if musical styles are somewhat of a guide, I think there may be a mistake in discounting memorization. We find that you always start by memorizing -- this happens because some phrasing isn't as easy to get correct, so you memorize that. But then what happens is, like with memorizing words and letters, you get to a certain point where you grasp the language of it more intuitively, and even to the point that you can _bend_ the rules. So memorization is always involved on some level, but as a stepping stone to really grasping the style, provided you have the capacity to move beyond simple imitation of the phrases/forms.
One other thing here is that rather than attributing the loss of oral poetry strictly to the emergence of writing, I think it partly dies due to the success of some great poets; jounglers beat out improvisators when copying the "best" is better than improvising, so the process of "meritocracy" ends in a "bloom", after which the plant dies.
I suspect that oral traditions would sometimes die pre-writing because an oral poet's particular formulations became so beloved that people simply imitated them, copying them as nearly as possible (probably favoring shorter works;) and spent time memorizing things exactly rather than understanding the meta-language of the improvisation. This is precisely what I think has happened to European Classical Music; most of the composers were part of a formalized compositional tradition (one version of this is called 'the Aetlier method' iirc) that had them memorizing formulas for cadences and common melodic ideas until they could make compositions themselves, and the best of them could improvise whole pieces. This tradition was always attached to the through-compositional tradition, not because the music was written or there was no improv (or that free improv wasn't something all of these masters could do) but because ensemble requires coordination and you can't coordinate if people are doing things that conflict beyond a certain level. So if you are doing vocal imitation, it's possible to improvise a theme-variation on a motet, but not with four singers, who may know the same language of phrases, but may make choices on the fly that break the harmonic sounds. So in this tradition you have a combination of improvisational sections or pieces and through-composed ensemble work, which for most of the history sat side by side unmolested! I think this is because the way in which music was taught involved teaching one to compose using formulas which create that meta-language, which equipped all trained musicians to both improvise and through-compose.
Good points. It's worth keeping in mind that what Parry and Lord observed among illiterates with a functioning tradition will not work for moderns approaching poetic language as a 'reconlang'. To draw the usual analogy, if an illiterate wanted to learn a language, he would have to move into the physical company of native speakers and start slowly picking it up from simple words; but I would give myself a lot of hassle by trying to learn Serbo-Croatian like that, when I can put example sentences into Anki and try to memorize grammar patterns.
I left this point out of the text, but according to Michael Witzel, the Rig-Veda poems were frozen and handed down by memorization long before they were committed to writing. This must have been an incredibly difficult undertaking, and (while being mindful of cause and effect) I cannot imagine any other motive for it than religious veneration. So apparently it is this will to veneration that leads to the fatal perfection of a tradition, but the advent of writing makes the whole process so much easier.
I don't know enough to treat the topic in detail, but I would say that the development of Western music into text-dependence (and, more importantly, into 'vertical' forms that tend to enforce that dependence) is entirely parallel to the development of literary poetry. Perhaps it is only the inefficiency of schools at teaching musical notation to most people that prevents its further development, into the silent contemplation of scores on the page.
Indeed. That's my point – that if music ever became as text-dependent as poetry already is, people would be reading scores in silence instead of actually listening.
maybe — interestingly, I think a better corollary is with recording vs. live. So long as people value the feeling of live music, live music will persist, as recordings are far cheaper and more available, and largely better in quality. If your interest is specifically in the absolute quality of the listening, perhaps measured by how well it reproduces the best performances ever done, other than boredom there’s no point in learning to play an instrument or playing an instrument live. In some sense, this more-likely endpoint of music development shares the characteristics of what has mostly happened to poetry.
I think a spoken poetry tradition of this sort could persist if people preferred the sound and feel of the improvised poetry more than they preferred the availability of the written texts. It shouldn’t be forgotten that like music recording, poetry recording (in the form of written texts) would likely increase their availability, including allowing people who are not part of a living tradition the opportunity to perform them themselves, or read them at their leisure. Jounglers kind of act as a middle ground where the ‘best’ versions are reproduced by people more competent and speaking/memorization, allowing more to experience them spoken.
Thus, such a poetry tradition in addition to being living (i.e. handed down through personal relationships and training) it would need to have one of two characteristics, I believe, following the example of still-living musical traditions (i.e. Gypsy Jazz)
It would need to be afforded a high status through fiat; this is essentially a political act and is reminiscent of how poetry works in Wales, albeit I think without the spoken improv aspect. (It needn’t be the government, of course)
It would need to do things you can only do live, or at the very least things for which a live performance improves them greatly. In such a case, recordings and written versions could easily be treated like sheet music or tabliature, kind of a performance aid, but not the real poetry.
On the latter part, Jazz still lives as a performance art in part due to its improv tradition I think, same with things like Bluegrass. (The avant garde part of Jazz is mostly gone I think, which may be a good thing!)
That's food for thought. Only half a restoration would be accomplished, if music and performance were brought back to poetry, only for a few recordings to take the place of written texts on the pedestal of idolatry.
One way to head that off would be to hold competitions like they do in Serbia, but demand original (recomposed) work and disqualify people for jongleurism. That would create a constant sportsman-like pressure to outdo the greats of the past, but it would concern only an elite minority practicing the art to a high standard. A functioning tradition would require a much larger group of people practicing at a journeyman level, and for them it might take the form of a social activity – like those that took place in Anglo-Saxon England, mentioned in the story of Caedmon, in which the lyre was passed round the table from person to person.
