Ritual appeals to conformists and conformists perpetuate ritual. The idea that everything goes as planned and everyone behaves in a predictable manner is another facet of familiarity. It is tied with safety. Within a cultural bubble, a safe form of art is a form of art that stays within boundaries predefined by years of repitition. The art itself is a ritual. All improvisation must remain within the boundaries. Whilst arbitrary boundaries themselves can be used to help an artist approach material with a fresh perspective, boundaries set by endless ritual are far more restrictive. They create opacity in the membrane of the bubble.
The inhabitants of the bubble become an isolated village. Their artistic ritual is a cult where any outsider who wants to be a part must conform rigidly to strictures or be rejected, or at least endlessly corrected. There is only one way and it is the right way. It reminds me frighteningly of dogmatic religion, another bubble cult formed from ritual.
I’ve seen this phenomena especially in folk musics, though it’s certainly alive in other arenas. The ritual, over time, defines what is puro for the music. Deviation creates tarnished bastardizations. Hybrids are smirked at. Of course, the village inhabitants are brought closer by this puro. In fact, it enforces the sense of community. When the comet wipes out the rest of the species, this village will be happy alone with their puro. On different levels of abstraction, every village is prone to this centricism. Those that manifest centricism in art have an opportunity to preach their version of puro to those outside the bubble, to those willing to be indoctrinated. I view this as a manner of releasing said puro into the wild so it can be hybridized with other forms. In the case of music, it can by hybridized with other rhythms, melodic ideas, and harmonic structures. The village elders will not be pleased.
Artistic egoism?
Purists are ridiculous just from the fact that every connotation of puro both the same (abstractly) and different (specifically), and the majority of village inhabitants either don’t realize it or simply reject it.
The same idea is to never learn a word of a foreign tongue though the world is populated with them. Hybridizations in all things are seeds of evolution.
