable phrase, as when the four-line stanza ABBC becomes ABBA or ABCD becomes ABCA. A similar type of repetition occurs on a larger scale, as when related events in a narrative folk song are given the same musical setting. Scholars refer to this type of repetition as “incremental,” imputing to it the dramatic function of leading up to and then heightening the climax of narrative folk song (Barry 1933:5 and Abrahams and Foss 1968:33). Repetition tends either to crystallize and strengthen the formulae underpinning a particular version or to cause such extensive proliferation that formula actually replaces other structures necessary for the articulation of more complicated genres; an example of such replacement is the elimination of dramatic impetus in narrative folk song, leaving in its stead lyrical folk song.

The obverse of repetition and reliance on formulae is forgetting. German scholarship has referred to the degeneration and disintegration of folk song with resulting new versions as Zersingen, or “singing into bits and pieces” (Danckert 1966:30-36, Dessauer 1928, and Goja 1920). During the past half century, the self-destructive quality of Zersingen has caused it to fall from favor. I purposely use forgetting because of its more neutral tenor and broader, cross-cultural applicability. The imperfection of memory can engender both creativity and degeneration, depending on the cultural attitudes toward change. It therefore behooves one not to think of forgetting as simply the lopping off of salient members from the body of a piece, eventually reducing it to a desiccated and lifeless trunk. Forgetting also results from mishearing or lack of understanding (Abrahams and Foss 1968:17), or even from mistakes during performance (Nettl 1983:105). Mistakes naturally cause the appearance of new textual and musical phrases, sometimes only distorting the meaning or form of a previous version but often engendering new versions that take on a life of their own.

The stabilized unit of folk music in oral tradition is often a fusion of several versions rather than being a single, original version. The process producing this stabilized unit is called consolidation. Consolidation may take place in overt ways, such as borrowing from other pieces, or in more covert ways, such as the assimilation of like melodic phrases. One of the most overt paths of consolidation has been dubbed by Nettl the “ ‘Top of Old Smoky’ effect” to describe the creation of new versions in ways similar to those occurring when the broadside ballad “The Pretty Mohea” adapted for its second half the popular country tune “On Top of Old Smoky” (Nettl 1983:108). Whether this particular act of borrowing was conscious on the part of the communities where “The Pretty Mohea” was traditional is not known. The borrowing of a well-known tune for new texts, as in broadside ballads, or even for other texts long a part of traditional singing, as in vernacular hymn-singing traditions of German-American immigrants, is a long-standing practice (Bohlman 1985:38-40).

Consolidation may be a gradual process of change, or it may occur dramatically to precipitate and then to stabilize a new style. The formation of Native American musical styles that embraced numerous tribal groups from different areas has demonstrated both rates of consolidation. The development of a pan-Plains style has occurred more gradually, finding new catalysts in changing social settings for music-making, such as the powwow, whose explicit purpose draws diverse tribal and communal groups together. The most notable case of rapid consolidation was the emergence of Ghost Dance music in the late nineteenth century. In this style, probably derived initially from the music of Native American tribes in the Great Basin area, phrases occurred in pairs, the, second often an exact or near repetition of the first (example 1). The consolidated style made it possible for Ghost Dance music to spread quickly to many areas of the American West.

Consolidation of musical style not infrequently allows particular songs or genres to pass into the oral tradition of several communities. Musical style thus can combine different musical traits in such a way that its foreignness subsides, or at least becomes inconsequential. The Spanish romance, with its eight-syllable lines and four-line stanzas, spread throughout Latin America during the centuries after the initial Spanish settlement because of this type of adaptability, which in turn led both to well-preserved forms and to those with considerable variation and structural change (Olsen 1980:389-91). Hiromi Lorraine Sakata observed this pattern of stylistic consolidation during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the folk song “Mullā Mohammed Jān” (example 2), which originated in the city of Herat, became widespread in Afghanistan and had even been recorded in Iran. The formulaic structure of the second half of each line and the repetitiveness of the refrain served both to popularize the song and to give singers “the opportunity to improvise short, appropriate rhyming phrases without worrying about a difficult melody or strict poetic rhythm” (Sakata 1983:145). Consolidation may have been, in effect, a function of a simplified style, yet a style that simultaneously contributed to the creativity requisite for quickening oral tradition.

