Oral Transmission

El flamenco dejó de ser exclusivamente una cultura musical de transmisión oral con la introducción de nuevas prácticas de transmisión como la oralidad parcial y la literalidad. La observación de la realidad actual del flamenco confirma la diversidad de prácticas y contextos de transmisión en los que el flamenco se difunde por lo que es necesario llevar a cabo una reconceptualización de los métodos de transmisión en el flamenco y redefinir el flamenco como un sistema de transmisión transcultural que abarca lo auditivo y lo visual.

This is the fourth volume of proceedings of the Āgama seminars convened by the
Āgama Research Group at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (formerly
Dharma Drum Buddhist College). It comprises nineteen studies, contributed by
eighteen different scholars, on various themes related to the Connected Collections of
discourses (suttas, sūtras) — Saṃyutta-nikāya in Pali, Saṃyukta-āgama in Sanskrit —
transmitted by different early Buddhist lineages of reciters, preserved in their Indic
originals in Gandhari, Pali and Sanskrit as well as in Chinese and Tibetan translations.
This research draws attention to fundamental methodological points posed by the
study of these scriptural collections as windows into the formation of early Buddhist
texts and the organisation of their transmission.

Joe Neil MacNeil holds in his memory a wealth of Gaelic folktales, learned in his youth in Cape Breton. For over a decade, he has told his tales to John Shaw, a specialist in Celtic folklore and fluent speaker of Gaelic. Shaw has recorded, transcribed, edited, and translated the tales and folklore into English. This rich and entertaining collection is the result of their collaboration. Folktales, anecdotes, proverbs, expressions, rhymes, superstitions, and games are presented in translation and, in the cloth edtion, in the original as well. All variations of the genre are represented: a fragment from the Ulster cycle, some items from the Fenian cycle, hero and wonder tales, fairy and witch lore, romantic tales, tales of the exemplum type, tales of cleverness, "numbskull" stories, animal tales, and tall tales.

MacNeil also describes his early years in a Gaelic-speaking rural community, where story-telling is still a basic element of community life. He explains how he learned the tales and the customs and practices associated with their telling. He also introduces us to the families and individuals who were custodians of the tales. John Shaw's introduction outlines the informant's tradition and its place in the world of the European story-teller.

The commentaries of MacNeil and Shaw, the tales, the games, and the other folk material offer a rich and unique perspective on the Gaelic culture generally, and as it has developed on Cape Breton Island in particular.
(From McGill-Queen's University Press and Edinburgh University Press)

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the collaboration between a collector of the Byzantine chant tradition of Piana degli Albanesi (Palermo) in Sicily, fr. Bartolomeo Di Salvo, and the editorial board of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, i.e. an institution under the aegis of the University of Copenhagen.
Bartolomeo Di Salvo (1916-1986), a Catholic monk of Byzantine Rite, gathered between 1950-1960 the most complete collection of this late-medieval and still living musical tradition, handed down over the last five centuries only by means of the oral transmission. In the same decade, fr. Di Salvo got in contact with the MMB, and eventually they agreed to publish the critical edition of this collection.
After more than fifty years, the updated and revised version of the edition of this meaningful collection is finally being published by the MMB.

In northwestern Europe, the migration of legends has been a growing
area of study, exploring their history, development, and geographical/cultural
distribution. The past two centuries have been a time of large-scale voluntary or
forced migrations that have provided new opportunities for investigating how
folklore, including legends, has survived and changed during mass population
movements. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, is foremost among the Scottish
Gaelic diaspora communities, established in North America during the Highland
Clearances, where oral storytelling traditions have been extensively recorded,
and provides a unique opportunity for ethnologists to study survival and
adaptation of various folklore genres through comparisons with those surviving
in the Scottish Highlands from the early 19th century. This article will examine
the kinds of legends that have travelled over the Atlantic; how they have adapted;
legends that have sprung up in the new environment; and what distinctive new
developments have appeared in post-migration tradition.

The essays contained in this volume deal with some important questions concerning the relationship between the world of custom and the world that can be most precisely defined as cultivated, which found its expression in writing. For the medieval and modern periods, these questions involve a close relationship between the educated, elaborated and tendentially abstract viewpoint expressed through writing, and the one substantially tied to social practices, intimately connected to oral tradition and custom. It is not by chance that customs played a primary part in the hierarchy of sources which a judge theoretically had to take into consideration in his jurisprudential activity.  The contact with the world of custom and tradition allows to see some of its most significant features, above all in the many judiciary cases produced by the ever more intrusive and classificatory activity of the ecclesiastical and secular institutions. It is possible to appreciate this aspect in many spheres of social and political life; however, it comes out most clearly in the complicated matter of marriage.
The emergence of tradition, understood above all in the sense of custom and of a legal order characterized by orality and mediation, is therefore a historical and cultural phenomenon filtered in the modern period through the activity of secular and ecclesiastical institutions that aimed at regulating and constraining it within legal parameters reflecting new social and political instances. And the interpretative tool of legal anthropology helps the historian understand its scope and meanings. This collection of essays essentially intends to follow this line of interpretation, in an attempt to grasp through a varied and complex selection of judiciary cases the emergence of social practices that had long been grounded in custom and oral transmission.

