Secondary Orality and Creativity Processes in Multipart Singing

The pervasive diffusion of instruments for sound's recording/reproduction has radically changed (and is still continuously changing) our concept of music inducing us to think of music as a thing. It afflicts all the making music's scenarios all over the world with different impacts and consequences. Within what we still call “oral music” - but it would be better to use the Ong's concept of “secondary orality” since a real “pure orality” is only a theoretical abstraction – a very large range of deep “in becoming” transformations concern both the music performance and its conversational representations. Particularly in multipart music oral practices, the recording/reproduction instruments promote specific new formulation of music creativities that are consciously shared by the performers. On the basis of my research experience on multipart singing, by means of very significant case studies the essay analyzes some aspects of the phenomena. On one hand, it considers new strategies in the realization of the single vocal parts arising from the very detailed listening and memorization’s experiences due to the use of recording/reproduction instruments; on the other hand, it deals with (re)elaboration processes of recorded “sound materials” (or other pre-fixed materials) that singers’ groups realize in order to produce “new oral pieces”. Beyond the music outcomes, the essay dwells on singers’ representation of music creativities, and above all on an explicit orientation towards a precise characterization of the sound of every singers’ group.