Which Terms Refers to a Synthesis of Many of the Arts Into Unified Work or Total Work of Art

The "Total Work of Fine art"

The notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk (GKW) or "full work of art" was established past artful philosophers and practitioners in the nineteenth century. It represented a grand unification of the arts, encompassing theater, music, trip the light fantastic, and visual design, as applied to transcendent literary themes from mythology, folklore, history, and faith. Richard Wagner'southward music-dramas, near notably Parsifal, correspond a meaning manifestation of this philosophy in activeness. The concept of a GKW extended to architecture, such that Wagner'southward operas were to be performed in a newly constructed venue that would provide the requisite religious feel of a performance occurring in a shrine, a veritable temple of the arts. This place, located in the small-scale German language town of Bayreuth, was called a festival house, reminiscent of the pagan festivals that characterized Deutschland'southward ancient past. As with a festival, audience members would engage in a pilgrimage to attend these opera performances. All in all, the GKW would achieve an artful synthesis—or what Smith (2007) calls a "pseudo-organic totality"—that would create a utopian feeling of spiritual purification for those in attendance, hailing dorsum to Romanticist aspirations for a life grounded in aesthetics.

This philosophy permeated artistic and architectural practice well into the twentieth century and even into modern times. Smith's (2007) historical analysis of the Gesamtkunstwerk includes the "total theater" of the Bauhaus move, the folk spectacles and propaganda films of Nazi Frg, magical theme parks such as Disneyland, Andy Warhol's multimedia Happenings, the pseudo-organic totality of the cyberspace with its potential for collaborative networking, and the multimedia immersiveness of virtual reality. As Smith writes, "the full work of art is however a potent aesthetic thought, e'er intertwined with engineering, continuing to blur distinctions between high and mass culture, artwork and commodity spectacle" (Smith, 2007, p. six). The total work of art is not merely a synthesis of artistic media per se, but is often times a grade of mass spectacle that engenders total immersion, social collectivity, and even spiritual redemption by those who experience it.

We will argue in this paper that, long earlier European aesthetic theorists had devised the notion of a GKW, ceremonial rituals in indigenous cultures had for millennia been syntheses of the arts on a similar scale and of a like scope to GKW's. This has been well-described from the perspective of the anthropology of the arts (Durkheim, 1912/1995; Turner, 1966; Schechner, 1974, 1985; Tambiah, 1979; Dissanayake, 1988, 2017; Rappaport, 1999). Our primary thesis hither is that the GKW concept has deep evolutionarily-predisposed and anthropological roots, and that the ethnographic "ceremony-equally-Gesamtkunstwerk" is the aboriginal precursor of the more contempo practice of "Gesamtkunstwerk-as-anniversary." Our second thesis focuses on religious exercise itself, and argues that ceremonial rituals across cultures tin be accurately and productively described every bit collections of arts behaviors and objects. If one performed a thought experiment and eliminated, one by one, each art behavior or object from any item formalism ritual, there would be fiddling that would remain. From this notion, we propose that religious practice and the arts co-evolved, to the bespeak that one organization could not have emerged in human being societies without the other. We justify this by arguing that the arts function to provide an emotionally-felt and transcendent means of establishing contact with supernatural beings during communal ceremonial rituals.

Before discussing these problems, we commencement explore an important cognitive question: how practice the arts combine? In other words, if someone had the intention of creating a total work of art, how would they go nigh doing information technology? For this, we demand to think about the nature of the arts and how artforms can combine with one another. Nosotros will first hash out how to construct a GKW, and and so wait for historical precedents of the GKW in formalism rituals.

How the Arts Combine: A Framework for Synthesizing the Arts

In order to think about how to create a synthesis of the arts, we need to consider what the arts are and how they tin be synthesized. For the purposes of this commodity, nosotros conceive of the arts in terms of the standard conception of "branches" establish in the humanities, with the four major branches beingness music, dance, theaterⁱ (and film, simply too including oral forms of storytelling and verse), and the visual arts, as shown by the tetrad in Figure 1. (We ignore arts related to the chemic senses, such equally perfumery and gastronomy). We next divide the tetrad into two opposing triangles based on cognitive and behavioral considerations. The superlative triangle comprises the "performing arts," and therefore excludes the visual arts every bit static objects, such as paintings and sculptures. The lesser triangle comprises what we refer to as the "representational arts," since they can be used in a narrative fashion to referentially convey information about objects, people, and events. Music is excluded from this grouping since it is generally unable to convey information referentially in the way that a sentence or picture hands can. Information technology is not disquisitional for this scheme that all forms of dance or visual fine art be representational. What is important is that these artforms take the potential to be representational and that this is a critical characteristic that distinguishes them from music. Annotation that, in the double-triangle representation, theater/film and dance sit in both categories.

