Sounding sacred: Interpreting musical and poetic trances. (open access)

Sounding sacred: Interpreting musical and poetic trances.

This essay investigates the relationship between trance and various musical and poetic expressions that accompany trance when it is interpreted as sacred. In other words, the aim of this investigation is to interpret how experiences of the entrancing power of the sacred come to expression with the sounds of music and poetry. I articulate such an interpretation through the following four sections: I) a discussion of the basic phenomenological and hermeneutic problems of interpreting what other people experience as sacred phenomena, II) an account of the hermeneutic context within which modern Western discourse interprets trance as madness that perverts the rational limits of the self, III) an interpretation of the expressions of trance that appear in the poetry of William Blake, and IV) an interpretation of expressions of trance that appear in the music of Afro-Atlantic religions (including Vodu in West Africa, Santería in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil).
Date: May 2006
Creator: Mickey, Samuel Robert
System: The UNT Digital Library