| Summary: | Chanted polyphony sets a communicative situation including more elements than the simple chant. This article aims to tackle the study of religious polyphonies as well as the analysis of other elements of perception taking part in it. The arrangements of bodies in space, the modulation of light, and the senses of smell and touch allow us to understand what resources are deployed to achieve an individual experience of the senses and the body, enabling the – even fictitious – feeling of belonging to a social group. It is the beginning of a “rhetoric of the senses” that develops into highly coded ritual frameworks. The studies of the Ceremony of Tenebrae on Holy Wednesday carried out by the brotherhood of Sant’Antone from the town of Calvi, and of the Ceremony of Vespers in the Catalan Pyrenees show us, on the one hand, the sensitive elaboration orientated by the ritual logic and, on the other hand, make us understand the aesthetical and social target of polyphonies, of the “sonorous density” which shapes itself as a mesh of very singular timbres, ornamentations, intensities, voices and individualities. Thus a rhetoric of the senses and corporality unfolds, where chanted polyphony becomes a decisive matter in achieving the target: building the communitas and giving individuals access to a special time.
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