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 “Musicworks”
(Canada), winter 1991
CAN ARCHETYPES BE HEARD?
by Gianfranco Salvatore
When we hear a melody, a rhythm or a mere sound, we sometimes
feel an emotion that goes beyond mere sensory perception, but
is not necessarily limited to an aesthetic emotion. A touch
of the arcane together with a certain feeling of uneasiness
can help us define this sensation as a 'primordial' emotion.
At these moments, one is projected into the world of the symbolic
by means of sound and music. This is not an instance of 'phonosymbolic'
sound, whereby the music stands for a realistic or emotional
situation. lt’s not an instrumental sound or a musical
phrase alluding to a concrete presence or to a natural phenomenon,
by means of the imitation of sounds in nature. Neither is it
an example of Affektenlehre - intending or attempting
to reproduce through music certain ‘emotional curves’
in human feelings.
I would like to discuss the symbolic power of music (as well
as the modes of perception of a certain kind of sound symbolism)
from a wider perspective than that which is offered at present
in the field of musical studies. Archetypology, the definition
and classification of archetypes has, until now, dealt with
conceptual and visual data that occupy primordial positions
in human imagery. The aim of my research is to extend its theses
to the field of sound, in order to formulate an archetypology
of music.
According to some scholars, the study of archetypes goes as
far back as Piato's doctrine of 'ideas', or even as far as the
PreSocratics, but in modern culture the first systematic definition
of archetypes took place in Jung's work, and in particular within
his theory of the collective unconscious. Charles Kerényi
later discussed archetypes in more phenomenological terms related
to the study of religious thought. But only with Gilbert Durand
has archetypology been given its own anthropological context,
within the study of the Symbolic: Durand pointed out the possibilities
of the perception of archetypes, based on data of a non-sensory
nature.
 I
wouid like to try to apply certain fundamental elements of Durand's
theory to music, in particular to itsperception andemotionalpower,
but I will use them from a different angle even methodologically,
making use of a more simplified formulation. One could begin
by asking why music is usually ignored in the study of symbolic
thought. This branch of study has inexplicably imposed limits
upon itself by exploring the aesthetic domain almost exclusively
in its literary and figurative contexts. Even the more modern
studies in the history of religion tend to select mythologies
and rituals, narrative functions, and concrete, visible symbols.
The whole realm of the 'audible' is normally excluded in the
analysis of symbolism. The symbolic figures are also usually
considered in their static and bi-dimensional form, and this
constitutes a restriction typical of the late European cultural
sensibility. For instance, we are used to conceiving as a flat
image the symbol of the cross, which Early Christians could
still see as a symbolic representation of six directions within
space, according to a tradition that goes back to the Hebraic
doctrines. Only Oriental symbology, that draws the cross as
a swastika, still recognises in it the sense of a vector, in
this case a clockwise rotation. Dynamic conception of the symbol
is common to many other Oriental symbols, such as the cosmic
wheel. And Oriental symbology recognises chant and music as
having symbolic status, and considers sound as being at the
origins of the cosmos, conceiving the universe as vibration,
singing the sacred syllable AUM with complete awareness of the
symbolic meaning of each of its sound components.
Before Gilbert Durand's work, studies of the Symbolic neglected
the dynamic and cinematic aspects of symbols. Durand started
to consider archetypes not as images but as deep figural impulses
that determine the creation of symbolic motifs and images, thus
providing the symbols with their original matrices and dynamic
roots. But Durand's analyses, despite this widened perspective,
end up concentrating again on the archetypal visual images and
their structures, leaving music outside the argument. One must
remember that music is not just an art of time, but also possesses
an apparatus of concepts and metaphors of its own, in order
to indicate imaginary positions in space (i.e., high
and low pitches). Music treats sound as an element in motion,
with its own directions, and thus it takes on a cinematic and
vectorial meaning. Moreover, the contributions of music to symbolic
imagery should also include the means by and the conditions
in which it is produced (in that which can be defined as the
‘musical act’), so that the power of music in its
functioning as a 'sound gesture' enriches itself by the actual
gesture with which the performer provokes the vibration of the
sound instrument.
