Modern Music Rituals: What are they and why do we need them?

Summary

What are music rituals and how do they differ between cultures? This article explores the traditional role of rituals, initiations, and cults, exploring their customary symbols, metaphors, and processes. It suggests that music rituals are aspects of most cultures, including in Australia, where ritual symbols and processes are expressed through performances, such as electronic music events, to produce experiences of transformation and transcendence.  

Sometimes we have to step out of our own culture to see it from afar. That’s what I did, throughout my 25-year music career as a Latino-Australian, travelling regularly between Australia and Latin America, and then through my academic work, starting with my honours project and progressing into PhD research, a 7-year project that explored music rituals in the Caribbean and the West. The project led me to the brink of madness because our minds are brittle things, held tightly by our cultural norms, perspectives, and worldview. It’s not until our worldviews are challenged that the mind loses its grip on reality. That happened to me when my research into music rituals, religions, and initiations led to me questioning my own worldview and resulted in a shifting of my cultural perspective and ideas about music and ritual.

What are music rituals?

We may think of rituals as repetitive things we do, like washing our hands, but this is not the type of ritual I am speaking about here (although they are related). Rituals are cultural repetitions that reenforce a cultural belief, and specifically, religious rituals are powerful because they use ritual acts, objects, metaphors, and symbols to reenforce a larger cosmological view that permanently affects the minds of its devotees.

The ritual creates a multi-sensory world which is participated in by its devotees. The ritual creates a reality that requires participation of all senses: touch, smell, vision, hearing, taste, but also involves other higher functions, such as mind, spirit, intuition. A masterfully created ritual addresses all these elements using a symbolic style, so that it reenforces the cultural reality of the group, often implying a mysterious supernatural world which symbolises the mind to be transformed.

Music is the prime symbol of many rituals because of its capability to affect emotions, thus provoking a direct physical experience that can be pushed to extremes through the manipulation of musical intensity. Intensity is used to create sensory overload, which overwhelms the subject, a process that the Wagogo peoples of Tanzania use in boyhood circumcision rituals as an anaesthetic to ease the pain of the cut (Polo Vallejo (2007, p.12). Music provides the ritual soundtrack which reneforces its beliefs, and symbolises the nature of the higher deities, worlds, or states that comprise the cultural cosmology.

Initiations are rituals that, in addition to reenforcing cultural beliefs, create a permanent transformation in the individual. They achieve this by providing a direct experience of the cultural cosmology through participation that include physical acts, vocalisations, symbols, emotionality, and mythologies. The goal of initiations is to inoculate the devotee into the group through a shared cultural belief, while at the same time, providing a direct experience and participation in the cultural world. This results in a permanent transformation whereby the initiate is introduced into the secrets of the group and provided with a new social and personal standing.

Cults use both rituals and initiations within hierarchical power structures where power is funnelled towards the leader. It is based on the reinforcement of a cultural cosmology and ritual narratives that disempower individuals. Its rituals create a world which is participated in, except the power is hoarded by the cult leader/s. Such systems are determined by the upward flow of energy, and it is highly encouraged to introduce new members to maintain the replenishment of energy and manipulation of power. Cults use rituals and initiations, but not all rituals and initiations are negative, rather, they are methods for achieving transformations and social-cultural inclusion that can be used to empower or disempower its members.

Humans are prone to rituals.

Humans have a psychological desire for growth, development, and transcendence. It is a characteristic of human beings that was outlined by many thinkers including Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Maslow, Jung, and Tacey. We seek to develop ourselves and are pushed by life’s challenges to grow, learn, and constantly change. Tacey (2013, p.32) suggested that the desire to grow is so powerful that it often turns negative through death wishes leading to suicide, drugs, or other risky behaviours, such as high-speed activities and thrill seeking. Such is our desire to transform that we will self-medicate using its negative and dangerous forms.

The desire for transformation is traditionally embedded within rituals through narratives of rebirth, and its symbols that include head shaving, death acts, exchange of clothes,  travel to new places, crowning into king or queenship, burying, or other symbols that imply a womb-like state of regeneration into new life. The Christian form of this rebirth theme occurs in the resurrection of Christ and the symbolic eating of the flesh of Christ during the celebration of the Eucharist. While in afro-Cuban culture, rebirth includes the initiation from ordinary to new states of consciousness through integration of its supernatural beings (orishas).

