Nearer and Farther Than Sound: Myth and the Music of Being

Bradley Olson, PhD
40 minutes ago
7 min read

I always cherish the honor of contributing to the MythBlast series. Moreover, with this first essay of the new year, I am pleased to introduce the MythBlast Theme for 2026, which we’re calling Experience the Power of Myth in Music.

Music is at least as old as Homo sapiens, and it might well be even older. Neanderthals appear to have possessed the vocal anatomy for making complex sounds, suggesting that early human ancestors used their voices to sing or hum long before developing language. The hyoid bone found in the throat of Homo heidelbergenis indicates that this species had the anatomical ability to sing at least 530,000 years ago.

Flutes have been found in Germany and Slovenia that date back forty to sixty thousand years. Anthropologists believe music began with natural sounds—the rhythmic pounding of tools, clapping hands, or mimicking bird songs. Why, we’re still transported to an altered state by drum beats approximating the rhythms of the human heart. Every human culture we’re aware of has some form of music, and as such it must be considered a fundamental aspect of human identity.

Music is arguably the most “mythic” of the arts because it is the least representational. It signifies without pointing to any single, discrete meaning. Just as myth speaks in images that exceed explanation, music speaks in tonal structures that exceed language. Music may not be a secondary "voice" for ancient stories, but the very symbol—the singular psychological image-experience that triggers their creation in a human mind.

By utilizing structural principles found in, perhaps, all cultures—repetition, contrast, and circularity—music provides an immediate, non-verbal experience of the infinite, the ineffable, which mythology then attempts to name. This may explain why cultures throughout history have insisted on the "divine origin" of instruments: the sound itself is such a potent, evocative force that it feels like "miraculous rhetoric," something that has always existed, long before human language.

Myth and music are symbolic languages of the unconscious or “the inward.” In one of my favorite works of poetic art, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the poet writes:

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the

instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor

the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing

his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that

of the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they. (“Song for Occupations”)

“It is nearer and farther than they.” Whitman’s “It” doesn’t refer to—and I hate myself just a little for this terrible pun—the instrumental cause of the music. Rather, he refers to the paradoxical nature of the ineffable, of the transcendent apprehended. Immanent transcendence. It’s Plato’s music of the spheres, Harmonia tou kosmou, the harmony of the universe that produces its inaudible, utterly sublime "music."

In “The Myth of Er,” Plato described a vision of the cosmos where eight celestial spheres revolve around a central spindle. On each sphere sat a Siren who sang a single note; together, those eight notes created a single perfect harmony. As Plato well knew, there are also eight notes to a diatonic scale forming an octave, and serving as a fundamental unit of rhythm and phrasing especially in dance, where a complete musical "sentence" often lands on the eighth beat (an "8-count").

Music provides an immediate, non-verbal experience of the infinite, the ineffable, which mythology then attempts to name.

Campbell, music, and myth

This symbolic power of music was not merely theoretical for Joseph Campbell. Like Whitman, Campbell believed that music has an awakening function. In The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, he says:

[Music] has an awakening function…Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it’s an awakener of life. (224)

Music was always central to Campbell’s life. Trained on the violin as a boy, he soon added guitar, banjo, ukulele, and mandolin, and later the saxophone. After transferring from Dartmouth to Columbia University in 1922, he joined a jazz band formed through the Instrumental Club, playing night gigs in Manhattan that emphasized improvisation and ensemble over technique alone. Though he often played saxophone, the university newspaper highlighted his banjo playing as a standout feature of student concerts—an early hint that Campbell’s lifelong sensitivity to myth would be shaped as much by rhythm as by words.

There were, of course, the usual rowdy college audiences, but Campbell and the band often had invitations to headline at more upscale venues such as dances at the Plaza Hotel. Campbell’s musical career proved surprisingly profitable; in 1925 he was able to save $3,000 that year alone—equivalent to over fifty-five thousand dollars today, a hundred years later. Campbell later claimed that it was on the savings he earned during his years in the band that he was able to “retire” to Woodstock during the Great Depression and spend those all-important years reading in the Catskill woods.

Thoughts no words can utter

Music, it is said, expresses "thoughts which no words can utter," and I recall having such an experience in my childhood. I was quite young, young enough to hold my father’s hand as we walked through the boreal forest of northern Minnesota lake country, when we came to a small clearing, absent enough trees to let the direct sunlight shine on us. Pausing for a moment—whether to enjoy the sun on our faces, reorient, or simply take in the scene, I don’t remember—I heard the most sublime a cappella choral music. I turned to my father and excitedly said, “Did you hear that?” “Hear what?” he replied. “Nothing” I said, as I instantly became aware of the disturbingly strange, alien power of the uncanny, blurring the boundaries between reality and the surreal, causing even the familiar to seem alien and somehow dangerous.

I revisited that childhood moment when I was an undergraduate studying William Wordsworth’s poem, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." This poem reframed my experience. It was no longer an experience of the uncanny, nor of reality bleeding into surreality. By then it was exactly for me as Wordsworth wrote: “For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.” The sublime’s chastening, subduing power is the constant companion to those who seek to reconcile the demanding conditions of life with the deep longing to see what this human stuff is capable of.

For Plato the sirens sang the enchanting music of the spheres. For Homer their enchanting songs also lured sailors irresistibly nearer, causing them to steer their ships onto rocky shores, resulting in shipwrecks and death. The mysteries of existence and the mysteries of death are inseparable. They give us both the vitalizing fanfare of life and the dirge-like march toward death.

One way or another, death must be the coda in the music of life. Mortal we remain, after all. Yet death, too, is a manifestation of the sublime, with the ultimate power to chasten and subdue. But how can something universal to all living things—not just human beings—be “bad”? How can the consequence of death be torture or separation from divine apprehension? No. If death is, as I have said, a manifestation of the sublime, then as such it also delivers an aesthetic revelation of unanticipated beauty.

Here, I return to Whitman again:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas'd the moment life appears.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. (“Song of Myself”)

This is the eternally recurring refrain in the music of life: death leads forward life, and that is luckier than anyone supposes.

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MythBlast authored by:

Bradley Olson, PhD is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com)

This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.

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Rebecca Armstrong is a mythologist, minister, and educator whose life has been guided by the transformative power of story. For twelve years, she served as the International Outreach Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, helping to create and nurture the worldwide Mythological RoundTable™ groups that carried Campbell’s work into communities around the globe. With an earned doctorate and two master’s degrees, Rebecca has spent over three decades teaching myth, religion, ethics, and film studies at major universities, and she currently leads a course called Movies & the American Myth at Indiana University. In her private practice as a Jungian Coach and Spiritual Guidance counselor at workingwithsoul.com, she helps others reconnect with the deeper stories moving through their lives. In this episode, Rebecca joins JCF’s John Bucher for a rich conversation about her life, her relationship with Joseph Campbell, and how myth continues to inform her work in the world today.

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This Week's Highlights

"Music has an awakening function. Life is rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms . . . The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life."

-- Joseph Campbell

The Hero's Journey, 261