Religion is often associated with what is called ritual (though ritual is not always religious), and outsiders often conflate these concepts. Nevertheless, important concepts identified with ritual are useful for analyzing music and religion.
Roy A. Rappaport
, an anthropologist working in New Guinea, defined ritual as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by the performers
” (1979:175). These acts and utterances are learned or...
