Church Music Through the Lens of Performance 9780367530655, 9781003080329

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: performing church music
1. The next step: performance studies?
2. Ritual and performance in church music studies
3. Talking about ritual, participating in ritual
4. Body in worship: church music and embodiment
5. Making special, play, and change
6. Performing church music: faith, community, tradition
Conclusion: “a larger performance”
Appendix 1: interview reference list
Appendix 2: interview outline
Index

Citation preview

Church Music Through the Lens of Performance

This book is an investigation into church music through the lens of performance theory, both as a discipline and as a theoretical framework. Scholars who address religious music making in general, and Christian church music in particular, use “performance” in a variety of ways, creating confusion around the term. A systematized performance vocabulary for the study of church music can support interdisciplinary investigations of Christian congregational music making in today’s complex, interconnected world. From the perspective of performance theory, all those involved in church musicking are performing, be it from platform or pew. The book employs a hybrid methodology that combines ethnographic research and theory from ritual studies, ethnomusicology, theology, and church music scholarship to establish performance studies as a possible “next step” in church music studies. It demonstrates the feasibility of studying church music as performance by analyzing ethnographic case studies using a developmental framework based on the concepts of ritual, embodiment, and play/change. This book offers a fresh perspective on Christian congregational music making. It will, therefore, be a key reference work for scholars working in Congregational Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, Ritual Studies and Performance Studies, as well as practitioners interested in examining their own church music practices. Marcell Silva Steuernagel is Assistant Professor of Church Music and Director of the Master of Sacred Music Program at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, USA. Marcell writes at the intersection of church music, theology, musicology, and performance theory. He served as Minister of Worship, Arts and Communication at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Curitiba, Brazil, for more than a decade and is an internationally active composer and performer.

Congregational Music Studies Series Series Editors: Monique M. Ingalls, Baylor University, USA Martyn Percy, University of Oxford, UK Zoe C. Sherinian, University of Oklahoma, USA

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. Music can both unite and divide: at times, it brings together individuals and communities across geographical and cultural boundaries while, at others, it divides communities by embodying conflicting meanings and symbolizing oppositional identities. Many factors influence congregational music in its contemporary global context, posing theoretical and methodological challenges for the academic study of congregational music-making. Increasingly, coming to a robust understanding of congregational music's meaning, influence, and significance requires a mixture of complementary approaches. Including perspectives from musicology, religious and theological studies, anthropology and sociology of religion, media studies, political economy, and popular music studies, this series presents a cluster of landmark titles exploring music-making within contemporary Christianity which will further Congregational Music Studies as an important new academic field of study. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age Edited by Anna E. Nekola and Tom Wagner Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives Mark Porter Congregational Music, Conflict, and Community Jonathan Dueck Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide Edited by Monique M. Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Zoe C. Sherinian Church Music Through the Lens of Performance Marcell Silva Steuernagel For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Congregational-Music-Studies-Series/book-series/ACONGMUS

Church Music Through the Lens of Performance

Marcell Silva Steuernagel

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Marcell Silva Steuernagel The right of Marcell Silva Steuernagel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steuernagel, Marcell Silva, author. Title: Church music through the lens of performance / Marcell Silva Steuernagel. Description: [1.] | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Congregational music studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045592 (print) | LCCN 2020045593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367530655 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003080329 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Church music. Classification: LCC ML3000 .S84 2021 (print) | LCC ML3000 (ebook) | DDC 781.71–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045592 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045593 ISBN: 978-0-367-53065-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08032-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

To the scholars and musicians who strive to give the church a voice to sing, who seek to understand and live out the wild nature of our calling.

“Performance” is a troublesome word for musical leaders who attempt to understand their role in worship, sometimes seeing spiritual authenticity as incompatible with the complex skills required of a performer in worship. Professor Steuernagel provides a nuanced description of embodied worship performance and offers selfawareness strategies for those that guide sacred ritual. Integrating a complex array of fields, this is break-through research that offers a clear framework for redefining the vocation of the musical worship leader across musical styles and cultural, ethnic, and ecclesial contexts. C. Michael Hawn, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Church Music, Adjunct Professor and Director, Doctor of Pastoral Music Program, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, USA Music is never alone. By bringing the multi-disciplinary lens of performance studies to church music, Marcell Silva Steuernagel expands our awareness of how musical acts of worship are embodied, constitutive actions. Performing music doesn’t just bring a repertoire to life but the music brings us to life. Balancing ethnography with critical analysis, Silva Steuernagel offers a smart and thoughtful way to understand the complexities of community and identity. Anna Nekola, Assistant Professor of Music, Canadian Mennonite University, Canada

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments Introduction: performing church music

viii ix 1

1

The next step: performance studies?

22

2

Ritual and performance in church music studies

40

3

Talking about ritual, participating in ritual

65

4

Body in worship: church music and embodiment

97

5

Making special, play, and change

128

6

Performing church music: faith, community, tradition

162

Conclusion: “a larger performance” Appendix 1: interview reference list Appendix 2: interview outline Index

186 192 194 195

Figures

0.1 Conceptual framework for the investigation of church music as performance 0.2 Exterior of São João Lutheran Church, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 0.3 Interior of São João Lutheran Church in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 0.4 Exterior of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas 0.5 Interior of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas 0.6 Exterior of University Baptist Church, Waco, Texas 0.7 Interior of University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas

7 10 11 12 13 13 14

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Redentor Lutheran Church in Curitiba, South Brazil. It was there that I found my calling and understood the singing congregation. Many thanks to the churches that opened their doors, minds, and hearts to my ethnographic research: São João Lutheran Church in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas, USA; and University Baptist Church, our family’s spiritual home during our Waco years. I also thank the Dancing Bear, the premier craft beer hangout in Central Texas. “The office,” as we called it, hosted conversations and interviews that found their way into this book. I thank Roseane Yampolschi and Maurício Dottori, who taught me how to read, research, and write music. I thank Baylor University’s School of Music and the Center for Christian Music Studies for the collegiality and hospitality I encountered upon beginning my doctoral work there. David Music taught me thoroughness and mastery; C. Randall Bradley embodied the commitment to a vision for music of the church; and Monique Ingalls, my advisor, showed me how to blaze ahead and write imaginatively. I thank Sam Eatherton for his humor and heart. The doctoral journey would have been miserable without the deep friendship I have shared with Nathan Myrick. My thanks to those who became close friends in Waco: Nate and Leslie Myrick, Kristin and Mike Dodson, Lance and Mindy Yaeger, and the Select jiu-jitsu family. I also wish to thank my colleagues and friends at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Dean Craig Hill for his ongoing support; Mark Stamm and Jim Lee for their mentorship; and Anthony Elia, Christopher Anderson, and C. Michael Hawn for friendship and conversations that went on deep into the night. Many of you read portions of my work, for which I am thankful. I also take responsibility for any errors that may have wormed their way into these pages. Finally, I thank my parents and brothers, who taught me to love good books and conversation. I thank my wife, Carol, and our children, Arthur, Davi, and Alice, who remind me of the joy of life, which I so often forget. Carol, I am forever in awe of your resilience, unending love for our family, and commitment to keeping us all together.

Introduction Performing church music

It’s Sunday. I’m leading worship for our contemporary evening service at Redeemer Lutheran Church, a downtown congregation in Curitiba, the capital of Paraná state, South Brazil. Right before the entrance to a chorus, the hours I had spent earlier that week working on conducting patterns for my undergrad conducting class kicked in. Without thinking about it, I raised my arm and cued the congregation. This was not something I would have previously done because, in my mind, my “classical performer” and “contemporary worship leader” personas lived in two separate worlds. In that moment, hearing the congregation’s response to my cue, those walls came down and I realized the potential of thinking about worship leadership as performance.

“Talking past each other”: assumptions about performance “Performance” is a bad word in church. Drop it into a conversation about music in worship and listen as voices rise and echoes of the “worship wars” of the 1990s bounce around the room. Tensions around church music and performance surface in backstage arguments, deacons’ meetings, and worship conferences. To make matters more complex, practitioners and scholars use the word “performance” in different ways. While the concept is ubiquitous, its uses are varied and loosely defined.1 Consider the following excerpts from church music and liturgy sources: Sometimes, scholars have treated Christian congregational music as an autonomous ‘text’ – an object with a fixed form that is believed to carry inherent meaning for the scholar to ‘decode’ regardless of the varying contexts of its performance. Recent musicological work has shown this model to be reductionist, arguing that musical meaning is constructed in and through performance and moving toward the model that explores ‘musicking’ as a social practice, activity or performance. (Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013, 4)

2

Introduction Music unfolds not only in ritual but as ritual, as a mode of ritual performance. An assembly’s musical performance inevitably influences the whole ritual process. At the same time, participants’ ritual and spiritual expectations and commitments shape the parameters of musical performance. (McGann 2002, 35; emphasis in the original) Some worship leaders use the word presentational to describe worship that serves as a wonderful performance on the part of the pastor or choir or worship band, but fails to empower the people of God to participate fully and authentically. (Rienstra and Rienstra 2009, 24; emphasis in the original)

These examples all employ an idea of performance, albeit in different ways. The first, from the introduction to Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience (Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013), conceptualizes performance as an activity and a social practice. Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner acknowledge the creation of meaning through “musicking,” defined by Christopher Small as taking part in a musical performance “whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (1998, 9). The second passage comes from Mary McGann’s Exploring Music as Worship and Theology (2002). She likewise conceptualizes music performance as a component of ritual process in which congregations participate. On the other hand, Rienstra and Rienstra, in Worship Words: Discipling Language for Faithful Ministry (2009), contrast performance and congregational participation, betraying a common trope in practical theology and liturgical studies: that the “performance of worship” weakens its efficacy due either to a “lack of authenticity,” or because performance is inherently presentational.2 These excerpts demonstrate how the meanings of performance vary across different contexts and academic disciplines. They represent but a small sample of how ideas about the meaning and place of performance in worship arise from differing constellations of assumptions.3 Church music practitioners likewise grapple with performance-related questions. Their constellations of assumptions include theological perspectives and their own experiences. Consider the following scenes: It is a late afternoon in October 2017. I am talking to Fabiane Behling Luckow, discipleship and worship pastor at São João Lutheran Church, a centenary congregation in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. Our conversation has turned to movement and body language in worship leading. Luckow explains how she thinks about the physical performance of worship. “In a way, [being conscious of the body] means having a performance persona that’s a little more elaborate when I’m up front singing than when I’m sitting in the pew. I’m a lot

Introduction 3 more conscious of the gestures I’m making, of my posture, when I’m up front, because I know that, in a way, the congregation mirrors or pays attention. So, when I’m up front, I’m more expressive, quote-unquote, because I also construct a more contained performance for myself, which is more in line with the kind of music I like. You know, more centered. I don’t think I need to play a role that isn’t in line with my aesthetic, with what I like.” 4 (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Cut scene. It is a weekday evening in late November 2017. I am visiting with Eugene Lavery, director of music at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas, USA. Our conversation also turns towards the topic of physical performance in worship. Lavery reflects on how his bodily comportment informs his approach to conducting. “I naturally, as a conductor, don’t have a very distracting or overly ostentatious style. So, I don’t have to think about it too much, but I don’t think a conductor should … some conductors can be very ostentatious, and verge on some form of liturgical dance. And I think you don’t want to, as a conductor, be distracting to whatever else is going on. I want people to be listening to the music, not thinking about what fun moves I am doing. So, it’s always about trying to avoid making it about the individual, and the focus should be on God and the worship experience.” (Interview with author, November 20, 2017) Luckow and Lavery have never met, do not belong to the same tradition, and operate in distinct ecclesiological environments. Nevertheless, their comments exemplify two of the many ways in which practitioners deal with questions about performance of church music. Lavery acknowledges that his conducting, a technical requirement to direct the singers, is watched by the congregation. While he doesn’t use the term “performance” in this excerpt, he speaks of a tension: he wants congregants to focus on the music and on the God they are worshiping, and not on his movements. But he recognizes that he unavoidably calls attention to himself as he performs his conducting role. The music at São João is very different from the music at St. Alban’s, but Luckow grapples with similar questions. She customarily leads from the front of the nave, microphone in hand and no instrument, accompanied by a contemporary ensemble (when the choir participates in the service, it sings from the gallery, under another conductor’s direction). Luckow is constantly balancing her responsibilities as a music leader with the expectations of the congregation, and this negotiation is mediated through the body, voice, expressions, and other components of music making. Her observations about the body in worship converge with Lavery’s assumption that there is a divide,

4

Introduction

a distinction, between the participants sitting in the pews and those in a position of musical leadership. In this configuration, neither Luckow nor Lavery want to “play a role” that misrepresents their beliefs about church music, even as they recognize the requirements of leadership. The way in which these questions of performance are addressed has a profound impact on scholars’ and practitioners’ approach to church music. These vignettes and excerpts illustrate the difficulty of thinking, and talking about, church music as performance. They also reveal a gap in how this performance is perceived from the pulpit and the pew. I described the perspectives that inform these conceptualizations of performance in church music as constellations of assumptions. They can also be viewed through Harris Berger’s concept of “stances” (2009): positions from which scholars and practitioners view and interact with particular phenomenological instances, and negotiate participation in them. In church music scholarship and practice, disparate stances abound. One stance defends the idea that performance occurs exclusively at the altar or on the stage/platform during worship. Another perspective, encountered in the literature on church music hailing from different corners of theology, conceives of performance as insincere stage posturing, and thus the opposite of “authentic” worship.5 A third stance on performance, shared by church music studies and musicology, refers to the stylistic/technical choices of performers in making music, also known as “performance practices.”6 My thesis is that all participants are performing in church music. In this book, I investigate church music through the lens of performance, both as a discipline and as a theoretical framework. I argue for a conceptualization of performance that combines academic literature from the many fields that inform church music scholarship with ethnographic research. My goal is to develop a vocabulary that enables scholars and practitioners to talk about the performance of church music without falling prey to the “worship war” rhetoric, in which one perspective defends itself against others. The manifold—and sometimes conflicting—ways in which performance is approached in church music begs the question: is the term worth using, given the widespread confusion it seems to cause? I argue that the very ubiquity of performance language in church music conversations justifies its use and indicates the need for a systematization of the concept in the field. A more nuanced understanding of performance would contribute to the way in which scholars and practitioners examine the music, and the musical practices, of congregations. Moreover, such a conceptualization has been systematized in the field of performance studies. By analyzing church music through the lens of performance studies, it is possible to mitigate the confusion that surrounds the term. A retooled understanding of performance would allow scholars to address the divide between pew and platform that appears in Luckow’s and Lavery’s comments. A clearer understanding of performance would also facilitate investigations of church music that take other texts, such as architecture and soundscape, into account. I follow the work of Shepherd (1999), Frith (1989), and others who

Introduction 5 describe text as any component of the experience of music that can be “read” in culture (Shepherd 1999, 162), expanding the textuality of music to “sounds, words, images, and movement” (1999, 174). While words are certainly one textual component of song (referred to here as lyrics, not as text), other texts are included in making music. A musical artifact, in this sense, is a “bundle of texts” that interact with one another and are interpreted in context. To this end, performance must be defined in a way that recognizes its dual agency of simultaneously accomplishing a goal and playing a role. John Fletcher’s definition can help us to move from a general, amorphous “idea” of performance to a more concrete concept: I take my cue from performance studies theorists like Richard Schechner in defining performance more broadly, beyond the imitative or spectacle-oriented presentations in formal theater auditoriums. Given that to perform combines the senses of both presenting (for an audience, in accordance with a planned, rehearsed, or ritualized pattern) and doing, performance can encompass not merely formal theater but practically any discrete expressive act directed toward and for the benefit of someone else. (Fletcher 2013, 17; emphasis in the original)7 Richard Schechner points to this dual nature when he defines performance as any human behavior that is “twice-behaved”; it is rehearsed or practiced repeatedly within structures of social life (2013, 28). Fletcher’s and Schechner’s definitions recognize the etymology of performance. According to Victor Turner, the word “performance” comes from the old French verb parfournir, meaning “to complete or carry out fully” (1982, 13), and implies both the act of doing something, and the act of playing a role. This performance studies lens, therefore, encompasses all aspects of musicking in congregational settings, from pew and platform, soundboard and choir, clergy and laity. Church music is something that participants perform together.

Constellations of scholarship and practice: interdisciplinary nodes Congregational music making across Christian traditions is extraordinarily varied, and the study of church music draws on many fields, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, and anthropology. A mere juxtaposition of performance theory and church music scholarship will not yield the vocabulary we are looking for, much less the concepts needed to undergird it. A systematized approach to the study of church music as performance requires that theory and ethnography be combined to accomplish two goals. The first is to identify points of intersection––what I refer to as nodes––between areas that intersect in the study of church music. The second goal is to connect theory and practice in my investigation. My concept of node echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a rhyzome as “a nonhierarchical, heterogeneous, multiplicitous, and acentered” configuration (1987, 21).

6

Introduction

A node can be connected (at least potentially) to any other in the rhyzome. It is a hub and an intersection. Richard Schechner uses the term in this sense to explain his typology of performance, which includes play, sports, and other categories. For Schechner, any nodes connect and interact with other nodes at any given time in ritual activity (2013, 18). Within my interdisciplinary matrix, I have identified four nodes that serve as gateways and points of convergence between disciplines: ritual (and participation in ritual); embodiment; making special; and play/change. “Making special” is a term I borrow from the work of Ellen Dissanayake (1995) to support my discussion of play and change in church music. Each node is rooted in the history and theory of performance studies. The first node is the study of ritual, foundational for an examination of church music as performance. Performance studies stems from a cluster of ideas developed in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the work of J. L. Austin on performativity and the work of Victor Turner on ritual. Broadly defined by Catherine Bell, ritual can be described as “a type of critical juncture wherein some pair of opposing social or cultural forces comes together” (2009, 16). Currently, many scholars concur that “there is no lack of definitions of ritual, and no two definitions are alike” (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 2). I agree with these claims that, in each discipline, ritual is defined differently, and we will encounter some of these definitions in the scholarship. Bell also cautions that “a tighter hold on [the definition of ritual] does not prevent such ‘slippage’” in the way it is understood (2009, 13). For her, the definition itself is a tool to be wielded. I wield it cautiously, recognizing that rituals are not stable entities, but ways humans deal with one another. [They] provide a frame and a means to socialize, especially in times of change – that is, in situations that are seen as a chance and as a threat at the same time. Rituals also provide opportunities for what might be labeled “proxy negotiations” when disagreements in other fields of social interaction are debated and acted out via ritual or negotiations about rituals. (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 3) Moreover, the study of ritual has been incorporated into Christian liturgical studies in various ways, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3. Embodiment is our second node, and can be defined as a recognition that “any act will inevitably have to go through the body” because we who perform are living bodies (Alloa 2014, 147; emphasis in the original). As performance studies coalesced, the connection between ritual processes and the body continually resurfaced, and the concept became central to performance scholarship. In this configuration, participation is crucial because there can be no ritual activity without bodily engagement. The third and fourth nodes are connected. Play and change (the fourth node) occur within the boundaries of “special activity” (the third node). Separated from ordinary life, they are frequently construed within Christian worship practices as “sacred.” Examinations of embodied rituals within performance studies frequently

Introduction 7 investigate questions of play and the negotiation of change. Performance is the platform upon which many types of negotiation will be carried out—cultural, theological, social, and political debates, to name but a few. These nodes of ritual, embodiment, making special, and play/change are offered as a schema, an incremental narrative that demonstrates how, when performing church music, congregations and individual practitioners create, negotiate, amplify, and crystallize identity and meaning through the performance of faith, community, and tradition (Figure 0.1).

PLAY AND CHANGE MAKING SPECIAL EMBODIMENT RITUAL

Figure 0.1 Conceptual framework for the investigation of church music as performance

As I trace how the concepts in each node have developed, coalesced, and merged in the humanities, I use my ethnographic research to help shape the theoretical framework. The benefit of this structure is that it highlights historical connections between disciplines that inform church music investigations today. Therefore, the book’s architecture flows between theory and practice, and scholarship and ethnography stand in integrative and generative relationship to each other.

Ethnographic methods and case studies My second goal in combining theory and ethnography is to achieve a “thick description” of musical practices in local contexts, which allows us to connect theoretical conceptualization to congregational realities from different traditions and locations. As we have seen, the nebulosity of performance is not relegated to scholarship or practice discretely; it occurs in both settings and between them. Clifford Geertz employed Gilbert Ryle’s idea of thick description to point to the “multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another,” that the ethnographer must grapple with in fieldwork ([1973] 2000, 10). I use the term to emphasize the complex and messy nature of church music, the cruciality of ethnography for

8

Introduction

our investigation; and finally, the process of description is the source from which stems my vocabulary of church music as performance. In addition, a thick description responds to performance studies’ call for a broad analytical spectrum in examinations of human activity. Therefore, the ethnography both undergirds the theoretical intersections we will examine, and illustrates them. Since the foundation of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1954, ethnomusicology has increasingly contributed to the study of music in general, and to church music in particular. According to Mark Porter, ethnographic research has become an important methodological approach to the study of church music, yielding key insights into the musical lives of congregations and contributing to the study of music making in these contexts (2014, 164–166). Mellonee Burnim demonstrated, by the mid-eighties, that the insider perspective of the participantobserver had found its place in ethnomusicological scholarship on religious music making (1985). More recently, ethnomusicological perspectives have helped scholars examine current church music issues, such as the increasing importance of transnational musical phenomena (Porter 2014, 164), and the historiography of church music (Ingalls 2016). Furthermore, practical theologians increasingly recognize the value of ethnographic methods. Elizabeth Phillips has described the rich potential of ethnographic research for theologians studying Christian congregations (2012), a turn that has yielded developments such as the Journal of Ecclesiology and Ethnography, and the work of Peter Ward on celebrity worship and Charismatic Evangelical music (2012, 2017). In all these cases, by engaging in fieldwork, academics are launched into a kaleidoscope of interactions with practitioners, texts, and social nuances that are not available solely through abstract reflection. In this volume, engaging in and with the messiness of the musical life of congregations is a requirement for the examination of church music as performance because the ethnography grounds the idea of performance, helping to circumvent the scholarly temptation to safeguard theoretical constructs from the untidiness of practice. Figure 0.1 illustrates the architecture that facilitates this integration, in which literature and theory are not mere antecedents to the ethnography, instead they are partners in dialogue. Because interviewees are situated within convoluted, interconnected webs of events and ideas that reflect the complex nature of human cultural life, the ethnography is neither ancillary nor superfluous to the investigation. If, as Fletcher argues, performance combines being and doing, this book combines theory and ethnography as a way to offer a conceptual vocabulary for the discussion of church music as performance in a broad sense, and to ground this investigation into lived realities of the performance of church music. Just as the connection of concepts into nodes across disciplinary boundaries is generative, ethnography and theory are generative in relation to each other.8 My conversations with practitioners and field observation fed back into the framework-in-progress and modified it, supplying, in the process, part of the language I offer to understand church music as performance. Descriptions of participation, performance of identity and community, and other dynamics of

Introduction 9 congregational music making are teased out from the case studies and highlighted in subheadings throughout the volume. With this goal of integrating theory and practice in mind, I developed a set of criteria for research sites. Because they needed to be similar enough to afford historical and liturgical comparability, the churches I researched fall within the broad Protestant Christian tradition. Conversely, my research sites could not be so disparate as to appear ad hoc. In light of these criteria, I chose three sites: a Lutheran church in Pelotas, Brazil, and two congregations in Waco, Texas; one Baptist, the other Episcopal. Both in Texas and in South Brazil I have the historical connections, personal relationships, participant-observer access, and contextual knowledge that support robust research. The geographical and denominational variety between research sites offers unique perspectives and contributions, thus securing a fertile pool of ethnographic materials for analysis that mirrors the historical roots of the Protestant traditions in the North Atlantic, but also reflects how missionary work has led to the development of these traditions in the global South, where the Christian church is growing (albeit not necessarily along these denominational lines). Moreover, the proximity between the two churches in Waco, Texas, highlights their liturgical and historical distinctions. Within Waco’s ecclesiological topography, University Baptist Church (UBC) represents a “young” generation of churches that, while grounded in history, aims to engage in a fresh way with its cultural environment and denominational heritages. St. Alban’s, on the other hand, can be considered a “traditional” Protestant church that embraces its aesthetic and liturgical legacy, but is growing in the same demographic range as UBC, namely that of young families. Moreover, as we shall see, the leadership at St. Alban’s considers its approach to the Anglican tradition to be new in its own ways. Fieldwork at each site followed standard ethnographic methods: field observation; video recordings of services; and structured and informal interviews with congregants and leadership. At all sites, interviews followed a similar script based on the aforementioned nodes of ritual, embodiment, making special, and play/change (the interview outline can be found in Appendix 2). Although I use pseudonyms to protect the identities of my interviewees, the identities of congregational leaders are disclosed by permission under the understanding that they are public figures in positions of leadership (see Appendix 1 for a full list).9 My first research site was São João Lutheran Church in Pelotas, a city in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. São João, founded in 1888, is a church of the Igreja de Confissão Evangélica no Brasil (IECLB/Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil) (Igreja Luterana São João. n.d.). The congregation gathers in a centenary building inaugurated in 1925, close to downtown, facing one of the city’s public parks (Figure 0.2).10

10

Introduction

Figure 0.2 Exterior of São João Lutheran Church, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

São João has approximately 600 members, and gathers between 300 and 400 worshipers in two Sunday services, at nine in the morning and seven thirty in the evening.11 Members refer to the morning service as “traditional,” and the evening service as “contemporary.” Fabiane Behling Luckow, the worship and discipleship pastor at São João, is in her midthirties and oversees the music for both services. São João has helped to pioneer the use of Brazilian styles of music in Lutheran worship in Brazil, and uses materials from the Lutheran hymnodic legacy and contemporary sources, both Brazilian and international. The congregation’s choir sings about once a month, frequently accompanied by a nylon-string guitar

Introduction

11

instead of an organ (although there is one in the gallery). Nestor, a senior member, leads music for the morning services with his accordion. He is backed by a varying ensemble that may feature woodwind instruments, strings, some light percussion, and guitar or banjo. Musical leadership for the evening services is provided by a rotation of bands featuring drums and percussion, bass, acoustic/electric guitar(s), keyboards, and a vocal ensemble led by a worship leader (Figure 0.3).

Figure 0.3 Interior of São João Lutheran Church in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

The second site is St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas. St. Alban’s was founded in 1946, and gathers for worship in a stonewalled temple built in 1950 on a corner of Waco Drive, one of the city’s main roadways (Figure 0.4).12

12

Introduction

Figure 0.4 Exterior of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas

St. Alban’s is a growing congregation that focuses on outreach, cultural engagement, and family ministry.13 The church offers three Sunday services. The first, held at seven thirty in the morning, is a spoken Eucharist service (Rite I) that does not include music. At nine and at eleven fifteen, choral Eucharist (Rite II) services are offered. On the Sundays I attended St. Alban’s, average attendance was 100 congregants per service. The music for the Rite II services are led by music director Eugene Lavery, a parish choir (approximately 15 singers organized into four sections) composed of music professionals and amateurs, and a pipe organ (Figure 0.5). According to the church’s website, the music is “grounded in the unique Anglican heritage” (St. Albans 2017). St. Alban’s supports a “Sacred Arts” concerts series (in 2017, seven concerts were sponsored) focusing on sacred music in the Western art tradition. The church also offers a chorister’s program for children and teenagers aged between six and 17, free of charge, “in the Anglican choral tradition” (St. Alban’s 2017). The third and final case study is UBC, also located in Waco, Texas. UBC has a fairly young congregation, and was founded in 1995 by Chris Seay and David Crowder (UBC n.d.). While Baptist in name, UBC was set up as an alternative to established expressions of Baptist worship. According to Hannah Grace Howard’s ethnographic research, Seay and Crowder both grew up Baptist, but “set out to create a church community that was the antithesis of their upbringings” within the emergent church movement (2016). UBC gathers in a repurposed supermarket close to Baylor University (Figure 0.6).14

Introduction

Figure 0.5 Interior of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas

Figure 0.6 Exterior of University Baptist Church, Waco, Texas

13

14

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Originally, UBC’s membership mostly comprised college students, but the church has grown into an intergenerational church with children’s and youth ministries. UBC offers one Sunday service at ten thirty in the morning, gathering around 500 worshipers during the academic year (Figure 0.7). In the summer and holidays, a typical service might have between 70 and 200 participants. Music at UBC is led by Worship and Arts pastor Jameson McGregor and a band usually composed of drums, bass/pads, one or two guitars (in any combination of acoustic and electric), with McGregor on vocals. The repertoire draws on traditional Christian hymnody and contemporary worship music, including original compositions.15

Figure 0.7 Interior of University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas

A succession of mashups: book overview This book develops in a succession of mashups. I use the term to reinforce the generative drive of interdisciplinary connections, in line with Stefan SonvillaWeiss’s description: mashups “combine and collect material and immaterial goods and aggregate them into either manifested design objects or open-ended re-combinatory and interactive information sources on the Web” (2010, 9). The first mashup is between disciplines. In Chapter 1, I synthesize concepts in the fields of church music, ritual studies, and performance studies, to support my argument that perspectives from performance studies can contribute to research in church music. In the process, I clarify how the key nodes of ritual, embodiment, making special, and play/change are conceptually incorporated

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into performance studies, and the way the field has, in turn, emphasized and developed each concept. My second mashup is between theory and practice, literature and ethnography, and is undergirded by the through-lines of the intersectional nodes. In Chapter 2, I examine ritual as a transversal concept that cuts across practical theology, liturgical studies, and anthropology. By paralleling perspectives on ritual from anthropology with Christian theology and liturgical studies, I outline how the study of ritual became instrumental to the development of performance studies, and attempt to reconcile conversations about ritual beyond and within the boundaries of church music. In Chapter 3, I expand the examination of ritual to focus on how people participate in ritual activity, particularly in the performance of church music. I briefly discuss participation in music to arrive at a nuanced model of participation in church music, reading the work of Thomas Turino (2008), Elizabeth Margulis (2013), and Judith Becker (2004), through the lens of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (1990). This framework provides a typology of five modes of engagement, or ways in which congregants participate in church music: presence, singing, silence, surrogacy, and immersive spectatorship. The question of what constitutes the failure to participate in church music is also considered. The focus of Chapter 4 is the embodied performance of ritual. I investigate how this performance helps to create meaning in church music, offering performance theory as a perspective from which the examination of a performing body is welcomed and considered as a matter of course. This discussion of embodiment refers both to individuals and congregations. Based on the work of Monique Ingalls (2018), I offer the concept of performative utterances as a way to examine embodiment in church music, in relation to expression, sincerity, leadership, prescriptions, and vocality. Finally, embodiment is discussed as a performance of conflict, in which negotiations of theological, ideological, and ecclesiological projects, as well as their legitimacy, are enacted through the body. In Chapter 5, I examine how participants employ extra-musical components such as architecture, decoration, congregational layout, clothes, bodily gestures/ performative utterances, lighting, and sound amplification, to make the performance of church music special. In this context, performative utterances become integral to the creation of a special time and space in which special groups— congregations—worship. It is within these special boundaries, upon this special stage, that negotiations of faith, community, and tradition occur, thus enacting processes of play and change.16 Due to the varied nature of the ethnography, questions of hybridity serve as a backdrop to my discussions about the negotiation of identity and meaning in church music across and beyond boundaries. These negotiations are part of a constant fluctuation of cultural/liturgical/ritual flows with myriad political, theological, and aesthetic overtones. I propose the term “messiness” to describe the complex, contested means whereby transformations are performed in these contexts. The ethnography itself shows how bits and pieces of elements such as the legacy of missionary activity, transnational worship

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projects, denominational initiatives and resistances, all come together to create distinct worship environments in which American Anglo-Baptists worship in Texas and Lutheran Afro-polkas are sung by congregants in South Brazil. Thus, if boundaries for ritual performance must be established through performance, it follows that they can be modified, ignored, contested, reinforced, or broken; and what they contain can also be debated. Content and style are played (and played with), and change inevitably takes place as church music is performed. Throughout this volume, I use the term “style” in a comprehensive sense that echoes Allan Moore’s use of Leonard Meyer’s theory of style (Moore 2001, 433). According to Meyer, “style is a replication of patterning, whether in human behavior or in the artifacts produced by human behavior, that results from a series of choices made within some set of constraints” (1989, 3). Meyer’s definition is broad, but—as Moore’s work demonstrates—it can be applied to music scholarship. When the term is used in a citation or in an interview, the meaning of style may diverge from my own. Finally, in Chapter 6, I apply the vocabulary gleaned from these mashups into a demonstration of how church music can be examined through the lens of performance. Seeking to ameliorate the fundamental problem of how unevenly the idea of performance is applied in conversations about church music, I synthesize theory and ethnography, in light of the particular affordances of a performance approach to the study of church music outlined in Chapter 1. These cover a broad spectrum: cultural hospitality and interdisciplinarity; an affordance for hybridity, and a recognition of creases and disjunctions between theologies, communities, and traditions; a refocusing from “being” to “doing,”; and liminality, playfulness, and change in church music. The Conclusion highlights how the approach I offer here alleviates discursive gaps that tend to pit scholars and practitioners of different stances against each other, because they understand performance according to different constellations of assumptions. Seeking to unify these many perspectives into a comprehensive approach, I conclude that an investigation of church music as performance not only recognizes the validity of these different stances, but is able to connect them into a broad web of examinations of religious musical activity. I offer this book as a “test drive,” a trial run, of how to study and talk about church music from the performance perspective.

A caveat: performing scholarship about church music Before “diving in,” I must make a caveat. I write under the assumption that a book is a performance of scholarship, a performance that has rules and follows a script. It is enacted upon a specific stage (the academic publishing industry), participants fulfill particular roles (such as author, editor, and reader), and go through rites of passage (such as the editing process). Writing a book is a performative act, and I strive to acknowledge my role in this performance and take my stance under consideration as I write.

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My caveat therefore acknowledges the double consciousness of writing about church music as performance. I turn to the work of Shoshana Felman in order to nuance what I mean. In The Scandal of the Speaking Body (2003),17 Felman devises a conversation between Molière’s Don Juan, J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, and the work of Émile Benveniste: a meeting between the dramatic, the literary, and the philosophical. She argues: “current research on the performative is very often organized around promising, which is taken as the exemplary model of speech acts in general” (2003, 3). Felman aims to uncover the “incongruous but indissoluble relation between language and the body; the scandal of the seduction of the human body insofar as it speaks” (2003, 5). Even as it is about performance, Felman’s book is written (and intended) as a performance of scholarship. She leverages the seductive nature of Austin’s discourse, its playfulness, and bases her performance as a scholar on Austin’s own. Her argument is that Austin and Don Juan do the same thing: they play with words, they seduce. In fact, she states: “to seduce is to produce felicitous language” (2003, 15). According to Felman, “for Don Juan, however, saying is doing: acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the interplay of forces within it” (2003, 140). Or, as Austin calls it, Don Juan does things with words. The idea that Austin is “performing performatives” about which Felman is writing connects performance and performativity through play: a constant ritual of analysis and scandal, of promising and questioning, that I also aim for in this book. Echoing Felman’s stance, my goal is to perform church music scholarship. The ways in which I speak of ritual and church music, about embodiment and interviewees’ observations of the body, about play, change, and church music, are performative in nature. I am doing things with words—writing a book—to demonstrate the viability of my thesis. When I speak of creating a vocabulary for the investigation of church music as performance, I mean that it is through the mashup of my own thoughts, the voices of scholars, and my ethnographic interlocutors that these words will surface in ways that can be used further. Thus, I seek to do a thing—to accomplish a goal—and, in so doing, to fulfill a promise: to demonstrate the applicability and application of my thesis. While one might argue that all “good” books accomplish these goals, the fact that this is done intentionally and consciously here modifies the way I write and, therefore, the final outcome of the process. The book, like most kinds of performances, unfolds according to a script, namely the circle of nodes in Figure 0.1. Each circle represents a scene, or an act, of a performance that weaves together different scholarly performatives: reading, citing, asking, and answering. In following these concentric nodes, we arrive at a performance of scholarship that demonstrates how to talk about church music as performance.

Notes 1 While the terms “performativity” or “performative” may differ from “performance,” they are frequently used as adjectives to refer to the quality of performance. As we shall see, there is a theoretical divide in this regard.

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2 In contrast, scholars such as Allan Moore, in Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, discuss the question of the performance persona in Christian worship without further emphasis on this pervasive distinction between performance and “authentic” worship in Christian circles (Moore 2015, 183–198). 3 Other examples can be found in Best (2003); Bradley (2012); Cherry (2016); Dueck (2017); and Wren (2000). 4 Translations from Portuguese to English are my own unless otherwise indicated. 5 Greg Scheer refers to “the worship leader as performer” in his description of how worship leaders can become the center of attention, a common trope in books about contemporary worship (2006, 215). See also Jones (2006, 58); Lynch (1999, 72); McLean (1998, 87); Miller (1993, 68). Examples from internet commentaries and periodical articles include “Presentation Vs Performance” (Worship Together 2014); “The Difference between Congregational Worship and a Concert” (The Gospel Coalition, n.d.); Easum (n.d.); Jackson (n.d.); Jobe (n.d.); Kiefer (2016); “Mercy Not Sacrifice” (2012). 6 Naomi Cumming’s work demonstrates the use of performance from a Western classical perspective that is primarily preoccupied with the gestures of interpreters (2000). 7 I use Fletcher’s definition purposefully, even if he is in fact borrowing from Richard Schechner. I do so because Fletcher uses the definition in Preaching to Convert (2013) specifically in his discussion of evangelical performance practices in outreach efforts. 8 Here I make a distinction between “literature” and “theory.” Where “literature” is used, it refers to the body of academic literature. “Theory” refers to concepts, frameworks, and ideas drawn from the literature. 9 To preserve the flow of the text, I avoided providing a full reference every time an interview is cited. The first time an interviewee is cited, the full reference is given in parentheses. Subsequent references are abbreviated. For box quotes, interviewee names are always supplied. In in-line citations, names are suppressed if they are given in the sentence. References are suppressed in vignettes, but interviewee names are provided in these cases as well. 10 Praça Dom Antônio Zattera, 250, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. 11 These statistics were given to me by Luckow (2017). 12 305 N. 30th St., Waco, Texas. 13 According to St. Alban’s website, the congregation has grown by more than 20 percent over the past three years (St. Alban’s 2018). 14 1701 Dutton, Waco, Texas. 15 A terminological discussion of what is commonly referred to as “contemporary Christian music” can be found in the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (Ingalls, Mall, and Nekola, n.d.). I use “contemporary worship music” here in accordance with their typology. When the term is used within interviews and other citations, I have not changed references to conform to this typology, preserving the expression “contemporary Christian music.” In interviews and in most of the scholarship, contemporary Christian music seems to be used as an umbrella term, including musics offered for listening and for congregational worship, and not differentiating between participatory- and presentation-minded songs. I employ the term “musics” to highlight the diversity of musical traditions and expressions within the history of the Christian faith. It is a common term in ethnomusicology. 16 I mean “negotiation” broadly. I borrow from Hüsken and Neubert: “negotiations take place on all levels of human activity; they are expressed by a wide variety of actions and discourse and in all shades of intensity. As negotiations take different forms, there is no single definition that is clear-cut and convincing … what unites the diverse understandings of this term is the open eye for processes that originate in disagreement and that at the same time aim at a certain form of agreement, even though such agreement might not actually be achieved” (2012, 3).

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17 Originally published in French as Le Scandale du corps parlant: “Don Juan” avec Austin ou la séduction en deux langues (1980). The volume’s original English title, which appeared in 1983, was The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. The title itself conflates linguistic performativity and theater.

References Alloa, Emmanuel. 2014. “The Theatre of the Virtual: How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-Ponty.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, ed. Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, Catherine M. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Best, Harold. 2003. Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Bradley, C. Randall. 2012. From Memory to Imagination: Reforming the Church’s Music. Calvin Institute of Christian Worship liturgical studies series. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Burnim, Mellonee. 1985. “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist’s Research on Gospel Music.” Ethnomusicology 29(3): 432. Cherry, Constance M. 2016. The Music Architect: Blueprints for Engaging Worshipers in Song. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Cumming, Naomi. 2000. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dissanayake, Ellen. 1995. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dueck, Jonathan. 2017. Congregational Music, Conflict and Community. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Easum, Bill. n.d. “Worship Is a Celebration, Not a Performance.” The Effective Church Group (blog). https://effectivechurch.com/worship-is-a-celebration-not-a-performance/ (accessed March 20, 2018). Felman, Shoshana. 2013. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fletcher, John. 2013. Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Frith, Simon. 1989. “Why Do Songs Have Words?” Contemporary Music Review 5(1): 77–96. Geertz, Clifford. [1973] 2000. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Guyton, Morgan. 2012. “Worship Not Performance.” Mercy Not Sacrifice (blog). August 23. Accessed April 2, 2018. www.patheos.com/blogs/mercynotsacrifice/2012/08/23/wor ship-not-performance/.

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Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Howard, Hannah Grace. 2016. The Making of a Modern Saint: An Analysis of Grief, Charisma, and Community Identity in Transition. Honors thesis. Lexington, VA: Washington and Lee University. https://dspace.wlu.edu/xmlui/handle/11021/33776. Hüsken, Ute, and Frank Neubert, eds. 2012. Negotiating Rites. Oxford Ritual Studies series. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingalls, Monique M. 2016. “Transnational Connections, Musical Meaning, and the 1990s ‘British Invasion’ of North American Evangelical Worship Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, ed. Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan Dueck. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingalls, Monique M., Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience. Farnham: Ashgate. Ingalls, Monique M., Andrew Mall, and Anna E.Nekola. n.d. “Christian Popular Music, USA.” The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. London: Canterbury Press. www. hymnology.co.uk/c/christian-popular-music,-usa (accessed April 3, 2018). Jackson, Wayne. n.d. “The Growing Trend of Performance Worship.” Christian Courier. www.christiancourier.com/articles/130-growing-trend-of-performance-worship-the (accessed March 20, 2018). Jobe, Kari. n.d. “God Isn’t Looking for Performance but for True Worship.” Charisma Magazine. www.charismamag.com/spirit/spiritual-growth/13065-untainted-love (accessed March 20, 2018). Jones, Paul S. 2006. Singing and Making Music: Issues in Church Music Today. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing. Kiefer, Bill. 2016. “The Difference Between Praise, Worship and Performance.” Pastor Bill’s Blog. https://wjkiefer.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/the-difference-between-praiseworship-and-perfomance/ (accessed February 17, 2016). Lynch, Kenneth. 1999. Biblical Music in a Contemporary World. Chester, PA: Selfpublished. McGann, Mary E. 2002. Exploring Music as Worship and Theology: Research in Liturgical Practice. Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press. McLean, Terri Bocklund. 1998. New Harmonies: Choosing Contemporary Music for Worship. Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2013. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyer, Leonard B. 1989. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Studies in the Criticism and Theory of Music. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miller, Steve. 1993. The Contemporary Christian Music Debate. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House. Moore, Allan. 2001. “Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre.” Music & Letters 82(3): 432–442. Moore, Allan. 2015. “On the Inherent Contradiction in Worship Music.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, ed. Anna E. Nekola and Thomas Wagner. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies series. Farnham: Ashgate. Phillips, Elizabeth. 2012. “Charting the ‘Ethnographic Turn’: Theologians and the Study of Christian Congregations.” In Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, ed. Pete Ward. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans.

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Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1(2): 149–166. Rienstra, Debra, and Ron Rienstra. 2009. Worship Words: Discipling Language for Faithful Ministry. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Igreja Luterana São João. n.d. “Igreja São João.” www.igrejasaojoao.com.br/ (accessed March 18, 2018). St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. “Music. n.d-a. www.stalbanswaco.org/music (accessed September 10, 2018). St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. “Saint Albans.” n.d-b. www.stalbanswaco.org/home (accessed March 18, 2018). Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Media ed. Sara Brady. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Scheer, Greg. 2006. The Art of Worship: A Musician’s Guide to Leading Modern Worship. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Shepherd, John. 1999. “Text.” In Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thom Swiss. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan. 2010. Mashup Cultures. New York: Springer. Taylor, Justin. n.d. “The Difference between Congregational Worship and a Concert,” The Gospel Coalition (blog). www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/thedifference-between-congregational-worship-and-a-concert/ (accessed March 20, 2018). Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performance Studies Series, vol. 1. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. University Baptist Church(UBC). “UBC.” n.d. www.ubcwaco.org/ (accessed March 18, 2018). Ward, Peter. 2012. Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Ward, Peter. 2017. “Celebrity Worship as Parareligion: Bieber and the Beliebers.” In Religion and Popular Culture in America. Oakland: University of California Press, pp. 313–335. Worship Together. 2014. “Presentation Vs Performance.” http://blog.worshiptogether. com/presentation-vs-performance/ (accessed April 11, 2018). Wren, Brian A. 2000. Praying Twice the Music and Words of Congregational Song. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Zak, Albin. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1

The next step Performance studies?

As the humanities and social sciences underwent critical investigations of coloniality—which has been termed “the postcolonial turn”—accompanied by examinations of scholars’ own inherent research biases, academics began acknowledging that “the ways we talk and think about the world that surrounds us, and in which we are immersed, shape our perspectives on practice, theory, and in the case of religion, theology and worldview” (Clifford and Marcus 1986).1 Increased openness to cultural “insider” perspectives afforded by these shifts created opportunities for church music scholars, many of whom were also practitioners, to study their own musical practices as participant-observers. One outcome of these processes is the burgeoning field of congregational music studies, which is devoted to the global, interdisciplinary, and interfaith study of Christian congregational musics. Mark Porter (2014) traces the rise of congregational music studies and the interactions it has afforded between areas without previous communication, such as theology and ethnomusicology. Furthermore, argues Monique Ingalls, “many of [today’s] unlikely or reluctant church music scholars hail from fields like sociology, media studies, and ethnomusicology, which have not historically been centers for reflection on congregational singing” (2019, 3). In his retrospective of congregational music studies, Porter points to two pervasive tendencies in previous approaches to the study of church music. The first is musicology’s emphasis on art music traditions to the detriment of popular/folk traditions, an emphasis that does not easily accommodate the complex role of the congregation in congregational music making, or the repertory familiar to many worshipers within popular/folk musical environments (Porter 2014, 150). Second, Porter echoes other scholars, such as Jeremy Begbie (2005), who lament the absence of serious discussions of music in modern theology. The limitations Porter identifies have historically shaped investigations of church music. On the one hand, musicology has been inclined to analyze music as an object, a penchant aggravated by the very question of which musical objects are worthy of analysis and/or inclusion in the canon of “approved repertoires.”2 On the other hand, theology approaches church music from a logocentric perspective, often reducing it to textual/lyrical content.3 Furthermore,

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a cursory glance at church music scholarship produced in the last 50 years reveals the recurring prescriptive tone of works primarily concerned with the moral suitability of a particular repertoire for use in worship environments, or with the practical implementation of specific theological and denominational projects.4 In contrast, Porter and Ingalls argue that congregational music studies’ interdisciplinary approach draws on ethnomusicology, practical theology, ritual studies, and liturgical studies; features a wide range of interests and approaches; and is hospitable towards contributions from practitioners and lay people. In Porter’s opinion, “it is, at least partly, this intersection of perspectives which marks out the field as one with a great deal of latent potential and it remains an important driver of both interest and innovation” (2014, 165). The characteristics that Porter mentions appear in some church music bibliographies. Judith Kubicki’s analyses of Taizé music (1999) relies on Victor Turner’s perspective of ritual as process, as well as his ideas of liminal experiences and communitas, and draws on J. L. Austin’s performative language theory, which is also central to performance studies and other disciplines that have connected the performance of certain behaviors to identity and meaning.5 More recently, Monique Ingalls (2018) has drawn on Austin’s idea of performative utterances in her investigation of the expressions and gestures that authenticate worship leading/ concertizing in contemporary Christian music concerts. Kubicki’s and Ingalls’ works illustrate Porter’s argument that scholars use concepts developed outside established theological and musicological boundaries for church music scholarship. If the postcolonial turn and the rise of reflexivity have produced fresh ripples in the pond of the humanities, congregational music studies is a current ripple in this pond (in the study of church music), and performance studies may be the next step in the same direction.

Crossing boundaries: performance studies and church music In the Introduction to this volume, I demonstrated how the term “performance” has encountered widespread and varied usage in church music scholarship. Nevertheless, concepts from performance studies have been used largely in piecemeal fashion instead of being informed by a nuanced and theorized understanding of performance theory.6 These usages are examples of “conceptual feathering,” a concept I adapt from Thomas Turino’s work. Turino borrows from Charles Keil to describe the characteristics of participatory music, which features blurred contours, and in which “the start and conclusion of the piece are not sharply delineated” (2008, 38). I apply the notion to conceptual boundaries, in order to describe how definitions of performance are not clearly delineated, while at the same time recognizing the significant (and potentially overlapping) uses that the term has found. I use the term “nebulosity” in the same sense: juxtaposed constellations of assumptions from which practitioners and scholars talk about church music as performance, even when the boundaries of these uses do not align with each

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The next step

other. Performance scholar Christopher Balme points out how nebulosity is indeed connected to burgeoning areas of scholarship: “academic and artistic interest in something is usually a sure sign that matters are unclear, conceptual boundaries are blurred and old certainties are anything but that” (2014, 16). These “blurred conceptual boundaries” describe the conceptual feathering that pervades the way in which church music scholarship talks about performance. It is my goal to sharpen these boundaries, thereby providing a systematized framework that offers distinct advantages for investigating church music as performance. These advantages are a broad spectrum approach involving a prioritization of cultural generosity and interdisciplinarity that facilitates the study of complex cultural phenomena; a conceptual shift from focusing on objects to focusing on activities (from “being” to “doing”), from abstract object to embodied activity; and a recognition that examinations of performance activities must be contextual. The shift to a performance lens in church music studies also recognizes texts that go beyond the aforementioned music/lyrics binary that Porter refers to (2014). Space/architecture, interior design, body movement and fashion, non-verbal utterances (such as vocality and other performatives), lighting and production, amplification in the worship space, matters of branding and liturgical framing; all these things represent possible components of the “bundled experience” of congregational music making. Moreover, performance is a continuum that moves beyond the walls of the sanctuary, cross-fertilizes different types of music across denominational boundaries and institutional oversight, and reflects the constant shift of global cultural flows. Acknowledging this dynamic can help to account for the important connection between church music as experienced in a formal worship environment and beyond these boundaries due to mediatization, an increasingly common phenomenon catalyzed by the recent reality of the outbreak of the pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in early 2020 and the closure of borders. A performance approach to church music recognizes components within and beyond formal liturgical spaces, acknowledging each instance as an embodied and significant unit of experience. In the Introduction, performance was defined as “twice-behaved behavior,” a simultaneous dynamic of presenting and doing. This conjoining of being and doing presents a conundrum for performance studies as a field: if everything can be considered performance, it follows that performance studies can examine any activity, behavior, ritual, or expression. If that is the case, what are its distinguishing features? What are the boundaries between performance studies and other disciplines? As Diana Taylor asks: “is it a discipline, an inter-discipline, a post-discipline?” (Steuernagel and Taylor 2015).

Performance scholarship: constellations of variegated assumptions To answer Taylor’s question (which is also ours inasmuch as it concerns the study of church music), I will synthesize the history of the discipline and point

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out its distinctive features and boundaries, along with one significant “glitch”: the conceptual “gap” between performance and performativity. Addressing this gap is important because, if one of the goals of this project is to provide a performance vocabulary for discussing church music, fissures in this vocabulary must be recognized. The work of Richard Schechner is frequently considered a catalyst for the rise of performance studies. Since the 1960s, his work has revolved around the “how and why” of interactions between people (2003, xii). In Performance Theory, Schechner explores ideas about play and non-productivity in human existence, offering a taxonomy of performance that connects ritual and theater, which serve as opposing poles of a spectrum between entertainment and efficacy. According to Schechner, these poles establish a basic polarity between efficacy and entertainment that creates a contextual opportunity: Whether one calls a specific performance “ritual” or “theater” depends mostly on context and function. A performance is called theater or ritual because of where it is performed, by whom, and under what circumstances. If the performance’s purpose is to effect transformations—to be efficacious—then the other qualities listed under the heading “efficacy” will most probably also be present, and the performance is a ritual. And vice versa regarding the qualities listed under “entertainment.” (2003, 130) His concept of performance inhabits this continuum: The whole binary continuum efficacy/ritual-entertainment/theater is what I call “performance.” Performance originates in impulses to make things happen and to entertain; to get results and to fool around; to collect meanings and to pass the time; to be transformed into another and to celebrate being oneself; to disappear and to show off; to bring into a special place a transcendent Other who exists then-and-now and later-and-now; to be in a trance and to be conscious; to focus on a select group sharing a secret language and to broadcast to the largest possible audience of strangers; to play in order to satisfy a felt obligation and to play only under an equity contract for cash. These oppositions, and others generated by them, comprise performance: an active situation, a continuous turbulent process of transformation. (2003, 156–157) Schechner’s work on performance developed out of a critique of the historiography of Western theater: “before performance studies, Western thinkers believed they knew exactly what was and what was not ‘performance.’ But in fact, there is no historically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance’” (2013, 2). His attempt to interconnect human activities pushed back against the Western paradigm of “theater as drama” and became known as a

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“broad spectrum” of performance that includes “performing onstage, performing in special social situations (public ceremonies, for example), and performing in everyday life” (2013, 170). All these can be considered instances of performance that blend into each other. It is telling that Schechner’s critique of neatly categorized Western paradigms of theater parallels Porter’s critique of the limitations of musicology and theology to encompass the multimodal dynamics of congregational music making. A performance/theater approach allows examinations of congregational music making as an activity in which all participants have roles to play. Schechner’s setup of performance as a spectrum between entertainment and efficacy can be useful in discussing repertoires for worship that might fall on (or be intended for) different points on the continuum.7 Schechner’s openness to performance traditions outside of the Western canon infused the field with an ethos that seeks to recognize other stances and experiences. The inclusive ethos of performance studies finds much of its provenance in the formative years of Schechner’s life when, according to Harding and Rosenthal, “as a Northerner coming to the South in the early 1960s, [he] was thrust into a crucial battleground of the civil rights movement” (2011, 4). Because of this inclusive ethos, the discipline became a kaleidoscopic investigation into activities around the world, as diverse as medical clowning and the sociopolitical performance of the emperor in Japan. This diversity highlights the connection between Schechner’s “broad spectrum” approach and cultural hospitality. In order to sustain such flexibility of subject and method, performance studies has shied away from anchoring itself to particular academic disciplines or methods, because it is “enthusiastically committed to interdisciplinary analysis of multiple variables to any performance” (Reynolds 2014, 1). In summary, says Reynolds, “the ethical drive at the core of performance studies makes the field serious, benevolent and activist” (2014, 3), creating what he calls “transversal poetics”: an approach to research that is broad and context-responsive, helping to reveal the “marginal or hidden objects” or “fugitive elements” of the subject being examined (2014, 3). Schechner’s thoughts about interdisciplinarity and cultural generosity, therefore, laid a foundation that absorbs multiple disciplinary perspectives along with methods and subjects of inquiry. Performance studies is grounded in practice. From the performance perspective all human behavior involves performance, therefore the practices themselves are a focus of scholarship. In other words, say Henry Bial and Sara Brady, since “virtually all human behavior involves performing, then we can think of the theatre as a kind of laboratory where actors and directors stage experiments to help us better understand ourselves” (2016, 251). It is noteworthy that already in the 1960s, Mantle Hood and others were advocating for a bi-musicality in ethnomusicology that echoes Schechner’s vision of theoristpractitioners (Hood 1960). The performance studies perspective resonates with the ethnomusicological perspective and, as we have seen, opens up possibilities for scholar-practitioners to examine their own congregational music experiences. We will examine these particular affordances of performance studies later in this chapter.

