Myth And Music Analysis

While there are quite a few similarities between music and myth, the differences in articulation enable music to connect a society through the physical senses. Both myth and music are bound by the “temporal requirement of perception, the necessity to listen to the whole myth or composition, the impossibility of stepping outside of the stream of mythological narration or music without loss of the context” (Kozel 2016: 4). Myth and music are symbolic and audible images, respectively, that are composed and performed as a whole, and are transformed into meaningful images through the archetypes recognizable to the audience’s social realities. Archetypes, “as organs of a psychoid…nature, represent a constitutive part of the human” (ibid.: 7). When …show more content…
There are no full-time Suyá musical specialists, and such a fact creates an erroneous impression that music lacks importance in Suyá society. The reality of the matter is that the number of resources devoted to music are contributed by the entire Suyá population, guaranteeing a solid three or four hours of daily singing under traditional conditions, or at least prior to the advent of certain diseases that resulted in the loss of Suyá land (ibid. 1979: 373). Generally speaking, there are no full-time music specialists because everybody performs Suyá music, and Suyá music, by combining both the aspect of song and the aesthetics of singing, becomes an integral part of the village community. Sound and movement are intertwined to an emphatic degree, in which making music “is also dancing, politicking, and a moment when people communicate something about themselves” (ibid.: 375). Where musical events take place is also meaningful, and the village itself holds a special place in the Suyá musical community. For the Suyá, to sing is to express their existential happiness and their support for the way things are; to not sing is to be in a state of dissatisfaction. How a person sings is not as important as the fact that the person sings at all (ibid.: 375). Other ethnographic examples can no doubt demonstrate similar principles of societal articulation through music, but the Suyá …show more content…
Both poetry and song lyrics attend to prosodic features of rhythm and rhyme. Just as musical rhyme and rhyme are rooted in mime, so are their poetic counterparts. Poetry is used to communicate, learn, and remember “in part through the mnemonics of song and prosody” (Maynard 2009: 120). Classical poetic structure can be traced back to the development of oral traditions, to the time of ancient Greeks and Romans, where rhetoric skills improves alongside memory. Poetic imagery is a powerful mnemonic aid, and “it is especially useful where the rapid retrieval of information is important, as it is in singing to a fixed rhythm, and where the spatial layout and interacting components of a scene offer additional forms of organization” (Rubin 1995: 62). Rhyming and aesthetic alliteration are also essential tools for verbatim recall, and are by nature well-suited for poetic oral traditions. For a more familiar British example, take the mnemonic verse of monarchs in England that begins with “Willie, Willie, Harry…” and also consider how “many children 's rhymes in English are iambic, or even iambic pentameter” (Maynard 2009: 120). The prosodic structure is a cultivated tool for information retrieval, and it is easily refined into an instinctual part of a society’s traditions. Poetry communicates a social reality compressed into organized forms of articulated