Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music

Leo Treitler

Speculum, Vol. 56, No. 3. (Jul., 1981), pp. 471-491.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-7134%28198107%2956%3A3%3C471%3AOWALPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

Speculum is currently published by Medieval Academy of America.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/medacad.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Tue Jan 22 14:53:09 2008
 SPECULUM 56,3 (1981)

Oral, Written, and Literate Process

in the Transmission of Medieval Music
By Leo Treitler

T h i s paper is about ways of understanding how music was made and how it
circulated in the European Middle Ages.* My intent is theoretical: to pose
the problem, sharpen the concepts, and identify the pertinent categories of
evidence. I shall propose a broad historical view of the subject, not for its
own sake, but to provide a perspective for the task of interpreting medieval
documents.
T h e topic of musical transmission in the Middle Ages cannot be discussed
without reference to the debates about oral and written tradition, and it is
my intention to pose the problem in that light explicitly. I n doing so I shall
refer to the literature about oral poetry and the history of writing, in which
these matters have received more attention than they have so far in the study
of music. O n the other hand I hope to bring to the attention of students of
literature the relevance of evidence from musical studies to the oral-written
question, and to begin to identify the parallels between o u r subjects that can
constitute the grounds for a general theory of literacy.
I begin with a metaphor that will enable me to develop in a fresh and
accessible context some ways of thinking about musical transmission that o u r
habits in dealing with medieval musical traditions have tended so far to
exclude.
Some years ago I was able to purchase at auction in Vermont the music
library of a German emigre musician named Bauer, who had settled near
Boston about 1840. It included samples from every level of musical art, from
handwritten copies of Haydn symphonies to horse quadrilles for the circus.
Somewhere between those extremes was a print of a short piece bearing the
title Le Disir: Favorite Waltz by Beethoven, published in 1842 in Boston. T h e
piece is actually more o r less the second of Schubert's opus 9 Waltzes,
commonly known in that incarnation as the Sehnsuchtswalzer. 'The tune is the
same, but in the pseudo-Beethoven version it is dressed in a flashy triplet

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Medieval Academy of
America in Los Angeles on 27 March 1980, under the title "Tradition and Innovation in the
Transmission of Medieval Music."
' T h e transmission of titles for this piece is dizzying. Schubert's waltz first appeared under the
title Trauerulalzer in 1821, but it has come to be known as Sehnsuchtsu~alzer.Sehnsuchtswalzer seems
to have originated as the title of the first pseudo-Beethoven publication, in 1828. While
Beethoven inherited the waltz, Schubert inherited the title. T h e subtitle, "Favorite Waltz," may
be a cryptic reference to F. H. Himmel's Fauoritwalzer, on which the third section is reportedly
based. See Otto Kinkeldey, "The Beginning of Beethoven in America," The Musital Quarterly 13
(1927), 245, and G. Kinsky, Das Werk Beethoverzs (Munich, 1935), p. 727.
47 1
 The Transmission of Medieval Music
figuration that is not Schubert's, whereas some of the characteristic bit-
tersweet harmonic details that no doubt earned the original its nickname
have been washed over by pedestrian alternatives. Schubert's waltz is in two
short sections; a third section has been added to the new version, making it
long enough to sell as a separate piece.
There is a context for this bit of piracy. Before 1870 at least fifteen
editions of Le Disir had been published in the United States, and this was
only one of some sixty "Beethoven" waltzes circulating here around that
time. A Beethoven boom and waltz fever were simultaneously sweeping the
country.
Eventually Le Disir reached Brazil. An edition was published in S ~ Paolo
O
around 1950 under the double title Le De'sirlSehnsuchtswalzer. Beethoven is
given as the composer in the heading, but a footnote confides that the piece is
really by Schubert.
There are many variants from one edition to another, and it is not easy to
distinguish between notational ineptness, typographical error, misunder-
standing of a musical detail, and deliberate revision. None gets the Schubert-
ian harmonies quite right, but the Brazilian edition does better than most,
and since it does not have the triplet figuration, it gives the impression of
closer contact with the original. But it does have the third section, so we
know that the scribe was somehow in touch with the pseudo-Beethoven
version as well. Near the end of that section he suffered a minor catastrophe
that is as revealing as anything in the whole complex. What would have been
the fifth measure from the end has been skipped over (the sixth and fourth
measures from the end are exactly as in the other editions). Instead of going
right on the scribe evidently decided to compose a new ending that would
make sense of the strange lurch that he had inadvertently produced. T h e
result is clumsy and reveals itself as an effort to make the best of a bad
situation.
T h e skipped measure suggests an act of copying, whereas the recovery was
an act of composing. So was the original invention of the triplet figuration.
On the other hand the fading-out of harmonic detail from Schubert's origi-
nal, and the range of insignificant variation among editions, show that the
transmission of Lr Dhir must in some measure have been a matter of writing
it out from memory. T h e precipitation of the piece in a particular edition
entailed composing, remembering, and copying, and evidently all at once.
While there are variants among some editions, others are identical in every
detail and seem even to have been produced from the same plates. In that
case a written (printed) tradition has been established for a particular ver-
sion.
T h e range of variation apparent in the printed editions must have had its
counterpart in performance. If we imagine Bauer playing Le Disir at a party,
we don't know that he would have played it exactly as it appears in the score
just because he happened to own a printed score that belongs to a written
 The Transmission of Medieval Music
tradition. If we imagine someone rushing home after the party to write out
the waltz in the hope of peddling it to another publisher, there is no
assurance that he would have written it out just as Bauer played it. That is,
performing and writing down have in common that both may entail remem-
bering and composing; writing down may entail copying as well, but not
necessarily.
In summary, an original composition, circulated through print and
through performance, was transformed by way of "oral" process into a new
version - perhaps gradually, perhaps all at once. T h e new version then
entered its own written and oral channels. These two channels were not
sharply distinct, nor were the traditions of the two versions, which seem to
have crossed at least once. Each new edition or performance arose as a
realization of a model that would be difficult or impossible to specify exactly.
Certainly one cannot assume these models to be identical with either the
original composition or its earliest transformation. T h e realization process
entailed copying, remembering, and composing, separately or all at once, in
various mixes. Even the editions that are associated together in a written
tradition based on copying alone have no special claim to authenticity or
proximity to an original. And one cannot assume, just because of their
mutual identity, that they would have given rise to identical perfornlances.
Indeed no edition can be assumed to specify a performance uniquely.
The transmission of L e Ddsir has much of importance in common with the
transmission of music in the Middle Ages. It poses the problem of "oral" and
"written" tradition, but in a way that shows the relation between the two to
be more complex and more subtle than a straightforward dichotomy. It casts
doubt on the notion that there are oral or literate styles. And it has the
advantage of leading us quickly to think our way clear of what I call the
"paradigm of l i t e r a ~ y . "Medieval
~ music has mainly been approached by way
of this paradigm, by rvhich I mean the model of the composer producing
finished works that circulate in stable form through closed written channels
in scores that are blueprints for the performers, who must be able to read
them in order to produce performances that are essentially identical from
one time to the next.
That a state of literacy answering more or less to that paradigm had
evolved in at least one musical tradition by the twelfth or thirteenth century
can be shown. But I shall be mainly interested here in the possibilities of
describing musical traditions in which that relatively clear condition evi-
dently did not obtain. Such a description will have much in common ~vith
descriptions of the evolution of verbal literacy that have been offered by