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In summary, performance studies has become, in the last few decades, a fully fledged discipline covering a wide array of subject matters and interests that are catered for by departments at major universities, conferences and journals.8 It is an interdisciplinary field that resists fixed definition, but encompasses the study of performance in almost any realm of human activity. According to Schechner, its hallmarks are engaging “questions of embodiment, action, behavior and agency” dealt with interculturally (2013, 2), and leveraging “many methods to deal with this contradictory and turbulent world” (2013, 3) that include textual analysis, ethnography, and other methods from cultural studies, and sociology (2013, 10). However, even if performance studies is committed to a broad approach to human activity, informed by an intercultural and interdisciplinary stance, it is not (and does not sell itself as) a hermetic, neat theoretical framework. It is a constellation of questions that function as a lens and a discipline, and it is still young. It is flexible and messy, and presents theoretical challenges of its own.

Excursus: performance and performativity One of these theoretical challenges pertains to the distinction between performance and performativity. Just as performance is both being and doing/presenting, “performative” is both a noun and adjective. While the noun can indeed be used in the Austinian sense of indicating a word or sentence that “does something with words,” the adjective “describes the performance-like qualities of the noun with which it is associated” (Schechner 2013, 123). We discuss this distinction here because I use the language of performatives that Ingalls derives from Austin’s work in my framework. While I am tempted to refrain from any further qualification of these terms, to do so would be to ignore the historical transposition of the idea of performativity into performance theory. Schechner argues that Austin, who first used the term “performative” in his Harvard lectures in 1955 and, later, in How To Do Things With Words (1962), “did not understand, or refused to appreciate, the unique power of the theatrical as imagination made flesh. … What happens on stage has emotional and ideological consequences for both performers and spectators” (2013, 124). For him, even if Austin recognized the performative qualities of a word or phrase, he did not account for their impact beyond language. But if the term is used outside of the framework in which Austin was operating, it can reference things beyond words. Thus, there is a distinction between these early uses of “performativity” and the way in which the term came to be part of the performance studies vocabulary. However, the shift in the meaning of performativity has not completely erased the fissure caused by the transplantation of the term, as James Loxley argues. He traces “the history of the ‘performative’ and the ‘performativity’ that it is held to embody from its first formulation by Austin in the 1950s through to its significance for contemporary theories of culture, language, law, identity and performance” (2007, 140). For him, though distinct, performativity and performance remain connected, sometimes in agreement and other times in disagreement.9

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When Loxley says that performances of identity “are like Austinian performatives, in their ‘pure’ or declarative form, it is because they are constitutive: they create gender identity in being performed, bringing about the entity, the ‘I’ to which they refer” (2007, 119). Loxley is pointing to the connection between the creation of identity and processes of repetition, such as Judith Butler’s concept of hyper-repetition. The impact of the concept of performativity on the concept of identity is important here because it surfaces frequently in the scholarship on congregational music making, as exemplified by the work of Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner (2013), and in the ethnography, as I examine the ways in which congregations negotiate questions of identity and meaning through the repeated performance of church music: a kind of hyper-repetition of faith identities through music. Loxley concludes that it is “the term rather than the concept [of performativity] that has been transplanted” across disciplinary boundaries (2007, 140). He calls the parallel relationship between Austin’s performativity and the concept of performance as employed in performance studies asymptotic; they converge, but never resolve. For Loxley, if “the proximity between theories of performance and performativity is to amount to anything very much, the light that each term can shed on the other will have to be a continuing point of reference” (2007, 165). In other words, there is no “one” way to grapple with either concept. Austin and others’ work on performativity produced impact through convolution: as the term echoed through academic corridors, it reverberated in departments asking different questions. These, in turn, produced context-responsive answers to the performative prompt. One example of this “convolutionary quality” appears in the work of Shoshana Felman (2013). As we saw in the Introduction, in critiquing Austin’s theory of the performative even as she herself attempts to do things with words, Felman’s proposition exemplifies Loxley’s description of the shifting relationship between performativity and performance, which gravitates constantly between the philosophical thirst for precision and an embodied desire for experience, for the seductive. In this sense, the performative is a seductive ritual: “If the performative, in fact, is an event—a ritual—of desire, should we be surprised to learn that performative desire always takes as its model, rhetorically, the symbolics of sexual desire?” (2003, 15). In her work, playfulness, seduction, and the liminal nature of the special experience connect to Turner’s theory of ritual and to Schechner’s conceptualization of performance. Scholars sometimes distinguish between “performative” and “performatic” to circumvent this ongoing nebulosity between performance and performativity (Steuernagel 2015; Taylor 2003). I do not adhere to this distinction because of my own use of performatives, but acknowledge it nevertheless. In any case, if Loxley identifies Butler as “glossing over” the disciplinary fissure that resulted from the term’s disciplinary transplantations, what does such a maneuver entail for a discussion of church music?10 A possible opportunity arises when this transplantation moves beyond the word to the body, such as in the work of Judith Butler. Butler identifies that

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“the relationship between speech and the body is that of a chiasmus. Speech is bodily but the body exceeds the speech it occasions; and speech remains irreducible to the bodily means of its enunciation” (1997, 155–156). According to Saba Mahmood, Butler negotiates the chiasmus between speech and body, between performativity and performance, resisting the reduction of the nondiscursive to the discursive. For her, meaning is constructed in the gap between performativity and performance, between “doing” and “meaning,” because “Butler insists that the body is not reducible to discourse or speech” (2011, 165). Therefore, Mahmood concludes: “discursive terms, in turn, become constitutive of the extra-discursive realms of the body because of the formative power of language to constitute that which it represents” (2011, 165). Thus, body and speech are imbricated with each other even as they coexist across a chiasmus. This is the crevice, the fissure, in which I argue that play and change happen in the performance of church music, as we will see later on.11 It is also worth noting that Mahmood’s reading of Butler happens in the context of a religious context (the mosque), demonstrating one way to connect performativity and religious activity. Other scholars have recognized this gap in discussions of musicking and worship in theology. Graham Hughes deals with performance and performativity (which is symptomatic of the gap between body and speech) in a study that applies linguistics, phenomenology, and structuralism to the study of liturgy (2003). He addresses the divide in a particular way, and is wary of the use of performance as a cloaking device for the divide between analytical and continental traditions in philosophy. Hughes claims that meaning making within worship does, in fact, occur “in other than linguistic forms” as “a multitude of tiny signals,” arguing that the acknowledgement of this dynamic has caused a “performative turn” in liturgical studies. Hughes is interested in an account of liturgy that includes this “multitude of tiny signals transmitted by their producers” (2003, 123). For him, just as a song is a bundle of texts that come together to form meaning, so is a worship service a broader bundle, in which “each of the actions, utterances, artifacts and spatial arrangements carries or combines within it all of these semiotic dimensions,” including space, performance, order, experiences of the divine, and the very fact that people are assembled (2003, 182; emphasis in the original). Hughes’ work leverages the gap between speech and body, between performance and performativity, to recognize a broad perspective of meaning in liturgy that exists beyond speech, and is but one of the many convolutions that performativity has created as it bounces around the halls of academia.

Affordances of performance studies for the study of church music Fissures notwithstanding, and having completed our excursus, we now unpack in detail each of the disciplinary traits that make performance studies uniquely suited for church music research. These characteristics are the foundation upon which rests the basic scaffolding of our performance framework for the study of church music.

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First, as we have seen, performance studies is interested in a broad spectrum of human activity. It embraces myriad scenarios and welcomes concepts from different fields to analyze subjects as diverse as neural connections, video performance, Catholic Mass, and contemporary theater. Taking into consideration the diversity of Christian musics available today, this broad approach becomes compelling; all the more so if we acknowledge the underlying connections between a Hillsong video on YouTube, the current CCLI charts, K-LOVE playlists, and worship as performed on a Sunday morning.12 This broad spectrum approach can also be viewed as an “ecological” approach to the study of performance. It affords investigations that, besides being interested in objects or subjects, are concerned with the connections between these objects/ subjects, and the context in which performances exist and occur. In Schechner’s work this “environmental theater” accounts for what is off the stage, such as audience and architecture, as much as for that which is on the stage. The connection with church music is immediate if the image of a worshiping congregation is substituted for a room full of theatergoers: what is happening off the stage, in the pews, becomes just as important as what is happening on the platform (i.e., at the altar). An example of how an ecological approach begins to find a place in the study of church music is Swee Hong Lim and Lester Ruth’s discussion of the architecture of ritual space and technological mediation in their work on contemporary Christian worship (2017). A second characteristic that arises from this broad spectrum approach of performance studies to the study of human activity is its inherent interdisciplinary and transcultural stance. Both Schechner and Turner emphasized looking to other cultural traditions in search of alternative approaches to practice and theory; this is clear in Turner’s anthropological work, and in Schechner’s engagement with traditional Indian performance manuals. Harding and Rosenthal (2011) describe how the fusing of Schechner’s broad spectrum with global interests has configured the field, with its particular balance between local expressions and transcultural connections. Performance studies is an “outward-looking” discipline with an ingrained translocal perspective. Because of this ecological perspective, studying church music as performance requires a methodology that acknowledges the rhyzomatic configuration of texts, protagonists, environments, and ideas. Today, church music is an essentially interdisciplinary undertaking, a “restless discipline” that combines interest in the changing face of global Christianity with efforts to acknowledge previously spurned voices. This restlessness has led to attempts to decolonize and demasculinize the discipline and the historiography of church music. New disciplinary perspectives have found a place in the church music toolbox. Scholars studying Christian religious music making today hail from a wide gamut of disciplinary backgrounds and rely on an interdisciplinary approach. They investigate transnational phenomena (Rommen 2007; Nekola and Wagner 2015); Christian musics and the music industry in general (Beaujon 2006; Stowe 2011); and music and religion in everyday life (Bohlman et al. 2006; Marini 2003).

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Performance studies’ interest in the cultural performance of the “other” has produced an academic stance that is well suited to these interdisciplinary and crosscultural applications. This stance can be helpful in examinations of mission work and curation of musical repertoires; immigration, diasporas and worship; transnational repertoires and imagined worshiping communities; global song and cultural justice; technological mediation and the impact of the Internet on contemporary worship music. All these topics, and others, happen at the fringes of cultural boundaries, and must be examined between disciplines as much as within them. Schechner uses “creases” to describe metaphorical areas for change in the perceived topography of human activity and society, such as cultural boundaries, defining them as “areas of instability, disturbance, and potentially radical changes in the social topography.” For him, “creases are not marginal, on the edge, but liminal, in between” (2003, 184). Schechner’s argument aligns with other interpretations of how aspects of culture, including products, ideas, and people flow from location to location on a large scale. Arjun Appadurai, describing increasingly intense global cultural flows, speaks of the disjunctures between different “worldscapes,” such as mediascapes and ethnoscapes, emphasizing that such flows occur at these disjunctures (1996). Thomas Csordas discusses the globalization of religions, in which boundaries are constantly negotiated, along similar lines (2009). For these scholars, the complex negotiation of boundaries and the flows that permeate these boundaries are characteristic of today’s cultural interactions. The framework of performance studies offers a methodological advantage to the study of the complex ebb and flow of influences that characterize the practice and interpenetration of religious repertoires in the church today, because it is able to go significantly further in the exploration of “the stakes, contingencies, perspectives and other factors that come into play any time humans interact with each other” than previous methodologies (Reynolds 2014, 3). It flourishes along these creases and disjunctions. A final consideration that warrants the application of performance studies to investigations of church music touches on questions of embodiment, play, and transformation in ritual activity. Performance research emphasizes the power of ritual to change and transform. Thus, it is not difficult to tailor its methodological structures to investigate how congregations, as they gather in a special place and time to make music together, negotiate questions of meaning and identity. For Schechner, “the ambition to make theater into ritual is nothing other than a wish to make performance efficacious, to use events to change people” (2003, 56). While Schechner’s connection of ritual and performance occurs in the context of theater, applying the idea to church music is not difficult. During the past half century, the Christian church (especially in the West) has experienced significant shifts in cultures of congregational worship often organized around the binary opposition between “traditional” and “contemporary.” In addition, the underlying expectation shared by much of the practical theology literature on church music is that what congregational

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worship does—or should do—is “change” people; in other words, it converts them. The integration of a systematized performance perspective can serve as a framework for the investigation of doing worship, particularly participating and engaging in congregational music in ways that are embodied.

Talking about performance: ethnographic perspectives Thus far, I have nuanced the concept of performance based on its disciplinary history, and outlined how it can contribute to the study of church music. Nevertheless, my claim that performance is a “bad word” in church is also rooted in my own experience of the “worship wars” of the 1990s and my analysis of worship literature.13 In order to fulfill my methodological promise of mashing up theory and practice, I turn to ethnography. Listening to voices “on the ground” can help us to understand the particular ways in which church members and musicians talk past each other in their own ways when negotiating questions about performance. Overall, my ethnographic interlocutors echoed the tropes, encountered in the literature, that betray a suspicion towards the idea of performance in church music. George, a university professor who worships at St. Alban’s, said that he appreciates the music there because “it’s not based on performance” (interview with author, December 12, 2017). A long-time UBCer, Bryan, shared with me his “cynical attitude towards the theater parts of worship. The concertiness.” His concern is that the “concertiness” could interfere with a general Godward orientation in their music. For him, the intention behind the playing should be different in church music. Furthermore, he believes that church music “should be a participatory thing, where everyone feels like they’re equally invested” (interview with author, December 18, 2017), implying that performance divides altar from pew, and separates performers from congregation. Other interviewees offered more generous perspectives when asked about the relationship between performance and worship, especially in the case of participants with formal musical training. John, a senior member of the St. Alban’s choir who taught university-level music for four decades, said that he integrated his performance experience with his church music. For him “they’re one and the same,” because the “teaching and the schooling that [he] had gone through to get ready to teach, that all contributed to what [he] had to offer when [he] was a choirmaster” (interview with author, December 19, 2017). Rebekah Hughes, a professional singer on the staff at St. Albans’, shared a similar perspective: Having been on the stage, and loving theater, from a very early age, and then eventually discovering opera and being a part of productions, there’s no way for me to separate that part of it from church. Even though it’s not a performance per se … I think it’s a much more basic thing, in that the whole reason that we offer music is to the honor and glory of God. So, we’re coming together to worship. And why are we coming together to worship? Because that’s what we do as Christians. And we form a body

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and worship together, and that’s a really basic thing. But out of that comes performance. (Interview with author, December 12, 2017) Hughes’ claim that worship “is not a performance per se” is telling, even if she does not regard the motives for performance as suspicious. Her claim echoes the conflicts identified in the scholarship between the presentational configuration of having some people up on the platform, people who are “twice-behaving” in a particular way, whose role is surrounded by a particular set of leadership expectations and who have rehearsed and prepared; and participants in the pews who are also “twice-behaving,” but who have not undergone the same process of preparation. This might be considered a performance configuration with audience and actors that, according to one condemning stance, cannot be considered valid because it is “unspiritual.” Hughes recognizes the performative configuration, but adds a caveat just in case: “even though it’s not a performance per se.” For Hughes, the performance nature of church music connects to her leadership responsibilities. If leaders perform well, participants do not notice “glitches” in the performance: I mean, if you’re sitting in a performance and something has obviously gone wrong, to me the best performances are where maybe, as an audience member, you know something has happened, but the performer covers it so seamlessly that it’s not a big deal and it just goes on … [There should never] be a place where you’re kind of wondering: “Is this supposed to be quiet or did someone forget to do something?” (2017) Other worship leaders echoed Hughes’ concern that the flow of the service should not be disrupted by awkward silences or unplanned punctuations. Therefore, leaders must prepare, rehearse, in order to perform leadership in church music. At São João Lutheran Church, worship pastor Fabiane Behling Luckow described how she tweaks what she describes as her “performance persona” according to where she is participating from, pew or platform: “I’m a lot more conscious of the gestures I’m making, of my posture, when I’m up front because I know that, in a way, the congregation mirrors or pays attention. So, when I’m up front I’m more “expressive,” she says. In contrast, when she is sitting in the pew she is more introspective: Certainly, when I’m in the pew I’m more introspective. I like to listen, to close my eyes, to keep to myself. Not that I won’t raise my hands or clap, but I’m more expressive when I’m up front, because I understand that I have a role [other] than in my personal space. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017)

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Luckow is describing a double performance of leadership. These performances are juxtaposed, and create a unique phenomenon in which church music leaders feel that it is imperative to monitor, among other things, their own gestures, voices, and body movements. The need to negotiate these two simultaneous performances—to reconcile different “performance personae”—extends beyond music to other aspects of the liturgy. At UBC, the weekly announcements come after the sung doxology and before the benediction. Toph Whisnant, the community pastor, and Jamie McGregor, the worship pastor, follow a routine of what long-time UBCer Emily Nance refers to as “snarky humor” and “dry comedy” (interview with author, February 7, 2018). Whisnant described how this weekly “liturgical skit” came about: When I was hired, the guy who did announcements before me was really funny … I’m not. I have a very dry humor that some people find as an asshole, some people are like “I get it, sweetie.” … I was told by our founder, David Crowder, that you need to be funny. And when I wasn’t funny, I was told that I need to be funnier. These are real conversations that I’ve had. So, part of that was one, that pressure. But then it is a time to offer some levity and not take ourselves too seriously, which I think is one of the attractions to UBC. So, it took me a while to push back and say “no, I’m not gonna be…” I felt the pressure, and then I was like “screw this, I’m not gonna be funny. I’m just gonna come up here and do announcements.” … The way I can create levity in that moment is just to stare at [McGregor] awkwardly and try to make him feel really awkward, and then people find that interaction humorous. He probably hates it. But it’s become our schtick. I’m just gonna stare at him, and he’s gonna keep shaking his head, like: “I don’t have anything.” I’m not funny, but people have told us they enjoy it. And so it’s a way that I can add some levity to the moment that, hopefully, brings people in. ’Cause now they look forward to it, like: “Oh, Toph and Jamie are up there. I usually find this humorous. I’m going to pay attention.” And hopefully something that I say actually sticks with them. (Interview with author, November 15, 2017) Whisnant’s “schtick” is a pastoral strategy. He trusts that participants will pay renewed attention as their leaders approach something as trivial as announcements with care, through a humorous performance that frames the announcements, and makes them special. In all these cases, performance personas serve specific purposes that are not readily apparent to the average churchgoer. McGregor acknowledged the awkwardness that Whisnant spoke of, not only in relation to the announcements, but also as part of his introverted personality. During our interview, I remarked that I never saw him lead worship without a guitar. McGregor said that holding a guitar in front of him “is a self-soothing sort of thing”:

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Maybe, in that moment, stripped of something to hold, it would be more evident that I’m extremely uncomfortable when I’m standing in front of people, you know? So, that’s an outwork of insecurity. I’m not super ashamed of my own insecurities. I’m OK with being honest about those … ’Cause on some measure, in terms of stage presence, that is a version of myself. That is a lot like me, but it’s almost like a mask that looks like me that I have to do in order to serve that function that I have been called to do by this community. ’Cause the non-mask-version, I’m not standing in front of people and I’m not doing these things. (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) The description of another McGregor, that is “a mask that looks like me,” is a means to an end, a performance persona that serves “the function that I have been called to do by this community.” Both Luckow and Hughes echoed McGregor and Whisnant’s point about building adequate performance personas and serving the congregation. What surfaces from participants’ and worship leaders’ descriptions of performance is a recognition that church music is, as Schechner said, twicebehaved. Such performances are sometimes centuries in the making, as leaders are trained to perform within the specific boundaries of tradition they inhabit. By entering into the performance of the music and the liturgy of the church, members and leadership weekly rehearse special behavior in a special place designated for their activity, and embody practices that may be recent or ancient. In the process, intercultural influences flow across congregational, denominational, theological, and geographical boundaries. They are received, contested, negotiated, and dissected. As a cluster of practices, activities, behaviors, and narratives, this glossolalia of church music can be considered the ritualized enactment of the sacred in the devotional life of believers. Moreover, this cluster of practices is contained in a separate space and time: the weekly congregational convening of a church body to worship together. Sunday worship is ritual performance.

Notes 1 I acknowledge that the postcolonial turn and the rise of reflexivity are distinct phenomena. Nevertheless, both are steps in the same direction in terms of accepted methodologies for research in the humanities, as well as reactions to previous assumptions in scholarship. In this sense, they are responses to a group of realizations and anxieties, but remain distinct. 2 A critique of the idea of canon can be found in The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums (Jones 2008). More recently, it seems that objectoriented music analysis is considering performance implications in analysis—a welcome development. 3 Examples include Rienstra and Rienstra (2009) and Wren (2000). Although in both cases there is some allowance for other texts, most of the repertoire analyses depend on lyrics.

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4 Such as, but not limited to Cloud (1998); Johansson (1992); Jones (2006); Lynch (1999); Makujina (2000); McLean (1998); Miller (1993); and Seel (1995). 5 Judith Butler’s concept of hyper-repetition, for instance (Butler 1990). 6 Examples include Reily (2002); Grainger (2009); Oswald and Trumbauer (1999); and Son (2014). 7 An important point here is that the performance of church music is located more on the “efficacy” side of the continuum; in my fieldwork, when interviewees talk about their experience, they are generally engaging in a discussion of what they deem to be “effective” participation in church music rather than in a merely entertaining experience that has little transformative consequence on their lives. 8 The first performance studies department was founded at New York University in 1981 (Schechner 2013, 2). The program at Northwestern followed in 1985 (2013, 6), and programs are now available in the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Asia. 9 Speaking, for instance, of Searle and Derrida’s argument on how to read Austin’s work, Loxley suggests that “neither party was able to acknowledge that his own account of Austin might not encapsulate the body of work that had provided the occasion for confrontation” (2007, 4). 10 Butler’s transplantation of the term “performative” is symptomatic of the historical tension between continental and analytic philosophy. Scholars such as Cavell, in The Claim of Reason (1999), have attempted to address this divide, and I will refrain from doing so here. I use “fissure,” and “divide” in a manner similar to Cavell’s use of “gap” or Agamben’s idea of the “open” (2004), or Mahmood’s “chiasmus.” All these descriptors point to the epistemological divide in relation to the availability of knowledge. For more background on the divide and its implications for philosophy and performance studies, see Bell (2016); Krasner and Saltz (2006). 11 Moreover, Butler’s idea of hyper-repetition can be traced to Erving Goffman’s work in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Goffman was one of the first social scientists to “turn to the theatre for a framework with which to interpret non-theatrical behavior” (Bial and Brady 2016, 61). Goffman defines performance, in the context of his work, as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (Goffman 1959, 15). 12 “CCLI” stands for Christian Copyright Licensing International, the company that licenses most of the music in the contemporary Christian industry (CCLI n.d.). K-LOVE is one of the largest Christian radio networks in the United States (K-LOVE n.d.). 13 For a historical account of the worship wars, see Terry W. York, America’s Worship Wars (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003). An example of anecdotal literature/commentary about church music can be found in Michael S. Hamilton, “The Triumph of the Praise Songs,” ChristianityToday.com, www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/1999/july12/9t8028.html (accessed September 5, 2016).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Balme, Christopher. 2014. “Public Sphere.” In Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories, ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beaujon, Andrew. 2006. Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

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Begbie, Jeremy. 2005. “Theology and Music.” In The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918, ed. David Ford and Rachel Muers. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bell, Jeffrey A. ed. 2016. Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge. Best, Harold M. 1993. Music through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco. Bial, Henry, and Sara Brady. 2016. The Performance Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Bohlman, Philip Vilas, Edith Waldvogel Blumhofer, and Maria M. Chow, eds. 2006. Music in American Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Cavell, Stanley. 1999. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. CCLI. n.d. “About Christian Copyright Licensing International.” https://us.ccli.com/a bout-ccli/ (accessed November 30, 2015). Clifford, James, George E. Marcus, and the School of American Research, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cloud, David W. 1998. Contemporary Christian Music under the Spotlight. Oak Harbor, WA: Way of Life Literature. Csordas, Thomas J. ed. 2009. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Felman, Shoshana. 2013. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Grainger, Roger. 2009. The Drama of the Rite: Worship, Liturgy and Theatre Performance. Portland OR: Sussex Academic Press. Hamilton, Michael S. n.d. “The Triumph of the Praise Songs.” ChristianityToday.com. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1999/july12/9t8028.html (accessed September 6, 2016). Harding, James Martin, and Cindy Rosenthal, eds. 2011. The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hood, Mantle. 1960. “The Challenge of ‘Bi-Musicality.’” Ethnomusicology 4(2): 55–59. Hughes, Graham. 2003. Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingalls, Monique M. 2019. “Guest Editor’s Notes.” The Hymn: A Journal of Congregational Song, 71(3): 3. Ingalls, Monique M., Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner. 2013. Christian Congregational Music Performance, Identity, and Experience. Farnham: Ashgate. Johansson, Calvin M. 1992. Discipling Music Ministry: Twenty-First Century Directions. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Jones, Carys Wyn. 2008. The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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Jones, Paul S. 2006. Singing and Making Music: Issues in Church Music Today. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing. K-LOVE. n.d. “Positive & Encouraging K-LOVE.” www.klove.com/ (accessed April 6, 2018). Krasner, David, and David Z.Saltz, ed. 2006. Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kubicki, Judith Marie. 1999. Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol: A Case Study of Jacques Berthier’s Taizé Music. Leuven: Peeters. Lim, Swee Hong, and Lester Ruth. 2017. Lovin’ on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Loxley, James. 2007. Performativity. New York: Routledge. Lynch, Kenneth. 1999. Biblical Music in a Contemporary World. Chester, PA: Selfpublished. McLean, Terri Bocklund. 1998. New Harmonies: Choosing Contemporary Music for Worship. Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute. Mahmood, Saba. 2011. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Makujina, John. 2000. Measuring the Music: Another Look at the Contemporary Christian Music Debate. Salem, OH: Schmul. Marini, Stephen A. 2003. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Miller, Steve. 1993. The Contemporary Christian Music Debate. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale. Nekola, Anna E., and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies series. Farnham: Ashgate. Oswald, Roy M., and Jean Morris Trumbauer. 1999. Transforming Rituals: Daily Practices for Changing Lives. Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1(2): 149–166. Reily, Suzel Ana. 2002. Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reynolds, Bryan, ed. 2014. Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rienstra, Debra, and Ron Rienstra. 2009. Worship Words: Discipling Language for Faithful Ministry. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. “Mek Some Noise” Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley, CA and Chicago, IL: University of California Press. Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Media ed. Sara Brady. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Seel, Thomas Allen. 1995. A Theology of Music for Worship Derived from the Book of Revelation. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, no. 3. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Son, Timothy D. 2014. Ritual Practices in Congregational Identity Formation. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Steuernagel, Marcos. 2015. The Surface of Events: Politics and the Body in Contemporary Brazilian Performance. PhD thesis. New York University. Steuernagel, Marcos, and Diana Taylor. 2015. What Is Performance Studies? Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/wips/index (accessed October 1, 2016).

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Stowe, David W. 2011. No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wren, Brian A. 2000. Praying Twice the Music and Words of Congregational Song. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. York, Terry W. 2003. America’s Worship Wars. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

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Ritual is a fundamental aspect not only of religion, but of everyday human life. Since the nineteenth century, the notion of ritual has been instrumental to the study of religion and society. Ritual studies came into its own after the midtwentieth century through the works of Victor Turner and Ronald Grimes, and became a cornerstone concept in anthropology, theology, church music studies, and performance studies. Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) was particularly influential in theology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and performance studies. His work shaped Richard Schechner’s thoughts on ritual, and found its way into his definition of ritual as “collective memories encoded into actions” (Schechner 2013, 52). The concept of ritual is a nexus in historical, chronological, and methodological terms. It connects scholarship in anthropology, theology (including liturgics), musicology (including ethnomusicology and church music), and performance studies. My goal is to synthesize these connections into three ritual nodes for the study of church music as performance: repetition, transformation, and—in Chapter 3—participation. From the perspective of ritual, Schechner’s description-definition of performance as “twice-behaved” or restored behavior is connected to the establishment of identities, demarcation of time, and the creation of narratives (2013, 28). Church music certainly falls within this purview, and the idea of church music as “twicebehaved” connects to other phenomena investigated in relation to worship by scholars, such as deep listening and trance (Becker 2004), embodiment in Pentecostal experience (Poloma 2003), and entrainment (Myrick 2017). Congregational musicking can be considered a type of ritual action that forefronts “collective restored memories” into a tangible, performable activity. Broadly speaking, the performance of church music is a ritual that wraps restored memory (anamnesis), ritual, and music into a performative bundle.

The rise of ritual studies According to Ronald Grimes, early interest in the study of ritual within Western Christianity began in medieval universities. This period was followed by growing interest in ritual outside the halls of seminaries by early anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after which

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participant-observation and ethnography began to appear in research (Grimes 1996, xiv). Finally, in the 1960s, anthropologists began investigating rituals without oversight from theological institutions, thereby giving rise to functional understandings of ritual both as “an object for and method of analysis” (Bell, 2009, 14).1 The work of Turner is central to the study of ritual and to the development of performance studies.2 Furthermore, influenced by his own conversion to Roman Catholicism (Larsen 2014, 189), Turner pushed back against anthropologists’ tendency to “explain, or explain away, religious phenomena as the product of psychological or sociological causes of the most diverse and even conflicting types, denying to them any preterhuman origin” (1969, 4). Turner’s advocacy for the study of religious phenomena from the perspectives of anthropology and ritual studies created a path for the application of his work to the academic study of religious music in particularly fruitful ways.3 His work allows for the possibility of a divine other, an allowance that appears, for instance, in his work on Ndembu ritual in Zambia (Turner 1976, 519). In 1908, Van Gennep published Les Rites de Passage, and Turner draws from Van Gennep’s architecture of ritual activity, which runs along a conceptual path of structure and anti-structure. Turner depicts social life as a dialectic process that “involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality … states and transitions” (1969, 97). In this architecture, ritual activity can be viewed as a kind of special container of imbalance, a platform on which transitions between structures, or the pendulum flow between stability and instability called liminality, can be negotiated without harm to the structural foundations of society. Based on the work of Van Gennep, he describes liminal entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (1969, 95). Liminal entities are special, and serve as a label for the transitional and elusive in ritual experience. Another concept that appears in Turner’s work in connection with liminality is communitas, derived from the “blend [offered by liminal phenomena] of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship” (1969, 97). He differentiates community, characterized by stability within societal structures, with communitas, which emerges during ritual activity. The concept of communitas acknowledges “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society” (1969, 97; emphasis in the original). Liminality and communitas are interrelated concepts, and are phenomenologically linked in a dialectic tension of stability and instability that results in the reintegration or re-stabilization of individuals undergoing ritual experience into the broader society.4 In light of these concepts, Turner envisions society as a process that unfolds in successive phases of structure and communitas. Human experience, he claims, wavers between the two but needs both: the certainty of structure, and the exploration of the unknown (1969, 203). In other words, the human experience wavers between known and verifiable and unknown and unverifiable. Such claims found their way into performance studies, liturgical studies,

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and other environments in which religious ritual and musical activities are examined in combination. They also demonstrate how the concept of ritual has moved beyond anthropology and ritual studies into liturgical studies and church music, an intersection to which we now turn. Ritual from anthropology into theology and liturgical studies Grimes’ account of the rise of ritual studies places the discipline at the boundaries between anthropology and theology (1995, xxv). Whereas early anthropologists tended to focus on non-Western cultures extraneous to their own worlds, since the 1970s, anthropologists have increasingly focused on their own cultural milieus, leading to processes of anthropological self-examination, including the anthropology of theology (Adams and Salamone 1999, 2). At intersections such as this, we begin to see recurring tropes that surface in performance studies: a concern for intercultural dialogue; a valorization of reflexivity; and a participant-observer stance willing to examine one’s own beliefs and, in this case, ritual practices, from a scholarly perspective. These investigations of ritual activity can be turned outward and inward because the definition of ritual is flexible and scalable; it can encompass a variety of texts and can be applied to minute or vast instances. Edward Muir, in his examination of ritual in early modern Europe, defines ritual as “a social activity that is repetitive, standardized, a model or a mirror, and its meaning is inherently ambiguous” (2005, 6). Such inherent ambiguity reflects Turner’s framing of ritual activity as liminal, i.e., something that is identifiable but which defies description. In this sense, as Muir teases out the implications of ritual theories for the religious practices of European Christians, he warns of the dangers of reducing ritual to words (or to any one text, for that matter), concluding that “one must pay as much attention to the body as to the mind, as much to the power of the gaze and the touch as to the meaning of words” (2005, 11). The examination of ritual, then, is a broad exercise that cannot be performed teleologically, with exclusive concern for its intended goals. Grimes warns that, if theology seeks to study ritual solely from the perspective of its designers, a fundamental dimension of ritual activity—the “thoughts and gestures” beyond oversight during ritual activity—might be overlooked: Liturgists sometimes think the meaning of a ritual consists of the ideas that theologians and pastors thought when they first constructed them. But ritual meaning consists just as surely of the random thoughts and gestures that occur during a ritual. In practical terms this criticism means that more serious attention must be given in seminaries to the anthropology of ritual and to comparative liturgics if we are to find the skills and methods for performing such tasks. (1995, 8)

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Grimes’ concern with examining ritual from a comprehensive perspective echoes the broad spectrum approach of performance studies, and was reflected in my ethnography. Whether in reference to gestures of engagement, such as the raising of hands or the closing of eyes, or in the way interviewees talk about their bodies—or the body of the other—in their experience of church music, my interlocutors frequently demonstrated interest in what was going on at the fringes of congregational singing, or what Grimes calls “random thoughts and gestures” in musicking, as we shall see later on. Grimes’ critique—that an understanding of ritual activity that is limited to the intentions of liturgists and pastors is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, dangerous (a view espoused by Muir and others)—has not come solely from outside of theology. In fact, liturgical scholars have also acknowledged that ritual studies, especially as developed within anthropology, is an essential tool for the study of Christian worship and, for our purposes, the study of church music: “ritual studies obviously has a huge potential for helping worship leaders to understand better the activity in which they are engaged and the effect that their innovations can have on congregations” (Bradshaw and Melloh 2007, vii).5 The study of ritual in theology has crystallized into various perspectives, four of which I engage with here: ritual practices and pastoral pedagogy; ritual in everyday life; liturgy as ritual theater; and intersectional readings of ritual in theology and ritual studies. I do so broadly, incorporating voices from a variety of liturgical traditions, to better demonstrate the relevance of an examination of ritual to the study of church music. The work of Timothy Son illustrates how ritual has become crucial in practical theology, especially in the study of pastoral care (2014). Exploring the pedagogical functions of ritual practices in worshiping congregations, Son leverages Turnerian concepts such as liminality and communitas, seeking to build a bridge between “an anthropologically informed approach to ritual practice and a socio-religious investigation of congregational identity formation” (2014, 4). In his work, the idea of performance appears through a perspective that examines how “ritual practices nurture and transform the collective sense of identity shared among congregation members” (2014, 17). Oswald and Trumbauer’s work represents a second cluster of theological investigations of ritual that are aimed at a wider readership (1999). They describe ritual as “patterned activities that create and express meaning through the use of symbols and gestures” (1999, 11), approaching ritual primarily with practical applicability in mind, and broaden the reader’s comprehension of ritual activity to include everyday activities from the perspective of pastoral care. Primarily oriented towards liturgists, pastors, and other church leaders, their work does not focus on the intricacies of ritual theory; rather, it tends to “cut to the chase,” giving people with limited time for reading and research avenues to explore ritual in their church environments. Other scholars examine ritual in everyday life, beyond the church walls. For philosopher and theologian Gerard Lukken, ritual in the culture of Western Europe has suffered a crisis and a resurgence (2005). An important connection

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that he makes is between the edicts of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent flowering of interactions between the study of ritual in the church and study of ritual from the anthropological perspective (2005, 5–6). Lukken weaves the study of ritual and the study of culture together, because “the interrelations of ritual and culture have far-reaching consequences when a radical cultural transition takes place” (2005, 218). For him, the secularization of the West has broken Christendom’s monopoly on ritual in everyday life. Consequently, the West has moved from a crisis in ritual, especially in the 1960s, to a renewed multiplicity of cultural rituals after the 1990s. Tom Driver’s work flows between theology and ritual studies (1998), in a unique blend of scholarship oriented towards the church but fully engaged with the main corpus of ritual studies (1998, xvi–xvii). He echoes basic assumptions of ritual studies scholarship about the essentiality of ritual in human activity and its pervasiveness in everyday life. Driver’s account connects ritual activity to performance, especially as framed by Schechner’s efficacy-entertainment braid, in an analysis of corporate ritual performances along with everyday ritual activity, arguing that the patterns of behavior we meet in rituals are no more formal and prescribed than those of hard-at-work traffic cops, barbers, cooks, or tailors. If certain behaviors are repeated frequently and in familiar ways in rituals, that is because the rituals are techniques. (1998, 238) They are, in effect, twice-behaved behaviors. In other words, they are performances. A final subset of practical theology’s approach to ritual compares church and theater. In The Drama of the Rite (2009), Roger Grainger leverages the connection between ritual and theater in an attempt to “bridge the gap between writing theoretically about liturgy and actually finding a way of making our own worship more immediate and authentic as the expression of our actual lives, our own experience of God and one another” (2009, 4). His work walks a fine line between practical applicability and robust engagement with ritual theory. Grainger explores the dramatic and narrative aspects of ritual activity, arguing that theatre’s connection with liturgy thus concerns the very heart of our experience of drama—the way we feel drawn beyond the limiting circumstances we usually find ourselves in to engage a spiritual reality which enables us to share and lose ourselves in sharing. (2009, 41) Grainger’s work shares in foundational aspects of performance theory. His idea that the performance of ritual activity produces reintegration and/or transformation resonates with the idea that the performance of church music is, in fact, ritualized drama: those who participate in it have roles that are defined through tradition, expectations, and context.

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The examples I mention illustrate some of the connections between the study of ritual and theology, and demonstrate several ways in which they interact with one another. Finally, we must pursue ritual studies into performance studies, folding this genealogy into the study of church music. Ritual and performance studies Owing to his collaboration with Schechner, Turner shifted from the concept of ritual to performance as a “hub” around which to organize his work. In From Ritual to Theater (1982), he expands his anthropological analyses of social processes by conflating the idea of drama into social enactments, exploring the theatrical potential of social life (1982, 9). In other words, he treats social life as performed ritual. Turner searched for these dramas in every arena of human activity, because “every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre, and poetry, is explanation and explication of life itself” (1982, 13). At this point, Turner uses the etymology of performance to catapult his endeavor into performance: “it has nothing to do with ‘form,’ but derives from Old French parfournir, ‘to complete’ or ‘carry out thoroughly.’ A performance, then, is the proper finale of an experience” (1982, 13). Turner envisions Schechner’s connection between social drama and stage drama as a loop that continually feeds back into itself, and from there expands his original definition of ritual from “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine” (1967, 19), to include performance: “I like to think of ritual essentially as performance, enactment, not primarily as rules or rubrics. The rules ‘frame’ the ritual process, but the ritual process transcends its frame” (1982, 79; emphasis in the original). His definition sheds light on how performance theory conceptualizes ritual in two respects. The first is a consideration of scope. Performance “gobbles up” ritual and opens up its analytical curiosity to any form of patterned or twice-behaved behaviors. Second, performance theory expands the ritual process beyond its frame. It is not contained in the ritual, but convolutes outwards through myriad (and complex) interactions. Everyday life and performed ritual become inextricable from each other. Turner recognizes this dynamic: “the rules may ‘frame’ the performance, but the ‘flow’ of action and interaction within that frame may conduce to hitherto unprecedented insights and even generate new symbols and meanings, which may be incorporated into subsequent performances” (1982, 79). Schechner shares Turner’s notion of ritual as being essential to human life. He examines the interplay between what he considers the great spheres of performance (entertainment, healing, education, and ritualizing) in The Future of Ritual (1993). Here Schechner defines ritual as “a process applying to a great range of human activities rather than as something tethered to religion” (1993, 20). He suggests that ritualization is in fact a process of recycling, of performing inclusion into an archive, of creating a repository of memory; not only thematically, but also structurally (1993, 19–20). Arguing for the application of a performance lens to subjects outside the realm of theater, Schechner advocates

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that this framework is “a very effective method for a time of charged rhetorics, simulations and scenarios, and games played on a global scale” (1993, 20). He suggests that “performance studies builds on the emergence of a postcolonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with, and fertilizing each other” (1993, 21). Schechner acknowledges that an increasingly complex world warrants an increasingly broad framework for analysis, thus eliciting the expansion of the idea of ritual into performance. He concludes that “rituals are not safe deposit vaults of accepted ideas but in many cases dynamic performative systems generating new materials and recombining traditional actions in new ways” (1993, 228). Schechner suggests that, through the application of a performance lens, it is possible to examine ritual as a dynamic and constant interplay between exploration and safety, between continuity and change, in human activity. Moreover, these processes occur in experience; not apart from the body, but in interactions within and between bodies; a recurring leitmotif that will be addressed later. As such, Schechner’s characterization of ritual as dynamic and generative lends itself to the study of contemporary church music phenomena, complex as they are.

Ritual nodes in church music studies Amid the multiple features of ritual that emerge across disciplinary boundaries, three intersectional nodes come to the fore: repetition, transformation, and participation. My discussion of each of these nodes mashes together the theoretical work on ritual we have examined up to this point with the voices of my interlocutors on the ground. First, I examine how ritual repetition of church music, in the context of particular worship traditions, generates meaning and identity for participants. Second, I investigate how ritual activity often entails expectations of change, and how these transformative expectations are enacted. The third node, participation, is the subject of the next chapter. “Forming deep grooves into people’s souls”: ritual repetition and church music It is All Saints Sunday at St. Alban’s. I usually sit up in the balcony to get a better view of the congregation, but today I am seated in a pew downstairs. Behind me, a young mother balances the service bulletin in one hand, and her daughter in the other. In front of me, a senior couple transitions seamlessly from one part of the liturgy to the next. I think to myself that they’ve done this for a while. The celebrant finishes a collect and, as he says “Amen,” the organ leads the congregation in a short refrain: “glory, glory to God in the highest.” The choir responds with the continuation of the Gloria; we listen for the cue, and join in again: “glory, glory to God in the highest.” Back to the choir. Each time, we wait expectantly for our turn to join in, punctuating the lyrics with these repetitions. We follow this pattern four times, and the liturgy moves on.

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Repetition is integral to making music. In On Repeat, Elizabeth Margulis argues that “not only is repetition a feature of the music of all known cultures, it is also rather irresistible” (2013, 5). Furthermore, she argues, repetition is part and parcel of shared activity and helps to create “interpersonal cohesion” (2013, 6). In the context of church music, repetition is crucial. From the refrain of a worship song to yearly festival liturgies, congregations revisit words and music in worship. We will explore this complex interlocking pattern of musical repetition from two perspectives: the creation of patterns, and the creation of memory. First, repetition establishes patterns, or what Driver calls an “economy of behavior,” that sets up routines in a repertoire of gestures that we regularly navigate (1998, 134). In the case of “going to church,” these patterns can be as diverse as making the sign of the cross when crossing the threshold of the temple, or stopping by the coffee table on the way to the sanctuary. As it establishes these patterns, repetition frames the specialness of the location and the activity, prepares participants for engagement in worship, and orients the mind towards the activity in question. The patterning created through repetition might be experienced unconsciously by congregants, but it is certainly central in the minds of congregational leaders. Neal McGowan, assistant rector at St. Alban’s, talks of the cyclical nature of worship, using the metaphor of an LP: The hope is that [the repetition of liturgy] shapes [congregants’] identity. The hope is that liturgy can form habits, that the words get sort of ingrained, like on a record, you know, the grooves in the record, on people’s hearts and minds. And you do see evidence of that. I see it when there’s people who grew up Episcopalian, leave the church for years, and say: “I never forgot the liturgy, I just had to come back.” There’s something deep in them that both the actions and the words connects with and never left … But I think the hope is that it does sort of form deep grooves in people’s souls. (Interview with author, December 11, 2017) This image of forming deep grooves in “people’s hearts and minds” reflects McGowan’s expectation that ritual repetition will shape congregants over time, and that it will reverberate beyond the boundaries of the sanctuary and into the lives of participants. To this effect, ritual must be rehearsed. It must be repeated during worship, but also in preparation for worship. At St. Alban’s, where Eucharist is offered every week, the importance of synchronizing music and action appears in the preparation routine. Aaron Zimmerman, the rector, and McGowan rehearse Eucharist almost every week in order to align it with director of music Eugene Lavery’s choice of anthem. According to St. Alban’s connections coordinator and staff singer Rebekah Hughes, the foremost concern in this process is “so you’re not watching people bumble up there” (interview with author, December 12, 2017). But I also suggest that rehearsing the Eucharist every week produces deep grooves—patterns—for the leadership

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team itself. Even if rehearsal is considered a “backstage” activity that is not apparent to Sunday morning worshipers, it is this ritual repetition, the rehearsal of performance, which facilitates and supports the Sunday morning performance of liturgy. Just as a musician rehearses to perform in front of an audience, or actors rehearse a script for the stage, congregational leaders polish their own performances and rehearse gestures, coordination, expressions, and logistics, patterning their ritual actions to facilitate the congregation’s participation. One might argue that the activity at St. Alban’s is unique because it is an example of highly regulated ritual; one that is more fixed than Free church traditions such as Baptist or non-denominational ones. However, I argue that repetition is important to the performance of liturgy and of church music within these contexts as well. Zack, a university professor who teaches design and worships at UBC, stated: One of the key elements of unity in a composition is repetition. So, if you don’t have anything to unify the diverse parts, there’s no relationality from one thing to next. It’s like, “this doesn’t make sense in this work, ’cause it’s got no connection to other things.” Repetition, then, becomes a way to create that unity in the dialogue throughout the whole thing. But then, if you have something that’s just purely unified, just pure repetition and nothing diversified, it seems that’s when things become dead. So, I just think that form of repetition is like a human need, I think, a really deep human need, to feel like some kind of sense is being made of year after year. (Interview with author, January 2, 2017) Bryan, another UBCer, argued in the same direction when talking about the Eucharist: People do complain about taking communion too often. It’s like: “Oh! Do you feel the same way about sleeping with your spouse?” No! “Hey, I’m only gonna do it once a month, ’cause any more than that ruins the meaning.” Things that you love and care about, and have a meaningful connection to, the repetition of it is not a question. Because it becomes a question when it is something you don’t like doing, something that’s disturbing to you. (Interview with author, December 18, 2017) Both of these remarks illustrate how ritual repetition is valued even in Free church congregational worship, and illustrates how this balance between repetition and variety might be negotiated in a context different from that of St. Albans. Later in the conversation with Bryan, which turned to the cyclical nature of the music at UBC, he mentioned that the music of the church is something one becomes “wrapped up in” by repeating older and more recent songs, and that repetition is meaningful “because it allows it to be old and new

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at the same time” (2017). Thus, repetition affords participation on two axes: that of interaction with the present, with the “new songs” of the church, and also with the musical heritage of congregations. Ritual repetition patterns these connections. It is the cyclical engagement in worship that allows these chains to be established for participants in church music. The second perspective through which we examine these patterns of musical repetition pertains to the creation of memory in ritual repetition, particularly in connection with the use of words in liturgy. Words are of paramount importance in Christian worship, both in liturgy in general, and in the lyrics of church music in particular. Words are repeated, either through song or through recitation; through event slogans and catch phrases; through utterances such as “peace be with you” and “welcome to [insert name of congregation here].” Stephen Marini describes the power of words in religious ritual activity as a form of “mythic language” that gives name to the sacred and reveals how this sacred interacts with people. According to him, this language “supplies a criterion by which musical emotion qualifies to be a carrier of sacred meaning. The harnessing of musical expression to mythic content defines sacred song (2003, 4). Marini’s idea that these sacred songs supply words and “articulate the sacred cosmos” for worshipers aligns with Turner’s description of transformations in ritual processes. In fact, Marini steers his argument about the function and power of sacred song towards ritual: Sacred song must at least combine music with mythic content. Under what conditions, however, does a song become religious? The answer to this final defining question lies in sacred-song performance and the complex realm of sacred ritual. … For a song to be sacred, it must possess not only belief content but also ritual intention and form. Ritual is the defining performance condition for sacred song, as mythic content is its defining cognitive condition. … The ritual process, however, does not occur only in traditional religious environments like churches, synagogues, or mosques. In those sacred spaces, the ritual intention and context of sacred song are made categorically explicit. … But there are other sacred-song contexts in which mythic content is less explicit and ritual itself becomes the principal vehicle of religious meaning. (2003, 7) Marini combines the basic components in the recipe of sacred song: music, mythic content, ritual intention, and ritual form. His claim that “ritual is the defining performance condition for sacred song” resonates with how worshipers talk about their own participation in the music of the church. Marini uses Turner’s language of ritual process and extrapolates it beyond the traditional spaces in which the sacred is performed, recognizing something that Turner, Schechner, Grimes, and other scholars emphasize repeatedly: that the performance of ritual moves beyond its boundaries; that the words that are sung on Sunday morning echo into Monday and throughout the week, and that the combination of activity and memory etches deep grooves in the lives of participants.6

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Leaders and congregants alike recognize the importance of ritual repetition in the “etching” of belief in ways that help them to negotiate words in theology in liturgy and song. At St. Alban’s, Zimmerman speaks of how participating in ritual repetition “marinates you in these theological ideas and truths” (interview with author, November 17, 2017), an idea shared by participants. A congregant told me that repetition actually ingrains it in my mind and it’s there when I need it. You know, at previous times in my life I thought a lot that it was just vain repetition, but since I’ve been a part of it I’ve found that it’s actually the opposite … It helps to ingrain it in your consciousness … And music, to me, almost speeds up the memorization process. (Paul, interview with author, December 13, 2017) Other interviewees echoed the notion that music serves a mnemonic function, facilitates memorization and—as suggested by the image of “ingraining”—deepens comprehension of these words through ritual repetition. Fabiane Behling Luckow, worship pastor at São João Lutheran Church, also spoke of how “music helps to record the word in a hemisphere of the brain that is not the rational.” Luckow described how her grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, recognized the melody, remembered the words, and I think that in this sense music is different from the spoken word because besides touching on the part of the brain responsible for speech and listening, it also activates another kind of memory, so it helps to record the message. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Similar narratives surfaced in other interviews. While leaders and participants were not necessarily able to describe the process in detail, questions such as those of Jamie McGregor, UBC’s worship pastor, show an awareness of the phenomenon: what does melody do to the brain? What does song do the brain that we can tuck those things even in the recesses of our head? Toph Whisnant, UBC’s community pastor, stated: I think the fact that we sing together sticks with us more … So, if there’s a rhythm to [a song], it helps it ingrain within me more, and I’m able to recall it more. That is the nature of music in a lot of ways. (Interview with author, November 15, 2017) Scholars agree with these practitioner impressions. Margulis emphasizes that music’s goal is not to convey information; its function is aesthetic, but not in the same way that other art serves an aesthetic function such as painting or film. To make her point, she compares music and poetry:

