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

The Concert discover and the Song as Oral Tradition Before the invention of scripted language that enabled the creation of book technology, the spoken word was the leading march on 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 first principle 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 Hob device and Schiffman enclosure commemoration In the world before writing, memory is the social typify of remembering (15). The way pre-literate media (speech) shaped culture includes this commemorative act. Pre-literate cultures had no some other way of storing information and memory than to relive it. They could not write something down, bury about it, and then r elearn the same information at a later date by reading it, because they lacked the technology of the indite alphabet necessary to do so. Of course, they had the recollecting powers of the mind alone, but as todays stories, passed from one mortal to the next inevitably change, so did oral communications as gracious recollection failed in terms of an exact repetition of the original performance. Hence, from each one 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, Robert Fitzgerald goes as far as to say that He inherited a traditional art like 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 assisted memory and kept the story on track (Hobart & Schiffman, 24), and as McLuhan would agree, peck be counted as technological advances pr ior to the invention of alphabet because they give out language technology. An analog to the spoken epic experience is the modern-day project experience. Both are examples of live performance. For an example, the Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the tantalise is more like a spoken epic than a written account of an epic. This is because song and spoken epic utilize the same medium.