2.1 The first archetype: telling stories

2.1 THE FIRST ARCHETYPE: TELLING STORIES People love stories. They like telling and passing on traditions, legends, ballads about their own life, about love, war, the past (both real and imaginary), and the future (based on realistic expectations or imaginary). Nowadays this appetite is more than satisfied by a stream of films and television series. Already many centuries ago, telling stories was linked to music. One of the oldest still existing forms of this can be found in China. In the Ancient Mediterranean civilization the Greek rhapsodists were of great renown as singers/tellers of the Homerian epic poems, in the Celtic world there were the bards, and in Northern Europe the era of the scops and skalds comes to mind. And the Portuguese fado, with Coimbra as its capital, where it lives on as a folk tradition.

In China, the art of storytelling has been around for thousands of years. Today, it is no longer the nomadic singers/actors/instrumentalists who preserve this popular tradition, but a state-controlled form of culture. There are various forms of narrative genres. In the Soviet Union this tradition was very much alive in the Ukraine, before Stalin put a stop to it by having all of these so-called kobzars massacred in 1932.

This narrative music always takes the same form: a singer or actor tells a story, accompanied by an instrumentalist or by himself. This may grow into a group of multiple instruments and this quickly leads us to pop music with its endless stories on the theme of ‘boy meets girl’. In classical music the link between storytelling and music took an important turn when the singer was replaced by an instrumentalist to tell the whole story. This happened in the early Renaissance.

Exactly when is unclear, but it probably started in home settings, where it was popular to make transcriptions of frottole - madrigals and chansons - for strings, flutes, lute, or clavier (Marcel Boereboom, Handboek van de muziekgeschiedenis [Handbook of Music History] (1958)).

Various narrative forms developed: the song-form in the sonata, the fantasia, the toccata and from there on to the classic and romantic sonata and symphony. The archetype of music as a narrative is the most important and most beloved form of music. Even the abstract form of the fugue has always been a game of multiple participants chasing each other around the same musical theme.4 The later symphony has all the traits of a narrative.

We need only think of Beethoven’s symphonies, in which in the first part the hero tries to find his way in the world, the second part deals

4 To go on the run = darsi alla fuga.