Two patterns of musical and textual change often initiate consolidation and borrowing. The first pattern retains the formal superstructure of a piece. Substitution takes place within the piece, often affecting units smaller than the musical or textual phrase. One type of substitution occurs when commonplace references replace those less well known in the community. Roger D. Abrahams and George Foss have observed that such substitutions tend to reflect a community’s sense of either the universal or the local (1968:29-31). Thus the outsiders portrayed in many Middle Eastern folk genres frequently shed all traces of unique identity, acting instead according to a universal and hackneyed role that gypsies, Jews, or other outsiders are imagined to play with stereotypical regularity, regardless of whether such groups could possibly have played such a role. Substitution of local names for stranger foreign names is a common way of drawing a folk song closer to the canonic core of a community.

Wanagi Wacipi Olowan

Translation

EXAMPLE 1

Addition of borrowed or new material to the piece’s superstructure is another impetus to consolidation. Samuel P. Bayard’s exploration of the history of the tune he labels “The Job of Journeywork” revealed certain stages at which shortened versions of the tune were expanded by adding material from external sources (Bayard 1954:13-33 and Nettl 1983:105-8). It is theoretically possible that this process of shortening, coupled with addition, can continue beyond the point at which variants contain any remnants of the original tune, even though the history has been one of continual and logical change.

Mullā Mohammed Jān

Translation (H. L. Sakata)

EXAMPLE 2

Creativity as a motivation for change in folk music has both individual and communal roots. By far, most theoretical discussions and personalized visions of folk music have stressed the communal underpinnings of change. Jacob Grimm’s enjoinder “das Volk dichtet” has persisted in various forms to the present. It is, nonetheless, probable that many of the changes introduced into folk tradition result from acts of individual creativity, some of which may be accidental but others intentional and idiosyncratic. One locus for the role of the individual is in the act of composition itself. Improvisatory genres require relatively more individual creativity than those for which the community would frown upon improvisation. Composition has widely varying meanings when applied to folk music. It may refer to the creation of a new piece; it may refer to the publication of a broadsheet, necessarily tied to existing tunes and textual formulae even if its narrative is new; it may refer to the conscious performance of unique variants. Nettl suggests that a useful distinction between individual and communal creativity lies in the history of individual songs and versions (1973:5). The first stage, composition, relies predominantly on individual acts. Thereafter, it may be communal re-creation—the gradual and accepted reworking of songs by individuals other than the original creators—that determines the pattern of change. Communal re-creation has become a tried-and-true concept of folk music transmission since its formulation as a theory by Phillips Barry (1933).

The efficacy of communal re-creation is a consequence of musical and cultural factors, but clearly the question of widespread acceptance—change permissible within canonical strictures—is central to it. Communal re-creation comprises many considerations necessary for assessment of the different processes of change presented here. It weighs the role of the individual against that of the community and does so without negating either. It accepts change as the creative and natural result of the history of folk music in oral tradition, yet recognizes the checks that a community places on the direction of change. And it combines cultural and musical motivations for the composition and preservation of folk music. Communal re-creation, as well as the other types of change it subsumes, stresses the dynamic quality of folk music by dialectically counterpoising the products and processes of oral tradition. Indeed, it is this broad-ranging ability to explain musical change against a backdrop of stability that causes one to concur with Nettl’s claim that “this process, called ‘communal re-creation,’ is one of the things that distinguish folk music from other kinds” (1973:5).

The Dialectic of Oral Tradition

The dialectic of oral tradition consists of both products and the processes by which these products are derived. For folk music, the product is the discrete entity—the song, the record of a single performance, a version of the unit of transmission—whereas the process is the continuation of transmission. This process theoretically has beginning and ending points and therefore comprises all renderings of the product. Product and process are not so simple as creation and inscription of text, for each of the dialectical components extends to and represents other aspects of oral tradition. Some of these aspects derive from the music itself, others from its cultural context. Interpreted in relation to the dialectic of product and process, however, these components of oral tradition reflect the dynamic force inherent in the performance, transmission, and reception of folk music (cf. Vansina 1985:3-5).

