A mythological component has always been present in culture, whether archaic or modern. In one way or another, mythology reveals itself in every creative process; it is the first system of thought in the history of culture. The semioticians of the Tartu-Moscow school—Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), Zara Minz (1927-1987), Boris A. Uspenski (b. 1927), Eleazar M. Meletinsky (b. 1918), and others—observed that, although a restoration of mythic thought in its totality is impossible within the framework of modern culture, certain components of that thought continue to inform artistic creativity of the modern age. Meletinsky wrote: “Beginning with the second decade of the twentieth century, re-mythification became an unstoppable process that in the end came to dominate different sectors of European culture.” Re-mythification, or “neo-mythologism,” a term coined by Meletinsky, has features that are typical of archaic mythologia—its paradigmatic nature, its use of archetypes, and its mediation of opposites. However, modern mythmaking incorporates Jungian metaphorical approaches to the unconsciousness and an ironical estrangement from a common orthodoxy. Neo-mythologism involves the search for an individual language and individual myths.

Because of the particular semiotic problems associated with the study of music, the application of myth in modern literary genres has received much fuller discussion than in music. A recent non-musicological study emphasized “the primacy of mythical archetypes even in modern literature, where the field has been cleared of the ancient gods.” Yet the mythographer Claude Lévi-Strauss considered music to be a sign system no less closely related to myth than literature: “Mythology occupies an intermediary position between two diametrically opposed types of sign systems—musical language on the one hand and articulate speech on the other.” Indeed, the primacy of mythical archetypes is palpable in many works of twentiethcentury musical repertoire and parallels that of modern literature.

The mythological features of some twentieth-century compositions are commonly mentioned in different sources, from composers’ interviews and program notes to scholarly works. However, research on the role of myth in twentieth-century music is not extensive. There has been no study devoted exclusively to the past musical century as a whole and its unique relationships with mythology.