 Taking
this argument to its extreme limit one can discover that music
also, just like any other image of movement, has the power to
reproduce archetypal motifs by means of a dynamic-cinematic
symbology that is often analogous to the visual productions
of symbolic images. Furthermore, within the sounds actually
emitted lies a symbol reflective of the dynamic patterns from
which they are produced. It can be demonstrated, in fact, that
in determined ritual contexts the acoustic element and its traditional
ways of production express, with sounds and gestures, the same
archetypal patterns as the visual elements of the ritual.
An approach toward archetypological-musical analysis can begin
with a very simple sound instrument used in the most archaic
rituals, possessing a ceremonial function. Thus it will be possible
to examine its technique in the production of sound and compare
it with the symbolic structures within the rituals in which
the instrument is used.
The bull-roarer was used as far back as the Stone Age.
Present within the archaic civilizations of all five continents,
it is probably the most widespread among all sacred instruments,
and in ancient Greece it was sacred to Dionysus. In pastoral
civilizations the sound of the instrument is considered to be
the voice of a god, and the divinity evoked by the bull-roarer
is generally a Bull God (as Dionysus was for the Greeks). In
a context of natural magic, the voice of the Bull God (the sound
of the bull-roarer) is identified with the roar of thunder.
The structure of the bull-roarer is very simple: it is made
of a throad a few meters long, to which is attached a wooden
or bone elongated object, usually spindle-shaped. André
Schaeffner emphasized the fact that the bull-roarer's shape
alludes to that of a fish; its symbology, in fact, is associated
with water. Often used to invoke rain, according to a principle
of homeopathic magic, the bull-roarer imitates the sound of
thunder; where there's thunder, there will be water. It's not
just by chance that in ancient Greece, the bullroarer was sacred
to Dionysus, a god of the ‘liquid’ element.
What is the relation between the sound of the instrument, its
techniques, and its archetypal meaning? The sound of the bull-roarer
is produced by the rotating of its thread, which traces in the
air a circular trajectory, whose axis is the performer's arm
(he provides the impetus by turning his wrist, but holding his
arm still). Al the same time, the spindle revolves around its
own axis. But the circles traced in the air by the components
of the bull-roarer are never quite the same, so that the thread
and the spindle describe, in fact, two spirals, or two vortices.
The bull-roarer's movement is therefore double, and its sound
is composed of two sounds. Basically, the thread gives off a
high-pitched sound, just like that of a fine whip, but a continuous
one; whereas the spindle, shorter and thicker than the thread,
generates a low-pitched sound, similar to a deep drone. Interference
between the two spiral-shaped movements also produces interference
between the two sounds. Since the impetus of the performers
arm is constant but never regular, the frequency (and therefore
the pitch) of the sound oscillates, producing the howling quality
of the bull-roarer's sound that made it comparable to the roar
of thunder and to the bellowing of the bull. The meaning of
the bull-roarer's sounds is utterly analogous to certain conceptual
and 'visual' meanings of the archetypes to which it is related.
In order to show this analogy, various symbolic elements must
be organized into a sequence that can be defined as a mythical-ritual
scenery. The two symbolic connotations mentioned above - the
roaring of thunder (with its symbolic association to water),
and the bellowing of the bull (that represented the sound epiphany
of Dionysus) are not as heterogeneous as they may seem. The
Bull God cult was in fact common to all Neolithic civilizations
of the Eastern Mediterranean. Dionysus only represents a late
and even 'classical' aspect of this archaic cult. But originally,
the sacred bulls' and cows' horns were considered images of
the Moon. The moon is one of the most important archetypes,
because it cyclically influences any occurrence related to the
liquid element: tides, menstrual fluxes, the regenerating of
lymphs in plants and thus of nature as a whole. Therefore on
the human level, as well as on the animal and vegetable, the
moon regulates fertility and fecundity, in other words, the
cyclical regeneration of life. But the roaring thunder that
announces the coming of powerful waters is just one aspect of
the symbolism related to the roaring of the 'lunar' bull. Also
commonly associated with the bull-related symbols of antiquity
was a major cosmic archetypal image: the spiral.
A bull-roarer produces its sound on the basis of a double spiral
shaped movement: is this incidental? No. This sound, in fact,
tends towards that of the great cosmic spiral, that the universal
cosmogonies associate with the creation of the world as it is
now (meaning after the end of the mythical Age of Gold), for
which the Bull God is the demiurge, or at least a tutor. Symbolically,
the visual aspect of the ritual rotation of the bull-roarer
thus perfectly corresponds to its sound aspect. Such a statement
would not be possible outside the dynamic-cinematic conception
of symbolic production: in other words, outside archetypology.