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Poems are reread, and re-enjoyed, but lack both the internal repetition characteristic of music, and the capacity to generate earworms (you don’t get stuck in the shower reciting “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?,” although if it were set to a pop tune you might). … You could duck out of the poem fairly easily, whereas a snippet of familiar music triggers a cascade of “that song” that takes over and won’t let you go. Interestingly, it’s much harder to memorize a poem than a song. At first glance, this would seem to make repetition more desirable for poems than for music, where we are able to know “how it goes” much quicker. That the reverse is true suggests that the pleasure we derive from musical repetitions might stem less from increasing knowledge about the piece than from a growing sense of inhabiting the music: [it is] a transportive, even transcendent kind of experience. (2013, 14–15) Margulis argues that repetition is more prevalent in music than in language, be that everyday speech or the heightened language of poetry, and attributes the efficacy of song to “etch deep grooves into memory” to the interest generated by repetition itself. In other words, the structured framework provided by music affords interest, or engagement, in unique ways. While listening to or performing church music may or may not be an everyday ritual for congregants, even if practiced once a week, it might be considered an “everyday ritual” in the sense that it is repeated in a regular fashion. Overall, Luckow’s idea that “music touches other parts of the brain” is precisely what scholars such as Margulis, along with congregational participants and leaders, describe. Ritual repetition etches deep theological grooves in people’s lives through words, as well as deep musical grooves in their memories. A distinction between the experience of reciting words together and singing them together was also expressed. Emily Nance, former children’s pastor at UBC, feels that singing together “opens the door to everyone, and it implants more deeply in us when we sing the words together” (interview with author, February 7, 2018). Nance, who grew up singing from the Baptist hymnal, said that I know every alto line to every hymn by heart. I know them all, because my mom was an alto, and the other lady who sat with us was an alto, so I heard them from either side. I don’t know the melody of a lot of them, but I know the alto lines to every single one. But I think that sort of knits us together. (2018) She was not the only one who mentioned singing hymns with grandparents and other community elders. Sometimes congregants’ strong memories of paired hymn texts and tunes create challenges. St. Alban’s music director Eugene Lavery mentioned congregants’ resistance to his pairings of texts and tunes in unorthodox combinations:

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Ritual and performance in church music studies [I]f you suddenly mix [it] up and say “OK, I’m going to put this text with this tune that they only know to other words,” people will notice that and not feel so good about it often … In a kind of way, that speaks to the power of music. (Interview with author, November 20, 2017)

It also speaks, I should add, to the power of the ritual repetition of music. Hughes, who works with Lavery, describes these associations, these pairings, as “something deeper and different than just a word … I think that hearing familiar things set in new ways is another way to go deeper and think about things differently” (2017). In other words, within the context of ritual repetition, variation is important. The “jolt” described by Lavery and Hughes, which comes from hearing a familiar tune or text recoupled with a different tune or set of words, can reignite participants’ interest in ritual activity. On the other hand, it may harm participation, a concern discussed in the next chapter. In any case, the combination may be important because of what the ritual repetition of church music does beyond the words, as McGregor articulated: One verse that makes a lot of sense to me because of my charismatic background is in the end of Romans, 3:26-ish I think, where the Spirit groans with utterings that cannot be [expressed] … yeah, and I think that for me, like, you look at evolutionary science and how just, very early on, there’s evidence that people were communicating through sustained grunts or tones. And I think that there’s something primal about those groanings. In that noise. And there’s a point in the church, just like silence, where words fail and music, wordless music, takes us to a place within our own hearts that lyrics can’t. (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) If, in McGregor’s words, music takes us to a place that lyrics can’t, what place does it take us to in church music, as repertoires are projected in time through repetition, and congregational performances catapult the experience beyond the descriptive nature of the words? What senses does it generate in the performance of church music? “Habits make us who we are”: musical repetition and identity The ritual repetition of church music generates a sense of identity, both individual and corporate, and positions participants in relation to particular traditions of worship. It helps participants to engender particular identities. My interlocutors described congregational music making as “plugging in” to a story. Juarez, a young guitarist in São João’s music ministry, said: repetition is important because there is a continuity in our faith journey. If repetition were not important, maybe there wouldn’t be the need to come

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to worship every week. So, we pay attention to what we are singing, what we are saying, through music. (Interview with author, October 22, 2017) Juarez is describing the process of participating continually, repeatedly, in the song of the church. The way in which music helps worshipers to “pay attention to what we are singing” connects with Margulis’s perspective of processes of cognition in music (2013). Besides the lyrics of the songs, it is the repetitive act of “coming to worship every week” that helps worshipers to interact with the liturgy and its theology. By engaging in this activity, worshipers position themselves as part of the story because the words they are singing are the words of the story. They appropriate these words by singing with their own voices, and confirm by their repeated bodily presence in the communal instances of church life that they are there, that they are a part of the group. Through this process of participatory ritual repetition and sharing of a repertoire, a narrative identity is established. Moreover, liturgical repetition generates identity in macro- and micro-cycles—two ritual patterns, one revolving within the other. The macro-cycle is the church calendar of seasons such as Lent, Epiphany, Christmas, and Easter. The micro-cycle is the weekly experience of worship. These revolving, concentric circles of ritual activity are acknowledged by leadership when they talk about the music of the church. Josh Carney, UBC’s senior pastor, describes a conversation with a young participant who held him accountable for not “preaching the Gospel” in every service. Carney’s response was: “we tell the Gospel story every year, and not every week.” From his perspective, one of the main roles of the macro-cycle is to tell the entire story. The role of music in the telling is “to help locate the mood of that story. Just like a score does in a soundtrack” (interview with author, December 2, 2017). Whisnant echoed this sentiment: So from a macro-cycle level, it’s a reminder of, in essence, the seasons of life, as we go through Advent, and the expectation of hope and what is to come, to Ordinary time, where we live most of our time in, to a time of Lent, and of mourning and thinking about what is to come, and then Easter, of celebration of hope, Pentecost and all of those. (2017) For Whisnant, the telling of the story becomes associated with moods and stances that might help congregants to understand the nuances that make Lent different from Pentecost, for instance. His comment moved from the macro-cycle to the weekly cycle: [At the] micro-level, I think it is a reminder that our day-to-day lives are important as the inbreaking of the Kingdom, but that this gathering together of the body is a way to encourage us to continue to live out those [liturgical themes] throughout the week. (2017)

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Thus, the micro-cycle serves as a reminder: it is a wheel that revolves within the larger story, and grounds worshipers’ daily lives in the narrative. In both of these instances, ritual repetition is the means through which the Christian story is told and retold, even as it finds purchase in the individual lives of congregants. Furthermore, these processes of ritual repetition through music engender a sense of identity that is corporate as well as individual. Lucia, a young female worshiper at São João, mentioned the importance of coming to São João on a weekly basis, identifying this pattern as an essential part of her faith development. According to her, repetition helps to form identity: I think that that’s what repetition is—having a habit, and the way I understand it, habits end up making us who we are. This is also true for the congregation: the repetition of a song or a liturgy, of a certain sequence of things, having a certain emphasis, will also shape the way a congregation is. (Interview with author, October 22, 2017) How does repeated engagement with church music shape the way worshipers develop a sense of self as individual devotees, and as part of something larger than themselves, but still distinct from the world at large, namely a congregation? If the repeated performance of worship places congregants within a narrative, as part of a tradition, it stands to reason that worshipers see themselves as framed in relation to this tradition, either as insiders or as outsiders. In the case of church music, it would be incorrect to presume that repertoire is prescribed from above and that congregants are unable to exercise their own volition in its selection. (Any number of mainline churches can attest to the widespread phenomenon of teenagers who disappear from church life after confirmation is over, thus “voting with their feet.”) In other words, participants come to participate. They come to be engaged. They come to be a part of the liturgy. They come to find identity in community. They come, to use Schechner’s words, to be part of an efficacious performance. If “habits end up making us who we are,” the corporate repetition of these habits shapes us throughout the ritual process. Participation in the ritual life of the church is voluntary, and helps worshipers to negotiate their sense of self within and beyond the boundaries of the performance itself. In addition, participation includes a collective sense of self. Participation in the liturgical calendar, says George, a worshiper at St. Alban’s, “helps [to] shape the trajectory of the community towards one vision” while “surrounded by reminders of the consumerism that’s happening outside” (interview with author, December 12, 2017). George is claiming that certain needs cannot be met through the consumption of goods. Coming to church, in this context, is the performance of counterculture and, by proxy, of identity. By taking an alternative liturgical stance, and by sharing it with those who come to worship alongside him, George positions himself against what he perceives as a general cultural thrust: to consume goods in order to satisfy cravings. Through

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processes such as this, participants in ritually repeated processes differentiate themselves from the “outside”; in this case, from the “consumerism of Christmas.” Through engagement in ritual activity, by voicing the music of the church together, they become part of the community and find identity in the performance of their music. The interplay of narrative and identity, of theology and performance, also appears in the way leaders talk about worship and liturgical planning. At UBC, Carney describes how McGregor’s theological proficiency has helped UBC to become “more authentically what we are. We’ve grown into the leadership that he [McGregor] has provided and it fits very well right now” (2017). Here, the interplay of narrative and identity gives birth to a process of liturgical refinement, in which leaders and congregation rehearse identity within the Christian story week after week, revolving through the micro- and macro-cycles of Christian ritual that are referenced here and making adjustments as they go about performing. The continuity of these processes becomes a type of constant rehearsal that sets up a medium, a membrane, for interaction with the world outside the church, a dynamic that Carney mentioned in his interview: You know, I think maybe the struggle is how do we engage [the culture outside the church]. I alluded to the fact that we critique it, we evaluate it, but maybe the thing that a lot of the rest of the church would be uncomfortable with is also the confession that we learn from it. Sometimes they’re offering the liturgy for us to grow into. (2017) While not all church leaders subscribe to the idea that the culture outside the church might propose a liturgy for their congregations to grow into, Carney’s description illustrates the constant process of negotiation that goes into deciding what is “in” and what is “out,” what belongs and what does not. In some cases, this process can lead to strategies that seem somewhat paradoxical, as we shall see later. For now, it is enough to emphasize that the negotiation of boundaries is intricately tied to the perception of identity, both individual and collective, of worshipers who participate in the musical life of the church. Because these processes happen over time, such performances of identity engender a sense of continuity, of tradition. Hence––and in this process of generating a sense of individual and corporate identity––repetition grounds worshipers and congregations in the narratives and legacies of the Christian tradition, even as it creates a new sense of continuity, and new stories. If tradition is, as Henry Glassie defines it, “the creation of the future out of the past” (2003, 176), then the ritual repetition of these musical repertoires is the constant re-creation of these narratives into the present life of the church. Glassie elaborates: “if tradition is a people’s creation out of their own past, its character is not stasis but continuity” (2003, 177). The music of the church survives, and projects itself forward, through these repetitions that are more than the repetition of words in songs––they are the repetitions of

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memories and life stories in the process of establishing congregational identity. By performing these musics in worship, participants become how they are; they circumscribe their identity and belonging through song; they tap into the myth, as Marini (2003) suggests, and become a part of it. At São João, a middle-aged woman told me of her desire to sing more hymns from Hinos do Povo de Deus (Hymns of the People of God) (1981), the denomination’s traditional hymnal, framing it as “a question of legacy,” of being connected to a larger story through tradition.7 From her perspective, “music has history too” (Lídia, interview with author, October 20, 2017); a connection recognized by church leaders and used to pastoral effect in the life of the church. At St. Alban’s, says Zimmerman, music “takes people back to summer camp, it takes them back to Grandma’s house, it takes them back to church” (2017). By tapping into these resources of musical traditions, leaders can weave a soundtrack that ties generations together: grandmother and grandchild at the piano, singing hymns, as in the case of a São João worshiper who described “the history and richness in the hymnal” (Daisy, interview with author, December 13, 2017). As church music is repeated through the performance of consecutive generations—and as new materials are incorporated into the lattice—worshipers understand themselves in relation to, and as part of, narratives of performed church music. Before turning to the issue of participation in ritual activity, which is the final node in our examination of ritual, we must delve deeper into how these generative processes enact transformations in church music participants. “The music will do its work”: musical repetition and transformation It is a sunny weekday morning, a few days before Christmas. I am sitting on the porch of Josh Carney’s house, drinking tea to take the edge off the chilly morning air as we talk about church music, liturgy, and preaching at UBC. Carney weaves numerous popular culture references into his sermons. He does the same in his interview. We are talking about music and creation. He says: “So I would go with an artistic interpretation of Genesis 1 that says creation was not just spoken, but this act of vibration, of molecules in the universe, was the first echoes of music.” I answer: “Like singing into being.” Carney pauses for a second. “Yeah. And that’s the imagery in Narnia, that’s the imagery from Tolkien. I think that makes sense. And it lends itself, too, to deeper theodicy issues of, you know, you have themes of harmony and disharmony, and sour notes. And I think the metaphor probably works so well because I think there’s something ontologically true about it at a metaphysical level. So, I think the prominence of music in liturgy, for me, exists for that reason. And then just personally, right. Like, I have music on right now. Music is immediate.”

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In the vignette above, Josh Carney, UBC’s lead pastor, voices the common belief that music, in contrast to language, is immediate. It vibrates and resonates and occupies spaces. As participants make church music, that music fills spaces between bodies and within them. Both the words and the music become vibrations that interact with the body in a way that goes beyond cognizant, rational processes. As we have seen, much of the church music literature that is engaged in evaluating and curating music for Christian worship relies on the lyrics, and does not address the question of what music does beyond words, how it acts upon the body. But my interviews suggest that not only are people aware that “something else is going on”; indeed, they expect “something to occur,” sharing an instinctive understanding that music moves beyond the text that is paired with it. When asked about what music does in worship beyond conveying the words of songs, interviewees responded in a variety of ways: [Music] absolutely [does something beyond the words] … And it stirs emotion in a way that … you know, those songs that are timeless. And their melody is timeless. (Nance 2018) There are ways that music can … there’s certain things that really move you in a way, that I do think impacts you on a different level than words, or these songs without words, I think there’s something that music itself does separate from just the text. (Diana, interview with author, January 2, 2017) There’s a resonance to singing that hits the soul that regular speaking may or may not, just depending on the person who’s singing it. But music reaches a different part, an unspoken part of our lives, an unarticulated part. (Daisy 2017) I think that music, in one way or another, messes with people’s emotions, whether it is made in the church or out of the church. So, I think that when we sing the Word, when we sing the lyrics, music also messes with people’s emotions. … I think that when we’re singing, that’s the difference: music will, in some way, mess with people’s emotions. (Juarez 2017) I see that worship, music, has a strong emotional impact … This issue of repeating each week, this is something that I think is good … some people memorize the lyrics and, in their daily life, it influences them. Not only during the service, but in their daily lives. (Tonn, interview with author, October 20, 2017) So, when I say we’re trying to have an existential crisis, what we’re really trying to do is get to the heart of you. The heart of the matter. We live in

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Ritual and performance in church music studies our heads all the time, what’s going on in your heart? And the music, in our service, is a sneaky way of trying to get to that, of trying to crack you open a little bit, break the shell, connect with the part of you, make an end run around all the defenses you have intellectually and get to your [heart] … Not in an emotionally manipulative way, [but] because our songs are … kind of sneaky. (Zimmerman 2017)

In each of the excerpts from my interviews there is a pervading recognition that musical sound moves, or, as appropriately phrased by one congregant at São João, “the melody will do its work,” regardless of the particular musical style or genre (Maria, interview with author, October 20, 2017). Such recognition is shared by the church music leadership, and is leveraged pastorally in the ministry. Tonn, a missionary who works at São João and at a church plant in the nearby impoverished neighborhood of Navegantes, is conscious of the impact of music on his preaching, and strives to make connections between people’s engagement with the music and his message. Similarly, Zimmerman is aware of the potential of music to be “sneaky” in a pastoral sense, because part of his expectation of the effect of congregational worship at St. Alban’s is that the music might “crack [people] open a little bit.” This “sneakiness” is not, in the context of his interview, viewed as a manipulative, negative aspect of music making at St. Alban’s. On the contrary, it is viewed as an asset and is shared by others. McGowan, who works with Zimmerman, uses similar language to describe how music acts in our bodies, providing an opening for the heart to receive something. It sort of breaks through barriers, it breaks through coldness, indifference, and it has a way of just cutting to the quick, music does. Just the sound itself. (2017) Music’s agency beyond words is also used, in the words of participants, to “set the mood” for ritual activity. It “illustrates or amplifies the action that’s going on” (John, interview with author, December 19, 2017). Leaders and participants compared liturgy with a movie, mentioning the power of music to alter and nuance the rhetorical actions contained within it (John 2017; Nance 2018; Zimmerman 2017); a unique description of the ability that sound has to frame ritual action, to alter the rhetoric of liturgical discourse. One UBCer described this dynamic by remembering the first time she heard David Crowder, UBC’s first worship pastor, play his own arrangement of “Come Thou Fount”: “I was like, ‘I have to hear this song again. This was the most amazing experience that I’ve had to date” (Lila, interview with author, January 18, 2017). Music’s ability to add variety to a set of words repeated many times over the liturgical year makes it a potent ally of liturgists and church musicians as they design and prepare for worship. In other cases, rhetorical variety in music was compared to speech. Another UBC congregant described how hearing a great speaker “is almost music. You

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hear the different rises and falls of the pitch, and the loudness and softness, they use dynamics” (Gordon, interview with author, January 18, 2017). Moreover, these performances happen in time, and are never exactly alike: people perform the same action, the same scene, to different music. In each case, the resultant “bundle” of texts within the ritual performance will be unique, different. If such is the case, what music does when it “sets the tone” in church is always special, because it is always unique and can never be replicated exactly the same way. Carney’s portrayal of the act of creation in Genesis as an “act of vibration” in the vignette at the beginning of this section sets up a discussion of what happens during the ritual repetition of church music. Several assumptions implicit in his remark are shared by others in the case studies. First comes the assumption of “echoes of music” as built into, and imbricated with, the act of creation itself.8 Echoes of the theological postulate of humanity as imago Dei can be found here, along with an invitation to create into creation. Carney reinforces this assumption by steering his claims about music in the liturgy in an ontological direction with metaphysical implications. The second assumption Carney shares with others is that music is immediate—or, as other interviewees stated, palpable, and concrete. Carney implies that life without music is not the same, that music is, in fact, essential for Christian liturgy to realize its full potential in the present moment. While seeking to avoid an over-reaching generalization about music’s centrality, it appears that music’s generative role in Christian ritual is acknowledged by practitioners and academics alike. It is generative not only because it contains lyrics, but also because it provokes responses beyond the rational. It creates environments that are collectively hospitable to the transformative expectations of worshiping congregations, environments in which the performance of the music, with all its implications and interactions, result in a rich ritual experience for participants. At the beginning of this discussion of musical repetition and transformation, we established how participants and leadership expect something to happen as “music does its work.” A cursory glance at the literature on church planting or the missional movement will incorporate such an expectation that people be transformed through participation in worship.9 From these perspectives, what worship is supposed to do is “change” people; it converts them. Such expectations align with assumptions about the efficacy of ritual not only in theology, but in anthropology as well. Turner predicts transformations based on Van Gennep’s notion of rites of passage, and speaks of “reintegration”: after the imbalance set in action by ritual activity, balance can be recovered and the social weave of society can be preserved, instead of torn, by crisis outside of ritual (Turner 1969). Along similar lines, Schechner proposes that “the ambition to make theater into ritual is nothing other than a wish to make performance efficacious, to use events to change people” (2003, 56). Later, as Schechner developed his ideas of performance under the influence of his experience at Tulane, the civil rights movement, and his work with the Free Southern Theatre, his reading of ritual activity shifted from ritual as preservation of the status quo towards ritual as transformation.

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Thus, while in effect the idea of transformative ritual is not original to performance theory, its incorporation into the discussion of what happens from the perspective of a performance converges with the transformative expectations of many churches and church leadership, serving as a framework for the investigation of doing worship and engaging in congregational music making. Viewed through the lens of performance, these transformational expectations serve as a looking glass through which questions of identity, boundaries, individuality, tradition, and community align, as the congregation waits for the transformation that is expected to occur during the liturgy. Zimmerman’s description of what happens as the service ends sheds light upon the idea: And we sing this final hymn, and then we go out. And it’s this very cleansing, grounding, wonderful thing … and I haven’t told anyone how they should feel. We just do this thing in a very matter-of-fact sort of way, and it seems to do the work. And I mean, that’s what [liturgy is]—the work of the people. And if you do the work, something happens. And that’s my long answer about what I think is happening on Sunday morning. (Zimmerman 2017) “If you do the work, something happens.” Something changes, someone is transformed. Embedded here is a unique description of performance: we do this thing, and the efficacious performance of it does the work. We perform, we engage in this ritual activity, and transformation happens. The logocentric penchant of theology might lead one to conclude that most transformations depend on the words being spoken, sung, prayed, or recited, and taken home like a boxed dinner from a drive-through. In fact, words do seem to be part of the transformation, as our discussion of lyrics and memory has made clear. Talking about the repetitive nature of worship, one interviewee mentioned how coming again and again to worship is “like reading a great book a second or a third time.” Something new is generated in the process; hence there is a “richness in doing things in cycles” (Daisy 2017). Speaking, singing, praying, and reciting sacred words is indeed a part of the ritual process, an ongoing by-product of the weekly performance of worship. But is it the only agent of these transformations? Participants’ and leaders’ comments strongly point to a broader view of transformation that centers on other aspects of the communal performance, including music, and a set of expectations that look beyond the performance itself to the wider environment in which congregations exist. At UBC, Whisnant expects transformations to change the outlook of worshipers as they prepare to live out their week, “more hopeful, more encouraged to go out to be a part of the kingdom of God” (2017). Expectations such as this are based on the idea that church music elicits a unique type of transformation. When I asked Luckow what she thought was different about making music at São João in contrast to other settings, she responded:

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Often times, we haven’t even gotten to the sermon yet and God has already spoken to people, and transformed them during that musical time. So, this experience of all of us together, savoring community as only the Holy Spirit can afford, it makes for a different experience. When we’re at a concert, we leave with the sensation of having participated in a great program, feeling good about ourselves, relishing a transcendent moment. But the next day, basically, life is the same. It doesn’t generate transformation. But in church, sometimes even when the musicianship itself wasn’t the best, the work of the Holy Spirit effects transformation, and makes the difference. Of course, if that is helped along by great music, better. There are people who go to church and experience musical fruition; but other people experience something beyond that, a transformation that goes beyond what humans can do. And this differentiates music at church from music in other contexts. Not that God can’t operate at a secular concert. It’s just that at church, this is the expectation. That’s where our efforts are oriented … there is this holy expectation that something will happen, that the Holy Spirit will once again pour over the church, that people will be touched. (Luckow 2017) Luckow’s comment reinforces the idea that people experience something beyond musical fruition in worship, that music moves beyond words. Another ripple arises from this “beyondness”: as music moves beyond words, engagement in church music effects transformations beyond church on Sunday, or what we could call an “extended” expectation of ritual transformation. On Monday, life is not the same for the worshiper, because in church, people are gathered with “this holy expectation that something will happen.” An alignment occurs (and church music is a major agent in the alignment): a group of people face the same expectational direction, waiting for the transformation that is a response to the liturgy, the work of the people. In this regard, says McGregor, “to gather together consistently with a particular group of people over a period of time, one might suspect that they would have similar kinds of transformation occur” (2017). In other words, the group expects to be transformed together: I think it is true that the repeated action of coming together, the repeated action of having similar sort of vocabulary in your liturgy and stuff like that, that is all true. … hopefully it’ll be shaped by the Spirit through these things. But that, again, goes to the thing of hoping that this is not just a one moment thing but extends beyond that, this is rehearsing a posture that hopefully will soon, outside of that. (2017) Once again, McGregor evokes the idea that liturgy “is doing its work.” His notion that worshiping congregations rehearse postures together is also noteworthy. In the Introduction to this volume, I used Berger’s definition of stance to describe the constellations of assumptions under which practitioners and scholars speak of performance. Now, we encounter constellations of

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transformative expectations that coalesce into postures of worship. Musicking congregations are waiting, immersed within a specific soundtrack, for transformations of a particular order that will vary according to their theological and ethical constellations. But, importantly, the “soundtrack” they listen and perform to is more than just background muzak. More than a catalyst, it is a protagonist, an essential component of the ritual activity itself. It may or may not contain words. Either way, it grafts a group of people into a tradition, it reinforces their sense of community, and it gives them a narrative for transformation. Church music, when analyzed through the lens of ritual performance, can be seen as an embodied rehearsal of the sacred. Because of its many ritual affordances, music helps to embody belief itself. These processes of embodiment happen through participation, which we discuss in detail in the next chapter.

Notes 1 The study of ritual as a field was described initially in 1977 (Grimes 1995, xxv) at the first Ritual Studies Consultation. For Grimes, ritual studies is “a distinct subdiscipline of the academic study of religion” (1995, xxv), and he recognizes that, as an essentially interdisciplinary exercise, it can be placed under the umbrella of theology or that of anthropology. 2 Grimes, one of the precursors of ritual studies, studied under Turner. 3 See Ammerman (2013) and Margulis (2013). Even if Margulis’s work does not fall within church music scholarship, she does reference religious music making in general, and the music of Taizé in particular, in On Repeat (2013). 4 Bell says that Turner’s work “on ritual and performance remains fundamentally within the framework of his early theory of ritual as the transformational dialectic of structure and antistructure (or organization and communitas) to serve as a vehicle for unfolding social dramas” (2009, 41). 5 According to Bradshaw and Melloh, “it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the horizons of the discipline [of liturgical history] began to be extended to include other dimensions, and in particular those of liturgical theology and ritual studies” (2007, vii). 6 The narrative of how this happens, or what signs these deep grooves might engender, will vary significantly between traditions. It is also important to remember that I am assuming ritual efficacy here; the question of ritual failure will be dealt with in the next chapter. 7 For background on the development of repertoire and hymnals in the IECLB, see Silva Steuernagel (2016). 8 Which is not, of course, a novel concept in Western thought. Concepts such as the harmony of the spheres, or Boethius’ divisions of musica mundana, humana, and instrumentalis are but a few of the ways in which Carney’s idea of music as imbricated in creation have surfaced throughout history. See Begbie (2007) and Faulkner (1996). 9 Examples include Abernethy (2008); Adams (2010); Warren (1995).

References Abernethy, Alexis D., ed. 2008. Worship That Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Adams, David V. 2010. Lifestyle Worship: The Worship God Intended Then and Now. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications.

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Adams, Walter Randolph, and Frank A. Salamone, eds. 1999. Anthropology and Theology: God, Icons, and God-Talk. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Ammerman, Nancy T. 2013. Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Begbie, Jeremy. 2007. Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Bell, Catherine M. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bradshaw, Paul F., and John Allyn Melloh, eds. 2007. Foundations in Ritual Studies: A Reader for Students of Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Driver, Tom F. 1998. Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Faulkner, Quentin. 1996. Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Glassie, Henry. 2003. “Tradition.” In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Grainger, Roger. 2009. The Drama of the Rite: Worship, Liturgy and Theatre Performance. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 1995. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Rev. ed. Studies in Comparative Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Grimes, Ronald L., ed. 1996. Readings in Ritual Studies. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil. 1981. Hinos do povo de Deus: Hinário da Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil. São Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal. Larsen, Timothy. 2014. The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lorenz, Konrad. 2002. On Aggression. London: Routledge. Lukken, Gerard. 2005. Rituals in Abundance: Critical Reflections on the Place Form, and Identity of Christian Ritual in Our Culture. Liturgia condenda17. Dudley, MA: Peeters. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2013. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Marini, Stephen A. 2003. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Muir, Edward. 2005. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myrick, Nathan. 2017. “Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 3(1). Oswald, Roy M., and Jean Morris Trumbauer. 1999. Transforming Rituals: Daily Practices for Changing Lives. Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute. Poloma, Margaret M. 2003. Main Street Mystics the Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Schechner, Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Media ed., Sara Brady. New York: Routledge. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. 2016. “History and Structure of Hymns of the People of God, Vol. 1.” Vox Scripturae XXIV(1): 181–197.

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Son, Timothy D. 2014. Ritual Practices in Congregational Identity Formation. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Turner, Victor W. (Witter). 1976. “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic.” Worship 50(6): 504–526. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performance Studies series, vol. 1. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Warren, Richard. 1995. The Purpose Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Message and Mission. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

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In the previous chapter, we examined the first two aspects of ritual participation in church music as performance: repetition and transformation. It is now time to engage with participation in ritual itself. If repeated engagement in church music does indeed generate a sense of identity, and if this performance is fraught with transformational expectations, what characterizes participation in ritual activity in general and, in our case, in church music? It is by assuming some type of participation that one might consider church music as performance. While an observer might, at first glance, connect participation to particular types of verifiable visual responses to music within a given context, this visual diagnostic falls short of a typology that, in addition to defining participation, qualifies its modalities as applied to congregational musicking. Moreover, as we have seen in previous chapters, the expectations that surround Christian worship gravitate towards the efficacy pole of performance. In this case, and if visual verification is insufficient, how can one be assured that participation is “effective,” or, in other words, that participation in church music actualizes the expectations ascribed to church music? This is a question that scholars and practitioners ask themselves, especially in connection to ideas of authentic/sincere participation in religious ritual: “Is it right for me to raise my hands now?”; “Is it alright if I close my eyes and pray instead of singing out loud?”; “Can I participate legitimately in ways other than singing?” Questions about what constitutes legitimate participation in church music are almost as old as Christianity itself. Augustine, in his Confessions, questioned the legitimacy of his response to church music, feeling the currents of sensory delight sweeping his heart away from centered, “devotional” hearing (Conf. 10.33., in Pusey 1960, 210). Thomas Hastings, in one of the first modern philosophical investigations of church music, also examined what adequate participation in church music might entail (1822, 95–121). Throughout history, even as worshipers participate in church music, they constantly reflect on their participation. This process of examination impinges directly on how participants see themselves as either immersed in, or detached from, the music making. The question of what participation means, or which actions define participation, is therefore connected to the promises that are implicit in ritual activity: if one does not participate fully, how can one expect to receive the benefits that are available to those who do?

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I offer here five perspectives that can help to scaffold this examination of participation in church music. These perspectives combine approaches from music and psychology, ethnomusicology, and theology. We will begin with the work of Thomas Turino (2008) and, from there, nuance the idea of participation in music through the work of Elizabeth Margulis (2013) and Judith Becker (2004), arriving at the Second Vatican Council’s idea of “full, conscious, active participation” as addressed by Michael Joncas (1997). In order to propel these approaches into the ethnography, I rely on Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (1990), described by Schechner as being “fully engaged in any activity” (2013, 98). This path will allow us to subsequently offer a typology of participation in church music along a spectrum that includes presence, singing, silent participation, and surrogate participation. Finally, we will examine how ritual participation in church music is projected beyond the sanctuary, through car radios, iTunes podcasts, YouTube videos, and other avenues of digital propagation, into what I call immersive spectatorship. The work of Thomas Turino reflects ethnomusicology’s shift away from the idea of music as a unitary, absolute form of art, to music as activity. In Music as Social Life (2008), Turino argues for an understanding of music as “fundamentally distinct types of activities that fulfill different needs and ways of being human.” For Turino, participation in music making is part of “the processes of personal and social integration that make us whole” (2008, 1). Turino’s work can provide us with a model for thinking about musicking from a social, communitarian perspective. Turino proposes a fourfold typology of musical experience to be dealt with in pairs: first, participatory and presentational performance, and subsequently the recording fields of high fidelity and studio audio art. He defines participatory performance as “a special type of artistic practice in which there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles, and the primary goal is to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role” (2008, 26). In contrast, presentational performance is a musical experience in which one group prepares music for another group that does not participate directly in the music making experience, but acts as a receiver, or listener, for the prepared music (2008, 26). High fidelity, the first of the two recorded music fields, refers to “the making of records that are intended to index or be iconic of live performance” (2008, 26). Finally, studio audio art is described as a different type of recorded music, created and manipulated in a studio or on a computer, resulting in a sound object that is not intended to represent live performance. Turino emphasizes that this typology is not style- or genre-based (2008, 27), and that aspects of different fields can be combined (2008, 88). Turino grafts his typology of music fields into a discussion of how senses of identity, construction of meaning, and social interactions come together in making music, involving cultural cohorts and cultural formations. Cultural cohorts are social groups formed through “specific constellations of shared habit based on similarities of parts of the self” (2008, 111). Cultural formations, on the other hand, are groups brought together by the sharing of habits that

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“constitute most parts of each individual member’s self” (2008, 112). While in both cases people share habits based on specific characteristics, the various types of habit can be distinguished by repetition over time: “it is the pervasiveness and often the time-depth of habits influencing individual thought, practice, and decision making that distinguish cultural formations from cultural cohorts” (2008, 112). In other words, cultural cohorts can become cultural formations if they are afforded enough time to become an ingrained part of the individual member’s sense of identity and habits. Second-generation enthusiasts are an example of how cohorts can become formations. In these cases, what was initially the value system, or habits, adopted by a cohort becomes a formative configuration that assumes center stage in the sense of self of the individuals raised within the formation. While Turino’s framework can help us to understand how music binds congregations together, Elizabeth Margulis’s work on repetition in music can add further nuance to his conceptualization of cultural formation through musicking (2013). Margulis pushes back against aspects of Turino’s treatment of participatory and presentational modes of music making on the issue of repetition. For her, “the notions of participatory and presentational are imaginary poles, with substantial residue of the participatory clinging to much music that appears to be strictly presentational” (2013, 11). Margulis “blurs” Turino’s typological boundaries, because, she argues, repetition in presentational music carries many of the invitations and traces of repetition in participatory styles. Margulis’s idea of “discursive repetition” is crucial this regard: [E]ven repetition that is very far at the discursive end of the spectrum, such as repetition of a chorus within a song, or the repeated sounding of a particular track, can provide the scaffolding for a participatory experience. Once a listener “knows how it goes,” he is free to sing along, or indulge in some air guitar, or tap out the rhythms. (2013, 144) Discursive repetition is one way to describe the process whereby participants in church music move from being “outsiders” to “insiders,” from spectatorship to participation. As they become familiar with the music through repetition, they “know how it goes” and are free to participate; they know the script and can become actors on the performative stage. Furthermore, Margulis says, certain dynamics of repetition are active beyond the texts of a song (I continue to use “texts” comprehensively, including other components besides lyrics in the “bundle of texts” of musicking). While sound is certainly a part of musicking, each participant’s unique perception of sound is important to understand the conditions whereby “a person can experience a highly pleasurable sense of extended subjectivity, or a perceived merging with the music” (2013, 141). She concludes that, because musicking lives at the intersection between the external world and extended subjectivity, repetition invites listeners to become participants. As they hear the music, they think about it and become

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involved in it: “prior to this affordance to move along with the music is an affordance to think along with the music”1 (2013, 144; my emphasis). What is this “affordance to think along with the music” that Margulis references? Edwin Gordon proposes the concept of audiation to describe “thinking about the music” as it happens, either external or internally: “having the ability to audiate means an individual is able to comprehend musical meaning, and function musically within that understanding” (2007, 4). Taken together, Gordon’s idea of audiation and Margulis’s idea of “thinking along with the music” describe a process whereby congregants weave musical, lyrical, aural, and other texts into webs of meaning through the performance of church music. I call this process theologization. Why use the term theologization instead of just recognizing that people are affected, in general, by all the interacting texts that overlap during congregational singing? The choice is based on Gordon’s references to “understanding meaning” and “functioning” within a social context (which link his work with Turino’s concern for the context of musicking). Theologization is not passive reception; it is conversational interaction with the texts of church music. If theologization occurs not only based on lyrics but includes other texts, we can investigate this process by using a performance approach that analyzes how, through participation, worshipers enmesh themselves in a web of experience and theologize as they go along. In this sense, theologization is a prerequisite of transformation, one of the nodes of ritual activity, and gains weight through repetition—the other node. A question of order emerges from this portrayal of participation in church music. Do participation in and self-examination about musicking occur simultaneously or sequentially? Does one first participate in the music, and reflects on it post factum? Here, Judith Becker’s work on music cognition may help us to develop a model for participation that inhabits Turino’s participatory-presentational spectrum, acknowledges Margulis’s claim that repetition blurs the boundaries between the two, and creates space both for participation and theologization. Her work brings together ethnomusicology, biology, psychology, and neuroscience in an examination into Pentecostal charismatic expressions of ecstasy in relation to church music, troubling the Western dichotomy of the self as divided into mind and body (Becker 2004, 10).2 She seeks to examine questions of embodiment and understand musical experiences, such as trance, in religious contexts. Considered an extreme type of participation in music (religious or otherwise), trancing is “an alteration in thinking or in perception of time, a loss of control, a change in emotional expression, dissociation between mind and body, perceptual changes, feelings of profound insight, a sense of the ineffable, feelings of rejuvenation, and hypersuggestability” (Helland in Poloma 2003, 41).3 Becker parses three modes of relating to music: meditation, trancing, and deep listening, a term she borrows from composer Pauline Oliveros to describe “persons who are profoundly moved, even to tears, by simply listening to a piece of music” (Becker 2004, 2). For Becker, deep listening comes near to trance, a kind of “secular trancing.” Furthermore, she uses the gerunds “languaging,” “musicking,” and

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“trancing” to emphasize the processual nature of engagement with music. It is in the way she uses these concepts that Becker’s work may aid our examination of participation. Becker critiques the way music is viewed in Western culture: [T]he history of trance in our civilization is the history of a perversion. Serious trancers such as Pentecostals are considered to be indecorous and mildly embarrassing, nonserious trancers such as many New Age followers are written off as dilettantes or, worse, crackpots. (2004, 11) Both the gap between theological reflection and full participation, and the constant questioning of oneself when engaged in church music, are tied to our question of how participation in music and reflection on participation unfold in church music. Moreover, this suspicion of trance and other forms of participation, viewed as overly “intense” or indecorous, appeared in my ethnography. Becker’s account of religious participation in music resists the idea that intense involvement is necessarily akin to possession; in other words, to an uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, giving over to spasms of a body that has been completely divorced from its mental faculties. But, she says, even trancers must necessarily not experience their selves as disengaged. To feel oneself at one with the music and the religious narrative enacted, there must be no distance at all between event and personhood: no aesthetic distance, no outside perspective, no objectivity, no irony. Later, perhaps, the trancer may reflect on his or her experience, but to do so at the moment of trancing is to introduce the very disengaged subject that will break the enchantment. (2004, 92; emphasis in the original) In other words, reflecting about trancing during trancing interrupts trancing, because it distances the self from itself and interrupts the flow of participation in music. One of my interlocutors described this phenomenon thus: “if you’re thinking about how you’re moving, then it’s not participating fully. I feel like you’re still participating, but you’re not as present in the moment” (Lila, interview with author, January 18, 2018).4 For Becker and for my interlocutors, even during intense participation, the self might be engaged in ways that preclude self-assessment. Thus, I argue, theologization can occur during participation, but cannot be measured or assessed solely in relation to discursive theological content because such an attempt would immediately reduce the depth and breadth of the participatory experience. It would interrupt the feeling that my interviewees described, of “just being there, fully present” (Gordon 2007). The danger of dissociation looms over forms of participation in which attempts to curate one’s participation while doing it creates a gap between cognition and experience. Moreover, theologization (in the context of church music) is intimately tied to the transformation of the self that ritual scholars speak of, pastors expect for their worshiping congregations, and participants engaged in the

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performance of church music look forward to as groups and individuals. For Becker, a transformed self “is both a hallmark of trance and a phenomenon frequently associated with musical performance” (2004, 87). Overall, Becker’s approach to intense, embodied experiences of ritual participation in music making in the church sits within Turino’s framework and Margulis’s retooling of it. If, for Becker, the engagement of Pentecostals and Separate Baptists with church music could be considered acts of trancing in worship, I argue that the same could be said of vigorously sung pointed psalmody at St. Alban’s, dancing to a samba version of a traditional hymn at São João Lutheran Church, and rocking out on Easter morning at UBC. In each of these settings, transformation is expected as a result of participation. Moreover, for those involved in the performance of the music, adherence is expressed in many different modes of engagement: kneeling, standing, silence, the raising of hands, the closing of eyes, singing and not singing. Becker’s terminology of musicking, languaging, and trancing as possible layers can be juxtaposed over Turino’s categories of music making, and qualified through Margulis’s emphases on repetition as a prime means of creating opportunities for participation. From this perspective, the Catholic idea of “full, conscious, and active participation” in worship assumes new meaning as a comprehensive ideal for participation in the music of the church.

Participating in church music: “full, conscious, active participation” The Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II) had an impact on the music of the global church that was even greater than its proponents could have imagined. In fact, Piero Marini suggests that it “exceeds in breadth and depth all other major reforms of the past” (2013, 2). The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, was promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1963. One of the council’s contributions was an influential definition of participation in musical worship in paragraph 14: Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy. Such participation by the Christian people as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. 2:4–5), is their right and duty by reason of their baptism. In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit; and therefore pastors of souls must zealously strive to achieve it, by means of the necessary instruction, in all their pastoral work. (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, II.14) The Sacrosanctum Concilium’s description of “fully conscious, and active participation” has become pivotal to the way in which Catholics in particular, and

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Western Christians in general, understand participation in church music. This conceptualization of participation acknowledges that “full and active participation by all people … is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit” (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, II.14), even when it does not entail singing. For Michael Joncas, Catholic instruction allows listening as a valid way of participating in church music, even as it recognizes vocal participation through responses, prayers, and chants. In addition, it indexes participation not only through vocal engagement—though this is still a primary consideration—but through body position, ritual gestures, and attentive listening. According to Joncas, active participation can be internal, external, and sacramental; the first two allude precisely to the idea that participation without singing is possible. Finally, the documents analyzed by Joncas are careful not to pit one type of participation against the others. Such a framework of participation, developed in Catholic church music, fits with the idea of a ritual performance of the sacred. Catholic musician Peggy Lovrien describes this ritual performance as enabling “a room full of people to ‘perform’ the music, that is, to sing the liturgy” (2007, 23). Lovrien’s description of “a room full of people” parallels one of my fundamental arguments about church music as performance: that all participants are performing, and not only the people on the platform. But what is the difference in the way they are performing? I propose five categories of participation in church—presence, singing, silent participation, surrogate participation, and immersive spectatorship—as a way to describe these different ways of participating in church music. Before examining each in turn, we must define the idea of flow in relation to this process.

“Preserving the flow”: familiarity and participation One approach to understanding the dynamics that underlie participants’ experience of having, or not, participated in a musical activity is by looking at the way they describe their involvement. Participants in congregational singing often refer to forgetting the passage of time or being entirely present in the experience of church music. These descriptions of full participation indicate that the experience was uninterrupted, unspoiled by distraction or disruption. To ground this idea, I resort to Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”: A subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself. … The defining feature of flow is intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity. Attention is fully invested in the task at hand, and the person functions at his or her fullest capacity. (Csikszentmihalyi 2014, 230) Flow is significant within any ritual activity, including church music. It is a widely accepted concept in various sectors of the humanities. Becker says that

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Csikszentmihalyi’s description of flow suggests trancing (2004, 161). Margulis recognizes that flow and repetition are intertwined (2013, 25). Turino claims that flow is central to musicking, especially to participatory music making (2008, 30–31). In particular, repetition seems to be intimately connected to the affordance of flow in ritual music making. This connection between repetition and flow came to the fore during the interview process. A young worshiper at São João mentioned that “people will only understand [a new song] on the second or third repetition to be able to sing along” (Juarez, interview with author, October 22, 2017). Repetition, thus, is a rehearsal of participation in liturgy. Each new week presents an opportunity for increased participation, and for increased flow, because the performance of church music is a rehearsal of faith, community, and tradition. Fabiane Behling Luckow, São João’s worship pastor, describes repetition as a rehearsal that moves beyond the music and encompasses the whole liturgy: We’re always talking and hearing about people not remembering what was said during the service but remembering the music, or that music creates an environment of unity for the people that are singing together … we like a routine and predictability, right? I know what’s going to happen, which means that I share in this code, this process that unfolds here. I feel comfortable. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Predictability and structure create a safe environment in which people can rehearse ritual repetitions until they are comfortable with them. Nevertheless, just as flow can increase with repetition, it can also be disrupted by unfamiliarity. Mere familiarity through repetition does not guarantee flow, because according to Csikszentmihalyi, one of the conditions for flow is a balance between the interest generated by novelty and the spontaneity created by familiarity. Familiarity must be tempered with novelty in order to accomplish this loop. So, flow is preserved through multiple instances of balance. Not only does the repertoire need to strike a balance between familiarity and novelty, but also style, dress, body movement, authenticating gestures, and media must also be considered as part of an attempt to create flow and to preserve it throughout the liturgy. One long-time worshiper at St. Alban’s described how the congregation members used to “[fumble] with the prayer book and hymnal, Bible, and everything together” every Sunday as the congregation moved between readings, songs, and other elements of the liturgy (George, interview with author, December 12, 2017). More recently, St. Alban’s has switched to a unified bulletin that includes all elements in a single medium, thus bypassing the “fumbling” factor that could disrupt flow, especially for novices who are not accustomed to the complexities of the Anglican liturgy. Leaders might also manage the balance between familiarity and novelty by incorporating new elements or calling attention to specific aspects of the liturgy

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or music. George, who worships at St. Alban’s, described his experience of an “Anglo-Catholic” service in another town: “it was a rich change of pace, and I think we always need to be both very comfortable and at home somewhere, but also occasionally prodded out of our comfort zones” (2017). Church music leadership seems to recognize the force of these quasi-jolts, fabricating them by reframing familiar elements of worship. Luckow describes planning worship and building in moments where she wants the congregation to “stop to think: ‘wait! How was this supposed to go again,’ but that doesn’t destabilize them to the point where they don’t recognize themselves as part of it anymore” (2017). In other words, she is mindful of not pushing them to the point where they fall out of flow. By directing worshipers’ participation through flow, liturgists and worship leaders can weave different nuances into liturgical discourse. This could be called “participatory rhetorics”: choices made by church music planners to alternate between flavors of performance, to alter the flow in ways that emphasize or de-emphasize certain elements of the liturgy, be it within the music or the service in general. This technique for managing flow has been acknowledged in the church music literature in various ways. One example is Michael Hawn’s discussion of sequential and cyclic musical structures in Gather into One (2003). Speaking of how these forms might be leveraged in worship, particularly in relation to the use of global song, Hawn claims that “musical form is a significant factor in determining the effectiveness of the congregation’s involvement in the ritual” (2003, 224). For Hawn, different musical forms afford unique modes of participation that waver between narrative, linear content (in the case of sequential forms), and particular kinesthetic responses (in the case of cyclical forms). Thus, our discussion of flow comes full circle, as we return to repetition in ritual performance. But if flow is presumed, what modes of engagement are available to those willing to participate in church music? I have organized these modes into a fivefold typology of participation in church music: presence, singing, silent participation, surrogate participation, and immersive spectatorship. Before singing: “showing up” as participation in church music I am at the Dancing Bear, Jamie McGregor’s favorite weekday dig. This is where UBCers meet for pub group every week. I ask him what defines participation in the music at UBC. He thinks for a few moments, and says: “Honestly? I think that on the most basic level, I would say showing up. It is participating … I’m not watching thoroughly to see what people do. Now that sort of extends the trust to the process of the liturgy, sort of extends the trust to an idea of Holy Spirit, but also sort of like … I’m not a very instructional worship leader, like I said. So, I’m not taking a poll to see who’s listening and who’s not. But outside of that, one way to look at it … giving people the option to stand up is the one thing I do. So, most people stand up. Not all people do. In that moment, if I see somebody sitting down, my first thought isn’t like: ‘oh, they’re not with us right now.’

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual Or if I look out and I see people not singing, my first thought isn’t: ‘oh, they’re not into this right now.’ Because I’ve been that person who’s not singing, and sometimes it’s because I don’t know the song well enough, sometimes it’s because I just can’t in that moment. And I would like to think that being in a place where you can’t mean the things that are being said, or maybe you just don’t have the energy to sing, [because] you’re like that down, I think that even in that moment there’s a way that is, itself, participating in worship. ’Cause once again, you showed up.” (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) Cut scene. Days later, I am back at the Dancing Bear with Toph Whisnant, UBC’s community pastor. I ask him the same question I asked McGregor and he responds in similar fashion: “I think for some people participation means just showing up. I’m here, I don’t really have a lot to give, because I’m hungover from the night before, but I’m here. And hopefully we trust the Spirit’s leading in that. So, I don’t want to say that’s not participation, someone who doesn’t sing, someone who doesn’t even stand for the song, or do anything like that. For me, it’s knowing why I’m here. Am I present in the moment, am I reflecting on the music? Am I present to the Spirit’s leading in that moment? I think that’s much harder in looking out at the congregation, and making a judgment like: ‘oh well, I see Marcell down there, he has his eyes closed,’ or ‘I see soand-so, they’re sitting down, so they’re just checked out. ’Cause it could be, ‘I need to sit down, because the Spirit’s really speaking to me in this moment.’ So, I think participation can be very active, I think participation can be passive. And I think just being present in the moment is forming us together in a way that, if we’re not there, we can’t be formed.” (Interview with author, November 15, 2017)

Many of my interlocutors in leadership positions defined participation in church as, quite simply, presence. At UBC, McGregor and Whisnant used the expression “showing up,” reflecting a pastoral concern with how participation is defined and, I believe, with defining it in broad instead of narrow terms. Overall, leaders did not demonstrate an expectation that all congregants participate in the same way, that worshipers stand or sing throughout the musical portions of the service all the time. At St. Albans, music director Eugene Lavery mentioned that defining participation is “tricky, because if you’re present for a church service and you’re engaged, that to me seems like participation” (interview with author, November 20, 2017). He gave a detailed account of how these expectations play into the liturgy, saying that “if the choir is singing, that doesn’t mean you’re not participating.” Moreover, his comment that “congregational singing is actually a relatively new thing in the history of the church” pointed to a participation that engages with the history of Anglican

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worship, and does not necessarily align with the idea that active participation equates with vigorous singing and hand-raising, as is sometimes the assumption in contemporary styles of church music. On the other hand, he says: We also have to … realize that people do want to sing in church, for the most part. So, it is important to keep people engaged. You can argue over semantics, but if there’s no one left out in the congregation, it becomes kind of pointless. I’m certainly personally a believer in good congregational singing. (2017) To keep people engaged, Lavery negotiates the flow of participation throughout the year instead of addressing all expectations on any particular Sunday. If the music one week leans more towards the presentational side of the spectrum, on the next Sunday he might be more intentional about prompting the congregation to sing. “Keeping people engaged” is not something to be resolved in one service but managed over time: an effort to preserve the flow, throughout the church year, week after week. Moreover, it is a process that presumes repeated participation throughout the course of the year. Of course, worshipers come to church with the expectation of participating in one way or another. Presence, the first mode of engagement, is accompanied by participatory expectations. UBCer Bryan describes participation as a form of self-yielding to the liturgy, a conscious giving into the ritual process of liturgy (interview with author, December 18, 2017). And yielding is expressed performatively. By kneeling, standing, singing, praying, and other means, worshipers perform participation in the music and the liturgy without necessarily expressing it vocally. In doing so, they “show up.” The logical next step in this unfolding of participation is to engage with the liturgy, to yield to the narrative. In many cases, this means active singing, possibly accompanied by a series of bodily gestures. “But singing and participating are not the same thing”: the centrality of singing in church music I am interviewing a couple who have been at UBC for almost 20 years. We’re talking about what defines participation, and they look at each other hesitantly, mental wheels spinning, trying to describe it in words: Gordon: “It’s definitely not singing, because there’s many times that I’ve refrained fully from singing and just listened, and it was very spiritual and moving.” Lila: “I think it’s being there, in the moment, with everybody else, hearing the same thing and receiving it.” Gordon: “It’s not being pulled to the past or the future. It’s being there. That’s participation.” Marcell: “So participation doesn’t depend on …”

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual Gordon: “On doing anything.” Lila: “I think, participation, you have to be present.” Gordon: “But it doesn’t depend on singing.” Marcell: “And is participating by listening or by moving?” Lila: “I think any of that. Some people start moving, like I bop around, but I don’t raise my hand, some people raise their hands, some people sing, some people don’t, some people are sitting and taking it in in a different manner.” Gordon: “I don’t think you can define it by outward signs. Somebody can be moving around but what’s going on in them is like: ‘I wanna do this because I hope that this is the right thing to do, maybe.’”

The back-and-forth between Lila (2018) and Gordon (interview with author, January 18, 2018) portrays the ambiguity that seems to populate definitions of participation in church music. Notice the apophatic pattern of the exchange. As indices of engagement like singing or moving are brought up, they are rejected as proof of legitimate participation. For them, participation is something one can feel, but cannot define with absolute certainty. In contrast, simplistic readings of the performance of church music that abound in Christian popular discourse equate participation with a defined set of expectations, like standing and singing. But a simplistic correlation between a performed gesture and participation crumbles as soon as one begins to pay attention to the complicated messiness that characterizes group activities. Luckow describes her conundrum: I think that from the moment you’re there, independent of singing or using your body, you’re participating. Because the crowd is a part of it: the fact that there are people sitting next to you. There are people, for example, who don’t know how to sing, who are ashamed of singing even in the midst of other people where they won’t be heard, but in a way they are participating because, if they’re attentive to what’s happening, if they’re reading the lyrics and hearing the music, I think that is also participation. I want to believe that it’s impossible to be in that environment and be present in what’s happening and remain aloof, even if it’s not active participation. (2017) The tension between the expectation that, if one is “really there,” it is impossible to remain aloof clashes with the reality that, for any of a variety of reasons, not all will, or can, sing. Nevertheless, the perspectives of Luckow, Gordon, and Lila also imply that, even when the discourses of worshipers (as is the case here) represent hospitable and generous stances towards what it means to participate in worship, singing is still important. Singing remains, in a way, the mode of engagement with church music par excellence. The expectation that participants engage vocally with church music surfaced across the ethnography.

