Music and Trance

A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession

Gilbert Rouget

Gilbert Rouget

418 pages | 8 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 1985

Paper $46.00ISBN: 9780226730066 Published December 1985

Ritual trance has always been closely associated with music—but why, and how? Gilbert
Rouget offers and extended analysis of music and trance, concluding that no universal law
can explain the relations between music and trance; they vary greatly and depend on the
system of meaning of their cultural context.

Rouget rigorously examines a worldwide corpus of data from ethnographic literature, but
he also draws on the Bible, his own fieldwork in West Africa, and the writings of Plato,
Ghazzali, and Rousseau. To organize this immense store of information, he develops a
typology of trance based on symbolism and external manifestations. He outlines the
fundamental distinctions between trance and ecstasy, shamanism and spirit possession,
and communal and emotional trance. Music is analyzed in terms of performers, practices,
instruments, and associations with dance. Each kind of trance draws strength from music
in different ways at different points in a ritual, Rouget concludes. In possession trance,
music induces the adept to identify himself with his deity and allows him to express this
identification through dance.

Forcefully rejecting pseudo-science and reductionism, Rouget demystifies the so-called

theory of the neurophysiological effects of drumming on trance. He concludes that music's
physiological and emotional effects are inseparable from patterns of collective
representations and behavior, and that music and trance are linked in as many ways as
there are cultural structures.

Contents

Preface to the American Edition

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1. Trance and Possession
2. Music and Possession
3. Music, Shamanism, Mediumship, Exorcism
4. The Strange Mechanism
Part Two
5. Music and Trance among the Greeks
6. The Renaissance and Opera
7. Music and Trance among the Arabs
8. Conclusion
Discography
Filmography
1. Subject Index
2. Index of Religions, Sects, Divinities, and Religious Figures
3. Index of Ethnic Groups and Places
4. Index of Authors, Individuals, and Characters

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Música, chamanismo y posesión en el japón contemporáneo. Una

comparación con fuentes literarias, iconográficas y hallazgos arqueológicos

Daniele Sestili and Patricia Ángeles Delgado

Estudios de Asia y Africa

Vol. 34, No. 3 (110) (Sep. - Dec., 1999), pp. 551-582

Published by: El Colegio de Mexico

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40313342

Page Count: 32

Abstract

The discussion about the interrelationship between music and shamanistic experiences (mainly of
the possession type) in Japan is still ongoing. This topic has been one of the major concerns of
Japanese (and non-Japanese) ethnomusicologists only for the last fifteen years. In contemporary
Japan, the main shamanistic figures are the miko, a female medium, and the yamabushi, a
mountain ascetic. Both use music in most of their practices. Performed by these shamanistic
figures in the past but now handed down to simple villagers is the kagura. This major folk rite
deeply involves the use of music. Yet the significance of these contemporary phenomena cannot
be properly understood unless they are studied in terms of data inferred from literature (e.g.,
entries in the Kojiki and the Nihongi), and pictorial evidence and archaeological finds (like haniwa,
funerary figures) related to ancient shamanistic practices and their music. This paper focuses on
the shamanistic uses of some types of instruments (drum, cymbals, flute) and how they and their
magic-religious functions have been preserved up to present times in a ritual context.

Chamanes a través de los tiempos: quinientos años en la senda del conocimiento

By Jeremy Narby, Francis Huxley