Shamanic music

Shamanic music is music played either by actual shamans as part of their rituals, or by people who, whilst not themselves shamans, wish to evoke the cultural background of shamanism in some way. So Shamanic music includes both music used as part of shamans' rituals and music that refers to, or draws on, this.

In shamanism the shaman has a more active musical role than the medium in spirit-possession. But a shaman's ritual is a ritual performance and not a musical performance, and this shapes its musical dimension. A shaman uses various ways of making sounds to which different ritual purposes are ascribed. Of particular importance are the shaman's song and shaman's drumming.

Recently in Siberia, music groups drawing on a knowledge of shamanic culture have emerged. In the West shamanism has served as an imagined background to musics meant to alter a listener's state of mind.

Korea and Tibet are two cultures where the music of shamanic ritual has interacted closely with other traditions.

Although shamans use singing as well as drumming and sometimes other instruments, a shamanic ritual is not a musical performance in the normal sense, and the music is directed more to spirits than to an audience. Several things follow from this. First, a shamanic ritual performance is, above all, a series of actions and not a series of musical sounds. Second, the shaman's attention is directed inwards towards her or his visualisation of the spirit world and communication with the spirits, and not outwards to any listeners who might be present. Third, it is important for the success of the ritual that it be given its own clearly defined context that is quite different from any kind of entertainment. Fourth, any theatrical elements that are added to impress an audience are of a type to make the contact with the spirits seem more real and not to suggest the performer's musical virtuosity. From a musical perspective shamanic ritual performances have the distinctive feature of discontinuity. Breaks may happen because a spirit is proving difficult to communicate with, or the shaman needs to call a different spirit. Typically, phases of the performance are broken off abruptly, perhaps to be restarted after a gap, perhaps not. The rhythmic dimension of the music of shamans' rituals has been connected to the idea of both incorporating the rhythms of nature and magically re-articulating them.

It has been argued that shamanism and spirit possession involve contrasting kinds of special states of mind. The shaman actively enters the spirit world, negotiates with her or his own helper spirit and then with other spirits as necessary, and moves between different territories of the spirit world. The possessed medium, on the other hand, is the passive recipient of a powerful spirit or god. This reflects on the different uses of music involved. Possession music is typically long in duration, mesmeric, loud and intense, with climaxes of rhythmic intensity and volume to which the medium has learned to respond by entering a trance state: the music is not played by the medium but by one or more musicians. In shamanism, the music is played by the shaman, confirms the shaman's power (in the words of the shaman's song), and is used actively by the shaman to modulate movements and changes of state as part of an active journey within the spirit world. In both cases the connection between music and an altered state of mind depends on both psychoacoustic and cultural factors, and the music cannot be said to 'cause' trance-states.

...
Wikipedia