Timeline + Chart

Timeline Integrating Ong & My Research:

Visual Representation of Ong's Argument:

Music as a Text or Thing: How Does Music Fit In With the Development of Writing?

• As you can see, this is a simple visual representation Walter Ong’s argument in Orality & Literacy. There are some neat correlations with the history of music notation/storage and the history of writing. The same impulses that caused people to write down spoken words and make visual representations of them are the same that led humans to create musical notation and compositions. Like with writing, music could become more complex and layered once notation was developed & standardized. In short, how we consciously understand music was also reshaped by writing.
• Outside of highbrow culture, which in the West was based on written musical compositions; a great deal of music remained oral. It was learned, imitated and passed on orally. Ong might call this “oral residue.” The modern “discovery” of oral cultures in the early twentieth century that Ong details coincides with the technological development of sophisticated field recording techniques, and the rise of music recording in general. So, it’s no accident that academics and intellectuals like Harry Smith, J.A. Lomax and his son, Alan, were interested in preserving, collecting, compiling, printing, recording, anthologizing and archiving folk music which had never been transcribed or collected for a mass audience. Think about the folk songs that you know. No doubt that you learned them from recordings, sheet music or some other way that was the result of them being transcribed. Thus, they became standardized and lost many of the regional variations that they once had when they were only orally transmitted. So, through the process of recording and transcription, even folk music became secondarily oral.
• Part of the appeal of the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music is that to many people, it represented a world that no longer existed, even though many of the recordings had been made only 20-25 years prior to its release – listeners heard the “old, weird America” that had given way to the present era of industrialization, mass culture and post-war consumerism. Like the argument that Ong makes about the book, the recording also creates a sense of “closure.” Similar to the book, a sound recording is also a world unto itself.
• In 1964, the pianist Glenn Gould quit public performance to concentrate on recording. He had already predicted the death of the public performance, and anticipated that electronic media would take its place. One of the benefits was the prospect of “archival recording.” As recording companies demanded more product and as storage capabilities improved, there was a greater demand for the complete works of a given composer. A musician could interpret a work, record it, and shelf it without having to commit it to memory for performance. The machinery of the studio acted as a memory aid or extension of the artist himself, freeing him to explore a wider repertoire, much like Ong argues that writing allowed for a greater degree of introspection and exploration of new ideas.

William G. Bryan