Ethics and Christian Musicking 9780367431488, 9781003001485

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
List of tables
List of contributors
Introduction: music and ethics in contemporary Christianity
PART I: The body and beyond
1. Praise, politics, power: Ethics of the body in Christian musicking
2. The silence of the monks: The ethics of everyday sounds
3. Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter: Aesthet(h)ic(al) negotiations in Black Gospel’s Afro -Asian Crossings
PART II: Fulfilling responsibilities and negotiating values
4. “That worship sound”: ethics, things,
and shimmer reverberation
5. Amateurism-without-amateurishness, or authenticity as vanishing act in evangelical worship music
6. Music business, ethics, and Christian festivals: progressive Christianity at Wild Goose Festival
7. The ethics of adaptation in hymns and songs for worship
PART III: Identity and encounter
8. “Hillsong and Black”: the ethics of style, representation, and identity in the Hillsong Megachurch
9. A worship-rooted lifestyle? Exploring evangelical ethics at Bethel Church, Redding, CA
10. Applied ethnomusicology in postmission Australian aboriginal contexts: ethical responsibility, style, and aesthetics
11. Singing together as global citizens: toward a musical ethic of relational accompaniment
PART IV: Valuing the Self
12. Deceitful hearts and transformed lives: performing truth and truthfulness in fundamentalist Christian vocal music
13. Beyoncé Mass and the flourishing of black women
14. Ethics, experience, and western classical sacred music
Index

Citation preview

Ethics and Christian Musicking

The relationship between musical activity and ethical significance occupies long traditions of thought and reflection both within Christianity and beyond. From concerns regarding music and the passions in early Christian writings through to moral panics regarding rock music in the 20th century, Christians have often gravitated to the view that music can become morally weighted, building a range of normative practices and prescriptions upon particular modes of ethical judgment. But how should we think about ethics and Christian musical activity in the contemporary world? As studies of Christian musicking have moved to incorporate the experiences, agencies, and relationships of congregations, ethical questions have become implicit in new ways in a range of recent research – how do communities negotiate questions of value in music? How are processes of encounter with a variety of different others negotiated through musical activity? What responsibilities arise within musical communities? This volume seeks to expand this conversation. Divided into four sections, the book covers the relationship of Christian musicking to the body; responsibilities and values; identity and encounter; and notions of the self. The result is a wide-ranging perspective on music as an ethical practice, particularly as it relates to contemporary religious and spiritual communities. This collection is an important milestone at the intersection of ethnomusicology, musicology, religious studies, and theology. It will be a vital reference for scholars and practitioners reflecting on the values and practices of worshipping communities in the contemporary world. Nathan Myrick is Assistant Professor of Church Music in the Townsend School of Music and Director of the Music and Human Flourishing Research Project (funded by a Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship with Funds provided by the Lilly Endowment, Inc.) at Mercer University. A graduate of Baylor University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Providence University College, his research focuses on musical activity and human flourishing in the context of Christian communities. He is the author of Music for Others: Care, Justice, and Relational Ethics in Christian Music (2021), and the author and series editor of “Music

Matters” for Ethics Daily. His work has appeared in ​The Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Bloomsbury Academic, Liturgy, The Hymn, and others. Mark Porter studied at University College, Oxford, and King’s College, ­London, before completing his doctorate in ethnomusicology at City University, London in 2014. Following this, in 2015, he took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt. He is author of​ Contemporary Worship and Everyday Musical Lives (Routledge 2016) and Ecologies of Resonance in Christian Musicking (2020) and is co-founder and programme chair of the biennial Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives conference.

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. 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 Studying Congregational Music Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives edited by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt and Monique M. Ingalls Ethics and Christian Musicking Edited by Nathan Myrick and Mark Porter For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Congregational-Music-Studies-Series/book-series/ACONGMUS

Ethics and Christian Musicking

Edited by Nathan Myrick and Mark Porter

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 selection and editorial matter, Nathan Myrick and Mark Porter; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nathan Myrick and Mark Porter to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 utilized 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 A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367431488 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003001485 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Table of contents

List of tables List of contributors Introduction: music and ethics in contemporary Christianity

ix x 1

MARK PORTER AND NATHAN MYRICK

PART I

The body and beyond

19

1. Praise, politics, power: Ethics of the body in Christian musicking

21

MARCELL SILVA STEUERNAGEL

2. The silence of the monks: The ethics of everyday sounds

38

MARCEL COBUSSEN

3. Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter: Aesthet(h)ic(al) negotiations in Black Gospel’s Afro -Asian Crossings

51

BO KYUNG BLENDA IM

PART II

Fulfilling responsibilities and negotiating values

71

4. “That worship sound”: ethics, things, and shimmer reverberation

73

JEFF R WARREN

5. Amateurism-without-amateurishness, or authenticity as vanishing act in evangelical worship music JOSHUA KALIN BUSMAN

88

viii  Table of contents 6. Music business, ethics, and Christian festivals: progressive Christianity at Wild Goose Festival

105

ANDREW MALL

7. The ethics of adaptation in hymns and songs for worship

124

MAGGI DAWN

PART III

Identity and encounter

143

8. “Hillsong and Black”: the ethics of style, representation, and identity in the Hillsong Megachurch

145

TANYA RICHES AND ALEXANDER DOUGLAS

9. A worship-rooted lifestyle? Exploring evangelical ethics at Bethel Church, Redding, CA

164

EMILY SNIDER ANDREWS

10. Applied ethnomusicology in postmission Australian aboriginal contexts: ethical responsibility, style, and aesthetics

183

MURIEL SWIJGHUISEN REIGERSBERG

11. Singing together as global citizens: toward a musical ethic of relational accompaniment

202

MAREN HAYNES MARCHESINI

PART IV

Valuing the Self

223

12. Deceitful hearts and transformed lives: performing truth and truthfulness in fundamentalist Christian vocal music

225

SARAH BEREZA

13. Beyoncé Mass and the flourishing of black women

240

TAMISHA TYLER

14. Ethics, experience, and western classical sacred music

252

JONATHAN ARNOLD

Index

271

List of tables

8.1 Participant Demographics 11.1 Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, adapted from the work of Dr. Milton Bennett by Kristina Gonzalez. Utilized by the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship Colleague Council and Board of Directors, and provided to the author during training.

149

211

Contributors

Emily Snider Andrews teaches church music and worship leadership at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama where she serves as Assistant Professor of Music and a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Worship and the Arts. Her research interests include studies of evangelical worship, sacramental theology, and the interlacing of music and theology. An ordained minister, Emily believes worship lies at the heart of what it means to be a Christian disciple and remains deeply committed to the corporate worship life of the church. Jonathan Arnold  is Director of Communities and Partnerships in the Diocese of Canterbury, UK, and former Dean of Divinity and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is also a former member of The Sixteen and co-founder of the girl choristers’ choir in Oxford, Frideswide Voices. Publications include Music and Faith: Conversations in a PostSecular Age (2019); Sacred Music in Secular Society (2014); The Great Humanists (2011); and John Colet of St. Paul’s (2007). Sarah Bereza is the Minister of Music at the First Congregational Church of St. Louis. She produces resources for church staff and musicians, including the podcast Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza, all housed at sarahbereza.com. Her forthcoming book, Professional Christian: Integrating Personal Faith and Public Ministry in a Fragmented, Filtered World, helps leaders learn to be fully themselves as they live out the call to be “all things to all people.” She holds master’s and PhD degrees from Duke University, a master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, and a bachelor’s degree from Bob Jones University. Joshua Kalin Busman is Assistant Dean of the Esther G Maynor Honors College at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke where he also serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. He completed his PhD in Musicology in 2015 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his research focuses on music contemporary evangelical Christianity with particular attention to questions of worship, affect, and mass-media.

Contributors xi Marcel Cobussen is Full Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium). He studied jazz piano at the Conservatory of Rotterdam and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Cobussen is author of several books, among them The Field of Musical Improvisation (LUP 2017), Music and Ethics (Ashgate 2012/Routledge 2017, co-author Nanette Nielsen), and Thresholds. Rethinking Spirituality Through Music (Ashgate 2008). He is editor of The Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (Bloomsbury forthcoming, co-editor Michael Bull), The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (Routledge 2016, co-editors Barry Truax and Vincent Meelberg), and Resonanties. Verkenningen tussen kunsten en wetenschappen (LUP 2011). He is editor-in-chief of the open access online Journal of Sonic Studies (www.sonicstudies.org). His PhD dissertation Deconstruction in Music (Erasmus University Rotterdam 2002) is presented as an online website located at www.deconstruction-in-music.com. Maggi Dawn is a songwriter and musician. She is Professor of Theology at Durham University (UK), and Associate Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. Alexander Douglas i s an interdisciplinary and portfolio researcher working across aesthetics, phenomenology, ethnomusicology, mental health, and theological anthropology. An award-winning jazz pianist, his Bach-andspirituals solo piano project A Sacred Journey was premiered at the 2019 Three Choirs Festival and he is also Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Bach Collegium. He has taught gospel music at the Universities of York and Cambridge, theological aesthetics at the London School of Theology and is currently developing a research project on theology, worship, and mental health. Maren Haynes Marchesini, PhD, studies the intersections of music, popular culture, power, and masculinity in American Christianity. She currently teaches at Carroll College and directs music and worship at St Paul’s United Methodist Church in Helena, Montana. Bo kyung Blenda Im is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. Her interdisciplinary work, which deploys a combination of ethnographic, historical, and musicanalytical methods, addresses popular culture and religion in Korea and the Korean diaspora through the lenses of critical race theory, transnationalism, and diaspora. Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University (Boston). His research and teaching focus on music industries in North America, festivals, and the political economies of Christian music. His

xii  Contributors work has appeared in American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Popular Music, Twentieth-Century Music, and several edited volumes. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor of the volume Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021). Nathan Myrick is Assistant Professor of Church Music in the Townsend School of Music and Director of the Music and Human Flourishing Research Project (funded by a Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship with Funds provided by the Lilly Endowment, Inc.) at Mercer University. A graduate of Baylor University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Providence University College, his research focuses on musical activity and human flourishing in the context of Christian communities. He is the author of Music for Others: Care, Justice, and Relational Ethics in Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2021), and the author and series editor of “Music Matters” for Ethics Daily. His work has appeared in T ​ he Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Bloomsbury Academic, Liturgy, The Hymn, and others. Mark Porter studied at University College, Oxford, and King’s College, London, before completing his doctorate in ethnomusicology at City University, London in 2014. Following this, in 2015, he took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt. He is author of ​Contemporary Worship and Everyday Musical Lives (Routledge 2016) and Ecologies of Resonance in Christian Musicking (Oxford University Press 2020) and is co-founder and programme chair of the biennial Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives conference. Tanya Riches is a Senior Lecturer and the MTh Coordinator of Hillsong College. Her monograph Worship and Social Engagement in Urban Aboriginal-led Australian Pentecostal Congregations: (Re)imagining Identity in the Spirit (2019) was published by Brill. Marcell Silva Steuernagel, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Church Music and Director of the Master of Sacred Music Program at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. 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. Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg is affiliated to The Open University, UK’s Music Department. She has held previous affiliations with The Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia and the Goldsmiths, London

Contributors xiii Music, Mind and Brain Centre in their Psychology Department. Her research interests include Australian Aboriginal Christian choral singing, applied research, research ethics and responsible open scholarly communications. She has published numerous articles and book chapters as well as the co-edited the Routledge volume Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide (2018). Muriel is also a Senior Research Impact and Knowledge Exchange Manager at The Open University, UK. Tamisha A Tyler i s a PhD Candidate in Theology and Culture and currently serves as Co-Executive Director of ARC: Art | Religion | Culture. Her work focuses on the intersection of theology, Black studies, and literature. Her latest project focuses on the religious themes in the work of Octavia Butler. Jeff R Warren, P hD is interim Chief Academic Officer and Professor of Music and Humanities at Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia. His book Music and Ethical Responsibility (Cambridge University Press) examines the ethical implications of everyday musical experiences. Current research projects include musical multimedia and mountain biking culture, Christian congregational music, and the relationship between music, politics, and phenomenology using post1968 Paris as a case study. His creative work includes sound recording, sound installations, and performance on double and electric bass. More at jeffrwarren.wordpress.com.

Introduction: music and ethics in contemporary Christianity Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick

As studies of Christian musicking as participatory activity have developed over the course of recent years (Porter 2014), questions of ethics have often been present towards the margins of this scholarship. In asking how communities function, what their values are, and why they do what they do, ethical questions are increasingly implied within scholarly investigation. Through work on Christian congregational music in particular (Ingalls, Landau and Wagner 2013), a wide range of communities and dynamics have been opened up to investigation and, with this, a wide range of lived-situations operating according to a broad range of ethical assumptions and ethical entailments. Despite the frequent presence of  these ethical questions, either through the moral values of communities themselves, or through the questions which scholars ask as to the functioning of these communities, explicit attention to such issues has yet to become a major theme within such studies. This volume aims to address this lacuna by bringing together a range of perspectives on the ethics of Christian musicking, with a focus on music as an ethical practice, ­particularly as it relates to contemporary religious and spiritual communities. The collection can be outlined with reference to three keywords from the title: Ethics: As recent volumes by Cobussen and Nielsen (2012), Hesmondhalgh (2013), Warren (2014), Rommen (2007), Porter (2016), and others have highlighted, as music becomes bound up with human activities and experiences it takes on a range of ethical dimensions. While questions of ethics and aesthetics are often held at something of a distance in contemporary academic discourse, in reality music is bound up with questions of values, significance, good, bad, right, wrong, virtue, vice, harm, flourishing, character, care, justice, and other associated concepts right from the moment it begins. The ethical concerns that it touches on are numerous and diverse, and lend themselves to a variety of approaches. As such, this volume brings together a range of perspectives from different authors, shedding light on the topic from a variety of different

2  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick standpoints, each reflecting their own particular interests and specialisms so as to shed as much light as possible on a wide and complex field. Christian: This volume’s work on music and ethics is distinctive primarily through its focus on musicking within a particular set of religious traditions. Religious and spiritual concerns always bring with them their own ethical entailments, norms, and practices— often drawing ethical concerns to the fore in a way that differs from other musical contexts. Traditions have inbuilt values and convictions, and religious communities have their own sets of ethical entailments, all of which are in a constant process of negotiation and contestation. Reflecting on these themes is important not only from an academic perspective, for those seeking understanding, but for communities themselves as they reflect upon their practices, challenges, and experiences in the contemporary world. Musicking: In common with much recent work within studies of music, the volume looks at the intersection of music, ethics, and religion not through an abstraction of music away from processes of performance, engagement, and negotiation, but through the ways in which it is embedded and constituted within them (Small 1998). In doing so, ethics is not an abstract theoretical concept imposed at a distance to human life and action, but constantly immanent in the undertakings of individuals, groups, and communities.1 In bringing together ethics, music, and religion, this collection is situated at a potent and multifaceted thematic intersection, which touches on issues of crucial importance in a world where communities negotiate ever-more complex cultural, religious, and aesthetic realities.

