Performed Narratives and Music in Japan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Embodied Orality: Transmission in Traditional Japanese Music
Asian Music, 2018
Abstract:Although the debate of orality versus literacy began with Plato, can we say that this debate has come to its rightful conclusion? There is still a lot to understand about orality in the transmission of music when we consider that an important aspect of it has clearly not been studied extensively: embodiment. Can there be a knowledge transmitted through the body that makes writing and verbalization play a peripheral role? The acting, moving, learning, feeling, and knowledgeable body plays a crucial role well beyond what is being transmitted. A large part of that knowledge cannot be put into words, but it is imparted when musicians or dancers perform onstage. In this article, we take a close look at the importance of embodied learning in traditional Japanese oral transmission.Abstract:「口頭性」と「書記性」についての論争はプラトンに始まるが、その論議は果たして正 当な結論へと導かれたと言えるだろうか。音楽を伝える過程においての「口頭性」につ いて、未だ研究されていない重要な点のひとつに「エンボディメント（身体化及び具 体化）」があり、議論する余地が十分にある。文書や言葉にして表現したり伝えたり することに重きをおかず、身体だけを通して伝えるという知識自体がありうるの...
Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology
2010
The literacy-orality problematic, which has been debated from Plato to Postman, has focused on how the visuality of the literary medium affects the aurality of the oral medium. Recent research by John Miles Foley has addressed the particular advantages in using the most modern technology of the Internet to simulate and explore the oldest technology of orality, thereby calling into question our continued reliance on textually based media in orality research when electronic media provide a more effective vehicle for scholarly investigations into oral forms. 1 But how does this discussion relate specifically to the act of music-making? Is there an interface between a musical orality and a musical literacy? Musicologists have treated the question of the musical dimension of orality in such works as Yoshiko Tokumaru and Osamu Yamaguti's The Oral and the Literate in Music (1986), Stephen Erdely's research on the musical dimension of Bosnian epics (1995), Bruno Nettl's collection of cross cultural research on the topic of improvisation (1998), Karl Reichl's compilation of music research in a wide-ranging number of oral epic traditions , and Paul Austerlitz's work on the "consciousness" of jazz (2005), but less attention has been given to the link between the visual technology of notation and its effect on the oral-aural processing of music. 2 Scholars of medieval music have been at the forefront in addressing the connection between oral performance and the emergence of notation. Leo Treitler's work during the latter half of the twentieth century that considered the visual-aural link in medieval music was groundbreaking, culminating in the recent collection of seventeen of his foundational essays on medieval chant (Treitler 2003). Seminal works by Susan Boynton (2003), Kenneth Levy (1998), Peter Jeffery (1992, and other medievalists have also contributed considerably to the discussion of orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages. In addition, Anna Maria Busse Berger's recent book, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (2005), highlights the change in performance practice and composition with changes in medieval notation practices (250-51). Busse Berger asks why musicologists have been slow to address the role of memory and notation in music, and then follows with a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the interaction Oral Tradition, 25/2 (2010): 429-446 This pioneering approach to the study of orality through Internet technology is explained in Foley 2002Foley , 2004Foley , 2005. See further The Pathways Project, which consists of a forthcoming book, Pathways of the Mind: Oral Tradition and the Internet, and a website (http://pathwaysproject.org).
Performance has been recognized as the bedrock of Oral Literature thus contextual performance situations become the best avenues for the appropriate assessment and analysis of pre-literate traditions and their artistic endowments. In the past, Oral performances of the so-called pre-literate societies were erroneously classified as fossils and lacking artistic or aesthetic appeal. This paper, therefore, attempts an assessment of Bakor Song compositions within their contextual performance situations with a view, not only to bring out the artistic and creative potential of the artists but also to portray the contemporary relevance of the artists and their compositions
Introduction to Orality in African Literature
Therefore, what counts most in the final analysis is the beneficial effect of traditional literature upon the audience (readers or listeners); and whether that effect brings about moral, cultural, social or political transformation.
Textual to Oral: The Impact of Transmission on Narrative Word-art
2001
This paper will undertake an approach to 'the oral history of the Middle Ages' which is indirect in at least three ways. In the first instance it studies recent oral tradition rather than medieval texts directly, in this reflecting the general thrust of the writer's research, which has characteristically sought to supplement direct approaches to medieval and Renaissance literature and culture by the indirect (and philologically less challenging) one of exploring whether folk traditions of the last two centuries or so, be they songs, legends or customs, may preserve something of, or otherwise cast light on, their latemedieval and early-modern antecedents. This is done in the spirit of Peter Burke's 'regressive method', 1 moving cautiously from better-documented recent tradition to worse-documented early tradition, rather than that of much earlier (and some recent) research, which, on the assumption that folklore preserves a primitive, prehistoric culture, can assume a massive continuity in tradition. 2 Secondly, while one imagines that for most historians, the orality that most concerns them pertains to the phase that comes before textualization, that is the eye-witness reports, the rumours, the legends, etc. that intervene between an event and the making of the surviving written record of the event (and which significantly affect the validity and accuracy of that record), 3 this study is of an orality that follows textualization, when a written (here more strictly a printed) text is memorized and later retrieved from memory in performance, memorized by others from such performance and reproduced by them in performance in turn, and so on, in what mutates and bifurcates into the verbal instability and polytextuality endemic to folk tradition. And lastly, rather than dealing with conventional historical (i.e. functionally utilitarian) texts like legal, financial or administrative documents, this study will examine song texts, that is to say consciously constructed verbal artefacts, examples of what my title designates as 'word-art', by way of proffering a term suitable for covering both the written (and printed) works for which