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First, worship leaders want congregants to sing, and see it as their job to guide congregations in/to worship. They share the notion that there is, indeed, a difference between participation in the general sense, and singing as a prime and concrete expression of participation. Most of the interviews with pastors and church music leaders pointed to a preoccupation with drawing participants into vocal engagement with music, a concern that Luckow verbalized: I think people are on board with this: that the music is made for people to sing. I noticed that people repeatedly mentioned that the music was not for show, to exhibit one’s musical gifts. That’s a search. And I like that. So, the music we play during the service can be sung by people. If the song is complicated, if it is in a range that people have a hard time singing in, we work hard to make it accessible. We lower the key, edit out a highly melismatic part that is demanding, we’ll compress it … so we try to keep the songs as simple as possible, at least at first, until the congregation knows it well. And this is something I emphasize a lot with our people: that the first couple of times we do the song, any harmonies can’t obfuscate the melody, no improv, nothing like that. Let people learn. Later on, people will sing. And we have a lot of songs that are like that, that don’t need leadership. People will join in and sing without needing anything. (2017) Luckow uses several strategies to draw people into song. Alterations to the key, edits to the arrangement, the removal of ornamentation—all of these are devices used to adapt musical material for the congregation. She also implicitly recognizes the power of repetition and the importance of congregational rehearsal, from week to week, “until the congregation knows it [the song] well.” Considerations of flow and familiarity come into play. The final goal, according to Luckow, is for participants to move beyond leadership, into spontaneous participation that does not require leadership: “people will join in and sing without needing anything.” For her, the ultimate expression of vocal participation arises naturally from the pews. At St. Alban’s, Lavery speaks of his preoccupation with drawing congregants into the Anglican vocal tradition: With the more modern songs, often there’s a bridge, and then they can be in different keys every time you sing, [and you can use] different instrumentation … there will often be a soloist who will have their own version of how it’s meant to go, or they want to change the rhythms, so then are you just listening to them sing or are you trying to join in, whilst having no music in front of you? And even some of the more modern hymns, even some that are in a hymn book, I find them hard to sing. And if I’m finding them hard to sing, I don’t know how the average person, who doesn’t have the musical education or is musically literate, would be engaged with them,

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual whereas the congregational hymns, the more traditional ones, were meant to be sung by people who weren’t musically literate, necessarily. So, I think that’s why they’ve been effective. (2017)

Rebekah Hughes is a professional singer on staff at St. Albans. She believes singing is the full expression of church music: “the congregational singing, to me, is the part where we all really come together” (interview with author, December 12, 2017). She described not singing as “slightly less active,” claiming that participants who do not sing when the opportunity presents itself are missing something: “you don’t have to sing loudly, but I think you’re missing out if you’re choosing to not sing” (2017). The idea that singing is a special way of participating may be connected to more than simply the generation of a “corporate sound” when the majority of people in a group are singing, but also because of the notion that singing does something special to those who do it. Neal McGowan, St. Albans’s assistant rector, says that one has “no way of knowing” how engaged people are simply by looking at them during the service. On the other hand, he pursues an active congregational voice because “there does seem to be, though, something about singing yourself, that is much deeper participation” (interview with author, December 11, 2017). The “deeper participation” he describes appears to be connected, at least in the interviews, to the act of giving voice to one’s participatory intent. UBC musician Junior described the process: I think participation means voicing what you’re looking for as a member [of the congregation]. Giving feedback and saying, “I love that song, I think that’s a song that I resonate with,” or saying, “hey, I really like this song. Have you considered playing it?” Like, that’s a part of your participation as a congregation member, of making your voice heard … Making that heard, and saying, “I think this music was good, I think this was challenging, I don’t know if I like this.” (Interview with author, October 11, 2017) From his perspective, voicing participation moves beyond the music and into the polity of the church because the voice adds body and corporality to participation. By disturbing the air in the worship space, by producing a vibration that reaches others in the same space, the participant is saying: “I am here, and I wish to participate in this conversation.” Perhaps herein lies the distinctiveness of singing in church music: the need to hear, to feel, the voice of the other as an actualization of the body of Christ through the sonic and visual performance of the community. Even so, my research made it clear that participants recognize other participants through various means that move beyond singing to include its perceived opposite: silence. I focus on these silent expressions of participation not as a negation of singing, but as a complementary and, for many worshipers, crucial way of engaging with the liturgy and its music.

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Yielding to the liturgy: silence, listening and attention in church music Some of the time, the willingness to yield to the liturgy finds an external expression, such as closing one’s eyes or kneeling to pray.5 The praying itself might happen silently, and is inward-oriented; but to any observer, the rehearsed posture says: “I am praying.” Behind this external guise lies another, deeper posture, that McGregor identifies: I think on the most fundamental level, corporate worship, and maybe worship in general, is an act of attention. It is orienting your observing self, so to speak, towards God or towards God’s story or something like that. That is the posture that undergirds a lot of this stuff. (2017) Thus, the “showing up” identified by McGregor and Whisnant is, in fact, accompanied by something akin to Becker’s “deep listening” that encompasses the entire liturgy. But how do congregants and leaders measure levels of engagement in the liminal space between subjective, internal participation and, say, singing? At UBC, individual responses to music are encouraged and expected. Emily Nance served as UBC’s children’s pastor for four years, and outlined her family’s engagement with church music. For her, it generally means singing the alto lines of songs. For her husband, it means swaying lightly with hands pocketed. For one of her children, participating means “singing every word,” while for the other child it means dancing along to the music. She came to the conclusion that we engage the music and the sermon differently, but I feel like you have to find that for yourself. There are definitely Sundays that I am more participatory than others, you know? When I have more trouble shutting off my mind, and being in that singular moment. (Interview with author, February 17, 2018) Her comment illustrates how participation varies not only between congregations or individuals, but also from instance to instance for the same person. Sometimes it is easier to focus than at other times. Conversely, while UBC seems to favor giving each individual space to express themselves uniquely, the leadership at St. Alban’s views the very prescription of engagement as an act of freedom. Aaron Zimmerman, the church’s rector, spoke of this at length: [One] thing that I think is distinctive and good about people that worship in the mode that we do here, is that for the most part, participation is expected whether you feel it or not. And I think there are some worshiping ideas where the idea is “if you feel it, then you will do this action.” If you’re feeling it, you’ll put your hands up in the air. You’ll close your eyes.

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual You’ll sway a little bit. If you’re not feeling it, you feel like a chump. Here I’m just standing with my hands in my pockets, and I’m missing out on the experience. In our context, when we kneel everybody kneels. When we stand everybody stands. When you go forward for communion, everybody goes forward for communion. And I’ve talked to people who’ve found that a great relief, because you’re not creating two classes of people experientially: the people who are feeling it and the people who aren’t. And you’re also not demanding ecstatic religious experience as a sign of devotion. You know, people feel like “I’m not a good Christian if I’m not feeling it as much as the person next to me.” And there’s not room for the fact that some people are introverts, some people are extroverts, some people need quiet, some people [like noise] … and so I think that if we all do these things together, there’s something wonderfully freeing about that. We’re not leaving the decision up to you, about your own emotional state and feeling emotionally awkward. (Interview with author, November 17, 2017)

From Zimmerman’s perspective, collective engagement confers anonymity, and removes from the individual the need to constantly monitor and make decisions about what the appropriate index of engagement should be for a particular moment in the liturgy; in other words, to disengage from flow. There is a promise here, offered through a particular participatory rhetoric: “we’re not leaving the decision up to you.” Overall, interviewees noted that participation can mean different things for different people because there are particular roles, or tasks, that need to be performed during the service. For Pedro, a musician and lay leader at São João, there are many forms of participation that go beyond singing or playing (interview with author, October 20, 2017). A youth in the church echoed his claim: “[during] the service, there are people who will play specific parts” (Juarez 2017). People participate by running the sound, some act as ushers, others play instruments, and some operate media projectors. From the perspective of performance, participation equates to performing a role that needs to be performed as much as a role that one simply wants to perform. People perform for others through service and throughout the service, and by doing so reinforce the sense of specialness and community associated with the ritual activity of worship. Because churches offer different ways to participate, through singing and otherwise, worshipers might choose places of worship based on the modes of engagement that they offer to potential participants, saying: “come perform this ritual with us in this particular way.” Churches afford spaces for silent participation in different ways. At UBC, says Junior, When I am in the congregation, and singing on Sundays when I’m not playing, I rarely sing along. And I rarely move. Usually I’m holding something, like a coffee cup in my hand, listening and kind of singing, just kind

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of letting it happen. I think it’s because I want to remove myself from what I normally do so much, so I go to the furthest extent. And then in moments when I feel I wanna sing along I do, but I wanna jump to the other extreme of saying: “in no way am I engaging in this intentionally, but just sort of letting it wash over me.” (2017) Junior’s idea of “letting the music wash over you” peppered many of my conversations with musicians, clergy and church members as a valued response to the liturgy and its music. Certain interviewees framed silent participation as essential. Paul, a parishioner at St. Alban’s, said that he would not be able to worship “in a place that didn’t incorporate some kind of silence into the service” (interview with author, December 13, 2017). Taking these perspectives into account, silent participation can be viewed in at least two ways: as part of a participatory cadence that alters between listening and singing, and as a performance of reverence. First, silence can be construed as a response to singing, as a respite from vocal engagement. Junior recognized the need to listen and to breathe in church music. For him, there must be space for “an individual to just sit and let it happen to them” (2017). He pushed the claim further, suggesting that participants may even be afraid to let the moment overtake them, and silence is the way one may “give in to the moment,” whereas singing would, as an active response, stop the music from “washing over you.” From his perspective, there is a space for singing and a need for listening not only to others, but also to one’s own reactions in worship; a self-diagnosis mode that apparently stands in stark contrast to the idea of full participation, but is an acknowledged form of participation nonetheless. Without the option of not singing, this type of performed reflexivity would not be possible. Such a perspective represents a rehearsal of availability, openness, or vulnerability in worship: Just let it hit you. Just take it in, allow yourself to take it in and recognize what’s happening in this moment. Vulnerability, accessibility, availability kind of things. All the “ilities.” And then recognizing that silence is also music, and that the sermon is also a music in its own way. There’s a rhythm to it. (2017) Part of such an idea of rhythm in participation may stem from the understanding that, while singing and listening are both possible responses to the liturgy and to church music, they accomplish different goals. A female UBCer in her thirties said: I definitely don’t feel like you always have to be singing. I know for me, there are times when I don’t sing and I just listen. Or maybe I’m just, kind

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual of, running the words in my mind, but then I might sing too. So, it doesn’t feel like I have to be singing in order to feel like I’m participating. (Diana, Interview with author, January 2, 2018)

She alternates and flows between singing and listening. If such is the case, which may not be true of all participants, then the performance of silence reveals a posture of reception and listening. This listening might occur during a song, as a participant stops to reflect on a particular nuance, on certain lyrics, or on any other aspect that caught their attention during performance, as Zimmerman describes: I think one of the things about our service is that because it’s repetitive, sometimes people get used to it and you can mentally disengage. You can pull out. But I think you can also do that in any church service. And sometimes that’s just normal human cognitive functioning: you can’t process everything and be fully present all the time. Your brain says: “hold on, give me a break, and then we’ll dive back in.” I think some of that can also be spaces where the Holy Spirit is working in groans too deep for words. Sometimes, I’ll find myself—and other people have this experience as well—you’re singing a hymn, you totally check out for the second verse ’cause you’re still thinking about something that was in the first verse, about how it interprets your own life. How it exegetes you. And then you kind of come back in for the third verse or whatever. (2017) He is describing the cadence of singing and listening, of saying and understanding, of theologizing during the performance of church music, that Diana mentioned. Participants find new connections to their own lives and to their corporate experience in the process or, as Zimmerman puts it, the music exegetes performers. Because no exegesis is the same as the last, this is an ongoing development, a ritual process. Second, and in alignment with this posture of silence as receptivity and listening, comes the notion of the performance of silence as a performance of reverence. A middle-aged Brazilian woman at São João told me that her approach to worship is to “place myself in adoration, in silence, in prayer. Because often it is the time to come and put your heart before God. I use worship [music] for that” (Maria, interview with author, October 20, 2017). For her, music is the conduit to surrendering the heart to God. This scenario reinforces the important ritual node of transformational expectations of worshipers that we encountered in the previous chapter. By offering oneself to God and rehearsing a posture of receptivity, of vulnerability, through active silence, a participant might be saying, “I am ready for the transformation effected through participation in this ritual.” Generally, leaders seem to “read the room,” measuring the pulse of participation not through one specific mode of engagement, but by looking for

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outward signs of inward processes. UBC community pastor Whisnant says: “I think eye contact would be a big [sign], like, looking to what’s happening, whoever’s speaking, and that could be the preaching moment to the Scripture reading, to looking at the screen, or whatever the case may be” (2017). Leaders also use their ears to measure participation, listening for a “sound” that points to the overall quality of engagement. Lavery describes how the congregation does respond better some weeks, some of it is just simply if there’s more people out there. You know, the church is packed and everyone’s singing the last hymn very well, they engage in everything … and sometimes I can tell when they’re more grabbed by, say, the anthem during the offertory, because there’s just less noise going on out there. (2017) In this case, “sound” is not restricted to the combined result of many people singing, but has space for a silence that points to the absence of distraction. Silence is the sound of listening; it is the performance of engagement when the voice is not active. “I will take this on myself”: surrogate participation One mode of participation that surfaced during the interviews falls outside this pattern of singing or being silent in person: the idea of participating for those who are absent. UBC incorporates lament into its liturgy in a very intentional way. One reason why lament is strongly present in the worshiping ethos at UBC has to do with the death of former senior pastor Kyle Lake, who was performing a baptism with around 800 people in attendance when he was electrocuted. This event deeply shaped UBC’s development as a congregation (Christianity Today 2005; Howard 2016). McGregor recognizes the tendency: But say somebody’s decidedly not paying attention because they’ve had some major crisis that completely overwhelms their attention. They’ve shown up, but they’re trying their best to just keep it together. That’s where the sense of gathering as a community, I think, takes hold … There are people who don’t necessarily feel like they’re in that [dark] place. But there are definitely people who are. So, in some way, for a person who’s not there to sing that, is to champion the person who is. To sing it for them. Because the person who is in that dark place might not be able to sing, so it’s almost like an act of care, of love. (2017) McGregor connects the question of participation during the music on Sunday morning to people’s lives outside of the sanctuary. He is suggesting that one reason behind what may appear to be distraction, of falling out of flow, might be suffering—a suffering that distracts, that mutes an otherwise active voice.

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This penchant is also reflected in the way UBC’s staff weave topics like sexual abuse and racism into prayers and community action. Black History Month is a major theme at UBC, and the congregation is involved in community outreach in Waco. Emily Nance mentioned the church’s connection to the city in a comment about McGregor’s compositions, which feature regularly in UBC’s liturgy: I think there’s been a lot more speaking of truth and pain in [McGregor’s] songwriting, because it’s very important, as a community, that we can sing those songs together and experience those things together, and perhaps lift the burden of those who are really, really, deeply hurt, really suffering. It may not be your suffering that you’re singing about, but you may be joining in someone else’s. (2017) Nance’s claim demonstrates that lament is part of the way UBC views itself in the larger community of Waco: a place for sinners and sufferers. Other UBCers acknowledged the same focus. A young mother said: “there’s obviously space made at UBC for doubt and struggle, and I value that, and I think that’s really an important thing for the church to do” (Diana 2017). In contrast, she also suggested that the music spends more time than it should in the “lament department.” Diana has asked for more “intentional moments of celebration and thankfulness.” But as a group, UBCers seem to gather around the idea of voicing not only their own lament, but that of others as well. McGregor elaborated: It’s a way to say: “I will take this on myself, and I’ll voice it for you.” And then maybe you have somebody who can sing about it and is in a dark place. And they voice it for the person who doesn’t necessarily connect with it, because just because they can’t connect with it in that moment doesn’t mean that, as a human being, they will not be in that place next week, you know? So, there’s this shared thing. Now, let’s say we have a song that’s making claims that are more positive that someone can’t necessarily voice; well then, same story. You have the people voicing the praise or joy or thanks or whatever, for the person who can’t. As a community, this is a way to share the load together. And then … we have a lot of songs that have first person personal pronouns, you know, like “I” or “me.” And I’ve said: “hey, on the one hand, yeah, you’re a group of individuals. So yeah, there’s a way in which this is you having a personal connection. On the other hand, you’re a group of individuals, and you might look at this as the ‘I’ or ‘me’ or whatever, this is the community, and not just you.” … So, the participation might be done by the surrogate of someone else, but once again, I think just being there. And I might even be able to make a case of, say, you couldn’t even get out of the door that morning, but you’re still in community with these people. Maybe there’s a surrogacy there as well. Just because you’re not present that day, you’re still a part of the community and still, somehow, shaped by that via the people who you are attached to. (2017)

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McGregor’s words illustrate this idea of taking it upon oneself to participate in lieu of those who are not able to do so, for a variety of reasons. Being “a group of individuals,” for him, has bidirectional implications, because church music must allow for individuality and community. A consequence of these connections is that individual relationships and congregational responsibilities extend beyond the liturgy. McGregor points to a surrogacy of presence, whereby those who are there for worship might also be engaging in the music in lieu of those who are not able to be present on a given Sunday, but who are still part of the community. These absentees are woven into the ritual process of the congregation’s rehearsal, from week to week, of the liturgy. For McGregor, an important aspect of this surrogate participation is that it extends both ways. Not only do those who may not be suffering sing for those who are, but those who are suffering may be able to better express certain dimensions of the Christian faith precisely because they are going through difficulty, keeping in mind that “just because they can’t connect with it in that moment doesn’t mean … they will not be in that place next week.” McGregor connects surrogate participation to questions of community and identity that are negotiated during the performance of worship. Another form of surrogate or vicarious participation occurs when choirs and other groups of formally trained musicians perform on behalf of congregations. Such performances are an integral part of many Christian traditions to a stronger or lesser degree; in Tridentine Catholicism or Greek Orthodox liturgies, for instance, silent participation is the mode of engagement expected from participants during a large part of the liturgy. Many Free church liturgies feature a choir that is not only seated apart from the congregation, but may sing a “special” song that congregants listen to. At UBC, McGregor usually sings the offertory song without an expectation that people will join in. At St. Alban’s, the choir plays an active role in the liturgy and, on any given Sunday, will sing several pieces by itself while the congregation listens. At São João, the choir may alternate between supporting congregational song and performing one or two prepared pieces during the service. Juxtaposed modes of engagement are at play here. Silent participation, as framed in the previous section, is overlaid with surrogate participation, as the congregation listens and participates in the liturgy through the active singing of an other that may be clergy, a choir, a quartet, or another separate formation of performers. For certain interviewees, such as Bryan at UBC, these moments present an opportunity: “you can have participation through silently listening to the offertory song that you don’t sing” (2017). For others, the choir is a surrogate that sings for them that which they cannot sing themselves, a dynamic that appeared frequently in my conversations at St Alban’s. Lincoln, a father in his early thirties, said: There’s no way I can sing at the level of the choir, but their spirituality moves them to sing some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. And so, you’re not often gonna catch me singing along to the hymns in the

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Talking about ritual, participating in ritual handout. I’m gonna be listening and enjoying, watching these people and how they celebrate their faith, and what moves them. (Interview with author, February 19, 2017)

Lincoln participates silently through the voice of the choir: “I like to think that the choir is there to sing for me.” In this case at least, the juxtaposition of silent and surrogate participation appears clearly, demonstrating the applicability of our typology of modes of engagement to describe participatory dynamics in church music. Surrogate singing, vicarious participation, is a way through which congregations perform community. They are carrying the other by performing their voice, and lamenting members are performing the other’s potential suffering through their silence and/or absence. “At home, in your car, by yourself”: immersive spectatorship As we have seen, one implication of the idea of vicariously “singing the voice of the other” is that participants’ understanding of what it means to worship as a community can expand to include not only those who are silent, but also those who are absent. Consequently, the idea of surrogate participation, especially when configured as participating in lieu of an absent other, pushes church music outside the confines of Sunday worship, to include the way participants engage with church music in everyday life, away from the liturgical event, and beyond church boundaries. Participants recognized, and attempted to explain, the porous boundaries between church music on Sunday, the Christian music cultures to which they may be connected (to varying degrees), and music culture in general. If these boundaries can be read as concentric circles, my research indicates that the music of the church can be experienced beyond the first and second circles and into the third. People do not stop listening to music—or church music—when they leave church. At UBC, Junior argued that people will respond to unfamiliar music “even if it’s not the thing that a congregation member is gonna go and put in the CD player in their car, or turn on their Bluetooth” (2017). George, a worshiper at St. Alban’s, claimed that we have CDs for the whole reason of experiencing music that is beyond what we usually do on a Sunday. I don’t expect a perfect performance or everything to be what I want it to be on a Sunday, but that’s why I have a CD player or whatever, an MP3, in my car and at home. (2017) My interlocutors acknowledged that they do, indeed, listen to church music in their cars, via CD, Bluetooth, radio, or streaming through sources such as YouTube or Spotify. Aware of this dynamic, churches around the world record their music and make it generally available, so that people may, in turn, plug it into their sound systems and extend the experience of church music beyond the walls of the sanctuary.

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Along with participants, church leaders recognize that the boundaries between Sunday liturgy and weekly mix tapes are porous. In fact, this is true of other church music boundaries, such as those between church service and worship concert, and between hymnal and iTunes (Ingalls 2018). At UBC, McGregor records some of his material, which is available on a series of online platforms in audio and/or video format.6 His strategy is recognized by congregants, who speak positively about it: Jamie has done a good job of reinvigorating that [tradition of writing music for the church]. Not that it ever didn’t happen, but he has really taken that to heart, in saying “I’m gonna write music for this place. We’re gonna record albums for this church.” And not worry about whether or not it’s gonna take off elsewhere, but saying “these 400–600 people that meet here on Sundays, this is what they need. We’re gonna give it to them. This is what we need, we’re gonna give it to ourselves.” (Junior 2017) So, too, do the “big players” in contemporary Christian music, such as Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, Jesus Culture and others, understand the importance of releasing more than an audio product; each single is accompanied by a video on YouTube. Scholars within theology and church music departments have recognized that the hymnal no longer represents the embodied artifact of church music par excellence (Bradley 2012). Anna Nekola and Tom Wagner have recognized the shifts in processes of the commoditization of material culture that have come about through the growth of the niche Christian culture market and through the pervasiveness of digital communications (2015). These blurred boundaries, in turn, demonstrate the porosity between participatory and presentational modes of music making; a fluidity that Turino (2008) recognizes, as does Margulis: There’s no more endearing image, perhaps, of a truly effective episode of musical communication than a person playing full-throttled air guitar. A short-lived reality TV show on VH1 called Motor Mouth chronicled particularly egregious instances of that other signature index of positive musical experiences: the in-car radio sing-along. Successful musical communication feels like a scooping up of the listener into the music, a process of bringing the listener along. This can take the form of imagined coparticipation, in which the listener follows the musical logic so intensely that it comes to feel as if he’s executing it. But it can also take the form of overt participation: singing along, or carefully reproducing the demonstration of a teacher, providing evidence that the student understood the teacher’s point even though no words were exchanged. (2013, 136–137) When a participant listens to a piece from last Sunday’s set list in their car on a Thursday afternoon, or when they watch a YouTube video of Hillsong

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performing “Oceans,” they are “scooped up into the music” as Margulis describes. There is a compilation of participatory events that sweeps the listener into an experience of worship, woven together by the ritual repetition of church music. Because the participant has “been there, done that,” sensory mnemonic triggers and liturgical memories are activated and flood the listening/watching experience. Thus, watching a video of Jamie McGregor singing “In the Night” on Vimeo, for a UBCer who has performed the song in church during Lent, becomes more than just web surfing—it is immersive spectatorship. Performance scholar James Ball has developed the idea of immersive spectatorship in his work, connecting Schechner’s ideas of environmental theatre as immersive performance experience to media rituals, digital political protesting, and other conflations of media and performance that populate culture. Speaking of Schechner’s “Six Axioms for Environmental Theater” (1968), he claims that: Schechner comes closest to identifying his environmental theatre with immersiveness: “in multi-focus, events happen behind and above and below the spectator” (58). Importantly, Schechner’s theories of environmental theatre, developed in the 1960s, emerged from his efforts to rethink the theatrical event along a continuum running between traditional theatre, intermedia Happenings … and public events and demonstrations. (Ball 2018, 87) Schechner’s effort to “rethink the theatrical event along a continuum” propelled Ball’s research into today’s digital environments: a project on immersive spectatorship that recognizes the active nature of a way of looking in which all sense are absorbed and engaged in ways that “enact the social webs that ensnare individuals even as those webs are mobilized for aesthetic ends” (Ball 2018, 92). For Ball, these experiences of immersive spectatorship are not neutral, but have social, ideological, and material consequences for those that participate in them (2017, 1). While in these cases of immersive spectatorship not all the senses are necessarily engaged, I argue that there is enough connection between the memory of ritual practices of worshipers, especially those with a strong record of ritual repetition, and these immersions to warrant an extension of the boundaries of church music, and what participation in this music means. The ability of the media to engage worshipers has not been lost on industry professionals, as demonstrated by the abundance of material on the Internet. Mary Hess reminds us of this reality: how we understand media has shifted from a “message transmission” model to one of cultural ritual. … Rather than being reliably produced and predictably consumed, media “rituals” provide space for the creation of, negotiation with, and even resistance to meaning-making. The same point can be made of liturgical ritual. (2001, 302)

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Hess’s comment acknowledges that worshipers can “tap into” the repertoire of the church, whether local or global, and extend their participation in worship—through whichever screen they happen to be looking at—beyond Sunday morning, as we have seen. Her point is that the gap between liturgical ritual and cultural ritual is a space in which those who engage with mediatized materials can indeed continue processes of making meaning. Nick Couldry pushes the same point further, arguing that from the perspective of anthropology, “media rituals are practices that enact and reproduce the categories which underlie beliefs in the social institution of the media, just as religious rituals reproduce the categories which underlie religious beliefs” (2009, 46). The correlation of belief and ritual that Hess and Couldry speak of dovetail into and reinforce the claims of Nekola and Wagner (2015), outlining the dynamic by which the immersive spectatorship of worship videos becomes an active component in the worshiping life of participants in church music. If immersive spectatorship is indeed such a widespread practice, it begs the question: is watching worship videos on YouTube a media ritual or a religious ritual, or both? One ritual does not exclude the other; they are juxtaposed. If such is the case, then rituals of immersive spectatorship solidify (and generate) belief in the theology (both that of the listener and that being participated in), and in the medium of interaction itself, and demonstrate how theology, religious material culture, and media are not only intertwined, but are imbricated in today’s church music environments. Within this matrix, digital processes become imbricated with the performance of church music. Investigating church music or congregational processes of theologization without taking into account the extrapolation of repertoires into participants’ earbuds and cellphones is a severe handicap for scholars and church leadership, because the exercise depends on outdated paradigms of content transmission that separate content from the medium of delivery, and canonical practices from popular practices. Such paradigms do not stand up to the phenomena described by Couldry, Wagner, Nekola, Ingalls, Ball, and other scholars who recognize how the convergence of media and religion, especially in its ritual aspects, do in fact shape culture and religious piety in human experience. These convergences of media and religion bear upon the music of the church. The distance between what the contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry’s target listener, often dubbed “Becky,” listens to in her car on the commute to pick up her kids from school; what church music enthusiasts watch on their cellphones and computers; and what participants engage in on Sunday morning worship is shrinking.7 The idea of immersive spectatorship, a concept placed squarely within performance studies, can describe these convergences and help church music scholars to deal with the complex web of musical repertoires, popular culture, and media theory that need to be negotiated in order to study the music of the church today.

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When participation fails: falling out of flow, ritual disruption, and participatory discrepancies I previously positioned our discussion of participation in church music on the “efficacy” pole of Schechner’s efficacy-entertainment braid. Schechner argues that, when the function of the performance is mostly aesthetic or entertainment, the performance can be dubbed “theater,” whereas if there is an expectation of results of some sort, or if the performance is aimed at efficacy, it can be labeled a ritual (2013, 79–80). For him, “the purpose is the most important factor determining whether a performance is ritual or not.” On the other hand, he reminds us, “no performance is pure efficacy or pure entertainment” (2013, 80). Performances waver between these poles. Moreover, especially on the efficacy side of the spectrum, they can fail. Both literature and ethnography suggest that simply engaging in ritual, even repeatedly, does not guarantee ritual efficacy. The performance of ritual does not guarantee reintegration or transformation. Because our investigation is concerned with church music, a ritual activity in which transformation is indeed expected, several questions emerge that are related to ritual failure. What happens on individual, communal, or musical levels, when church music fails? How and when do participants “fall out of flow,” thereby severing their connection to congregational music making? What are the roles of distraction and wavering intensity in participation in church music? Ritual failure has been a topic in ritual studies from very early on, although it has received less scholarly attention than efficacious ritual activity (Schieffelin 2007, 1).8 Grimes, based on Austin’s linguistic typology, has proposed the idea of “performative infelicities” as a way of explaining such failures, which seems to place responsibility on design or procedure to explain the failure of ritual (1990, 191–194). But it would be difficult to ascribe such failures to any one individual aspect of such a complex activity as ritual. Edward Schieffelin points out that “ritual imperfections have such a vast array of different kinds and levels of ‘causes’ and consequences as to challenge notions of straightforward explanations” (2007, 19). In other words, there are so many factors connected to ritual failure that it becomes difficult to hold any one specific aspect accountable for it. He also acknowledges that discussions of ritual failure “often emerge as a matter of political contestations deriving from tensions and struggles outside the ritual that are expressed in one way or another within it,” emphasizing that any discussion of ritual failure is necessarily contextual, because it depends on what experts and participants in a particular milieu believe ritual is and does in context (2007, 19). This concern appeared clearly in the “worship wars” of the 1990s, in which specific pedagogies of church music, whether contemporary or traditional, were defended and attacked, explicitly or implicitly, based on their efficacy to produce transformation in congregants’ spiritual lives. Overall, discussions about the failure of ritual pertain not only to the causes of failure themselves, but to the ideological, philosophical, and theological divergences that surround ritual practices. They are connected to the expectations that are set up beforehand about what participants expect to happen as they enter into ritual activity.

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While Grimes speaks of performative infelicities, Kathryn McClymond prefers “ritual disruptions” to “failure.”9 One of the reasons for her word choice is that ritual failures are not contained within the boundaries of ritual, but seem to have repercussions and implications far beyond the ritual stage itself. Her notion aligns with the ripple pattern of participation in church music that we have identified here, which can range from active, bodily present singing, to surrogate participation and immersive spectatorship. McClymond echoes Schieffelin’s recognition of the difficulty in investigating ritual disruptions, because ritual can be disrupted frequently and on multiple levels, extending far beyond the boundaries of actual performed events. Ritual disruptions (and the corrections or adjustments that occur in response) are like weather vanes in ritual systems, signaling which way the ritual system winds are blowing, for good or for ill. (McClymond 2016, 174–175) Her comment opens up the possibility of viewing these ritual failures, which may be minute momentary distractions or massive disruptions, in the context of the rehearsal of church music that takes place across singing communities from week to week. As a way to nuance these failures––and will I continually acknowledge the complexity of such failures––I propose three ways to articulate them: falling out of flow; repetitive failure; and participatory discrepancies. The first articulation of ritual failure is the “falling out of flow” mentioned by McClymond when she says that “rituals are disrupted at the level of discrete elements” (2016, 175). These might be as minute, say, as the notification buzz on a cellphone that draws one’s attention away from the ritual activity. One young adult at São João described “the person who’s messing with their phone and [is] oblivious to the things around her” as an example of this disruption (Davi, interview with author, December 13, 2017). A St. Alban’s parishioner recognized that, sometimes, “I’ve got stuff on my mind” (Paul 2017); in other words, “stuff” that calls participants’ attention away from the activity. Disruption might not last for the duration of a whole ritual event, because Paul also says that “there’s times even in the same service when I’m engaged and then there’s times when I’m checked out.” His comment points to the potentially wavering nature of participating in church music. While some participants may be fully in a state of flow (or trance), unaware of the passage of time and fully engaged in music making, others may hover at the fringes, negotiating their participation as the ritual activity unfolds. Ritual disruption was also mentioned in connection with repetition. One UBCer said: “you could [sing] the same words over and over again, the same songs over and over again. You risk not recognizing what you’re singing anymore. You can only sing ‘Oceans’ so many times and actually mean it” (Junior 2017).10 The idea of “not recognizing what you’re singing anymore” owing to excessive repetition is tied to concern about the efficacy of ritual and the

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sincerity of the performance.11 Ritual failure may occur not only as a lapse in attention that curtails participation, but also through a severing of the connection between action and will, between words and intention; a concern that is shared by participants and leaders alike. The gravity of this concern is also amplified or dismissed according to a faith tradition’s conceptualization of sincerity as a significant factor in the performance of faith, as Adam Seligman aptly reminds us, saying that within contemporary Western society, concern with sincerity “is, to a significant degree, a result of the strong role of Protestant Christianity in the making of our modern world. … The importance of sincerity within Protestantism is in many ways a commonplace” (2008, 9). Furthermore, sonic considerations play a role in ritual disruption. At UBC, which tends towards the “louder” side of the decibel spectrum in worship, participants mentioned that, on occasion, the level of the music was a disrupting factor.12 They described the music as loud in a way that interrupted flow, that expelled them from it; as “so loud that it disrupts the Word” (Zack, interview with author, December 2, 2017). Such disruption was also connected, in other interviews, to musical style and “jolts,” shifts between traditions or elements that seemed to be beyond participants’ familiarity. In one case, a congregant said that the music itself was distracting; not in reference to style or volume, but to the simple fact that there was music (Diana 2017). While her position is unique and does not seem to represent the view of the majority, it nevertheless illustrates a disruption in which music (and its associated components) may either invite participants to engage in ritual or, conversely, it can create particular resistances for certain potential participants. And these invitations and disruptions may happen simultaneously. How does one account for this porous ecology of participation at the fringes of ritual action, in which certain participants may be moving towards ritual engagement even as others may be drifting away from it? Here, Turino’s development of Charles Keil’s concept of participatory discrepancies (1987) can offer a framework to understand these movements, along with a vocabulary that can help to portray them.13 Turino describes participatory discrepancies as a function of the different affordances given to music (2008, 26), recognizing the cloaking function of these discrepancies in participatory music making, an effect created by simultaneous variables in singing and other forms of participation. He says that in participatory modes of music making, “virtuosity, while present, tends to be intensive, like variation itself, and is usually subtly merged with the overall collective sound” (2008, 47). For Turino, “the quality of the performance [in a participatory context] is ultimately judged on the level of participation achieved” (2008, 29). In this case, the concepts of embodiment and participatory discrepancies can help to describe the connections between musicians, congregation, and repertoire in the performance of church music. Participation in church music can be viewed once again as a spectrum between intense participation and non-participation. Between these two extremes, participants are falling out of flow, achieving flow, and negotiating distraction and repetition. Such variety provides a cloaking function through participatory

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discrepancies that relate to the manner and degree of participation. These participatory discrepancies, then, instead of interrupting congregational music making, serve instead as a sonic marker, a textural sign of participation. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examined church music as ritual, moving towards a performance perspective. I identified three ritual nodes in the process: repetition, transformation, and participation. While participation can be understood on a spectrum from virtual to trance-like, there can be no ritual activity without participation of some sort. Ritual repetition, the construction of meaning and identity, the sense of community, any type of transformation, and even ritual disruptions, are possible only if there are bodies to perform (and by body I include the voice). Disembodied intentions do not participate in church music; embodied worshipers do. It is the body that musicks. It is the body that is touched by music. During afternoon tea with a couple of UBCers, one young mother of two, a musician in her own right, commented: I think for me, I love music. There’s a certain non-volitional bodily response that I have when there’s music playing. I just move around more. Not like crazy or anything, but I definitely feel a different sort of energy, I guess, with music. (Diana 2017) As argued in the Introduction to this volume, the strong logocentric heritage of Christian theology has led it to consider concerns of the word and mind as taking precedence over questions of the body. More recently, liturgical studies scholars have demonstrated a renewed interest in the body as related to liturgy. As Grainger says, “liturgy is about embodiment.” For him, “the cognitive-emotional paradigm is very far from being a useful way of approaching human truth,” because “human experience is inescapably embodied” (2009, 20). These are the central theses of the next chapter, and it is to this “non-volitional bodily response” that we now turn.

Notes 1 In 1979, James Gibson proposed a theory of affordances as “possibilities for action that an environment allows to an animal” (Dotov, de Wit, and Nie 2012, 29). In sum, affordances are possibilities for action offered by a specific environment. A doorknob, for instance, affords twisting to open the door. 2 While Turino’s work is ethnomusicological, Margulis’s research dialogues with psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, and uses laboratory-based data. 3 Poloma relies here on the description of Roger Helland, a Vineyard pastor. I was unable to track down the original source, which describes Canadian revival phenomena (Poloma 2003, 58). 4 In context, these quotes do not imply that “being there” means passive participation; they imply that “being there” is a prerequisite for further participation, such as singing. 5 I am not, in this instance, enforcing the mind/body dichotomy I will critique in Chapter 4. I am echoing Joncas’s categorizations of internal and external modes of participation.

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6 Such as Vimeo (see https://vimeo.com/user52289386). 7 “Becky” is an industry moniker that refers to the target listener of adult contemporary Christian radio: “a woman, age approximately thirty-four, mother of two, and driving an SUV or minivan” (Perkins 2015, 239). 8 An early address on the matter of ritual failure seems to have been Clifford Geertz, when he purposely examined a ritual “that failed to function properly” (1957, 34). For McClydon, “anthropologists and ethnographers, more than other scholars of ritual, have identified ritual disruptions” (2016, 12). 9 Here, I am using “ritual failure” and “ritual disruptions” as interchangeable terms. 10 “Oceans” is a worship song (2013). 11 I am using “sincere” here instead of “authentic” to avoid highly charged and contentious discussions of authenticity in church music and ethnomusicology. These are not the focus of this investigation, which assumes efficacy on the performance spectrum, as we have seen. 12 Before services at UBC, there is a slide on the screen announcing that earplugs are available in the lobby for those who might be uncomfortable with the sound volume. This is an interesting strategy to mitigate complaints about the volume levels. 13 Keil’s original proposition is that in order for music to be “personally involving and socially valuable,” it must present discrepancies either of process or texture. For Keil, these discrepancies create opportunities for a variety of meanings to be ascribed to music (1987, 275).

References Augustine, and E. B. Pusey. 1960. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Washington Square Press. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ball, James R. 2017. “Within Spectacular Politics.” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Performance Studies Focus Group Pre-Conference: Spectacle. Las Vegas, NV, August. Ball, James R. 2018. “Eye Contact: Mesmeric Revelations in Baltimore.” TDR/The Drama Review 62(4) (December): 81–104. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00794. Bradley, C. Randall. 2012. From Memory to Imagination: Reforming the Church’s Music. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Couldry, Nick. 2009. “Media Rituals: From Durkheim on Religion to Jade Goody on Religious Toleration.” In Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age, ed. Christopher Decay and Elisabeth Arweck. Farnham: Ashgate. Christianity Today. 2005. “Pastor Electrocuted in Baptismal.” Christianity Today. www. christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/novemberweb-only/14.0.html (accessed April 7, 2018). Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2014. Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. New York: Springer. Dotov, Dobromir G., Matthieu M. de Wit, and Lin Nie. 2012. “Understanding Affordances: History and Contemporary Development of Gibson’s Central Concept.” AVANT. Pismo Awangardy Filozoficzno-Naukowej 2: 28–39. Geertz, Clifford. 1957. “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example.” American Anthropologist 59(1): 32–54.

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Gordon, Edwin. 2007. Learning Sequences in Music: A Contemporary Music Learning Theory. Chicago, IL: GIA Publications. Grainger, Roger. 2009. The Drama of the Rite: Worship, Liturgy and Theatre Performance. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press. Grimes, Ronald. 1990. Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory. 1st ed. Studies in Comparative Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hastings, Thomas. 1822. Dissertation on Musical Taste; or, General Principles of Taste Applied to the Art of Music. Albany, NY: Websters and Skinners. Hawn, C. Michael. 2003. Gather into One: Praying and Singing Globally. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Hess, Mary E. 2001. “Media Literacy as a Support for the Development of a Responsible Imagination in Religious Community.” In Religion and Popular Culture: Studies on the Interaction of Worldviews, ed. Daniel A. Stout and Judith Mitchell Buddenbaum. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Howard, Hannah Grace. 2016. The Making of a Modern Saint: An Analysis of Grief, Charisma, and Community Identity in Transition. Honors thesis, Lexington, VA: Washington and Lee University. https://dspace.wlu.edu/xmlui/handle/11021/33776. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Joncas, Michael. 1997. From Sacred Song to Ritual Music: Twentieth-Century Understandings of Roman Catholic Worship Music. Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press. Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” Cultural Anthropology 2(3): 275–283. Lovrien, M. Peggy. 2007. “Before All Else: Full, Conscious, and Active Participation.” Pastoral Music 32(2): 22–26. McClymond, Kathryn. 2016. Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption. Oxford Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2013. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Marini, Piero. 2013. “Liturgical Reform: Most Visible Fruit of the Second Vatican Council.” In Vatican Council II: Reforming Liturgy. Carmen Pilcher, et al. eds. S. Havertown: ATF Press. Marini, Stephen A. 2003. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Public Expressions of Religion in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nekola, Anna E., and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies series. Farnham: Ashgate. “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail).” 2013. Track #4 of Zion. Brentwood, TN: Hillsong/ Sparrow/Capitol CMG. Perkins, David. 2015. “Music, Culture Industry, and the Shaping of Charismatic Worship: An Autobiographical/Conversational Engagement.” In The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, ed. Monique M. Ingalls and Amos Yong. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Poloma, Margaret M. 2003. Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Pusey, E. B. 1960. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Washington Square Press. Schechner, Richard. 1968. “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre.” The Drama Review: TDR 12(3): 41–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144353.

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Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Media ed. Sara Brady. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Schieffelin, Edward L. 2007. “Introduction.” In When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure and the Dynamics of Ritual, ed. Ute Hüsken. Numen Book series: Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 115. Boston, MA: Brill. Seligman, A., ed. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vatican Council II. 1963. Sacrosanctum Concilium. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_coun cils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en. html (accessed June 10, 2020).

4

Body in worship Church music and embodiment

Musicking is a bodily activity. When people make music, they move both intentionally and unintentionally. Similarly, participants in church music engage with it in and through the body. Christian traditions deal with this worshiping body in different ways, although, as we shall see, Christianity’s suspicion of the body is deeply ingrained. Judith Becker traces this separation between body and mind, famously distilled by Descartes into the claim “I think, therefore I am,” to “the prevailing doctrine of the church that knowledge depended on a disembodied soul” (2004, 4). She argues that it is a perspective that “does not seem able to deal with the body” (2004, 5), but continues to shape the way we think about music and cognition. The problem, says Becker, is that “we experience music with our skins, with our pulse rates, and with our body temperature.” Because of this, “to subscribe to a theory of musical cognition which cannot deal with the embodiment of music, of the involvement of the senses, the visceral system, and the emotions is to maintain a Cartesian approach of mind/body dualism” (2004, 6). There is a deep-seated correspondence between the mind/body dichotomy that has shaped Western thought and the theories of music cognition that have shaped Christian thinking about music in worship. For Don Saliers, how worshiping congregations negotiate the musicking body has implications, because distinctions between body and spirit and between what may or not be appropriate affect the way in which Christian communities engage in music making (2007, 15). In the face of the mind/body divide described by Becker, church music scholars are left with a problem: how to talk about music making, specifically as performance, if the subject of the body is taboo.1 An examination of church music as performance must account for the body, in line with Schechner’s claim that “your body is not your ‘instrument,’ your body is you” (1994, 145). The acknowledgement that “our body is us” shifts the way we think about the performance of church music, and brings us to the concept of embodiment, which Emmanuel Alloa defines thus: [T]he performer is that living body through which he performs and, as such, the performer cannot face his own body; he cannot act upon it as he would upon an object. Any act will inevitably have to go through the body. (2014, 147; emphasis in the original)2

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The concept of embodiment indicates the phenomenon whereby ideas, notions, and intentions are generated, experienced, and expressed through and in the body. In this chapter, we will examine the body as it is engaged in church music. In order to provide a context for how my interlocutors spoke of their own sense of embodiment, I provide a brief account of Christian worship’s uneasiness with the worshiping body, and offer a vocabulary to talk about the body from the perspective of performance. This vocabulary includes analyses of certain embodied gestures––or bodily performatives––that stem from the ethnographic research and feed back into our overall investigation of church music as performance.

The gap between mind and body in Christian worship The rift between body and mind has haunted Christianity since early on. Christian perspectives on music were formed as the new faith defended itself amid other religions, based not necessarily on liturgical or theological grounds, but on questions of morality (Music 1998, 27). A string of patristic writers either condemned the use of instruments outright, or reinterpreted biblical passages alluding to instruments through the lens of allegory and metaphor. For Clement of Alexandria, the exciting rhythm of flutes and harps, choruses and dances, Egyptian castanets and other entertainments get out of control and become indecent and burlesque, especially when they are re-enforced by cymbals and drums and accompanied by the noise of all these instruments of deception. (Quoted in Music 1998, 35–36) Theodoret of Cyrus, and Epiphanius of Salamis, to name but a few others, also condemned the use of instruments in church music (Music 1998).3 Christianity inherited, at least in part, a Hellenistic conceptualization of music as a pillar in the formation of human character espoused by the Greek doctrine of ethos, and entertained suspicions about its misuse precisely because it recognized its power. Plato’s suspicion of music led to the pervasive condemnation of instrumental music and its companion art, dance, in the early church. This stance developed, according to Brian Wren, into the idea that “the human body is shameful and distasteful, that sexual desire (seen as located in the body) is a temptation rather than a blessing, and that everything bodily is inferior to, and hostile to, our ‘spiritual’ and ‘rational’ nature” (2000, 87). For him, this perspective has shaped the way Christians worship, especially in the West: pews constrict movement, bodies touch each other only minimally, and participants engage in an over-ritualized and disembodied Eucharist that has morphed from a full meal into tiny pieces of bread and wine (2000, 87). Wren’s diagnostic summarizes how early Christian thoughts about the body in worship in general, and the musicking body in worship in particular, have shaped the way we think about participation in church music. It depicts a piety in which, according to Christine Gudorf, the human body continues subject to mind and

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soul (1994, 208–209). Such negative valuations have characterized Christian theology and liturgiology in their engagement with church music. Because of the mind/body separation Gudorf and Becker describe, and because of the legacy of suspicion associated with the body in Christian worship, Ronald Grimes notes that “Most liturgical rites seriously ignore, if not bodily contradict, participants’ ‘lower’ (a poor term), biological nature” (1995, 9). Grimes describes the typical pattern of relating to the body within Christian liturgical studies as a progression from a presumed higher faculty to a lower one (e.g., divine to human, intellect to soul) claiming that many Christian rites are still “gnostically disembodied, and gestures continue to contradict theological proclamations of the incarnation” (1995, 9). In contrast, Turner argues: All the sense of the participants and performers may be engaged; they hear music and prayers, see visual symbols, taste consecrated foods, smell incense, and touch sacred persons and objects. They also have available the kinesthetic forms of dance and gesture, and perhaps cultural repertoires of facial expression, to bring them into significant performative rapport. (Turner 1982, 81) His description attempts to “cover all the senses,” and contrasts with Christian liturgy’s (and liturgiology’s) attempts, in the words of Grimes, to “idolize the socalled ‘higher’ senses, especially speech and vision. Words overwhelm most liturgical silences and obscure most of the tactile, gustatory, and kinesthetic aspects of liturgy” (1995, 9). When forced to recognize embodiment, Christian theology rears its logocentric head by favoring the senses that are most detached from the grime and sweat of the body: speech and vision. Touching, tasting, and smelling are relegated, in the best of cases, to a secondary role in the performances of Christian liturgy.4 Our goal here is to override the tendency of “stopping short of the body” in church music scholarship, leveraging performance theory’s focus on the body. Echoing Alloa, Schechner, Gudorf, Turner, and Grimes, I acknowledge “embodied experience” as the only experience available to participants in church music. While this perspective may cause discomfort in certain theological and ecclesiological environments, it rows against the tide of separation between body and mind to counterbalance the strength of these historical currents. I agree with Heike Peckruhn that if theologians appeal to embodied experience, we must do the work of attending to the sensory perceptual aspects of embodiment, the bodily capacities and orientation to the world, in order to investigate the complex ways in which our experience is facilitated and shaped in and through our bodily existence in the world. (2017, 6) My goal is to follow Peckruhn’s recommendation in relation to church music, an endeavor tempered by her claim that the question is not if embodied experiences

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will be valued, but how (2017, 9). In other words, even when the body is denied, covered, obfuscated, or otherwise ignored, these enforcements represent pedagogies of repression and cannot successfully erase the body from existence.

Embodiment in church music performance In order to frame the ways in which my interlocutors talked about the worshiping body, I will nuance our primary definition of embodiment with certain overtones from Christian theology, ethnomusicology, and phenomenology. This nuanced framework will help us to sift through the case studies, and a typology of performatives—bodily gestures that perform—will surface that can deepen our understanding of church music as performance. The debates about the body in worship have been negotiated and renegotiated throughout the history of Christianity. In the twentieth century, events such as the Second Vatican Council opened the door to fresh perspectives on the body from outside the Euro-American axis. Perspectives such as that of Elochwu Uzukwu contrast Western immobility with practices of bodily engagement from other parts of the world. Uzukwu speaks for the body from an African perspective, arguing that our motions or gestures, and the way we generally interpret human rhythmic movement, are bound to an ethnic experience. Consequently, our praise or thanksgiving, adoration or contemplation, prayer of quiet or measured ritual dance, which display the assembled body of worshipers before God or spirits, have meaning within an ethnic group. (1997, ix) For Uzukwu, Western Christianity’s Hellenistically infused paradigm of immobility and moderation coalesced into a fear of the moving body, resulting in a profoundly impaired connection between the ideal of “pure” worship and Western Christianity’s ethic of the body (1997, 7). From this perspective, any exaggerated movement in worship becomes improper, scandalous, and must be restrained. While it is important to recognize that this is not so in every Christian tradition, I contend that even in Christian traditions such as Pentecostalism, that do value energetic engagement with worship through the body, such engagement is highly regulated and the body is not necessarily viewed without suspicion. This dynamic of bodily restraint in church is individual, but also corporate, says Uzukwu, because it is the imposition of a gesture in an attempt to uniformize practices of Christianity (1997, 15). David Chidester corroborates this notion from a phenomenological perspective. For him, the body is a material site “at the center of the production and consumption of religion and popular culture,” because it “provides sensory media—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching—that make both religion and popular culture possible” (2005, 26). Both Chidester and Uzukwu recognize embodiment as the means through

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which meaning, change, identity, narrative, and other foundational aspects of human life and experience are actualized individually and collectively. Therefore, it is through embodiment that the ideological, theological, and ethical tenets of a given community are expressed, including embodied practices of musicking. Because embodiment is both individual and collective, performances are shared by communities, including religious communities. Moreover, to acknowledge embodiment in church music is to move beyond a simplistic model of church music as words accompanied by sound, to a more robust understanding of church music as bundled texts of expressed worldviews embodied in performances. Embodiment is an integrative function, combining ideas, thoughts and intentions, and grounding them in lived experience. Behind embodiment is the realization that all knowledge is necessarily attained through the body, and thus must be examined phenomenologically. Uzukwu’s and Chidester’s arguments not only recognize, but rely on, the idea of embodiment as the de facto medium through which selfhood is not only constructed but performed. For them, there can be no selfhood outside the body and, therefore, no performance extraneous to it. Performance is an embodied phenomenon that extends outwards into interpersonal, corporate, collective configurations that, in turn and in time (to evoke once again Turino’s framework of cultural cohorts and formations), crystallize into social life. This process of crystallization results in the selection of “appropriate” gestures that draw deeply on the cultural and historical configuration of a particular social context. In other words, whatever the body ethic of a particular social group, this ethic will help to determine not only which body movements are considered acceptable in performing church music, but which gestures denote valid participation in it. Chidester’s connection between culture and religion makes explicit what is at stake in negotiations of the worshiping body. If the body is the site for the production and consumption of such human phenomena as culture and faith, the control of the body brings power. Thus, performance and power become connected in the concept of embodiment; it happens “in” bodies and “between” bodies, from individual to community. Uzukwu does acknowledge a shift towards a more positive pedagogy of the body that seeks to envisage the movements and gestures people perform in worship as symbolic codes (1997, 15). Brian Wren, for instance, says that “when we sing with full voice our attitude changes. When body attitude combines with deepest beliefs, singers are taken out of themselves into a heightened awareness of God, beauty, faith, and one another” (2000, 87). He is, in effect, outlining the idea of an embodied performance of belief, in which one engages fully and is transformed by engagement. Frank Senn, along similar lines, defends the notion that any interactions between people (and between people and deity) must necessarily pass through the body (2016). Public worship is a sensuous experience that involves speaking and hearing, touching and tasting, seeing and doing, motion and emotion. We cannot participate in

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For Senn, performance is embodied ritual intention: “liturgy is a public work performed out of the world, but also before the world” (2016, 19). The way in which Senn and Wren deal with Christian liturgy as rituals imbricated with the idea of performance as embodied activity demonstrates the extent to which the concept of embodiment has found a place in Christian theological conversations. Nevertheless, this theological interest in embodiment conflicts with its strong logocentric penchant, a tendency that has often resisted engagements with music that move beyond the “lyrics.” In the words of Jeremy Begbie, “given Christianity’s commitment to words, music presents an irksome challenge to theology, for it can be an impressive means of Christian communication yet at the same time stubbornly resistant to being captured linguistically” (2005, 720). Because it explores meaning making in the body and in the collective nature of embodiment that results from the presentation of bodies to one another, performance theory challenges such logocentrism.

