Music, Ritual, Speech

In a Mars Hill Audio with Ken Myers, Christopher Page discusses teh ritualizing effects of music. Speech is much more tonally and rhythmically complicated than music. To reduce all the tones and variations in speech to a seven-note scale is a radical simplification of sound, and, Page thinks, moves toward ritual.

He immediately adds an observation about the difference between singing and talking to yourself. If you find someone singing to himself, you’d think him uncommonly happy; if you find someone talking to himself, you’d find the number to the asylum. Page tentatively suggests that the reason for this is that speech elicits counter-speech and expects conflict and response in a way that music does not. Music has more of an end-in-itself quality, again drawing it close to ritual.