In every repertory of folk music there is a balance between characteristics that many pieces share and those that distinguish pieces from each other. In other words, one can identify elements of unity and uniqueness that together define the relation between the musical core and the boundaries of a repertory. Similarly, these characteristics represent the repertory’s capacity for both collective and individual expression. Various terms have been employed to describe the interaction of these characteristics, among which style and content (e.g., Nettl 1982:10) and Saussure’s langue and parole (1966) are the most common. If the coupling of these concepts suggests the unity and uniqueness within a repertory, it also frames the range within which the repertory’s performance or execution—the processes yielding the products of the repertory—take place. The performative processes are by definition dynamic, constantly stating and restating the relation of content to style, parole to langue (cf. Austin 1975). They are therefore also constantly responsive to and expressive of cultural pressures that effect change.

Performance of folk music draws upon both the unity and the uniqueness of the tradition. Depending on the cultural expectations available to the performer and the audience, each performance combines elements of unifying style with individualizing content. In some cultural settings, the expectation requires that unity predominate; in others, the tolerance of individuality is greater. Whatever the cultural constraints and expectations, performance of folk music brings content and style into immediate contact with each other. The individual choices necessary in each performance continually restate the dialectic that defines a tradition and repertory of folk music, while ensuring that they are in a state of constant change (Nettl 1983:108-9).

Contrasting the relative components of tradition and transmission has often provided another means of addressing the dialectic of unity and uniqueness in folk music. Again, tradition as the sum of all individual performances is shaped by the processes of change, whereas the unit of transmission, the performed version of a piece, is the product marking various stages of these processes. Tradition, moreover, acquires the dynamism of history; it has an essentially diachronic nature. Because it can denote a particular moment in tradition’s temporality, transmission approximates synchrony. For the individual performer, individual performance is always a synchronic act: his or her version of a folk song is the correct one, and it therefore epitomizes the entire tradition (Barry 1933:4). For the community, however, the entire history of a folk music repertory, whether known to the community’s members or not, comprises the tradition (Nettl 1982:3).

Stability and change exist in both community and individual constructs of tradition and transmission. The correctness that the individual presumes in his or her correct version exudes a confidence in stability; nevertheless, it is exactly such an individualized stability that reflects change when any “correct” version is compared with all other versions. Contrastingly, the expansiveness of community tradition is itself an assurance of stability, but only because of its ability to encompass widespread and ongoing change within its various repertories.

Historiographic consideration of various folk music theories reveals very different concepts of the interaction of stability and change in transmission. One of the earliest models, Wilhelm Tappert’s “wandering melodies” (1890), attributed remarkable integrity to individual melodies. This integrity was so great that motifs from individual melodies presumably could and often did travel from region to region, regardless of physical and political impediments (cf. Nettl 1983:104). Many melodies could withstand the ravages of time with a stability so great “that their existence is almost as old as history itself’ (Tappert 1890:5). Implicit in Tappert’s claims for stability is the changeability of tradition vis-à-vis the units of transmission that constitute it, although he was not particularly concerned with applying that changeability to melodies whose integrity was not quite so intrepid as the world travelers in his model.

Melodic integrity is also primary in most concepts of tune families and tune histories. In the tune family, stability results from the sharing of stylistic—one might say genetic—traits. There are inevitably other traits that are not shared, and it is these that explain variation and change. Still, it is the stability of family relationships that provides the soil to nurture the family tree from which the limbs of variation spring. Tune histories, too, are initially determined according to the sharing of melodic traits, but these histories are the products of both internal and external forces. In other words, the stability and change represented by each piece of music are components of an entire repertory, which in turn sustains or fails to sustain the life of the piece (Coffin 1961:248-50 and McMillan 1964:305-6).

Just as stability often resides in some form in the pieces constituting a repertory, so too is it evident in the processes of transmission. Transmission may be determined not just by what pieces of music are put together but by how they are put together. Style is one of the primary determinants of the ways in which new pieces are composed or existing pieces acquire new versions. Extending the notion of style to a community’s repertory, one might explain similarities by noting the stylistic penchant to create pieces of music in analogous ways. George List has applied this concept to even larger cultural areas, such as Europe, in order to explain the frequency with which certain melodic types are found in different repertories (List 1978).

The transmission of style depends in part on culture-based stability. It may also depend on the stability of structural units in folk music. Several types of folk music contain specific lines or motifs that serve as the loci of change. The “bridge” in many American popular songs functions in this way, especially when performed in improvisatory genres like jazz; Nettl has observed that this is also the case in the third line of many Czech folk songs with the form AABA (1983:111). The stability of smaller units of such repertories permits change in the larger units, thereby making the speed and direction of transmission consequences of stability and change.