Traditions of thought The relationship between musical activity and ethical significance occupies long traditions of thought and reflection both within Christianity and beyond. From concerns regarding music and the passions in early Christian writings through to moral panics regarding rock music in the 20th century, Christians have often gravitated to the view that music can, in some way, become morally weighted, building a range of normative practices and prescriptions upon particular modes of ethical judgment (see e.g. McKinnon 1987, Nekola 2009). In particular, alongside a regard for the positive virtues of certain kinds of musical activity in nourishing the soul or drawing individuals to God, there has been frequent anxiety through much of Christian history that certain forms of music might, in some sense, exert a bad moral influence, causing Christians to feel and behave in ways which might lead them astray—whether that be through the allure and power of its aesthetic beauty, its ability to stir particular emotions, moods and

Introduction 3 passions, or its association with bodily movement. These views have often been deployed somewhat strategically in relation to different conflicts and situations in which Christian worshippers have found themselves, with particular ethical judgments becoming significant as and when they can be deployed against a religious or cultural other from which particular Christian communities seek to distance themselves. As such, ethical discourse has often stood in close relation to political negotiation, on the one hand, and relational power negotiation, on the other. Some of these traditions, it is fair to say, are more in line with prevailing patterns of contemporary thought than others. The more-ascetic strands of Christian ethical thought regarding music can, for those not immersed in such traditions, sometimes feel hard to take seriously when popular musical expressions have become a normal part of everyday life. Indeed, the idea that particular kinds of music have inherent moral weight becomes evermore difficult to countenance as societal musical patterns and experiences diversify in ever-more multifarious ways. Whereas it is possible to imagine more-uniform cultural groupings in which musical forms have agreed upon significance and weight, such a situation is not characteristic of a highly networked global society in which cultural flows lead to multiple competing systems of meaning-making and evaluation within even the smallest worshipping communities. Indeed, even within Christianity, traditions emphasizing music’s moral weight have to be understood alongside strands of thought which do precisely the opposite (Nekola 2009, Ingalls 2018), which deny music any ethical significance either as a neutral medium or as a purely aesthetic form, as something largely independent of and incidental to core Christian projects, whether those be framed in terms of doctrinal truth, the inner heart of the believer, or the actions which believers are called to embody in the world around them. In the face of highly visible Christian discourses around morality which can focus on issues such as racial [in]equality, abortion, war, sexuality, or euthanasia, it can sometimes seem that music is, at best, a marginal concern to Christian projects in comparison to such weighty themes. Indeed, this is perhaps an easier route for many to take, to view music as essentially amoral as a result of its seemingly harmless nature. However, such narratives can face equally significant hurdles when the sheer diversity of perspectives on the matter are considered. While wanting to take existing traditions of ethical thought seriously, this volume is not situated entirely inside of established Christian ethical traditions surrounding music. These do indeed become important at varying points throughout the volume, and the editors do not set out to dismiss such teachings out of hand. However, we do not seek simply to re-repeat church teachings of a given tradition, but rather to enter into critical dialogue with them. Thus, we understand that music is neither ethically neutral nor inherently morally loaded in one particular fashion. Rather, it is able to take on a variety of different ethical significance as part of a variety

4  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick of different musical activities. This is a stance which takes both trains of thought seriously, but neither as absolute. In accordance with long traditions of Christian thought, music can have moral weight—but the nature of that weight can no longer be taken for granted. In accordance with competing traditions which allow music a freedom from particular assumptions of ethical worth, we acknowledge music’s flexibility and ability to escape particular sets of ethical assumptions; but this freedom does not allow it to escape ethical considerations altogether; rather, we insist upon their contingency. With this move beyond a relatively constrained set of musico-ethical intersections, other streams of (Christian or other-than-Christian) ethics can also be brought more to bear on music, particularly, perhaps, the imperative to attend to matters of social justice. In acknowledging a degree of flexibility, a door is opened up to a broader range of ethical frameworks; ethical modes of consideration that have developed in situations other than Christian devotional practice can also be brought to bear, just as modes of music, architecture, or language which have developed elsewhere nevertheless find a role within those worshipping practices themselves. Such considerations cannot always be imposed upon the communities themselves as necessarily determinative of practice; but rather, it is a key contention of the authors that the ethical implications of Christian musical activity need, at the start of the 21st century, once again to undergo new reflection in light both of the changing world in which this musical activity takes place, and, in light of the changing understandings of what music is and does, a shift which inevitably brings a different variety of concerns to the fore. Indeed, not only music but ethics has evolved, as the range of ethical concerns with which we have to grapple in a contemporary societal context bring issues to the fore that may not have been prominent concerns at other points in time. Likewise, the nature and form of Christian devotion and community is constantly taking on new forms, which read themselves back into the broader social settings they inhabit, altering existing forms and provoking new modes of thinking and musicking. This dialectical interplay of multiple poles results in something resembling a rhizomatic matrix of dynamic and diverging expressions of musicking in, around, and because of, Christian communities.

Recent turns to ethics This book is, in part, an outworking of broader scholarly trends that have emerged over the past couple of decades in response to this evolving understanding of musical meaning within glocal contexts. While professional associations such as the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) have increasingly emphasized the importance of ethics for musical researchers, particularly as a result of the need to engage with institutional processes of ethical review, 2 in recent

Introduction 5 years, several scholars have also turned to questions of ethics within studies of music more broadly. In both contrast and complement to traditions within Christianity, recent scholarship has sought to interrogate music’s ethical potential in new ways, emphasizing the significance of the diverse ways in which music is employed in relation to different situations and structures. As music studies have increasingly broadened out to take in a wider variety of social and cultural concerns, the ethical dimensions of musical activity have become more obvious points of reflection. One of the first authors to do this was Kathleen Higgins (2011 [1991]). Higgins insists on the need to consider music as it takes on roles within our lives and experience, and ethics in terms not just of moral dilemma but of virtue and value. Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen’s collaborative work (2012) serves as another important milestone in bringing a renewed focus on ethics to musicological attention and in highlighting some of the potential avenues which scholars might wish to explore when seeking to reflect ethically upon musical practices and experiences in the world we find around us. In drawing attention to categories of listening, discourse, interaction, affect, voice, and engagement, Cobussen and Nielsen locate questions of musical ethics in the processes of interaction that occur during musical performance. David Hesmondhalgh (2013) refrains from foregrounding ethical terminology too strongly in his account of Why Music Matters; however in discussing the value of music and its relationship to human flourishing, his work is full of ethical themes. Rather than focusing on interaction, he examines the different ways in which music contributes to private and public realms of life, particularly in relation to affective experience. He emphasizes the value of particular musical practices to individuals and to society more generally and, in doing so, seeks to retrieve an account of music’s importance from those who believe music and the arts to be of marginal interest to broader societal interests. Hesmondhalgh’s title implicitly raises the concern that there are many who might believe that music doesn’t matter, not so much because they don’t enjoy it, but because individual and societal conceptions of worth are often focused elsewhere. In complement to the work of other authors, Jeff R Warren (2014) has pursued one particular interactional avenue through his focus on the responsibilities to other individuals that arise through musical activity, highlighting the crucial role that relationships have to play whenever music takes place. Crucially, in foregrounding the role of responsibility, he pushes away from ethics simply as a matter of abstract reflection and moves into a category in which it is hard not to take seriously the implied consequences of ethical reflection for practical engagement. For Warren, “people bump into other people in the world, and have to make decisions about how to respond. Ethics ensues. Music bumps into people, and sometimes is the medium through which people bump into others.” (2017, 33). It is through concrete interactions with other people and other things that ethical practice emerges.

6  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick It is a consequence of living in the world and the almost-inevitable consequences of doing so. These varying accounts all serve, in a variety of different ways, to redress a lack of attention to crucial ethical dimensions of musical activity that has emerged precisely through a historical failure to understand music as activity. Rich ethical discussion emerges much less-easily from attention to musical objects than from attention to human beings; however, once the argument has been made that we can consider music’s ethical significance, and that there might be particular ways in which we can do so, there remains a further task to pursue—that of considering this ethical dimension within the variety of situations in which we work on music. Indeed, this is an essential step once music’s ethical significance is acknowledged, because it is in this attention to particular situations that we can begin to develop an understanding of musical ethics precisely as music becomes part of the world around us.

A renewed ethics of Christian musicking While a renewed attention to the ethical has begun to take shape within music studies more generally, work to explore such re-thought ethical frameworks in relation to Christian musicking is only just beginning. Nevertheless, as studies of Christian musicking have moved to incorporate the experiences, agencies, and relationships of congregations (Ingalls, Landau and Wagner 2013), ethical questions have become implicit in new ways in a range of recent research—how do communities negotiate questions of value in music? How are processes of encounter with a variety of different others negotiated through musical activity? What responsibilities arise within musical communities? Within studies of Christian musicking the work of Timothy Rommen, in particular, has served to put ethics on the agenda for many recent scholars. For Rommen, ethics and music began to connect, within his fieldwork, as communities develop a variety of potentially competing morally laden discourses around particular styles of music and their associated meaning and value. One of the key achievements of Rommen’s work is in pluralizing Christian musical ethics so that rather than being understood as a unitary proscriptive phenomenon it becomes clear that different Christian groups develop their own particular and contingent ethical evaluations in relation to a range of different phenomena and different Christian value-systems. This work has been picked up by a number of different scholars. Monique Ingalls, for example, counterposes Rommen’s work with Charles Taylor’s ethics of authenticity, focusing on how participants and organizers conceive of ethical relationships between the individual, community, and God during worship (2018, 46–49). Ethics, for Ingalls, is about the relationships which participants are led to aspire to in different musical communities and the imperatives, which shape their engagement

Introduction 7 in worship. These are shaped by different theological discourses and relate to the ways in which different styles are performed as well as the basic models according to which different, contrasting Christian musical communities function. Jeffers Engelhardt, in a similar manner, has connected Rommen’s work with the imperative in Orthodox Christian traditions to sing in the right way (2014, 13), drawing attention to the connection between right singing and right belief in the context of communities which themselves sustain a particular way of living. Jonathan Dueck, meanwhile (2017), brings Rommen’s work into discussion of ecumenical questions of conflict and identity within Canadian Mennonite communities, and numerous other authors have referenced Rommen’s coinages in order to pay tribute to the ethical negotiations implied in the practices which they are studying. The editors, likewise, have both built upon these foundations in different ways in their own work on ethics and Christian musicking. Having spent time grappling with the different experiences of worshippers in his own work with congregations and in attempting to think about the nature of justice within Christian musical communities, Mark Porter (2016) has used the foundations of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics in order to argue that music takes on ethical significance within Christian communities as it becomes bound up with the experiences of different congregation members, and as they attribute different value and meaning to it in their experience as parts of broader communities. He argues that the ways in which these different experiences relate to and are (or aren’t) allowed to shape communities’ understandings and models of worship can be a crucial ethical juncture which exposes the ethical tensions inherent in bringing diverse sets of individuals into collective processes of musical participation. Porter’s description of an ethical cosmopolitanism presents a vision of communal ethics shaped by the diverse movements and identities of individuals in contemporary society, offering an ethics of community built upon a constant process of negotiation between individual participants and communal practices. Nathan Myrick (2021), meanwhile, has gone further than this in proposing a particular ethical framework for evaluating the musical activity of Christian communities. Myrick has suggested the applicability of a care ethics oriented towards restorative justice to Christian musical activity, enumerating a number of different ways that responsibilities to others might arise in the course of devotional musical practices. In highlighting the relational ontology of musicking in Christian communities, he argues that musical worship is ethical when it cares, that is, when it preserves people in, and restores them to, just relationships with each other. While the editors have foregrounded ethics explicitly and intentionally within their work, as already asserted, we also believe both that similar questions are implicit within a much broader range of recent work on Christian musicking, and that these implications deserve to be drawn

8  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick out at greater length. In the first volume of this series, Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner frame their collection in terms of three categories—performance, identity, and experience. Each of these categories, while not necessarily ethical in and of itself, provides a potential springboard into a variety of different ethical concerns. Performance is the arena in which practices, activities, and interactions begin to take shape, and it is this situation of interacting human beings which begins to put ethical questions back onto the agenda as we begin to take it seriously once more as a crucial realm of research and exploration. Identity, likewise, very quickly becomes bound up with ethics as soon as the relationship between different individuals and groups becomes a focus for exploration. The extent to which different identities are constructed, affirmed, contested, welcomed, renegotiated or rejected in and through music is a realm of ethical concern precisely because it raises questions of how different kinds of people are treated when difference brings automatic relations of solidarity into question. Experience is a category, which almost always comes with an evaluative element. Experiences are rarely neutral, but are something which individuals can understand (or remember bodily) as positive or negative in a variety of different ways, which they evaluate according to a variety of values and criteria which are important to them, and which offer them various affordances which connect to broader life-­ projects and goals. To reflect upon ethics and music, then, is to reflect upon the implications of musical activity as it becomes significant within the lives and experiences of individuals and communities; it is to take seriously and pay attention to a complex dimension of these activities as value and norms are negotiated and performed, and as those things and relationships which, in some way, become implicated in physical, social and spiritual performance.

