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Rituals
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Bernd Brabec de Mori
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Music in the Social and Behavioral
Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Rituals
Contributors: Bernd Brabec de Mori
Editors: William Forde Thompson
Book Title: Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Chapter Title: "Rituals"
Pub. Date: 2014
Access Date: December 16, 2014
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781452283036
Online ISBN: 9781452283012
DOI: [Link]
Print pages: 966-970
Music in Social and Behavioral
©2014 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SAGE knowledge
[Link] of Music and Performing Arts,
Graz
Ritual is a term used to describe an action or a series of actions that are fixed and
symbolically loaded according to a given context within a particular community.
Ritual is a metalinguistic term: it does not define an object or event as ritual, or a
quality inherent to an object or event; rather, it is an analytical tool that can be applied
to a variety of situations or events: “viewing something as a ritual.” Ritual is often
synonymously used with rite, ceremony, and sometimes liturgy or performance. Music
and ritual can be integrated from a variety of standpoints: Music performance can be
studied as a part of rituals, or music as a communicative tool may refer to or describe
rituals. Additionally, music performance in general can be described as ritual, applying
analytical frameworks from the academic area of ritual studies to any manifest formal
music performance. Ritual theories have been developed during the past century,
mainly in anthropological writings, but also in sociology, psychology, education, and
literature studies.
Etymology and Definitions
Ritual stems from Latin ritualis, “belonging to a ritus,” with ritus meaning certain temple
services in ancient Rome, and the Catholic Church's worship in medieval Europe.
Ceremony (caeremonia) probably stems from the Etruscan. [p. 966 ↓ ] In the medieval
canon of ecclesial services, the book ceremoniale describes services executed in the
pope's and emperor's coronations, and around the episcopal ranks. The older book,
rituale, prescribes priest services such as marriages or funerals, not included in the
mass and office (which are treated in other books). The term liturgy (from the Greek,
meaning “public service”), used in its latinized form from the 16th century onward,
encompasses all formalized ecclesial services. Since the 19th century, these terms
were also used outside of Christianity, retaining in part their meaning.
Although the terms often present overlapping definitions, a liturgy denotes a system of
religious practice that is institutionalized in a given society. A rite describes a series of
actions commonly encompassing a sequence of ritual actions. Ritual, or ritual action,
is the core concept defining one or more actions constituted by strict rules and that
are highly symbolically loaded. Rituals are furthermore repeated with no or minor
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alterations, resulting in a “tradition” or “canon.” Ceremony is most often used as a
subset of ritual, dedicated to the celebration of a person, object, or event. One can
conduct a ritual in solitude, but a ceremony is celebrated in community and is usually
evaluated positively. A performance is any action that is staged or representatively
organized. Finally, ritual action has to be juxtaposed to what became known as
ritualized action; the latter may refer to any traditional act, habit, or routine that is not
directly reflected upon, for instance brushing one's teeth every morning.
Ritual Theories
Outside of Christian liturgy, ritual and related terms were most often used to refer to
acts of “others,” commonly evaluated as inferior, primitive, or archaic (a connotation
still found in popular judgements). Émile Durkheim understood ritual action as a
social process, attaching the individual to society by the means of symbolic actions
of believers toward their gods. In 1915, he explained in Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life that ritual was a representation of social structure to a society. Belgian
anthropologist Arnold van Gennep investigated formal structures in ritual, and in 1909,
he describes in his seminal work Les rites de passage a temporal sequence defining
ritual action: preliminaire, liminaire, and postliminaire. This threefold structure was taken
up by British anthropologist Victor Turner, who formulated the most influential model
for ritual music performance: In 1969, he published his observations on how African
Ndembu install a new chief for the community. Turner described the three phases as
“separation,” “liminality,” and “reaggregation.” During separation, the participants would
depart from their roles and duties of daily life and enter the space and time of ritual
action, which is different from the ordinary. During liminality, social rules, hierarchies,
and norms (“structure”) are turned upside down or made ambiguous (“antistructure”).
