This project explores music performance as a ritual, arguing that its performative form reflects and reinforces a particular worldview and its concomitant social structures and relations. It proposes a definition of a standard Western form of music performance, identifying it to be based on a duality of an active performer and passive audience, and suggests ways in which this form sponsors ‘everyday’ social structures and relations,
emphasizing rationality and individuality. It follows this by proposing an alternative form of performance, one of active participation, that is seen to sponsor social structures and relations that emphasize viscerality and community. It draws extensively on the writings of Georges Bataille, particularly his concepts of the sacred, self and
community, and the art of Joseph Beuys, particularly his active employment of myth and shamanism, and his concern with the socially transformative potential of art.