Ethics in a cosmopolitan era Our expectations of performance, identity, and experience are in a process of constant evolution as musical activity, social, cultural, and political reality are in a seemingly continual state of flux. Alongside the evolving dynamics of contemporary scholarship, the constantly evolving condition of the world itself also demands a renewed reflection upon ethics and Christian musicking, and leads us to draw together a book which both has some sense of resonance with previous traditions of reflection around ethics and Christian musicking and which, nevertheless, says things which might not have been said before. Following from Porter’s existing research, one particularly important thread to trace throughout the volume is that of a contemporary cosmopolitan condition and the attendant ethical negotiations which this requires. This has to do with both the trans-national movements and flows which are increasingly present in our everyday interactions, whether through different individuals that we encounter, through

Introduction 9 products that we consume or through songs that we sing, and the internal diversity that these flows help to create within many of the social, musical, and spiritual constellations which we inhabit. Cosmopolitanism is a contested concept both in relation to contemporary societies and in relation to Christianity. We can trace increasing political polarization between cosmopolitan and localist impulses in political contestations and, as Etienne de Villiers writes, “‘Cosmopolitanism’ belongs to a set of concepts, including ‘libertarianism’ and ‘communism’, which are mostly used by theologians in a negative sense” (2014, 161). It is a concept which often draws to mind allegiances felt to be in competition with more-pressing local, national or spiritual priorities. Nevertheless, even without idealizing the concept as one which is to be aspired to, it is possible to describe the contemporary condition of the world as one which has slowly evolved towards a more-cosmopolitan condition. In the words of Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitanism has ceased to be merely a controversial rational idea; in however distorted a form, it has left the realm of philosophical castles in the air and has entered reality” (2006, 2). What does this cosmopolitan condition mean? To follow Beck one step further, “The cosmopolitan outlook means that, in a world of global crises and dangers produced by civilization, the old differentiations between internal and external, national and international, us and them, lose their validity and a new cosmopolitan realism becomes essential to survival” (2006, 14). This is equally the case with musical practices (both interpersonal and communal) as with political negotiations. It is no longer easy to juxtapose a particular form or style of music belonging to the church as something essentially other from music which occurs outside of that context, neither is it possible to isolate particular musical genres or practices as belonging purely to one location or culture, regardless of the other musical flows, distinctions, and cross-fertilizations in which they participate. In relation to the particular themes of this book, this means that the musical ethics of contemporary Christian communities are often required to come into negotiation with a broad range of values, cultural forms, and actors at varying levels of distance to those centered upon the worshipping community itself. They find ways of becoming hospitable to difference, make choices and position themselves in relation to a range of near and distant others, creating particular alliances on a musical stage which always transcends in some way the internal logic of the worship gathering itself. It is, therefore, precisely within these complex and multifaceted encounters that a range of different ethical negotiations begins to take place. Whether or not cosmopolitan ethical values themselves are adopted or adapted in some way, musical ethics at the start of the 21st century are nevertheless often shaped by the increasing presence of a cosmopolitan societal condition. These have to be negotiated theologically and spiritually in particular ways, which acknowledge that the connection between Christian faith, and such a condition, while important to negotiate, is not always obvious

10  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick or straightforward. Within the pages of this volume, (while contributors rarely reference cosmopolitan dynamics directly) it quickly becomes clear just how pervasive these concerns can become. Haynes Marchesini, Riches and Douglas, Im, and Swijghuisen Reigersberg all focus directly on the negotiations of difference and diversity that come as the result of the plural and interconnected relationships which individuals and communities attempt to navigate in the contemporary world. Silva Steuernagel highlights the challenges to particular values which come about in relation to geographical diversity, and Warren draws in dynamics of global circulation and the way in which different globally circulating sonic practices enable different relationships to the other. Even in chapters which focus less-directly on these themes, there is a continual awareness that each community is able to adopt and negotiate particular priorities in relation to a variety of either immediate or non-local, internal, or external others. It is this ever-present, geographically varied plurality that forms the context in relation to which different options become available, different meanings and values take shape, and different decisions are made. The assumption that a particular worshipping community contains only members who belong wholly within its bounds, who are shaped according to the same set of ideals, and who possess no competing or concurrent allegiances and experiences may never have been an accurate description of the world, but now, more than ever, it is an ideal which struggles to gain a foothold in our experiences of the communities around us. On a musical level, it is an idea which is almost laughable, when anyone with an internet connection can experience almost any imaginable genre of music recorded or influenced by different nationalities, beliefs, values, experiences, and spiritualities with the touch of a finger. It is precisely this which can make first-century descriptions of Christian musical ethics sound so odd to a twenty-first-century ear. The certainty as to the moral effects of particular kinds of musical engagement which so often seems to form their main backdrop is only possible where there is a background condition of shared meaning stemming from particular cultural givens which result from a sense of shared formation and experience. When the meaning of particular musical practices is tightly bound up with the particular group contexts in which they are enacted they are less likely to be heard or re-used for a range of other purposes by a range of different others beyond the bounds of that particular enactment. Despite, or perhaps even as a consequence of, the exponential varieties of musical forms, practices, and the values that inhere to these as the contexts for meaning-making, and which are accessible to individuals according to their own needs and preferences, the reality of injustice and perhaps even musical violence persists for many Christian communities. Thinking in more concrete terms, new ethical questions emerge from the cosmopolitan contexts in which many communities are gathered; how is musical appropriation managed in light of the often extreme

Introduction 11 and intense power differentials that are even now emerging in contemporary consciousnesses? How might the often-invisible machinations of music industry be negotiated faithfully for cosmopolitan Christians? A significant compounding factor in such thinking is the functional value of “authenticity” in musical worship. For many, authenticity means honesty and integrity together with the vulnerability of making one’s self known, inclusive of the postures and attitudes with which one engages ideas and subjectivities with honesty. If authenticity means bringing the breadth and depth of one’s being to bear on a given topic—and holding firmly to one’s convictions in spite of evidence or opposition—then it necessarily involves disagreement and dissent. The ability to value or even tolerate such authentic dissenting postures is compromised by the competing valuation of agreement; we need to decide how much dissent we will tolerate while still maintaining community with others. It is precisely here that we are reminded that our ethical responsibilities are not to a disembodied concept of music, nor to an abstract system of thought or subjectivity; but rather to the embodied human other who is increasingly made immanent through the ever-evolving glocal and cosmopolitan networks human beings inhabit and generate through their inhabiting. This presence in distance or proximity recurs in a relational refrain; decentering “music” as a metaphysical reality that must be served allows for people to be re-centered as the focal points of ethical reflection. Cosmopolitan realities remind us that it is neither “this music” nor “that music” which configures ethical experiences or responses, but rather that volition and intentionality converge in/as human agency.

The chapters The contributors to this volume bring with them a range of concerns and approaches. Some come from a philosophical background, some from a theological, and some from an (ethno)musicological tradition. For some these questions are bound up with their own practices and experiences in worshipping communities, for others these approaches are bound up with no such involvement. It is our conviction, in these considerations, that both emic and etic voices, and all shades in between, need to be taken seriously, bringing, as they each do, the ability to observe and notice things not always so immediately present to or graspable from other subject positions. All chapters focus, in some way, on current communities and practices, as the most-immediate arena of ethical concern. These are the arena in which ethical priorities are currently being negotiated and, indeed, the arena in which ethics could be considered, above all, in some way to matter. The chapters cohere into four distinct, although overlapping, thematic subsections in the book according to the different approaches adopted.

12  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick The body and beyond Relationships between the mind, the body, and the material have been at the heart of Christian prescriptions surrounding music from the very beginning. Chapters in this first section therefore cover the trajectories that these have taken through longer Christian processes of evolution and adaptation, the nature of such negotiations in recent situations, and the ways that a broader acknowledgment of the material might contribute to a more-adequate ethical perspective. Marcel Silva Steuernagel emphasizes the constraint that traditional Christian ethics of musical bodies place on worshippers, drawing particular attention to the potential inadequacy of these models when faced with contemporary musical patterns that take place well beyond the constraints of Euro–American musical models. He argues that we have good reason to go beyond the constraints of these models, and that a new ethics of the musical body may be necessitated in order to do justice to the varying situations in which Christian musicking now takes place. Marcel Cobussen, meanwhile, is concerned with the potential for Christian sonic practices to do justice to a world of activity that extends well beyond the limits of human bodies. He suggests ways in which the silent practice of a Carthusian monastery can help to show a sonic ethics of relationships in which the sounds of everyday life help to situate the self in a wider ecology of interdependence and in which qualities of care and humility come most-closely into view. Bo kyung Blenda Im is concerned with the delay that can occur between musical hearing and face-to-face encounter when hearing music that originates far away, drawing attention to the ethical space that this can open up for the renegotiation of racial and colonial power in Korean practices of gospel music. Each of these chapters steers us in a different direction: Silva Steuernagel takes us towards the body, and Cobussen beyond it, while Im works in the space between bodily presence and absence. Within Christian musicking bodies take on ethical significance not simply as self-contained entities, but as they come into interaction with each other and the values and things that configure their being. Fulfilling responsibilities and negotiating values Responsibility to others, or the duty to fulfil particular ethical imperatives, stands at the heart of a great many ethical considerations. Chapters in this second section consider some of the different responsibilities and imperatives that are negotiated in different settings, considering not just the notion of responsibility, but the tensions that are felt when particular ethical imperatives stand in potential conflict with one-another. Jeff R Warren focuses in on particular sonic qualities of contemporary Christian worship music, exploring the way in which a particular variety of reverb works on us and, in doing so, shapes the ways in which we relate and respond to one-another

Introduction 13 in times of worship. In shaping the level at which we interact, it also shapes the way in which we perform our responsibilities to others, thereby becoming a crucial part of ethical negotiations within different worshipping communities. Josh Busman, meanwhile, focuses on tensions between different ethical imperatives within recent evangelical worship music, as musicians are urged to keep their distance from conspicuous displays of technical skill in order to emphasize their role as amateurs, performing sincerely and authentically whilst also producing performances polished enough so as to retreat from the congregations’ awareness when approaching God in worship. Andrew Mall turns in the direction of capital, examining the relationship between economic dynamics and progressive ethical imperatives at the outdoor summer festival Wild Goose. Mall describes the festival’s creation of an alternative to the broader Christian music marketplace as a vision of hope, while lamenting the limited reach of this vision until economic forces align to make progressive ethical practices a viable business enterprise for a wider range of festivals and companies. Maggi Dawn, in closing off this section, focuses not on particular events or experiences but on musical texts, drawing out the different responsibilities that arise in adapting hymn and song texts for different congregational groups. Dawn charts some of the numerous competing demands that need to be done justice to when adapting (or refraining from adapting) particular songs for the use of contemporary worshipping communities, and in doing so sheds new light on debates frequently encountered in the use of hymn adaptations. Identity and encounter Encounter between different cultural, social, or racial groups can very quickly become ethically charged through the negotiation of different value-systems, but also through the ways that the identity of the other is included, rejected, or acknowledged within different social groupings. Chapters in this third section offer perspectives on these encounters and negotiations. Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas focus on the extent to which global megachurch Hillsong is hospitable to a range of different racial identities within its worship, and, in particular, the ways that black and non-white attendees at the church negotiate their own identity and practice in relation to a predominantly white congregational identity. Emily Snider Andrews focuses on the relationship between experiences in the moment of worship and broader questions of lifestyle and social and political influence at Bethel Church in California. She draws attention to the ethical consequences of a lifestyle built upon divine encounter in worship, and describes some of the ethical critiques that have been leveled against Bethel’s views and influence. In doing so, she highlights the public contestation that can take place in the performance of particular ideals or values. Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg reflects on her own encounters as a choral facilitator with the Lutheran Aboriginal community of Hopevale, North

14  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick Queensland. She draws attention to questions of influence and response when negotiating reciprocal working relationships in which research and practice are combined. In doing so, she helps to build up a positive vision of applied research which is sensitive rather than manipulative, and which enhances wellbeing, mutual respect, and curiosity. Maren Haynes Marchesini also reflects upon her own experience of writing and practicing an ethical framework for music and worship, in her case as part of a dispersed community. Her chapter helps to paint a portrait of what it is like not simply to reflect on the ethics of Christian musical practices in prose, but to consciously implement ethical strategies in partnership with other individuals. Haynes Marchesini describes modes of deeply respectful engagement in situations of profound diversity, building an ethical model of accompaniment as a means of negotiating the challenges of community. Valuing the self Within Christian musical activity, the value of the self is subject to processes of negotiation and contestation. Christianity contains elements within it that draw attention both to negative and positive dimensions of the self and, at the same time, to their possible transformation in relation to the action, evaluation, and gift of God. The final section focuses on questions of individual worth, flourishing, and struggle. How is the value of the self-­ constructed within different settings, how is this opened up in and through music, and how is this contested between different ethical stances? Sarah Bereza focuses on the moral conceptions of the self which shape contemporary fundamentalist musical practices. She describes a fundamentalist suspicion of authentic self-expression which arises out of fundamentalist understandings of the human heart as a deceitful and morally doubtful source of inspiration. Beyond critique, however, Bereza describes what it looks like to create an alternative model of vocal performance, and musical practices which are the result of deep-felt moral conviction. Tamisha Tyler, in her chapter on Beyoncé Masses, develops a womanist ethics of Christian musicking, emphasizing the close relationship between epistemology and ontology and the power of music which comes from outside of congregational boundaries in articulating lived experience and doing justice to the lives of Black women. Tyler describes what it means to create a space for testimony and in doing so to experience fully embodied honor and love. Finally, Jonathan Arnold focuses closely on questions of human wellbeing, and on the potential for musical activity to provide space for human flourishing both on an individual and on more-communal levels of experience. In considering a Classical concert series during Lent, he contends that classical sacred music is still able to promote healing, well-being, and cohesion in contemporary society not just on a personal level but through further outworking in relation to social justice, bringing benefit not just to the self, but, through the opening up of compassion, to the other.