For instance, people may transform into animals, living persons may appear dead
and vice versa, or the chief was subjected to insults, as in Turner's example—the
main thing being that social roles are different from outside the ritual. In this phase,
participants may experience a state of immersion that Turner termed “communitas.”
During reaggregation, participants would return to their positions in daily life. These
positions then may carry a quality of renewal, or represent a new social status. Central
characters emerge in new roles, such as a married couple, a new chief, or an initiated
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adult. Turner, together with literature scholar Richard Schechner, also compared ritual
to theater and established the ritual drama, initially by teaching students to act out
rituals that Turner had observed in Africa. This concept explores the performative effect
(taken from John Austin's linguistic speech act theory) of drama on the solution of crisis
in the daily life of the theater audience: the seriousness of play.
Performativity is the central concept in the ritual treatises by Sri Lanka–born
anthropologist Stanley Tambiah. This author suggests that rituals were necessary for
maintaining a cosmology, so that the world (or a specific worldview) would not end: for
example, he presents U.S. Independence Day celebrations. For the efficacy of ritual
action, he mentions performativity and iteration: he relates performativity to effects of
a determined action outside ritual and toward entities not physically present, such as
gods or the U.S. government. Iteration maintains the stability of roles both inside and
outside ritual space-time, and at the same time of the action. He mentions [p. 967 ↓ ]
ritual chants to be generally iterative, repetitive in both musical and lyric structure.
Roy Rappaport extrapolated the function of performative speech in ritual; Erving
Goffman described rituals as interaction in sociological terms; Maurice Bloch presented
a Marxist interpretation of ritual as the power of the transcendental over the everyday;
and Catherine Bell (1992) considered the ritual category not a property of the object of
study, but of the scope of the beholder. Building upon Bruno Latour's work, nonhumans
can also be considered agents in ritual relational networks, for example in writings
by Michael Houseman or William Sax. Furthermore, ritual theories today extend to
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, including music therapy, as well as education
including musical learning, where rituals and ritualized processes (in this case bad
habits) may appear as obstacles in development, but can be consciously used in order
to establish new habits and acquire new abilities.
An Aspara dance is performed in Siem Reap, Cambodia, October 2008. In Cambodia,
dance, drama, and music make up the traditional performance of ritual offerings to gods
and ancestors.
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Music in Ritual
There are few rituals lacking music. This may be because the basic requirement
of formalization counts for both ritual and music. Music in ritual is often considered
repetitive and highly canonical because rituals have these qualities. In evolutionary
musicology, ritual music is placed between an animal's sound-making and art music on
a scale of rising complexity. Ellen Dissanayake, for example, suggests an ethological
approach to music and ritual based on “suggestive similarities between the evolutionary
(biological) process of ‘ritualization’ in animal communication and the ritual (cultural) use
of musical behavior in human rite or ceremonies.” She argues that emotional responses
to ritual music are associated with selection advantages such as youth, health, and
social worth. This is seldom adopted by ethnomusicologists because it is grounded in
the Western dichotomy of biological and cultural evolution.
Another explanation is more grounded in emic understanding: among many indigenous
societies (and in Christian liturgy), music in general, certain kinds of music, or
highly formalized speech like prayer are conceived as a metalanguage that can be
comprehended by the addressed nonhuman agents (like gods, spirits, or saints), who
therefore may react in a predictable way to ritual performance. Ritual efficacy is here
thought to originate from these agents who understand the humans' messages, coded
in music performance. Such concepts are more likely to be accepted when attached to
non-Western, “traditional” societies, rather than to Western art music, therefore implying
“otherness” in those who conduct rituals. Classical ethnomusicology, as in the works of
John Blacking, Bruno Nettl, or Steven Feld, supports this because it is concerned with
music in its foreign contexts and social functions, unlike Western historical musicology
and aesthetics, which rather tend to treat art music as a phenomenon.
