In the early 30s, an enterprising classicist named Milman Parry had a theory: that certain features in Homer--most notably the inclusion of formulae--indicated that the Homeric poems were oral in original and should therefore be treated differently than written texts. In the finest tradition of ethnographers everywhere, Milman Parry decided to test his ideas empirically by investigating modern oral poetic practices.. When his visa to Russia was denied-- he had considered studying Russian folksong--Parry discovered that (former) Yugoslavia would admit him. So, with a newly-graduated Harvard man in tow, Albert Lord, Milman Parry dedicated several years of his life to the recording and transcription of South Slavic singers, from ballads and lyric to full-fledged epics of several thousand lines: Homeric length. What he found confirmed his initial hunches: that in traditional song cultures (such as the Balkans), bards transmit the traditional songs through
composition-in-performance, a technique far different than mere memorization.
In composition-in-performance, a bard (such as Avdo Mededovic, below) knows the general shape and contour of his song (the themes which makes up a full-fledged piece of singing), but the actual mechanics of the poetic line take place on the fly, often accompanied by music. In the clip below, Avdo is actually creating the poetry (at an incredibly rapid pace) as he tells the story; therefore, every song is unique because the next retelling (while preserving the same themes) will not have the same lines. On the basis of Parry's research on South Slavic epic, Albert Lord argued brilliantly (in his Singer of Tales) that the Homeric epics were, like South Slavic song, products of composition-in-performance, a medium of kleos and cultural memory.
Avdo was, in Milman Parry's estimation, the finest bard the scholars encountered in their trips through the Balkans. This 90 second clip is the only visual record of South Slavic singing, though countless examples have been transcribed in the Milman Parry Collection (website here). Because the audio and the visual components were recorded separately; the synchonization is not exact, and the audio will quit about 15 seconds before the video. In its own way, the clip is a testament to the type of society, and type of singing, that prospered in the Balkans at the end of the 19th century, and which ethnic strife has now almost completely extirpated. This precious clip of Avdo then, is a grim reminder of the price of war, especially on song-cultures; without bards to sing them, songs dissolve into a final and irrevocable silence.