Figure 1. A classification of the arts. The figure shows the iv major branches of the arts equally making upward a tetrad. Inside that are opposing triangles. The acme triangle is fabricated upwardly of the performing arts. These arts are phrase-based, as comprised of verbal utterances (or sentences in written forms), melodies, or dance sequences. The lesser triangle is made up of the representational arts, which comprise a "narrative triad" of speech, gesture, and graphic images. Theater/film and trip the light fantastic toe sit in both categories.

As indicated inside the pinnacle triangle in Figure 1, the three performing arts are all based on the domain-specific generation of phrases. These phrases include verbal utterances for theater/moving-picture show (and sentences in written literature), melodies for music, and dance sequences for dance. In all cases, phrase formation is guided by what theorists in each domain refer to every bit a grammer or syntax. The notion of musical syntax is quite prominent in the field of music psychology (Patel, 2008), while that of dance syntax is present, though less prominent, in the assay of dance (Kimmel and Preuschl, 2016). Next, it is noted inside the lesser triangle that the three representational artforms embody, respectively, the three principal modalities of representation in human knowledge, namely spoken language, gesture, and image making. In other words, each of the representational arts is specifically dedicated to conveying narrative via one of the three modalities of narrative representation in man cognition, highlighting the strong linkage between the arts and cognition. This creates three parallel channels for the conveyance of narrative ideas via spoken linguistic communication, gesture, and graphic images, respectively, something we can call up of as a "narrative triad" (Yuan et al., in printing). In addition, language itself can be conveyed multimodally through speech (theater and storytelling), writing (literature), and gesture (sign language, pantomime, emblematic gestures). As we describe below in the department "Ceremonial Rituals every bit Total Works of Art," the experience of these artforms, both individually and through their combinations, engenders strong emotional effects on producers and perceivers, resulting in a process of group emotional expression during both religious and secular contexts (von Scheve and Salmella, 2014).

How do the arts combine to create syntheses? Figure two starts with the same double-triangle representation equally Figure i, simply now includes additional data related to how the arts are able to combine to create synthetic forms. The 4 branches of the arts have the potential for six binary interactions, each of which we at present describe.

Figure ii. Interactions among the arts. The aforementioned double-triangle representation from Figure i is shown here. In red text are the six types of ii-way interactions between artforms. The directionality of the greyness arrows in the top triangle implies that dance is often (though by no ways e'er) performed to a musical beat, and that songs tin can be created by either setting pre-existing texts to music or past calculation words to a pre-existing melody. The directionality of the grayness arrows in the lesser triangle implies that visual forms—such every bit sets, props, costumes, and brand-upwardly—are by and large created in the service of performance forms, such as theater and dance. Whereas most interactions involve simultaneous combinations of artforms, the interactions marked with asterisks (i.due east., incidental music, and trip the light fantastic toe in verbal dramas) are those that tend to occur in alternation with one another.

Music/Theater Interaction

At that place are at to the lowest degree 5 major manners past which music tin can combine with language and theatrical narratives. The start is a direct coupling between musical pitches and spoken syllables via the singing of words. Compositionally, this tin can be achieved by either adding text to an existing melody or past setting an existing text to music, the latter procedure referred to as text setting. Note that the text can resemble standard spoken language (akin to a play) or tin be much closer to poetic text, as in many fine art songs. In improver, the singing of words can occur in wholly sung works like opera, or it tin can occur in alternation with spoken segments, as in musical theater, vaudeville, opéra comique, and Singspiel. Second, music videos contain the singing of words, but couple that to visual narratives, in almost all cases occurring in the absenteeism of speech or dialogue. Third, in much cinema—but in very little theater—groundwork music (so-chosen underscore) is played during the dialogue and action of the film. This is a much looser type of music/narrative coupling than that between pitch and syllable during singing. 4th, in the case of incidental music, music is performed between the scenes of a play, with well-known examples being Mendelssohn'south music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Grieg'due south music for Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Finally, "programme music" refers to instrumental musical works composed in such a manner as to map onto the plot line of literary or theatrical works, every bit is seen in Dvorak'due south Noonday Witch or Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet overture.

