Walter Ong's text on the relationship of the spoken word to that of the written is a dense book. But throughout the many subjects Ong discusses tangential to orality and literacy, none is so vital as his argument for the primacy of orality to the written word. I found the following statistics presented as part of Ong's argument to be intensely interesting:
Of all the thousands of languages that have been spoken during the course of recorded history, only 106 of them have been committed to writing advanced enough to produce literature.
and
Of approximately 3,000 languages spoken currently in the world, only 78 have produced literature.
What does this mean to us discussing writing? Are we to approach the languages that have developed literature with praise and the solely oral languages with scorn? Does the fact that a language has been committed to writing somehow gain it leverage in its 'validity' as a language? The answer that Ong gives us, and the correct one, is a resounding no, as "The basic orality of language is permanent".
This concept is also interesting when one considers its applications to music.
Oral tradition is, was and always will be a larger part of music than notation. There are numerous example of this, spanning multiple genres of music. Take, for example, the folk songs and 'murder ballads' of the Appalachian region. These ballads are Scottish and English in origin, yet have been passed down though generations solely by oral tradition. It was not until ethnomusicologists like Harry Smith, Alan Lomax, and others began swarming into the hills of Appalachia and transcribing these ballads that they were ever codified. I remember seeing a performance by a ballad singer, and she said that out of the hundred or so ballads she knew by heart, the ones that were easiest for her to call to memory were the ones taught to her by family members, orally, before she had ever begun to learn any codified method of singing or begun to read notated music.
The same is true of instrumentalists, as well. Jazz pioneer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong used the melody of a given song as a guidepoint for improvisation, keeping track of the chord changes of the song by continually recititing the melody in his head as he played. This method of ear training is all that existed for early jazz musicians; no notated system of jazz education existed until the later half of the 20th century. Jazz players were educated by recordings, pulling melodic lines from records and learning the ins and outs of chord changes only by repetitive listening and singing.
It is slightly humbling for those of us involved in the business of writing to think that our finely honed craft is and always will be inferior to a well-told story, or that an ungodly expensive education in music could be easily replaced by a couple of records and a good musical ear, but these are the simple truths that history has taught us. Although writing lends our thoughts permanence, and greatly decreases the difficulty inherent in certain tasks, time and time again it has been proven that the most effective form of communication and art is simply talking and listening to one another.
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