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Separation and the Lost Language of Nature in the Music of M. K. Čiurlionis
- Kristina Dryža
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
There’s an ancient saying that music is the language of the gods. Long before it was entertainment or background sound, music was understood as something closer to enchantment, a force capable of aligning the human soul with powers larger than itself. In antiquity, specific forms of elevated music were believed to hold real efficacy to heal, summon, order chaos, and attune human life to the rhythms of the cosmos.
Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau ranked music as the highest of the arts, writing that it “paints everything, even objects that are only visible: from an almost inconceivable prestige, it seems to put the eye in the ear.” Music doesn’t merely describe reality; it translates experience across sensory and symbolic thresholds.
To experience the power of myth in music goes far beyond identifying mythological references embedded in sound. It is to evoke something stirring within us that is older than language, an echo of a time when human beings were still woven into a living world whose song resonated within them. Both myth and music share this quality because they bypass the intellect and speak directly to the body, the imagination, and the nervous system.
Separation as a modern condition
Joseph Campbell explained separation as the opening movement of the hero’s journey to Bill Moyers during the PBS documentary series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (1988). “To get out of that posture of dependency, psychological dependency, into one of psychological self-responsibility,” he stated, “requires a death and resurrection, and that is the basic motif of the hero journey. Leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition.” Here separation extends beyond the personal and psychological by also unfolding culturally and cosmologically.
One of the defining separations of modern life is our estrangement from nature. Early human consciousness was immersed in the natural world. There was no hard boundary between human and non-human, between our inner life and the outer environment. Rhythm preceded reason, and sound preceded meaning. Rivers, winds, seas, and seasons functioned as participants in a shared musical world.
Much of this more uplifting music as it exists today grew out of this intimacy. Birdsong shaped early melodies, while the pulse of waves, the cadence of walking, and the rise and fall of the breath became the first measures. Long before notation, music was something humans entered into, not something they produced.
Today something in us still recalls this—though faintly—as the modern mind too often privileges dry abstraction over living participation. The intellect tends to isolate, categorize, and dominate, severing itself from the rhythmic intelligence of the body, of nature, and of the planet itself. Campbell warned that when we lose contact with nature’s wisdom, we lose our mythic orientation as well. “We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature,” he expressed in the PBS series, “and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.” It is precisely this lost accord that the music of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) mourns, and—for a moment—restores.
Čiurlionis and the sound of remembered nature
At the turn of the twentieth century, as Europe stood between old cosmologies and modern fracture, a small number of artists began searching for forms capable of holding both inner vision and cosmic scale. Among them was the Lithuanian composer and painter Čiurlionis. He was a musical prodigy from early childhood, able to play by ear at five (some reports say three), and sight-read fluently by seven. Technical brilliance alone, however, fails to account for the depth of his work. Over a remarkably short life, he composed hundreds of musical works, alongside an expansive body of paintings and other literary writings.
His symphonic poems In the Forest (1901) and The Sea (1907) sound like nature remembered from the inside. These two compositions evoke immersion in a living, rhythmic world drawing the listener’s perception towards participation ... the music gently carries us back into nature. For Čiurlionis, music offered contact with something primordial, a universal symphony underlying visible reality. As such, his musical creations are saturated with a longing directed towards reunion. He also experienced synesthesia, perceiving sound and image as intrinsically interconnected.
In the Forest: re-entering the living world
In the Forest unfurls slowly, patiently, almost ceremonially. Themes emerge and recede as if following hidden paths. The music envelops and shelters the listener ... creating space to breathe.
The forest held profound significance in Lithuanian cultural memory. For centuries it served as a refuge of sustenance, boundary, and threshold. It protected communities, fed them, and accompanied them at the end of life’s journey. In Baltic pagan cosmology, forests were believed to be inhabited by spirits and ancestral presences. Death unfolded as a movement deeper into the living fabric of the world. The forest functioned as a mediator between human and ancestral realms, serving as both provider and witness. Čiurlionis appreciated forests as a lived reality, and not simply folklore alone.
In this symphonic poem, the forest becomes a mythic space of separation and return. Time loosens, and linear progression gives way to cyclical movement. The music invites the listener to slow down to hear what modern life has trained them to ignore. In the Forest resists extractive ways of knowing. Greater meaning unfolds through an embodied presence as the listener’s perception begins to shift. And here, myth blossoms as a lived experience within nature.