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Literature, particularly fiction represents life. Sometimes, however, life seems to reflect orally transmitted fiction. Premendra Mitra narrates how Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay's observations of his fellow boarders in a south Kolkata mess made him exclaim, 'It appears that you are telling a written story.' This is the dialectics of the reflection of reality in fiction.

Durch detaillierte philologische Untersuchungen wird ein neues Bild von der Frühgeschichte des gregorianischen Chorals gezeichnet: Die Anwesenheit und Abwesenheit bestimmter Typen von Melodievarianten spricht für eine stabile schriftlose Überlieferung und eine unabhängige Verschriftlichung der Überlieferungszweige, sodass die Rekonstruktion der Melodien von circa 800 prinzipiell möglich scheint. Die Analogie der Variantenbildung zwischen römischer und fränkischer Überlieferung erlaubt den Schluss, dass der altrömische Choral nicht archaisch, sondern dekadent ist. Fragen der Gesangstexte und der liturgischen Ordnung werden mitbehandelt.

This paper focuses on a repertoire of instrumental pieces performed and orally transmitted among players of a two-stringed lute called dutar in Turkmenistan. Through music analysis, it seeks to illustrate exactly how Turkmen dutar players negotiate contrasting demands to maintain the pieces as learned from their masters while also developing them over time as part of an ongoing collective composition process. The analysis relates to a complexly interconnected set of research areas: studies of that focus on the importance of formulas and patterns to the process of reconstructing memorized material and studies that show how musicians draw on formulas, internalized schemas, and compositional principles to generate new musical material in the course of improvisation or composition. While Turkmen music does not feature separate, marked spaces for generating new melodic sequences at length as do most of the genres that have been studied by scholars taking similar analytical approaches, we can observe similar generative processes at play in the ways that Turkmen musicians vary and expand on traditional repertoire. Specifically, I show how traditional pieces feature constantly shifting constraints on and affordances for variation and development. Turkmen musicians internalize principles for exploiting such affordances in the process of learning the repertoire and reapply these to the traditional compositions as they reconstruct them in performance. I separate such analytical observations from the question of how Turkmens assess and valorize performers’ variations on and contributions to the traditional compositions, providing additional ethnographic data on this point. In doing so, I also seek to bring clarity to some of the confusion surrounding the much-discussed, problematic term “improvisation.”

The liturgical repertoire of the Albanian, or rather Arbëreshe communities in Sicily has been mainly administered by means of oral transmission, since the time of the diaspora (ca. 1480) up to the end of the 19th century, and it is considered to belong to the “Byzantine chant tradition”. This last statement was made for the very first time in 1952 by the Sicilian monk Father Bartolomeo Di Salvo (Piana degli Albanesi, Palermo).
In the last two decades, the studies carried out by Garofalo (2006) and Ahmedaja (2007), and recently by Gerlach (2015), offer a description of the cultural identity, key players, and an analysis of the ecclesiastical musical tradition of the Arbëreshë in Southern Italy. Nevertheless, little is still said on the internal features of such ‘transhumant repertoire’, and more specifically on some traces of archaisms that might be possible to find in the Sicilian-Albanian tradition.
The aim of this paper is to give an account of a study (2015) conducted within the framework of my PhD project as yet, i.e. on the basis of extensive fieldwork I have carried out over the last two years, and of a methodological approach, which includes a comparison with the characteristics of the broader Byzantine late-medieval written tradition. This analysis is also meant to give an outline of some fundamental elements, such as the presence of melodic and textual patterns, the development of recurring melodic formulae – and their adaptation to diverse texts, etc., that actually constitute the ‘principles’ or ‘mechanisms’ observed by actual cantors in Piana degli Albanesi.
Lastly, I will shortly refer to a study undertaken by Christian Troelsgaard and myself (2016) based on the most complete collection of musical transcriptions of such repertoire, provided by Fr. Di Salvo in 1950’s, by also pointing out the features of its performing practice.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the collaboration between a collector of the Byzantine chant tradition of Piana degli Albanesi (Palermo) in Sicily, fr. Bartolomeo Di Salvo, and the editorial board of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, i.e. an institution under the aegis of the University of Copenhagen.
Bartolomeo Di Salvo (1916-1986), a Catholic monk of Byzantine Rite, gathered between 1950-1960 the most complete collection of this late-medieval and still living musical tradition, handed down over the last five centuries only by means of the oral transmission. In the same decade, fr. Di Salvo got in contact with the MMB, and eventually they agreed to publish the critical edition of this collection.
After more than fifty years, the updated and revised version of the edition of this meaningful collection is finally being published by the MMB.

Keywords:
Byzantine chant; Oral transmission; Sicily; Collections; Ethnomusicology; Critical edition; Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB).