Towards Greater Collaboration in Oral Tradition Studies

Abstract

A key player among Iberian oral traditions, the pervasive and resilient pan-Hispanic romancero merits attention not only for its sheer volume, its vast temporal and geographic span, and its cultural, thematic, and musical diversity, but also for its complex interconnections both with other Hispanic and pan-European verbal art forms and with the learned literary and musical traditions of the Peninsula and beyond. Of the more than three thousand distinct ballad narratives produced, re-created, and documented in one or more of the five peninsular languages from the fifteenth century to the present day, some one thousand romances have been recorded in the modern oral tradition on no fewer than five continents and often in hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of versions. 1 Differences with respect to other oral genres notwithstanding, Hispanic ballads manifest certain fundamental features and behaviors common to all living traditional art forms. 2 Most notable is the intrinsic openness of their narrative, poetic, and musical structures and their concomitant dynamic and inexorable transformation across time and space in response to changing aesthetic and ethical values and evolving linguistic, ideological, and socioeconomic systems. As students of the romancero we recognize that each time a traditional ballad is re-created (in our case, brought into a singer’s repertoire), a unique compromise has been effected between the opposing forces of heredity and innovation at each level of organization of the ballad’s