Introduction 15

Beyond the book The chapters printed within the pages of this book engage with profoundly practical situations which arise in the contemporary world, and they raise issues of profound relevance to contemporary congregations. Questions of ethics are rarely a matter of simply abstract consideration, and raise the question of how we might respond to them, in varying ways, in our own musical, social, spiritual, and religious practices. If Christian musicking is a realm of ethical negotiation—if, to follow David Hesmondhalgh (2013), this musical activity is something that matters—then, ultimately, it has to be treated as such. To consider the ethical implications of particular activities means not just to describe them as they are, but to consider how they should be. For researchers, this often means that simple description is not enough but, rather, that, in writing about particular ethical topics in the communities by which we are surrounded, we are dealing with questions that are bound up with potential questions of value and evaluation, and which, if taken seriously, will have potential implications for those communities. As such, it is better to acknowledge these implications and to reflect upon them than to leave them unreflectively present. For practitioners and those in positions of pastoral responsibility, meanwhile, this means, perhaps, stepping back from established routines and practices in order to reflect upon the values they embody, the individuals who encounter them, and on the tensions between norms, practices, and experience, which are inevitably present within many musical activities. An ethical approach to practice is one that is self-conscious of its various ethical dimensions, and which seeks to develop practices going forward that are informed by this awareness. Ethics is by no means always a straightforward process, and such practice may involve a variety of different trade-offs. These do not, however, necessitate a complete abandonment of ethical consideration, but rather demand a nuanced rather than completely monolithic response. While research and practice often come into contact through a variety of ad hoc and serendipitous routes, as they have for many contributors to this volume, this contact is also institutionalized within different societal structures which seek explicitly to enable such convergence. A crucial mediating environment between research on Christian musical activity and those who are active practitioners in this area is that of educational institutions, particularly those such as seminaries, which aim to provide instruction for those taking on pastoral responsibility in Christian communities. It is our hope that this book will provide some room for reflection for those going on to consider their own responsibilities in this arena. Music is an arena of profound ­pastoral importance within contemporary congregational environments, and it is the conviction of the editors that practical musical instruction needs to take place in the context of broader reflection regarding its role in the lives of both individuals and communities.

16  Mark Porter and Nathan Myrick While beginning to write this introduction, a tweet crossed the timeline of one of the editors urging those who read it to adopt more-ethical practices of Christian musicking through a boycott of Bethel Music. The tweeter found profound significance in the music that Bethel put out into the world, but found continued use of this music to be problematic due to Bethel’s support of conversion therapy for gay and lesbian individuals. Since using this music results in financial capital flowing back to support Bethel ministries, use of the music ended up supporting the continuation of practices to which the tweeter was firmly opposed. In the contemporary world, ethical opposition through corporate boycotts is a common response to the ethical failings of particular companies, and—to the extent that the contemporary Christian music industry has taken on the forms of corporate structures—it is natural that this has become one of the ethical responses available to individuals in negotiating the ethical musical landscape in which they find themselves. This kind of ethical engagement is new in the sense that it is a response to a specific corporate religious landscape which has emerged in the early decades of the 21st century. Just as our analysis of ethics undergoes evolution within the current music-spiritual landscape in which we find ourselves, so do the avenues of practical ethical response and engagement which are available to us. It is our hope that, in charting some of the changing terrain in which we find ourselves, that this book might also serve to open up the range of responses available on the ground. This is, as much as writing, a task of creativity, which requires sustained care and attention. It is a task which we commend both to ourselves and to others, as a part of a music scholarship which seeks not to abstract itself from the world around it, but to dive into the realities of contemporary musical activity and to engage them with the knowledge that they matter not just to the detached observer, but to those whose everyday lives are shaped by the realities which they enable.

Notes 1 In examining these themes, it is worth highlighting both the commonalities and distinctions to be made between ideas of Christian musicking and those of congregational music on which this book series is founded. Both Christian musicking and congregational music point to a similar range of activities, but each brings different nuances to the fore. The idea of congregational music has done important work in moving our gaze away from the specialized activity of smaller groups of musicians towards a focus on the experiences and activities of a much wider range of participants. This volume largely takes such a move for granted, having been more than adequately accounted for in the earlier volumes of the series. Rather, in speaking of Christian musicking, the volume seeks not to take particular forms of devotional community, or indeed the notion of community itself for granted, but instead to open up an already implicit space somewhat more intentionally, instead using Small’s term to point towards the broad constellations of actors and entities involved in musical activity.

Introduction 17 2 See their statements at https://bfe.org.uk/bfe-ethics-statement, https://www. ethnomusicology.org/page/EthicsStatement, and https://www.ethnomusicology. org/page/PS_IRB.

References Beck, Ulrich. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate. De Villiers, Etienne. 2014. “Christian and Cosmopolitan Ethics: Friends or Foes?” In Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public Sphere, edited by Maria Rovisco and Sebastian Kim. London: Routledge. Dueck, Jonathan. 2017. Congregational Music, Conflict, and Community. Congregational Music Studies Series. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Dueck, Jonathan. 2017. Congregational Music, Conflict and Community. New York: Routledge Publishing. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2014. Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2013. Why Music Matters. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. 2011. The Music of Our Lives. Lanham, Md.; Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Ingalls, Monique M, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. McKinnon, James W. 1987. Music in Early Christian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myrick, Nathan. 2021. Music for Others: Care, Justice, and Relational Ethics in Christian Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Nekola, Anna E. 2009. “Between This World and the Next: The Musical “Worship Wars” and Evangelical Ideology in the United States 1960–2005.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1 (2): 149–66. Porter, Mark. 2016. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. Abingdon: Routledge. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover; London: Wesleyan University Press of New England. Warren, Jeff R. 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warren, Jeff R. 2017. “Music Ethics Politics.” New Sound: International Journal of Music 50 (2): 25–41.

Part I

The body and beyond

1

Praise, politics, power Ethics of the body in Christian musicking Marcell Silva Steuernagel

It is 7:30 am on a Sunday morning in Waco, Texas. Coffee in hand, I make my way to a worship gig at a local church. Earlier that week, I logged onto Planningcenter.com to get a sense of the set’s vibe, and work through the solo bits. I know I am expected to play “like they do it on YouTube” instead of improvising, a significant departure from my church music experience in Brazil, where we are expected to add our own spin to material. No problem, this isn’t my first rodeo. I set up my amp, pedalboard, and guitars. After sound check, the worship leader talks us through the set, and we run through it. We retreat to the green room for donuts and more coffee, making light conversation. Ten minutes before the service, we gather for a quick prayer, stuff in our in-ear monitors, and head to the platform. A timer counts minutes and seconds until, finally, we launch into the first song. Everyone is on top of their parts. It sounds good. I start bobbing my head, a small movement that escalates into full bodily interaction with the music. This is how we make music in South America, how we interact with bandmates and congregation. I move with the music. I’m digging it. People respond by standing, and some raise their hands as they sing. I look to my right at the drummer in the plexiglass cage. He gives me a nod, as if to say: “Yeah, this feels good.” I look to my left and make eye contact with the bass player. As we lock eyes, I notice something is not right. He doesn’t nod, he doesn’t wink. He’s glaring, and suddenly it dawns on me: I’m moving way too much. The way I demonstrate my engagement with the music is too energetic, too bodily, for this particular flavor of Southern Baptists. I get the message and tone down my movements to replicate those of the bass player: closed eyes, maybe a head nod, and that’s it. The history of Western Christianity is fraught with tensions surrounding the musicking body. From the Patristic period, through the Enlightenment, and into its contemporary expressions, Christianity—particularly in the West—has attempted to erase the worshiping body. This chapter examines how the body ethics of these Christian traditions has shaped musicking

22  Marcell Silva Steuernagel practices of worshiping congregations around the world as a channel for praise, a platform for the negotiation of power, and a means to establish and perpetuate practices of embodiment. It is a historical account of how perspectives on the mind, the body (and the gap between them), and musicking have coalesced into a body ethics of worship in the Christian West. I use “worshiping body” in a broad sense, including physical gestures as well as the senses—both bodily senses and senses of meaning—of embodied identity that converge into practices of congregational musicking. Certain questions arise at this intersectional reading of music, ethics, and faith. How are ethics of the body inherited through tradition and combined with current developments to shape the way music is led, and participated in, in local contexts? What tensions arise from the consolidation of media networks on a global scale, on the one hand, and the search for localized expressions of church music, on the other hand? I focus especially on how Western perspectives on the worshiping body have crossed the dividing line of the twentieth century, a period of notable transformations in the landscape of the church. Events such as Vatican II and the rise of the Christian music industry, allied with an increased intensity of global cultural flows (Appadurai 1996, 27), have broken down or resisted pre-­established modes of negotiation and negation of the body in Christian worship. I am also interested in how these Western perspectives have crossed the dividing line of the Equator as the church moves from north to south. If ethical resonances are considered constantly immanent in the religious activity of individuals and groups, an examination of the body ethics of worshiping congregations must account for these developments. By analyzing contemporary realities of Christian musicking in light of the history of Western Christian thought, I tease out specific emphases of this tradition’s dealings with the musicking body and examine how they continue to influence the way Christians worldwide think about, and perform, their music in church.

Body, mind, and Christianity Early Christian thinkers, striving to carve a space for their belief system in the Greco–Roman world, were motivated by the need to articulate scriptural claims, settle disputes about the interpretation of these claims, and defend the burgeoning faith and its worldview from skeptical challenges, argues George Karamanolis (2013, 12). Within the world in which early Christianity was immersed, Hellenistic thought was central to understanding the dynamic between soul and body. Early Christian thinkers shared “the generally agreed thesis among philosophers in antiquity that animals, including man, consist of soul (psyche) and body” (181). While Christian thinkers inherited insights from surrounding philosophical systems, an underlying distinction separated their efforts from those of philosophers in late antiquity, whose goal was to “accommodate data from

Praise, politics, power 23 the sciences and make their positions philosophically more sophisticated.” Christian thinkers “had some rudimentary views in Scripture as their starting point” (Karamanolis 2013, 184) but also re-interpreted biblical passages that alluded to musicking through the lens of allegory and metaphor, weaving together musical and moral claims. Clement of Alexandria speaks of the “devious spells of syncopated tunes and of the plaintive rhythm of Carian music that corrupt morals by their sensual and effected style, and insidiously inflame the passions” (Clement of Alexandria Paedagogus, Book 2, Chapter 4 in Wood 1954, 130). Epiphanius of Salamis describes the flute as “a copy of the serpent” and points towards how the flute player mimics the reptile: “he throws his head back as he plays and bends it forward, he leans right and left like the serpent. (Epiphanius in Music 1998, 40). Therefore, if the world “throws its head back and bends it forward” in musicking, the Christian must not. Patristic thinkers responded to extravagant musicking with immobility, which fed back into this nascent theology. Such systematic silencing affected both instruments and body, severing the connections between piety and any movement, particularly movement with sensual connotations. Since such constructs relied on the Greek doctrine of ethos, Plato’s conservative attitude that “viewed continuity with long-established tradition as an unquestioned good” became ingrained into these Christian perspectives on musicking early on. In this scenario, “musical change and decay are at the root of deterioration and disintegration in the state” (Faulkner 1996, 40). While the church may not have embraced Plato’s views wholesale, it did inherit a notion of music as an agent in the formation of human character, preserving a healthy dose of suspicion towards its use, especially uses that deviated from tradition (Faulkner 1996, 47). Brian Wren argues that this suspicious attitude informed how “the early church acquired the increasingly powerful belief 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” (Wren 2000, 87). Today, says Wren, whatever gestures we do perform in worship, such as standing, sitting or kneeling, are constricted. When taking communion, “we take the tiniest portion of bread, wafer, juice, or wine, in the most disembodied manner possible, as if to say we’re having a meal, but not really drinking and eating” (Wren 2000, 87). Wren’s comment paints a clumsy picture of a Eucharist that, instead of being a celebration of the Incarnation, becomes an inconvenient detour into the world of the organic -and therefore sensuous and sinful -during the liturgy. The example serves as a portrait of the problematic nature of Christian worship’s dealings with the senses, in particular with those that cannot be detached from the body such as speaking and looking. Such claims shaped how devotees thought of themselves, their place in the world, and their expressions of worship. While I acknowledge that Christian worship around the world is varied, these specters have not

24  Marcell Silva Steuernagel ceased to haunt the worshiping body. Therefore, it is important to tease out the implications of this convoluted network of theological and moral views of the body, and claims about mousike and its companion arts. I identify here four emphases within Western Christian perspectives on the matter. The first is the emphasis on mind over body, and three others result from it: the emphasis on logos over eros, on stillness over ecstasy, and on male over female. Karamanolis reminds us of the distinction between two levels of virtue in the Christian tradition, one bodily and the other intellectual, that resulted in a valuation of the intellect above the composite of soul and body (2013, 227). Moreover, early rejection of instrumental music in worship led to vocal music becoming the prime mode of Christian musicking. This viewpoint flowed from Hellenistic into early Patristic thought, and from there to Calvin, to Descartes, to Newton, and shaped post-­Medieval ­conceptions of music in Europe. Daniel Chua highlights that, from the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European perspective, instrumental music had no sacred content; “it was explained, instead, by Newtonian physics and was experienced as physiological vibrations that could quite literally slacken one’s moral fibers.” Vocal music, on the other hand, “emanated from the inner sanctum of the human being; the alignment of word and tone provided clear and distinct concepts that signified the presence of the thinking ‘I am’ that was the moral identity of the Cartesian self.” This mechanistic understanding of the nature of sounds without words, according to which the body was a soulless machine with no divine spark, “purely material and dangerously secular” (Chua 2011, 146–7), illustrates how the two orders of musicking (instrumental and vocal) are connected to the distinction between two orders of human existence. Moreover, for Plato and his contemporaries, mousike “presumed the inseparable association of music and words” (Faulkner 1996, 39). Thus, not only is vocal music preeminent over instrumental music; text is also preeminent over sound in vocal music. As Mark Porter has pointed out, the study of church music has focused primarily on words as the vehicles of content, theology, and transformation in congregational musicking (2014). The notion is easily found in the twentieth-century church music literature. Lovelace and Rice argued that “while music and poetry are closely related, music will have an optimum impact only when it parallels the poetry and forms a perfect union with it” (1960, 20). Jeremy Begbie points out that “when Christians start talking about music, they love to change the subject: they speak about lyrics, texts, titles, and the musical sounds are often forgotten.” From this perspective, the sounds are erased and become “no more than a transparent varnish on the words, which alone carry content” (2007, 24). Such comment reflects this preference for the word as the main protagonist in the sound/word dyad, a hierarchy that has made it easier for Christian theologians and practitioners to “forget” the deep ways in which musicking engages the body.