The archetypal nature of the spiral-shaped movement and of the
sounds that are related to it is verifiable in various other
cases. During the Athenian Anthesteria festival, spiral shaped
honey sweets used to be offered in the cult of the dead; and
Dionysus, in Greek religious imagery, is in fact the 'dying
god'. As a baby, he was killed by the Titans, who distracted
him by giving him toys. Among these toys was a bull-roarer (as
discussed above, a generator of visual and sounding spirals).
There was also a top, a cone which, by spinning on its tip,
traces eccentric spirals on the ground. Not one scholar of Dionysism
has realised, despite the number of archaic civilisations whose
rituals used sacred tops, that the top is an aerophone: its
cone is a hollow resonator, with holes which let the air within
vibrate. Thus, the top's movement, as well as its sound, are
comparable to those of the bull-roarers spindle.
 Further
certification is given by the homology of sound and visual symbols
within the dynamic schemas of sacred dances. One of the
most often recurring movements in the ecstatic dances of Dionysus'
priestesses, the Maenads, was a spinning motion, another symbol
connected to the archetypal spiral, comparable to the sound
of the bull-roarer that used to announce, to the Maenads, the
epiphany of their god. The similarity between this spinning
motion and the Dervishes’ dances confirm to us that this
meaning is not only cosmological, but also initiatory: in other
words, the ritual dance aims establishing the identification
of the believer with his god through a psycho-motory technique
of trance. The rondes, or circular dances, that took
place collectively around a centre of a sacred axis, real or
imaginary, had an analogous meaning. This circular movement
schema is the matrix of the spiral-like motion that was developed
within the sacred labyrinthine dances. Various scholars, from
Charles Kérenyi to Giorgio Colli, have demonstrated that
the Minotaur, at the centre of the Labyrinth in the myth that
took place in Crete, is an archaic form of Dionysus. The defeat
of the Minotaur (meaning the initiatory identification with
the Bull God) was celebrated with a labyrinthine dance, which,
according to the myth, was accompanied by the seven-stringed
Apollonian lyra. Seven is the number of circular paths within
the Labyrinth, and the number of planets in archaic astronomy,
as well as the number of levels that separate one world from
the other. The journey/dance within the Labyrinth was thus accompanied
by a music whose scale criteria were analogous to those that
ruled the ‘harmony of the spheres’ in the Pythagorean
doctrines. The Labyrinth was also associated with another instrument,
the shell trumpet. This wasn't used in the labyrinthine dances,
but nevertheless some ancient lexicographers defined the Labyrinth
as a “shell-shaped place", and the poet Theodoridas
called the conch a “sea labyrinth”. It is a known
fact that conical conch-shells were blown as horns. In the writings
of the poet Ovid this marine instrument was associated with
Triton, who plays it in order to call back the waters of the
flood. Homeopathic symbolism is evident there: the conch shell
(daughter of the sea, which pressed against the ear produces
the sea’s sound) is played in order to recall the sea itself;
the similar attracts the similar. And not by chance, among various
civilizations, the shell trumpet has the ritual function of
attracting rain, just like the bull-roarer. Thus, even its archetypal
dominion is that of the moon that attracts the fluxes: in India
and in Mexico it is considered an attribute of the lunar gods.
In other words, the shell-trumpet has the the cyclical meaning
of a death/rebirth process: the same archetypal meaning of the
Labyrinth, which constitutes a biological equivalent to it.
The helicoidal development of the conch shells, in fact, represents
a case of the logarithmic spiral, studied by structural biology,
a schema to which the bull's horns belong. And so the sound
of the shell-trumpet may be considered another of the Cosmic
Spiral’s sound emanations, which here takes on the symbolic
value of the 'sound of the abyss', just as the bull-roarer in
the Dionysiac rituals has the ritual function of the 'sound
of trance'. In any case, it’s a sonority to which is attributed
the power of attracting, because the instruments that produce
it reflect (within their structure, or more often within their
movement) the archetypal shape of the Spiral.
