The Concert Experience and the Song as Oral Tradition :: Communication Literature Essays

The Concert Experience and the Song as Oral Tradition Before the invention of written language that enabled the creation of book technology, the spoken word was the leading edge of communication. Spoken epic poetry such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh was the content of the speech medium. These epics were created as spoken pieces, and because listeners lacked an alphabet to commodify them (separate them from their performance), the tales had to be heard and experienced first-hand. This group experience of the spoken epic involves what authors Hobart and Schiffman term commemoration: â€Å"In the world before writing, memory is the social act of remembering† (15). The way pre-literate media (speech) shaped culture includes this commemorative act. Pre-literate cultures had no other way of storing information and memory than to relive it. They could not write something down, forget about it, and then relearn the same information at a later date by reading it, because they lacked the technology of the written alphabet necessary to do so. Of course, they had the recollecting powers of the mind alone, but as today's stories, passed from one person to the next inevitably change, so did oral communications as human recollection failed in terms of an exact repetition of the original performance. Hence, each time listeners heard a spoken account of the Iliad, it changed a bit. In terms of an exceptional pre-literate performer of the Iliad or Odyssey, Rober t Fitzgerald goes as far as to say that "He inherited a traditional art comparable in range and refinement to the art of the musical virtuoso in our day, but more creative and fluid, for in some degree it remained an art of improvisation" (484). Mnemonic devices such as rhyme and meter aided memory and kept the story on track (Hobart & Schiffman, 24), and as McLuhan would agree, can be counted as technological advances prior to the invention of alphabet because they extend language technology. An analog to the spoken epic experience is the modern-day concert experience. Both are examples of live performance. For an example, the Rolling Stones' song "Sympathy for the Devil" is more like a spoken epic than a written account of an epic. This is because song and spoken epic utilize the same medium.