As for the political status of traditional poetry, it could one day be to dissidents what hip-hop is (or was?) to ghetto blacks. But that would require it to somehow break through the wall of their obsession with right-wing politics, and that is easier said than done.
if musical styles are somewhat of a guide, I think there may be a mistake in discounting memorization. We find that you always start by memorizing -- this happens because some phrasing isn't as easy to get correct, so you memorize that. But then what happens is, like with memorizing words and letters, you get to a certain point where you grasp the language of it more intuitively, and even to the point that you can _bend_ the rules. So memorization is always involved on some level, but as a stepping stone to really grasping the style, provided you have the capacity to move beyond simple imitation of the phrases/forms.
One other thing here is that rather than attributing the loss of oral poetry strictly to the emergence of writing, I think it partly dies due to the success of some great poets; jounglers beat out improvisators when copying the "best" is better than improvising, so the process of "meritocracy" ends in a "bloom", after which the plant dies.
I suspect that oral traditions would sometimes die pre-writing because an oral poet's particular formulations became so beloved that people simply imitated them, copying them as nearly as possible (probably favoring shorter works;) and spent time memorizing things exactly rather than understanding the meta-language of the improvisation. This is precisely what I think has happened to European Classical Music; most of the composers were part of a formalized compositional tradition (one version of this is called 'the Aetlier method' iirc) that had them memorizing formulas for cadences and common melodic ideas until they could make compositions themselves, and the best of them could improvise whole pieces. This tradition was always attached to the through-compositional tradition, not because the music was written or there was no improv (or that free improv wasn't something all of these masters could do) but because ensemble requires coordination and you can't coordinate if people are doing things that conflict beyond a certain level. So if you are doing vocal imitation, it's possible to improvise a theme-variation on a motet, but not with four singers, who may know the same language of phrases, but may make choices on the fly that break the harmonic sounds. So in this tradition you have a combination of improvisational sections or pieces and through-composed ensemble work, which for most of the history sat side by side unmolested! I think this is because the way in which music was taught involved teaching one to compose using formulas which create that meta-language, which equipped all trained musicians to both improvise and through-compose.
Something of this sort is possible with poetry.
Good points. It's worth keeping in mind that what Parry and Lord observed among illiterates with a functioning tradition will not work for moderns approaching poetic language as a 'reconlang'. To draw the usual analogy, if an illiterate wanted to learn a language, he would have to move into the physical company of native speakers and start slowly picking it up from simple words; but I would give myself a lot of hassle by trying to learn Serbo-Croatian like that, when I can put example sentences into Anki and try to memorize grammar patterns.
I left this point out of the text, but according to Michael Witzel, the Rig-Veda poems were frozen and handed down by memorization long before they were committed to writing. This must have been an incredibly difficult undertaking, and (while being mindful of cause and effect) I cannot imagine any other motive for it than religious veneration. So apparently it is this will to veneration that leads to the fatal perfection of a tradition, but the advent of writing makes the whole process so much easier.
I don't know enough to treat the topic in detail, but I would say that the development of Western music into text-dependence (and, more importantly, into 'vertical' forms that tend to enforce that dependence) is entirely parallel to the development of literary poetry. Perhaps it is only the inefficiency of schools at teaching musical notation to most people that prevents its further development, into the silent contemplation of scores on the page.
Music is about how things sound, few can hear it by reading a score.
Indeed. That's my point – that if music ever became as text-dependent as poetry already is, people would be reading scores in silence instead of actually listening.
maybe — interestingly, I think a better corollary is with recording vs. live. So long as people value the feeling of live music, live music will persist, as recordings are far cheaper and more available, and largely better in quality. If your interest is specifically in the absolute quality of the listening, perhaps measured by how well it reproduces the best performances ever done, other than boredom there’s no point in learning to play an instrument or playing an instrument live. In some sense, this more-likely endpoint of music development shares the characteristics of what has mostly happened to poetry.
I think a spoken poetry tradition of this sort could persist if people preferred the sound and feel of the improvised poetry more than they preferred the availability of the written texts. It shouldn’t be forgotten that like music recording, poetry recording (in the form of written texts) would likely increase their availability, including allowing people who are not part of a living tradition the opportunity to perform them themselves, or read them at their leisure. Jounglers kind of act as a middle ground where the ‘best’ versions are reproduced by people more competent and speaking/memorization, allowing more to experience them spoken.
Thus, such a poetry tradition in addition to being living (i.e. handed down through personal relationships and training) it would need to have one of two characteristics, I believe, following the example of still-living musical traditions (i.e. Gypsy Jazz)
It would need to be afforded a high status through fiat; this is essentially a political act and is reminiscent of how poetry works in Wales, albeit I think without the spoken improv aspect. (It needn’t be the government, of course)
It would need to do things you can only do live, or at the very least things for which a live performance improves them greatly. In such a case, recordings and written versions could easily be treated like sheet music or tabliature, kind of a performance aid, but not the real poetry.
On the latter part, Jazz still lives as a performance art in part due to its improv tradition I think, same with things like Bluegrass. (The avant garde part of Jazz is mostly gone I think, which may be a good thing!)
That's food for thought. Only half a restoration would be accomplished, if music and performance were brought back to poetry, only for a few recordings to take the place of written texts on the pedestal of idolatry.
One way to head that off would be to hold competitions like they do in Serbia, but demand original (recomposed) work and disqualify people for jongleurism. That would create a constant sportsman-like pressure to outdo the greats of the past, but it would concern only an elite minority practicing the art to a high standard. A functioning tradition would require a much larger group of people practicing at a journeyman level, and for them it might take the form of a social activity – like those that took place in Anglo-Saxon England, mentioned in the story of Caedmon, in which the lyre was passed round the table from person to person.
As for the political status of traditional poetry, it could one day be to dissidents what hip-hop is (or was?) to ghetto blacks. But that would require it to somehow break through the wall of their obsession with right-wing politics, and that is easier said than done.