27 - Music and ritual

Summary

The topic of music and ritual is fundamentally anthropological, concerned with how people have used music within a ritual context, from prehistory to the present, all across the world. Plainsong was the sonic glue of ritual in the fifteenth century. Most composers of polyphony for ritual use in the fifteenth century were, like Guillaume Du Fay, clerical men immersed from boyhood in the daily performance of plainsong. Even at this late stage in its development, chant remained a vibrant repertory whose melodies, texts, and performance practices varied according to the needs and traditions of the different worship communities it served. Composers' awareness of the ritual context of the music they created played a fundamental role in their compositional decisions. Genres of ritual action proposed by scholars of ritual studies offer more nuanced categories for considering music and ritual than do musical genres.