Singing the Rite to Belong: Music, Ritual, and the New Irish

Abstract

Two decades of ethnographic, pedagogical and musical experience in Ireland inform Helen Phelan's investigation of the singing voice in ritual performance. She examines diverse ritual practices including community-based festivals, children's carnivals, women's choirs, university-based ritual laboratories, rituals of the established Irish Catholic churches, as well as those of new religious communities against the backdrop of economic, social, religious, and cultural changes in twenty-first century Ireland.