Praise, politics, power 25 The problem is that the body is persistent. Even when it is ignored in theological discourse or moral codes, it still moves to and with the music. In fact, Begbie says, “it would seem that music’s first appeal (but not necessarily its last) is to the body, and certainly not to the ear alone. (…) Our bodies latch onto the perceived properties of the music–we sway our heads, snap our fingers, clap” (2007, 47). This persistence of the body was met, head on, with its suppression in different ways in Christian moral codes. From intellect over sense stems logos over eros, stillness over mobility and ecstasy, as preferred modes of Christian musicking. To illustrate, I turn to Dewey and Tufts’s Ethics (1908). While certainly dated, their work gives us a glimpse into a particular instance of how Greco–Roman concepts developed in Western thought. Dewey and Tufts trace the idea of temperance from the Greek sophrosyne through Roman temperantia, and from there, to Christian purity. The Greek sophrosyne is a blend of “the authority of reason with the force of appetite” (1908, 407). The Roman temperantia implies a moderation “of each act in a series by the thought of other and succeeding acts–keeping each in sequence with others in a whole” (406). This idea is then Christianized as purity. Thus, passion “is not so much something which disturbs the harmony of man’s nature, or which interrupts its orderliness, as it is something which defiles the purity of spiritual nature. It is the grossness, the contamination of appetite which is insisted upon, and temperance is the maintenance of the soul spotless and unsullied” (406–7). Such a concern with purity, with keeping the soul protected and the moral fiber intact, brings urgency of self-control. This is because of “the tendency of desire and passion so to engross attention as to destroy our sense of the other ends which have a claim upon us” (408). One is always under the menace of giving in to these passions: “love of excitement allures man from the path of reason, [and] fear of pain, dislike to hardship, and laborious effort, hold him back from entering it” (410). A “tug-of-war” emerges here in which modesty and temperance pull on one side, and the passions on the other. If one manages to enact self-­ control, which Dewey and Tufts characterize as the “negative phase” of temperance, then its positive consequence becomes possible: reverence. To reverently worship “attaches dignity to every act” (408), and the self is governed “free of adulteration” (410). Dewey and Tufts’s warning is that a step in the wrong direction may compromise the poise, the dignity, of a virtuous existence. Such a life is characterized by the opposites of passion: stillness, immobility, reverence. Musicking which might give pleasure, causing the head to move and the hips to sway, must be avoided because it is a threat. Ecstasy, even religious ecstasy, is therefore out of the question and the aspirations of Christian musicking become detached, controlled, and never trance-like or extravagant.1 Closely connected to this fear of ecstasy is the emphasis on male over female. Within the Patristic world and beyond it, the female essence was connected to the lower order of eros and passion, and the male essence to

26  Marcell Silva Steuernagel the higher order of intellect. This male essence was also defenseless against the corrupting allures of femininity. If male sexual desire was uncontrollable in this regard, it would be better to prevent its arousal; thus, “women were made to cover their bodies and restrict their movements to those areas deemed safe from male lust; such areas were often limited to the home, and even to parts of the home in some societies” (Gudorf 2013, 102). Similarly, in order to avoid falling prey to the allure of Dyonysian sounds, the Christian ear must remain separated from music that might compromise the virtue of pious living. As Heidi Epstein argues, music’s mandatory subservience to the Logos (metaphorically) places it in the inferior, much maligned position of “body” in traditional patriarchal meaning systems. As Body, music’s erotic powers must be spiritually sublimated. Contemporary theologies of music continue to rely uncritically upon classical formulations of music’s theological significance without questioning how the latter functioned as regulative ideals that occasioned very harmful forms of musical and social censorship. (Epstein 2004, 26) This ordering of male over female, mind over body, that Epstein points to is found already in the New Testament, particularly in Paul’s opinions about marriage (Karamanolis 2013, 228). Fear of the female and fear of the body, along with the allures of the enjoyment of its senses—including the enjoyment of music—coalesced into Christian moral and ethical codes. Such codes surface in commentary against dancing in church, or even modes of musicking that might exacerbate bodily responses, such as in Epiphanius’s portrait of the flute player, who writhes sensually when playing an instrument connected to evil. More recently, the body language of rock has been dubbed a “discourse of barbarism” (Makujina 2000, 51). Musicking practices such as hand-clapping and dancing have been condemned because they are “fleshly responses” that indicate self-centered musicking (Johansson 1992, 73). Makujina and Johansson are not Patristic writers, but recent examples of the same trope echoing in conservative Christian circles: the ecstatic body is morally depraved, illicitly sexual, barbaric, pleasurable, fleshly, and infantile. Such lower orders of response to music are contrasted with the virtuous, reverent, humble, chaste, and holy detachedness of legitimate responses to music. This separation is further expressed in terms of stillness over ecstasy. Why? Because, if one is more compelled to “moving, swaying, clapping, than listening to the lyrics, [the music] is dangerous” (Wheaton 2000, 62); because “music that emphasizes rhythm over the other two elements of music is a style that appeals primarily to the flesh or the body. That which appeals to the flesh is not that with which God is pleased” (Lynch 1999, 28). From Church Fathers to contemporary expressions, the mind/body gap and

Praise, politics, power 27 its corollary bipolarities created what Chua calls a musical “split personality.” In the eighteenth century, this split was epitomized “by Descartes’ cogitating ego, which divided its identity from the flesh as a disembodied mind (Chua 2011, 146).

From church fathers to Christendom’s colonialism: problems in musicking body ethics The history of Christendom “has been inextricably bound up with that of Europe and European-derived civilizations oversees, above all in North America” (Jenkins 2011, 1). Ideas about the musicking body were folded into the Western Christian worldview and enforced in different ways throughout Christendom. Starting with the Greco–Roman paradigm of godlike immobility, Elochukwu Uzukwu traces these patterns through Christian ideas of reverence, modesty, and piety, and into a profound aversion to the commotio carnis in worship. He argues that “the inculturation of Christianity in the West popularized this [Greco–Roman] cultural type and deeply influenced further developments of the attitude to the body and gestures” (1997, 7). Especially within regions that inherited the intellectual tradition of Christendom—the North Atlantic—early Christian conceptualizations of the dangers of the worshiping body presented spiritual hazards for musicking Christians, caught as they were between the compelling bodily invitations of musicking, on the one hand, and threats of eternal damnation, on the other hand. As the body ethics of European Christianity made its way into the North American Colonies through Protestant movements of migration, it created new reverberations. According to Peter Gardella, Christians in America were groomed under what he calls “Protestant sympathies.” Even into the first half of the nineteenth century, and even in the case of historically liturgical denominations, American churches “tended to be very plain” (2016, 33). He describes a church culture in which very few Americans had heard organs in church, or “seen a painting or sculpture in any context, Christian or secular” (33). In contrast, Catholic attempts at “pomp and beauty” in the new world seemed to these Americans “outlandish and immoral,” because “Protestants felt certain that this kind of ecstasy had nothing to do with Christian faith” (33). For American Protestants, the entrapments of Catholic worship—vestments, incense, and all—were idolatrous and Catholicism was “an insidious falsification, a corruption of the Gospel by collusion with the fallen nature from which true Christianity delivered people” (33–4). Gardella’s account illustrates how views about the body and the senses crystallized across the historical-denominational spectrum. In a broad sense, Western Christianity’s ethics straightjackets the body, which serves as the outward indicator of inward, spiritual realities. One might enjoy the music, but should not wear that enjoyment on the body. 2

28  Marcell Silva Steuernagel On both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide, the body ethics of Western Christianity was propagated through missionary activity, casting musicking webs beyond geographical or theological boundaries. As the Catholic Church launched into its missio dei, 3 it forced the liturgical and musical trappings of its worship upon other societies and established a varied, but global, liturgical network. Similarly, as Protestant missionaries worked abroad, they propagated their traditions of Christian musicking (see Blenda Im’s discussion of musical style, ethics, and racial formation in this volume). These missionaries spread across the globe, and their connections to their home churches “kept up, and often still do, many formal appearances of the imported religion (hymnody, liturgy, rituals, ecclesial polity, etc.)” (Westhelle 2010, ix). Thus, for both Protestants and Catholics, the rise of Christendom and missionary activity, connected to commercial interests and expansionary activity across the globe, created networks that cast ethical webs over people groups. These webs might favor Gregorian chant or Luther and Watts, but in all cases presented restrictions as to what could be sung, and how it should be sung: instructions about instrumentation, body movement, musical style, and other aspects of musicking. This was true throughout the colonized world, as Nicholas Ssempijja describes: “during the colonial era, most Christian missionaries working in East Africa prohibited the use of traditional musical instruments and styles in their churches” (2018, 122). It is an ethics in which the power of tradition, bolstered by the threat of spiritual consequences, constrains musicking. The question that concerns us now is how this ethics traversed the twentieth century, a period in which the established church culture of the West, spread globally through colonial activity, became subject to increased fragmentation. These webs began to weaken, resulting in ecumenical collaborations and, in the Catholic world, the Second Vatican Council (SVC).4 Interest in repertoires from outside the North Atlantic began to grow even before the SVC. The World Council of Churches (WCC), formed in 1948, created an “ecumenical wave” (Hawn 2013, 210) that rippled into and beyond the SVC, which in turn impacted the music and liturgy of the Catholic universe and the global church along with it. The Sacrosanctum concilium proposed a standard of “conscious, active participation” for Christian musicking that exceeded “in breadth and depth all other major reforms of the past” (Marini 2013, 2). According to Marzanna Poplawska, the Catholic opening to vernacular liturgical possibilities enacted a shift “from liturgical uniformity of the universal Church to liturgical diversity of local churches. This shift legitimized the contextualizing/localizing undertakings of many individual culture brokers.” (2018, 135–6). In other words, power shifted, and with it arose an opportunity to “play with the rules” of musicking in relation to the body. The SVC created an opening for Catholics worldwide to examine the worshiping body from new perspectives. 5 Concepts such as inculturation and contextualization were developed to describe these

Praise, politics, power 29 experiments.6 As congregations were given permission to explore their own modes of musicking in liturgy, examinations of the body ethics entangled with these musics became increasingly important.7 C Michael Hawn recognizes that “the first wave of global song in the modern era was the hymns that accompanied the European, and later the North American missionaries to the ends of the earth, translated into many languages and accepted broadly by the peoples of the world as sung expressions of the Christian faith” (2013, 209). Nevertheless, the hegemony of Western church music (whether in its Protestant or Catholic expressions) was further compromised by the rise of Christian Popular Music (CPM),8 and its underlying information revolution. Interconnected ­matrices of communication developed and created modes of cross-­pollination for Christian musicking. According to Anna Nekola and Thomas Wagner, “new forms of media technology and new processes of mediation have the potential to alter existing power structures, relationships and current religious and economic institutions” because audiences and consumers have more agency and can re-imagine communities and re-create their systems of belief (2015, 11). Nekola is speaking of a shift that goes beyond exposure to fresh musical repertoires, encompassing new possibilities of agency, and modifying local actors’ ability to create and propagate modes of musicking. These possibilities continue to shape the global soundscape precisely because of the digital environment’s potential for interconnectedness. New conditions of musicking neighborliness continue to be created. The second development is a new force that emerged in the wake of the popular culture industry: CPM. The history of CPM is well documented,9 and created a musicking web that draws on Pentecostal-charismatic origins and leverages the power of mass mediation. According to Monique M Ingalls and Amos Yong, because of world tours and digital circulation, “praise and worship music continues to permeate the worship of Christian communities worldwide.” But, even as it has become the ­lingua franca of communities around the world, “it remains closely tied to the Pentecostal and charismatic networks from which it emerged” (2015, 8). Ingalls and Yong describe an influential musicking web, and the media ecology within which this web is imbricated. Because CPM is tied to this ecology, it is particularly suited to take advantage of the channels through which cultural influences flow back and forth. One can think of these musicking webs as juxtaposed layers of philosophical, theological, and technological matrices that continue to shape how Christians around the world think about and make music. Furthermore, the church has changed. Christianity has moved away from its epicenter within the historical loci of Christendom. As Jenkins puts it, “the gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America” (Jenkins 2011, 2), and away from the North Atlantic. Notwithstanding, the body ethics and musicking webs we have examined remain connected to the North Atlantic. Even

30  Marcell Silva Steuernagel CPM, a recent phenomenon, is historically and sonically a product of North American popular music culture. Due to mediatization, these webs that originated in the North continue to influence Christian communities globally,10 giving rise to ethical questions about how believers engage in musicking. Speaking specifically of the North American environment, Robb Redman says that “churches with a worship service that reflects European culture and tradition generally are finding the congregation growing smaller, and discovering—belatedly in many cases—that their services do not appeal to immigrants to the rest of the world with their own worship expectations and values” (Redman 2002, 97). In other words, the gap is not only between churches located in the north and those in the south of the globe. Because of current movements of migration and diaspora, these gaps manifest themselves at the neighborhood level and on a global scale concurrently.

