Re-discovering the sound of ‘texts’: Oral poetry

Though Florens Chladni was already experimenting with visualizations of acoustic wave figures in sand-covered plates created by the vibrations of the violin bow, ‘Goethe's definition of literature did not even have to mention […] acoustic data flows.’ The practices of oral tradition were silenced by the general textualization of the word and ‘only survived in written format; that is, under pre-technological but literary conditions. However, since it has become possible to record the epics of the last Homeric bards, who until recently were wandering through Serbia and Croatia, oral mnemotechnics or cultures have become reconstructible in a completely different way.’ This difference is dramatic: a change from symbolic notation to signal recording. ‘Even Homer's rosy-fingered Eos changes from a Goddess into a piece of chromium dioxide that was stored in the memory of the bard and could be combined with other pieces into whole epics.’

Since Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, the media-critical argument repeats: the dead letters of alphabetic recording kill the living memory culture of oral poetry. Textualization is a threat to oral traditions. Is Milman Parry's theory of formulae-based oral poetry itself an effect of analyzing oral poetry in a transcribed and thus textual form? Aristotle gained his insight into the phonetic character of speech only after its visible elementarization by the phonetic alphabet. The alphabetization of phonographically recorded oral poetry in philological studies (Homer studies, Classics) papers over its essential nature: sound. In a somewhat oxymoronic and, at the same time, significantly honest way, the name given by Albert Lord to the impressive archive of recorded oral poetry from the former South Yugoslav countries at Harvard University is the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. But media archaeology recognizes that there is no primary ‘text’, only recorded voices and sound – even if some of them were transcribed into literature and musical notation.

When the classicists Parry and Lord set off to the kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1934/35 to record epic songs on aluminium discs, their research was driven by the philological impulse to reconstruct the mechanism of Homeric oral poetry by analogy. Thus, the first thing to do after phonographic recording was to transcribe the song as a musical score and poetical text.