Oral perfomances in a (post-)literate society

The attempt of the present paper is to introduce the following question: How is it possible to still talk about “oral performances” in a literate, indeed “postliterate” society? In order to stress the relevance of such a topic, I will examine some achievements in research fields both dealing with literary studies and musicological enquiry. Taking into account some instances of oral musical traditions gathered during ethnomusicological fieldwork, e.g. the singing of mandinàdhes (couplets of improvised rhymed verses) from Crete and the Byzantine liturgical chant of the Albanians of Sicily, I will analyse the process both of (re)writing a poetic-formulaic tradition by adapting itself to the modern multimedia technology (i.e. the “media literate poets” case on Crete) and developing techniques of oral safeguarding without the usage of musical notation (i.e. the case of the Sicilian-Albanian community). This very last example will show how one can talk about “aliterate” performers, who choose, on purpose, not to write down their own singing tradition, although they do know how to read and write. These cases might seem a bit more complicated to look at if one just considers that, in the so-called Facebook Era, it has become increasingly difficult to define a clear border between orality and literacy. Indeed, we should observe the striking switch from the relationship of “writers and readers” to that one of “bloggers and followers”. Finally, by studying such musical phenomena, it is possible to deduce that – since the systems of oral performance have significantly changed over the last century – we can still find a relevant bond between techniques of oral musical transmission and written safeguard in a (post-) literate society.