Music and Rituals

As we been work our way through the music of both Native American and Andean cultures, we are  observing music created for various rituals. Weddings, funerals, religious ceremonies, holidays, and various other gatherings almost always include specific kinds of musics. This, of course, is hardly surprising to most of us--we've been to weddings and funerals and other gatherings ourselves, and those rituals have almost always included specific music.

For this blog, you're going to explore this relationship between ritual and music. You can talk about your own experiences or the ways that music is used in rituals in other cultures, or a combination. Here are your guidelines:

• Your blog should be at least 400 words long.
• Your blog should include a minimum of two media selections--videos, pictures, sound files, links, etc. More is better. Please embed your videos, rather than just link to them. At least one of these selections must be music that we can hear.
• Please don't just rehash the rituals and music that we've already talked about in class--introduce us to something new. (So, no, you may not talk about Andean children's funerals, unless you have something quite new and significant to add to our understanding.)
• If you use sources beyond your own experiences, be sure to share them with us--you can provide links within your text or actual bibliographical citations at the end of your blog. (In informal blog writing, youtube videos act as their own link--you don't need to cite them in any other way.)

Within those guidelines, you may take this blog wherever you like. Tell us about all the music at your sister's wedding, or your high school graduation, or your church's Christmas service. Or go farther afield--what sort of music might you expect at a traditional Thai wedding or a Scandinavian funeral? How about the music that accompanies medal ceremonies at the Olympics, or at a presidential inauguration? Think of something that might interest you, go find out more about it, and tell us about it on your blog.

Here's my example, which incorporates both personal experiences and those of another culture:

As a professional musician, I've played for many rituals over the years--weddings, funerals, graduations, Converse University events like Opening Convocation and Founders Day, and countless rituals situated at churches, like baptisms and holidays. Out of all of these rituals, I sometimes find the music at funerals to be most meaningful--the family often requests specific pieces of music that were meaningful to the deceased. In fact, over several years now, there's been one specific piece that I've found myself playing at many funerals (and sometimes weddings)--"Gabriel's Oboe." It's a short but beautiful piece for oboe that inevitably tugs at the heartstrings. The backing harmonies are lush and the melody soars. It has no words, but it somehow gives folks permission to cry.

What most of the mourners don't know is that "Gabriel's Oboe" is actually from a movie from the 1980s, "The Mission." In the movie, a Jesuit priest travels to the Amazon in the 1750s as a missionary, to meet and convert the indigenous peoples there. A turning point is when the priest takes out his oboe and plays a tune on it, enraging one member of the tribe but enchanting the others. 

One of the most meaningful times I got to perform this beautiful work was at my own grandmother's funeral. Like the rest of my family, Grandmom Ruth lived her whole life in central and west Texas, but she and my grandfather had made many mission trips with their church, including several trips to Brazil. So it seemed fitting that I play this particular piece--written for a movie about a missionary to Brazil--for my own grandmother, who had made similar trips over 200 years after the movie was set. She passed away while I was visiting my family for Christmas, but it was obvious that she might not make it past that Christmas holiday, so I stuck the music for "Gabriel's Oboe" into my suitcase, just in case I'd need it. Honestly, my mom wasn't sure about me playing the piece for the funeral--mom didn't know the piece, and she wasn't sure that it would be appropriate--but it worked its magic on her, giving her a few minutes at the funeral to sit in silence, remember her own mother, and cry just a little.

Thinking about my family in Texas and funerals makes me think of a news story that I read in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting. Uvalde is located about an hour west of San Antonio (and just about three hours south of my hometown, San Angelo). Like much of southern and western Texas, the community there is largely Mexican-American. One of the musical traditions of that culture is Mariachi, a traditional music usually performed by strolling musicians singing and playing guitars, violins, and trumpets. The songs range from the upbeat to the soulful, and, even though I'm personally not Mexican-American, I grew up hearing it played in my hometown in all kinds of venues.

So of course I was drawn into the New York Times news article that recounted the story of fifty Mariachis (each musician is referred to as "a mariachi") from San Antonio that traveled together to to Uvalde to sing for mourners in the town square, bringing both voice for their grief and songs of comfort. Here is a clip of their performance:

And one small item to bring the gift of the mariachis' music back around home. One of my college classmates, a violinist, has spent much of her adult life as a librarian at Alamo College in San Antonio. At one point, she started taking mariachi lessons and played in a mariachi group, and her teacher was Juan Ortiz, the older gentleman that starts singing right around the 3:33 mark of the video. Just another small example of how music binds us all together.