How You Tell The Story

Greek myths & music arranging: the art is in how you tell the story and what lens you choose to use.

One of the things I love most about Greek Mythology is its malleability.

Read The Iliad, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or a Sophocles play, and you are experiencing one version of myths that were universally known to the society who first consumed them. Everyone knew the stories of the Olympians, the heroes, etc.

The outcome of that is that when you went to see Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, you weren’t there to experience the story: you were there to experience Sophocles’ version of the story. The themes Sophocles wanted to highlight, the tone and weight of the dialogue, the characters he chose to center or omit.

That’s true to this day – Greek myths have been a popular source for progressive rewrites in recent years, from Broadway’s Hadestown to Madeline Miller’s Circe to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Because the source stories are shared, authors have the opportunity to express themselves through the work.

The same is true of arranging – including folk song or jazz arranging but really any arrangement that uses existing source material. Arrangers tend to be dismissed as less artistically significant than composers, but I say that just as Sophocles and Homer created high art by retelling stories everyone already knew, so Gene Puerling and Alice Parker have created art in their settings of, for example, folk melodies, Beatles songs, and the Great American Songbook.

It’s not whether the story is original; it’s how you tell it.