HERE IS HARDLY ANY PRIMITIVE MUSIC THAT DOES NOT TELL A STORY. IT’S NOT THE WORDS THAT TELL THE STORY

 

 

 

It is an L. Ron Hubbard trademark that before engaging in any form of musical expression, he would research the matter to the bone. Case in point was his 1978 investigation of music and theater. Vaguely touched upon by mother of modern dance, Martha Graham, the relationship between these art forms is, of course, very ancient. Yet it was not until Ron’s 1978 examination of the matter that music and theater was so succinctly revealed as a barometer of culture as a whole.

he actual genus of music and theater is very interesting. One can get a better understanding of these art forms by looking at their origin.

Music and theater started with primitive tribes. In a hunter society, a very basic type society, the hunters would go out to get meat for the tribe. They would be out in the woods banging deer on the head and getting ducked in cold streams and hand-wrestling lions and so forth while the other tribe members were all sitting home. The rest of the tribe would sometimes get rather critical about a shortage of meat, so the hunters, unacknowledged, decided to bring the hunt to the village. They started out with a very primitive, very elementary story of the day’s hunt. These people weren’t very verbally or musically inclined, so they would depict the story of the hunt by having one of the hunters run around with his hands over his head enacting the deer while another chased him around and hit at him with a club or something like this.

Over a period of time, this type of presentation advanced to a point in any given tribe or culture where they used preserved skins and headdresses and mock weapons. Then, possibly from the bang-bang-bang of their sticks trying to drive animals out of the brush, these hunters got the idea that there was rhythm involved. They became more dramatic, and started putting certain standard hunting exploits into a standard sort of dance with standard costumes and rhythms. But all the way along the line they were working for one thing, and that was to make the villagers aware of and interested in hunters.

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E ARE WORKING IN A CULTURE
WHICH IS ALREADY RUNNING A RUGGED DEGRADE
IN THE AREA OF THE ARTS.
ALL WE HAVE TO DO
IS KEEP AN ART TRADITION GOING UP,
AND WE WILL GET QUITE A REACH.

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From this base, other village activities started dramatizing their workloads. In looking at primitive music, one will find that almost all of it tells a story. With the development of agricultural societies there were songs about sowing the seeds and the music and theater progressed and advanced from there. The people had dances, and these dances had various rhythms that went along with them. The society finally built up a whole repertoire of music and theater peculiar to that tribe or that culture.

Based on the origins of music and theater one can actually plot the course of an art. When a culture starts going very bad and degraded -- when it starts penalizing its producers and rewarding its nonproducers -- music and theater lose course. These arts aren’t headed in any particular direction and they begin to not express stories. The theater of such a culture will start deifying things they should have nothing to do with. Examining the theater of a culture on the degrade, aspiration and hope turn up missing. Heroism and gallantry disappear. All these things submerge.

The state of a culture can’t be judged by its technical advances. During the Golden Age of Greece, when they made all their beautiful statues and were at the peak of their artistic achievement, the rug was already coming out from underneath Greece and it actually did not have very many more decades to go. So technical achievement can very often ride forward while the dry rot is already setting into the culture.

Those in charge of the arts are usually the ones who degrade the arts faster than anybody else, and they will actually teach a society in this direction. Then all of a sudden somebody makes a movie like Star Wars where everything is heroic and adventurous and it makes 200 million dollars. This is because the people still have their creative sparks and are more anxious to follow those than, “It’s all hopeless and degraded and we all ought to be on drugs.”

So you see, if the arts would get on the ball maybe the society would find it isn’t as late as it thinks.

That is the factor we’re working with. We are working in a culture which is already running a rugged degrade in the area of the arts. All we have to do is keep an art tradition going up, and we will get quite a reach.

Both photographs above by L. Ron Hubbard