Instrument Teaching in the Context of Oral Tradition: A Field Study from Bolu, Turkey

Abstract

In almost all industrial and post-industrial societies of the modern age as well as in a majority of developing countries, musical-cultural accumulation is documented via writing, musical notation, and similar audio-visual tools to achieve transmission with minimum information loss. As a consequence of the formation of written culture and widespread use of musical notation, musical works could then be registered on permanent documents to enable transmission not only to the immediately following generations but also to many generations over future centuries. The use of writing and the consequential transmission of music via writing, however, are comparatively new yet noteworthy developments in the long history of humankind. The earliest traces of using symbols or writing in music can be seen in the musical cultures of “ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, and Greece” (Michels 2001:159). 2 Nonetheless, “music writing with a notation system” (Rosing 1997:79) and its written transmission is a practice that gained popularity amidst European culture, though it was not so widespread among other global musical cultures. Western notation started with letters and neumes, but it then became more systematized when the ninth-century Dasia Notation gained prominence through the spread of the printing press and then underwent several evolutionary steps up through the sixteenth century. It reached its peak use in the twentieth century, when it was then renewed and reused by New Music composers or abandoned completely by other composers. Still, this traditional European notation system bears remarkable responsibility for the transmission of music culture from one generation to the next.