Medicine music is a loose term for the songs that live in ceremony and gathering culture: icaros from the Amazon, chants from many traditions, and a large body of new songs, mostly in English, Spanish and Portuguese, written in the last twenty years to be sung in circles. They share a shape: simple melody, repeated lines, easy to join by the second time round, and built to shift the people singing them rather than to impress an audience.
On the land, medicine music is the house style, at the fire, in ceremony, at the stage on gentler nights. Musicians who play it are welcome to apply through the co-create page; the fire is open to anyone with a guitar and the nerve.
The word medicine is used with care. The songs do not cure anything. They do reliably make a field of strangers into one voice, and that is medicine enough.
Related words
- CeremonyA marked moment with a clear beginning, a clear end and someone trusted holding the space in between.
- Drum circlePeople seated in a ring with drums and percussion, playing together without a score or a leader, finding a shared rhythm as they go.
- Ecstatic danceFree movement to music, without alcohol, talking or performance, as a practice rather than a party; often at sunrise, outdoors.
- ToningSustaining simple vowel sounds with the voice, alone or in a circle, for the physical and emotional effect of the vibration.
Join the circle