ABSTRACT
This chapter points out the ubiquity of mythologisation of music, even in the case of most scientific of analyses and treatises. To connect social distinctions and questions of sacred capital to mythologisation and other debates surrounding the origins of music, then requires certain inferences where the “low” or mass cultural dimension of the popular as well as the religious and factional aspects of the sacred are of particular use. In the eyes and ears and minds of official religious authorities and by extension the overall societal establishment, the more “popular” music is – particularly aesthetically, sociologically and partisanly, the less sacred capital it possesses. The mythological power of music is by no means restricted to singing, as evidenced, among others, by Orpheus and his lyre, the Pied Piper of Hameln and composer Adrian Leverkühn who made a deal with the devil in exchange for musical ingenuity in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.
