ABSTRACT
In the final chapter, vocality is examined through the convergence of musicology, paleoanthropology, neuroscience, phenomenology, and performance studies. Gary Tomlinson’s hypothesis of the co-evolutionary biocultural emergence of music and language serves as a basis for challenging language-centric evolutionary theories of cognition that fail to account for singing since tonality, timbre, and melodic contour are neither language-like nor symbol-like. Also relevant to this discussion is Grotowski’s suggestion that source techniques, including traditional singing, may enable us to experience consciousness not linked to language but to presence, as if activating an embodied ancestral relation to those who sang the first traditional songs. This practice-based understanding of a connection between presence and consciousness achieved through doing is corroborated by Alva Noë’s phenomenological reclamation of presence as a vital aspect of non-representational modalities of knowledge by which we gain access to the world. The reader is then invited to travel to Occitania to hear Pèire Boissière speak about an orally transmitted vocal tradition whose revitalization constitutes a radical form of cultural activism that defies nationalist ideology rooted in France’s colonial history. Returning to Canada, our journey will come full circle at the En’owkin Centre with a unique cross-cultural encounter between two vocal traditions from different continents.