Dance/Music Interaction

Dance is universally performed to music, including rhythmic-based percussion music; the but existent exceptions are some forms of modernist dance in Western cultures that accept no musical accompaniment. The dance/music interaction tin can occur in three major manners. First, trip the light fantastic toe can be performed and so as to conform to the meter of the music existence played, every bit in a waltz or tango. Hence, the dance will be choreographed such that the largest and strongest movements occur in synchrony with the potent beats of the music, resulting in a parallel metrical structure between the dance and the music. In addition to dance itself, a like blazon of motility/music interaction is found in certain forms of puppet theater, such every bit Vietnamese water puppetry. Second, trip the light fantastic can occur without consideration for musical beats. In this example, the music plays "in the groundwork," and the choreography occurs relatively independent of information technology. In that location are many prominent examples in globe cultures, especially in narrative forms of trip the light fantastic. Dances can, of class, utilize both types of coupling, synchronizing to musical beats during some dance segments, but not in others. Finally, in some forms of gimmicky trip the light fantastic, composers can create music for pre-choreographed dance works, hence showing the reverse progression to dance being choreographed to music.

Trip the light fantastic toe/Theater Interaction

At that place are ii major manners past which trip the light fantastic toe interacts with theater. First, dance can itself be a blazon of theater. This is seen specially in the case of narrative forms such every bit ballet, where dancers portray characters and interact with one another just equally dramatic characters do, simply in the absence of speech. For instance, Prokofieff's ballet Romeo and Juliet is a danced and unspoken version of the Shakespeare play, using exactly the same characters and narrative events as the theatrical version. Second, in the example of dramatic works, dance tin exist interleaved with non-dance segments of the piece of work. On the one paw, this can occur in completely sung works, such as opera, where the dancing occurs to an instrumental musical accessory, typically in the absence of singing. Well-known examples are found in the operas of the Baroque period (e.g., the works of Lully, Rameau, and Gluck), where ballet segments are interleaved with the sung segments of the opera. In such forms, the singers are near never the same people as the dancers. Next, dance segments can be found in spoken dramatic works, the major example being musical theater. As with opera, trip the light fantastic toe segments are typically interleaved with the verbal part of the work, rather than occurring simultaneously with it. This is, at to the lowest degree in part, an accommodation to the fact that it is physically challenging to sing and trip the light fantastic toe at the same time, although pop singers since the time of Madonna and Michael Jackson have managed to achieve this in a compelling style, creating the three-way interaction between sentences/utterances, melodies, and dance sequences. In musical theater, unlike opera, the singers very often perform the dance segments as well, accompanied by a corps of dancers who also make up the musical chorus, as in musicals like Oklahoma and W Side Story.

Theater/Visual Arts Interaction

Because we excogitate of the visual arts equally being comprised of static objects—bated from some avant garde works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries described below—the major interaction betwixt the visual arts and performing artforms such equally theater is found in the static components of theatrical works. This includes the sets, props, costumes, and make-up. It also includes the architectural features that make upwards the functioning venue, including its interior and exterior design. Another interaction that we list in the figure is comprised of films that occur as role of multimedia video installations in fine art museums. While some of the works are stand-alone videos, others are components of larger installation works that contain static (or fifty-fifty mobile) visual-art objects. While some of these videos contain scenes with people in them, many of them practise not. Some accept sound (including music), while others are purely visual. Hence, this is a difficult form to characterize. Nosotros classify information technology as a visual-arts interaction with film, more so than one with theater. Another interesting interaction that is difficult to classify is the use of videos or animated films in performance works, such equally operas or plays. For instance, a production of Shostakovich'southward opera The Nose past the director and designer William Kentridge included a vast collage of both even so images and animated images that appeared not only betwixt the scenes of the opera but during the scenes every bit well.

Dance/Visual Arts Interaction

Everything mentioned in the last point nearly sets, props, costumes, brand-up, venue, and multimedia applies hither. A broader view of the visual arts, as developed in the twentieth century, incorporates a performance component to this branch of the arts. Hence, "performance art" takes the visual arts beyond the domain of static and inanimate images/objects and brings them into the realm of performance (Goldberg, 2011). We could listing this as an interaction with either theater or dance (or both), only we include it with trip the light fantastic toe in the figure since it often occurs in a wordless manner, more reminiscent of trip the light fantastic toe than verbal theater.

Music/Visual Arts Interaction

The interactions between the visual arts and music are the least prominent among the interactions described in this section (although run across the related word of music video above). Some multimedia installations displayed in museums non only take sound merely include music. Groundwork music is occasionally played ambiently throughout an unabridged exhibition infinite so as to give it a particular feel, say of a foreign civilization whose artifacts are being exhibited. Outside of the context of museums, one occasionally finds images projected onto surfaces such every bit walls during musical concerts in concert halls. Music frequently occurs as an accompaniment to fireworks displays; composers such equally Handel even created music specifically for such occasions. At the compositional level, in that location are many examples of paintings or sculptures that stand for musicians and/or musical instruments (e.g., Picasso's many cubist guitars), likewise every bit musical works that attempt to represent visual art works (e.chiliad., Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, based on paintings past Hartmann).

