A common assumption we see everywhere from “elite” venues like the New York Times to “popular” venues like beer commercials is that foreign movies are supposed to be boring and confusing. It’s too much work to figure out all that weird foreign stuff. It would be more fun to just see an action movie or a romantic comedy instead. 30 years ago the director Martin Scorsese nailed the attitude in both places. He arguing that it was actually dangerous, blinding us and dulling our senses.
So what about ‘foreign’ religions? I’m lucky to be teaching a class on religious ritual and myth in the ancient Mediterranean right now, and it’s all ‘foreign’ ritual and music so this Scorsese letter hit home for me.
First we watched some of the Hatian Vodou ceremonies from the late 1940s that Maya Deren recorded in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, still miraculously communicative and easy to “read.” We’ll do a little music theory to see why the singing there sounds so different…
What makes these African-based group vocals sound different from “Western” ones–is it the same thing that made Jewish music sound so threateningly terrible to early modern Christian audiences? Or is Jewish liturgy more like Arabic music, and how can we tell?
People often feel these musicological differences in their guts, viscerally and immediately, whether or not they have a technical vocabulary to describe it. What does this all have to do with the nature of ritual and the religious experience of music?
One of the main things I hope to explore in the class is whether we can get beyond “ritual theory.” We’re looking for more down-to-earth, shareable ways of talking about what gives so many religious performances and activities their shape and power, beyond “religious experience.”
This week we’re reading Dionysiac tragedy. Next week, John Chernoff’s “African Rhythm and African Sensibility,” which departs from “The Birth of Tragedy”‘s idea that music is “beyond rational understanding…too close to the basic mysteries and contradictions of existence”..
Nietzsche doubted we really can “comprehend music in a scholarly way; if we want to study that of a different culture, the question is even more to the point. How can we bring something of a different order into our world of understanding” yet “recognize it on its own terms?”
“conveying my experiences with African music through the heritage of our traditions of understanding seemed to offer an opportunity not only to expand the relevance of what I had learned but also to indicate how those traditions can respond to the challenge of such an undertaking
Like many rituals, music performances are ordered into meter and time that the hearer “gets” as they connect to the piece and live through it as it plays out. One thing that makes a ritual “readable” and compelling are these moments that organize both the music and the hearer.
These generative yet definable moments of a song or ritual are one of the ways people enter into and co-create the order that music or religion can produce. In his only biblical piece, “The Voice of Jacob,” the anthropologist Michael Silverstein ז׳׳ל calls it “metricalization”
One reason avant-garde music or movies can piss people off, including some that now seem rather old-fashioned, is when they constantly challenge audience attempts at making sense. They thwart the hearer’s ability to assume-to metricalize–demanding extra attention and skill.
This can feel–and often is–elitist, shutting out everyone but the ones who keep banging at the door of music perception. Henry Flynt talked about Tony Conrad giving him the latest European art music and him *working at* liking it until he finally liked it.
Though this too can have a cultic aspect, as in those mystery religions where, when asked “What form do they take, these mysteries of yours?” the answer is:
sethlsanders 