This paradigm and its alternatiies are discussed in my paper, "Transmission and the Study
of Music History," Inter?zational 12.lusicolog~calSoczety, 12th Congress, Berkeley 1977: Report (forth-
coming).
474 The Transmission of Medieval Music
Clanchy, Goody, and H a ~ e l o c k and
, ~ it will touch on issues about medieval
oral poetry that are still alive.4

T h e first point in the description is the flat assertion that before the intro-
duction of musical notation in Europe in the ninth century, all European
musical tradition was exclusively oral. This may be doubted on the grounds
of the suspicion, natural enough, that music writing was an older practice
but that earlier traces have not survived. T h e arguments against this suppo-
sition are nevertheless persuasive:
1. T h e oldest music books are books of Gregorian chant, and the oldest
chant books with neumes are from the tenth century. (Notational specimens
from the ninth century occur scattered individually, in books not mainly
having to do with the Divine O f f i ~ e . ) ~
2. There are complete chant books (some of them identified as "books of
musical art") from the ninth and early tenth centuries that lack neumes,
containing orlly texts or text incipits. Some of these assign the texts to
ecclesiastical modes.
3. Analysis of the melodic corpus transmitted in writing in later periods
shows that liturgical designation and modal assignment jointly determine the
genres of chant, and that given a text and the genre in which to intone it, the
singing of the chant without a score would have constituted no problem.
(There will be a single demonstration of that in what follows.)
4. Lists of chant incipits with their modal assignments, that is, lists giving
precisely that information, can be dated back to the eighth century. There-
fore, there was an oral tradition for the chant at least between the eighth and
the tenth centuries. Hence the supposition of a lost earlier written tradition
is hardly relevant, and in any case there is no evidence for it. T h e indirect
evidence for the oral tradition reaches u p to the point where the direct
evidence for the written transmission begins. There is no reason not to read
all the evidence at face value. Before the tenth century the tradition of
Western art music was an oral tradition. Confession of this fact is a strategic

M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (London, 1979). J. R.

Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, Eng., 1968). Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato
(Cambridge, Mass., 1963); "Pre-Literacy and the Pre-Socratics," Institute of Classical Studies,
University of London, Bulletin no. 13 (1966); "Prologue to Greek Literacy," lecture given at the
University of Cincinnati, 1971 (printed by the University); Origins of Western Literacy, T h e
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Monograph Series 14 (Toronto, 1974); "The Pre-
Literacy of the Greeks," New Literary History 8 (1977). 369-91.
See Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Cambridge, Eng., 1977).
The details are given by Michel Huglo, "Tradition orale et tradition ecrit dans la transmis-
sion des melodies grkgoriennes," in H. H. Eggebrecht and M. Liitolf, eds., Sturlien zur Tradztion
in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag (Munich, 1973), pp. 31-42. Huglo presents a
view similar to the one adopted here regarding the broad outlines of the history of transmission,
but he has not developed a similar view about the nature of the oral tradition. My views on both
matters approximate those of Helmut Hucke, "Toward a New View of the History of Gregorian
Chant," Journal of The Awterzcan Musicological Society 33 (1980), 437-67.