Musical archetypes: the basic elements of the tintinnabuli style

Abstract

Archetypes It could be said that, like the music of Haydn, Pärt's music is appreciated all over the world. One reason for this rather rare phenomenon for a contemporary composer is that he found ways of (re)building the music out of very simple basic elements or patterns such as scales, which are commonly recognized. I suggest characterizing these elements or patterns as ‘archetypes’: this multilayered Greek term can literally be translated as ‘original or primal image’ ( arche = beginning, source). In the twentieth century, it has been known primarily through its use in Carl Jung's analytical psychology, where it is linked with the equally important concept of the collective unconscious. For Jung, this means a deep layer of the unconscious mind, which can be called collective inasmuch as it is “not a personal acquisition but is inborn” and thus “not individual but universal.” Jung calls the contents of this collective unconscious ‘archetypes.’ These “contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals” are by no means to be perceived as concrete images or ideas: in Jung's understanding, the archetypes are rather “definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere.” Elsewhere, Jung also strongly emphasizes that: archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience. Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, performs the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own … Th e archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas performandi , a possibility of representation which is given a priori. Th e representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only.

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