Music supports these rebirth symbols by facilitating an emotional transformation in its devotees that mirrors the act of rebirth. The music portrays a transformation through its  musical content, which symbolises and evokes the rebirth that is sought in the initiates. The music uses binary oppositions to reenforce the transformation, for example, moving from low to high density, low to high frequency range, or low to high intensity. This serves the ritual by provoking a sensory overload which provides the intensity required to facilitate transformation of consciousness. This transformation act can be analogised using the imagery of boiling water, that upon extreme heat intensity transforms into steam. Similarly, the human being is transformed spiritually using excessive intensity during rebirth rituals that take the devotee to the brink of death. This intensity emerges from its music, acts, symbols, drugs, secrecy, sensory overload, lack of sleep, and other ritual behaviours that affect the body and mind. These, often harrowing experiences, are used to cause permanent transformation that introduce devotees to new states of consciousness- new identities- that are valued by the cultural group and symbolise the death of the old self to make way for a new self. This rebirth event, its symbols, music, and acts are aspects of ritual that facilitate the transformation into a new cultural norm, with associated cosmologies, and social hierarchies.

Rituals in the West

We may think of such rituals as typical of cults and religions, but these are common to all cultures including our own. In the West, and in my home city of Sydney Australia, electronic music festivals have been mirroring many of the typical tropes we see in religious rebirth rituals. This includes the creation of large altars that serve as DJ consoles, and which include many of the facets of traditional ritual initiations, such as its decoration with nature, symbolic icons, and a central focus for clubbers to project their attention.  

Drugs and alcohol is used to facilitate transformations of consciousness, aided by the music and imbued with many of the elements typical to ritual music culture: continuous non-stop sound, peaks and troughs of music intensity, heightened emotional states, use of cross-rhythms and sounds that enhance sensory overload, symbols of rebirth and transcendence such as icons of ascending spirits, burning effigies, or an overseeing eye; placement of power and energy upon a central set of performers; narratives and mythologies that reenforce a cultural belief such as peace, free love, or states of oneness; and a core focus upon personal and collective transformation as the successful result of these events, and which includes states of possession through excessive drugs and alcohol consumption, loss of self-consciousness, or a feeling of being overtaken by a higher force or spirit (Sylvan 2002, p.138).

These Western music rituals highlight the fact that humans desire transformation, and while cultural groups may vary, these desires are embraced the world over using similar musical and symbolic tropes. The way these tropes are expressed may vary, having vastly different aesthetics, sonics, and environments. Yet,  they retain many of the core features of traditional rituals because these are fundamental for the altering of consciousness in human beings. Music rituals and initiations are psychological systems that are used for creating transformations, expressed in a variety of ways across culture and contexts. They are reformed and reinterpreted, refashioned and recapitulated, to facilitate the transformation of consciousness. In the West, where the slow death of religion has eliminated the previously sought ways for transcendent experience, it is no wonder that acts of spiritual transformation have moved into other arenas such as electronic music festivals and events. 

Thanks for reading. If you want more information about my work then head over to www.vincentsebastian.com.  Don’t forget to join the newsletter to receive the latest thought-provoking articles.  Also, you can check out my ​music​ here. 

References

Jung, C.G., (1902), Four Archetypes. Routledge, Oxfordshire, UK, 2014

 Kierkegaard, S., (1941). The Sickness unto Death. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, USA

 Koltko-Rivera, M.E., 2006. Rediscovering the later version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self-transcendence and opportunities for theory, research, and unification. Review of general psychology, 10(4), pp.302-317.

Schopenhauer, A., 2023. The world as will and idea. Good Press.

 Sylvan, R., (2002). Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music. NYU Press, NY

 Tacey, D., (2013). Gods and diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing. Routledge, Oxfordshire, UK

 Vallejo, P., (2007). ‘Logic and music in black Africa (II): social function and musical technique in the gogo heritage, Tanzania’ Transcultural Music Review, (11), p.1, Spain