In the 20th century, music became a totally new phenomenon. With the mechanical reproduction - that means the recording and play back of sound - music changed its nature fundamentally. Music once was a kind of communication between the participants of a musical event. Listening to music was inseparable combined with the activity of making music. Listeners and musicians took part in the same situation. With the invention of the sound recording, this first epoch in the history of human music ended. Music - at least from a western point of view - lost its transitory character and became independent of time and space. Thenceforward you could store music and keep it as long as you want: something that was previously reserved for western art music with its notation. The invention of the mechanical reproduction of sound was a milestone in the history of music. In its significance, it is absolutely comparable to the one the invention of writing or printing had for the spoken word.
Nevertheless, with every new invention, new problems arise. Maybe you remember Socrates who warned that the invention of writing would mollycoddle the youth by making the use of memory obsolete, or Clement of Alexandria who complained in 200 AD that to write all things in a book is to leave a sword in the hands of a child.  The same could be said about the technical reproduction of music: there are some negative impacts resulting from this invention. However, we always have to bring to mind that each new era blotted out its predecessor and nevertheless world still turns around and human culture did not decline yet… We should neither complain nor promulgate the beginning of the golden age. We simply have to face the fact that a great deal of musical communication nowadays is no longer taking place in a face-to-face situation but it is disembodied and transcultural.
Media theorists usually call this new form of oral tradition without a face-to-face situation «secondary orality» and they deal with this subject at least for the last two decades. (The American scholar Walter Ong introduced the term in 1982 in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London and NY.) Musicologists do not. They could not even agree on a designation of this phenomenon. «Secondary orality» is a term almost unknown in musicology as well as in ethnomusicology. Some German and even a few English authors use the term «aurale Tradition» or «aural tradition» (from Latin «auris»: «ear») but this denomination never succeeded - especially in English where there is no difference in pronunciation between «aural» and «oral» (from Latin «os»: «mouth»), which in practice makes the term a little unwieldy.
Although it has been a marginal field of musicological research, we cannot overestimate the influence of this new kind of orality because it turned music literally into a different thing. With the invention of the audio technology, a new way of making music came into existence that you don’t have to practise for years: to press the button. In the past, you had to sing or play an instrument if you want to hear music or let somebody do this for you. Nowadays there is a third possibility that is much easier to learn: you can switch on the radio or start a CD and you get a perfect interpretation of whatever you want. This new possibility had a great influence on music in every respect: production, dissemination and perception of music totally changed, not only in view of mechanically reproduced music but also every kind of traditionally played live music. The impact is so strong, that we cannot refuse to give attention to this new situation. Therefore, I will try to show you some of the consequences that came with the technical reproduction.

        From shortage to abundance

        Music was a very rare thing up until the middle of the 20th century. Since all human societies seem to feel a need for music, it was not only rare but highly valued, much loved and considered to be of great importance. People could hardly accommodate the need for music in these days. They seized every opportunity to make or to listen to music. Even a simple jew’s-harp or a five-hole-flute could entertain a party and make the guests dance. The listeners did not hold it to be deficient, because it was better than the alternative: no music at all. Just the fact that there was music playing somewhere - no matter what kind of music - was a happening in itself. With the invention and dissemination of mechanical reproduction, the occasions for hearing music strikingly increased. We have a greater quantity of music of the second half of the 20th century than of all the previous centuries together. As we know from the economic theory of marginal utility, not only the demand for playing live music diminished but also the need for listening to music. Due to the ubiquity of canned music in everyday life the need for music in general constantly decreased. Nowadays supply exceeds demand. You cannot avoid hearing music everywhere in urban areas, and on the countryside, there is at least in every shop or restaurant a radio playing, almost all over the globe.
        This abundance changed our relation to music basically although we are oblivious of that.
        On the one hand, this surfeit causes a certain emotional blunting, an indifference to music. We are not stirred or enthused anymore by a single musical experience in the same deep existential way our ancestors used to be. Imagine a Swiss farmer of the 19th century. He never heard anything else in his life than country-style dance music, the chant in the church on Sunday, the folk songs that people used to sing in the region, maybe a small brass band in his village and a few times some roving musicians that were passing through by accident. We cannot fully comprehend the emotions he had, when he would have heard for the first time a symphonic orchestra, a choir of 100 singers or an organ of a cathedral. For him it would have been an unforgettable, formative impression, an experience incomparable to anything he knew.
        Of course this is an extreme example, but it shows the problem: we are familiar with so many different kinds of music - with all types of instruments, stiles, timbres and sounds from a soft whisper to the loudness of a jet fighter. Even if we hear for the first time a Chinese Gagaku orchestra for example, it reminds us to something we are familiar with. We gained so many experiences with recordings from all over the world and of every epoch, that we cannot have absolutely new and unique experiences anymore. Nevertheless, this musical surfeit is not only a problem; it is also a chance.

