MUSIC AND NARRATIVE: AN INDISSOLUBLE COMBINATION AS ANCIENT AS HUMANS
Have you ever wondered why we are so fascinated by stories? And why a movie without soundtrack seems almost impossible to imagine?
It’s not just children who get kidnapped by a good story, also adults cannot resist at heroes, enemies, combats, romance, turn of events, dramatic moments and sob ends.
We can say that nobody can remain impassive to a well told story.
Of course many people like stories rich in patos, others prefer a lighter narrative, some other are mad of love stories, while others don’t conceive stories without bloodshed…
It’s subjective but, if done in the right way, everyone’s attention can be captured for the whole duration of the storytelling.
The passion of the humans for stories is as ancient as the world itself, and it is still not clear if it was the rootcause or a consequence of our way of interpreting the Universe.
One thing is certain: before the coming of writing, families liked to gather around the hearth and tell stories about heroes’s deeds.
This habit was such rooted that, over time, started to appear talents and professionists in telling stories, who wandered from one place to another, telling the most famous and popular tales.
In ancient Greece the aedi were born, wandering singers with a fervid imagination who, on the basis of a set cloth, added free verses to the formulas already memorized
Alongside the aedi were the rhapsodies, who did not take the trouble to invent new literal devices, but limited themselves to singing compositions of the popular tradition.
Aedi and rhapsodies differed from simple poets because in their songs they told the stories and myths of heroes.
Exactly, they sang. The music was in fact a fundamental part of the narration that these travellers brought to the villages.
It was thought that the aedi were even able to communicate directly with the divinity and take inspiration from it thanks to a kind of tranche induced by music.
We can affirm that the first soundtracks were born right there in ancient Greece, from the lyre and the flutes of the aedi and rhapsodies.
Music was in fact funcional to the storyteller for two aspects: by one side it helped memorizing of very long stories which were passed down only orally, by the other side it was entertaining the public, favoring what later in the theatrical sphere was called katarsis, that is, the spiritual “purification” generated by the hypnotic rapture of musical instruments and by the identification in the characters, through which people atoned for their sins and exorcised their fears.
With the introduction of music, verses began to be shaped in catchy metrics and well canonized formulas.
Memorizing became always easier, until the invention of writing completely revolutionized the Greek literary landscape. I t was decided to put in writing all the work handed down from the songs of the aedi: so the two epic poems par excellence, the Iliad and the Odyssey were born.
Homer’s work was the result of centuries-old interweaving of notes and words. Plots that forged the Western collective imagination for millennia, serving as a solid cultural basis for the greatness of the Roman Empire before and of all the European kingdoms from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century afterwards.
Without stories and without music we would not be who we are today; we owe to them much of our ideas, our philosophy, art, language and science.
With the passing of the centuries, the link between music and narration continued indissoluble: the choir in the Greek theater, the acrobats and the storytellers of the medieval and Renaissance court, the pantomimes of the Baroque age, the Opera, the compositions of singer-songwriters in contemporary times…
Today we have lost this sense of deep union between stories and music, we only have movie soundtracks and some songwriting songs left.
N.I.N.A. project. New Ideas New Armonies of Maestro Stefano Cataldi, Etnomusician, pianist and composer internationally renowned, aims to rediscover this union in a modern key, spreading through the story his guides to listening.
Books, disks, seminars, music dedicated cultural trips, up to live concerts, all this characterizes “From music narration to concert” and is the beating hearth of this new project N.I.N.A., realized to approach the passionates to music world but also to help young people who are starting their professional career, to go on on solid bases.