Myth as a Figure of Speech in Musicological Discourse

Many scholars use notions and terms related to myth, but only a few musicologists apply them systematically as a purposeful method. A number of recognized scholars have suggested connections with myth without fully developing this idea. Most limit applications of the term “myth” to imply misconstrued notions or utopian beliefs. For example, in her 1987 lecture on postmodernism, Susan McClary characterized broad concepts moving from pre-modern through modern into postmodern thought in terms of one myth replacing another:

Occasionally, some conceptual ideas that late-twentieth-century music historians have produced echo similar ideas developed earlier in the neighboring discipline of mythographic research. McClary's claim, in the same lecture, that one of the typical impulses of postmodernism in music is the construction of a new world from fragments of the old, resonates with Franz Boas's description of the transformation of one myth into another, which Lévi-Strauss cited: “It would seem that mythological worlds were built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments.”

It is only natural that modern musicology, like other humanitarian disciplines, should adopt notions and descriptions that mythographers and anthropologists originally developed. Take, for example, the portrayal of a taboo.

Incorporating figures of speech that refer to mythic images into the musicological narrative greatly enhances its expressiveness, as in this McClary passage: “The prohibition against tonality is rather like sacred prohibitions against saying aloud the name of the Hebrew God or against making graven idols.”

The mythological dimension of our general thinking not only provides figures of speech—comparisons and metaphors—for a musicological narrative, but it also broadens the perception of music history. In Music and the Historical Imagination, Leo Treitler uses the notion of history in so broad a sense that it becomes very close to what Eliade, the mythographer, considered to be “antihistory”— myth and ritual. In one of Treitler's paradoxical definitions, he states that in a sense, history, “too, is ritual, like the chanting of epic and oral history, like the ritual performance of tragedy in the cultures of Greek antiquity, like the chanting of Scripture in the Judeo-Christian tradition (sometimes called ‘historia’).”