Stances of church music performance If the body is important in worship, if its movement has significance alongside the rhythm of poetry, what is its place in an investigation of church music as performance? We have already encountered Harris Berger’s work on stance in the Introduction to this volume, which hails from a phenomenological and ethnomusicological perspective and investigates the “interpretation of affect, style, and meaning in expressive culture” (2009, vii). Defining expressive culture as any social behavior with aesthetic implications, Berger considers texts to be anything that can be read in context, or “clearly bounded units that convey meaning for a person” (2009, ix). He proposes the idea of stance as “the affective, stylistic, or valual quality with which a person engages with an element of her experience” (2009, xiv).5 This element that can be a performance, practice, or item of expressive culture. In other words, the constellation of expectations, preferences, and narratives that bear upon the way people experience (and assess their experiences) of the world around them is a stance that is “frequently the pivot of meaning, the point around which turn the interpretations of expressive culture” (2009, 5). For Berger, different people and groups of people share a similar experience in distinct ways. One example he gives is the different expectations that listeners of alt rock or electronic music have about how a vocal track should be mixed in a song (2009, xiii–xiv). The alt rock fan expects the voice to be front and center, whereas the electronic music enthusiast is used to vocals that function texturally, “buried in the mix” instead of up front. Furthermore, similarly to Uzukwu and Chidester, Berger extrapolates connections between individual and corporate stances: “just as stance in the production or reception of expressive culture is the pivot on which aesthetic

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effects turn, so is stance on large time-scales the pivot on which the meaning of lives turns” (2009, 93). In other words, stances are Berger’s way of explaining embodied experiences of expressive culture, among which is religious music making. Participants in church music, too, come to its performance from different stances. Berger’s views on stance can help us to explain, from the perspective of embodiment, how texts evoke powerful meanings for people, how the partial sharing of meaning between participants occurs in performance, and how the interplay of culture and agency in practices of production and reception unfold. Communities share stances that embody what they believe to be important about making music as a group. Overall, this idea applies to the study of church music, where the idea of a shared theology, a shared understanding of the world (both visible and invisible) plays a role in creating and sharing the significance of worship. Given the nature of church music as a corporate performance par excellence, that aggregates individual participants into collective experiences of music making, his terminology can contribute to a discussion of an embodied experience of church music as a complex and simultaneous performance. Investigating stances, then, means investigating how worshipers embody and perform community, faith, and tradition through music. Just as we previously spoke of repeated ritual postures that are rehearsed by participants, we now have access to a framework that recognizes embodied practices of congregational musicking, allowing us to look at the individual and collective stances that worshipers assume within these participatory frameworks. Within these stances, gestures become the “bodily unit” of significance and performance, as we shall see.

Embodied intentions: performative stances in church music Gestures are important in church music. They are performative and expressive. How similar are the gestures of a rock band’s frontman to those of a worship leader in any given context? How does a congregation interpret a leader’s expressive gestures while the singing unfolds? How is individual freedom of movement conditioned by expectations about the body within distinct Christian traditions? Both from the pew and from the altar, the question of how gestures are used, which gestures are appropriate, and which are condemned, is crucial. The conceptualization of gesture I outline here draws from musicology and music psychology, and lends itself to discussing a series of gestures within a typology of bodily movements developed for the study of church music as performance. Coming from the Latin root gestus, Uzukwu defines human gesture as “a designed movement of the body in time and space” (1997, 2). More recently, Trevarthen et al. describe a unit gesture as “expression of intention by a single movement. Any bodily movement can be an expression with potential to communicate, but the expression most often meant when we speak of a human gesture is a movement of the hands” (Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, and Schlöger 2011, 13; emphasis in the original). Other definitions, especially those

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from music psychology, describe gesture as a configuration of purposeful movements, be they conceptual or physical. Robert Hatten offers a broad survey of scholarly definitions of gesture: I propose that human gesture be understood more generally as expressively significant, energetic, temporal shaping across all human modalities of perception, action, and cognition. (2004, 97) A prototypical gesture is a relatively short temporal gestalt that generally occurs within the temporal frame of the experiential present, or working memory (ca. 2 seconds). (2004, 101) A prototypical gesture (one that takes shape in the perceptual present) entails a fusing of two gestalts: the imagistic (e.g., facial features; timbre and sonority in music) and the temporal (e.g., movement; melody, rhythm, and in general, progression of any element in music); together these provide configurational depth and breadth. The interpretation of a gesture often appears to be immediate since these emergent cognitive inferences are so richly implicated in perception, with its biologically attuned, sensorimotor integration. (2004, 108; emphasis in the original) Hatten uses “prototypical” to describe gestures in music. He claims that most of these gestures are brief, expressive, and multimodal, and calls them “a fusion of two gestalts.” The same can be said of bodily movements in participation in church music. Moreover, says Uzukwu, “gestural behavior is repetitive; it establishes a way of doing; it is above all a pattern of communication that ensures group identity” (1997, 5). Repetition is important when comparing gestures in order to discern whether there are repeatable patterns that are adapted and integrated from context to context and become, over time, ubiquitous, accepted means of performing meaning into congregational worship across a broader religious spectrum. The question is how these gestures might be conceived of as utterances fraught with significance in our discussion of the embodied performance of church music. In Chapter 1, we followed James Loxley in tracing the transplantation of the term “performativity” from performative language theory. For him, the term “performative” could be used in broader terms: “performativity would therefore mean only the rather general quality something might have by virtue of being a performance,” and not operate under “the specific implications that would follow from an invocation of the line of thought first developed distinctively by Austin” (2007, 140). Overall, discussions of performativity, in tandem with a renewed interest in ritual and its expansion into everyday life have established an environment in which “performatives” may be (re)configured “adjectivally” (2005, 2140), with a specific application—in our case—to the study of church music.6

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From the perspective of performance, a “performative” unit can be equated to embodied intention: a gesture. It is an idea and action intertwined in (and with) liturgical-ritual context, piety expressed in and through church music; a performance of faith, community, and tradition wrapped into a musicking utterance. Moreover, if the practice of music is inescapably bodily, there is a connection between how practitioners conceive of faith, community, and tradition and the way they perform musical participation using these performatives. They express historical, local, and contextual realities. In this sense, the way church music is conceived of in context affects the way it is planned for and performed. Through the bodies of participants, the music embodies these narratives and stances—it is a portrait of them. Bodily performatives can be described as gestures and postures through which participants perform faith, community, and tradition in church music. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin develops a typology of these communicative units, coining the often-used phrase performative utterances: What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, “a performative.” The term “performative” will be used in a variety of cognate ways and constructions, much as the term “imperative.” The name is derived, of course, from “perform,” the usual verb with the noun “action”: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something. (1962, 6–7) The sentences that Austin offers as examples of these performatives include statements such as “I do [take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife], and “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” His examples fuse saying with doing, and illustrate cases in which the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action (1962, 6). Austin’s concept readily applies to the activity of congregational singing. In Singing the Congregation, Monique Ingalls expands Austin’s performative utterances to include verbal exhortations, “musical sounds and gestures [that] can help to affirm participants’ sense of a God-centered focus by communicating sincere intentions.” (2018, 51). Ingalls connects the concept of musicking gesture to Austin’s performative utterances, a connection that I adopt for gestures that occur both from the platform (leadership gestures) and from the pew (congregational participant gestures). In worship concerts, as well as other worship events, when participants sing certain words, they simultaneously accomplish the action that the words describe. By uttering the words “I worship you,” worshipers not only state what they are doing, they accomplish the act of worship itself.7 Describing these utterances, Ingalls speaks of “a series of specific sonic moves and bodily gestures embedded in performance [that] serve to authenticate the concert as worship, forming a ‘concert congregation’” (2018, 42).8 Ingalls also leverages the work of popular

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music studies scholar Simon Frith (1996) to interpret worship leaders’ “use of vocal and bodily techniques that index effort, including straining to reach certain notes and contorting the face into a serious impassioned expression” (2018, 51), Her goal is to assess “the degree to which pop-rock performance conventions are used to construct authentic worship” (2018, 52). She concludes that “speech, song, musical style, and gesture are performative means of establishing authenticity within worship concerts” (2018, 63). Such conventions and techniques are performed bodily utterances. In The Problem of Speech Genres (1986), philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin frames communication as a mutually responsive configuration, in which speech utterances are recognizable units in discourse (a definition that echoes’ Trevarthen’s description of a gesture). Bakhtin suggests that a listener, upon perceiving the meaning of discourse, assumes an attitude that is simultaneously responsive to discourse. In this configuration, utterances are respondents in context: “The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude towards other’s utterances and not just his attitude towards the object of his utterance” (Bakhtin 1986, 92; emphasis in the original). For Bakhtin, these units are tied in an exchange between participating subjects in a configuration. For our purpose of investigating gestures in church music performance, then, a gesture can be equated to an utterance: a unit in a participatory configuration with many levels of discourse, in which specific roles are performed. In summary, participants in church music use gestures as utterances to signify and index certain aspects of the practices they are engaging in. A performative utterance can be equated here with a performed gesture of worship, including the verbal utterances and bodily movements that are included in it. In this context, gestures are performative in two respects: first, because a gesture is literally being done; and second, because in doing the gesture, one can be said to be doing more than simply moving—one is also performing an act of worship. Worshipers are engaging in performing a sacred space into being; a delimited area in space and time, in which priorities are changed and social conventions may be altered, and one of the means whereby they are doing so is by using bodily performatives.

“Moving from speech into music”: a typology of church music performatives If gestures are indeed performative utterances in church music, what do these gestures mean, and how are they interpreted in context? How do participants express their own emotions and perform meaning into their experience? How do leaders in particular attempt to resolve tensions between gestures that are expressive and those that guide the congregation? We turn to the ethnography in order to identify how participants construe their own embodiment during participation in church music, and how this participation crystallizes into discrete clusters of performatives.

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In musical worship, performatives include leadership gestures, spontaneous expressive gestures, agreed-upon indicators of sincerity, and prescribed ritual gestures. I argue that these performative utterances, these performatives, do not occur in a linear pattern. Rather, they must be viewed as clusters, constellations, that crystallize through embodiment when participating in church music. The way my interlocutors talked about embodiment and gestures in church music varied significantly, and their responses seemed to be connected to the bodily role they perform in the liturgy. When I asked Rebekah Hughes, a professional singer who works at St. Alban’s, what she thought about the difference between spoken and sung words, she said: Maybe singing is harder work, even if you’re not trained and thinking about, like: “OK, so what is my diaphragm doing right now, in what position is my larynx,” and going that far, that there’s just something different about making music. (Interview with author, December 12, 2017) She further asserted her claim by offering the idea that singing is “moving from speech into music,” precisely because of the added requirement of effort on the singer’s part. Such physicality of musical performance is not lost on leadership. Aaron Zimmerman and Neal McGowan, rector and assistant rector, respectively, at St. Alban’s, mentioned physicality in their description of what happens when the congregation sings. McGowan implied that music is sacramental, because it is an audible sign of inward grace: Music has this funny combination of being both spiritual, non-physical, and deeply physical, at the same time. You feel it when you’re singing. There are vibrations in your body and when you hear them [you feel them]. The experience of music is deeply internal, spiritual, in a way that other art forms just aren’t. A painting, the physical object is always present. And in music, there’s something about it that draws you in beyond simply the physical vibrations. And so I think there’s a connection between that and what the sacrament of communion is doing. It is bread and wine, it never loses its bread and wine nature, it’s always a physical thing, yet there’s this deeper reality that is there as well. (Interview with author, December 11, 2017) He claims that these vibrations excite both the singer and the listener. Something that was not there comes into existence, making music “both spiritual … and deeply physical,” he says, suggesting that music exists in two worlds—spiritual and physical. His comment illustrates the mind/body dichotomy that is pervasive in traditional explanations of “what music does in worship,” even as he struggles to move beyond that separation by describing music as something that passes through these so-called boundaries between

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the material and the immaterial. Participation in music becomes, from this perspective, embodied sacrament. For Zimmerman, musicking affords a participatory opportunity that other modes of participation may not: [Music] resonates! Your diaphragm, your lungs, your heart, everything! The tones are vibrating the cavities in your sinuses and in your skull, and all this stuff is happening, and so, even if you’re not aware of that, it’s a much more full body experience. You’re standing, so you’ve kind of forced your body to wake up. Your nervous system does something different than when you’re sitting. So, all that’s happening, and I think when you sing something, at least for me, I have a more emotional response as opposed to an intellectual response to it. (Interview with author, November 17, 2017) Here, the integrative nature of musicking comes to the fore. Not only is music the mode of engagement whereby the Word excites the body into action; it is also participation in which emotion is aroused in opposition to the intellect (once again, Descartes looms heavily over this description). However, these observations necessitate further questions. How does the process of embodiment appear in the performance of church music? Is it possible to identify discrete movements of the body, be they vocal or otherwise, and analyze them separately or as configurations as meaningful components of the experience of worship? An analysis of my ethnography through the lens of performance yielded five discrete clusters of performatives present during participation in musical worship: performatives of expression; performatives of sincerity; leadership performatives; prescribed, shared congregational performatives; and vocal performatives. All these clusters are variously combined in ways that establish a complex lattice of moves, countermoves, and glossing that occur during the performance of church music. We will examine each of these clusters in turn. “Play it like you mean it”: performatives of expression The first cluster of gestures arises from the expressive aspects of musicking, or “spontaneous responses” to the music. The question is not why these gestures happen. They are the “non-volitional responses” to music that Diana, one of my interviewees, spoke of when describing her engagement with church music. These expressive performatives, or expressives, are performed by musical leaders and by church members. Jamie McGregor, UBC’s worship pastor, described his experience: Personally, I don’t think a ton about my movement. The movement that I do is not an intentional extension of expression, it’s more just an accident of the expression itself. So, I guess the conscious thing is, I don’t make

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myself stand perfectly still. That is a conscious thing. I’m like: “no, I’m not gonna try and be a statue and play this song. I wanna be in this song, and I want to play it like I mean it, just as though I sing it like I mean it.” And that might mean pacing around, or moving back and forth, more often than not, as a way of being attached to the song. I will often sway with the tempo, because I have it banging in my ears, so that’s a way to do it. But if I lay into a chord, I’m probably gonna bend a little bit, because that’s gonna work out a lot better if I do that, than if I were to keep myself still. (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) The question of an “intentional extension of expression” will be addressed later in this chapter. For now, it is enough to note that McGregor does not constrict himself to immobility. In fact, he suggests that part of what it means to “play it like you mean it” includes an affordance for movement, a latitude for expression, that is an integral component of what it means to be engaged in performance. The swaying with the tempo, the correlation between leaning into the chords and bending over, are all acknowledged as resulting from engagement with the music. McGregor argues that the experience itself will “work out a lot better” if he accepts these expressives, instead of consigning himself to an unnatural (he suggests) immobility that might curtail his bodily expression and, consequently, the quality of the performance. Furthermore, church music leaders frequently engage in worship from a visually advantaged perspective such as the altar, stage, or platform, thus fulfilling a dual role in this performance. They sing and/or play along with the congregation even as they observe the singing congregation, which gives them insight into the expressive utterances of the congregation as they sing. Deloir Tonn, a missionary on staff at São João Lutheran Church, mentions “clapping and the body” as typical responses to the music. He works at a church plant on the outskirts of Pelotas, in the lower-class neighborhood of Navegantes. For Tonn, people there enjoy greater freedom of expression because they are removed from the center of tradition: Dance … maybe in the conservative culture of the Lutheran church [it’s] not as strong, but thinking of Navegantes: people clap, and people [dance]. So, the context of a more Brazilian church lends itself to more interaction than a Pomerano context; there’s a lot more movement.9 The German folk are reticent to clap. In some places like Navegantes, that aren’t so tied to that tradition, the ease with which the church claps and interacts bodily with the music [is noticeable]. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) It is interesting that Tonn places dancing in the realm of a “more Brazilian” iteration of worship. In this case, expressive performatives take on new meaning as they become an instrument of otherizing the Pomeranos who worship downtown, and who might be more reticent to clap, dance, and express

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themselves, than those at the periphery of Lutheran worship in Pelotas. Thus, expressive performatives can become means of negotiating identity and meaning, a topic that will be examined later. For now, it is enough to appreciate that expressive performatives are not exclusive to leaders or participants, but are embraced by all in the performance of church music in ways that are connected to the expectations that surround particular roles in the performance. “The most beautiful thing in the world”: performatives of sincerity A cluster of performatives that arises from expression, of “playing/singing it like you mean it,” is connected to the question of sincerity in worship. I use “sincerity” instead of “authenticity” for two reasons. The first is to avoid discussions around the meaning of authenticity in music scholarship (Upton 2012). Second, I follow Ingalls’ nuancing of the term (2008, 199–200), based on the work of Trilling (1972) and Jackson (2005). Ingalls says that “in order to reframe their activity in worship concerts as ‘God-centered,’ worship leaders and participants collectively express sincerity” using a variety of musical cues (2018, 53). She identifies how sincerity is tied to intention, and to the presentation of self to others (2008, 199). If expressive performatives are a type of “non-volitional bodily response,” sincerity performatives arise from the interplay of song lyrics and the performance of faith; gestures that index that the participant “means what they sing.” Expression, in the context of performance, is closely tied to sincerity, or the idea that we “sing it like we mean it” together, as a body of believers. This sincerity may be expressed by spontaneous expressive gestures, but also by prescribed gestures such as kneeling and standing. The portrait that Tonn paints from his leadership perspective at the altar, at São João or Navegantes, can help us to understand these “spontaneous” expressive responses to the worship experience: Sometimes you’ll see people with their eyes closed. One can read that as enhanced concentration, as that person being more concentrated than someone with their eyes open. Or when someone raises their hands, as a form of adoration … So, this reaction, this moving of the body in the moment, expresses a lot of how the person is trying to meditate, to think about what they’re singing. I think that this bodily reaction communicates a lot, in this sense. They’re concentrating on the lyrics. Not only with their voice, but also with their body. Their body is reacting along with their voice, with their mind, to what they’re singing. (2017) Tonn reads congregants’ gestures as he assesses their participation in worship. He calls the closing of eyes and the raising of hands “reactions” to the performance of worship. These reactions, according to him, correlate to people’s efforts in immersing themselves in ritual activity; efforts that go beyond the

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singing voice and are expressed in the body. Both types of performatives, vocal and bodily, are signs of commitment to the moment and, by proxy, to the church: “their body is reacting along with their voice, with their mind.” Speaking of the pedagogy of musical embodiment at UBC, McGregor says that he doesn’t “prescribe a way” for the band to move onstage, because he wants them to feel free to express themselves. I argue that the way he encourages the musicians to “do their best to mean it” and accept “however that looks” is a message that is also conveyed to the congregation. In fact, McGregor mentioned that, apart from a weekly invitation for them to stand “if they feel like it,” he severely limits verbal instructions about how the congregation should respond to the music. He applies the same principles to himself: “I do my best to be in that moment, and to mean that thing, whatever it is” (McGregor 2017). At St. Alban’s, the liturgy follows the Anglican heritage, and the gestures that signal sincerity are prescribed by this tradition.10 In these cases, sincerity coalesces into postures understood to express specific actions of piety: kneeling/humility, standing/conviction, raised hands/glorification, closed eyes/ immersion. These are all examples of specific stances of sincerity as expressive performances of piety. Furthermore, according to my interlocutors, these postures gain significance over time as congregants rehearse them week after week. Paul, who has worshiped at St. Alban’s for over three decades, says that kneeling is “a sign of humility, a sign of surrender” (interview with author, December 13, 2017). He also mentioned the elder members of the congregation who insist on coming up to the rail for communion. While ushers are available to bring the Eucharist to them, it is the processional performative of coming to the rail that evidences the specialness of what is being done, and deepens the ritual significance of the moment. An elder who slowly ambles up to the altar, makes an effort to kneel and take communion, struggles once more to rise, and slowly finds his or her way back to their pew, becomes a mirror reflection of the Via Dolorosa in the Passion narrative. One knows it will hurt, but one goes anyway to participate in the sacrifice, which reflects the meaning of the Eucharist: “do this in remembrance of me.” Associate rector McGowan describes another example of a posture of suffering that mirrors that of Christ and points to commitment and devotion: I do know when I look out, and we do the doxology, we’re at the altar, and I see [a senior member of the congregation], she’s like 95. She’s actually not been able to attend for a couple of weeks, because she fell and got hurt. And I see her with her eyes closed, and her hands raised, singing the doxology. And it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. (2017) Prescribed gestures such as this, charged through ritual repetition, become utterances of sincerity in the performance of the liturgy.

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“A very present mindfulness”: leadership performatives The need for liturgical and musical direction in the performance of church music elicits a third category: leadership performatives. These performatives are important in church music for at least two reasons. First, because of how the leader’s body is implicated in the technical requirements of music making in a group, such as conducting or giving non-verbal cues. Second, because by watching a song leader, congregations respond to, and in some cases emulate, these leadership performatives and make them their own (in which case they become other types of performatives). In some instances, this leadership dynamic may involve standardized conducting gestures; in others, when leading from the guitar, piano, or organ, it may include head nods or arm waves. Again, leaders are aware of these requirements. But even according to musicians who are not frontpersons, leadership gestures have significant implications for those who are in the pews. Pedro, a long-time percussionist at São João, described at length how the context in which the band performs conditions what leadership gestures are available/acceptable to the musicians, and how they negotiate these differences: In our parish, which includes São João and Navegantes, the contexts are different. As a musician, depending on the movement we have here at São João, there’s not a lot of alteration in the participation of the congregation. People don’t seem to get too much into it. But at Navegantes, people get into it more, give in to the experience more. And [as musicians/worship leaders] we have a role of encouraging the congregation. Our movement, our participation, the way we sing, influences the congregation … If we give in ourselves to the experience of worship, whatever we do will encourage people, will make a difference and help people to engage with worship, to give in to worship … So, the way we worship, the way the worship band worships and sings, the way we give in to the moment, will make a difference in the way the congregation will participate in the moment. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Pedro is a percussionist and not the band’s leader, but his perspective provides valuable insights on leadership performatives because he is on stage. In our interview, his description of “giving in to the moment” was accompanied by effusive “air percussion” and facial expressions of joy and musical fruition. Pedro is describing a performance of warmth, of natural engagement with the music. If musicians and leadership “give in to the moment,” they improve the odds that congregants will do the same. Participation is mirrored through embodiment, even as musicians play their instruments, which involves gestures that might be foreign to most congregants. These technical leadership gestures might assume a variety of forms in different contexts. The musicians in the Sunday morning services at São João, for example, do not rehearse. Although Nestor, the worship leader, does send out

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an outline on Tuesdays so that people can prepare, he describes their music as “an intuitive process.” Nestor has led music for these services for more than 20 years with his accordion, seated in the front pew. He described how the musicians vão chegando: they arrive slowly, in their own time. Some might be early, while others might arrive after the service has begun. Within this improvisational environment, Nestor says that “there are moments when I need to call attention to the pitch, or something like that. Sometimes people don’t even notice. For example, if someone’s playing too loud” (interview with author, October 22, 2017). To this end he uses head nods, visual contact, and other subtle gestures that may or may not interrupt his own accordion playing. In environments that rely heavily on improvisational skills, which is the case at São João, these impromptu technical gestures become crucial because the musicians depend on leadership and inter-ensemble cues more than if they had undergone extensive group rehearsal. Because performatives of leadership extend beyond the music into the liturgy as a whole, it is common for them to be shared among a group of leaders, or for music leaders to take upon themselves leadership responsibilities that might not be directly connected to musical performance. A broader examination of how congregational leaders deal with leadership performatives can help us understand their importance during worship. I am at the Dancing Bear, a regular hangout for craft beer enthusiasts in Waco, Texas, talking to Neal McGowan, assistant rector at St. Alban’s. He is talking about the body, musing on how his recent ordination has changed the way he carries himself and negotiates his body during Sunday services: “Sometimes it’s hard being up in the front, because I’m thinking of other things in the service. And so I know my experience of the music in the church has changed. I just was ordained recently, in June, so my experience of the music has changed … I used to serve in all the different liturgical roles that a layperson can, and it’s still not the same as … I wasn’t guiding people. And I don’t do a whole lot of that now. But it’s different. My experience of the music is different.” Cut scene. I am sitting in Aaron Zimmerman’s office at St. Alban’s talking about the Sunday service. Zimmerman, the rector, works with McGowan. Our conversation ranges from literature to pop music, and turned towards how he carries himself, how he negotiates his own body, during the service: “I am conscious of [the body]. It does matter. Because the one who is conducting the service can be a great distraction. I saw an Episcopal priest once and he was wearing shorts under his vestments. And when he raised his hands everybody could see his bare ankles. I just thought it was a bad look! And it totally pulled me out of the experience. Or if you see anybody that’s up there in the front, acolyte or lay minister, or the clergy, you

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Body in worship know, a gigantic yawn with an uncovered mouth is also bad. So yeah, you’ve gotta be aware of these things. You know, there are people on one end of the spectrum that are extremely rigid. They look like robots up there. And so this is a system we’re in, and we respect it, and we enjoy it, and we appreciate it and we’re grateful for it. And we do try to do everything, as St. Paul said, decently and in good order in our worship. But we’re not slaves to the liturgy, and I wanna create an environment where people are still allowed to be human. Because if you feel like you have to be on your best behavior at church on some level, the message you’re sending is “God doesn’t love you unless you’re on your best behavior.” So, I want people to still feel like they can be people. So, when I sit in the chair next to the pulpit, that little prayer desk I have, I’m not gonna sit like I’m at the beach, but I’m not gonna sit like I’m a kid in trouble that’s waiting outside the principal’s office, with my back rigid and, you know, with my palms pressed together in some sort of pious posture. I’m gonna try to sit like an attentive, respectful, normal person who feels, in some sense, relaxed but also alert … When I’m officiating a service, I want it to feel like there’s real warmth in it. And so in terms of my body language when I get up and do the announcements, or interact with the kids before the children’s sermon, all those sorts of things. And to when I celebrate the Eucharist. There are positions, the orans position, and some people get very formal and very rigid and very prescriptive about every movement at every time in the service. And that’s definitely not me. I don’t think the Lord did it that way the first time. And I realize that in some contexts those manual acts are signals for certain things, but really it’s a secret code that only clergy understand. So, I try doing what would feel natural in that moment.”

Church leaders prepare intensively in order to align their body language with ritual intent as they participate in the liturgy, mainly because their participation has leadership responsibilities attached to it. Zimmerman’s commentary demonstrates the thought processes that regulate not only how he carries himself, but also the care with which he considers how worshipers will read the way he carries himself. He reveals what rubs against his pedagogy of embodied leadership, such as the rigidity, the formality, or lack of attention to detail (such as in the “bare ankles” case). In order to emphasize the “real warmth” with which he hopes participants will engage in the liturgy, he prepares his body, and leads through the way he sits at the prayer desk, prepares the table for Eucharist, and assumes the orans position. McGowan, who is training in the same tradition, mentioned many of the same tropes, bringing in examples of clumsy leadership (including a “bare ankles” case similar to Zimmerman’s). His words illustrate how the responsibility of leadership has modified his embodiment during the service. At São João, Tonn points to the same burden of responsibility when describing his gestures during worship:

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[W]hoever’s leading has a very present mindfulness, because of the realization that the congregation is following them. So, there’s a responsibility, a commitment. At the same time, the way in which the leadership worships will have a direct influence on the way the congregation sings … One has to keep in mind that people are following along. It’s different from singing at home, in your room, in the car by yourself … the responsibility is different for whoever is leading, and the congregation will follow according to the rhythm of whoever is leading. (2017) Taken together, these comments illustrate how leaders are conscious of their gestures, and how they construe leadership cues to provide direction and help to shape the way congregants participate in the liturgy and in music. Leaders are acutely aware of body language, whether instinctively or by training, and the congregation witnesses their awareness and absorbs it. Gordon, a UBCer with more than 20 years of experience performing in the Christian music scene around the United States, mentioned that his thoughts about the body come from “an awareness of the fact that closed body language affects your own mind, and it affects everybody else’s mind too. It makes them worry, which is the one thing you don’t want” (interview with author, January 18, 2018). In other words, if the leadership is not comfortable in their own skin, congregants will not be either. Toph Whisnant, UBC’s community pastor, agrees, stating that congregations take cues from their pastors; he described how he makes a point of being the first to stand up and move towards communion, in order to overcome congregants’ hesitancy to be the first ones to get up. From his perspective, leaders are the ones who model what “is OK or not OK to do in this moment” (interview with author, November 15, 2017). In Pelotas, São João worship pastor Fabiane Behling Luckow describes the same connection between leadership and expression. For her, if leaders feel comfortable in their roles, in what they’re doing up front, the more freedom there is on the part of those who are participating in the service. But if the bodily expression of the leaders is rigid, contained, with rules on posture and how to dress, the more folks who are attending the service will feel compelled to enter that rule. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) She echoes Zimmerman’s remarks about being on one’s “best behavior” and participation. Using performatives, leaders are modeling participation for their congregations even as they lead. Boundaries between performatives of expression and leadership are rarely clear cut. In fact, they may be variously combined, such as conducting the congregation with one hand while playing the bass line on the piano with the other. The many ways in which congregants might read each of these gestures may further complicate the process of negotiating these performatives in

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context. At UBC, a musician, Junior, described an exhortation he was subject to while on the road: I have a tendency to turn around and face away from the crowd. I think it’s just a personal thing, I need to focus inside and seeing people can sometimes [cause me to] get distracted, and I look at people. And it doesn’t affect my playing, but it does affect my awareness, and what I’m focusing on … and the set ended or whatever, and [the person with whom Junior was playing] said: “Hey, can you not turn around during the service? Nobody wants to see your back.” And I was like: “oh, what does that mean? Why do I need to face them?” Is this like: “don’t allow them to look at a part of you that could be sexual in some way?” These are the thoughts I’m having, as a 19-year-old. Or is he saying, you need to face the crowd and give them your attention? I was deeply concerned about this, and I never asked him, ’cause I was 19 years old and you don’t think to ask: “What do you mean by that?” You just go: “OK, I’m sorry, I won’t do that again.” But now, I have since returned—and for a long time I trained myself to never turn around, so I would get halfway, and then I would come back: “Don’t do that, nobody needs to see your behind, they wanna see you worshiping. And now I’m at a point where I’m like: “it doesn’t matter!” … and if they’re focused on me, that’s on them! Do what is comfortable for me. I’m not leading. I think it would be different if I was singing, but because I’m a background musician, it’s a little bit different. They’re not expecting me to conduct them in some way with my voice. (Interview with author, October 11, 2017) Conductors could ask similar questions given that they stand with their back to the congregation as they conduct the choir, as Junior asks when he is playing the bass guitar. In the complex entanglement of gestural resistances, negotiations are happening on multiple levels between performatives of expression, sincerity, and leadership. Responsibilities are different for singers and instrumentalists, for preachers and worship leaders, for choristers and lectors. But all these participants, in different ways, lead with their bodies. Their bodily stances and gestures matter profoundly in shaping the meaning and affect of church music. “These movements that you do”: prescribed performatives A fourth cluster of performative utterances is that of prescribed gestures. Although they may often be perceived as improvised, these performatives are, in fact, coded and conditioned in subtle ways: through leadership, glares from someone in the other pew, or imitation of other participants, for example. In the previous section, we saw how Ingalls describes the dynamic that gives rise to prescribed gestures. As leaders guide gathered groups in worship, they model “devotional gestures such as raising hands and faces as if towards heaven” (2018, 41–42). Prescribed performatives include gestures from our previous

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categories; what brings the cluster together is the process of prescription. This process may be self-conscious and intentional and include, among other things, verbal instructions; or it may happen spontaneously, as worshipers learn the gestural vocabulary of those around and in front of them. Leadership motivations and pedagogies can vary.11 Certain congregations intentionally refrain from verbally prescribing gestures beyond the occasional invitation to stand and certain gestures prompted by liturgical words (lyrics describing raised hands, for instance). Such is the case at UBC and São João. In certain cases, the inclination towards perceived spontaneity is a response to what some interviewees described as “oppressive prescription”, such as when participants feel “forced” to enact performatives that, from their perspective, would not happen naturally. McGregor describes an early formative experience: I was at a camp in middle school where we sang “we stand and lift up our hands, for the joy of the Lord is our strength.” And the dude stopped, and said: “so, are you guys just liars?” And we said, “what?!” And he said, “you just said: ‘we stand and lift up our hands.’ I didn’t see standing or hands go up. We’re gonna try that again! Try and mean it this time!” All this was said in a smug tone. I was in 7th grade, so of course I didn’t [resist] … but I did also, maybe in that moment, silently vow to myself that I wouldn’t be that guy. (2017) McGregor’s mentions being “forced” to reproduce a gesture. His vow that he would never “be that guy” speaks to the influence that leadership instructions can exert upon worshipers, and the vigor with which one might react against them. In contrast, not all negative experiences push worship leaders and congregations towards outright opposition of worship gestures. McGregor himself has strived to find a natural balance for his own leadership: Now, if (as has happened before) I jumped up on my amp and jumped off, and in the process kicked my amp over and landed on my ass, you know, that’s a great rock and roll move … and maybe if I’m in it in the moment, I would give myself a little bit of grace. But I can’t imagine getting into that space. So, I don’t know. Maybe there are things that I would never consider doing, but that’s because there are things that, more often than not, I’m not going to naturally do! (2017) Here, we come full circle. McGregor values spontaneous gestures that remain within the somewhat speculative subjective boundaries of the bodily ethics at UBC. In other words, the distinction between “what we might naturally do” and what we effectively do appears to be complex and nuanced. Ingalls says, Because worship is a performative action undertaken by participants in the bleachers as well as the worship leader onstage, these God-centering moves

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Such processes add subtle pressure from platform and pew that shapes the use of performatives, altering, in the process, perceptions of “what we might naturally do.” Another way in which “spontaneous” gestures may be prescribed arises from participants’ desire to be a part of the group. UBCer Junior described his “active” period of participation in worship to me: [T]here was a period of my life when I was doing those things, but I was doing them not out of interior decisions but out of external influences that were not honest … it was not my natural mode of expression but I did it, because when you’re a teenager, you just try to fit in. (2017) This desire to fit in leads participants to emulate the gestures of those around them, in a peculiar conflation of performatives of sincerity and prescribed gestures that may mean, at the same time, sincerity in worship, a desire to be part of the group, and the rehearsal of a variety of embodied theological postures. For certain participants, such processes may lead to second-guessing, or what can be described as a meta-reflection about performatives even as one accepts or resists them. In a peculiar type of dissociation that we have already encountered in Judith Becker’s discussion of deep listening, these worshipers think about their bodies as they negotiate gestures during performance. One UBCer mentioned that there was a phase in his youth when it was normal for him to raise his hands during worship, but later the matter became a concern for him: So, I would go back and forth and back and forth in my own head for such a long time that it almost seemed to be more productive to quit worrying about that. And my stillness is confusing to me … I almost never dance in life. And I think that there’s something wrong with that, and I haven’t figured out what that something is if that’s the case, but I know that’s not normal. And it seems like a part of humanity that has been stifled in a way. My humanity. But I don’t know how to think through that, I don’t know how to overcome that. (Bryan, interview with author, December 18, 2017) According to Bryan’s account, encouraging participants to be spontaneous can lead, ironically, to paralysis: a condition in which preoccupation with expressing sincerity becomes so overwhelming that movement is inhibited from the outset. Nipped at the bud by a confusing rhetoric of bodily restrictions and theological/ ethical preoccupations that constantly feed back into one’s consciousness, participants’ ability to engage is compromised, leaving them unable to “think through”

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performatives and be immersed in musicking at the same time. Bryan, who is in his thirties, connects his paralysis to a desire “to exude a self-possession that you can’t maintain. Like, you know, you wanna guard yourself. I think this is true for others, not just myself. But guard yourself from the embarrassment of dancing” (2017). As Grimes reminds us, the majority of pedagogies and ethics of the body in Christian churches of the West, especially the musicking body, systematically ignore these tensions because of the legacy of reticence towards the body that has become part of their church music performance DNA. Nevertheless, not all “contemporary” worshipers condemn traditions that uphold prescribed gestures as the standard for participation. Emily Nance, who served as UBC’s children’s pastor for four years, does not consider herself a “hand-raiser” and describes her participation in fixed liturgy services as a positive experience, even if UBC does not adopt a fixed liturgy pedagogy: So, I’ve been to lots of different types of church. And there is something, probably because I didn’t grow up doing this, the novelty of it seemed really neat. To be asked to kneel, to pray … you know, it was less on the charismatic side and more on the ritual side. And that is another way to sort of focus your mind: to have these movements that you do, that you progress through, throughout the service. But that’s not just the type of worship that has been really been practiced at the church that I go to. But I see the value in it. I mean, you look at a yoga class. Or how Muslims pray. I think that’s really cool, and I can see how that can sort of centralize your mind as a form of worship. (Interview with author, February 7, 2017) Her description references some of the discourses used at churches that do, in fact, prescribe corporate ritual gestures for worship. St. Alban’s places strong emphasis on the corporate performance of ritual gestures. It is striking that McGowan describes an experience that is similar to McGregor’s, saying that he raised his hands, as a teenager, “because of peer pressure half the time. So, what was going on with me was ‘I don’t want to look like an idiot by this cute girl’” (2017). At the same time, his adherence to St. Alban’s pedagogy, in which congregations are called to stand, kneel, and turn towards the Bible during the reading of Scripture in the middle of the nave, speaks to how he has come to view these prescriptions as positive, community-building strategies of embodiment in his tradition. We have already seen Zimmerman’s description of how these prescriptions, in his opinion, liberate participants so that they do not worry about producing individual performatives of sincerity, because they are uncalled for. In both cases, by prescribing spontaneity or uniformity, leaders strive to include participants in the performance of church music. “Putting words out there”: vocality as embodied performative Our final cluster of performatives is connected to vocality and the embodied voice. As we have seen, previous church music scholarship has tended to follow

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theology’s logocentric penchant, treating the voice as a disembodied phenomenon, and disconnected from the body that phonates. In contrast, fields such as popular music studies have recognized the importance of the voice not only in relation to content, but also in relation to tone, as Simon Frith postulates: In listening to the lyrics of pop songs we actually hear three things at once: words, which appear to give songs and independent source of semantic meaning; rhetoric, words being used in a special, musical way, a way which draws attention to features and problems of speech; and voices, words being spoken or sung in human tones which are themselves “meaningful,” signs of persons and personality. (1996, 159; emphasis in the original) Frith parses the popular singing voice into component parts: words, rhetoric, and voice. He argues that “once we grasp that the issue in lyrical analysis is not words, but words in performance, then various new analytical possibilities open up” (1996, 166). Other scholars echo his strategy. Allan Moore, analyzing the vocal performance of Bono, lead singer for the popular Irish rock band U2, refers to the “vocality” of the singing voice as “a feature not only of how his voices sounds, but also of the ways that he uses it” (1998, 22).12 For Moore and Frith, vocality is much more than the words that the voice shapes. This idea of listening beyond the words to the voice’s uses has found its way into scholarly investigations of religious musicking. Nicholas Harkness contrasts South Korean Christian so-ngak style performers, who view “European-style classical voices [as] a privileged nexus of phonic and sonic practice for Christians” (2014, 3), with p’ansori, a traditional singing style considered “rough” and associated with folkloric and “pagan” heritages from Korea’s pre-Christian history, and therefore “inappropriate for church” (2014, 91). Similarly, John Burdick, in his analysis of Brazilian black gospel, 13 speaks of the “hyperconsciousness of the voice’s physicality” due to its strenuous technique, generating hyperattention to the physical organs of the vocal apparatus, considered by Brazilian singers to index the “inheritance from their African ancestors” (2013, 137). In line with these scholars, I refer to vocality as an embodied, sonic expression of performative intent, laden with aural indexes of physicality: graininess, breath, vibration.14 The voice is not separated from the throat that produces it, just as the mind is not separated from the body. The voice is the sonic manifestation of embodiment. Lincoln, a young father who worships at St. Alban’s, described this concreteness of the worshiping voice. When asked what music does, especially church music, he claimed: It puts it into the universe! It makes it exist! … You see it, it’s in the world. You say it to another person, they hear it. They can hold you accountable to what you said … When you’re reciting these lyrics, when you’re saying the Lord’s Prayer, all these kind of things, the Nicene Creed, you’re going

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through this as a community. You’re putting your word out there. I always hit on what the definition of integrity is: your words and actions are in a dance, and the more in alignment they are, the better your dance moves look. (Interview with author, February 19, 2018) Lincoln says that singing puts intentions “into the universe” and makes them exist, instinctively recognizing that for there to be a voice, there must be a voicer. As in our discussion of leadership performatives, the tone of the church music voice reflects the nature of engagement as expected/prescribed from the platform, a fact that is clearly manifested at São João. While much of Christendom has in fact inherited a Western comprehension of what Christian worship entails as regards the body—a comprehension heavily influenced by the godlike immobility of Hellenistic heritage—Brazil presents a unique variation on this theme. Here, visceral engagement with the musical material falls more in line with the African valuation of virtuosity in worship due to Brazil’s conflicted history with slavery. As Burdick describes, the vocality of black gospel taps into this history, and exemplifies a connection between vocality and history that is reflected in my ethnography on Brazilian church music. At São João, Luckow––who does not have an African heritage––strives for a distinction of identity that is based on the sound of the singing voice. She emphasized that, even when singing international repertoire, she does not sing it with what she calls an American vocal placement. I want to sing with my voice, employing my phonetic system in the way I learned to speak Portuguese. So, I search for the best options within this [proposition]. And that’s what I work on with my vocal coach. (2017) Luckow is doing more than expressing a patriotic aspiration. Through the voice, she is positioning her congregation in relation to transnational projects of worship, going so far as to work on technique with her vocal coach to make sure that the music can be grounded into what she would consider a “Brazilian vocality.” Luckow’s careful attention to this issue reveals her pastoral stewardship in church music. She searches for a vocality that connects words, tone, and context in a way that makes sense for her participants and for the church itself, grounded in its place and history. Moreover, one might apply this concept of vocality to non-verbal components of church music. The recognition of the unique connection of tone, lyrics, and meaning can be expanded beyond the human voice to include the tone of other expressions of church music, such as the instrumental arrangements that support singing. McGregor describes how this strategy is employed at UBC: [I]t’s never just about the words … Within music, I feel like there’s something akin to the way that, when you’re having a conversation with someone, your tone can convey a different thing based on how you say

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McGregor is describing how vocality manifests itself in church music beyond the lyrics. Vocalities inform and generate meaning through texture and instrumentation, a realization that sets McGregor’s pursuit of sonic tone in alignment with Luckow’s pursuit of a particular congregational vocality for São João’s members. For McGregor, arranging songs in a way that offers a tone for the congregation is a pastoral responsibility; it is the shepherding of UBC’s vocality. This shepherding can be gentle or jarring. McGregor says that there is space for “a jolting sort of thing” that calls congregants’ attention to what is going on. Overall, he is looking for sounds that embody and ground the ecclesiological, theological, and pastoral assumptions of UBC’s unique pedagogy of worship. The examples of Luckow and McGregor also illustrate how embodiment is a phenomenon that expands beyond individuals into social groups. In order to explore this expansion in the context of our discussion of performatives and vocality, I evoke Charles Keil’s idea of participatory discrepancies as framed by Turino (2008), which we dealt with in Chapter 1. Turino describes the “feathered” quality of participants joining in and falling out of participatory performances as “densely overlapping textures, wide tunings, consistently loud volumes and busy timbres [that] are extremely common sound features of participatory music throughout the world” (2008, 46). The same happens in congregational music: individual “featherings” feed into the tapestry of sound created by the collective vocalities of participants, giving rise to unique congregational vocalities that are, sonically, performances of community. Finally, the expansion of embodiment from individual to community can be extrapolated further, to include social, cultural, and political perspectives. If individual performers bring their particular vocality to the corporate performance, these are meshed into the vocalities of congregations that incorporate, in addition to human voices, the aesthetic, stylistic, and musical decisions expressed in their music. At UBC, the imperative to construct a collective vocality appears in the prioritization of original compositions over contemporary worship repertoire, and the significant extent to which the worship band modifies arrangements in order to make the music of others their own. At St. Alban’s, it appears in worship director Eugene Lavery’s commitment to researching his tradition’s musical legacy, looking for ways in which the music for the coming Sunday can be enriched and become, at the same time, uniquely Episcopal and Anglican. And at São João, a particular congregational vocality emerges by incorporating typical Brazilian dissonances into chords of Hillsong music, and by seeking to deliver the melodies with vocal inflections that are comfortable to native Portuguese speakers.

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“Every time we do it”: ritual repetition of embodied performatives In conclusion, I return to the issue of repetition. The performatives we have examined here—of expression, sincerity, leadership, prescribed performatives, and vocalities—repeated over time, configure and code the way congregations rehearse embodiment. In her discussion of medieval religious plays, Jill Stevenson argues that “cognitive science offers empirical evidence that the embodied actions seen in performances are simulated by and linger within the spectator’s body, where they contribute to subsequent meaning construction” (2010, 132). If we apply Stevenson’s claim to performative utterances in church music (and there is no impediment, since Stevenson’s investigation discusses liturgical traditions of Western Christianity), this means that congregants, as they watch and follow song leaders at the helm of the experience as well as co-participants, embody performatives by mirroring them, although in some cases these performatives may be actively resisted. In other words, leaders’ performatives condition the worshiper’s construction of meaning, influencing their individual “making special.” What is performed from platform and pew modifies and qualifies the performance of congregations, and does so incrementally over time through repetition. Hughes, a singer at St. Alban’s, spoke of this dynamic: I think that repetition and centering are huge in almost all religious traditions. I mean, when you think about walking a labyrinth, or meditative prayer, any religion/denomination, those are things that you are trying to connect: heart-body-mind-spirit, and get them all in the same place to worship. And having those repetitive cycles are the ways that we do that. It’s why we pray with prayer beads; because it’s something physical and cyclical that our bodies do, just like going through the cycles of the liturgy is something cyclical for our minds that there’s a sense of anticipation, and kind of knowing what’s coming that allows us, every time we do it, to perhaps delve deeper because it is something familiar. And so we kind of peel that onion and see what’s here next time, since I know the story and now I’m gonna see what’s underneath it. (2017) For Hughes, repetition does more than simply engrave gestural grooves into participants in church music. Repetition also unveils new layers of meaning. On the one hand, as worshipers become familiar with the narratives, gestures, and discourses of church music, they “know the story” and come to see themselves as part of the performance. On the other hand, repeating these familiar performances opens up the possibility of new configurations and reconfigurations. Thus, repetition does not lead to sameness but to variety. Performatives are repeated, but they acquire different meanings over time. Hughes describes a “sense of anticipation” in repeating these familiar patterns because, in the process of repeating embodied ritual activity, something else happens: these performances become special. They become circumscribed

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in a way that sets them apart from other rituals of everyday life, and from other performances. Zimmerman’s defense of prescriptive gestures at St. Alban’s underscores the importance of repetition: It takes a special kind of person to feel OK raising their hand in a room full of people … But if we all do the thing, we can all be fools together, so there’s no embarrassment factor. And in inviting people to all participate together when we do these things—if we’re all gonna kneel, let’s kneel, if we’re all gonna stand, let’s stand—I think it creates room for an emotional experience. I think doing the bodily act often can create the emotional response. If you’re waiting for the emotional response to trigger the act, you may never get there. (2017) From Zimmerman’s perspective, prescribed gestures invite one to participate because “we can all be fools together.” Furthermore, he implies that one must participate in the performance in order to understand what is special to the performers. Hence, congregants are invited to “do the bodily act,” to embody their participatory intentions, and through performance they come to understand what the congregation is doing through engagement with church music: it is “making special” the performance of music in a particular place and time, and in doing so it is establishing a platform on which processes of play and change related to faith, community, and tradition may unfold apart from everyday life. These processes of making special, play, and change are the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1 While one might argue that the question of the body is no longer taboo in academic circles, I contend that it continues to be taboo in certain corners of practical theology that deal with worship and music. Even if scholars have shifted to more nuanced representations of embodiment and cognition that either nuance or bypass the mind/ body divide, this divide still frames how certain authors, at least, talks about the body in relation to church music. Examples can be found in Johansson (1992, 73); Lynch (1999, 21–22); Seel (1995, 125); Wheaton (2000, 67). 2 The definition of embodiment is open and contended. Scholars frequently treat embodiment as a constellation of definitions (Kiverstein 2012; Steuernagel and Taylor 2012). 3 Abundant examples can be found in Music (1998). 4 It is important to recognize that these three senses have not been completely ignored within Christianity, as demonstrated by the use of incense and relics in Catholic worship and the fully embodied engagement of certain Pentecostal traditions, to cite two examples. These instances do not undermine the legitimacy of my claim, but are, in fact, the exceptions that prove the rule. 5 Berger describes “valual” as the adjectival form of value, saying that “we experience things not only has having factual properties, but also as having qualities that involve their value for us” (2009, 137).

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6 As mentioned in the discussion of performativity in Chapter 1, I employ the term “performative” in accordance with its use in performance studies. 7 One could argue, especially from a theological point of view, that not every worshiper shares the same type or degree of worship experience. Even so, the performative aspects of the gesture itself continue to present solid grounds on which to defend the statement. 8 Scholars have described these configurations in other settings. Till’s description of electronic dance music scenes connects to my discussion of performative gestures, tracing a parallel in “secular” ritual. The same gestures appear in a different context, but the gestalt is similar: “Clubbers can often be seen raising their hands up towards the light(s) in a fashion very reminiscent of a Pentecostal church service. For clubbers I spoke to, raising their hands was a sign of release, rapture, escape, ascension and ecstasy, as they reached upwards and outwards towards lights that came down from above, framing their heads with a nimbus or halo, a signifier in religious art of the sacred or divine, all set within heaven-like smoke machine generated clouds” (Till 2009, 172). 9 Tonn uses “Pomerano” as an umbrella term for Lutherans with a German ethnic heritage. Originally from Pomerania, a region close to the Baltic Sea between present-day Germany and Poland, these immigrants came in large numbers to Brazil in the nineteenth century (Silva Steuernagel 2016). 10 I use the term “fixed liturgy” to describe churches that value scripted liturgy in adherence to tradition, such as Roman Catholic or Anglican liturgy. I avoid the term “liturgical worship” because all worship is, in some way, liturgical. 11 I use “pedagogy” intentionally here to emphasize the impact that the performatives from the platform––which have been rehearsed and reflected upon––have on the gestures of participants in the pews. 12 See also Moore (2012). 13 I italicize gospel to differentiate it from the American use of the word. When spelled “Gospel” it refers to the biblical narratives; when used without italics in lowercase, it refers to the American gospel tradition; and when italicized, it refers to the Brazilian gospel phenomenon. For more on this, see Silva Steuernagel (2021). 14 This idea of the “grain of the voice” comes from the work of Barthes and Heath: “something is there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form (the litany), the melisma, and even the style of execution: something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, and from deep down.” It is the organic in the timbre that points to the embodiment of the voice (1977, 181).

References Alloa, Emmanuel. 2014. “The Theatre of the Virtual: How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-Ponty.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, ed. Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern McGee, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. 1977. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Begbie, Jeremy. 2005. “Theology and Music.” In The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918, ed. David Ford and Rachel Muers. 3rd ed. The Great Theologians. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press. Burdick, John. 2013. The Color of Sound: Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil. New York: New York University Press. Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 1995. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Rev. ed. Studies in Comparative Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gudorf, Christine E. 1994. Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press. Harkness, Nicholas. 2014. Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hatten, Robert S. 2004. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2008. Awesome in This Place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evangelical Worship. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Jr., John L. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johansson, Calvin M. 1992. Discipling Music Ministry: Twenty-First Century Directions. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Kiverstein, Julian. 2012. “The Meaning of Embodiment.” Topics in Cognitive Science 4(4): 740–758. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01219.x. Loxley, James. 2007. Performativity. New York: Routledge. Lynch, Kenneth. 1999. Biblical Music in a Contemporary World. Chester, PA: Selfpublished. Moore, Allan F. 1998. “U2 and the Myth of Authenticity in Rock.” Popular Musicology 3(6): 5–33. Moore, Allan F. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series. Farnham: Ashgate. Music, David W., ed. 1998. Instruments in Church: A Collection of Source Documents. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, no. 7. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Peckruhn, Heike. 2017. Meaning in Our Bodies: Sensory Experience as Constructive Theological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Saliers, Don E. 2007. Music and Theology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Schechner, Richard. 1994. Environmental Theater. New York: Applause. Seel, Thomas Allen. 1995. A Theology of Music for Worship Derived from the Book of Revelation. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, no. 3. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Senn, Frank C. 2016. Embodied Liturgy: Lessons in Christian Ritual. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. 2016. “History and Structure of Hymns of the People of God, Vol. 1.” Vox Scripturae XXIV(1): 181–197. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. 2021. “Além do gospel: A History of Brazil’s Alternative Christian Music Scene.” In Christian Sacred Music of the Americas, ed. Joanna Smolko and Andrew Shenton. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Steuernagel, Marcos, and Diana Taylor. 2015. What Is Performance Studies? Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/wips/index (accessed October 1, 2016). Stevenson, Jill. 2010. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Till, Ruper. 2009. “Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community.” In Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age, ed. Christopher Decay and Elisabeth Arweck. Farnham: Ashgate. Trevarthen, Colwyn, Jonathan Delafield-Butt, and Benjamin Schlöger. 2011. “Psychobiology of Musical Gesture: Innate Rhythm, Harmony and Melody in Movements of Narration.” In New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King. Farnham: Ashgate. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performance Studies series, vol. 1. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Upton, Elizabeth. 2012. “Concepts of Authenticity in Early Music and Popular Music Communities.” Ethnomusicology Review 17. Uzukwu, E. Elochukwu. 1997. Worship as Body Language. Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Wheaton, Jack. 2000. The Crisis in Christian Music. Oklahoma City: Hearthstone. Wren, Brian A. 2000. Praying Twice the Music and Words of Congregational Song. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

5

Making special, play, and change

The interplay between tradition and change, repetition and familiarity, has been a recurring dynamic in our discussion of church music as performance. In this chapter, we will focus on how ritual environments are created and how participants in church music negotiate questions of faith, community, and tradition by “playing around” with music cultures, by repurposing components from within these cultures, and by bringing in outside artifacts and influences. Congregations delineate boundaries for church music performance in three fundamental dimensions: place, time, and group. Invoking the language of anthropologist Victor Turner (1969), these dimensions establish the stage of the liminal and contain what cannot be safely negotiated in everyday life.1 Furthermore, the boundaries of this stage are unevenly porous, and processes of play and change make performances of church music necessarily “messy” as influences flow across boundaries, are contained by others, and “leak” into new/other performances. Ellen Dissanayake’s idea of “making special” coupled with Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of “chronotope” to depict a special time-place, will provide the theoretical framework for us to explore the integrative and generative aspects of play and change in the context of church music as an embodied ritual activity.