A study included in my book Sounding Islands (Isole
Sonanti, 1989) led me to conclude that the shell-trumpet
was a cult
instrument sacred to Aphrodite or more accurately, to the Mediterranean
pre-0lympic divinity, a Great Goddess associated with water
and with the moon, who then became Aphrodite. The classical
iconography has attributed to Aphrodite the bivalvular shell
from which, according to one myth, the goddess was born, but
a famous Minoic gem has a Cretan Aphrodite's priestess engraved
upon it, who plays the shell-trumpet before the altar in order
to summon the goddess, invoking her epiphany. The function of
the instrument is therefore analogous to that of the bull-roarer
within the Dionysiac rituals. And Dionysus and Aphrodite are
in fact connected by two important factors: both represent the
power of the liquid element, and both were originally hermaphrodite
divinities, as various cults certified in the Greek world. This
is the androgyny of the primordial divinities who express the
undifferentiated nature of the primary substance. Another primordial
divine function, that of being in charge of cyclical movements
and transformations, was represented by circular symbols such
as the Uroboros (the snake eating its tail) and the Cosmic Spiral.
Spiral-shaped shells are produced by hermaphrodite mollusks;
objects which designate a symbol are never arbitrary. And this
is true for sound instruments as well.
The sound of the shell-trumpet stands for the sound of the sea,
of water, and of the undifferentiated element that generates
the cyclical movement, and through this the power to attract.
When the Olympian Aphrodite emphasized her function as Goddess
of Love more than her other archaic powers, a new sound instrument
was consecrated to her: the iynx. Considered as an amulet for
erotic magic, even the iynx manifested an expression of the
power to attract: making the beloved come near to the lover.
The scholar A.F.S. Gow described the iynx as "a spoked
wheel (sometimes it might be a disc) with two holes on either
side of the centre. A cord is passed through one hole and back
through the other. If the loop on one side of the instrument
is held in one hand, and the tension alternately increased and
relaxed, the twisting and untwisting of the cords will cause
the instrument to revolve rapidly, first in one direction and
then in the other". The sound produced by the iynx is a
kind of humming hiss, analogous to that of the bull-roarers
thread (as the sound of the sounding top is analogous to that
of the bull-roarers spindle.)
Here we find yet another meaningful coincidence, where the analogies
of movement are intermediaries between the analogies of symbolic
functions. Even the movement of the iynx's wheel is in fact
a spiral-like motion. Turning backwards and forwards alternately,
the iynx’s wheel describes a double spiral; or even better,
two spirals standing on the same axis (the iynx’s cord)
and with a common vertex, cyclically alternating their sense
of rotation. We are still in the presence of a sound epiphany
of the Cosmic Spiral that, with the bull-roarer and the iynx,
expresses two different forms of attracting. Perhaps this is
why the iynx and the bull-roarer were often confused by Greek
and Latin classical authors. But, if the sounding top is in
fact a dynamic image of a cosmogonic myth, the combined movement
of the bull-roarers thread and spindle synthesizes the top's
movement and that of the iynx, thus fusing a cosmic image with
an erotic calm. The ritual function of the bull-roarer is to
invoke the fertilizing (or 'erotic') role of a cosmic power
such as the Bull-God, or to evoke the thunder that, with the
rain, will bring fecundity and the renewal of the biological
cycle. This synthesis of ritual function perfectly corresponds
to the interference between two sounds: that of the top and
that of the iynx, respectively equivalent (in their archetypal
meaning as in their sonority) to the bull-roarer’s thread
and spindle.
There was perhaps a time when the power of sound, almost like
a code of dynamic forms and gestures, expressed symbolic meanings
exactly in the same way as visual images do for us today. A
forgotten language of which only a mere fossil remains in our
spirits: the slight uneasiness that creeps up on you when you
hear those archetypal sounds.
Gianfranco Salvatore
Gianfranco Salvatore has studied sonic archetypes for
many years. A composer who deals primarlly with the interaction
between experimental pop and serious music, he has also produced
several recordings, and writes as a music critic for several
publications in Italy. As a musicologist, his research mainly
concerns the language of improvised music - ethnic, jazz and
contemporary. He considers improvisation as performances with
anthropological meaning, actions during which the improviser,
by means of improvised patterns and spontaneous inspiration,
realizes and shapes his culture within the circumstances of
the environment. The author of three books and several audio-dramas
(based on the mixing of musical and verbal signals) he is currently
preparing a new book entitled Cerchio, Spirale, Vortice
(Circle, Spiral, Vortex), concerning the archetypal meaning
of circular shapes and motions both in visual and acoustic symbolism.
Gianfranco Salvatore
(Translated by Séverine Hamilton)
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