Having described these 2-way interactions (and the iii-mode interaction of dancing while singing words), we would like to point out that these interactions can occur either simultaneously or sequentially. The vast majority of interactions shown in Figure 2 occur such that both artforms play out simultaneously. Nevertheless, we mentioned previously that sung segments may occur as singled-out from spoken segments in forms like musical theater, opéra comique, and Singspiel. Two additional examples of sequential interactions are marked with asterisks in the effigy. First, in the case of incidental music, the music is interleaved with the dramatic segments of the play, rather than occurring simultaneously with them in the way that underscore does in films. Second, the trip the light fantastic toe segments found in theatrical forms like opera and musical theater are more often than not interleaved with the verbal parts of the drama, although they may occur simultaneously with sung parts in musical theater. Another interesting example to mention in this regard, although non shown in the effigy, is recitative in opera, which differs from the chief segments of the opera in that the song style is much closer to speech than to standard singing. This type of sing-song speaking affords an audition the opportunity to acquire more narrative information well-nigh the plot than is generally possible in the sung segments. However, what is of importance here is that segments of recitative typically occur separately from those that are sung. In general, the two vocal styles are not blended within a single scene. The few examples of blending that come up to heed are the Caucasian characters in Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess who only speak just who interact with characters who sing, and Sprechstimme characters similar Moses in Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron who interact with characters who sing.

With this conception of artforms and their interactions in mind, we tin now call up about how to build a Gesamtkunstwerk. Figure 3 shows eight forms of the performing arts forth the meridian. These are and so classified with respect to their inclusion of iv operation modalities: the speaking voice, the singing voice, instrumental music, and trip the light fantastic (and/or mime). The vertical arrows in the figure suggest that singing and dancing typically occur to the beat of instrumental music in these artforms. The dashed line for "music concert" implies that singing can accept instrumental accompaniment, but that it can also be done all on its own, just the way that instrumental music can be done. At the extremes of the scheme are the least synthetic artforms of theater (speaking voice only) and mime (gesture merely), although theater can involve incidental music, and mime can exist performed to music, since information technology was initially conceived of every bit a course of dance (Hall, 2009). In the middle of the scheme sit the nearly constructed forms. A major observation from this figure is that musical theater is the true Gesamtkunstwerk in Western art. Within the context of non-Western art, Peking opera shares all of the features of musical theater, making prominent use of dance and acrobatics. Richard Wagner, for all his aspirations to develop a total piece of work of art, never included dances in his operas (although he mentions dance ofttimes in his writings, encounter Wagner, 1849), nor anything resembling standard speech. Hence, the Baroque operas that preceded Wagner (and that he despised) were probably closer to existence total works of art than Wagner's own music-dramas.

Effigy iii. The performing arts with respect to functioning modalities. The figure shows 8 forms of the performing arts along the tiptop. These are so classified with respect to their inclusion of iv performance modalities: the speaking vocalisation, the singing vox, instrumental music, and trip the light fantastic (and/or mime). Black circles imply the presence of a given modality in a given artform. The vertical arrows suggest that singing and dancing are very oftentimes washed to the beat out of instrumental music in these artforms. The dashed arrow for "music concert" implies that singing can be done either a capella or to instrumental accompaniment; likewise, instrumental music can be performed all on its own. Functioning fine art (not shown hither) sits in the categories represented by dance and mime. Gray circles imply secondary uses of modalities. These include the occurrence of instrumental underscore in theater works, spoken segments in pop concerts and opera, trip the light fantastic toe segments in opera, and instrumental underscore in pantomime works.

While the focus of this article is on the performing arts, information technology should exist mentioned that the field of "multimedia" presents its own blazon of synthesis of the arts (Costello, 2016), combining relatively static elements, such equally still images and text, with dynamic audiovisual elements, such as video, animation, and music (Tan et al., 2013), and ofttimes doing and then in a far more interactive manner than is by and large the example in the performing arts. Finally, at a more elemental level, even still images like paintings can exist seen as syntheses, integrating grade, color, spatial organization, texture, implied depth, implied motion, symbolic content, and then forth.