Current subjections of the body We now examine how the philosophical-theological heritage of Western Christendom continues to shape Christian musicking in relation to body ethics in light of the current landscape of Christianity, across the “dividing line” of north and south. A primary consideration is the Western penchant to locate the core of Christian musicking in words and intellect, and not in bodily engagement. But, ignoring the musicking body does not make it go away. Covering the body does not remove its necessity for making, sensing, or participating in music. According to Begbie, music “is mediated through the body, and bodies have their own complex but highly structured means of coping with and deploying musical sounds for bodily purposes” (2007,  48). James KA Smith describes singing as a “full-bodied action” that is “a performative affirmation of our embodiment” (2009, 170), outlining how the very fact of making music points back to the body. Body ethics partly shapes how communities think of themselves as musicking bodies (both individually and collectively). When making music, congregations are becoming specific types of musicking communities, creating a feedback loop that reinforces itself. The ethics that undergird shared perceptions of the body, and the narratives that feed into these ethics, actualize in the performance of the music itself. But, because the body is needed to make and participate in music, if it is suppressed, musicking presents a conundrum. If immobility is enthroned as an ideal state of piety, then the body is constricted even as it attempts to musick. This means that the body ethics of Western Christian traditions continue to subject the musicking body in (at least) three connected ways, with varying degrees of intensity, across the globe: 1) through the primacy of the word and suspicion of the senses, 2) through a resultant idealization of immobility, and 3) by enforcing this idealization of immobility through prescriptions of modesty. First, because logos supersedes eros, the body is subjected by the word. From this perspective, any attempts to know God through the body are

Praise, politics, power 31 tainted from the outset. In Christian musicking, this claim engenders a clumsy attempt to voice, to mouth, the word of and for God, using a tongue that is, in fact, corporeal. In light of this conundrum, the language of liturgy became surrounded by a specialness that separated it from everyday speech and the everyday tongue. Latin became the holy language (and the language of political power). In light of the modern missionary movements that stemmed from the Reformation, English became the lingua franca of Protestantism just as Latin bound the worshiping tongues of Catholics until the mid-twentieth century. The global church still employs English as the lingua franca of Christian worship. Publishing and media industries ensure that we continue to converge towards English as a “happy ending,” the “real” coming together.11 Mediatization further solidifies this reality, offering commoditized tidbits of material religious culture infused with these ethical juices. Just like Latin in days past, English functions as a portal into a global colonial economy that offers privilege, power, and access. The worshiping body is bound not only by language, but also in terms of vocality. “Singing together” means “singing in the same language”— English—preferably in four-part harmony, and preferably with a lyrical, Eurocentric tone. The preferred voice for Western worship is therefore pristine, crystal-clear, disembodied, and non-organic. Growling, groaning, ululating, and other ecstatic and non-verbal (or post-verbal) uses of the voice are not to be encouraged, because they point to a breaking down of language, a losing control of the mind, a giving in to passion. For Nicholas Harkness, this means “the European-style classical voice is a privileged nexus of phonic and sonic practice for Christians, the voice of a Korean Christian aspiration” (2014, 2–3). Similarly, John Burdick argues that Brazilian Black gospel singing “cultivates hyperconsciousness of the voices, physicality,” which is to be avoided because it points back to the voice’s corporeality (2013, 137). In Epstein’s view, while patristic theologians developed a vocabulary of theological images for the idea of music, “the messy tangents that actual music-making took were not positively embraced as equally edifying, evocative, or inspiring” (24). In order for these “messy tangents” not to splatter all over the disembodied word, the body must remain quiet even when it sings. Harkness’s portrait of Korean Christian vocality extends beyond the sound of the voice and into control of the entire body; he describes a singer in a theater performing a Christian hymn. The singer “clasped her hands together, closed her eyes, and bowed her head in prayer.” For Harkness, apart from the fact that the scene took place in a concert hall, the portrait “would have suggested that a church service was taking place” (2014, 2). This is, I argue, the portrait of the worshiping body in Western Christianity even outside of church and beyond the North Atlantic: head lowered, eyes closed, hands clasped together. A portrait of submission, an aspiration of immobility.

32  Marcell Silva Steuernagel While these perspectives on the body are historically connected to the Christian West, they are increasingly problematic in a landscape that has moved away from its former geographical epicenters in the North Atlantic. Uzukwu contrasts the Hellenistic ethics of the body with different expressions of worship in Africa, which is highly corporeal. He insists: “to impose a gesture in order to realize a uniform practice of Christianity is h ­ armful” (Uzukwu 1997, 15). I concur, and have argued elsewhere that “this imposition is, in fact, the prolongation of a colonialist intent that seeks to ‘tame’ the body of the other using religious means” (Silva Steuernagel 2018, 164). If the body stands below the mind in the hierarchy of Christian experience, cultures in which bodily pieties are primary modes of religious expression will remain inferior to expressions that arise from the mind-oriented conceptualizations of human experience imbricated with Western Christendom. The Euro–American construction of immobility as the utmost expression of piety and reverence continues to suggest through a variety of means, if only implicitly, that excessive dancing, energetic movements in general, growling, sweating, and such “pagan profanities,” are an expression of the inferior passions of the body and, consequently, sinful. The repertoire of gestures allowed in worship varies between Western Christian traditions, all the way from the kneeling of Anglicanism to the dancing of Pentecostal-charismatics. In any of these scenarios, certain bodily gestures are permitted while others are not. I have argued elsewhere that gestures are prescribed in performance from the altar/stage/platform and also by worshipers in the pews, who learn the congregational vocabulary of accepted gestures by observing others and by musicking themselves. Closing one’s eyes, raised hands, swaying, clapping, and others “­establish authenticity—which could be considered a more active utterance—by ­ responding to a specific historic and cultural background” (Silva Steuernagel 2016, 18; 2018). In many ways, modesty is Western Christianity’s regulating response to the paradox between the aspirations of a disembodied voice and musicking as a bodily activity. I have identified, for instance, that part of the reservation leaders experience in “moving too much” in worship is related to their sense of identity as connected to modesty and propriety (Silva Steuernagel 2018). But, it is clear that these boundaries exist in conflict with an “impulse towards bodily movement” that characterizes engagements with musicking outside of the North Atlantic. In the struggle between mobility and immobility in Christian musicking, modesty impinges on the body itself, and dictates how the body should be covered. Here, again, the inevitability of male desire and the threat of giving in to the passions is connected to the idea of pulling one away from intellectual, mindful worship and into the visual and aural allures of the passions. Therefore, through various means, Western Christianity established a set of normativities of modesty for the worshiping body that are practiced beyond its historical centers along the North Atlantic. While certain configurations of colonial power are no longer in place, others have risen to assure

Praise, politics, power 33 that this continues to be the case. Mediatization is one phenomenon through which the worshiping body continues to be subject to certain normativities, prescribing modes of engagement through transnational worship projects such as Hillsong and Bethel. Information technology makes digital material religious culture artifacts, such as online video content, readily available across the globe. As local music leaders and congregants consume these products, they are shaped by the specific modes of musicking featured therein. Thus, Christian worshipers around the world continue to be influenced by the body ethics of Western Christianity, be it through the enforcement of specific vocalities (such as the “pure” sound of Western vocal techniques), the primacy of the male over the female voice in worship, or by the prescription of modes of bodily engagement that are subdued and/or restrained, therefore ascribing to the aspirations of modesty we examine here.

Conclusion The worldwide-mediatized exposure of Christians to content emanating from the geographical centers that withhold much of the technical proficiency and capital to curate digital content, located primarily along the Euro–American axis (Noll 2009, 28), continue to provide consumers with products that shape their performances according to those prescribed from digital stages. Because these artifacts are primarily Western in form and content, they lean towards linear, Western pop/rock styles of musicking, creating an unspoken connection between Christian identity and Western soundscapes.12 Under this hierarchy, improvisatory and/or oral transmission musical cultures continue to be considered inferior to notated music that reinforce predictability, are hospitable to linear lyrical content, and do not leave space to “stray away” from the musical script. Thus, linear forms and song lyrics will continue to find favor in detriment of circular forms more hospitable to trancing, whirling, ecstasy, and improvisation. This gap between ways of musicking in different cultures and the mediatized promotion of digital religious artifacts connected to the Western Christian tradition creates a new set of difficulties for Christians seeking to self-determine how they will make music in church (Lim 2019).13 It is a gap illustrated by Mary McGann’s use of Clarence River’s distinction between ocular and oral cultures. She demonstrates how, in the case of African American music traditions specifically (and, I would argue, African diaspora music at large), rhythmically based modes of musicking are degraded in favor of more subdued expressions. According to McGann, ocular music traditions are oriented towards melody, and have generally exhibited less rhythmic sophistication. African and African American music, on the other hand, tend to be more rhythmically complex and break the musical line into polyrhythmic structures that elicit more explicit bodily responses (2008,  70). McGann argues that, because the liturgical traditions of Western Christianity tend to favor ocular music cultures to the detriment

34  Marcell Silva Steuernagel of oral music cultures, these otherized repertoires have been degraded on moral grounds. In worship, these Euro–American tenets—especially as construed in connection to the historical rise of Christendom as a civilizatory (and, by extension, colonialist) force—continue to present themselves, implicitly or explicitly, as normative standards for Christian congregational singing throughout the globe. These normativities are a bundle of sonic, bodily, and ethical/theological/moral expectations surrounding congregational music making that continually (re)establish themselves as overall goals  for the performance of piety throughout Christianities. As music leaders around the world are exposed to these normativities, they accept them as standards to be imitated and propagated in their own realities. I argue that the Global South has good reasons for departing from Euro– American normativities of musicking in order to resist the body ethics of Western Christianity explored here in favor of their own expressions. Moreover, it is important for those who feel straight-jacketed in some way, shape, or form, to dance, to move, to holler; in other words, to develop their own body ethics for musicking in church. To not do so—on platforms, stages, and altars on which others may see us as we move—­perpetuates a hierarchy in which diverse musical selves and many-colored bodies are not allowed in congregational music making as they should, and the music of all singing congregations will suffer because of it.

Notes 1 It is true that the history of Christian thought includes a mystical heritage in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and others. Yet even in these cases, the mystical tradition carves its niche in a dialogic configuration with its intellectual counterpart. Thus, when Avila described her mystical visions, it was to defend the legitimacy of her experiences (Thiessen 2005, 150). 2 Of course, a significant exception to this claim is found in the case of Pentecostal and charismatic expressions of Christian faith, although these can be seen as exceptions that confirm the norm. Moreover, I argue, these ideas of modesty are expressed in these traditions through other kinds of bodily binding, such as strict regulations for clothes and appearance, along with moral codes that regulate how the body may or not behave in relation to Christian piety. 3 For a detailed examination of the concept of the missio dei and its uses in Catholic history, see: Kollman (2011). 4 For insight into how the ecumenical movement developed in regards to congregational song, see: Erik Routley (1959). 5 Such as Muchimba (2008) and Uzukwu (1997). 6 For a detailed summary of these concepts, see the introduction of Ingalls, Reigersberg, and Sherinian (2018). 7 Two examples are Muchimba (2008) and Scruggs (2005). 8 I am using Christian Popular Music (CPM) as an umbrella term that encompasses other references to “a sonically diverse repertoire of late 20 thand early 21st-century evangelical Protestant commercial popular music” (Ingalls, Mall and Nekola 2020). It encapsulates repertoires produced for

Praise, politics, power 35

9 10

11

12 13

presentational musicking and for worshiping communities, and referred to varyingly as “Contemporary Christian Music,” “Praise and Worship Music,” and others. See (to name but a few): Eskridge (2013); Gersztyn (2012); Peacock (1999). While some would argue that certain transnational worship networks, such as Hillsong Music, are not geographically from the North Atlantic, I believe they do reinforce the modes of musicking associated with Western Christianity by their choice of musical style and other aspects of embodied performance practices. Recent liturgical resources, such as the Santo, Santo, Santo/Holy, Holy, Holy hymnal, create space for greater diversity of language in the liturgy, aspiring to encourage “Spanish and English-speaking Christians to offer praise and prayer to God bilingually together, as the body of Christ.” (GIA 2019, i). For a discussion of circular vs. linear modes of religious musicking, see Hawn (2003). Swee Hong-Lim provides insight into the difficulties of musical self-­determination in in churches of the Global South.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota 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, MI: Baker Academic. Begbie, Jeremy, and Steven R Guthrie. 2011. Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies. Grand Rapids, MI: WB Eerdmans. Bertoglio, Chiara. 2017. Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Burdick, John. 2013. The Color of Sound: Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil. New York, NY: New York University Press. Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. 2019. Santo, Santo, Santo: Cantos Para el Pueblo de Dios/Holy, Holy, Holy: Songs for the People of God. Chicago, Illinois: GIA. Clement. 1954. Christ the Educator. The Fathers of the Church, a New Translation; v. 23. Translated by Simon P Wood. New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc. Chua, Daniel K L. 2011. “Music as the Mouthpiece of Theology.” In Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, edited by Jeremy Begbie and Steven R Guthrie. Grand Rapids, MI: WB Eerdmans. Dewey, John, and James Hayden Tufts. 1908. Ethics. New York: Henry Holt. Epstein, Heidi. 2004. Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music. New York; London: Continuum. Eskridge, Larry. 2013. God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Faulkner, Quentin. 1996. Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Gardella, Peter. 2016. Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure. New York: Oxford University Press.