How do the various components of stability and change actually fit together to form the dialectic of folk music in oral tradition? Do they all influence the direction of tradition in the same way? Even in different cultural settings? Any change, no matter how small and whether related primarily to process or product, exerts some effect on the entire repertory of which it is a part. The resulting impact and resonance of any given change must reflect the density of a repertory and the dynamics of change, again to borrow concepts proposed by Nettl (1982:11). The greater the density of a repertory, the greater the possibilities for stability. Density can be both a synchronic and a diachronic concept; that is, it can have both spatial and historical facets. The difference between the two facets is similar to Eckstorm and Barry’s consideration of “tradition in space” and “tradition in time” (1930:2). If the density of tradition is quite sparse, maintaining stability may be very difficult; similarly, if the dynamics of change are very rapid, stability may be a rather insignificant factor in determining the integrity of a tradition.

Cultural attitudes constantly temper the balance between the two processes. Awareness of a sparse census of folk songs, for example, may heighten a community’s endeavors to preserve or revive, producing concomitant forms of stabilization. Such endeavors may drastically alter the dynamics of change, thus transforming the entire dialectical relation between process and product. But variation in density of repertory and dynamics of change is vital to the nature of oral tradition, for it is such variation that persistently situates both stability and change in the transmission of folk music.

Oral Tradition and Written Tradition

Of the various ways of stabilizing change in oral tradition, none is more effective than written tradition. I hope the reader will bear with me when I state the coexistence of oral and written traditions as a blatant paradox, but I do so for two fundamental reasons. First, oral traditions of folk music are no longer immune from some aspect of literacy, whether it be a literacy that bears directly on folk music itself or literacy in other types of expressive behavior. Second, written traditions of folk music rely on many of the same structures and functions that make possible the oral transmission of music: formulae, iterative structure, cultural license for creativity, requisites for stability (cf. Saussure 1966:15-17). Literacy has become one of the most consistent contexts for folk music in oral tradition.

Although some scholars have insisted upon oral transmission as a prerequisite for folk music, many others have recognized the correlation of orality and literacy in the transmission of folk music (Seeger 1949-50). Barry consistently accounted for written traditions as the second of his two “media for transmission of folk-song,” the other being the singer (1914:67). Barry’s consideration of written tradition had a purely descriptive premise: Anglo-American folk songs in the early decades of the twentieth century circulated widely as broadsides or in chapbooks and newspapers. His descriptive premise suggests further that oral tradition and written tradition tend to be construed as ideal and somehow pure forms of transmission. But it is more likely that the history of a folk song exists sometimes in oral tradition and sometimes in written tradition, usually, however, drawing upon both. Indeed, the interaction of the two may succeed in stabilizing that history, while also facilitating and directing its change.

Written traditions also provide a frequent mode for the introduction of new folk songs into a repertory or effective conduits for external influences, if not borrowing from other repertories. Broadsides or broadsheets best exemplify the creation of new folk songs in Euro-American traditions (e.g., Shepard 1962 and Wright and Wright 1983). A composer of broadside songs writes a text, often about an event recently of concern to a community, which is then printed along with the name of one or several well-known melodies that would adequately set the new text. Even with the first performance, the broadside song (figure 1) stands with one foot in written tradition and the other in oral, and subsequent performances tend rather quickly to shift the song more or less completely into oral tradition.

FIGURE 1. German-language broadside about an 1838 flood in Budapest. The name of the melody for the new song appears below the woodcut. The first verse is at the bottom. (Source: Schmidt 1970:appendix 9.)

Literary representation of music serves as a link between the musical activities in many other social settings and the oral tradition of folk music. The songs of the popular theater and of protest movements and the hymns of religious groups may be transformed into folk music after initial publication in written formats. This process of transformation is, not surprisingly, prevalent in societies or cultural settings where literacy is fairly widespread, such as Central Europe or urban centers. German scholarship has even applied the methodological category Volksgesang as distinguished from Volkslied (both are commonly translated as “folk song,” but Volksgesang implies the change and preshaping of folk song through performance) to describe the movement of a folk music repertory from the literate boundaries to the oral core of a tradition (Schmidt 1970).

