ABSTRACT
Music is firmly embedded in social life and contributes to the ways in which people in most societies work, play, worship, and reproduce themselves, socially and biologically. Music is part of social life because musicians and their audiences are part of larger groups and processes. Composers, performers, and audience members have families, participate in social life, have some attitude toward religious beliefs, and have been brought up under unique historical conditions. Musicians and their audiences use music as a resource for a variety of religious and social purposes. Small Amerindian villages and large nation-states may be seen as comprising social groups, each with its own kind of music, performing together or apart. As they perform, they express, create, or recreate the social fabric of the communities themselves in a constant musical process of reformulation and renewal.