        The enhancement of musical knowledge

        In general, we do not realise how far reaching this change is. The quality of music has never been as high as it is today but we hardly realise that, because, at the same time, our quality standards rise too.
        I will give you another example: A music lover who lived in a European metropolis in the second half of the 19th century may had a wide knowledge of the opera repertoire, not only from the local opera house but also from song recitals in private houses, piano scores and from buskers in the streets and taverns that used to sing the most famous arias. But where could he listen to unknown works like Beethovens fifth symphony? (Nobody cared about instrumental music in the 19th century.) He was forced to study a piano score ? if he could find it somewhere. I think you agree that ? even if your well educated in playing the piano ? playing or reading a piano score instead of listening to an orchestra never gives you the same impression of a piece of music. People’s knowledge therefore was limited to things that were popular at the time. Nowadays we have access to the whole history of western art music. You can hear almost every work, furthermore in different interpretations. That means that we know significantly more music and we know it profounder than ever before.

        I tried to sketch you briefly the main impact mechanical reproduction has on our knowledge of music. Let us focus now on the oral tradition in the narrow sense of the word. That means the action of passing on, transferring or transmitting. Globally seen it is quite common to learn music by ear or by listening. The first part of a musical education is listening to your teacher. Then you try to play along with him. Most of the teachers do not explain much to their students; they just let them play along. Pedagogy and didactics in the Western sense is not very widespread in the world. Most of the folk music traditions do not know anything about it. In Switzerland for example, this method of playing along is the common way to learn the Schwyzerörgeli - a special Swiss type of a small diatonic accordion. There is an anecdote of a student of Rees Gwerder, one of the most famous players from central Switzerland. This student came to the first lesson, the teacher said hello and started to play. After an hour, he stopped and the lesson was over. Second lesson: the same. In the third lesson he suddenly said: «I tell you for the last time: you have to put the damn organ on your left knee!» In the fifth or sixth lesson, the student dared to ask his teacher where he could find the note c on his accordion. The teacher angrily answered: «if you ask such nonsense once again, you mustn’t come anymore!»
Among Jazz and Blues musicians there used to be a similar way of learning. You went to a bar and watched the musicians play and then you tried it yourself. If you were lucky, one of the more experienced musicians showed you some tricks or gave you some advice.
        This kind of learning can be replaced easily by secondary orality. Instead of listening to your teacher, you can just as well listen to a recording. Of course, you do not see a thing on the record, but as long as your teacher in a face-to-face situation does not slow down for didactic reasons or explain you something, you do not miss much, if you have only the recording. On the contrary, the recording has some inestimable advantages. If your teacher is a very patient one, he may play the same piece of music five or ten or even fifteen times for you. Nevertheless on a CD or a Cassette you can listen to it as often as you want, entirely or just parts of it. Like with a magnifying glass you can listen to every single note repeatedly, up until you know how to play it - not only the correct pitch and rhythm but also all the little details of phrasing and expression. Nowadays you even can slow down a recording on the computer, which is very comfortable for the micro-rhythms of fast passages. This kind of learning from sound carriers is common in popular music as well as in many other styles - to some extent in every kind of music of every society, that uses the invention of the mechanical reproduction - and most societies do.
        In the Arabic art music for example, a kind of music that is to a vast extent improvised, they already partly learn to play by means of sound carriers. Advanced students learn by heart taqsims played by a master-player, note by note, phrase by phrase with every detail in microtonal intonation, micro rhythmical delay and dynamic shape. This is something that has not been possible before. Even the master himself cannot play a taqsim twice in exactly the same way, because of its improvised character. Now we can record a classic interpretation of a taqsim and then an uncountable number of students can study it and compare it to their own interpretation and to other versions. This opens a possibility to improve your play and to reach a level that was completely unknown before. A similar phenomenon we find in improvised forms of Jazz, and even the non-improvised western classical music profits from the fact that every student can listen to a number of exemplary master-interpretations.
        I will show you now another example to demonstrate what kind of new possibilities secondary orality presents. In 1999 there was a singer named Gölä in Switzerland, who came out of the blue to the top of the charts with simple songs he sang in Swiss-German dialect. He sold about 350’000 copies of his first CD, which is an incredible lot if you think of about four millions of German speaking inhabitants in Switzerland. Just as almost every other band, he used to play his greatest hit at the end of his concerts. But he did not sing it; he just let the band play the instrumental part and held the microphone towards the audience. The audience sang the song then, not even the chorus line but all four strophes.
        Depending on the concert, it was a choir of 500, 1’000 or even 5’000 or more people that never had met before. They did not have a single rehearsal and although they spontaneously sang a song together, they, for amateurs, were astonishing precisely parallel in diction and phrasing. If you would teach all of them this song with a sheet of music in a face-to-face situation, it would take at least a few days. Most of the members of the audience did not learn this song actively. They just listened to it repeatedly, maybe fifty or more times. That means that you can easily teach a musically uneducated crowd a relatively difficult song with the help of a sound carrier. That is a point we should make use of in our musical education.
        Just to sum up: the mechanical reproduction of music had a positive impact in two respects. First, we enlarged our repertoire in a way you could not imagine two generations ago. Our knowledge of different styles and genres not only leads to saturation, it also gives us wide background for playing music and a lot of new material for composing. Second, we do not only have a much wider repertoire, but we also know it much better than before. It is evident that we improved our musical knowledge and sharpened our perception by the unbelievable variety of music we all know in details. (Remember for example that in a review of the premiere of Beethoven’s fifth symphony the critic emphasized as a positive fact that the orchestra made no major mistakes - something that is absolutely inconceivable today.) The phenomenon of secondary orality is mainly responsible for the fact that all of us are very well educated in music and we now have more and better musicians than in every prior epoch.

