As part of Ashgate’s SEMPRE (Society for Education, Music & Psychology Research) series on music psychology, Anne Dhu McLucas’ The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA evaluates the role and impact of oral/aural music traditions in the United States, augmenting information gleaned from conventional ethnographic approaches (i.e., embracing a Boasian relativism that respects sub-cultural autonomy) with a broader, empirical approach (i.e., one seeking and arguing for pan-cultural universals) informed by research in infant and adult psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This is a tall order for a short volume, necessitating, at times, a rather cursory treatment of complex issues, particularly the finer points of brain psychology, which could easily fill several volumes themselves. In spite of such glosses, however, the book provides sufficient detail in the form of various sketches and case studies to provoke deeper thinking about issues of learning, memory, performance, creativity, improvisation, emotion, social communication, evolution, and other interfacings of our mental “hardware” with our social-cultural “software” in the contexts of music-making. If it falls short of a hard-and-fast psychological theory of oral music practices, the author nevertheless makes a strong case for her central argument that “the power of American music exists chiefly in its oral traditions” (1).

What exactly is meant by “oral” here? McLucas defines the term to encompass word-of-mouth transmission, non-spoken (instrumental) performances, overheard (aural) sounds, visual and kinesthetic parameters of music performance, and anything else “not handed down in or necessarily learned from a written form” (1-2, note 2). What if a musician uses a mental image of a music staff to analyze and “map” overheard sounds? How about someone who transcribes a recorded improvisation, memorizes it note-for-note, and then uses it as a template for variations? Clearly, the distinction between oral and non-oral will always be a little cloudy. In general, McLucas is addressing how people form musical understandings without the aid of notation, ranging from basic sensory perception, to various forms of memorization, to creative uses of musical technology such as digital samplers and synthesizers—anything “happening between the ear and the mind, without the intervention of written notes” (75). These understandings, she suggests, have a profound influence on the form, content, realization, and reception of “oral” music praxes.

The first chapter presents four short sketches of roots musicians: an Appalachian singer, an Apache singer/healer, a bluesman, and an Irish-American fiddler. The accompanying CD includes clarifying musical examples, such as alternate versions of Hazel Dickens’ “Pretty Bird” (tracks 2 and 3) to show and compare elements of stability and variation between the performances. The general goal is to show that oral processes are central (but not necessarily exclusive) elements in these regional traditions.

Chapter 2, another series of case studies, targets American popular music. The discussion of Lou Halmy, a professional transcriber/arranger of popular sheet music, suggests that much is lost and/or added in the translation of oral to written, and that technology has become an important medium of literacy. The following section on Pat Monahan provides a complementary perspective, that of a musically illiterate songwriter. The end of the chapter examines timbre, first in general terms, and later its role in rap and rock music, arguing that in these genres creative processes are often manifested in the use of production technology to manipulate tones and textures, making them virtually impossible to document through notation. The CD’s musical examples are particularly helpful here.

The third chapter gives a historical overview of oral and written practices in American music, touching on colonial psalm singing and lining-out, musical theater, minstrelsy, plantation songs, shape-note hymnody, art music composers who appropriated “ethnic” vernacular traditions (some, like the Indianist composers, borrowing more from an idea of these musics than from the music itself), ragtime, and a handful of twentieth-century composers, from Charles Ives to George Gershwin. Although it is difficult to document oral traditions in the absence of sound or video recordings, McLucas points to variations in extant texts and contemporaneous descriptions of performance practice to show how they informed and influenced writers. There is also an interesting profile of teacher lineages in classical music conservatories.

The fourth chapter is an intriguing hodgepodge of oral traditions in everyday life: sing-alongs, football chants, community responses to the World Trade Center attacks, karaoke, passive repertoire (i.e., having recall memory for song lyrics), iPod playlists, etc. The author raises a number of issues concerning how specialized education and escalating technology have affected everyday musical participation. For example, how has the digital information glut affected the impact of individual songs on young listeners? How is musical creativity expressed in the act of listening? How do people develop sophisticated understandings of music in the absence of formal training?

The interludes separating each chapter are an attempt to provide scientific underpinning for McLucas’s sweeping ethnographic scope. The first interlude describes human memory function, with an indication of its relationship to musical thinking; the second, on creativity, briefly addresses contour memory, improvisation, melodic constraints and expectations, and how a musical “hook” works. The next relates how literacy may affect how our brain stores and uses musical information, and the final interlude examines emotion and meaning in music, pondering its evolutionary relevance. Collectively these interludes form a parallel study, intriguing for its glimpses into the workings of the mind, but less revealing of or connected to the quotidian cultural practices discussed elsewhere.

In the controlled environment of a psychological laboratory, where extraneous variables can be kept to a minimum, it is easier to say that X is related to Y. When the subject is a Yugoslavian ballad singer’s ability to memorize long texts, the uncontrolled but possibly significant variables expand exponentially, making it almost impossible to isolate specific cognitive processes or evaluate multi-laminate cultural practices. McLucas, well aware of the inherent constraints, approaches the problem from all directions, envisioning ways these disparate poles of inquiry might be integrated. Her defense of American oral musics, the victims of “denigration in the face of a seemingly superior European written tradition” (163), appears to be directed at academia and corporate sponsors of the “arts,” but is perhaps unnecessary in an era when consumer-driven electronic technology competes with print media, where a video clip is worth a thousand words.

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[Review length: 1031 words • Review posted on September 15, 2010]