Oral/Aural Culture in Late Modern Society? Traditional Singing as Professionalized Genre and Oral-Derived Expression

This article discusses some expressions and elements of orality and aurality in late modern society, and the roles, functions, and limitations of these expressions. Traditional song of different cultural origin has been the subject of much analysis and scholarship within the areas of orality studies, ballad studies, and several other related fields. However, songs and singing are in many cases analyzed chiefly as verbal art and verbal performance, while less attention is given to the closely interwoven texture of words, music, rhythm, and timbre, or to the balance between verbal and music-related sides of orality. I think more frequent discussions between scholars within the disciplines of folkloristics, literature, linguistics, and ethnomusicology might be fruitful. Initiatives of this kind are continuously taken in conferences and publications, and a couple of interesting texts on musical aspects have recently been published in Oral Tradition itself.1 My own discipline is ethnomusicology, and my topic is traditional singing (or vocal folk music) in a Northern European and especially Swedish/Scandinavian context, viewed as a contemporary cultural—verbal and musical—expression, and partly as an established sub-genre within the genre or field that is today labeled “folk music” or “folk and world music.” There are reasons to ask, in the early twenty-first century, what the consequences are for oral-derived singing and music-making in an era of accelerating professionalization, institutionalization, and formalization. Which elements and expressions of orality function in a cultural environment characterized by fast changes, access to innumerable cultural items, and music as a mediatized, processed, and often digitized phenomenon? And what are the consequences for affinity-centered and long-term qualities of oral tradition, such as learning songs across the kitchen table and performing and developing one’s repertory during a lifetime? This essay is based on my studies of the Swedish/Scandinavian contemporary folk music scene with some references to earlier periods of time and other European/Western music cultures. It is my belief that, despite these geographic and cultural limitations, several of my Oral Tradition, 27/1 (2012): 67-84