     Babylonian language confusion

        So, the mechanical reproduction of music seems to bee a good thing that improves our knowledge and sharpens our perception. But there is one point that I did not mention yet, that put into perspective the advantages of the widening of the repertoire:
We all know an incredible lot of music but we do not have a common repertoire anymore, neither musicians nor audience. A first example is from my experience with children in the age from 4 to 6 years in Switzerland: they learn in the kindergarten on an average about 8 new songs in one year. At home, only 20% of the children learn songs from parents, brothers and sisters or other relatives in the traditional face-to-face situation and mostly not more than 3 or 4 songs. More than half of the children know about 5 to 10, a few even 30 or more songs that they learned by heart with a CD or a cassette. They listen to it tirelessly again and again and a few hours later, they sing it themselves. «That’s great!» you may say, and I agree: it is really impressive how fast they learn by heart just by listening. But the problem is: they cannot sing these songs together, because no one of the others knows the same songs. Depending on their parents, they get other CDs at home and therefore learn other songs. So, they have a wide repertoire but they do not share it with anybody.
        The same is true for musicians too. If two musicians meet it is pure chance if they find more than two or three songs or pieces they both know, even if they are musicians of the same genre or style. Even musicians of the same genre share only a small part of their repertoire and their musical preferences. There is no common repertoire anymore, because of the enormous variety of available music. This is a complication for musicological research. We do not know anything about the musical background of a musician or a composer. I will give you an example: There is an inventive band in Switzerland named «Pareglish». They play traditional dance music in the Swiss country-style. Two members of band are sons of a famous clarinet player in this style. So, we can guess that they know the traditional repertoire - and so they do. But what else do they know? What sort of music was an influence on them? If we listen to some outtakes of their first CD, we are surprised. They played pieces of Richard Clayderman, a famous French trash pianist of the late seventies, a song of the American stadium rock band «Van Halen» and one of «Metallica» the kings of heavy metal. Would you have expected anything like that?
        The lack of a common repertoire is also a problem from another point of view, a much bigger one than we may think. Music is a means for identification. I think you all agree. Social groups dissociate themselves from others not only but also by music. The other way round you can say, that a particular kind of music makes you feel at home. If we cultivate our preferences and our taste by music that is disembodied and transcultural - as we do with sound carriers - we do not feel musically at home anymore in our real surrounding. Let me explain this a little more comprehensive:
We all have access to almost infinite lots of music and we decide autonomously what we choose - of course influenced in many ways by our associated field. Therefore, it is very unlikely that I share my musical taste for example with my neighbours. And this is a problem, as we will see soon.
        An elderly member of a Swiss men’s singing club told me once that they go to a pub after every rehearsal. Thirty years ago, they used to sing from time to time a few songs in the pub. People in the pub used to listen pleased and sometimes they even stand a round for the singers. Nowadays, the old man complained, people are quiet for maybe half of a song, then they restart talking to each other and if the choir begins a second song they bawl «will you stop it!» - no matter how good or bad they sing, it is just because they don’t like that kind of music. O.K. you may say, who cares about men’s singing clubs. But this non-consensus situation has other social impacts as well. In Switzerland for example, there is an increasing number of weddings without any music for similar reasons. No band or orchestra in the world can play music that pleases the majority of the wedding guests. The best you can reach is playing music that is tolerable for everyone, but on the other hand for nobody satisfying. This problem became apparent decades ago, but up to the seventies or eighties you could avoid it in a simple way: You could play serious music in the church, for example a string quartet of Mozart, Swiss country-style dance music in the beginning of the evening, later also tango or foxtrot or swing, and in the night, when the elder relatives were going to sleep you could play some rock ’n’ roll or disco music. A good band is able to manage this whole program, with the exception of the church music, for which you have to hire another orchestra. Nowadays this trick does not work anymore. Some of the older guests only like Swiss country-style dance music, while others of the same generation cannot stand it. They prefer maybe old time jazz, Elvis, «The Beatles», or «The Rolling Stones». The taste of the younger generation is also very non-uniform. Some prefer hip hop and would never listen to a techno track or an indie rock song. Others love salsa, African pop, and modern jazz or classical music. It is not anymore a clash of generations; even the generations are fragmented.
        A musical consensus is no longer possible because of the Babylonian language confusion we are in. We all know our musical languages better than ever before, but nobody else in our everyday life knows the same language. So, we can no longer communicate musically with the persons we meet in a face-to-face situation. (Dangerous exceptions are musicians, music teachers and musicologist who live in the illusion of a musical unity because they are living in milieu that is determined by common musical preferences.)
        There is no canon, no common musical standard at all. Anything goes, and that is disastrous not only for functional music in every day life but also for state-aided institutions like conservatories or symphony orchestras and for schools. For the future, we will hardly find majorities for a particular kind of music. But finding a majority is an indispensable condition for government aid in a democracy. How long do you think a city like Zurich will run three philharmonic orchestras if only 10% of the population is interested in classical music or regard it as something of importance? The problem is not that one genre will substitute another - for example jazz schools instead of conservatories - but that we will not find a majority for any kind of music. For the schools this will be a problem too. We all agree that musical education is important for personal development of children. It is scientifically proven that musically well-educated children get better results in other subjects as well. But what kind of music shall we teach them - Mozart or Indian art music or Hip Hop or a bit of everything? How can we decide if there is no consensus at all?