Ceremonial Rituals as Total Works of Art

The previous section established a recipe for edifice a total work of fine art past describing the ways in which the arts can exist combined to generate synthetic forms. This has of import ramifications for both historical accounts of the arts and the role of the arts in gimmicky society. We contend that the nineteenth century notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk is neither new nor revolutionary. Ceremonial rituals in ethnic cultures across the world have manifested this practise e'er since their inception, and have probably done and then on a larger spatiotemporal scale and in a more than participatory manner than theorists like Wagner could have imagined. In this section, we explore two complementary proposals, get-go that ceremonial rituals—and specifically religious ceremonial rituals—are so intimately connected with the arts that they can be conceived of as assemblages of the arts, and 2d, that these ceremonies were in fact the original GKW's in human societies. Figure four will serve as a guide for the discussion.

Figure 4. The relationship betwixt religion, the arts, and the Gesamtkunstwerk. The hypothesis of religion/arts co-evolution (RACE) argues that the emergences of religious practice and the arts are intimately interwoven during human history. The mutual bespeak of focus is the formalism ritual, which is proposed to be a collection of arts behaviors and objects, making it essentially a "full work of fine art." The aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk later evolved in large-scale cultures in the context of artistic do. It has a strong spiritual and ceremonial dimension to information technology, reminiscent of a religious ritual.

Religion/Arts Co-development

Since the kickoff of the twenty-first century, there has been a surge of interest in the evolution and biology of faith (east.one thousand., Barrett, 2000; Wilson, 2002; Bulbulia, 2004; Alcorta and Sosis, 2005; Johnson and Bering, 2006; Boyer and Bergstrom, 2008; Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008). Ii principal issues dominate the discussions, showtime why people believe in supernatural beings and their agency, and 2nd why people engage in elaborate group rituals that can last up to several days and that swallow vast amounts of valuable resources, both textile and personal. We can think of the first one as a cognitive issue and the 2d every bit behavioral.

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed a number of functional or causal mechanisms to explain the adaptive advantage of religious behavior. Regarding belief in supernatural beings, it has been proposed that pro-social behaviors can exist promoted by means of the moralizing strength of such agents (eastward.g., Johnson, 2006, 2015). A supernatural beingness functions equally a surrogate authority figure, especially one that operates when other humans are not effectually to observe and regulate 1'southward behavior. People believe that they can avoid disfavor or punishment from the supernatural beingness by refraining from engaging in self-serving and antisocial behaviors and past acting kindly toward and cooperatively with other members of their social grouping. A conventionalities in supernatural agency is essentially the awarding to physical phenomena of what Bruner (1986) calls the "narrative mode" of cognition. In the absenteeism of physical theories to explicate natural phenomena, people "narrativize" these natural events in terms of the intentionality of a supernatural beingness, with the implication being that these phenomena happen "for a reason," in the same way that man beliefs is believed to happen (Bering, 2002).

While this causal type of explanation for belief in supernatural beings is specifically connected with religion, the behavioral explanation for religious group rituals is no different from that for non-religious group rituals: creating solidarity and coordination inside a grouping, ultimately leading people to cooperate with 1 another and make personal sacrifices on the group's behalf (Sosis and Alcorta, 2003; Cohen et al., 2010; Whitehouse and Larman, 2014; Legare and Watson-Jones, 2015). Synchronization of movement and emotional expression through group rituals fosters a communitarian sense of belonging to the group and reduces barriers for cooperation with grouping members, not to the lowest degree with non-kin (Cherry-red et al., 2013; Launay et al., 2016). In item, singing, dancing, and drumming all trigger endorphin release in contexts where merely listening to music or performing low-energy musical activities does not (Dunbar et al., 2012). This has led researchers to conclude that active participation in ritual musical functioning and dancing is likely to stimulate these aforementioned neuropeptide systems and thereby give ascent to the kinds of euphoric effects noted by Durkheim (1912/1995, his "collective effervescence"), Turner (1966), Roederer (1984), and others. These authors further notation that these effects may play a especially of import part for humans in bonding social groups together (see also McNeill, 1995; Freeman, 2000; Dunbar, 2008).

Few evolutionary scholars have appreciated or fifty-fifty recognized that the arts in ceremonial rituals have been integral to religion as a behavioral and cerebral miracle. Examples of this omission include scholars such as Guthrie (1993), Hinde (1999), Pyysiäinen (2001), Boyer (2001), Atran (2002), McCauley and Lawson (2002), Kirkpatrick (2005), and Rossano (2010), although Alcorta and Sosis (2005) recognize the importance of the arts in ritual ceremonies for instilling cooperation and solidarity. We believe that this is far more than an issue of neglect than one of disagreement. Hence, a major objective of the present commodity is to discuss this neglect and provide a framework for thinking about the religion/arts connectedness in a principled way. Considering of the inseparability of the two (religious practise and arts-like beliefs), it is plausible to suggest that the arts—peculiarly those that accept place in time, such as vocal, trip the light fantastic, and rhythmic or repetitive forms of movement or speech—arose during homo history as components of ceremonial beliefs, rather than as contained activities (Dissanayake, 1988, 1992).