Ritual efficacy can be understood as direct or indirect causality, as in magical
manipulation, healing, or sorcery. This kind of effect is relevant for research in medical
ethnomusicology and music therapy. However, building upon Tambiah's [p. 968 ↓ ]
observation that rituals serve for maintaining a worldview, efficacy can also be traced
in a more ample radius. Anthony Seeger, for example, has shown that new music
among the central Brazilian Suyá is always acquired from “others” (neighbor groups, or
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nonhumans), and that performing this music is crucial for establishing and maintaining
the Suyá's position within a world which still does not end.
Music About Ritual
Music can also, as a metaritual, describe or reflect upon rituals. In Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart's Zauberflöte, dating from 1791, for example, an adept's initiation among the
freemasons is recounted and musically performed. Carl Maria von Weber's opera
Der Freischütz (1821) includes the ritual manipulation of a gun bullet, and Richard
Wagner, in Parsifal (1882), tells the mythic story of the protagonist's quest and religious
rapture. On the other hand, music can index ritual action by its structure. For instance,
Hector Berlioz's funeral march in his Symphonie Fantastique from 1830 may be
interpreted in this way, but the most prominent example is given with Igor Stravinski's
Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). Stravinsky applies rhythmic features and techniques
of instrumentation that reference the archaic. In popular music, ritual is likewise
addressed, for example in Tales of Topographic Oceans by the British progressive rock
band Yes (1973). Indexing ritual in Western art and popular music is generally achieved
by musically citing or reinventing the archaic, mystic, or foreign, creating emotional
immersion in processes removed from everyday experience. This cements the still
common association of ritual with otherness.
Music as Ritual
Music performance is attached to a degree of formalization and bound to a given space-
time (which can also be imaginary, especially with portable music), and therefore
virtually any music performance can be analyzed as ritual action. The assumption
based on otherness, that for example a Ndembu chief installation was a ritual, but
staging the Zauberflöte was not, was challenged by Turner and Schechner, and later
by Bell. During the last three decades of ritual studies, performance has acquired
a central status in conceptualizing rituals. When the Ndembu install a new chief,
they do not “conduct a ritual” from their point of view, they rather stage and perform
an event as prescribed by tradition and as considered necessary for the world (in
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its respective form) to continue, and the same applies to staging an opera. Various
ethnomusicologists have been casting a view from outside on Western art music,
for example Bruno Nettl (1989), Kay Shelemay (1992), or Raimund Vogels (2011),
the latter explicitly comparing Western repertoire concerts with a Nigerian funeral.
Understanding ritual and related terminology as analytical concepts, rather than
qualities inherent to an event, allows for broadening the scope of ritual studies, and for
comprehending all types of formalized musical processes.
Bernd Brabecde Mori, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz
[Link]
See Also:
• Anthropology
• Dance
• Drumming
• Education, Music
• Ethnomusicology and Ethnomusicologists
• Evolution
• Indigenous Music
• Meditation
• Music Therapy
• Performance
• Performativity
• Psychoanalysis
• Repetition
• Social Bonding
• Trance
• Weddings
Further Readings
Bell, C. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Dissanayake, E. “Ritual and Ritualization: Musical Means of Conveying and Shaping
Emotion in Humans and Other Animals.” In Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses
Page 9 of 10 Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An
Encyclopedia: Rituals
Music in Social and Behavioral
©2014 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SAGE knowledge
and Social Control of Music , S. Brown, ed. and U. Volgsten, eds. New York: Berghahn,
2006.
Kreinath, J., et al., eds. Theorizing Rituals . Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
Nettl, B. “Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture (An
Essay in Four Movements).” Yearbook for Traditional Music , v.21 (1989). http://
[Link]/10.2307/767764
Shelemay, K. K. “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts
on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds.” Ethnomusicology , v.45/1 (2001). http://
[Link]/10.2307/852632
Tambiah, S. J. “A Performative Approach to Ritual.” Proceedings of the British
Academy , v.65 (1979).
Turner, V. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure . Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
Vogels, R. “Zwischen Formalisierung und Überhöhung. Das Westliche
Konzertgeschehen aus Musikethnologischer Perspektive.” In Das Konzert: Neue
Aufführungskonzepte für eine Klassische Form , M. Tröndle, ed. Bielefeld, Germany:
Transcript, 2011.
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