Comparison of oral and written traditions of folk music suggests that they differ more in degree than in kind. Oral tradition relies more on memory and therefore contains more repetitive patterns and the mnemonic role of formula. Stylization is often greater in oral tradition, and so is the dramatic continuity of narrative genres. Oral traditions require somewhat greater density of performance, whereas density in written traditions is a factor of the circulation and availability of texts. Because of its greater dependence on performance for maintaining the vitality of a repertory, oral tradition relies on the transmission of rather complete versions. In contrast, literate transmission often deletes some component of completeness—for example, the melody of broadside songs or refrains after the appearance of the first stanza. This difference in the completeness of the unit of transmission often effects major changes in a tradition when literate transmission begins to predominate. The emergence of printed texts in the Yugoslav epic tradition during the early twentieth century not only took the form of abbreviated printed texts but also brought about considerable thematic streamlining and the gradual collapse of formulaic structure in oral performance (Lord 1960:130-32).

It is virtually impossible in the twentieth century to discover folk music traditions that are purely oral or exclusively literate. And still another lesson has accompanied the twentieth century: the spread of various forms of literacy throughout the world has not been the death knell of folk music that some scholars have alleged. It becomes increasingly necessary, in fact, to expand our understanding of the range spanned by such concepts as orality and literacy, especially when electronic and other media of transmission exert a growing influence on folk music. The essential issue for the study of folk music is therefore not either oral or written, but the dynamics and direction of change inherent in the coexistence of these two aspects of tradition.

Oral Tradition and the Canon

The oral tradition of folk music depends on a canonic core that encapsulates stability and change. The repertories embodied by this core differ from community to community, and the processes that shape the core are different in each culture. The canonic core consists of musical and cultural, textual and contextual elements. Among the musical elements serving as the core’s infrastructure are the integral units of transmission: pieces, formulae, normative settings of texts, shared musical vocabularies. The relative roles of composition, improvisation, and communal re-creation also determine what musical elements constitute the core. Cultural context is reflected in the superstructure or boundaries of the canonic core and therefore plays an active role in making each tradition distinct and characteristic of the group maintaining it. Some cultural contexts may undergird the stability of tradition by, for example, enhancing ritual or the epic recounting of collective history, while others may stimulate change by serving as the voice of protest or mediating class stratification (Lomax 1968:6).

Oral tradition reflects the selectivity of the community that initiates and bears it. It is thus not a random pattern of aesthetic and social expression but takes its shape from the stylistic concerns and emotional core of a given community. The selectivity central to oral tradition shapes its canon from the very inception of tradition and then continually reshapes it throughout the tradition’s history. Items enter the canon because they somehow stand out and are worthy of special artistic attention and because they can be fitted to the tradition without sacrificing the integrity of the item or the tradition (Vansina 1985:20). The same qualities that draw items into the canon assume new functions that were once a part of oral tradition, broadening context or transforming text into mnemonic devices, for example, and thus enlivening the tradition through their stabilizing impact.

The interaction of canonic core and its boundaries bestows to the oral tradition of folk music a dynamic, variegating quality. Change and differing attitudes toward change occupy the boundary areas some distance from the core. Performance practices that produce stability have a greater density near the core of the tradition, whereas those little encouraged by audience consensus shift increasingly away from the core. In a society where individual performance is not highly valued, the boundaries of oral tradition may provide a locus for individual creativity. Change in the canon then results as some pieces of folk music move from the boundary toward the core, there perhaps to gain gradual approval from the community, for whom the piece becomes a staple in the folk music repertory (Nettl 1982:4).

The dialectic between canonic core and boundary accounts for both the stability necessary if a folk music tradition is to have meaning for a community and the changeability required to withstand, encourage, or transform influences outside the community. Folk music manifests characteristics that are both unique to a community and shared almost universally with other communities. The mitigating role of the dialectic between core and boundary also allows for this seeming contradiction. The canon of folk music in oral tradition, far from being unchanging, is fully capable of absorbing new repertory and cultural functions, albeit only after they have been transformed by the canon’s boundaries into texts and contexts appropriate to the aesthetic and social criteria of the community at its core. The formation and maintenance of the canon, therefore, are predicated on stability and change, both of which are ongoing and inseparable forces in the determination of the oral tradition of folk music.