Making special: chronotopes of worship I am sitting in a coffee shop with Paul. He comes from a Free church background and moved to St. Alban’s in the 1980s. Paul speaks with evident pleasure about his congregation, describing what it feels like to be an Episcopalian in Waco, a “heavily Baptist” town in his opinion. He considers the liturgy at St. Alban’s to be in “dichotomy” with everyday life, in contrast to Free church worship, which he describes as “free-flowing, make-it-up-as-you-go, totally autonomous, this type of thing.” I asked what stood out in the Anglican tradition when he first became a member, and he said: “It’s much more formal in the Anglican tradition. You know, it’s almost more stoic. There’s no clapping after an anthem for the choir or something like that. I’ve been in traditional churches, I’ve been in contemporary churches, and the Anglican tradition speaks to me from a liturgy

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standpoint, from a musical standpoint, from a pageantry standpoint. One of the things that I got disillusioned with in the Evangelical tradition was that it seemed like every church was trying to change to attract people from an entertainment standpoint … They changed the way they did things. To me the Anglican tradition is the same that it was thousands of years ago. And I got to the point where I wanted my worship to feel different than my everyday life. I want it to be special. I want it to be set apart. My time with God deserves more than to just blend with my everyday life. I have contemporary [music] and I have relaxed, I have that all week long … To me the Anglican tradition does that. With all the colors and the vestments, and the tradition and the symbolism, that just all really speaks to me in [a time that] is different to me, and set apart.” (Interview with author, December 13, 2017) What is this “set apartness” that Paul is talking about? How does the process of separating a special place and time for worship unfold? While it is possible to list many aspects that indicate the boundaries between the special and the everyday, music appears to be important, as Paul’s comment suggests. The question is how this “specialness” of music takes shape in worship. Is making music in church different from making music in other gatherings that are also ritually charged, such as a football game or a party, when in many instances, even the performatives used (such as those of leadership) are transplantable? In summary, what makes the performance of church music uniquely special? Ethologist Ellen Dissanayake calls the process of delimitating the boundaries of the extraordinary “making special” in her research on aesthetic activity and ritual from an evolutionary perspective (1995). She applies the terminology to a gamut of activities, including play: “Often special places are set aside for playing: a stadium, a gymnasium, a park, a recreation room, a ring or circle. There are special times, special clothes, a special mood for play—think of holidays, festivals, vacations, weekends” (1995, 43). The description certainly fits Sunday worship. Dissanayake borrows concepts from Turner and Csikszentmihalyi that we have already unpacked earlier in this volume: Ritual ceremonies and the arts are socially reinforcing, uniting their participants and their audiences in one mood. They both provide an occasion for feelings of individual transcendence of the self—what Victor Turner (1969) calls communitas and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975) calls “flow”—as everyone shares in the same occasion of patterned emotion. For a time, the hard edges of their customary isolation from each other are softened or melted together or their everyday taken-for-granted comradeship is reinforced. (1995, 48; emphasis in the original) What Dissanayake is describing can be labeled “ritualization” in a broad sense, and I have chosen to employ her terminology for two reasons. First, as we have seen in Richard Schechner’s work, ritual activity has a broad scope which can

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include religious activities, everyday rituals, media rituals, and cultural rituals, to name but a few. Religious studies scholar Catherine Bell describes ritualization as “a strategic way of acting … a strategy for the construction of a limited and limitating power relationship” (2009, 7–8; emphasis in the original). The open nature of her definition does not necessarily reflect how Schechner theorized ritualization in relation to other forms of performance. In his well-known “fan and web” diagrams of performance, he distinguishes ritualization from rites and ceremonies (Schechner 2003, xvi; Schechner 2013, 18). For him, ritualization is a term brought in from ethology. Ritualized behavior connects to play (2003, 99), but is distinct from religious ritual. Second, there is a potential distinction between ritualization, ritual activity, and artistic activity. Schechner says that, although “separating ‘art’ from ‘ritual’ is particularly difficult” (2013, 32), the difference between “going to church, watching a football game, or attending one of the performing arts” (2013, 33) is functional. It is the need to account for these functional differences that demands restored behavior, “the key process for every kind of performing, in everyday life, in healing, in ritual, in play, and in the arts” (2013, 34). For Schechner, restored behavior has to do with the way people perform, and the key to integrating different modalities of performance is through the “recombination of already behaved behaviors” in the different spheres of daily life, ceremonial life, and artistic life” (2013, 35). So, while performance as “twice-behaved behavior” bridges these gaps between functions, serving (especially on Schechner’s models of the fan and the web) as an umbrella term that can designate all of these activities, Dissanayake’s definition combines making art with ritualization as part of ritual activity. She derives the idea of making special from the interplay between ritual and play, arguing that play is “something outside normal life,” marked by constraints or boundaries, and that it parallels artistic activity in many respects (1995, 43). Dissanayake describes how, in many societies, art serves as a “molder of feeling” (1995, 46), and how artistic production is connected to ritual activity; they are both formalized and socially reinforcing, “uniting their participants and their audiences in one mood” (1995, 48). Thus, in her work, artistic activities such as music are specially and explicitly imbricated with ritualization, folded into her idea of “making special.” While processes of ritualization can indeed rely on art to delimit ritual spaces, the convergence between art, processes of ritualization, and performance as an overall stance, as in Schechner’s theory, is particularly suited to a discussion of church music as performance. That is why Dissanayake’s vocabulary serves our investigation: it focuses on artistic activity as part of ritual performance, thus emphasizing the particular fusion of ritual and artistic activity that characterizes church music, and connecting two discrete strands in Schechner’s fan. It is possible to add further nuance to our conceptualization of making special. I resort to Mary Hufford’s use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopes, which refers to the representation of time and space in discourse (2003). Bakhtin’s original idea is that “everything in this world is a time-space, a true chronotope”

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2

(1986, 42; emphasis in the original). While the word itself is a conflation of chronos and topos, time and space, in Hufford’s work a chronotope refers to a time-space in which a certain discourse affords meaning to a journey, a biography, or seasonal activities (2003, 150), and in our case, to the weekly and yearly cycle of the Christian calendar. Here, the term “chronotope” refers to a time-space configuration that may frame special activity and has a special narrative attached to it. It is a unit of space-time made special. We thus arrive at a processual framework for describing the uniqueness of worship. By making special a certain chronotope (such as Sunday worship), congregants create a special place-time for the performance of worship, using, among other things, special performatives (such as the ones discussed in the previous chapter) and special music. One UBCer described experientially what I am describing conceptually: [A] moment of congregational music, church music, is about here and now. This people. This place … there is a recognition of the supernatural, I think, that is on the nose. Like, we are talking about a thing that is supernatural and bringing it to our lives. (Junior, interview with author, October 11, 2017) These chronotopes of church music can be extrapolated beyond the immediate boundaries of Sunday worship. The commoditization of congregational musical repertoire through digital mediation presents fresh challenges for the study of church music, as we have seen in our discussions of surrogate participation and immersive spectatorship. Along the spectrum of participation discussed previously, these songs can range from communal performances of music to digitally presented musical artifacts. But how does the “specialness” of church music we are discussing here transfer along this spectrum? If a certain chronotope, a certain time-space, can be made special, is the same true of a musical object presented, say, on a website? Can a song be considered special if it is commoditized; mass-produced like a bottle of soft drink, and shipped from one place to another? Can the transportation of “bottled” chronotopes of church music be considered a means through which transnational worship projects are spread and consumed away from their places of origin? For David Chidester, material religious objects hold “traces of transcendence,” of the sacred, that generate “a sense of community” at baseball games, pilgrimages to Graceland, and Star Trek fandom, as well as other special chronotopes. Chidester echoes Dissanayake, saying that religious activity “entails discourses and practices for creating sacred space” (2005, viii). He incorporates this notion of sacred space, which aligns with our special chronotopes, into discussions of religious material culture. For him, “popular culture adopts religious resources not only for forming a sense of community but also for expanding that sense of community like a transnational, missionizing religion.” (2005, 3) If we follow Chidester’s argument, artifacts of religious material culture make a new type of special wherever they go, because the unbottling of the

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object happens within a new constellation of assumptions, a new stance. Consequently, hybridity becomes inevitable, and a messy process of exchange is enacted “which bear[s] traces of religious practices and performances” (2005, 4). By moving special objects—worship repertoire—from place to place, time to time, and context to context, musicking congregations are in fact cross-pollinizing each other’s chronotopes of worship. Similarly, localized chronotopes are never special in the same way twice. Church music is in constant flux. The repertoire, the musical leadership, the weather, the number of people engaged in the performance, all shape the effect and affect of church music in a given chronotope. In this sense, the “specialness” of church music is not defined exclusively by its content or by its boundaries, but also by participants’ stances. Jamie McGregor, UBC’s worship pastor, described this ebb and flow of a special that is always different: [Church music] is in constant flux, because the church being what it is, we have people moving through, and yet the thing that makes it special is the same thing that makes that community particular. The similar set of values, in some way, also touches the way that music is executed there. And I could talk about that in so many different layers … Sometimes I’ll know, there will be a phrase, and I’m like: “there’s at least three different ways people are taking this phrase,” and they’re all meaning it. And that’s an interesting thing … But, there’s great disagreement here, and yet they’re singing the same words. (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) McGregor emphasizes that participants “mean” differently as they perform, but are gathered by their intent to do so as a group, singing the same words together. It is not just the words, or the singing, that make the performance special, but both. Together, they create a web of vocalities, expressive performatives, and other components. It is the performance of a narrative, a retelling of the “old, old, story” that is done from week to week, through ritual repetition that unfolds with the church year. It is, in the words of a congregant at St. Alban’s, “a rehearsal of the divine” (George, interview with author, December 12, 2017), a rehearsal that inhabits a distinct chronotope from everyday life. Some interviewees talked about the integration of life and worship in positive terms, and others revealed an expectation that their performance of church music should be special, and separated from the mundane, as Paul mentioned in the opening vignette. Zack, a UBCer in his thirties with a terminal degree in the fine arts, expressed similar expectations regarding design and architecture: Is the entrance of the church starting to lead you away from distractions and towards worship? I don’t know [if] it is … I mean, it surely is, because you enter the church. First off, it doesn’t look like a church, so maybe it’s not preparing you in that way, in terms of a special place, something that’s different, a place of worship. And I think of entering the main entrance … it

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does have kind of an interesting atmosphere, because of the ceiling and off to the side is the coffee room and … are we being led, being helped, into worship [instead of being] distracted? (Interview with author, January 2, 2018) Zack’s comment betrays a certain frustration with UBC’s architecture in relation to his expectations that a place of worship should be special, set apart. Paul and Zack worship in very distinct traditions, Baptist and Anglican. But their expectations gather both under a hope that the performance of church music will be special, even when the sheen of liturgy appears dulled by ritual repetition. Neal McGowan, assistant rector at St. Alban’s, described this balance in the liturgy: I love how it can be just so ordinary and boring, and unapologetically [so]. Like, someone sets a table, and we watch. And there’s something sort of freeing about that: even uninteresting things in life get brought up into our worship, to God, and are part of God’s plan for human flourishing, and for us being fully ourselves and giving praise. And so I think music connects with all of that. (Interview with author, December 11, 2017) McGregor rephrases McGowan’s thoughts in a different way, pushing back against a perceived tendency to make church music more than what he deems it to be: When I talk to musicians about what we do, I’ll typically say: “hey, in some way we are just playing music.” And maybe just playing music is itself a much more significant thing than we would like. ’Cause I grew up in the thing where every camp I’m going to held a breakout session to talk about being a worship leader, and they’re always saying like, “it’s something different than just playing music.” (2017) McGregor denied this type of specialness, which he associated with the manipulation of affective power in worship leadership. For him, church music is special not because it is inherently superior or different, but because “it’s just playing music in a particular context. And that’s the thing that’s different” (2017). Taken together, these various comments reveal expectations that church music performance should be ordinary yet special. Music, in a sense, enables the reconciliation of ordinariness and specialness in worship. But does all church music reconcile the exceptional and the colloquial? A body of literature that reflects this “tug-of-war” between specialness and colloquiality in church music comes from the “worship wars” fought around musical style in worship. Advocates on both sides of the worship wars seem to entrench music either in the familiarity camp or in the specialness camp,

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denouncing the other side as a distortion of what church music in particular, and liturgy in broad terms, should be. Rick Warren, a well-known proponent of seeker-sensitive worship, defends familiar styles of music in church: “You must identify who you’re trying to reach, identify their preferred style of music, and then stick with it. You’re wasting your time if you’re searching for a style of music that everyone in your church will agree on” (1995, 280). In contrast, traditionalists consider hymns to be special and unique, separate from other musical repertoires: One of the saddest situations to have emerged in our time is that in many churches there is an almost total rejection of the musical past and its traditions, something mirrored very much in the secular life of the nation. (Dakers 2000, 132)3 Worship leaders appear to be aware of this tension and how it continues to play out. Eugene Lavery, music director at St. Alban’s, commented: And it’s getting harder and harder, because we’re trying to sort of draw more, marketing to a shrinking brood of people. Not at St. Alban’s, but as you know, society’s becoming less religious, and [there is a] trend to try and make church more entertaining … And what are we gonna do next week to get these people here? We gotta top what we did last week. You know, even the Episcopal church could fall victim to that a bit. So, it’s tricky, because as I say, you could be doing all the right things, but if no one’s there, it becomes pointless. But then it can’t be just solely about getting as many people through the door as possible. Because otherwise you end up just becoming politicians, where it’s like “what do we need to do to get their votes.” (Interview with author, November 20, 2017) Lavery’s comments point to the challenge of finding the elusive balance between ritual repetition and making special. Moreover, church music is often the platform on which many of a congregation’s theological, ecclesiological, and missiological negotiations take place, and on which practitioners “tamper” or play with expressive and stylistic possibilities from week to week. How do leaders strike a balance between change and familiarity in church music? In order to answer this question, we must discuss three component parts that frame the performance of church music as special: place, time, and group. Making special place From the exterior, the sanctuary of University Baptist Church does not look like a church. UBC’s building is a repurposed supermarket. The building has no tower or steeple, and is surrounded by a parking lot. On the wall, the lowercase letters “ubc” discreetly indicate what lies inside.

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As the unwary visitor approaches, he or she might notice the doors. Instead of glass, two wide wooden doors open into a lobby that features a side table upon which are lollipops, a chalkboard, and UBC beverage coasters. Each wall is painted a different color. To the left, right beside the coffee room, there are wooden statues, one of St. Francis, the other of the Virgin Mary on the coffee table. A cabinet holds hundreds of mugs, donated by members and used weekly as congregants file in, pick a mug for the day, and fill it with coffee from a local roastery before heading into the sanctuary. Each room in the UBC building features its own design. From wallpaper to furniture to lighting, it seems each room was plucked from a different building and set inside this structure. Even so, the decoration does not seem haphazard. Several of my interlocutors claimed that UBC has a “House of Blues” vibe, with corrugated metal and strong colors, in a unique mixture of kitsch and hipster sensibilities. The wall of the upper balcony has been painted with a black and white rendition of the Lord’s supper, and the stage is decorated with dozens of candles. Some of them have been there for a while, as evidenced by the large pyramids of wax at the feet of the candelabra. Rugs adorn the stage, and large chandeliers give each chamber a unique hue of lighting. This description of UBC’s worship space illustrates how faith communities delineate a special chronotope by “making special” their performance space. Through a variety of means, from architecture to interior design to narratives, congregations demarcate the boundaries of the space within which special activity is performed. The architecture of worship spaces has received renewed attention in church music scholarship (Lim and Ruth 2017), and my interviewees recognized this significance. Aaron Zimmerman, St. Alban’s rector, spoke to me about how the architecture of the church demarcates the boundaries of the service, and emphasizes that it is “supposed to feel like something completely different from the rest of your life.” He places the threshold of distinctiveness at the entrance of the church: I think it starts when you enter the door. The architecture is designed to do something to you, whether you’re aware of it or not. You can’t help but know that you are in a space that’s different from almost any other space you’ve walked into during the rest of the week. Unless you teach at Hogwarts or something like that, walking into this church, with its vaulted ceiling and the stained glass, you [immediately] know that this is not a bank lobby. (Interview with author, November 17, 2017) Stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings, and a variety of architectural devices have been used to demarcate places of worship throughout history, a strategy that Zimmerman points to when he mentions that the space is “designed to do

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something to you.” Similarly, the architecture of São João Lutheran Church replicates, on a smaller scale, European Lutheran religious architecture, complete with an elevated wooden gallery at the back and extending to the sides of the building, and Romanic arches above the windows and over the nave. Both St. Alban’s and São João employ an architectural strategy that makes it clear to any passers-by that these are not ordinary buildings, but places where special things are meant to happen. In UBC’s case, it is precisely the contrast between the exterior and the interior of the building that emphasizes its specialness. Entering the building creates a “jolt” between an unassuming, industrial exterior surrounded by a parking lot, and a highly decorated interior kaleidoscope of colors and unexpected decorative elements. UBCers spoke at length about the church’s decoration: Well, honestly, like, the whole environment, including the music, is a House of Blues. I’ve been in a handful of Houses of Blues around the place… there’s no way you can convince me that it wasn’t intentionally copied. I mean, I went to the House of Blues in South Carolina, it had the exact corrugated metal, the exact color tone, the exact tone of the lighting. You know, it depends on the building. But the House of Blues is a religious place. The guy who started it, the House of Blues that I went to in South Carolina, had all the standard seven faith symbols that they will put up, kinda like the “Coexist,” similar. And all of those with a picture of the guy who founded House of Blues, its gurus. (Bryan, interview with author, December 18, 2017) Bryan points to some of the strategies that contribute to making UBC look like a House of Blues: the corrugated metal, the lighting, the color palette. His comment illustrates the “concertiness” that characterizes the church-going experience at UBC and connects it to House of Blues’ own performance of devotion to the blues. Bryan identifies a “religious” overtone to the way the House of Blues franchise uses décor to highlight the specialness of its particular brand of musical experiences. It features icons, such as the “Coexist” symbol, and pictures of the founders that are similar to the portraits of former clergy that line the lobbies and sacristies of churches. Weaving these extraneous elements into worship spaces creates new qualifications of specialness for congregants. Zack told me that the interior design of UBC is one of the best things about the church. He also recognizes that, as UBC leverages pop culture to make itself special, it is inviting these extraneous influences to the mixture that shapes their performance: I think the sheer harshness of the exterior makes that a pretty big jump into the interior. The contrast is so big I don’t think it creates continuity from life to worship, in that regard. I mean, of regular life to Sabbath life. I’m being a little bit critical here, but the design of it does make me feel like other cultural things I’ve been in. It makes me feel like: “this visual culture

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was adapted from something secular,” in a sense. I don’t know how much of it was invented or birthed out of rigorous Christian tradition of how art works. So, it’s kind of got a Southwestern, a combo of sculptures and kitsch, kind of icons and stuff. So, it seems like a pop culture thing that is brought into there. But at the same time, I like it in a lot of respects. (2017) Zack mentions the “pretty big jump” from exterior to interior, and goes on to problematize the connections enacted by UBC’s adoption of “something secular.” He seems to contrast these elements that have been “borrowed” from the outside with “rigorous Christian tradition.” While such a contrast may be problematic, especially as UBC’s leadership goes to great lengths to highlight the congregation’s integration with culture at large and its unbelief in established sacred-secular divides, it does shed light on how participants might interpret the way religious communities make their spaces special. Another means through which congregations make their spaces special is by using music to establish sonic boundaries. At St. Alban’s, great care is exercised in curating music from the Anglican/Episcopal Christian tradition. At UBC, songwriting is an integral aspect of McGregor’s ministry. And at São João, integrating old and new materials and adapting them to reflect local musical expressions is a priority. Lídia, a young woman who grew up attending São João, says that special care is given to the types of arrangements that are played, to make them distinctive. There are songs that everyone plays a certain way, but here, whenever possible, there is an attempt to create another kind of arrangement, something more sophisticated. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) For her, the attention to musical arrangements at São João adds to its specialness. Just as a gardener landscapes a garden, so do congregations use music to design a space that is theirs and that is distinct from the outside world and that features a special soundscape.4 Soundscaping also flows naturally from the bodies that come to participate in worship. Zimmerman describes the sonic threshold that one encounters when entering St. Alban’s: “the shuffling of papers and the scuffing of feet on the floor.” These sounds of expectation, of preparation, are followed by the formal prelude, which is “supposed to be a little ethereal and contemplative. It’s not supposed to be a bombastic thing; it’s a signal that we’re beginning to leave one world and come into another.” He calls this natural mix of special sounds, as half the people listen and the other half “ask about brunch,” a “magical mess” that emphasizes that real life is still there and that “we are approaching the throne of God” (2017). Once more, the liminal characteristic of church music comes to the fore. One world is not absolutely shut out in favor of another. Instead, the mixture of performance and “real life” is framed, especially by the

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music, as something larger than both; something that recognizes the legitimacy of sounds from everyday life, like the crying of a baby that punctuates the singing of a hymn. The strategies described here involve external and internal design, as well as attention to sonic architecture, and delimit the space in which ritual transformation is expected to take place. The implied promise of these environments is that by entering into a liminal space that is separate from everyday life yet integrated into it (especially through the rhythms of ritual repetition), something will happen. Making special time It is Sunday morning. I am at St. Alban’s for morning worship. Today is a special day, the first Sunday of Advent. I sit up in the gallery, watching congregants as they arrive and settle into their seats. They exchange greetings, handshakes, and hugs with those they know, to the sound of the organ prelude, a rendition of J. S. Bach’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.” The silence that follows the prelude is full of expectation There is no one at the altar. Suddenly, from below my feet, I hear the sounds of a matin responsory, composed by Palestrina, but sung in English. I look down to see glowing candles held by teenage acolytes. The congregation slowly comes to order, quieting their gestures and opening worship bulletins. All wait for the responsory to end and, as the organ launches into the introduction to “Lo! He comes, with clouds descending,” a Wesley hymn, the acolyte in the middle raises a golden cross atop a long pole. The congregation starts to sing. The acolytes process down the center aisle, followed by the choir and, finally, curates Neal McGowan and Aaron Zimmerman, all appropriately robed. At the front, they launch into a choreographed moving about: candles are set in sconces, the cross is set in its place, choristers file to either the decanii or cantorii side, and the service begins. The second aspect of making special the performance of church music is that of special time. The vignette above illustrates how St. Alban’s marks its worship time as special. Celebrants’ robes, incense, symbols, bells, audio vignettes, silence, processionals, preludes and postludes, are some of the means through which the beginning and end of special time is marked in Christian traditions. Just as a special place is marked by architecture and design, the transition into the service is marked by silent expectation and by sound. Ritual repetition is a primary means of making special time. As explained in Chapter 1, the process of repeatedly engaging in church music creates patterns of performance, or “deep grooves,” in participants. Repeated ritual activity establishes patterns that frame specialness. In church, micro- and macro-cycles of repeated special time are created using the weekly and yearly liturgical calendars. São João’s worship pastor Fabiane Behling Luckow spoke of how this commitment to repetition is a performance of special time, a commitment to these cycles:

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[T]he social practice of setting aside your Sunday morning or evening, of coming to the services, in a way also forms your identity. Because the people in your social life know you’re there, and know that this is a commitment you have on that day. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) For her, special time is public because it makes one unavailable for other commitments. This absence is also a social practice, a public declaration of “making faithful” that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a way of performing belief, tradition, and community. At UBC, every Sunday the band repeats a song that was played the previous week as a way to “return to what we experienced the week before.” UBCer and musician Junior explains the goal of this strategy: That’s building sort of a through-line for this season the year is in … So, this idea that last week is as much a part of this week as this week is of next week, and is of the next week. And the times between these days, these moments, are valuable. The time between the last time we sang this song and when we repeat it is important, and you think about the way you heard this song before the week, and the way you heard this song in light of the week … So, in what ways did that song speak to me last week, that I was thinking about as the week was progressing, and singing it again forces me to reflect on that moment again: “we just sang this song last week, what has happened since then?” So, for me, that’s a big part of it. That moment of saying, “we’re returning to this week through repetition of song.” And not saying, “think about the last week as you sing this song,” but the idea underlies that, that this is the bookend of the last week, in a sense. But also opens up for the next week, with another song that we’ll repeat. (2017) Junior’s description of repeated songs as “bookends” illustrates how the repeated performance of church music is used to create special time “right now” during the service. Moreover, the repetition of music in the micro-cycle of worship weaves connections between services that establishes a thread between “last week and next week.” Participants are called into weekly retrospection through the repetition of a song from last week’s service, and that performance frames their experience between services even as it projects forward into the following week. In this way, memory of what has happened and expectation of what is to come are brought together into the liturgical moment through the use of music. This strategy adds narrative layers to church music, frames memories, and creates expectations around a special time that projects into the past and into the future. In addition, the repetition of the macro-cycle of the liturgical year opens up opportunities to perform special repertoire. Expectation builds up to these markers slowly, over months, and the performance is made more special as

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people “decorate the singing” with candles and colors, just as the interior of a church may be decorated to demarcate its specialness. At UBC, senior pastor Josh Carney measures his tenure in pastoral work according to these larger cycles. He mentioned in our interview that he is currently on “his fourth trip through the lectionary” (in UBC’s case, the Revised Common Lectionary; interview with author, December 2, 2017). Thus, the narrative is kept in motion between chronotopes, weaving the micro-cycle and the macro-cycle together. In order to preserve the specialness of worship, leaders strive to renew participants’ attention in the performance of liturgy over time. At São João, Luckow always looks for ways to bring in an element of unpredictability, because she is wary that rote repetition might cause people to drift off. On the other hand, it is the very repetition of the performance within this special time that, according to McGregor, shapes participants’ experience. He recognizes the special time of worship as an opportunity, and considers it his job as worship pastor to “put words in people’s mouths,” hoping that “this is the time where we are trying to recalibrate, do something, to be further transformed in this moment” (2017). Here, the same expectation that surrounds making special place applies to special time: that participants may be further transformed in this moment. Another way in which music frames special time is by providing a “sacred soundtrack” to worship. George, a St. Alban’s congregant, argues that “there is another level that gets engaged” when he is participating musically during the service (2017). For him, this level is attained not only when he sings the psalm included in the liturgy, for example, but when he hears the choir sing the psalm as well.5 Because of this, says Paul, the liturgy draws one out of one’s self, it “takes you out of time” (2017). He is describing how music can frame the passage of liturgical time as distinct from everyday time. The soundtrack of worship— church music—makes the liturgy a special time. Special time is also enhanced by the “live” characteristics of church music. George sings in St. Alban’s choir and remarked that during a live performance “you can’t stop and replay the tape. You have to plunge ahead” (2017). The adrenaline associated with the risk of “messing up” adds to the specialness of the performance. All these factors—the way in which church music “takes us out of time”; the risk associated with its performance from week to week; and the fact that people make themselves available to participate in it—demonstrate how congregations separate the time of liturgy to perform specialness together. In addition, for church musicians, engagement goes beyond the service. Juarez, a young guitarist at São João, said that he cautions new team members: “Ministry takes at least four hours per service just including rehearsal and sound check, plus the time you need to dedicate at home to learn the song” (interview with author, October 22, 2017). The special time of liturgy taps into everyday time, connecting them in a unique way. This may be true for band musicians, organists, choral singers, conductors, technicians, and other people involved in providing music for the service. These processes of preparation create a rich texture of special times of church music, a unique performance of specialness, with a soundtrack made possible through coordination, cooperation,

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and the rehearsal of special postures that may vary from controlling faders to playing the timpani, and everything in between. Making special groups The very communities that gather to perform church music constitute a third boundary that surrounds chronotopes of worship. As we have seen, in church music, embodied participation occurs at the individual and corporate level. Repeated participation in church music in this space/time, this chronotope, causes congregants to become a community, a special group of people. In the process, the trope that “we are doing this together” is reinforced week after week, and the repeated rehearsal of worship through music, a means that invites corporate participation, establishes a porous boundary of belonging. While it is true that people drift in and out of flow during the performance, a core of participation is preserved. While one father may run to the bathroom with a toddler, the remainder of the congregation carries the song. Likewise, while something in the repertoire may be unfamiliar to a newer member, veterans carry the song until the unfamiliar becomes familiar to neophytes. The creation of a special group through collective music making is not exclusive to church music. People gather to make music for a number of reasons. Turino calls the resulting groups cultural cohorts and cultural formations (2008). Cultural cohorts share a habit, but are not united around core aspects of self-identity (2008, 111). Lucia, a young female worshiper at São João, mentioned concert-going as a manifestation of cohorts: I like a certain artist. I’ll go to a concert, as I did this last weekend, and that preference unites me with others who are there. Suddenly I’m talking to someone I’ve never seen before—this is actually what happened—and [the fact that we are all fans of the performer] is what brings people to that place. (Interview with author, October 22, 2017) She identifies the shared habit of going to concerts as the common denominator of this cohort. Cultural formations, on the other hand, are groups brought together by habits considered central to self-identification (Turino 2008, 112), such as religious identity. My interlocutors described the sensation of being part of this special group, or formation, in varied ways. Lincoln, a member at St. Alban’s, mentioned the passing of the peace as an embodied expression of communal care: I always think of the sharing of the peace, when you turn around and shake hands….. There’s some people that I always think, “what if that was their only human contact?” If you’re 30, 40, 50 years old, if you’re a single adult, you don’t have a family, maybe at work you sit in a cubicle or whatever, that might be your only human contact for the week. That’s totally a possibility. (Interview with author, February 19, 2018)

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This gesture is a prescribed component of the liturgy at St. Alban’s, and Lincoln sees it as an opportunity to provide human touch to those around him. Here, the specialness of the liturgy (specifically the idea of being part of a religious cultural formation) gives permission for Lincoln to touch those with whom he worships. While a heartfelt handshake accompanied by a “peace be with you,” spoken with a smile, may be out of place in a coffee shop or parking lot, it becomes appropriate here because participants are performing community. Such permission, in turn, frames the music making that the group performs together in a unique way. An important consequence of the crystallization of a community is the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Implied in the notion of being “part of this group” is the acknowledgment that others are not. The establishment of sameness and otherness is inherent to making special, because groups need markers by which to distinguish themselves from other groups. Chidester defines this kind of group delineation as an ambiguity inherent to religion itself that both gathers around sacred inclusion, but dehumanizes and excludes others and does harm in the process (2005, viii). For him, the process of creating community, of delineating boundaries for participation, creates an “other” out of those on the other side of the boundary. The theology of church music is one way through which St. Alban’s distinguishes itself in the church topography of Waco. My ethnography showed that the leadership at St. Alban’s goes to significant lengths to emphasize the church as a place of grace instead of a place of judgment. George said: “I almost never hear a message against someone or a group of people; it’s always for the Divine and for grace” (2017). By pointing to this distinctive stance in the music of the church, George implies that other churches may not do the same; they may, in fact, “be against something.” This example illustrates how the process of making a group special creates sameness and otherness in tandem, a phenomenon reflected also in music performance.

Play and change in church music One of the tenets of Turner’s theory is that ritual is a separate space in which forms of social conflict might be enacted without threatening the stability of social structures. Ritual activity is not dissociated from social life; on the contrary, it is a process that helps to mediate human interactions in times of instability, providing “a frame and a means to socialize, especially in times of change—that is, in situations that are seen as a chance and a threat at the same time” (Hüsken and Neubert 2012, 3). Thus, making special groups, time, and space establishes a platform on which negotiations related to meaning and identity can occur, both musical and otherwise. Church music is a means through which these negotiations are performed, while making special provides the stage on which ritual negotiations are performed, in our case, through music. In these negotiations, participants “tamper” with elements otherwise considered extraneous to the boundaries of the chronotope, or reclaim elements from within their own, or other, church music

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cultures. But tampering is taken seriously because of the ritual frame within which it occurs, and, in this sense, play is not necessarily frivolous, but can be serious business (Schechner 2013, 89). Here, I will couple a definition of this type of play with a qualification that nuances how Schechner speaks about play and my own use of the term. Schechner defines play in relation to ritual: “ritual has seriousness to it, the hammerhead of authority. Play is looser, more permissive—forgiving in precisely those areas where ritual is enforcing, flexible where ritual is rigid” (2013, 89). For him, play is essential but unpredictable. Johan Huizinga, writing in collaboration with Schechner in Ritual, Play, and Performance (1976), characterizes play as voluntary, free, and separated from everyday life (1976, 51). But, as I have said before, the study of church music as performance places the phenomenon of congregational music making on the efficacy pole of Schechner’s spectrum, distancing it from free, inconsequential play. Since I am emphasizing play within the context of ritual activity, the freedom that performance scholars such as Schechner and Huizinga ascribe to play in the fullest sense is rare in Christian worship, due to the ritual expectations that surround it. Nevertheless, play is just as essential in this context as in any other realm, because without it, there cannot be change within ritual activity. Furthermore, argues Schechner, play is a quality of restored behavior because it is revised even as it is restored (2013, 89). Play has an important role in the process of revision, allowing “wiggle room” for creativity in repetition, thus enacting change: the process whereby tampering, or playing, leads to transformations in the performance of church music itself. Schechner also recognizes the inherent tension of tradition and change in performance, because performance activities tend towards tradition (2003, 13). He says that all along the continuum, “the rules are designed not only to tell the players how to play but to defend the activity against encroachment from the outside. What rules are to games and sports, traditions are to ritual and conventions are to theater, dance, and music” (2003, 13; emphasis in the original). Schechner acknowledges that avant-garde subversion or questioning of these rules will encounter resistance because there is a concern in preserving the specialness of performance: “special rules exist, and are formulated, and persist because these activities are something apart from everyday life (2003, 13; emphasis in the original). Here, Schechner and Dissanayake converge. Rules exist to preserve the special status of performances, maintaining their separation, and preserving the effort that has been put into making special the space, time, and group for ritual activity. Artistic expression within ritual activity lives at this tension point between change and preservation. For Schechner, “art and ritual, especially performance, are the homeground of playing” (1993, 41). How is this tension expressed in Christian worship? The seriousness with which liturgy is treated, and the reverence with which it is met in practice, might distract from the idea that liturgy can be play. Nevertheless, Romano Guardini, in his classic work The

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Spirit of the Liturgy, says that “grave and earnest people, who make the knowledge of truth their whole aims, see moral problems in everything, and seek for a definite purpose everywhere, tend to experience a peculiar difficulty where the liturgy is concerned” ([1930] 2015, 33). This difficulty arises because play is an important aspect of Christian liturgy. It is a world for the spirit to live in, and Guardini compares it to the play of the child and the creation of the artist ([1930] 2015, 37), paralleling the ideas of Dissanayake and Schechner. For him, liturgy accomplishes the same goals of play and artistic creation: with all the seriousness of the child and the strict conscientiousness of the great artist, [the liturgy] has toiled to express in a thousand forms the sacred, God-given life of the soul … The liturgy has laid down the serious rules of the sacred game which the soul plays before God. ([1930] 2015, 40) What is more, Guardini argues that ignoring the playful aspect of liturgy is problematic: In their insistence that they are serious, not just playfully pretending, liturgists themselves have pretended that their callings are not also roles they play. Insofar as histrionics and liturgics remain divorced, insofar as imagination is construed as the antagonist of revelation, the church and theater alike suffer, the former from pretentiousness and the latter from frivolity. ([1930] 2015) Furthermore, Guardini points towards a connection between the playfulness of liturgy and its truth in Christian theology. It is remarkable how Guardini’s claim echoes one that Turner would make later in relation to ritual: that the “free or ‘ludic’ recombination [of cultural factors] in any and every possible pattern, however weird,” is the essence of liminality (1974, 60–61). In other words, religious ritual can be “sacred play,” a process that is not frivolous because it is essential, for instance, for education and integration into a community.6 In this sense, playing in liturgy, and playing with liturgy, mean experimenting with truth. For Anita Hammer, “because of [its] inherent uncertainty, the activity of playing opens up to experimenting with notions of truth. Perhaps there is a particular form of truth embedded in the notion of play itself, and the activity of playing” (2010, 106). If such is the case, the way that theological ideas and musical styles are played with in church become crucial, because they are more than just “icing on the cake.” They are expressions of truth. Moreover, in order to engage play to happen, there must be an environment where “players” abide by certain rules. Therefore, the space, time, and groups performing church music must be made special if they are to serve as fitting environments for the act of playing with truth through music. Play is often messy. Consequences of a child playing with mud, or a group of children pretending that the bedroom is a pirate ship, might include muddy hair

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and clothes, sheets tied to curtain rails, and drawers upended. Similarly, playing in/with liturgy often leads to unforeseen circumstances, “cracks in the walls” through which musical styles, liturgical practices, and extraneous influences transgress boundaries, coalescing into unexpected configurations and mixtures. Rosa, a worshiper at São João, described the relationship between the church calendar and ritual repetition as a game. She attends Sunday morning worship, and she mentioned how the music in a service might draw from three or four different hymnals, mixing “Castelo Forte” (“A Mighty Fortress”), a traditional Lutheran tune, with “Bêncão do Caminhar” (“Blessing for the Journey”), a recent composition (interview with author, October 22, 2017). Diana refers to this same “game” at UBC. She describes a recent Sunday when, amid the Trump administration’s newly minted immigration ban, a song called “All the Poor and Powerless” (2012) was sung. The song focuses on “the lost and lonely,” and “all who hurt with nothing left.” For Diana, the song took on “new layers of meaning” because of the political environment in which it was performed (interview with author, January 2, 2018). In the situations described by Rosa and Diana, making special does not insulate ritual performance from outside influences. A more accurate description would be that the process of making special creates a special place within the world, a place in which fresh associations between ritual and events in society at large can happen; associations that often spill over their intended boundaries. There is a balance—a flow—that needs to be preserved between what is happening inside these boundaries and in the “outside world.” McGregor described his pastoral concern in preserving liturgical balance: “we are in this time and place and we aren’t looking to be this sort of anachronistic, disconnected sort of thing happening at the same time. So, what are the things that we’re bringing in and grounding us?” (2017). He speaks of the connection between lectionary readings, the formality (or lack thereof) of the language used in prayers, the song selection, and current events in the world. The result is a rich tapestry: [M]ore often than not, spookily so, you will have something in the lectionary, or something like that, or just a general theme, that suddenly becomes very pointed in light of things around you. So, this past year, a lot of statements and songs in our liturgies have decidedly been politicized. (2017) This is reflected in Diana’s account of singing “All the Poor and Powerless.” Thus, play sheds new light upon events that are extraneous to the worship experience itself, giving them meaning from the inside out: from special chronotope to everyday life and back. These couplings between song and context come aloud, becoming relevant in the life of participants as they share in the experience. McGregor calls it “using Jesus as a lens.” The repetition of this process means that the same things, set against the surrounding environment, produce new results every time.

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A similar process is in place whereby the musical selection at St. Alban’s affords interaction between the Anglican musical legacy and the broader Western tradition. While most of the music sung during worship on the Sundays I attended came from the Hymnal 1982 (1985) and/or composers from the Anglican/ Episcopal tradition, such as Craig Phillips, Fela Sowande, Herbert Brewer, and Martin Howe, music by J. S. Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Palestrina was also performed.7 Music director Lavery defended this integration, because Anglican music borrows from other traditions, such as Roman Catholic and Lutheran musics (2017). At these intersections of ritual play, a frequent point of contention in my ethnography was related to the “sacred/secular divide”: the notion that there is a gap between actions and objects that should be used in worship, and those that should not (Begbie 2007, 32; Faulkner 1996, 146).8 There seems to be a concern with the ritual efficacy of church music performance in relation to this sacred/secular divide, especially in discussions of sincerity/authenticity in worship. The implication is that, for church music to be effective, it must be, in some way, “authentic”; if authenticity is compromised, the effectiveness of the performance is compromised.9 Meredith McGuire traces the crystallization of this perceived gap back to Reformation movements that attempted to “limit the realm of the sacred” by making it “more valuable, set apart, and awesome” and, consequently, more controllable amid the turmoil of the religious landscape of the time. For her, these Reformation movements “proclaimed that the sacred and profane had to be ritually separated” (2013, 44). McGuire identifies this pattern in Reformation ritual: Ritual effectiveness [in the medieval world] depended on performance, not intention or individual consciousness. Thus, a ritual action performed correctly was believed to be more effective than one performed incorrectly, even if the incorrect actions were done with greater earnestness and fervor. … Everyday ritual and magic were intertwined, making the distinction between religious practices and magical practices impossible. Knowledge of effective ritual actions was thus a potential source of individual power. (2013, 47) McGuire outlines why ritual effectiveness was crucial within such a conception of religious ritual. This specter still seems to loom over church music practices today, and withholds a hidden threat: that incorporating something from the “outside” will “contaminate” the performance of worship and weaken its effectiveness, thus diluting its ritual efficacy. We can see this concern take shape in samples from the literature: “I am convinced that CCM is one of the most dangerous things facing fundamental Baptist and other Bible-believing churches. It is one of the most effective Trojan horses of the ecumenical movement” (Cloud 1998, 10). These invectives assume that introducing alien repertoires into the church compromises the effectiveness of Christian worship, because it

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becomes “contaminated.” The relationship between “sacred” and “secular” across this perceived divide is tumultuous and complex. Nevertheless, as we have seen, play and change puncture boundaries in various ways, including those that separate “sacred” and “secular.” Participants and leadership “tamper with” themes and elements that may not necessarily fit in. Overall, these interactions fall onto two distinct axes: interaction with contemporary culture at large and interaction with past traditions. The churches in which I did my fieldwork found ways to establish a strong connection with the surrounding culture not only in terms of the music, but from the pulpit as well. Aaron Zimmerman described resistance to his pop culture references at other congregations he served, but shared that St. Alban’s is “a pretty easy-going place” (2017). There, he strives for a unique balance. While great care is given to ascertain that the music is “grounded in the unique Anglican heritage of music in the Episcopal Church” (St. Albans n.d.), Zimmerman considers the sermon “the part where I can speak in contemporary language to you” (2017). On one Sunday morning, Zimmerman referenced U2, Iron Maiden, and Pantera in his sermon. On another Sunday, his references included the satirical website TheOnion.com, Rod Stewart, Cat Stevens, Sheryl Crow, Wile E. Coyote, and the television show “The Good Place.” On yet another Sunday, he mentioned the eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, Soultrain, and the soft drink Kool-Aid. Josh Carney similarly weaves cultural references into his preaching at UBC, and regularly references “Saturday Night Live,” Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman, to name but a few. Carney describes a scene he witnessed the first time he visited UBC: 10

[David] Crowder … showed a video of Jim Caviezel doing an Elvis impersonation for a movie he was thinking about doing. And you know, the point of this was that he was hanging out with Jim Caviezel. This was right after the Passion of the Christ came out, so Jim Caviezel was very important at the time. And I knew what was happening in the moment, and what was happening in the moment was that [the church leadership was] being very smart about the presentation of what UBC was, in that moment, for all of us who were new. And the presentation was: “hey, we’ve seen what you’ve seen, and it’s gonna matter for what we do here.” (2017) Carney intentionally emphasizes the connection between the inside and outside boundaries of making special, and points to the need for this connection to be well stewarded. In fact, Carney claims that this stewardship is one of the things that have defined UBC as a church; he dubs it “being culturally conversant … We don’t reject what is happening in the world. We interpret it” (2017). Moreover, Carney and Zimmerman make generous use of humor in their sermons. Zimmerman paired humor and music thus:

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Making special, play, and change [H]umor is one of those things that, like music, can get past intellectual defenses, and can open the heart to be able to receive the Word. It makes the soil good. It opens it up. That hard rocky soil, humor can break it up, as does music. (2017)

In addition, churches find ways to play with, and negotiate, music cultures. At São João, drawing on Brazilian music culture has become a tradition that Luckow traces back to the 1990s, when musicians started including influences from “the outside” in their church music. A percussionist brought in Brazilian instruments from his father’s music shop, along with musical styles such as choro and samba. The music ministry grew, and musicians began playing professionally, bringing in a new level of sophistication from the noite (nightclub scene). Luckow adds: I also think we’re beyond that paradigm that believers can only listen to Christian music. So, our musicians have influences from outside the gospel environment, and they end up bringing their influences, their way of playing, into the band, because it’s what they listen to, it’s the aesthetic that they search out. (2017) Nowadays, such permeability is a hallmark of São João’s music ministry, even if these processes of “crossing the sacred/secular divide” are not always appreciated or approved by church members. Musicians there still faced resistance when incorporating Brazilian instruments such as the conga (often associated with Afro-Brazilian religious musics). At UBC, McGregor draws extensively on the American folk tradition. Brian described it as a “rare bird that could at least, in theory, be palatable to nonChristians who like contemporary folk, which is semi-popular at this point. You would imagine your average hipster would be able to stomach the music at UBC” (2018). He ascribes this palatability to McGregor’s attempt to “follow the music that he wants to write and make and sing.” Other members recognize how David Crowder’s participation in the founding of the church established a pattern that is still followed. Gordon, a UBCer who toured extensively with Crowder, remarked on how their “sound” was a tapestry that included Sinéad O’Connor, Peter Gabriel, Dave Matthews, Alanis Morrissette, and others (interview with author, January 18, 2018). Generally speaking, at São João and UBC, incorporating musical influences from the “outside” is considered a virtue, not a sin. Guitarist Juarez says: “the things I hear from bands that aren’t Christian, I feel as if I have complete freedom to try and bring into the music I play [at São João” (2017). At UBC, the music is a construct that draws on band members’ preferences, the pop and folk history of the congregation, and Americana. The following excerpt from my conversation with Junior exemplifies this tapestry:

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When I was in high school and starting to play bass, I was super into Blink182, still am, truthfully. Foo Fighters, this very pop-punk, but also just sort of rock direction. So, a lot of picking on the bass, which is now a very indie rock thing to do. I was also into Death Cab for Cutie … [Our] guitar player comes from a metal background. He played metal music in high school, and Jamie [McGregor] did too, on some level. And we don’t play metal music at UBC. But there’s sort of a, “what can we do that meets that ability and allows you to do that, because that’s what you do well, and combine that with what I play” … and we’re not afraid to change styles. I’m not afraid to change to a different style of bass playing, but you try as much as you can to sort of allow the person’s strengths to shine, and say, “if we’re all doing our best, then that might work out. You know, maybe we’ll all work together.” So that sort of openness to styles, I think, is a unique thing to UBC. Because there’s not, like, “OK, this is the movement of contemporary Christian music, we’re gonna do that. So, everybody, learn how to play like this.” It’s not like we wanna sound like, this Bethel music, or whoever it is. I don’t even know who the popular ones are. It’s more like, “what do we do well?” And maybe we’ll play some of the same songs, but we’ll put our spin on it. (2017) “If we’re all doing our best, then that might work out.” Stylistic freedom stems from a commitment to excellence. McGregor mentioned to me that he does not censor these influences, and considers them important to the sound of the band. It is worthwhile noting that these influences are considered distinct from contemporary Christian musics. In fact, Junior emphasizes the distinction between UBC’s music and more generally accepted contemporary worship music: “I don’t even know who the popular ones are.” The fact that they are not connected to the contemporary worship music scene makes them more authentic for these musicians. There is no interest in “playing it like on YouTube.” The goal is to sound like UBC. Even as the borders of these repertoires are expanded to include influences from outside church music traditions, repertoires are also expanded within traditions. Musicians at São João and St. Alban’s pride themselves on tapping into their denominational musical legacies. Lavery spends considerable time researching and incorporating material from the Anglican and other Western Christian traditions into St. Alban’s liturgy. Even in these cases, it seems that change, as a result of this “playing” with repertoires, is slow: And you know, these things can take time to change, and often people just aren’t aware of different practices. Like at St. Alban’s, specifically they’ve pretty much always sung the same “Gloria” every Sunday. I don’t think people realize that there was more than one out there. And so, when we started doing a couple of other ones, they went “I quite like those,” and I said “you know, there’s about a million different ones we could do.” (Lavery 2017)

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His comment implies that people may not be aware of the musical variety available within the tradition in which they place themselves, and he sees it as his responsibility to expand participants’ musical palette. Similarly, Luckow prides herself in incorporating historical materials into the music at São João, just as she prides herself in making extraneous repertoire sound “like São João.” Musicians at UBC and São João do not copy arrangements. They rearrange whatever music they incorporate, another marker of distinction. Luckow says: I’ve made an effort to salvage these older songs in the Lutheran tradition, and it’s funny, because a lot of people don’t realize what these songs are. It’s happened more than once that the younger folks will say, “I looked for this song on YouTube but didn’t find it. Which band plays it?” No band plays it, because these songs are from an older repertoire. (2017) Such intentionality in rearranging this historic material reawakens it in the congregation’s memory, resulting in the irony of congregants scrounging modern-day digital repositories in their search for repertoires that predate these platforms. Drawing both on the historical axis of the musical tradition and the culture outside, churches negotiate ways to make their music special. Theological and liturgical debates also take place through church music performances, in addition to the negotiation of musical influences per se. Junior gives an example: So, for example, [in] “Oceans” (I’m not a fan of the song, but that’s OK), there’s a line that talks about the sovereign hand of God. And that’s a contentious word, this idea of God’s sovereignty … So, what does that sovereignty look like? And that’s a discussion that needs to be had before we project that onto the congregation to agree with, to say: “do you agree with this? And if you do, sing along.” And having that level of recognition to say: “we don’t agree with that word, or we do agree with that word, and we feel like the congregation should, that’s a part of who we are.” Then when you present it you bring that weight to it. (2017) Junior’s comment reveals an aspiration that the congregation can trust the music leadership to curate, through their choice of repertoire, the theological claims of that faith community, such as how they conceive of God’s sovereignty. Liturgical decisions are crucial to these theological negotiations. UBC, for instance, did not always follow the church calendar. Bryan, a member who accompanied its incorporation into the liturgy, recognized that if you just walked into a regular Baptist church and you incorporate responsive calls in the way that we do it, I think you’d run up against a ton

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of pushback, because anything that you designate as Catholic is what distinguishes [it] … So that’s how I grew up, even the Pentecostal churches are somewhat similar. Anything that’s pre-written, like a prayer that’s written down couldn’t be a real prayer. (2017) Having set out to provide a very “spontaneous” type of service, UBC later moved towards a format in which most prayers are either written by McGregor or curated by him and read during the service, and where the liturgy follows a preordained pattern similar to the one at St. Alban’s. This is a remarkable convergence that aligns, in these two cases, Baptist and Anglican liturgical performances into “Anglo-Baptist” expressions that betray the messiness of church music. In addition, creating a special place for play makes explicit the intention of playing in a special way. In church music, play becomes special because it is oriented towards the truth that participants are making music about. At UBC, says long-time UBCer and former children’s pastor Emily Nance, the liturgy provides musicians with a structure “within which to be creative.” She likens this process, once again, to the way children are educated: “Setting parameters for your children, and then letting them create what they want inside those parameters of safety or cleanliness or well-being … within these parameters, you can do anything you want. You can make it yours” (interview with author, February 7, 2018). The setup she describes takes us back to Guardini’s account of liturgy, its playfulness, and to the messiness of children at play. Performing church music becomes playing with truth, and allows congregations to flirt beyond boundaries and establish connections between ritual activity and everyday life. But such negotiations do not always result in liturgical alignment, especially when they are enacted clumsily. McGregor spoke of a church that attempted to shift unsuccessfully towards a blended model. The whole affair was, according to him, “a terrible idea” (2017). Sometimes, fragile alliances crumble and negotiations fail. What determines success or failure can change. What is clear is that negotiations occur, and that the end products are messy, because they often elude labels and categorization. To further clarify how these elusive dynamics of negotiating musical repertoires, styles, and influences unfold, we will turn to São João as a case study of how this intermingling of influences can shape musical worship. Hybridity, messiness, and the church music melting pot It is 9 a.m. on a beautiful, crisp Sunday in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. At São João Lutheran church, the congregation gathers for worship. Without prior notice, the musicians, with barely a head nod, launch into an instrumental rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Most of them are senior members of the congregation, and they sit in a

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Making special, play, and change semicircle, to the left of the altar under the gallery. Some of them play from the Novo Cântico hymnal, while others follow along by ear. Nestor, the accordion player, sits in the front pew and directs the group with body movement, including head nods and light swaying. Nestor has been playing at São João for a long time; he told me he doesn’t even remember how long. On this day, the group is composed of two violins, one saxophone, and Nestor’s accordion. As they play, the choir gathers upstairs, at the back of the gallery, and people bustle back and forth. Members of the congregation greet each other with hugs and pats on the back, finding their way to their usual spots in the sanctuary. One violinist launches into a harmony, a third above the melody, and the sound of the bell fills the church as the musicians finish with a repeated cadence. As the bell continues to chime, the musicians discreetly talk to each other, coordinating for the next piece. The bell falls silent, and the group launches into a vigorous rendition of “Glória, Glória, Alleluia” (“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”) as members of the congregation quietly hum and tap their hands and feet discreetly on the pews. As they play, a teenager brings in a chair, spreads another hymnal on the first pew next to Nestor, and sets up his banjo. They finish the tune, full of polka-sounding rhythmic ostinatii on the accordion. Upstairs, the conductor of the amateur choir discreetly cues the notes for the singers on a nylon-string guitar. They stand and sing “Em Nome do Pai” (“In the Name of the Father”) in unison, swaying lightly as they sing. As they finish the chorus, the speaker at the front says: “Good morning!” The congregation responds, and the service continues — but my mind is stuck on the sound of the ensemble, a sound one would not expect from a traditional Lutheran service in any other place. It is the sound of mixture and of spontaneity mixed with tradition.