36  Marcell Silva Steuernagel Gersztyn, Bob. 2012. Jesus Rocks the World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Gudorf, Christine E. 1994. Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press. Gudorf, Christine E. 2013. Comparative Religious Ethics: Everyday Decisions for Our Everyday Lives. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Hall, Thomas Cuming. 1910. History of Ethics within Organized Christianity. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Harkness, Nicholas. 2014. Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hawn, C Michael. 2003. Gather into One: Praying and Singing Globally. Grand Rapids, MI: WB Eerdmans. Hawn, C Michael, ed. 2013. New Songs of Celebration Render: Congregational Song in the Twenty-First Century. Chicago, IL: GIA Publications. Ingalls, Monique M, Andrew Mall, and Anna E Nekola. 2020. “Christian popular music, USA” In The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Canterbury Press, accessed March 2, 2020, http://www.hymnology.co.uk/c/christian-popularmusic,-usa. Ingalls, Monique M, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe C Sherinian. 2018. Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ingalls, Monique M, and Amos Yong, eds. 2015. The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2011. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. 3rd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Johansson, Calvin M. 1992. Discipling Music Ministry: Twenty-First Century Directions. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Karamanolis, George E. 2013. The Philosophy of Early Christianity. Ancient Philosophies. Durham, UK: Acumen. Kollman, P. 2011. “At the Origins of Mission and Missiology: A Study in the Dynamics of Religious Language.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79 (2): 425–58. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfq077. Lim, Swee Hong. 2019. “We’re All ‘Bananas and Coconuts’: Congregational Song in the Global South.” International Journal of Practical Theology 23 (1): 136–56. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijpt-2018-0059. Lovelace, Austin C and William C Rice. 1960. Music and Worship in the Church. New York: Abingdon Press. Lynch, Kenneth. 1999. Biblical Music in a Contemporary World. Chester, PA. Self-published. Makujina, John. 2000. Measuring the Music: Another Look at the Contemporary Christian Music Debate. Salem, OH: Schmul. Marini, Piero. 2013. “Liturgical Reform: Most Visible Fruit of the Second Vatican Council.” In Vatican Council II: Reforming Liturgy. Carmen Pilcher, et alk. eds. S. Havertown: ATF Press. McGann, Mary E. 2008. Let It Shine!: The Emergence of African American Catholic Worship. New York: Fordham University Press. Music, David W, ed. 1998. Instruments in Church: A Collection of Source Documents. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, no. 7. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Praise, politics, power 37 Nekola, Anna E, and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Ashgate Congregational Music Studies Series. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Noll, Mark A. 2009. The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Peacock, Charlie. 1999. At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman. Poplawska, Marzanna. 2018. “Inculturation, institutions, and the creation of a localized congregational repertoire in Indonesia.” In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide. Ingalls, Monique M, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe C Sherinian, eds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1 (2): 149–66. https://doi.org/10.1163/2214447100102004. Redman, Robb. 2002. The Great Worship Awakening: Singing a New Song in the Postmodern Church. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson. 1872. Ante-Nicene Christian Library; Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to AD 325, Volume 23: Origen Contra Celsum. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. Routley, Erik. 1959. Ecumenical Hymnody. London, UK: Independent Press. Saliers, Don E. 2007. Music and Theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Scruggs, TM. 2005. “(Re)Indigenization?: Post-Vatican II Catholic Ritual and ‘Folk Masses’ in Nicaragua.” The World of Music 47(1): 91–123. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. February 2016. “Between Kantor and Frontman: Gesture as a Source of Authentication and Context Creation in South Brazilian Lutheran Congregational Worship.” Conference Presentation. Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. Boston University. Silva Steuernagel, Marcell. 2018. “Church Music through the Lens of Performance: The Embodied Ritual of Sacred Play.” PhD diss., Baylor University. Smith, James KA. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Cultural Liturgies, v 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Ssempijja, Nicholas. 2018. “Performing glocal liturgies: the Second Vatican Council and music inculturation in East Africa.” In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide. Ingalls, Monique M, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe C Sherinian, eds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth, ed. 2005. Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. Grand Rapids, Mich: W B Eerdmans. Uzukwu, E Elochukwu. 1997. Worship as Body Language: Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Westhelle, Vitor. 2010. After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies. Wipf and Stock. Wheaton, Jack. 2000. The Crisis in Christian Music. Oklahoma City, OK: Hearthstone. Wren, Brian A. 2000. Praying Twice the Music and Words of Congregational Song. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

2

The silence of the monks The ethics of everyday sounds Marcel Cobussen

Into great silence Outside, the ground is covered with a thick layer of snow. A watery sun shines down upon barren rocky mountains. The absence of human beings underlines the desolation, the remoteness, and the wintery silence. Inside, a candle is flickering. Still lifes bathe in a Vermeerish light. A bowl with some fruit. A chair in a corner. A crucifix. A monk in a white chasuble, kneeling at a confessional. His lips mutter a prayer—inaudible. Die grosse Stille. Into Great Silence. This is the friary of the Carthusian order, also known as La Grande Chartreuse. It is located in an isolated mountain range north of Grenoble. The monks live as recluses, engaged in their daily doings, centered around their devotion to God, and rarely in contact with the outside world. They are the protagonists of a documentary, released in 2005, by the German film director Philip Gröning. For over two hours and forty minutes, the film reveals the life of approximately twenty brothers following their day-to-day activities. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film is the almost complete absence of speech. No film music either. Gröning attempted to capture and portray the silence in which the monks have immersed themselves solely through images. Silence. A defense against distraction and a precondition for contemplation, introspection, meditation, and being able to hear God’s word. Carthusian rules are founded upon silence and solitude; the exterior silence of not speaking is a means of reaching the interior silence of mind and heart. Being silent eliminates certain sins and faults, sustains charity, and is a sign of detachment and humility. Or, as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the 18th-century bishop, theologian, and court preacher of Louis XIV, formulated it: “It is only in silence and in the avoidance of useless and distracting speech that God […] will make his presence felt within you” (quoted in Corbin 2018, Chapter 3).1 Into great silence. According to the 17th-century French thinker and scientist Blaise Pascal, “Christian speech is most vigorous and poignant and closest to its divine source” when it is “faithful to its silence” and remains in the register of oratio interior (quoted in Corbin 2018, Chapter 6). Christian

Silence of the monks 39 religion—a consecration to God’s Word—and western p ­hilosophy—a consecration to logos and logocentrism—seem to convene here: the only speech allowed is a silent inner speech, in fact a suppression of the voice in its full phenomenality, in its sonority and physicality. Its sounds lead to the exact opposite of what should be expected from an idealized voice. Critical thinking and religious devotion require a closure of the ears for the sounds of the outside. Think of Eryximachus who, in the beginning of Plato’s Symposium, suggests sending away the flutist from the banquet in order to provide space (that is, silence) for the appearance of reflection. (Musical) sounds have only a distorting effect on the ideality of meaningfulness; thinking, reflecting, meditating, praying—they exclude listening and advocate deafness, paradoxically, to “hear” more: more Truth, more seminal (Han 1997, 11–15). 2 The Carthusians of La Grande Chartreuse not only prefer to live separated from the “normal” world, they also don’t want to hear it either. The intrusion of “the (sonic) other” should be avoided at all costs in favor of a certain self-affectivity. With one exception. Singing is excluded from this regulation to be silent—singing religious music, that is, singing Gregorian hymns, singing together, thereby creating an atmosphere of togetherness and cohesion, of course, but concurrently excluding the outside world. Nevertheless, Qui bene cantat, bis orat—he who sings well, prays twice.3 No trace here of St. Augustine’s fear that the beauty of music, partly responsible for the loathsome “pleasures of the flesh,” will outshine the meaning of the sacred words.4 However, these collectively sung prayers, just like the ringing of the bells, mainly seem to prepare for an ever-deepening silence: both are the harbingers of another exercise in penitence and contemplation, while the bells also instigate an interruption of daily activities. The physical and auditory isolation of the monks finds a more secular equivalent in the attitude and life of the 19th-century and early 20th-­ century European intelligentsia. Verging on amusing are the anecdotes of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s complaints about the noise of whip-cracking, which would paralyze the brain, rend the thread of reflection, and murder thought (quoted in Bijsterveld 2004, 166). Similarly for his colleague, Theodor Lessing, noise—­ specifically the sounds produced by traffic and machines, but even including the din of church bells and carpet beating—operated in a profoundly anti-­ intellectual way, triggering only primitive and subjective emotions and instincts, at the expense of the intellection and rational functions of the soul; silence, on the contrary, engendered and signified wisdom, justice, cultivated self-control, and cultural maturity. Lessing even founded the Deutscher Lärmschutzverband, the German Association for Protection from Noise (Bijsterveld 2004, 167–72). Gottlob Frege and Friedrich Nietzsche walk the same track: the thinking subject loses its autonomy and unity when exposed to concrete sounds, as they bring in an otherness, a heterogeneous power, which disturbs the ideality of meaning.

40  Marcel Cobussen The tympanic membrane then optimally functions as a protective wall, parrying the intrusion of the other.

Listening to silence In the mountains surrounding the monastery, spring sprouts. The sounds of melting snow, blowing wind, and the first bird song faintly enter the basic single rooms of the monks—faintly, as the windows are still closed. The church bells resound differently now than when the trees are in full bloom. Inside his cell, a friar is reading and praying. Even the tiniest of sounds are audible: the turning of the pages, the rosary sliding against the roughly woven chasuble, the movements of his lips, tongue, and teeth, the dipping of his fingers in the stoup. Into great silence. Opening one’s ears to this silence immediately reveals that there is no such thing as silence. Listening to silence means exposing oneself to the sonic richness of the environment. Listening to this great silence means exploring and foregrounding the background noises of being in order to understand what is hidden when constructing a discourse of religious and contemplative silence. Listening to this silence means lending an ear to the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral aspects of all sounds, to the sources of natural as well as anthropogenic sounds, to their acoustic patterns, reflecting all kinds of activity, to the repetition as well as the constant change of the sounds, to the sonic intensities, densities, and energies, as well as to their (extra-musical) meaning and functioning: political, social, ethical, spiritual, economic, etc.5 To paraphrase the Belgian poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach, “sound speaks; it expresses its nature in a silent discourse.” Into great silence thus actually means becoming immersed in a rich and versatile world of sounds, a world deprived (only) of human speech. Into Great Silence is the deceptive designation for a politically and ethically interesting transposition in which listening to everyday sounds becomes imbued with concrete meaning and in which ordinary, nonhuman sounds receive a more incisive voice. The documentary certainly doesn’t confront its audience with an absence of sound; on the contrary, it makes one aware that—as John Cage already taught us in the 1950s—silence is full of sounds. Silence sounds; silence can be loud, even noisy. Emphasizing silence actually leads to the emancipation of sounds, of sounds usually neglected, ignored, or made inaudible, of sounds usually covered by human utterances. As soon as we start listening to these minute and insignificant sounds, as soon as we start listening to them attentively and unbiased, they become meaningful. They speak to us; they communicate.6 Removing human speech from the sonic environment, and thereby opening up the possibility for an aural reorientation towards the world, may lead to a rather radical reconsideration of the position of man in relation to his Umwelt, his ambience, his surroundings, his being-in-and-with-the-world.

Silence of the monks 41 Can specific, ancient Christian religious principles regarding sound thus open a way to a contemporary posthumanism, to an ethical decentering of humans, which at the same time implies an attunement to nonhuman agents existing in their own right? Are these monks, in their serene quietness, moving—and I paraphrase Jane Bennett here—from an endorsement of religious-ethical principles to the actual or immanent practice of religious-ethical behavior? Are they, at least on a sonic level, practicing interrelatedness with their environment without feeling exalted above other beings, things, and events? Are their walks always already soundwalks— that is, walks in which their ears are exposed to every sound around them—during which they experience the vitality of matter,7 a vitality that exists independent of human input, interventions or interference? And, can a shared materiality of human and nonhuman beings, created in and through a non-silent silence, be appreciated from an ethical standpoint? Said differently, do both sounds and monks participate in heterogeneous assemblages in which agency has no mastermind but is distributed across a swarm of more or less contingent potentialities or virtualities? Within this context, it is interesting to note that, every now and then, the documentary is laced with inscrutable sounds, sounds whose sources are neither revealed nor clearly discernible. It compels one to simply listen, to take the sounds as they appear, to encounter them, unprejudiced, to find out what they can do, rather than what they are, that is, to accept them outside of any identification as characters. As Bennett writes, “the ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it” (Bennett 2010, 14). Next to the insertion of non or not immediately identifiable sounds, the film makes its audience aware of several unavoidable, paralinguistic human utterances: respiring, coughing, snorting, throat clearing, and smacking. In a way, these sounds may be understood as either language, noise or music, or as all three of them simultaneously. Without the accompaniment of human speech, they meet in a space in which neither dominates the other; rather, one becomes the other, liminal phenomena between the sound and music of language and the language of music. As such, they provide opportunities for listening to and understanding sonic sources in new ways—a space between the communicative and meaningless aspects of sounds and/ as/in paralanguage.

