Sound and Writing: Complementary Facets of the Anglo-Scottish Ballad

Abstract

AbstractThe Anglo-Scottish ‘traditional’ ballad has coexisted in the different media of sound and writing from the early modern period to the present day. Nevertheless, it became the orthodoxy in the twentieth century that the ballad should be conceptually tied to its vocal performance. This essay seeks to argue that in fact a hierarchy of documentation that privileges sound is misleading. Rather, the ballad has always been, and remains, accessible through complementary media, fulfilling different purposes and following different conventions.It considers different levels of music-writing (‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’) and the non-indexical relationship between sound and writing in the ontology of music. It goes on to relate the privileging of sound over writing to the ‘metaphysics of presence’, and offers theoretical reasons as to why both sound and writing can in fact be divorced from the metaphysics of presence. A further analogy is offered with the work of the text and music editor in establishing a ‘set of instructions’ for the reconstruction of the ‘work’. Some pragmatic examples and theoretical principles are considered in relation to how ballad words might be transcribed, leading to the conclusion that different and complementary sets of instructions facilitate access to the intangible ballad, without the need to posit any hierarchical relationship between sound and writing.