The Sea: encountering infinity
Where the forest encloses, the sea dissolves. The other symphonic poem, The Sea, unfolds on a vastly different scale while carrying the same underlying movement of separation and return. Čiurlionis’ sea arrives with an elemental force shaped by depth, motion, and magnitude. This same quality is what gives his paintings–just like his music–a mythic register, which draws the viewer directly into elemental realities.
As a side note, the largest painting ever created by Čiurlionis, Rex (1909), gathers all the elements into a unified order held by a supra-human intelligence radiating a sense of cosmic totality. And within the 1908 painting cycle, Sonata No. 5 (Sonata of the Sea), water appears as rhythm, vibration, and movement, and is experienced as pulse rather than image. The sea appears as a cosmic substance, an elemental field of infinity, hidden depths, and dissolution that overwhelms human scale.
This same force reverberates through The Sea, where sound carries the listener into the vastness that the image evokes. The music rolls and engulfs ... at times gently, at other times with overwhelming force. Harmonic layers rise and fall like tides, leaving us feeling both held and dwarfed. The sea appears here as a threshold; a meeting place between the known and the unknowable.
In this sense, music—uniquely among the arts—allows us to experience scale without representation. A painting can depict vastness, while sound enacts it. In The Sea, time stretches and contracts drawing the listener into rhythms older than human memory. The sea carries this infinitude as something felt, and its mythic power becomes known through sensation.
Silence, sound, and the mythic threshold
In a 1908 letter to his future wife, Sofija, Čiurlionis wrote: “I’d like you ... to listen to silence, which is a song of the New Language. I would like to compose a symphony of the murmur of the waves, from the mysterious language of the ancient forest, from the twinkling of the stars, from our songs, and from my immense longing.” This longing is central to his works and reflects a mythic yearning for reconnection.
In Čiurlionis’ words, silence carries the quality of Source, and highlights how the most important elements of music often reside in the spaces between notes. Music is heard within silence. Poetry recognizes this as well. Drawing on John Keats’ notion of negative capability, the deepest creation transpires before conscious thought, before words even arrive. And in a similar way, music articulates what lies beyond sight, just as myth gives form to what remains unnamed.
Music as mythic re-alignment
Campbell identified one of myth’s core functions as aligning society with the natural and cosmic order. Čiurlionis’ music fulfills this function through experience, restoring a felt relationship to rhythm, cycle, and scale. Through this medium he emerges as a mediator between worlds, translating rhythms beyond the visible, and harmonizing the listener with nature.
His works In the Forest and The Sea exquisitely give voice to our separation from nature. Through sound, they allow us to feel what has been lost, and to briefly touch what remains recoverable. To experience the power of myth in music is to remember that the world once sang to us, and that we once knew how to listen. In that shared listening, a quiet hope takes hold that is rooted in reconnection, attunement, and the possibility of hearing the world—and one another—anew.
To close with the words of Čiurlionis: “One must carry light within oneself, to shine through the darkness for those standing along the way, so that, seeing it, they too may find light within themselves and follow their own path.” Listening to nature’s rhythms, and to silence, sustains and carries our inner light and offers illumination to others.
music articulates what lies beyond sight, just as myth gives form to what remains unnamed.
MythBlast authored by:
Kristina Dryža is a futurist-turned-archetypal consultant who helps people understand the unseen forces shaping their lives. At a time when speed, fragmentation, and overwhelm define modern experience, she shows how myth and archetypes offer something many of us have lost: an inner map.
Her work reveals the patterns beneath behaviours, relationships, creativity, and change, giving people a way to interpret their lives with meaning rather than confusion. A member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Editorial Advisory Group, Kristina brings depth, accessibility, and emotional intelligence to her translation of ancient wisdom into practical insight.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.
Stream The Power of Myth in Music playlist on Spotify
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This Week's Highlights
"Music, however, has a role apart; for it deals not with forms in space, but with time––sheer time. It is not, like the other arts, a rendition of what Plato calls “ideas,” but of the will itself, the world will, of which the “ideas” are but inflections."
-- Joseph Campbell
