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 Plato’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 would like to try to apply certain fundamental elements of Durand's theory to music, in particular to its perception and emotional power, 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 recognizes 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 recognizes 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer) is identified with the roar of thunder.
The structure of the bullroarer 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 bullroarer'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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer are never quite the same, so that the thread and the spindle describe, in fact, two spirals, or two vortices. The bullroarer'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 bullroarer's sound that made it comparable to the roar of thunder and to the bellowing of the bull.
The meaning of the bullroarer'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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer (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 realized, despite the number of archaic civilizations 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 bullroarers 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer. 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 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 bullroarer 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-Olympic 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarers thread (as the sound of the sounding top is analogous to that of the bullroarers 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarers 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 bullroarer 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 bullroarer’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 has studied sonic archetypes for many years. A composer who deals primarily 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.
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