        Regaining orientation

        As you see the enhancement of our musical knowledge has also dark sides. We have a wide-ranging knowledge but the price we have to pay is the state of total disorientation we are in today. It is easy to explain the reason for that situation but it is almost impossible to find a way out. The fundamental problem is not the technology of recording and play back sound. The problem is what we take for music. It is not surprising that the whole audio technology originates from the Western culture. For us CDs are an incarnation of music. From our Western point of view sound carriers are the best music you can get, because the musical texture is higher elaborated than in every concert. You cannot avoid some little mistakes in a live performance but in a recording studio, you can bring every detail to perfection. We take it for granted that the sounding part of a musical event is music. Because of this conception, we tend to neglect the situation in which music happens.
        In West African music for example, you often cannot hear the main beat. West Africans do not play it - they dance it. Therefore, they would never agree to call a sound recording music. For them, music is not just the sounding part of a particular situation but a unity of sound and motion. From their point of view, you cannot record music. You can store the sounding part and play it back again. But it is not music until you start to move… For most non-Western people sound carriers are always deficient because of the lack of the situation. For them it is a strange idea to listen to a particular music without knowing the context of it. (By the way, many Africans think that Europeans must have a very poor musical tradition. Why else should they be so interested in African music?) Music as pure texture of sound is something inconceivable. While for us playing music is something totally different from listening, for them it is not. Playing, as well as listening and dancing are musical activities and all of them are indispensable parts of a musical event.
        In general and a bit simplified: in non-Western cultures, the essential point of music is the situation of musical action; for Europeans - with their unique tradition of musical notation and audio-technique - it is the texture of sound. If you fully comprehend this in the first instance seemingly hair-splitting difference you may fathom out that it is of vital importance.
The problem of musical disorientation has more to do with our idea of music as pure texture of sound than with the invention of the mechanical reproduction itself. Therefore, we should not blame the mass media or the technology for something that lies in our mind. However, we can try to overcome the idea that the texture of sound is already music: we have to find means and ways to reintroduce the situation, the action, the ambience; the whole context that makes a sounding event to music. We have to accept that every sound carrier creates a new situation and a new context while playing back.
        I know that I did not present a self-contained theory explaining all implications of secondary orality. This cannot be done in a few pages. There are still a lot of open questions and contradictions. However, I tried to point out the significance of the audio technology and make you think about the current state of music where music is available in plentiful supply. Therefore, the most important aim of musicology is to find a new methodology to deal with this changed situation. And maybe we will regain orientation then, because a musical event remains a unique experience even when we are surfeit with different textures of sound…