That the commission, planning, and composition of the 1961 War Requiem interrupts the much longer gestation of the church parable Curlew River (completed in 1964) is one sign of their shared engagement with musical performance as an event of ritual significance. Britten comes close to defining his own concept of ritual in the notion of “occasional music” central to the Aspen Award speech given shortly after the première of Curlew River. Referring to music's ability to “utter the sentiments of a whole community,” and to the essentially unrepeatable quality in any individual performance of a single work – the “magic [that] comes only with the sounding of the music” – Britten (in a rare moment of public selfanalysis) articulates features central to a range of theoretical formulations of ritual as a recognized cultural activity. Beyond its direct reference to music's ceremonial and religious functions, the speech stresses the precise conditions of any performance, and of the concert experience itself, characterized as an act of listening that “demands … a journey to a special place” (20). In each case, Britten's concept of “occasion” bears obvious affinities with anthropological notions of rituals as “named and marked out enactments. … different from ‘ordinary,’ everyday events,” and as performances that mediate between fixed, canonical forms and the inherently “indexical” variations introduced in any single physical gesture, however stereotypical. Britten's reference to the “holy triangle of composer, performer and listener” (20), likewise, defines the musical event in the specifically communal terms inherent to ritual in its varying forms.