In trying to connect the two major issues of belief and ritual in models of organized religion, there appears to be a meaning gap. As mentioned above, non-religious communal behaviors that are synchronized and rhythmic seem to exist quite efficacious at creating group cohesion (Cohen et al., 2010; Reddish et al., 2013; Launay et al., 2016), without requiring supernatural conventionalities. As well, belief in supernatural beings for many people, even in contemporary club, tin operate effectively at the personal level, without requiring group rituals. So, what is the missing link that makes religious belief something that requires communal rituals, and that makes ritual into a manifestation and reinforcer of religious conventionalities? Nosotros propose that information technology is the arts. We propose that the arts provide an emotionally-felt and transcendent means of establishing contact with supernatural beings during communal ceremonial rituals. Such contact tin can be as simple every bit cartoon the being's attention to oneself, all the way to the expressions of request, penitence, praise, etc., that underlie worship in large-scale religions (Ladd and Spilka, 2002; Spilka et al., 2003; Poloma and Lee, 2011).

Dissanayake'southward (1988, 2009) concept of "artification" (or "making special") is relevant here. The kinds of arts behaviors that are constitute in religious rituals across cultures—from incantations to drumming to gestural displays to elaborate regalia to body ornamentation to incense—are ways of making the occasion (with its wish, desire, plea, or need) special and thus singled-out from the mundane actions and communications among humans that occur in everyday settings. In addition, they are ways of making oneself special (self-artification), thereby presenting oneself appropriately to a transcendent being. In religious ceremonial rituals, both the communicator and the communication process become strongly artified. This investment in extravagance demonstrates that the performers "really mean it," that is, that the topic of the ritual is an important and communally-shared matter, for example subsistence, safety, health, prosperity, fertility, or transitioning to a new stage of life.

Hence, arts-permeated religious ceremonial rituals are intended to attract and constitute contact with supernatural beings, creating a sanctified realm of interaction distinct from ordinary social interactions. These manifestations are meant to influence the actions of these supernatural beings toward particular individuals and/or the social grouping every bit a whole. The arts, as manifested in ceremonial rituals, are substantially acts of persuasion. This idea is consistent with work on Western religions showing that worship aims to place the worshiper in a positive light with respect to gods, such that requests of gods are accompanied by conciliatory expressions of praise, thanks, and confession (Ladd and Spilka, 2002; Spilka et al., 2003; Poloma and Lee, 2011). It needs to be pointed out that not all forms of religious behavior need be improvident. Our ideas apply first and foremost to communal ceremonial rituals, where the presence of arts behaviors and objects is quite compelling. Nonetheless, there are forms of individual penitence (fasting, mortification of the flesh), sacrifice, and personal prayer, including meditative prayer (Poloma and Pendelton, 1989), that may exist quite ascetic and that may fifty-fifty aspire toward a renunciation of textile objects. However, these behaviors, in general, are still "ritualized" in the ethological sense (Dissanayake, 1988, 1992), as described in the adjacent paragraph.

Numerous theorists have written about the nature of ceremonial rituals from an anthropological perspective, specially in traditional societies (Durkheim, 1912/1995; Turner, 1966; Schechner, 1974, 1985; Tambiah, 1979; Dissanayake, 1988, 1992, 2017; Rappaport, 1999). Formalism processes are highly ritualized, involving detail locations and times of day, and employing a large degree of repetitive activeness. This is seen specially with body movements and vocal chants. The process of "ritualization" when practical to brute courtship and territorial behaviors refers to detail changes or "operations" that make the activity prominent, distinctive, and unambiguous (Smith, 1977; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Different the original instrumental or ordinary precursor-behavior that inspired them, ritualized movements and sounds become "extraordinary" and thus concenter attention (Dissanayake, 1988). They typically go (a) simplified or stereotyped (formalized), and (b) repeated rhythmically, often with a "typical" intensity Morris (1957), that is, with a characteristic regularity of pace. The signals are oft (c) exaggerated in time and space, and (d) are further emphasized or elaborated by the evolution of special colors or anatomical features. These components are polymodal in that they tin can occur visually, vocally, or gesturally in both space and time. These well-described characteristics of the ritualization process in animals are also distinct and conspicuous in human ritual ceremonies and are characteristic of the arts.

