Women as performers and agents of change in the Italian ballad tradition

Abstract

What is lost when performances of orally-transmitted traditional songs are transcribed and published as written documents? This question arose for me as a result of the lack of connection I found between my experiences as a performer of Italian traditional songs and the ways in which the subject was treated by academic folklorists, among others, whose analyses tended to be centred in the content of the written documents. In particular, the concern of the written academic tradition with the "problem" of variation seemed to presuppose that staticity was normal, and yet my experience as a performer was that the unfolding of each performance in a unique context led inevitably to differences in the details. And all those differences were explainable in experiential terms; for example, I might sing in a different key depending on the current state of my voice, or I might leave out part of a song because I felt uncomfortable with the performance situation, or because I was singing with other people who knew a different version of the song. I came to believe that the reason academics expected uniformity between performances was related to the normality of exact reproduction inthe print media, and that in order to understand variation in the documents of an orally transmitted performance tradition it was necessary to ground the analysis in an awareness of the actual conditions of performance of the songs: even though the particular experiences that would explain the form of each document are no longer accessible, an awareness of the types of experience affecting performance seemed to me to lead to very different ways of interpreting and approaching the documents as a body of data. In particular, the written documents could no longer be seen as self-sufficient items of information, but rather represented a series of incomplete records of random moments in the continuing process of performance within an otherwise unwritten oral tradition .