Chapter Four raises the following questions: Have we inherited the instinct, need or desire to hum, chant, and sing from our most distant human ancestors? If so, how did they develop this vocal propensity, and why? What can be achieved through singing that cannot be achieved through language? Can (re)activating a traditional song in the present moment of performance reconnect the singer to those who sang that song for the first time?

I address these questions through the convergence of musicology, paleoanthropology, neuroscience, phenomenology, and performance studies. Musicologist 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. I then consider Jerzy Grotowski’s suggestion that the non-representational performative processes pertaining to 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.

To ground these alternative conceptions of presence, consciousness, and creative agency in a specific vocal tradition, I invite the reader to travel to Occitania and meet Pèire Boissière, a respected traditional singer specializing in the orally transmitted Occitan vocal tradition, which resonates with the voices of my ancestors. The resurgence of this oral culture has served as a source of agency and resistance for Occitan music revitalization, a radical form of cultural activism that defies nationalist ideology rooted in France’s colonial history, while offering a counter-narrative to the neoliberal model of global culture. As we return to Canada, our journey comes full circle at the En’owkin Center with a unique cross-cultural encounter between two vocal traditions from different continents.