On that Sunday morning, there was no organ.11 Instead, four seniors and a young adult led the congregation using an accordion, two violins, a saxophone, and a banjo. As they played “Amazing Grace,” my ear caught on to the distinctly Central or Eastern European sound of an 80-bass accordion playing polka-style counter-rhythms. The violins and saxophone shifted spontaneously between melody, fragments of harmonization, and musical ornamentation. The resulting soundscape was an aural portrait of the history of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the immigrant mixtures of the Brazilian South, the development of the Lutheran tradition in Brazil, and the local history of Pelotas. Overtones of Italian ancestry were intermingled with a distinctively Germanic approach to congregational music which, even if European in genesis, swayed and moved, displaying the Afro-Brazilian penchant for bodily modes of engagement with sound. The theological and hymnological characteristics of this portrait add a new set of complications to the mix. “Amazing Grace” is not included in Hinos do Povo de Deus (1981), or Hymns of the People of God, the traditional hymnal of the Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil (Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil), and neither is “Mine Eyes Have Seen the

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Glory.” Songs like “Amazing Grace” and “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” are from the British and American music heritage and are not considered traditional Lutheran hymns. However, they are framed here as part of the traditional worship at São João. More mixture, more messiness. Musical hybridity is not a novel subject of inquiry in musicology or church music studies. Guthrie Ramsey engages with hybridity when discussing the African American identity in the formation and current development of North American music. In his discussion of the relationship between hip-hop and gospel, Ramsey describes how 12

Hybridity has clearly shaped the religious realm. Thomas Dorsey’s mix of blues and gospel in the 1920s and 1930s, Rosetta Tharpe’s blend of jazz and gospel during the 1940s; Edwin Hawkin’s and Andre Crouch’s pop-gospel of the late 1960s; and the Winanses’ smooth-soul gospel of the 1980s were all seen as hybrid—and quite controversial—expressions in their day. … This tendency for hybridity links gospel to the larger world of black diasporic religious practices to which it belongs. (2003, 191) Within this context, Ramsey speaks of the tensions, dialogues, and negotiations connected to ideas of “traditional” and “contemporary” in the development of gospel music. He traces gospel’s interaction with musics considered extraneous to its boundaries in the antebellum era (2016), using “cross-traffic” to describe the constant incoming and outgoing influences that characterized this flow of influences across genre boundaries.13 Ramsey’s description of a “fusion aesthetic” to describe this blended musical result, which is a by-product of influencing and being influenced by other types of music, depicts the ongoing process of cross-fertilization that characterizes musical flows, especially within the context of global cultural interactions that are a hallmark of today’s processes of cultural formation. Identifying streams of influence amid the “back-andforth” of these interactions is a complex problem in music studies in general. As we have seen, performance studies’ acknowledgement of the creases, disjunctions, and hybridity that characterize artistic and ritual activity offers a disciplinary advantage to the study of the complex ebb and flow of cultural influences that characterize the practice and interpenetration of religious repertoires.14 Reynold’s concept of “transversal poetics,” which we dealt with in Chapter 1, acknowledges the generative nature of these flows, resonating with Schechner’s claims about creases being places for potential social change (2003, 184). Performance studies is interested in these areas of instability “in between” established cultural boundaries. Furthermore, Schechner argues that it is impossible to prevent hybridity, because “the intercultural performances of everyday life comprise a vast panoply of styles, habits, mixes, hybrids, and fusions inhabiting the way people dress, talk, eat, interact, worship, celebrate, and are entertained (2013, 265). Because of this “vast panoply,” performance theory argues that “there is no such thing as cultural purity. All cultural

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practices everywhere—from religion, politics, and the arts to cooking, popular culture, dress, and language—are hybrids” (2013, 329). These hybrids dovetail into Ramsey’s description of a fusion aesthetic to describe how musical traditions intermingle. Finally, performance studies accepts its responsibility to “explore, understand, promote, and enjoy this diversity” by asking questions in the midst of the cultural inequality that characterizes many of these interactions today (2013, 330). I describe these flows as more than hybridity—they are “messiness.” The term is borrowed from the work of Brazilian ethnomusicologist Werner Ewald. Writing about the mixture of Teutonic heritage and local cultural context in South-Brazilian Germanic singing, he describes the “messiness” of the musical life of immigrant communities in Brazil (2004, 134): [I]t is a music forged by variations, variations as its most foundational, unique and revealing feature, from its oldest manifestations until its most recent productions. … The messiness, the variations, the messy variations of this ethnic music are, indeed, a clear barometer of the way this ethnic community acknowledges and reacts to the complex experiences of its history as an immigrant group. “Messiness” is exactly what is, most of the time, ignored and avoided in the musicological studies in Brazil. (2004, 57–58) Ewald speaks of the mixture of secular and religious repertoires as markers of German-Brazilian identity. Throughout his ethnomusicological and hymnological study, this “messiness” appears to be one of the main ingredients of the song diet of Lutheran churches in South Brazil. Ewald’s description echoes a common trope in Brazil studies: the idea that the country is a de facto melting pot (a trope that is also vigorously contested). Speaking of local expressions of Catholic piety, De Theije and Mariz describe how “Catholicism has continually needed to adapt to local cultures” and outline the shape of this adaptation in Brazil, the world’s largest majority Catholic country (2008, 36). In doing so, they identify the Catholic effort of aggiornamento as portrayed by different dynamics of hybridity: acculturation, syncretism, and inculturation.15 Furthermore, they echo Appadurai’s assessment that today’s world is experiencing “new conditions of neighborliness” (1996, 29) by saying that “although this redefinition and constant re-creation are processes inherent to any tradition or culture, globalization has intensified them” (De Theije and Mariz 2008, 36). The distinction that De Theije and Mariz make between different types of hybridity is important. Syncretism is a word much used in Brazilian religious studies, almost always with negative connotations, as De Theije and Mariz aptly point out. As such, it does not fit with the type of hybridity I found at São João. There, the mixture is not only seen as natural by the congregation, instead it is viewed as “native” to that time and place. It is their music, and it is the one they use to worship. My use of messiness is slightly distinct from the conceptions of hybridity described by De Theije and Mariz and other scholars.

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It is an intentional use that leverages Turner’s pushback against a Western examination of ritual that tries to “tidy things up”: It is a late modern Western myth, encouraged perhaps by depth psychologists, and lately by ethnologists, that ritual has the rigid precision characteristics of the “ritualized” behavior of an obsessive neurotic, or a territory-marking animal or bird, and also encouraged by an early modern Puritan myth that ritual is “mere empty form without true religious content.” … Ritual is, in its most typical cross-cultural expressions, a synchronization of many performative genres, and is often ordered by dramatic structure … Ritual, therefore, is not “threadbare” but “richly textured” by virtue of its varied interweavings of the productions of mind and sense. (1982, 81; emphasis in the original) In my work, the term “messiness” is used as a marker of Brazilian musicking but also, broadly, as a marker of a church music that is “richly textured”; a descriptor that can be used in other contexts as well. My preference for messiness instead of hybridity stems from a desire to recognize the fluidity of the cultural flows that result from play in the context of church music. The term acknowledges the type of children’s play described earlier, in which paint may get smeared on the walls or on clothes, and won’t come off. Similarly, these flows spill beyond boundaries of church music, although the boundaries continue to be recognized and sometime reinforced even as they are continually (re) negotiated. I argue that church music is, and has always been, messy music. This realization allows us to see the intermingling of traditions of church musics in a more natural light, as valid and legitimate expressions of how local congregations negotiate tradition and context in their music. Intentional ambiguity, Anglo-Baptists, and Bapto-Catholics: “we make crap up and mix stuff together” My description of worship at São João illustrates the messiness that affords an Italian-German-Brazilian-Lutheran-Evangelical soundscape to emerge and serve as a defining characteristic of the music in that context. These sounds are not mere translations or adaptations (although translation and adaptation are certainly components in the mixture), but have become reworked over the course of many Sundays, in a process through which distinct influences are interpellated in order to produce new sonic identities of worship. Used in this way, messiness describes modes of theologization connected to more than theological appropriation; they build identity through performance. By engaging in musical mixture, by playing with present and past influences, congregants are in effect negotiating their own performances of faith, community, and tradition(s). These negotiations are not new in the history of the church. Ramsey describes, for instance, how they have been tied to the perception of the African

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American church as a creative greenhouse, an environment in which different types of music are preserved, modified, and created:16 The tension between tradition and innovation … is one of the reasons the church has remained a hotbed of musical creativity through the years. While church leadership has generally guarded and cherished the notions of tradition and convention, forces from within the church (more often than not the younger generation) have denied the older heads, as Thomas Dorsey called them … and claimed stylistic change as an artistic priority. The interaction of these two impulses [tradition and innovation] has provided a creative framework through which musicians have continually pursued new musical directions, despite the inevitable controversies that these innovations are sure to inspire. (2003, 191–192) Ramsey is describing a process in which the aesthetic policy of the church is negotiated using words and in music performance. Randall Bradley gives an account of one such negotiation. A young generation of worshipers in the 1960s “were beginning to play guitars in ways that mimicked the early stars of rock and roll and the newly discovered power of folk music” in church basements (2012, 17). Subsequently, this generation moved “up the stairs” (his terminology) to take over sanctuaries, airwaves, and the imaginary of American Christians. During America’s “worship wars,” this back-and-forth between permission and denial, or what Ramsey calls “consent” and “dissent,” (2016) fueled multidirectional cultural flows and impelled the development of new kinds of music. Other examples abound in the history of church music. Ramsey’s typologies of “consent” and “dissent,” along with Bradley’s account, emphasize the hidden and explicit intentions that underlie the construction of identities and, consequently, the perceptions of sameness and otherness built into musical negotiations. These fusions, the constant crosstraffic of influences, assumptions, and lived realities, are a part of human life and music. Congregations deal with consent and dissent, and perform roles that clash with these processes, or converge with others. In the process, theological mixtures that are unique to specific chronotopes are created, just as they are at UBC, São João, or St. Alban’s, albeit in different ways. In Waco, for example, Baptist culture is prevalent. This reality was asserted by UBCers, who are Baptist, and by Episcopalians at St. Alban’s, who are not. Overall, this reality creates an environment in which “Baptist” is easily equated with “Christian.” According to St. Alban’s assistant rector, Neal McGowan, “if you’re not Roman Catholic and you’re in Waco and you’re not Latino, you’re a Baptist. It’s like in East Texas where I’m from, everyone [is] Baptist, even the Catholics. It’s just, the culture’s so dominant” (2017). In Waco, while UBC is trying to understand what it means both to be a Baptist congregation and unique in a Baptist environment, Episcopalians are trying to understand what it means not to be Baptists in a Baptist environment.

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Such negotiations are not necessarily negative or combative. At UBC, for instance, the desire to walk the fine line between Baptist identity and progressive theologies can be perceived in the way in which the church prioritizes the creation of a welcoming environment. This intentional ambiguity ranges from décor to soundscape, maintaining a non-confrontational tone all the while. As we have seen, a visitor to UBC will be met, in the lobby, by statues of saints from the Christian tradition that share the space with a coffee table made out of reclaimed wood and coasters bearing a picture of Mr. Rogers. In the sanctuary, the slides in the rotation before the service include one about the value of questions on the spiritual journey, and an invitation to the church’s weekly pub night. When I asked Josh Carney, UBC’s lead pastor, about the idea of intentional ambiguity, he confirmed my impression and added: “if that description shows up on the website, just be glad you gave it to us” (2017).17 Carney connected such ambiguity to apophatic theology: “we don’t really know the God we’re worshiping,” he said. Instead of making assertive theological claims, he prefers to leave space for interpretation, and “trust that the Holy Spirit is gonna help me” (2017). Intentional ambiguity is also expressed in the music at UBC. It finds its way into the sound of worship, and locates UBC within the constellation of churches in which it is immersed. Church member Zack described the musical identity of the congregation: Evangelical Christian music is not like what we’re doing there, what Jamie’s doing there. So, it does cater to people who don’t fit the mold in Evangelicalism as well. And I’d say that if you’re looking for a less canned type of culture, a less canned type of music, you think: “well, there’s a rich heritage in Americana.” (2017) Bryan, a doctoral student in theology at nearby Baylor University who has served on UBC’s leadership team, went so far as to say that UBC is only Baptist in name, because its polity is more Presbyterian than Baptist. He also mentioned that the statues in the lobby were put there intentionally by Crowder to “trouble the notion of what it means to be a Baptist”: The reason why I’m drawn to that, is because it’s a mess, like I think all of Christianity is a mess. I love the diversity of Christian thought. I like that not everybody agrees … You know, this profound sense of humility? That’s what the messiness does for me. The fact that it is messy. I don’t want a tidying up, because I think tidying up is not what [we do] … like, we’re American Christians. We just should accept the fact that we make crap up and mix stuff together, and we just have a hodgepodge of ideas. … But the second thing it does is it ties you to a history of conversation. And so, it’s a re-anchoring. It’s both. That’s what it does. (2017)

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For Bryan, messiness is a good thing because it reflects the reality of Christianity. His conclusion, that UBC is a place of humble theological inquiry that admits that they make mistakes in their particular claims about God and the world, dovetails with Carney’s theological stance and with the way he negotiates pulpit and pop culture. For UBCers, intentional ambiguity distinguishes the church from other places where musical, liturgical, and theological lines are clearly drawn. This intersection of religion and popular culture is another messy crease between cultures. Stephen Stein claims that the creativity and invention that arise in the process of identifying insiders and outsiders of a given religious group are born “in a context of contact with other religions and results from the appropriation, adaptation, or rejection of religious elements from those communities. Religious groups at the edges define themselves in relationship to others, not in isolation from them” (1999, 32). Amid these flows, messiness characterizes the performance of church music in space and time. Even so, the music remains special and is in constant transformation, as water in a riverbed. In summary, church music performances are part of a threefold strategy through which congregations make their worship special: by making special place, making special time, and by circumscribing a special group. Music performance stands at the intersection between all these dimensions, helping to tie the experience of worship together. The chronotope is the stage upon which congregations negotiate questions of faith, community, and tradition, and this will be dealt with in the next chapter. Moreover, play and change are phenomena that point to the porous membranes between ritual and everyday life, between perceptions of sacred and secular. By playing with components of church music, participants help to enact change. Change, in turn, does not occur in organized strains that neatly preserve their genealogical integrity. It is messy change, in which influences and intercultural flows spill over between congregations, denominations, and so forth. The porosity of these membranes means that messiness is the rule rather than the exception in the performance of church music.

Notes 1 I use “stage” in both senses: the theatrical, and also as a stage in a process. 2 Hufford does not look further into the topic, and I chose to do the same for the sake of brevity. In any case, Bakhtin uses it amply in his discussion of Goethe’s work (1986, 46–50). 3 I surveyed over 50 volumes from the “worship wars” literature, published between the 1970s and the early twenty-first century. While some authors assume an aggressive stance towards popular and contemporary styles of church music (Cloud 1998; Wheaton 2000), most of the critiques are subtler. I cite Dakers as an example of a traditionalist who demonstrates “longing” for a previous repertoire, as well as featuring the sacred/secular divide that places hymns firmly “within” the church, and other repertoires outside of it. Furthermore, in some of the “worship wars” literature, the musics “from the other side” might be considered the “wrong kind of special”: “I am convinced that CCM is one of the most dangerous things facing

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fundamental Baptist and other Bible-believing churches. It is one of the most effective Trojan horses of the ecumenical movement” (Cloud 1998, 10). For Cloud, CCM is a “Trojan horse.” He recognizes its power, but sees it as a contaminating force. I am using “soundscape” in the sense described by Murray Schafer, who introduced the term as way to describe sonic environments: “The term may refer to actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an environment” (1977, 275). It describes the ecology of sound created, in this case, through the performance of church music. At St. Alban’s, the psalm is sung either by the choir or the congregation on any given Sunday. Lavery mentioned that he tries to alternate modes of engagement to keep things interesting. An example is Vasumathi K. Duvvury’s analysis of Tamil Brahmin rites of passage in Play, Symbolism, and Ritual (1991, 217). Fela Sowande is considered a foundational figure in Nigerian church music, and his history is closely associated with the Anglican church in that country (Omojola 2007). I have cited here two authors who give a historical account of how this divide came into being. I have chosen not to reference the (abundant) church music literature that seems to take this divide as a matter of course, as this is not helpful to the argument—or, in my opinion, to the discipline of church music. Other scholars, such as Niebuhr, have attempted to codify the ways in which Christianity relates to culture at large (1956). The quotations included here highlight the nebulosity surrounding use of the idea of authenticity in church music, a topic that has been the focus of recent scholarship (Redhead and Street 1989; Bithell 2014; Ingalls 2018). Further samples of this type of rhetoric can be found in Singleton (1980), Makujina (2000), and Wheaton (2000), to name but a few. The organ is no longer used in worship at São João. The musicians sourced it from the Novo Cântico (2004), one of the denomination’s informal hymnals, published by groups with distinctive theological agendas that coexist within the structure of the church. An example would be the role of ring-shout tropes in performing gospel music, and how these tropes have crystallized into contemporary performance practices. Ruth’s analysis of hymn repertoires in regard to trinitarian eschatological/humandivine nature can be considered an example of “analyzing” the disjunctions (2015). Aggiornamento translates as “updating” or “updating for today” in English, and refers to post-Vatican II efforts to update the Catholic liturgy. It’s important to acknowledge that Ramsey is pushing against the view of the church as an essentially conservative cultural institution, which some have argued or assumed that it is. While this view might sound contradictory to Schechner’s in relation to change in ritual contexts, I believe that their claims are made from different constellations of assumptions, and do not negate each other. I conceived this term during my fieldwork, and wanted to see how Carney would respond to it.

References All Sons and Daughters. 2012. “All the Poor and Powerless.” Track #3 on Season One. Integrity Music (Compact Disc). Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern McGee, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Begbie, Jeremy. 2007. Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Bell, Catherine M. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bithell, Caroline. 2014. A Different Voice, A Different Song: Reclaiming Community through the Natural Voice and World Song. New York: Oxford University Press. Bradley, C. Randall. 2012. From Memory to Imagination: Reforming the Church’s Music. Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies series. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cloud, David W. 1998. Contemporary Christian Music under the Spotlight. Oak Harbor, WA: Way of Life Literature. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1975. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Game. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dakers, Lionel. 2000. Beauty beyond Words: Enriching Worship through Music. Norwich: Canterbury Press. De Theije, Marjo, and Cecília Loreto Mariz. 2008. “Localizing and Globalizing Processes in Brazilian Catholicism: Comparing Inculturation in Liberationist and Charismatic Catholic Cultures.” Latin American Research Review 43(1): 33–54. Dissanayake, Ellen. 1995. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Duvvury, Vasumathi K. 1991. Play, Symbolism, and Ritual: A Study of Tamil Brahmin Women’s Rites of Passage. American University Studies. Series XI. Anthropology/ Sociology, vol. 41. New York: P. Lang. Episcopal Church, ed. 1985. The Hymnal 1982: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. Accompaniment ed. New York: Hymnal Corp. Ewald, Werner. 2004. “Walking and Singing and Following the Song”: Musical Practice in the Acculturation of German Brazilians in South Brazil. PhD thesis. Illinois: Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Faulkner, Quentin. 1996. Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Guardini, Romano. [1930] 2015. The Spirit of the Liturgy. Aeterna Press (n.p.). Hammer, Anita. 2010. Between Play and Prayer: The Variety of Theatricals in Spiritual Performance. Consciousness, Literature & the Arts27. New York: Rodopi. Hufford, Mary. 2003. “Context.” In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1976. “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon.” In Ritual, Play, and Performance: Readings in the Social Sciences/Theatre, ed. Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman. A Continuum Book. New York: Seabury Press. Hüsken, Ute, and Frank Neubert, eds. 2012. Negotiating Rites. Oxford Ritual Studies series. New York: Oxford University Press. Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil. 1981. Hinos do povo de Deus: Hinário da Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil. São Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Lim, Swee Hong, and Lester Ruth. 2017. Lovin’ on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. McGuire, Meredith B. 2013. “Contested Meanings and Definitional Boundaries: Historicizing the Sociology of Religion.” In Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives, ed. Melissa Wilcox. New York: Routledge. Makujina, John. 2000. Measuring the Music: Another Look at the Contemporary Christian Music Debate. Salem, OH: Schmul. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1956. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper. Omojola, Bode. 2007. “Black Diasporic Encounters: A Study of the Music of Fela Sowande.” Black Music Research Journal 27(2): 141–170. Ramsey, Jr., Guthrie P. 2003. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Music of the African Diaspora7. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ramsey, Jr., Guthrie P. 2016. “Y’all Like That?: Contemporary Gospel Music and the Sacred-Secular Divide.” Lyceum Series, Baylor University, Greater Ebenezer Baptist Church, Waco, TX, September 26. Redhead, Steve, and John Street. 1989. “Have I the Right? Legitimacy, Authenticity and Community in Folk’s Politics.” Popular Music 8(2): 177–184. Ruth, Lester. 2015. “Some Similarities and Differences between Historic Evangelical Hymns and Contemporary Worship Songs.” Artistic Theologian 3: 68–86. Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Schechner, Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. Media ed. Sara Brady. New York: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. 2004. Novo Cântico Hymnal. Curitiba: Encontro Publicações. Singleton, Harold Craig. 1980. The Ministry of Music as a Profession: A Study of Selected Graduates of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary School of Church Music. Louisville, KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. “Music.” n.d. www.stalbanswaco.org/music (accessed September 10, 2018). Stein, Stephen J. 1999. “Religious Innovation at the Edges.” In Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter Williams. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 1966. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Turner, Victor. 1974. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice Institute Pamphlet-Rice University Studies 60(3). Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performance Studies series, vol. 1. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Warren, Richard. 1995. The Purpose Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Message & Mission. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Wheaton, Jack. 2000. The Crisis in Christian Music. Oklahoma City: Hearthstone.

6

Performing church music Faith, community, tradition

In the previous chapters, I examined in turn each of the four nodes—ritual, embodiment, making special, and play/change—in our analytical structure . It is now possible to demonstrate the viability of the study of church music as performance using the vocabulary that this examination has yielded. I do so by proposing that, as participants engage with church music, they perform faith and community. They also position themselves in relation to existing traditions of church music. We will engage with each of these three performances individually, using the concepts and terms we now have at our disposal.

Performing faith: singing and silence, orthodoxy, and sincerity Participants in church music do more than sing—they perform faith. Individual congregations and Christian traditions employ unique and complex webs of prescribed texts, narratives, and performatives towards this end. Broadly speaking, my ethnography pointed to a strong connection between having faith and singing faith. At São João Lutheran Church, a middle-aged congregant named Maria told me: “what you sing, in accordance with the expression on your face when you sing, is one of the things that will bear witness to others. Because you have to believe what you sing, right?” (interview with author, October 20, 2017). For Maria, there is a connection between belief and song that is reflected in the “expressions on your face”: an external indicator of an internal reality, and its performance. Our previous examinations of ritual and embodiment expanded the concept of participation in church music to include other activities besides singing. All these modes of participation, from showing up at church to immersive spectatorship, are instrumental to what I call “performing faith”: the connection between belief and the externalizing of this belief in tangible form. These performances of faith happen in at least three component ways: the performance of reverence; the performance of orthodoxy; and the performance of sincerity (nuanced here in a different way from that in our discussion of participation). The first component of the performance of faith is reverence. We have seen how Western Christianity, especially within the Euro-American context, has coded specific performatives of stillness and immobility into the notion of

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religious piety. These constraints notwithstanding, in church music congregants step into and fall out of flow, listen and vocalize in turn, and move in aggregates of participatory discrepancies as the liturgy unfolds. The tension between these two requirements, that of stillness and the fluidity of participation, begs the question: how does one participate actively while, at the same time, performing reverence? I asked Junior, a musician at UBC, for his thoughts on singing and reflecting on song lyrics in worship: Opportunity for reflection, I think, is vital. And I think that comes in the way in which you move from one element in the service to the next. So there’s this idea of transitions. Do you sit in silence? Do you voice that this is an opportunity for reflection? Or do you just let it be? Do you just invite them to do whatever they want? I think that varies, depending on your church, or the week, or the moment. (Interview with author, October 11, 2017) The variation that Junior speaks of may be built into the liturgy: windows of silent reflection; corporate kneeling; and other actions that function as invitations for performing reverence. At UBC, the sermon is always followed by an invitation to sit in silence described here by former children’s pastor Emily Nance: I love that Josh ends his sermons with admitting the fact that he may not have gotten it right, you know? And it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to discern that for us. That’s not a level of humility that you often see in pastors: “you know what, I’ve worked really hard on this, and I’ve tried really hard, but I may have missed the mark. I may have been totally off. And I hope the Holy Spirit will tell you what I should have said.” (Interview with author, February 7, 2018) In this case, the performance of reverence serves as an opportunity for collective silence, in which congregants individually and corporately perform submission to God. The dynamic is made more potent by the preacher’s openness to having the sermon “edited” through this performance of reverence. Focused attention on the sermon that has just been performed from the stage transfers control from pulpit to pew, giving participants a chance to reframe the liturgical narrative through their own experience. Here, the performance of reverence suggests a corporate willingness to accept the Word in the service, and to submit to its interpretation through the Holy Spirit. A second way in which participants in church music perform reverence is through their adherence to performances of orthodoxy, particularly in relation to song lyrics. Lídia, a worship leader at São João, expressed the idea that there must be an alignment between song lyrics and sermon (interview with author, October 20, 2017). Another parishioner, Maria, told me: “I can’t sing something that’s different from what is written in the Bible. Because the time of

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singing is also a time when I’m affirming what I think. If I’m saying a word, I’m conscious of that word” (2017). For her, singing belief is a performance of orthodoxy, of the alignment of belief and word through performance of that word. Because this performance is fundamental for the “right” performance of faith, utmost care must be exercised by those in charge of putting words into the mouths of the congregation: the worship team/leadership. Silvia, a young vocalist, voiced her concern about this responsibility. When asked about the worship team’s music selection, she said that it is important “especially because of the teaching, right? To make sure something untoward isn’t being taught” (Silvia, interview with author, October 22, 2017). The concern that something “untoward” might creep into church music reveals an implicit concern with the performance of orthodoxy. The way orthodoxy is performed at UBC can be illustrated by lead pastor Josh Carney’s connection of scripture to song: The earliest theology in the church, we think, is Philippians 2:5–11. And that’s a hymn. Our best guess is that it’s a hymn. And I don’t think that’s accidental: that the first and in my opinion the most important thing that’s said about Jesus by the community was sung. And I think what’s happening there is, that’s an active training of the mind. That’s doing doxology and theology together. It may be the best way to do theology. (Interview with author, December 2, 2017) For Carney, the best way to “do” theology is to couple it with doxology, with “right worship.” This coupling is expressed in music, which is part of UBC’s core identity. The following vignette further nuances this performance of orthodoxy: When I [the author] began to attend UBC in 2015, I realized that McGregor wore black every Sunday. When we became friends, I noticed that his choice of attire was not restricted to Sunday. McGregor chose an outfit that he felt comfortable in, and dresses in black every day, all year. It keeps things simple. Cut scene. It is Easter Sunday at UBC. My family makes its way to our usual spot near the front. Something seems different, and I can’t quite place it. It takes me a few minutes before I realize that McGregor is wearing a white shirt! My astonishment gives way to understanding of his liturgical maneuver. Today is the day of resurrection, and white makes sense. It stands out. It is a liturgical statement of faith, similar to the colored banners on the altar of St. Alban’s. The band launches into a rendition of “In the Night,” a McGregor composition. They had been playing this song throughout Lent, adding one stanza every week. McGregor also stripped down the band

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during Lent. Over the course of the season, other instruments were added, one by one, to accompany his acoustic guitar: a keyboard, a mandolin (played by me), strings. Finally, on Easter Sunday, the full band is on stage. Right before the song’s chorus, there is a collective inhalation of breath. Those “in the know” look forward to what is coming. As McGregor sings (or screams) the words “in the night” into the microphone, the full band comes in, fortissimo. A tsunami of rock and roll hits the congregation. It is a sonic proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection. The “sonic proclamation” of Easter featured in this vignette was mentioned in several different interviews with UBCers. Toph Whisnant, UBC’s community pastor, said that “In the Night” is his very favorite musical progression of the year. He appreciates the gradual buildup of the song, through Lent, leading up to Easter Sunday. He specifically referenced the moment “when the drums kick in”: “That’s such a powerful moment. And that buildup, that whole season, adding an instrument, like a journey to Jerusalem, I think it’s very powerful” (interview with author, November 17, 2017). Orthodoxy is performed through the potent combination of words, music, and dress, a pilgrimage from Lent to Easter with its own special soundtrack, the crescendo of instruments from week to week. St. Alban’s rector, Aaron Zimmerman, also spoke about the performance of belief through song. For him, church music and communal prayer “forces people to think about their theology” (interview with author, November 17, 2017). Furthermore, the performance of orthodoxy is enacted through the organization of the space and the architecture, expressed in the leadership’s concern with preserving an unimpeded congregational view of the cross: You’ll notice the pulpit is not in the middle. And you’ll notice when Eugene Lavery gets up there to conduct the choir—and this is not an accidental thing—he stands just slightly to the right of the center, because you’re supposed to always have that central, visual access to the cross, to the altar and the cross. (2017) The zeal to preserve visual access to the cross is both a performance of orthodoxy, and a performance of reverence. Performing orthodoxy and reverence together galvanizes groups into performances of community, as we shall see. Parishioner Lincoln described singing at St. Alban’s as an expression that “the entire congregation has the same vibe. We all kind of support the same principals and morals and we all kind of follow the same beliefs” (interview with author, February 19, 2018). His comment is a synthesis of reverence and orthodoxy; congregations sing their faith together, and perform their devotion in community. A third way in which congregations perform faith is through the performance of sincerity. This performance varies from context to context, but remains essential to the performance of faith because, in a sense, it validates the

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performance as “more than theater,” more than entertainment. From the performance theory perspective, this is an intentional emphasis towards the efficacy pole of Schechner’s entertainment-efficacy spectrum. In the ethnography, these performances of sincerity appeared mainly through performances of spontaneity and/or commitment: by playing or not playing (in the case of musicians); by singing or not singing (in the case of participants); by moving or not moving (in relation to the body); and by committing to faith or questioning faith (through lyrics and liturgical commentary). Musicians perform sincerity by playing and by not playing. They provide music for the congregation to participate in, but there are instances in which the situation may be reversed, and this reversal may be construed as a performative of sincerity. Junior, at UBC, spoke of his concern: There have been times in my career as a musician where I’ve had to say “I don’t want to play for a while. I don’t want to play, because I’ve lost … I don’t feel like I need to be up there,” or “I feel like me being up there is distracting myself.” And if that’s the way I feel, then I’m not giving the congregation their best opportunity. It goes back to what I provide them. And if I’m not doing that for them, then I’m hindering it because then I’m focused inwards. And sometimes that means I should do it. I tell myself, “no, you need to break this, you need to do this and get stuck running away from it.” But there have been times where it’s like, “I need to not play for a couple months. I need to not be a part of this, and I need to just experience it.” Or I need to be away from church for a few months, and recognize what I was missing when I’m gone. (2017) For Junior, performing sincerity means protecting his faith in connection with his musical performance. His idea that “being up there is distracting myself” can be construed as a type of falling out of flow, in which the performance of belief is compromised by a dissonance between external signs of participation (playing in church) and internal feelings of disengagement (“distracting myself”). He recognizes that there may be more than one way to recalibrate his performance of sincerity. While in some cases it might mean not playing for a while, in other cases it might mean pushing through the distraction until flow is re-established. Similarly, congregants and song leaders perform sincerity by singing and by not singing. The question of sincerity as a connection between embodied participation and orthodoxy is important to participants’ commitment to “mean what they sing.” While most of the time singing might be considered the prime way to express this connection, there may be situations in which the performance of sincerity may entail being “honest enough not to sing that today,” as UBC pastor Whisnant put it (2017). Here, our previous discussion of surrogate participation comes into play. There are cases in which those who are performing sincerity—spiritual crisis, for instance—rely on those around them who are singing to carry the song of the congregation:

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Can I be honest enough with myself and with those around me to be authentic and say: “I can’t sing this right now, but I’m letting you all sing for me.” And that corporate piece around us … and I think giving people the space and the freedom to do that is really important. That’s what I hope for congregants as well. Not that everyone has to sing, but can you allow us to carry you when you can’t muster the words, when you can’t muster the energy to sing this with us now? (2017) This is how the performance of church music aligns ritual participation, embodiment on the individual and congregational level, and performances of faith and sincerity. At first glance, it may appear that these performative requirements are paradoxical: if leaders want their congregants to sing, how can not singing be construed as a sign of participation? Perhaps other performances, such as that of community, “bridge the gap” in the larger configuration. In Whisnant’s comment, what surfaces is an invitation to sing; but along with this invitation, a commitment to support the silence of the other is included, thus creating space for not singing as a performance of sincerity. At UBC, performing faith through sincerity is a core value. The church writes much of its own music, and sincerity is expressed in the way musicians engage with the music on the platform. By moving and leading in ways they feel are spontaneous, by “playing it like they mean it,” musicians are inviting the congregation to do the same. “You watch old videos of Nirvana playing, and they will face wherever the hell they want,” said Junior (2017). He is not claiming expressive freedom for its own sake, but in the hope that congregants will perceive how musicians are engaging with the music and be invited to perform their own sincerity. “If they recognize that I am within myself having a reflective moment and just embracing this moment for all it is,” said Junior, “then that should be an invitation for them to do the same, to say: ‘he is doing what he feels comfortable doing, and we’re not hindered by that, and maybe I can do that too.’” Worship pastor Jamie McGregor’s perspective on the same issue is similar, expressed in an excerpt we first encountered in Chapter 4: Now, if (as has happened before) I jumped up on my amp and jumped off, and in the process kicked my amp over and landed on my ass, you know, that’s a great rock and roll move, but is that [an invitation?] … and maybe if I’m in it in the moment, I would give myself a little bit of grace. But I can’t imagine getting into that space. So, I don’t know. Maybe there are things that I would never consider doing, but that’s because there are things that, more often than not, I’m not going to naturally do! (Interview with author, November 16, 2017) For him, the performance of sincerity may mean turning his back on the congregation, or committing to not moving in ways one would not naturally move.

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At UBC, sincerity is performed by opening up space for individual movement, which congregants seem to appreciate. Emily Nance says, I love that the lights are off when the music is played [at UBC], and it sort of makes that worship time feel private, like, on your own. For your own expression … I love that we view music that way: as our time to commune, one on one, with God” (2017) Private spaces are created within the congregation to perform sincerity, because UBC values these individual responses to the music. At St. Alban’s, on the other hand, the performance of sincerity is done together, not individually. That could explain, for instance, why the lights are dimmed during the music at UBC, while St. Alban’s makes no effort to cover the light coming in through the stained glass windows. In this context, abundant lighting allows congregants to see one another clearly, which reinforces the collective nature of the congregation’s performance of sincerity. At São João, performing sincerity necessarily involves performing spontaneity; a paradigm much in line with Brazilian culture in general. The church’s worship pastor, Fabiane Behling Luckow, says: I think that interaction with the past is related to the repertoire itself, and with the way we make music. The people that play in the morning service, for example, don’t prepare beforehand. They don’t check the sound, they don’t rehearse together. They distribute the scores, and each person plays according to how they think [the song] should go. The principal, Nestor, “pulls” [puxa] the songs and sings along, and the rest of the violins try to find the key, and by the end of the service they’re in tune.1 Some people come in after the bell has rung … It’s funny that they believe they’re a lot more formal than the evening folk. But the evening players have an entirely different protocol: they do sound check, they rehearse. The morning group doesn’t do all this. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) In this case, spontaneity is built into the ministry model, especially in the Sunday morning service. Nestor, a senior worship leader, spoke proudly of the spontaneity of this model. For him, not rehearsing before the service offers the congregation an invitation into spontaneity. The intended message is that “we did not prepare, we are not faking it, we are creating this together”: a performance of sincerity encapsulated within a performance of spontaneity. By accepting and engaging with these worship pedagogies, congregants at UBC, St. Alban’s, and São João perform sincerity, acknowledging that performing faith requires “buying into” a certain proposition of what church is. The covenant is enacted by performing church music together, and, in this way, becoming a community.

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Performing community: identity and church music I am at St. Alban’s on a Wednesday evening, talking to Rebekah Hughes, Newcomer and Ministry Coordinator. She also works with Lavery in the music ministry. Rebekah is sharing her thoughts about singing in church, particularly the connection between body and song: “I think it’s absolutely part of the connection, and I think it goes even deeper to something that’s more on a basic physical level, like we sit to listen, stand to sing or speak, and kneel to pray. Making music and singing congregationally is such a physical thing that it knits the congregation together in a way that nothing else does, because of how our bodies feel when we sing and make music together, and because of what music does to the air and the sound vibrating around us. It just creates a different thing that nothing else in the liturgy does.” (Interview with author, December 12, 2017) According to Hughes, performing community through music is unlike performing community in any other way. She acknowledges the multimodal, feedback-generating ways in which music creates sensations within the body and between bodies; it fills the air and makes it vibrate. Music fills the special place with a special sound; it evokes affective responses and sneaks into and around cognitive defenses, eliciting unexpected emotional responses. Hughes concludes that “it just creates a different thing that nothing else in the liturgy does.” I argue that one of the “different things” mentioned by Hughes that this performance does create is a community. We have seen how church music helps congregations to perform faith. But, as Stein reminded us in the previous chapter, performing faith also delineates the boundaries of “who we are” and the boundaries of “who we are not” (1999, 32). In their discussion of worship as media ecologies, Anna Nekola and Tom Wagner draw on Henrion and Parkins’ description of how corporations create points of contact with the public, and how groups of people, based on how they interact with institutions through these points of contact, develop ideas about these corporations (Henrion and Parkins in Nekola and Wagner 2015, 32). Nekola and Wagner’s application of their theory to religious organizations illustrates how the myriad experiences that are shared between churches, congregants, and outside spectators through these points of contact, one of which is certainly church music, could be perceived as embodiments of these congregations. These perceptions of community locate congregations in relation to other social bodies, in conformity with our previous discussion of how senses of embodiment are individual and also extrapolate into corporate expressions. From the outside, congregations might be perceived as homogenous units. Is such unity experienced from the inside as well? One way that participants perceive a togetherness that manifests itself concretely is by singing: “a tone that runs through all of us,” says Junior at UBC. For him, “part of being human is connecting in a musical moment” (2017). This sense of togetherness

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is considered an inherent value of church music, and positions the church as special in relation to the rest of the word. Performing church music together confers sound to unity, giving it a tangible presence for participants, and for those who hear it from the outside. What is more, the performance of unity moves beyond the community and into the world at large. The move appears institutionally, for instance, in the way ministries such as St. Alban’s chorister program are free and available to nonmembers who live in the vicinity of the church. Just as it positions congregations in relation to other religious institutions and within local social contexts, the performance of community positions local congregations both in space and time, and becomes an experience of belonging. Daisy, at St. Alban’s, shared that liturgy anchors me in the history as well as across the world. I’m aware that people are saying the same liturgy and reading the same passages in other parts of the world as I worship on Sunday. And I like that; I like that when we travel we can go to an Episcopalian church with maybe different tenors, different tones — you know, the music can vary significantly — but the liturgy is still something that I feel connected, across a common humanity, a common God. (Interview with author, December 13, 2017) In this sense, performing unity connects participants to sibling groups across the world. Many of my interviewees at St. Alban’s mentioned the Book of Common Prayer as a concrete instance of unity, a tangible sign of the performance of community throughout the global Anglican network. For parishioner George, anytime we can have something like the Prayer Book where you know that you can transplant that to pretty much anywhere you go that is using the Prayer Book, it’s a nice vehicle to take. But the more you recognize that you’re part of something much greater, the better. (Interview with author, December 12, 2017) Furthermore, by performing community through church music, participants outline who they are and who they are not. They establish markers of identity, which in turn become a means of interfacing with other social bodies, and with other narratives. This performance of community necessarily aggregates people into participants and non-participants, as we have seen through Chidester’s description of how making special “otherizes” those outside certain boundaries (2005). In his analysis of Canadian Mennonite worship, Jonathan Dueck speaks of “binding” and “loosing” as “processes by which church community is made, and also by which individuals are released or expelled from community” (2011, 33). Dueck acknowledges that one cannot exist without the other: Even as the grounds for loosing, for dispute and alterity, were laid and negotiated in it, the ritual frame of the service bound its body of songs and

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participants together, and in that ritual an inter-Mennonite community was imagined and performed. (2011, 42) In other words, processes of creating community and separating from community are, phenomenologically, inherent to performance: “Most fundamentally, though, society is strengthened by relationships of ‘conflict’ because they are enacted, performed social bonds where otherwise there might be no relationship” (2011, 46). The performance of sameness and otherness is, in a sense, the performance of social group. The performance of community is a corporate undertaking in which embodiment is crucial. Participants use the performatives discussed in Chapter 4 in this volume, and other external markers of identity, to imagine and perform community. Examples are the infamous “skinny jeans” that have become part of many worship leaders’ uniforms, the robes of celebrants at St. Alban’s, or McGregor’s black outfit. For those “in the know,” these performatives coalesce into an ethics of the body, both in its individual and corporate sense. This crystallization engenders a code for participation in a particular congregation’s performance of church music, and outsiders may not be privy to the particular ebb and flow of embodiments in a particular context. São João member Lídia described this feeling of unfamiliarity in relation to the performance code of her previous home church, also Lutheran, in another state of Brazil: When we vacation up there, at our home church, everyone is seated and we don’t know if we can raise our hands or not, what other people will think. So, in that sense you don’t have as much freedom. That’s not the case here at São João; you can raise your hands, you can express yourself however you want. I feel like I have that freedom to feel that. So, these older, more traditional songs, with a new rhythm, also draw the congregation in, even the younger people who might be coming for the first time. They notice the difference. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Her description of not knowing whether she can or cannot raise her hands betrays a discomfort with that particular performance code, and reveals an absence of participatory flow. Conversely, at São João, Lídia revels in a code that she knows well and subscribes to. For her, it draws people in, helping participants to express themselves and respond spontaneously. Her comment moves from loosing to binding, from being an other to being a same. Furthermore, negotiating “the scandal of the body”, as Shoshana Felman puts it (2003), is an important way in which participants position themselves as part of worshiping communities. Musicking congregations perform community by what they do in worship, and also by what they refrain from doing. My interlocutors described their aspiration to “be more subdued” (Maria 2017), and to “leave space for others to be themselves” (Paul, interview with author, December 13, 2017), illustrating how, by avoiding giving offense to others, by balancing

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between performatives of expression and modesty, participants are constantly negotiating their simultaneous roles as individual worshipers and as members or leaders of a musicking community. Participants try to express themselves in ways that avoid offending the other, but can experience tensions in the process. “I don’t [gesticulate] to show off; I do it because I want to,” says Maria (2017). At St. Alban’s, Paul (who comes from a Free church background) says that “doing big gestures and stuff, it could be seen as an imposition on others” (2017). There is a tension between expression and modesty. At St. Alban’s, there is a tendency to move away from gestural extravagance and towards reserve. In other contexts, such as at São João, extravagance may be construed as an invitation for newcomers to join in, to move from other to same. Moreover, the question of the other as boundary, both individually and collectively, is negotiated differently from the pew and from the platform. Pedro, the percussionist at São João, talks about the intricate web of negotiations happening in his mind as he leads worship: One time we went to play for a service at the [Catholic] cathedral. And I quickly realized I had to remain sober, I couldn’t go on a trip. We went to play at a school in Capão do Leão, and there I let myself loose, and it got everyone excited, they thought it was cool. So here you have two contexts in which we played, and you have to know where you can and where you can’t. And looking at it from the other side, when I’m not leading worship, as part of the congregation, there are Sundays when I come to church and sing the same song a different way. It’s happened many times that we’ll sing a song one Sunday and it’s OK, but I don’t raise my hands, I don’t close my eyes. It seems as if the music takes me to that place. Two different contexts … other times, the same song, and I’ll raise my hands, cry, close my eyes, without thinking. The difference I’m talking about is that when I’m leading worship, sometimes we have to think about what we’re going to do. On how I need to act depending on where I am. But when I’m in the pew, I let the music, the worship, take me. The reaction that arises needs to be spontaneous. But when we’re leading it can’t be as spontaneous. As a percussionist, I like to play and get excited. Depending on the context, I can’t do that. I have to think about what I’m doing. When I’m on the other side it’s not like that. Each time the worship sweeps me away, I’ll do it. It doesn’t depend on what the person seated next to me thinks about what I’m doing, if I’m clapping, closing my eyes, raising my hands. So, two different actions, one as worship leader and the other as a participant. (Interview with author, October 20, 2017) Pedro speaks of a spectrum between “letting oneself loose” at the school in Capão do Leão and his “sober” style at the Catholic cathedral. On this spectrum, infinite increments of expressivity are tied to his leadership performance as part of the worship ensemble. He is concerned with how his performatives, from his public place at the front of the congregation, contribute to or subtract

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from participants’ engagement with the music. From the pew, he aims for a spontaneous reaction, whereas when he is leading, his responsibilities modify his performatives. The specific requirements of each scenario lead to “two different actions, one as worship leader and the other as a participant.” For Pedro, sameness and otherness are negotiated differently from the pew and from the platform. Other worship leaders, such as Silvia (who plays with Pedro), describe this as the divide between leading and “singing in community: the singular and the plural” (2017). In some cases, the performance of unity—especially through the body— becomes front-and-center in church music. Whisnant wraps all of these performatives into this comment: I think we, as people, as society, really pick up on social norms and cues … So, I think we are products of our congregation, and the congregations that we choose. For me, I think I was definitely a hand-raiser back when I was in high school. Like, when I really feel a song, raise my hands up. Never really like a kneeler or a spinner, or anything like that. I was not charismatic. But I think it also depends on the type of music you’re singing. When you’re constantly singing more proclamations about God, I think this leads people to more claiming “you are holy,” and that leads to hand-raising, and if we’re singing songs that are more reflective, I think that causes you to take a more reflective posture, where you’re not raising hands. (2017) Whisnant connects some ways in which consciousness of the body, restrictions of the body, and the prescriptive influence of lyrics, shape participants’ gestures both individually and communally in musical performance, engendering performances of sameness and otherness. While Whisnant says he was “never really a kneeler,” at St. Alban’s kneeling would not be considered charismatic, but a routine corporate response to the liturgy. Hughes describes these performances from her vantage point in the choir at the front: I’m always very aware of an audience looking at me, and Aaron happens to play close attention to details like that, like, are we turning as a body? Are we bowing as a body? Because it looks nice, and when things look nice, it creates less anxiety for people watching. So, if you’re a person that’s never been to the Episcopal church before, or maybe you’re a long-time member and everybody up in the front doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, that creates anxiety. Like, “is everything gonna turn out OK?” Whereas when we all move as a body, and everyone seems to know what’s going on, you’re more at peace and able to worship. (2017) At St. Alban’s, the congregation performs corporate gestures. They stand, sit, and kneel together. When the Scripture reader proceeds to the middle of the

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nave, all the congregants face the center together. According to Hughes and Zimmerman, at St. Alban’s the performance of sameness “protects” new participants. Since everybody is doing these things together, what Turino refers to as participational “feathering” protects those that move a bit slower, or in a slightly different way. In addition, as we have seen, participants learn by mirroring others’ performatives, and by responding to gestures or verbal cues (“please stand as we sing”). Musicking congregations cast a wide participatory net by creating these affordances and issuing these invitations, in the hope of including all potential attendees in their performance of community. The result of these performances of community appears in perspectives about individual participation as part of a corporate act. St. Alban’s parishioner Paul argued: Well, it’s not just the music. It’s worship. It’s a corporate approaching of the throne that we as a body of believers do … and I think the use of music in the collective worship, it’s not just picking up a guitar and picking out a country song. There’s something deeper there, something that even beyond the words, even beyond the musicality of it, it’s just the cohesiveness that it brings to the body; you’re all singing the same thing … I think that music in church, obviously … just has to do with the purpose, you know? Why are we there, why are we singing? Well, we’re there to worship. (2017) There are certainly theological overtones to the idea of “sharing in the other’s body” in performing community. Resonances of the Eucharist, of sharing in the body and blood of Jesus, appear in rector Aaron Zimmerman’s description of how music brings participants together: Sunday morning is designed to get you out of your world, get you into a different space in your head and your heart, open you up to be confronted honestly, where you really are. And then having been vivisected, to receive grace. And that’s what the communion portion is. And one of the things that the chief architect of the Prayer Book, and of Anglicanism, one could say, Thomas Cranmer, said that the preaching of the Word puts the gospel into your ears. But the sacrament puts the gospel into your hands, and into your nose, and on your tongue, knowing that we are these frail, embodied creatures. Just hearing, and there’s some Reformed churches where it’s very much about what goes into your ears and into your brain, and that’s kind of the most important thing. And I think Cranmer had this understanding of people as embodied and the gospel needs to also be put in their hands and in their mouths. So that’s what we do. And the idea is that you would leave feeling … well there’s the denouement, right, we pray that prayer at the very end, after we’ve all received communion, we’ve all knelt, we’ve received … it’s a very personal, very intimate moment at the rail, where the bread and the wine is given to you by a fellow sinner. (2017)

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Here, Zimmerman connects many of the performance concepts laid out in this volume. Congregants share in the body of Christ, a performance of community that sets them apart as a group; making special (“get you out of your world”); mind/body dichotomies (his description of Reformed worship as “very much about what goes into your ears and into your brain, and that’s kind of the most important thing”); and embodiment (the Gospel being put “in their hands and in their mouths” through partaking in communion). His comments also highlight performances of sameness and otherness by contrasting the pedagogy of the Table in the Anglican tradition with “some Reformed churches” that may not recognize the importance of embodying the Eucharist in similar fashion. The potency in his description of the Lord’s Supper is accompanied by the delineation of boundaries of a performance. It is important to emphasize that these performances of community cannot be dealt with in absolutes, because as we have seen in our discussion of messiness, unevenness and permeability are inherent to them. As congregations delimit boundaries of identity, so do they celebrate diversity. This double performance engenders a tension: even as they recognize potential participants on the outside, congregations strive to preserve the insider status of members. To balance this tension between unity and diversity, congregations resort to discourses of pastoral care in their performance of community. Leaders and congregants perform pastoral care by doing, by taking care of fellow congregants, even as they are presenting, talking about what it means to be a part of the community. It is striking that many congregational leaders made a connection between pastoral care and church music. At São João, Luckow makes an explicit connection between worship leading and her pastoral work: And, of course, my role is different because I deal with people outside the context of worship a lot. I know that my testimony outside of those 40 minutes of worship will also make a difference in the way some people will receive that. But it’s an extra-liturgical element that legitimizes what I’m singing during worship, and that’s extremely valuable because I notice a lot that, since I know people and look at them, when I say something before a song, I notice that people are like: “I’m talking to Fabi, she’s telling me something here during the service that she could be saying out there as well,” because we have that proximity. So, in my case, that’s also a part of the service. (2017) Luckow’s experience illustrates the potential connection between performing community through church music and through pastoral care. Each supports the other, creating a performative feedback loop that reinforces both. As seen in our discussion of participation, one of the ways in which UBCers perform pastoral care through church music is by singing lament, and by singing for those who cannot sing for themselves. UBCer Bryan describes this strategy:

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Performing church music: faith, community, tradition UBC attracts people who have been hurt. And so you have a ton of people who hear a message that is willing to take suffering seriously and sorrow seriously and hurting seriously. The music is able to do that too, specifically Jamie’s music. I mentioned before its somberness, but … there’s a lot of sorrow and lament in his music. It almost always has some connection to God’s greater relationship to those things. But it never feels like it elides them into overcoming, or something. (Interview with author, December 18, 2017)

For Bryan, there is a connection between making special through music, providing pastoral care to congregants by singing lamentation on their behalf, and UBC’s identity within the church topography of Waco. For McGregor, this intersection creates a responsibility, whereby “being a pastor is also being a pastor of the music” (2017). His attention to the words of song and prayer are a performance of pastoral care imbricated with the performance of community. The musical performance of community through pastoral care extends outward through these porous boundaries of community. We have already mentioned St. Alban’s community-oriented chorister program. São João also brings music to the city of Pelotas, according to Maria. It does so when the choir sings at hospitals, or when the worship ensemble plays at a city event, or through congregants singing their way through the week, echoing the music they heard as they performed community last Sunday. For her, “music also hugs … It’s pastoral. We embrace people by singing, and I think that makes a difference” (2017). Taken together, these performances of community range from accepting the suffering of those for whom the church mourns to extending the church’s musical presence beyond the frontiers of the building. Participants in church music distinguish themselves from other social bodies, including other churches, not only by where they play, but also what they play and how they play it. At São João, my interlocutors mentioned time and again their pride in how the leadership curates the musical repertoire. Pedro, who plays percussion, said: It’s certainly very different from other churches that I don’t know that much about, like the Pentecostal churches, which I’ve participated in at certain moments in my life, in which people are singing the current hits. What’s contained in the songs many times has nothing to do with the service, with the gospel. And there was a certain moment when we as a congregation began to pay attention to that, to what songs had a connection to our identity. So that is a difference from other churches that I sometimes attend and I notice that’s a big difference. (2017) The same pattern emerged at UBC. Gordon contrasted the way in which UBC selects its repertoire from that of “other” congregations:

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[A] lot of places look for what are the eight hit songs that are traveling around the country and church circles, and they try to play those as closely to a copy of whatever the other people did, and then repeat. Which is great, and it does something, but it’s less of this church’s identity, it’s more of performing a function of “we’re supposed to sing together.” You know, that’s overgeneralizing but I think UBC has always been a place that’s worked really hard to create something new, even if it is a song that is popular. (Interview with author, January 18, 2018) For Pedro, the song selection at São João is a performance of identity. Similarly, UBC’s distinctiveness is reflected in its repertoire, which, from Gordon’s perspective, follows a different methodology from other churches that simply default to “the eight hit songs” at the top of the charts. Community is also performed through musical style, following a progression from what is sung, to how it is arranged, and finally to how it is played: at St. Alban’s, using a choir and organ; at São João, through the use of Brazilian rhythmic and harmonic materials; and at UBC, by playing rock and roll, and by playing it loudly. Lila, Gordon’s wife, remembers hearing David Crowder’s arrangement of “Come Thou Font” for the first time, and thinking: “This is ours … It provided an identity. And I think that Jamie continues that tradition today by writing songs specifically for UBC that get sung together” (interview with author, January 18, 2018). Since the foundation of UBC, even music brought in from elsewhere has been rearranged and edited, to make the song “sound like UBC” instead of sounding like what one would hear on the radio. In addition, at UBC, volume is part of style. Among the slides that rotate before the Sunday morning service at UBC, one says: “earplugs in the lobby.” This intentional “cranking up the volume” was spoken about in positive or negative terms by different interviewees, but it does fulfill a purpose. It is a performance of community boundaries: we like it loud. If you don’t like it loud, there are earplugs in the lobby. Welcome to UBC. This stances echoes how parishioners at São João speak of their Brazilianized arrangements of popular gospel hits or international repertoire, and the way that Lavery and others at St. Alban’s talk about performing the Anglican musical heritage.

