Orality

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches the oral from three angles: memory, poetry and cultural geography. For him, oral transmission is a school, but without written support the losses are tragic1. The griot, who carries memory without writing, embodies it: without him, the names of kings would fall into oblivion2. He points out a paradox: poetry, the literary genre par excellence, was oral for millennia, with formulas and a delivery that was both sung and spoken, since man sang before he wrote34. He also cites Nerval, for whom popular song is the finest fusion of word and music. He describes black Africa as the continent of orality. He presents Corsica as a land of shepherds and oral mnemonics, which came to writing late, and in Italian. He puts forward the hypothesis that this mentality of the given word, in which papers count for little, explains the success of Corsicans in the colonies5. Yet an oral culture that is not integrated into a literature readable beyond its speakers ends up being lost6.

1. 1The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 1:52:49
2. 2The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 7:43
3. 3#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music3 Dec 2020 · 1:09:29
4. 4#7 The Greeks, myth and music17 Dec 2020 · 30:03
5. 5“The Brass Band's Journey”, by Dominique Memmi6 Dec 2019 · 1:18:41
6. 6“The Brass Band's Journey”, by Dominique Memmi6 Dec 2019 · 1:23:17

Summary produced automatically from 10 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.