In traditional cultures, human rituals are highly participative and communal, blurring the standard Western distinction betwixt creators, performers, and spectators. The "persuasion" effect of the arts during ceremonial rituals has an touch non only on the supernatural beings being honored and entreated only also on the participants themselves. Arts-saturated rituals act as emotional reinforcers of the belief systems being communicated during the ritual, ultimately supporting a sense of consensus amid members of the grouping with respect to these belief systems. Interestingly, compared to the neophilia of modern art, ritual activities are highly conservative, since they are driven by a social need to uphold and perpetuate tradition, serving both to respect the actions of ancestors and to maintain grouping identity (Coe, 2003). Because of their critical importance to the life of a social group, rituals show very slow rates of change compared to non-ritual behaviors and products, making them among the nearly persistent features of any culture, whether that exist a big-scale culture or an indigenous civilisation. Pop music may change by the season, only religious music can persist for centuries if not millennia.

Although a scientific worldview would be skeptical of the idea that artified rituals themselves are effective at resolving the vital businesslike problems that inspire them, for example those related to successful hunting or influencing weather patterns, nosotros consider them valuable in that they address and satisfy evolved emotional needs in human psychology. Rituals, through their characteristic operations, create and reinforce emotionally-satisfying and psychologically-necessary feelings of mutuality and intimacy with other people (Bowlby, 1946; Miller and Rodgers, 2001; Dissanayake, 2011), as well as a sense of belonging to a group (Hinde, 1974; Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Dissanayake, 2000; Gratier and Apter-Danon, 2009). They coordinate and unify group members in a reassuring feeling of "oneheartedness" that provides an melancholia foundation for commonage and cooperative behaviors that tin be both risky and costly. They promote seven social functions that, in the realm of musical participation, have been referred to as the Seven C'south, namely contact, social cognition, co-pathy (being empathically affected so that inter-individual emotional states go more homogeneous), communication, coordination, cooperation, and cohesion (Koelsch, 2013), ultimately leading to a sense of community (an Eighth C).

Overall, we have proposed here a model of religion/arts co-evolution (RACE). The arts evolved in the context of faith, and organized religion evolved in the context of arts-based group rituals, where the two interfaced well-nigh strongly at the level of ceremonial rituals. The arts most likely arose in human history as chatty components of propitiary and supplicatory group rituals, rather than equally independently-evolved activities, hence making the unification of organized religion and the arts a natural coupling. Evolutionary theorists of faith regularly make mention of grouping rituals, but non of their pervasive arts components. Secular group rituals might have been sufficient on their own for promoting the survival needs of group living, just religious rituals redirect the focus toward a moral force that is higher, stronger, and more constructive than any single member of the group (Johnson, 2015), which is not the case in secular rituals. For this reason, they are probably more than efficient at engendering coordination force, group identity, and interpersonal cooperation. A big investment is made by group members in establishing this specialized mode of contact with supernatural powers, with the hope of achieving desirable outcomes and of alleviating adverse conditions.

Emile Durkheim'due south archetype book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912/1995) presents a wide-ranging early on analysis of religious rituals in indigenous cultures. Chiefly for our purposes, Durkheim's perspective of ritual is grounded in a vast fusion of artforms, 1 that includes not merely singing and dancing, simply face painting, body ornament, mime, costume, cartoon, oral storytelling, and the theatrical conveyance of the myths and prospects of a civilisation through "sacred drama". Watts Miller (2013) refers to this fusion equally Durkheim'south "total aesthetics." Therefore, Durkheim might have been the earliest thinker to advise that religious ceremonial rituals served equally the ancestral roots of GKW's. Such rituals, through their promotion of grouping assembly and communal participation, bind people together via a process that Durkheim calls collective effervescence, a process that is strongly linked to the effects of the arts components of these rituals.

Finally, a similar perspective tin can be found in Richard Schechner's writings about the emergence of theater from religious ritual, and even the contrary evolution of ritual from theater. While Schechner (1974) describes the multi-arts nature of rituals—combining dance, music, drama, and elaborate body ornamentation—his chief focus is on how the purposeful efficacy of rituals becomes transformed into the entertainment function of theater, an inter-relationship that he refers to as the "efficacy/entertainment braid." Hence, his hypothesis is less a faith/arts model as an historical business relationship of how cultural practices accept changed from being ritual-centric to becoming entertainment-axial. For example, in analyzing European history, he states that "[T]he late medieval flow was dominated by efficacious performances: church services, courtroom ceremonies, moralities, pageants. In the early on Renaissance these began to decline and pop entertainments, always present, gained, finally becoming dominant in the class of the public theaters of the Elizabethan period" (Schechner, 1974, p. 470).

