Ritual Sound, Force Field, and Existencial Spatiality: a Non- Musicological Aesthetics of the Bailes Chinos

Abstract

The Bailes chinos from Central Chile are an expressive power that combines ritual flutes, choreographic movement, and singing. Not just depending from the interests, values and analytical categories that might arise in the traditional studies of culture, the Bailes can be read straightforwardly, mainly, phenomenological, as a complex symbolic and ritualistic operation that validates the existential character of a space intervened by sound and the body. The present article looks for that straightforward reading, and attempts on the very form, literal, from the everyday occurrence, and from a mix approximation, both philosophical and physical-acoustical. From that spot, the article will try to establish an aesthetical sys- tem of correspondence that will tense the physical form, the existential form and the sense.