rites and ceremonies

From mundane tasks like listening to the radio on your way to school or more eventful tasks like a religious ceremony, music is ingrained into every aspect of of our lives. Throughout your life you will experience moments of music that are both of happiness and mourning. The thing you should remember from them is that these moments have powerful emotions behind them. For this blog post I will be explaining my opinions on music involving rites.

Rites are events that have a social aspect and usually hold a special meaning to them. Usually this involves some sort of ceremony or special event. These rites can range from having a religious background to just originating over time for a celebration of a milestone in a persons life. Rites usually only happen on special occasions of someone's life and could happen multiple times or only once. 

Some examples of rites in North America that are not based off of religions are Graduations from schools, proms, marriage, and more. A way that you can use music for all of these is by connecting songs to a certain event. Through traditions these rites have been created and have persisted to create rites that most people use in North American culture. Some rites have specific music that have been connected with them and overtime has become a part of it so whenever you hear these songs you would associate them with the event. For instance if you hear "Hear comes the bride" that would be associated with as it states the bride walking down the aisle. Another example of this would be when you graduate you hear "Pomp and Circumstance" as you're walking up the stage and it feels you with a sense of accomplishment. The whole point of music is to add to the emotion of the event and give you a sense of connection to the event. Whenever you are experiencing these things it is rewarding to think that you have accomplished this in your life and how far you have come from the start of your journey. 

There are also rites for death and usually these would try to show how the person was as they were alive and try and express those emotions through music. Usually at funerals there would a ceremony held talking about the points in the deceased persons life and accomplishments they have done in their life. I think funerals have developed over time and become more complex with tons of cultures involved with it. For every culture there could be a different way that someone would celebrate a funeral and hold traditions for those cultures some of those could have music as an outlook. One example of this is usually for western funerals music would be picked by the person before death or next of kin.