Ceremonies equally Collections of Arts Behaviors

The major observation that emerges from the RACE hypothesis is that ceremonial rituals are so filled with arts behaviors and objects that if one were to take away these arts components one by one, there would be trivial that would remain with respect to grouping behaviors and shared symbolic objects. (Of course, individual-level processes would remain, such as cognitive and emotional connections with supernatural beings). This leads u.s.a. to postulate that religious ceremonial rituals, at the behavioral and textile levels, can be considered as being reducible to collections of arts behaviors and objects. Table ane presents a general enumeration of the types of arts-related behaviors and objects that are found in some or all ceremonial rituals in world cultures, covering music, dance, language use, drama, the visual arts (regalia, masks, artifacts, torso ornamentation, etc.), and the chemical arts (such every bit materials that are smelled or consumed); these artforms can readily collaborate to form blends, either simultaneously or sequentially (Figures 2, 3). It is difficult to conceive of religious ceremonial rituals without these behaviors and implements. Without these "transfigurations of the commonplace" (Danto, 1981), it is hard to imagine what would constitute a ceremony. The more that 1 looks toward indigenous cultures, the more pervasive and necessary these arts-related elements seem to exist in the performance of grouping rituals. The arts are not ancillary add together-ons, but are instead essential components of the ritual. In fact, an absenteeism of these behaviors or their improper execution tin can contaminate or invalidate the ritual, with potentially severe repercussions for those involved, including death (Liénard and Boyer, 2006). Overall, we feel that the ceremonies-as-arts perspective provides compelling support for the RACE model.

Table 1. Artforms establish in religious formalism rituals.

The Ceremonial Ritual as the Precursor of the Total Work of Art

To now bring the statement of this article full circle, nosotros propose that long before artful theorists had devised the notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk, ceremonial rituals in ethnic cultures had for millennia been syntheses of the arts on a similar scale and of a similar scope to GKW's. In other words, formalism rituals are the historical precursor to what artful philosophers would later call GKW'due south in artistic practice. The complementary thought, as shown on the right side of Effigy 4, is that GKW's themselves came to adopt quasi-religious practices then as to become ceremonies in their own right. Wagner's music-dramas are the almost celebrated example of this (Smith, 2007). The GKW would take identify in a grandiose setting akin to a temple of the arts, to which the spectators would make a pilgrimage. The work would deal with spiritual and mythological themes that would send the work out of the mundane and technological globe of today and bring the audition back to its cultural roots. The piece of work would combine theater, music, poetic language, and elaborate visuals into a "pseudo-organic totality" whose performance would occur over a time bridge much longer than a standard concert or theater operation. The experience would exist transformative for those in attendance, rather than being a form of entertainment and diversion. It would be something along the lines of a religious experience, a route to redemption through the arts. This notion of arts-as-religion came to permeate much thinking about the arts in the late nineteenth and early on twentieth centuries and is not altogether absent in our times. "Slap-up fine art," and indeed participation in the arts in general, is still thought to nourish people'south spiritual side and better their well-being. This is one of the planks that motivates the use of individual arts for therapeutic purposes, including therapies based on music, dance, writing, verbal expression, office playing, and painting (Gladding, 2011). In addition, in the late twentieth century, at that place was a notable impetus to use the arts as a means of promoting learning in the classroom. In some respects, we haven't moved very far away from Schiller's 1794 notion of aesthetic didactics (Smith, 2007).

Conclusions

The nineteenth century concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk has deep evolutionary roots in religious practice beyond cultures, as suggested by anthropological and ethological analyses of the arts. Ceremonial rituals, specially the type that permeate religious practice, can be considered substantially as assemblages of arts behaviors and objects, making them the precursor of what would later exist called the total work of art in aesthetic practise, with its ain quasi-religious flavour. We have presented a framework for describing how a total work of fine art can be constructed by identifying the manners in which the arts can combine, involving both simultaneous and sequential interactions between artforms. Such combinations are seen ubiquitously not but in art works but in formalism rituals of all kinds, suggesting a strong co-evolutionary relationship between religion and the arts.

Author Contributions

Both SB and ED conceived of the ideas of this paper and wrote the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absenteeism of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This piece of work was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada to SB. We thank students in SB'south undergraduate class The Science of Functioning for critical commentary on the manuscript, and appreciate the helpful suggestions of two reviewers.

Footnotes

1. ^We are using the term "theater" here to signify narrative artforms that are expressed through either acting or storytelling. While acting is always performative, storytelling can exist done in either a performative way (oral forms of storytelling and verse) or, in literate societies, in a written—hence not-performative—manner. This creates a complication for our scheme. Technically speaking, written literature belongs together with the visual arts, since written text is a type of 2-dimensional image (Elkins, 1999). While we acknowledge this complication in classifying written forms of narrative in our scheme, we will not deal any further with this issue in the electric current article.

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