Performing tradition: alignment, modification, resistance The connection between performing community and the musical expression of tradition through selection and performance of repertoire leads us to the third and final aspect of church music as performance: that of tradition. In Chapter 2, we referred to Glassie’s definition of tradition as the creation of the future out of the past. I use “tradition” here to refer both to the active sense of tradition as creating the future out of the past, and the concrete structures that results from this process (“a tradition”). Glassie’s definition emphasizes doing, which aligns well with our definition of performance. Furthermore, I note that tradition is not stasis:

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Performing church music: faith, community, tradition [C]hange and tradition are commonly coupled, in chat and chapter titles, as antonyms. But tradition is the opposite of only one kind of change: that in which disruption is so complete that the new cannot be read as an innovative adaptation of the old. (2003, 176–177)

The interplay between tradition and change is a constant process in church music, as we saw in our discussion of play and change: it is a constant interplay of dialogic conversations between tradition and innovation. Participants in church music rehearse stances in relation to congregational, denominational, and broad Christian traditions, because tradition interacts with culture in the shaping of worldviews. My interviewees spoke of their own church music tradition or that of others in approving and disapproving aspects. Participants at São João place themselves in opposition to Brazil’s gospel phenomenon, and St. Alban’s parishioners describe themselves as a church that worships with “traditional Anglican music.” In this sense, the performance of tradition does not necessarily entail performing alignment with it. These performances can be viewed as points on a spectrum that varies between wholehearted acceptance and celebration of a tradition, and outright rejection. Here, we will examine three stances on this spectrum: alignment with tradition (including the expansion of what tradition might mean), modification of tradition (editing, changing, subverting, rearranging), and resistance to tradition. In each case, the ways participants experience their identities and community is tied to the stance, the posture, through which worshiping communities negotiate tradition. It also must be noted that in most cases (if not all), congregations do not assume these stances in relation to tradition with uniformity. Rather, there is considerable diversity within congregations on how tradition should be negotiated through performance. Therefore, the way in which congregations perform tradition varies continually and creates a narrative, a new “tradition,” that feeds back into the congregation’s ongoing performance of church music. The first stance that worshipers and congregations perform in relationship to tradition is to align with it, embrace it, and endorse it. A superficial examination of the case studies might lead to the conclusion that St. Alban’s is a prime example of a congregation that has adopted a tradition wholeheartedly, in opposition to the experiences at UBC and at São João, which appear to resist tradition. However, further examination reveals that such is not the case. All three congregations have found ways to celebrate the particular traditions in which they place themselves. At St. Alban’s, the Anglican tradition is actively celebrated. Zimmerman described the church’s adherence to liturgical historicity: So, there are a lot of people who are not on board with liturgical worship. They think it’s weird, especially in a town like this where there’s so many people who come from church backgrounds where this is suspect. It smells Catholic, it smells like superstition, it’s people just going through the

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motions. And I always want to point out to people the liturgy in football games, or any sporting event. And I specifically talk about the national anthem. You’re told to stand, everybody stands. You’re told to put your hand over your heart, you do that. You take off your hat, you all look at the flag, and you all say these words that you didn’t write. These memorized rote phrases. And for most people that’s a profoundly emotional experience. You weren’t told to feel patriotic. It’s a mini-liturgy that does everything that we do in our services. And that’s in service of country, ours is in service of God, but I always tell people: “this is a thing that works.” It creates an emotional, mental, physical, spiritual experience. And this why we do it. (2017) Zimmerman’s defense of liturgical worship, or more precisely, his defense of the liturgical strategy of St. Alban’s, may be viewed by outsiders as simply a defense of tradition, but for him, it is a pastoral strategy. The valorization of tradition is part of St. Alban’s project, and is recognized by congregation and leadership alike.2 Furthermore, at St. Alban’s the performance of tradition is set up in contrast to contemporary worship, as Zimmerman describes: It’s one thing to start with a certain chord progression on a synthesizer and create this ethereal, atmospheric, Coldplay concert sort of feeling in a worship service. We’re just playing the organ. You think it’s just gonna be organ music. But somehow people find themselves weeping, or whatever. You know, these are sixteenth-century, thirteenth-century, eleventh-century lyrics, so there’s not this kind of late twentieth/early twenty-first-century super-romantic “Jesus is my boyfriend music.” There’s none of that language in our hymns. There’s a Christian songwriter who just sang in Waco and I think he’s changing his whole approach, and he’s the guy that talks about a kiss from God. Like an unforeseen kiss. I always thought that was super creepy, I’m sure he’s a nice guy. But that’s not the kind of language we use in our hymns. It’s theological language. It’s personal, but it’s also theological. (2017) Zimmerman describes this emphasis on tradition as a strategic move to “get you in a different headspace.” For him, this emphasis on tradition is more than simply a way to distinguish his church from others in the area. It is a pastoral stance, and the way leadership and congregants talk about the Anglican tradition reflects their belief that there is space for growth, as a community, in the performance of tradition. Eugene Lavery, St. Alban’s music director, emphasizes that the goal is to draw on a broad range of music, moving beyond a restrictive definition of Anglican music to include the Roman Catholic music before it, other Reformation repertoires, along with chant and contemporary compositions that fit the aesthetic of the congregation. Lavery defends this pedagogy:

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Performing church music: faith, community, tradition So, when people say “we need to throw that out because it’s doesn’t work anymore,” I kind of think “well, it’s worked for 600 years.” There’s probably a sustained power for a reason, and with all the different cultural phenomena that’s happened with worship music, there’s still nothing that has galvanized congregational participation and singing as traditional hymns” (2017)

For Lavery, the value in the music at St. Alban’s is connected to its rootedness in tradition, even if the understanding of tradition itself is broader than might at first appear. Congregants at St. Alban’s mirror Lavery and Zimmerman’s perceptions, if only intuitively. George says that singing at St. Alban’s “feeds me and makes me feel like I’m part of something that stretches back a long way”. He values how Anglican hymnody is “respected and incorporated and not apologized for,” saying that this stance becomes “an invitation for others to enter into the tradition” (2017). Lincoln, a young father and usher, said that St Alban’s strategy is, for him, a marker of stability: “how hard would it be to derail a practice that’s been in place for so long?” He compares this approach to the perceived fickleness of contemporary worship, in which “a new pastor might completely change the vibe and the feel of the church. I know what to expect when I go to St. Alban’s, and that’s what I’m looking for” (2017). For both of these participants, identity, community, and tradition converge in the performance of church music. While St. Alban’s seems to project alignment with a tradition, UBC might be easily perceived as “anti-tradition.” The congregation meets in an old repurposed building, does contemporary Americana most of the time, and gathers mostly young families and university students. But UBC’s history shows that they align with their own tradition, in other ways.3 One example is song writing, which is valued and welcomed. The practice began under David Crowder, UBC’s first worship pastor, described as “writing music for here and now” (Junior 2017). Song writing is a traditional practice at UBC, supported by online videos of McGregor performing new compositions, set lists and lyrics that are available online, and an ongoing preoccupation with recording the congregation’s music to make it available to worshipers. UBC also aligns with its Baptist heritage by singing repertoire from the Free church songbook, such as “Be Thou My Vision” and “All Creatures of Our God and King.” In fact, with very few exceptions, the doxology is sung every week to the tune of “OLD 100TH.” We have seen how, at São João, the incorporation of Brazilian musical styles in worship has become a valued congregational tradition that started in the 1990s (Pedro 2017). Such emphasis on drawing from the Protestant hymnic legacy and joining it with popular Brazilian music (música popular brasileira) is not intended as resistance to the past, but towards a mixture, a recent tradition, that is unique to São João. Even a young worship leader like Silvia points out her desire

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not [to] deny the things that have been done in these 129 years. We always have to get the essence and renew, you know, bring in songs from the [hymnal] and bring them into our evening service which is geared towards younger people … with maybe a harmony that fits their profile better, the profile of the people who are coming to our church. (2017) Worship pastor Fabiane Behling Luckow summarizes São João’s performance of tradition by remarking that this intention goes both ways: from traditional to contemporary, and from contemporary to traditional. If, in some cases, the band at São João sings a Reformation tune using jazzed-up chords, in other situations the opposite might be true. She shared an anecdote about São João’s morning service, which self-identifies as traditional. In that service, “Pelos Prados e Campinas,” a contemporary Catholic composition, has been very well received:4 That’s a Catholic song. But we sing it, and it sounds like something we would sing in the morning service. So, an inversion I noticed is that, in services where I’m playing or Pedro is playing, we’ll include more songs from the Hinos do Povo de Deus [in the evening] than we sing in the morning service. The musical language makes the difference. But if you ask people in church, they’ll say “no, in the morning we sing traditional music.” (2017) At São João, expansion is achieved by a double sleight of hand of repertoire and style: new songs are made to “sound traditional” just as traditional songs are made to “sound Brazilian.” And at UBC, the same goal is accomplished by occasionally mixing standards from Baptist hymnody, such as “Come Thou Fount” or “Be Thou My Vision,” with UBC compositions, and by creating arrangements that can connect both. A second way through which worshipers and congregations can engage with tradition is by modifying it. These modifications can range from simply including or excluding sections of songs, to subverting components by reframing them in the context of liturgy. Here, once again, we begin to see how different stances of performing tradition interact to create a complex ecology in the performance of church music in each congregational setting. To illustrate the modification of tradition at work, I refer to Zimmerman’s (unusual, according to him) use of the Comfortable Words in St. Alban’s liturgy.5 Zimmerman proffers the Comfortable Words while walking down the aisle towards the back of the sanctuary, and then returning to his spot at the altar; a move that calls even more attention to his use of an unusual piece of liturgy. I suggested that this performance might be considered an active negotiation of the liturgical heritage. In response he says: The Anglican tradition is this wonderful china cabinet in the formal dining room. And you think about your Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re getting ready to celebrate that holiday. And there are dishes that are only used on

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Performing church music: faith, community, tradition Thanksgiving, in some types of families. And you eat in the formal dining room as opposed to the breakfast nook, or the family room. And it’s a formal setting. Think of Anglicanism, and our church is a formal setting. So, we’re gonna bring out all this beautiful stuff. And I feel like there are things in the china cabinet of Anglicanism that were put away in 1979, when the new prayer book was written. And I want to bring out some of those treasures for today, ’cause I think they still have great resonance. Pastorally, personally, psychologically, and theologically with people. And the Comfortable Words are the prime example of that … Everything I do in that service is in the prayer book. Well, you’re right: the walking down the center aisle during the Comfortable Words is something that I saw a professor in seminary do, and I thought it was very powerful and I thought: “I’ll do that if I ever get a chance”… But it’s more I’m gonna interpret the tradition and rework it … And I try to bring things out of the storehouse that maybe have gotten a little dusty and fallen out of use. That’s how I negotiate the tradition. And I think one of the reasons, if you want to use the term success, why it has been successful at St. Alban’s, is because it’s a beautiful tradition! And it is unlike anything you experience in your daily life, and I think there are people who are hungry for that. They don’t want church to feel like you just walked into a Best Buy. (2017)

Zimmerman’s move to bring the Comfortable Words out “from the china cabinet” and present them as part of the liturgy is a subtle double performance. By claiming that “bringing out the china” is part of the way St. Alban’s relates to tradition, Zimmerman aligns the church with the tradition. But, by incorporating something uncommon like the Comfortable Words, he is revising tradition, because he feels “like there are things in the china cabinet of Anglicanism that were put away in 1979.” By bringing them back, Zimmerman is resisting simple categorizations of what it means to conform to Anglican liturgical practice. Thus, the subversion of tradition is not necessarily its negation, but rather its embodiment into a specific chronotope of worship. At UBC, McGregor uses a similar strategy to frame UBC’s connection to tradition by retuning hymn texts. He told me that traditional hymns were important at UBC in a different way than at other churches, which (in his opinion) might use hymns unexamined, without critically engaging with their history and lyrics (2017). For him, other churches might sing traditional hymns merely for the sake of alignment with a denominational or congregational tradition, a performance that does not conform to UBC’s “do-it-yourself” culture. But this process of retuning and reshaping hymns, this subversive performance of tradition, is made in a spirit of respect towards the tradition, not its denial—just like at St. Alban’s. Finally, congregations perform tradition by resisting it. The question of what kind of tradition—be that congregational, denominational, or the tradition of a construed “other”—is being opposed is central to understand this performance.

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As we have seen, tradition can signify, in UBC’s case, actively denying repertoire from the CCLI “Top 40” list for worship (which UBC resists); or, in the Brazilian case, the gospel phenomenon (which São João resists). At UBC this resistance becomes particularly important due to the history of the congregation. When Crowder was worship pastor at UBC, the juxtaposition of his celebrity status and the church’s indie ethos created a conundrum. By trying to separate themselves from the Baptist tradition and doing something different for college students, they ended up becoming a focus of the Christian music scene, with buses of people flocking to the church on Sunday mornings in order to get, in the words of one long-time UBCer, “a free concert” (Bryan 2017). This history led to ambiguity in how UBC deals with the Baptist tradition, its historical musical legacy, and with the “tradition” of the Christian music industry, a contemporary legacy. Nance, who was on staff at UBC for four years, observed that “we don’t necessarily participate as much in what is currently popular in the Christian music scene, nor do we really delve as much as other churches into the historical hymns of the church.” Such ambiguity, according to her, puts UBC in a unique position: “I feel like it’s very opposite to what most churches, at least in our area, do on a regular basis” (2017). UBC’s cautious resistance to both traditions delimits its uniqueness and reinforces its song writing tradition. UBC’s stance is a two-pronged performance of resistance to tradition that outlines the unevenness of these boundaries between being or not being Baptist, being or not being “contemporary,” and how they can be negotiated differently in time, space, and context. In other aspects, UBC positions itself clearly in opposition to tradition, such as in Carney’s choice of dress. Members pointed to Carney’s fashion sense (or lack thereof) as part of UBC’s uniqueness. Zack, a university professor, said: Think of pastor Josh. He’s always really dressed down. There’s not the vestments, and also the building itself, that room, doesn’t feel like a church in the sense of a traditional Protestant or Catholic church … it just doesn’t have that cultural history of what a church is like, and what priests are like, and pastors are like even, in a more formal Protestant sense. (Interview with author, January 2, 2018) For Zack, that Carney chooses to wear sandals and cargo shorts to preach separates him from the “traditional Protestant or Catholic church.” It becomes a marker of identity, another means through which UBC performs community and makes special its Sunday worship: through a stance of opposition to what “priests are like.” On the other hand, UBC’s option to follow the Revised Common Lectionary places it within a tradition, a characteristic that Zack himself observes: “You know, all kinds of churches across the world following the church calendar. So that, to me, is a call to unity first and foremost” (2017). Once again, the complex overlays of stances point to the fertile ways in which individuals and congregations perform tradition by combining resistance and conformance in unique ways.

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An examination of these varied ways in which worshipers and congregations engage with church music through the lens of performance leads to a conclusion: any rigid or overly fixed description is insufficient to describe the processes that characterize them. Simply describing UBC’s music as “contemporary Baptist alternative rock,” or São João’s music as “Brazilian Lutheran,” is not sufficient to adequately portray these performances of church music except in the most general of terms. If we bring in the three axes by which these ritual performances are made special–– time, space, and group––it becomes evident that the performance of church music must be understood as a function of flow and stance. We have employed Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow repeatedly (1990), speaking of “falling out of flow” in relation to participation, of familiarity and unfamiliarity of performatives in relation to the flow of leadership, and of other instances in which flow is used to describe the liminal boundary between participation and non-participation in church music. Berger’s concept of stance as “the affective, stylistic, or valual quality with which a person engages with an element of her experience” (2009, xiv) has likewise helped us to understand how the perspectives from which participants in church music engage with its performance are varied and unique, and to describe the many postures and roles that participants play within the performance. Performances of community, faith, and tradition are a complex lattice that results from the juxtaposition of flow and stance, these movements towards or away from particular nodes on the church music topography, that characterize the way individuals and congregations perform church—particularly, the way they perform church through music. Nance touched on this complex lattice in our conversation by saying that church music is “something that you can’t even put your finger on” (2017). It is difficult to describe this “something” precisely because these lattices are unique in any one instance, which in turn emphasizes the complexity of the study of church music. The ecology of church musics created through the connections of these performances is daunting, and becomes more so as one’s scope of examination becomes even broader. It is in this sense that the performance of church music consolidates these infinite chronotopes of worship that represent the continuum of Christian tradition throughout history.

Notes 1 “Pulling” the song is Brazilian Portuguese jargon for leading the music. 2 An important caveat: an automatic correlation between tradition and advanced age does not appear and is, in fact, actively resisted at St. Alban’s. Many of the church’s young families point to this performance of tradition as a deciding factor to them joining the church. Lavery says: “if you talk to most young Episcopalians, the thing that has drawn them to the church is its tradition, its liturgy.” He contrasts this trend with an older generation of Anglican clergy who were educated amid the liturgical reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, saying: “now in the Episcopal church hierarchy often it’s the older clergy that are wanting the more hip folksy stuff, that hasn’t been hip since well before I was born.”

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3 While there are not many written accounts of UBC’s history, it was extensively described in the interviews. I also relied on the church’s online material, and on the work of Hannah Grace Howard (2016). 4 Originally composed by Frei Fabreti, the song was made popular by Father Zezinho, a popular Brazilian Catholic singer associated with the charismatic renewal movement in Brazil. 5 The Comfortable Words are a classic component of Anglican liturgy, included in the Book of Common Prayer, that have fallen out of common use, according to Zimmerman. For more on this issue, see Platten and Woods (2012).

References Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Dueck, Jonathan. 2011. “Binding and Loosing in Song: Conflict, Identity, and Canadian Mennonite Music.” Ethnomusicology 55(2): 229–254. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnom usicology.55.2.0229. Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Glassie, Henry. 2003. “Tradition.” In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Howard, Hannah Grace. 2016. The Making of a Modern Saint: An Analysis of Grief, Charisma, and Community Identity in Transition. Honors thesis, Lexington, VA: Washington and Lee University. https://dspace.wlu.edu/xmlui/handle/11021/33776. Nekola, Anna E., and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies series. Farnham: Ashgate. “Pelos Prados e Campinas.” n.d. Frei Fabretti. Platten, Stephen, and Christopher Woods. 2012. Comfortable Words: Polity, Piety and the Book of Common Prayer. London: SCM Press. Stein, Stephen J. 1999. “Religious Innovation at the Edges.” In Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter Williams, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Conclusion “A larger performance”

I am sharing a pint with Junior at the Dancing Bear in Waco, Texas, USA, on a sunny, breezy autumn afternoon. He is describing how he thinks the performance of church music relates to other musical performances, such as live concerts: “Well, on one level I would say it’s not any different than going to a live show, going to see your favorite band. On another level … there’s a larger performance going on. There’s a larger show happening, it’s not just the music. There are other things happening. On this side of things, on the ‘it’s just like every other show,’ I think there is a moment of that communal element, just experiencing humanity together. I think that’s true of all types of music, all sorts of live performances. There is a communal element, of ‘we’re all here experiencing this beautiful moment.’ And that’s beautiful, that’s a beautiful human moment. And I think that should be the approach that we take to music in church, a lot more often than not, and making it available for people to sing along … But the way it’s different, I think there’s this intentionality of a through-line through the whole thing. There’s a point to the songs we’ve chosen, why they were chosen. There’s a point to the way the sermon interlaces with the songs. That just exists, there’s an intentionality there. And I think that’s unique to the church; that there is a larger performance. It’s a lot more like going to a musical, than it is a live show. And not a musical where everything is sung, a musical more like … there’s dialogue, and there’s discussion that’s happening, and there’s this idea that music comes in for a heightened moment, music comes in and feels something bigger.” At the outset of this investigation, my goal was to clarify the nebulosity that surrounds the concept of performance in conversations about church music. My argument was that in church music, all participants, in the pews and on the platform, are performing. While church music leaders operate under a different set of responsibilities and expectations, those sitting in the pews also perform. If such is the case, a performance studies approach to the study of church music presents a set of unique affordances: a broad spectrum approach, a stance of

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cultural generosity and an interdisciplinary ethos, tools for dealing with questions of play and change in performance, and the assumption of embodied experience in understanding what it means to musick in church. With these affordances in mind, I set out to provide a performance vocabulary for scholars and practitioners to talk about church music employing a hybrid methodology that coupled theoretical sources and ethnography in an integrative and generative configuration. By reading across and between different disciplines, it became possible to synthesize concepts and establish nodes, or intersections, between and among them. The methodology is also generative. The dialogue between the nodes and the ethnography yielded a rich language, distilled from the ethnography itself, to talk about church music as performance. Performance studies acknowledges and accommodates the messiness of its varied subjects of inquiry, defined much more by methodological approaches than by theoretical structures, similarly to how ethnography—or ethnomusicology, for that matter—is identified, in essence, by fieldwork. In the same spirit, this volume contributes to the study of church music by inviting scholars to work at the methodological and theoretical creases between disciplines, recognizing the inherent messiness of church music, and encouraging interdisciplinary conversations by offering a vocabulary that is designed to account for the complexity of the subject in the context of lived experience. Examining ritual as a common denominator between anthropology, theology, ethnomusicology, and performance, and tracing the connections between these disciplines, I identified three nodes that characterize the concept of ritual in church music: repetition, transformation, and participation. Repetition opens up the possibility of looking at the performance of church music as a rehearsal of piety that occurs in revolving micro- and macro- cycles: the weekly liturgy and the church calendar. By recognizing the potency of sung words within this pattern, and by analyzing the potency of music beyond words in context, I looked at the ways in which church music undergirds the liturgy. It creates a soundscape, generates identity and community, and places worshiping congregations in relation to church music traditions. As participants perform church music with transformational expectations, they become community, rehearse postures of devotion, and conform to patterns of ritual development. In Chapter 3, I examined participation, still in connection to ritual activity. I proposed a typology of concentric circles of participation in church music: presence; singing silent participation; surrogate participation; and immersive spectatorship. The discussion of ritual failure—of what happens when participation is compromised—was articulated as falling out of flow, ritual disruption and distraction, and participatory discrepancies. All these concepts and terms were derived from, and substantiated by, the combined theory and ethnography. Placing participation at the center of church music performance led to a discussion of embodiment in the context of a critique of the mind/body dichotomy in Western thought, in the codification of Christian piety, and in church music scholarship. This critique pointed to the need for a typology that integrated

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gestures, intentions, and performance. Church music performatives were therefore classified under these labels: expressive performatives; leadership performatives; and prescribed performatives. Once established, I discussed such performatives in context: the chronotope of worship. Dissanayake’s language of “making special,” discussed in relation to space, time, and group, connected ritual activity in general with the performance of church music in particular. This special chronotope serves as a platform on which the boundaries between ritual space and everyday life are tampered with, worshipers play with outside and inside influences, and change is pursued or resisted. Using the broad spectrum approach of performance studies, we looked at how participants in church music use architecture, fashion, interior design, sound amplification, pageantry, gestures, and other means, to make their performance of church music special, and to play and negotiate change within a ritual context. I proposed the idea of messiness in church music as a way to recognize these transformations in relation to intercultural flows and other complex webs of influences characteristic of such negotiations. Finally, I used the vocabulary developed throughout the book in a discussion of the performance of church music through three interconnected aspects: faith, community, and tradition. I examined how participants and congregations perform faith by performing reverence, orthodoxy, and sincerity; how they perform community by performing identity, and establishing boundaries of sameness and otherness; and how they negotiate questions related to church music traditions by uneven performances of alignment, modification, and resistance/opposition to church music traditions and to other cultural flows. In the Introduction, I claimed that this book is, in itself, a performance of church music scholarship. Thus, the ideas of doing and presenting that define performance permeated my writing and methodology and culminated in a demonstration of how performance theory can contribute to the study of church music. The hope is that my work provides a way to talk about Junior’s description, in the vignette above, of “a larger performance” that occurs in church music. While on many levels music making in church correlates with other instances in which people make music together and/or ritualize, the performance of church music in liturgy, in ritual context, produces something unique to the church: “a larger performance.” Much of the contention around the use of performance in church music scholarship happens precisely because participants and scholars know that church music is important. They care about it and fight over it. These well-intentioned concerns, coupled with what I have described as a linguistic and conceptual impasse, are two of the factors that propel animated, and sometimes angry, discussions about music in church. If the goal of the book was to bypass the conceptual confusion surrounding the use of performance when talking about church music, the accomplishment of such a goal was demonstrated throughout the text, and especially in Chapter 6, when the vocabulary came together and allowed us to examine the performance of church music with a better understanding of the dynamics, implications, and sub-performances that happen within it.

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My hope is that descriptors like “falling out of flow,” “intentional ambiguity,” “surrogate participation, “immersive spectatorship,” and “messiness,” to name but a few (and it is important to note that I am not the original proponent of many of these terms), might be useful to scholars studying the music of the church, to performance scholars studying religious music making, to anthropologists studying ritual activity, and to theologians who would move beyond logocentric interpretations of church music. I hope they are also useful for practitioners who must negotiate the weekly realities of planning and executing worship in local congregations. Several opportunities for further research arise from this work. First, as I have argued, church music is an essentially interdisciplinary field, standing between musicology (both historical and ethnomusicology), theology, and anthropology, at the very least. In this case, performance theory presents itself as a “hub” of integration between the disciplines drawn into scholarly conversations about church music, and it can facilitate integration and interaction between them. At the same time, plugging new spokes (such as church music) into this hub may contribute to important ongoing questions of performance scholarship, such as the conceptual and terminological fissures that characterize the appropriation of concepts and terms between fields in the humanities. It is my hope that church music scholarship may contribute to the conversations surrounding these fissures, helping to nuance the way in which terms like performance and performativity are used and what we mean when we say them, or what we do with them, as Austin would say (1962). The second area for investigation concerns Shoshana Felman’s “scandal of the speaking body” (2003). A comprehensive overview and detailed critique of stillness as piety in Western Christianity can help church music practitioners and scholars to deal with questions of what to do with the body in worship. Such research can contribute to pastoral and practical theology, religious material culture studies, liturgical studies, and other areas in which accounts of the body need to be further nuanced so that participants can delve into their own engagement with church music without implied demands that they dissect mind from body, or what Grimes calls “rites that are still gnostically disembodied” (Grimes 1995, 9). Such an investigation is particularly important today, as the epicenter of world Christianities moves towards the global South (Jenkins 2011). Because of this shift, Euro-American pedagogies of the body in worship will lose force, which in turn will require church music scholars to address questions of embodiment, gestures, and ethics of the body in worship in new ways. A third avenue of inquiry pertains to messiness in church music, particularly as I have used the term to move beyond hybridity in relation to cultural flows and music making in religious contexts. While I recognize the work around race and cultural appropriation that has been accomplished in critical race studies, popular culture and popular music studies, and ethnomusicology in dealing with issues of cultural interflows, I argue that my terminology describes not only the hybridity of these flows, but also the unevenness with which they occur

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and adhere to music making processes in Christian worship. While recent scholarship in migration and diaspora studies has given renewed attention to these phenomena in today’s world (Capone 2004; Farahmand 2016), and scholars who study church music have indeed paid significant attention to transnational worship projects, mediatization, and globalization (Ingalls 2016; Nekola and Wagner 2015), the changing nature of the global church—especially in relation to the “inversion” of the epicenter of Christianity from north to south in recent decades—merits further research. The connections between transnational projects and theological, and ecclesiological questions need to be explored, particularly because treating church music as performance acknowledges the fluid nature of these cross-pollinations of repertoire, worship practices, and church music projects across boundaries. Moreover, as religious organizations learn to navigate the challenges presented by technology and mediation in relation to current issues, such as the outbreak of the pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in early 2020 and the explosion of digital ministries, complex and multimodal reflections are needed to undergird new practices and understand others. As I have argued, performance studies’ hospitality towards questions of intercultural flows, and its methodological eagerness to embrace messiness and difference, can cast light upon such issues. If, in fact, the performance of church music is a “larger performance” as Junior suggests in this Conclusion’s opening vignette, I offer my work as a contribution to the conversation that surrounds this performance and seeks to interpret it, both from the academic and practicing musician perspectives. The ethnography and theory have demonstrated how practitioners and scholars talk about performance in positive and negative, strict and broad, practical and metaphorical ways. While each of these voices speaks from a particular constellation of assumptions and brings valuable contributions to the table of church music studies, this volume can help to address some of the nebulosity that surrounds these conversations by providing a performance vocabulary that is specifically tailored for our area of study. While I do hope that my work will contribute to these conversations about the larger performance of church music, I do not wish it to be a final word, but an invitation to further scholarship. The music of Christian worship is diverse, fertile, and infinitely varied, and there is much work to be done by those who wish to embrace a comprehensive perspective of its performance. There is room on the stage for other scholars to perform.

References Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Capone, Stefania. 2004. “A propos des notions de globalisation et de transnationalisation.” Civilisations. Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines, 51: 9–22. Farahmand, Manéli. 2016. “Glocalization and Transnationalization in (Neo)-Mayanization Processes: Ethnographic Case Studies from Mexico and Guatemala.” Religions 7(2): 17.

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Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 1995. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Rev. ed. Studies in Comparative Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2016. “Transnational Connections, Musical Meaning, and the 1990s ‘British Invasion’ of North American Evangelical Worship Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, ed. Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan M. Dueck. New York: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2011. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. 3rd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Nekola, Anna E., and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies series. Farnham: Ashgate.

Appendix 1 Interview reference list

The following interviewees, public leaders at each research site, signed release forms authorizing the use of their names. Carney, Joshua. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 2. Hughes, Rebekah. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 12. Lavery, Eugene. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. November 20. Luckow, Fabiane Behling. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 20. McGowan, Neal. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 11. McGregor, Jameson. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. November 16. Nance, Emily. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. February 7. Tonn, Deloir. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 20. Whisnant, Toph. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. November 15 Zimmerman, Aaron. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. November 17. Other interviewee identities are withheld by mutual agreement. By pseudonym: Bryan. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 18. Daisy. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 13. Davi. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Diana. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. January 2. George. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 12. Gordon. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. January 18. John. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 19. Juarez. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Junior. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. October 11. Lídia. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 20. Lila. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. January 18. Lincoln. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. February 19. Lucia. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Maria. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 20.

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Nestor. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Paul. 2017. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. December 13. Pedro. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 20. Rosa. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Sheryl. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. February 19. Silvia. 2017. Interview with author. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. October 22. Zack. 2018. Interview with author. Waco, Texas, USA. January 2.

Appendix 2 Interview outline

1 For you, what is the most important part of the service? What is the role of music in this context? 2 How do you think the repetitive nature of worship influences/shapes the way you see yourself as a Christian/member of this congregation? 3 What is the role of the words we sing in worship? What about other important components of the experience of congregational music? 4 What does participation in church music mean to you? Why is it important (or not) to participate in it? 5 When you worship, do you think about your body? What kinds of restrictions and/or liberties can you think of in relation to how you move as you participate in music at church? 6 How would you describe the music of your congregation? What are its main characteristics, and what distinguishes the music here at ____________ from other churches you know or have been to? 7 How do you think the music here at ____________ dialogues with the history of this church/denomination and the culture within which it is immersed? 8 What do you enjoy most about the music here at _________? What would you change if you could? 9 Are there other ways to participate in congregational music besides singing? What are they? 10 What is special about the experience of congregational music? Why is it different from other forms of musical activities outside the church?

Index

Adams, Walter Randolph 42 affordances, theory of 68, 93n1, 92 African-American gospel music 153 Agamben, Giorgio 36n10 All the Poor and Powerless (song) 145 Alloa, Emmanuel 6, 97 Anglican Church 180, 184n2 anthropology 40–3, 59, 62–3, 89 Appadurai, Arjun 31, 154 Augustine 65 Austin, J. L. 17, 23, 27–8, 90, 104–5 Bakhtin, M. M. 106, 130–1 Ball, James R. 88–9 Balme, Christopher 24 Baptist Church 157 Barthes, Roland 125n14 Baylor University 12, 157 Becker, Judith 15, 40, 66, 68–72, 79, 97, 99, 118 Becky (Christian music industry term) 89, 94n7 Begbie, Jeremy 22, 102, 146 Bell, Catherine M. 6, 41, 62n4, 130 Berger, Harris M. 4, 61, 102–3, 124, 184 Bial, Henry 26 Book of Common Prayer 170, 182, 185n5 Bradley, C. Randall 87, 156 Bradshaw, Paul F. 43, 62 Brady, Sara 26 Brazilian gospel music 120–1, 125n13, 148, 177–8, 183 Bryan (interviewee) 32, 48, 75, 85, 118–19, 136, 150–1, 157–8, 175–6, 183 Burdick, John 120–1 Burnim, Mellonee 8 Butler, Judith 28–9, 36

Capone, Stefania 190 Carney, Joshua (interviewee) 53, 55–9, 140, 147, 157–8, 164, 183 CCLI 30, 36n12, 183 chant 71, 179 Chidester, David 100–2, 131, 142, 170 Christian congregational music studies 22–3 Christian liturgical year, macro- and micro-cycles of 53–5, 138–40, 187 Christian liturgical year: Christmas 53, 55–6; Easter 53, 164–5; Epiphany 53; Lent 53, 78, 164–5; Ordinary Time 53; Pentecost 53 Christian missions 9, 15, 131 Christian theology: Hellenistic influence on 98, 100, 121; logocentrism in 22, 60, 93, 102, 120, 189; mind/body dichotomy in 68, 93, 97–100, 107, 187 Christmas see Christian Liturgical year chronotope 128–35, 140–2, 156, 158, 182, 184, 188 church building: architecture 4, 24, 30, 132–3, 135–7, 165, 188; interior design 24, 135–7, 188 church music studies, interdisciplinarity in 5–7, 14–16, 22–3, 189 church music: Afro-Brazilian expressions of 148, 152; arranging 77, 121–2, 137, 150, 177–81; Brazilian expressions of 10, 109, 120–2, 148, 152–5, 168, 180–1; British-American heritage of 121, 153; choirs in/and 10, 12, 74, 85–6, 116, 152, 165, 176–7; composition of 14, 48, 84, 122, 164, 180–1; dancing in/and 2, 3, 70, 98–100, 109, 118–19, 121, 143; digital culture and 66, 87–9, 131, 150, 190; excellence in the performance of 149; hymnals in 51, 56, 62n7, 72, 87, 145–6,

196

Index

152, 159n12, 181; inculturation and 154; Korean 120; lament/grief in 83–6, 175–6; Lutheran heritage of 1–2, 10–11, 125n9, 136, 145–6, 150–5, 171; media/ mediation/mediatization in/and 24, 30–1, 72, 80, 88–9, 100; messiness in 153–5, 157–8, 187–9; negotiation of identity in 3, 15, 18n16, 55, 134, 142, 150–1, 155–7, 181, 188; otherness and sameness in/insiders and outsiders in 54, 67, 142, 156, 158, 170–1, 173, 175, 188; performance of community through 51, 55, 62, 72, 85–6, 122, 141, 150, 169–178; play and change in/and 128, 134–7, 142–151, 178; rehearsal of 2, 62, 77, 91, 112–13, 140–1, 168; soundscapes of/in 137, 152, 155, 157, 159n4, 187; spontaneity in 72, 77, 108–10, 117–19, 151–2, 166–8, 171–3 church polity 78, 157 Clement of Alexandria 98 Clifford, James 22 Cloud, David W. 146, 158n3 Communion see Eucharist communitas 23, 41, 43, 62, 129 conducting 1, 3, 112–13, 115–16, 152, 165 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy see Sacrosanctum Concilium Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) 18n5, 89, 146, 158, 159n3 Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) 14, 18n15, 31, 149 Couldry, Nick 89 COVID-19 pandemic 24, 190 Crowder, David 12, 34, 58, 147–8, 157, 177, 180, 183 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 15, 66, 71–2, 129, 184 Csordas, Thomas J. 31 cultural flows 15, 24, 31, 35, 153–8, 188–90 cultural rituals 43–4, 102–3 culture, music 86, 148 Cumming, Naomi 18n6 Daisy (interviewee) 56–7, 60, 170 Dakers, Lionel 134, 158n3 Dancing Bear (pub) 73–4, 113, 186 Davi (interviewee) 91 De Theije, Marjo 154 deep listening 40, 68, 79, 118 Delafield-Butt, Jonathan 103 Descartes, René 97, 118 Diana (interviewee) 57, 81–2, 84, 92–3, 108, 145

Dissanayake, Ellen 6, 128–31, 143–4, 188 Driver, Tom F. 44, 47 Dueck, Jonathan 170 Easter see Christian liturgical year, Easter Elevation Music 87 embodiment 15, 17, 27, 40, 97–124, 175, 189; communal/congregational 92–3, 102–3, 169; definition of 6, 107–9 Episcopal Church 3, 11–13, 128, 134 ethnography 7–14, 41, 187 Eucharist 47–8, 98, 111, 114, 174–5 Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (ECLCB) see Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil (IECLB) Ewald, Werner 154 feathering 23–4, 122, 174 Felman, Shoshana 17, 28, 171, 189 fixed liturgy 48, 119, 125n10 Fletcher, John 5, 8, 18n7 flow 66, 69, 71–6, 129, 163, 166, 184; falling out of/interruption of 80–3, 90–3, 141, 166, 187, 189 Free Southern Theatre 59 Frith, Simon 4, 106, 120 Geertz, Clifford 7, 94n8 George (interviewee) 32, 54, 72–4, 86, 132, 140, 142, 170, 180 gesture: bodily 33–4, 42–3, 47–8, 71–2, 75–6, 98–124, 141–2, 173–4; definition of 98–104; musical 18n6 Glassie, Henry 55, 177 globalization 31, 154, 190 Goffman, Erving 36n11 Gordon (interviewee) 58–9, 75–6, 115, 148, 176–7 Gordon, Edwin 68–9 Grainger, Roger 44, 93 Grimes, Ronald L. 40–3, 49, 62n1, 90–1, 99, 119, 189 Guardini, Romano 143–4, 151 Gudorf, Christine E. 98–9 Hammer, Anita 144 Harding, James Martin 26, 30 Harkness, Nicholas 120 Hastings, Thomas 65 Hatten, Robert S. 104 Hawn, C. Michael 73 Heath, Stephen 125n14 Hess, Mary E. 88–9

Index high fidelity (sound field) 66 Hinos do Povo de Deus (HPD, hymnal) 56, 152, 181 hip-hop 153 Hood, Mantle 26 House of Blues 135–6 Howard, Hannah Grace 12, 83, 185n3 Hufford, Mary 130–31 Hughes, Graham 29 Hughes, Rebekah (interviewee) 32–5, 47, 52, 78, 107, 123, 169, 173–4 Huizinga, Johan 143 Hüsken, Ute 6, 18n16, 142 hybridity 15–16, 132, 151–5, 189 Hymnal 1982 (hymnal) 146 Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil (IECLB) 9, 62n7, 152 immersive spectatorship (see also participation in worship, immersive spectatorship) 86–93 Ingalls, Monique Marie 1–2, 8, 15, 18n5, 22–3, 27–8, 87, 89, 105, 110, 116–17 Jenkins, Philip 189 Jesus Culture 87 Joncas, Michael 66, 71, 93n5 Jones, Carys Wyn 35n2 John (interviewee) 32, 58 Juarez (interviewee) 52–3, 57, 72, 80, 140, 148 Junior (interviewee) 78–81, 86–7, 91, 116–18, 131, 139, 148–50, 163, 166–70, 186–8, 190 K-LOVE 30, 36n12 Keil, Charles 23, 92, 94n13, 122 Kubicki, Judith Marie 23 Lake, Kyle 83 Larsen, Timothy 41 Lavery, Eugene (interviewee) 3–4, 12, 47, 51–2, 74–5, 77, 83, 122, 134, 146, 149, 159n5, 165, 169, 177, 179–80, 184n2 Lent see Christian liturgical year, Lent Lídia (interviewee) 56, 137, 163, 171 Lila (interviewee) 58, 69, 75–6, 177 Lincoln (interviewee) 85–6, 120–1, 141–2, 165, 180 Lucia (interviewee) 54, 141 Lim, Swee Hong 30, 135 liminality 23, 31, 41–3, 128, 137–8, 144, 184 liturgical calendar see Christian liturgical year

197

liturgical studies/liturgics 2, 23, 41–3, 93, 99, 189 liturgy of the Table see Eucharist liturgy, drama/theatre and 25–6, 44–5, 144–5 liturgy, play and change in/and 16, 137–9 liturgy, rehearsal of 48, 55, 61, 72, 79, 81–2, 85, 103, 111, 118 Lovrien, Peggy M. 71 Loxley, James 27–8, 36n9, 104 Luckow, Fabiane Behling (interviewee) 2–4, 10, 33–5, 50–1, 60–1 72–7, 115, 121–2, 138–40, 148–50, 168, 175, 181 Lukken, Gerard 43–4 McGowan, Neal (interviewee) 47, 58, 78, 107, 111, 113–4, 119, 133, 138, 156 Mahmood, Saba 29, 36n10 making special 6, 128–34, 158, 170, 175–6, 188; group 141–2; place 134–8; time 138–41 Marcus, George E. 22 Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth 47, 50–3, 67–8, 70, 72, 87–8 Maria (interviewee) 58, 82, 162–4, 171–2, 176 Marini, Stephen A. 49, 56 Mariz, Cecília Loreto 154 mashup 14–17 McClymond, Kathryn 91 McGann, Mary E. 2 McGregor, Jameson (interviewee) 14, 34–5, 50–2, 55, 61, 73–4, 79, 83–5, 87–8, 108–9, 111, 117, 119, 121–2, 132–3, 137, 140, 145, 148–9, 151, 157, 164–5, 167, 171, 176, 180, 182 McGuire, Meredith B. 146 Melloh, John Allyn 43, 62n5 memory in musicking see musicking, memory in messiness 15, 76, 151–5, 157–8, 187–90 Meyer, Leonard B. 16 Moore, Allan F. 16, 18n2, 120 Muir, Edward 42–3 Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) 148, 180 musical forms, cyclical and sequential 73 musical style 16, 92, 106, 133, 177 musicking 1–2, 5; body and 97–8, 119; cultural cohorts in 66–7, 101, 141; cultural formations in, 66–7, 101, 141; dissociation in 69, 118; familiarity in 71–2, 77, 92, 128, 133–4, 171, 184; memory in 40, 45, 47, 49–51, 60, 88, 104, 139, 150; participatory 23, 32,

198

Index

66–9, 72–3, 75, 78, 80–1, 86–8, 90–2, 103, 108, 122–4, 174; presentational 2, 33, 66–8, 75, 87; repetition in 67; ritual transformation in 40, 62 Nance, Emily (interviewee) 34, 51, 57, 79, 84, 119, 122, 151, 163, 168, 183–4 Nekola, Anna E. 87–9, 169 Nestor (interviewee) 11, 112–13, 152, 168 Neubert, Frank 6, 18n16, 142 New York University (NYU) 36n8 Nirvana (band) 167 Novocântico (hymnal) 152 Oceans (song) 88, 91, 150 Oliveros, Pauline 68 Ordinary Time see Christian liturgical year, Ordinary Time Oswald, Roy M. 43 participation in worship: immersive spectatorship 66, 86–93, 131, 187, 189; presence 71–5; silence 79–83; singing 75–8; surrogate 83–6 participatory discrepancies 90–3, 94n13, 122, 163, 187 pastoral care 43, 121, 175–6 Paul (interviewee) 50, 81, 91, 111, 128–9, 132–3, 140, 171–2, 174 Pedro (interviewee) 80, 112, 172–3, 176–7, 180–1 Paul VI, Pope 70 Peckruhn, Heike 99 Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul 2, 9–11, 18n10, 109–10, 151–2, 176 Pentecost see Christian liturgical year, Pentecost performance: of community 54, 78, 80, 101, 131–2, 142, 169–77, 183; of faith 162–7; of orthodoxy 163–5; of reverence 162–3; of scholarship 16–17; of tradition 177–84 performance persona/ae 1–2, 33–5, performance studies: broad spectrum of 24, 26, 30, 43, 186, 188; interdisciplinarity in 23–7, 30–1, 187; transculturality/interculturality in 27, 30, 42, 153, 188, 190 performance: definition of 5, 23, 27, 40, 45; efficacy-entertainment spectrum 25–6, 44, 90–1, 166; fan-and-web diagram 130; pastoral 34, 175–6; play and change in/and 6–7, 17, 25–6, 28–32,

46; rehearsal in/and 5, 33, 35, 123, 178, 187; tradition and change in 133 performative 17, 103–6 performative infelicities 90–1 performative utterance 15, 23, 29, 49 performative: prescribed 116–19; vocality as 119–22; of expression 108–10; of leadership 112–16; of sincerity 110–11, 165–8; bodily 98, 103–24 performativity 6, 17, 25, 27–9, 36n10, 104, 189 Phillips, Elizabeth 8 Plato 98 play and change, congregational resistance to 177–84 Poloma, Margaret M. 68, 93n3 popular culture: church music and 55–6, 86–9, 100–3, 131, 136–7, 147–8, 150, 154, 156–8, 168; preaching and 56, 136–7, 147, 158 popular music studies 105–6, 120 Porter, Mark 8, 22–4, 26 preaching, humor in 147–8 Protestantism 92 Ramsey, Guthrie P. 153–6, 159n16 Reformation 146 religious material culture studies 131–2, 189 repetition in musicking see musicking, repetition in Reynolds, Bryan 26, 31 Rienstra, Debra 2 Rienstra, Don 2 ritual disruption see ritual, failure in/of ritual studies 40–5, 62n1 ritual: artistic activity and 130, 143–4; definition of 6, 40, 42, 45; failure in/of 90–3, 94n8; liturgical studies and 42–5; pastoral care and 43; performance studies and 45–6; play and change in/and 31–2, 59–62, 128–40; rehearsal in/and 47–9, 132; repetition and 46–62; transformation in/and 25, 49, 56–62, 68–70, 82, 90–3 ritualization 129–30 rituals in everyday life 43–5, 104, 124 Roman Catholic Church 41, 70–3, 85, 124n4, 125n10, 151, 154–6, 159n15, 172, 178–9, 181, 183, 185n4 Rosa (interviewee) 145 Rosenthal, Cindy 26, 30 Ruth, Lester 30, 135

Index Sacrosanctum Concilium 70–1 Salamone, Frank A. 42 Saliers, Don E. 97 São João Lutheran Church 2–3, 9–11, 33, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 70, 72, 80, 82, 85, 91, 109–10, 112–15, 117, 121–2, 136–8, 140–1, 145, 148–56, 159n11, 162–3, 168, 171–2, 175–8, 180–1, 183–4 Schafer, R. Murray 159n4 Schechner, Richard 5–6, 25–8, 30–1, 35, 36n840, 44–6, 49, 59, 66, 88, 90, 97, 99, 129–30, 143–4, 153, 166 Scheer, Greg 18n5 Schieffelin, Edward L. 90 Schlöger, Benjamin 103 Second Vatican Council 44, 66, 70–1, 100, 159n15 Seligman, A. 92 Senn, Frank C. 101–2 Shepherd, John 4–5 Silvia (interviewee) 164, 173, 180 Small, Christopher 2 Son, Timothy D. 43 Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan 14 sound fields 66 South-Brazilian Germanic music 152, 154 Sowande, Fela 146, 159n7 St. Alban’s Episcopal Church 3, 9, 11–13, 32, 46–8, 50–1, 54, 56, 58, 70, 72–5, 77–9, 81, 85–6, 91, 107, 111, 113, 119–20, 122–4, 128–38, 140–2, 146–7, 149, 151, 156, 164–84 stance 4, 61–2, 102–3, 111, 184; scholarly 26–7, 30–1, 61–2 Stein, Stephen J. 158, 169 Steuernagel, Marcos 24, 28 Stevenson, Jill 123 studio audio art (sound field) 66 Taylor, Diana 24, 28 theologization 68–9, 89, 155, 164 theology: academic discipline 22–3, 26, 29, 42–5, 87, 99, 102, 124n1; logocentrism in 22, 60, 93, 102, 120, 189 thick description, 7–8 Till, Ruper 125n8 Tonn, Deloir (interviewee) 57–8, 109–10, 114, 125n9 tradition: definition of, 55–6; alignment with 177–81; modification of 181–2; resistance to 182–4 trance 25, 40, 68–70, 91, 93 Trevarthen, Colwyn 103

199

Trumbauer, Jean Morris 43 Trump administration 145 Tulane University 59 Turino, Thomas 23, 66–8, 70, 72, 92–3, 101, 122, 141, 174 Turner, Victor 5–6, 23, 30, 40–5, 49, 59, 99, 128–9, 142, 144, 155 U2 (band) 120, 147 University Baptist Church (UBC) 9, 12–14, 34, 48, 50–60, 70, 73–5, 78–81, 83–8, 91–3, 94n12, 108, 111, 115–19, 121–2, 131–40, 145, 147–51, 156–8, 163–9, 175–85 Upton, Elizabeth 110 Uzukwu, E. Elochukwu 100–4 Vatican Council II see Second Vatican Council vicarious participation see surrogate participation vocality 15, 24, 119–22 voice, grain of the 125n14 Waco, TX 3, 9, 11–14, 18n12, 18n14, 84, 113, 128, 142, 156, 176, 186 Wagner, Thomas 1–2, 28, 87–9, 169 Ward, Peter 8 Warren, Richard 134 Wheaton, Jack 124n1, 158n3, 159n10 Whisnant, Toph (interviewee) 34–5, 50, 53, 60, 74, 79, 83, 115, 165–7, 173 worship concerts 23, 87, 105–6, 110, 136, 183 worship leader/enlivener 1–2, 11, 18n5, 73, 103, 117, 133, 172–3 worship practices: African 100, 121; Brazilian 10, 109, 120–2, 125n13, 148, 152, 154–5, 168, 177, 180–1, 184 worship wars 1, 32, 36n13, 90, 156, 158n3 worship: Anglican heritage 12, 72, 74–5, 77, 111, 125n10, 128–9, 146–9, 170–5, 177–82, 185n5; Anglo-Baptist 16, 151, 155; Anglo-Catholic 73; anonymity in 79–80; Baptist heritage 12, 48, 51, 70, 150–1, 156, 180–1, 183–4; BaptoCatholic 155; body language in 2–3, 114; chronotope of 128–34, 141–2, 182, 184, 188; digital mediation of 66, 87–9, 131, 190; Free church 48, 85, 128, 172, 180; gestures in 3, 15, 23, 33–4, 43, 47–8, 72, 75–6, 98–125, 142, 172–4, 187–9; humor in 34, 147–8; kneeling in

200

Index

70, 75, 79, 80, 110–11, 119, 124, 163, 169, 173; Mennonite 170–1; modesty as reverence in 171–2; posture in 3, 33, 61–2, 79, 82, 102–5, 111, 114–15, 118, 141, 173, 178, 184, 187; raising hands in 33, 43, 65, 67, 70, 75–6, 110–11, 113, 116–19, 124, 171–3; ritual efficacy of 2, 26, 36n7, 59, 62n6, 65, 90–1, 143, 146, 166; sacred/secular divide in 61, 134, 137, 146–8, 154, 158; sincerity and authenticity in 2, 92, 94n11, 106–7, 110–11, 119, 146, 159n9, 159n9;

transnational phenomena of 8, 15–6, 30–1, 121, 131, 190 Wren, Brian A. 98, 101–2 York, Terry W. 36n13 Zack (interviewee) 48, 92, 132–3, 136–7, 157, 183 Zimmerman, Aaron (interviewee) 47, 50, 56, 58, 60, 79–80, 82, 107–8, 113–15, 119, 124, 135, 137–8, 147, 165, 174–5, 178–82