Between the sacred and the profane So, let’s move from silence to sound; from the postulated silence to the inevitability of the sonic; from an emphasis on what cannot be heard to what was always already audible, but all too often outside our conscious listening experiences. Of course, whether in the form of prayer, music, noise, or the imitation of animals and nature, in many rituals sound is turned to as a sensible vector

42  Marcel Cobussen of communication with gods, spirits, or natural forces.8 In the documentary as well as in the monastery, the emphasis on a sonic communication with God relies, as might be expected, on the first two: muttering prayers and collective chanting. Imitating animals or natural forces belongs to animist religions and not to the tradition of this Carthusian order. But what about the other sounds? It is interesting to notice how—during the film— the everyday sounds in and around the monastery—the rich combination of frequencies and complex resonances of the rolling out of linen, of dusting, sweeping, and scrubbing or the flapping of cloth—all receive religious overtones.9 Within the context of this consecrated place with its devout rituals, the ordinary is transmuted into the religious. Sounds of cleaning, eating, shaving, and chopping connote sacred practices when executed in silence and alternately or concurrently sounding with the ringing of the church bells, the monotonous mumbling of prayers, or the crackling sounds of incense. Perceived the other way around, the consecrated sounds blend into the most profane sounds of human and nonhuman activity. The bells of the monastery’s chapel—corporally activated by pulling a thick rope—are the monks’ time keepers, their enforcers of the daily routines as well as a sonic passport to a temporary otherworldliness. That is, when summoning the monks to the chapel, the bells not only announce the prayer times but also facilitate communication with the upper world; their loud sounds are believed—and here animism and Christianity meet—to chase away evil spirits (see Lévi-Strauss in Bonnet 2016, 14). Sometimes nonmusical sounds can be charged with sacred quality, with a religious aura that sacralizes them: bells, for example, are an auxiliary of religious rituals, helping the devoted connect to the divine—church bells as religious earcons. As François Bonnet writes, “the sacred modifies the sound formally, in so far as it leaves a trace in it—that is to say, it conditions its existence by assigning it a ‘place’ (precisely that place where the sacred appears) and a regime of audibility—a way of being heard” (Bonnet 2016, 16). Sounds in such a religious context thus always exceed the merely audible, the purely sensible, the immediately perceivable. For Bonnet, they are consecrated, removed from and unavailable for the “the sphere of human law,” as Giorgio Agamben writes in Profanations (2007, 73).10 However, church bells also perform a more secular function, the most common one perhaps that of telling the time.11 In Agamben’s terms, this could be called an example of profanation: the bells return to the “free use of men” (Agamben 2007, 73).12 Agamben stresses that the caesura that divides the two spheres is essential. However, he also admits that there remains “something like a residue of profanity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of sacredness in every profaned object” (Agamben 2007, 78). The sound of church bells, one could say, oscillates between the sacred and the profane: the separation is not erased but not sharply outlined either, for example, when church bells are rung during New Year’s Eve or after catastrophes. In their transfiguration, the sacred and the ordinary coincide.

Silence of the monks 43 The difference between the sacred and the profane is not audible—­ specific interventions are needed, as Bonnet makes clear. The sounding of the bells is both inside and outside of the sacred, eternally becoming-sacred or becoming-profane, thereby defying the rule of identity. Simultaneously deferring a final meaning, sounds can be called para-sacred, existing around the sacred, floating between the ephemeral world of man and the transcendent world of God. Bonnet’s hierophany has transformed into the para-sacred, the para-sacred as the liminality of the audible. Ringing bells, the crackling sounds of burning candles, the rustling of the rosary, and even the sharp frequencies of cutting vegetables, the tender humming of the clippers, and the spitting rain, which produces as many sonic variations as there are different surfaces in its path; the para-sacred reveals itself in various tonalities.13 “We must,” as Victor Taylor states (2000, 69), “become accustomed to affording the (non)concept of sacrality to things which seem quite ordinary or, perhaps, profane or obscene.”

The ethicality of the sonic So, here we are in a world, an assemblage, marked and framed by religion as well as everyday life, environmental as well as human sounds and music, nature as well as culture, God as well as the posthuman, and an ethicality based on a moral equalization between human and nonhuman agents.14 It is high summer—the monastery is bathing in sunlight. A monk walks through the garden. He meditates, not by sequestering himself but by blending into the environment. He listens, and the world around him listens back. Buzzing bees, the chafing of the habit against the plants, chirping birds, sudden air pressure differences, sound of his footsteps on the pavement, singing crickets, a gentle breeze, bodily movements—an assemblage of heterogeneous sounds and sound sources. At the same time, a bit further, another monk works in the forest, redirecting the course of a little creek in order to water the vegetables he has planted. The sounds of the gurgling stream mingle with his stacking of stones and labored breathing. A few hours later, back in their cells, the monks hear the trolley approaching with the evening meal. The little hatch in the door opens with beeps and crackling. With a dull whack and strong reverberation the tray, plate, and mug are shoved inside—tin or aluminum on stone. Slow chewing sounds are followed by the spattering of running water and the cleaning of dish and cutlery. In the silence that follows, one can hear the curtains flapping in the wind. No, this description is not meant to draw an idyllic picture, a sonic picture, of the everyday life of a monk in a remote monastery in East France; this is about a sonic environment which is no stable and inert ­formation but activated and actualized by the practices of those who inhabit it. What Into Great Silence makes audible are the interactions between the sounds already traveling through the spaces the monks traverse, their own sounds, and the acoustic features of those spaces, forming and transforming the

44  Marcel Cobussen sonic environment in a space-time multiplicity created and recreated through the contingency of their interferences. A soundscape is never independent of those who inhabit it; it continually changes with the interactions of human and nonhuman agents—a dynamic multiplicity. The monks are always already participating in the soundscape, they are listening to and contributing to the ongoing constellation of sound events that is already there and interacting with the environment through the reciprocal ­relationship that exists between a sound event and the acoustic properties of the space in which it is propagated. Human and nonhuman sounds spread through spaces and are reshaped according to their material and acoustic qualities, creating various effects: resonances, reverberations, reflections, and absorptions (cf. Biserna 2020).15 Sounds, materials, human and nonhuman beings, and spaces mutually affect each other. Nonhuman agents emerge as productive and vital forces. How then can sounds—both musical and “nonmusical”—not be ethical? Of course, an understanding of the word “ethical” is crucial to answering this question: what is ethics in this context? It is certainly not my intention to question the monks’ morality, their unconditional faith in God and faithfulness to God, their firm belief in transcendent, universal, and eternal values. However, is it possible to identify another ethical trace? Can ethics be rethought through sounds, through the ordinary, through the dynamic assemblages described above? What I am after is a deviation from a more well-known Christian morality in order to go down a path where rules and laws are not pre-given by a transcendental power but determined in their immanence. Such an immanent ethics would depend upon a set of optional (in the sense that they are neither imposed nor prescribed) rules to evaluate or assess each situation and each encounter in its specificity and particularity. Enter Spinoza, who, according to Gilles Deleuze, developed an ethics in terms of what is good or bad for a body; what affects a body and what is affected by it. In other words, an immanent ethics of interrelatedness, of coming into contact with another body.16 In “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” a short text preceding the English version of Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, Brian Massumi writes that: L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies). (Massumi 1987, xvi) The quality of an encounter between agents, between bodies, that is, depends on the capacity to affect or to be affected when an agent comes into composition with another agent: “A body in motion or rest must be

Silence of the monks 45 determined to motion or rest by another body, which was also determined to motion or rest by another, and that in turn by another, and so on ad infinitum” (Spinoza 2001, 58). Spinoza’s ethics is thus built on the logic of relationships of all things; the more a body can employ its capacity to act and to be responsive, the better it is. Furthermore, all interrelations necessarily involve relations of love and hate: love draws bodies together, while hatred sunders them. Deleuze and Guattari summarized it as follows: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body” (1987, 257). Bodies are thus not conceived of as closed, determinate systems, but rather by their affective potential; they are constituted by their relations rather than existing before them and being independent of them. Being affected by sounds implies going beyond the dialectics of sound and silence. Thus, Into Great Silence presents a much more complex set of affective resonances distributed across the frequency spectrum. The atmospheres of the many places in and around the monastery are influenced by sounds. This also implies a shift from a mere relating to sounds to a relating through sounds. Sound is a medium in which the monks are immersed and enveloped; they move in and through sonic ambiences. However, these sonic ambiences are not only perceived, they are also enacted by the monks’ everyday use of the various spaces. This mode of mutual affection operates beyond the unrefined opposition between sound and silence; it is vibrational, induced by various rhythms and frequencies (Goodman 2010, 83), some audible, others affecting beyond audibility.17 Such a sonic ethics of relationships prioritizes the insignificant sounds of everyday life. As such, it is an ethics of care and an ethics of humbleness. In both, it is recognized that something from which attention, commitment, and devotion was generally withheld—in this case the sonic atmosphere in and around a monastery—has deserved to be engaged with all along, perhaps simply by being silent in order to be able to listen, to let the other and otherness speak to us. Genuine engagement with even the most insignificant everyday sounds, care and respect for what presents itself to the ear, and modesty in regarding oneself as one agent amongst many others presupposes an interdependent self, a relational self, an ecological self, always already intertwined and resonating with other beings, touched by a call. As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just: “Each welcomes the other: each […] comes in accordance with the other’s will […]. This begins within the confined circumference of beholder and beheld who exchange a reciprocal salute to the continuation of one another’s existence” (2006, 90–2). The ethical consequence of this is a radical decentering, giving up the idea that man stands at the center of the world and permitting us to be adjacent. An ethical, ecological, and religious posthumanism. Into Great Silence. A crucifix, a black screen, citations from the Bible—all devoid of any accompanying sound; trees, abstracted close-ups in black and

46  Marcel Cobussen white, a monk writing at his desk—all accompanied by sounds whose sources are not presented; the mighty mountains, the impressive monastery, a tiny human being heading out—all silenced by sounds of rain and thunderstorms; another black screen—silence, some rumbling, one sung tone. Paradoxically, the silent images sound because of the working of our imagination and memory, and the sounds cause the listener to hear silence. Into Great Silence not only makes its audience aware of the sounds of silence, through the documentary one can also experience the silence in, of, and through the sounds. “Into” indicates movement: from silence to sound and back again, from outside to inside and back again, from nature to culture and back again; however, it disregards that the one is always already present and active in the other, affecting and affected by the other, each circumcised by the other.

Ite, missa est The prophet Jeremiah asks the Lord, “To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear? Behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the LORD is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it” (Jer. 6:10 [KJV]). To be able to listen to the holy word and live according to its values, the ear needs to be circumcised. Yes, the uncircumcised ear can hear God’s word, but it will remain deaf for its message, its meaning, its revelation; the ear needs to be “pierced,” that is, to be truly opened to be able to receive God’s good tidings. In contrast to what was assumed in the beginning of this text, Jeremiah’s text doesn’t encourage humans to turn inwards in order to gain access to God’s word; rather, it proposes, presents, and defends an opening towards God’s word’s appeal: arriving at the subject from the outside. The circumcised ear has the ability to be touched, to receive impressions, to undergo certain affection before there is an intentional, significant, traceable relation (cf. Van Maas 2002, 355–66).18 To be circumcised means to be able to be affected, not (only) through the mind, through reason or thinking, but first of all through the body, through sensory perception, and by means of a non-constituent listening. This opening up for what sounds through the ordinariness of environmental sounds happens between consciousness and unconsciousness, between an active attitude and a passive “letting things happen,” between a mental intervention and an embodied susceptibility. Between, that is the effect of the logic of a neither/nor and both/ and. Between, that is another manifestation of the “para,” a constituting force operating on borders, edges, and limits. Between, that is a transversal movement, an oscillation, flux or vibration, thereby touching on the logic of the sonic. Between, that is an ethical position. A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After

Silence of the monks 47 the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came the sound of sheer silence. (1 Kings 19:11–12)

Notes 1 A similar emphasis on the benefits of being silent can be found in the thoughts of some mystics. According to the Spanish Basque priest and theologian Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), co-founder of the religious order of the Jesuits, “God bestows, God trains, God accomplishes his work, and this can only be done in the silence that is established between the Creator and the creature.” He who wants to follow God should thus also live in silence. Whereas evil spirits enter the soul “with noise and commotion,” the good angel enters peacefully and silently (quoted in Corbin 2018, Chapter 3). And for the ­Carmelite friar and priest John of the Cross (1542–1591), a certain correspondence with God can only be established “in the calm and silence of the night.” He also writes about sublime “silent music,” surpassing all music that can be heard through our ears. However, “even though that music is silent to the natural senses and faculties, it is sounding solitude for the spiritual faculties” (quoted in Corbin 2018, Chapter 3). 2 “The deafness of the genius is inseparable from his originality,” Peter Szendy writes in Listen. A History of Our Ears. And, he continues: “It is even the condition for it: it is this deafness that founds genius in its inner clairvoyance, in its clairaudience. Deaf, the genius is all the more transparent to himself when he closes himself off from the noise of the world” (2008, 120). 3 Although St. Augustine is often accredited with speaking these words, they cannot be found verbatim in his writings. However, his comments in Sermo 29 on the first verse of hymn 117 can be convincingly interpreted along these lines (cf. Van Maas 2002, 130). Also, in the first book of his De Musica, St. Augustine argues that music can establish a connection to God: music is numerically ordered, and as the order of numbers refers to God, so does music refer to God. In the sixth book of De Musica, St. Augustine resumes this thought. Music’s inner harmony, which can be identified by human reason (instead of the ear), may count as one of the “invisible characteristics” of God. An ultimately rational understanding of music begins as a sensory perception, but the interaction with the soul provides a rational fundament underlying the aesthetic experience of enjoying music. 4 In Book X of his Confessions, St. Augustine describes a problem he encounters while listening to vocal religious music: “It [sometimes] happens that I am more moved by the singing than by what is sung.” St. Augustine confesses that he often oscillates between giving in to the seductions of beautiful music and abandoning this beauty in favor of the meaning of the Holy Words. In the first case, music offers access to a pious mood, but also to “dangerous pleasure.” In the second case, the Holy Words are saved, and the good and the truth ensured, at the expense of a poignancy needed to reach the soul (cf. Van Maas 2002, 106). Augustine claims he would rather not have heard the singing, but confesses to have sinned wickedly, as his body, soul, and mind were indeed seduced by the music. 5 According to Roland Barthes, “to listen is the evangelical verb par excellence: listening to the divine word is what faith amounts to, for it is by such listening that man is linked to God” (Barthes 1985, 250). 6 As the French Poet Paul Valéry writes: “Listen to this delicate sound which is continuous, and which is silence. Listen to what you heard when nothing makes itself heard” (quoted in Corbin 2018, Chapter 1).

48  Marcel Cobussen 7 By “matter” I do not mean to suggest fixed stability. A sonic materiality should be understood as force, as energy, as vibration, as intensity (see also Bennett 2010, 20). 8 With regard to the role of noise in a ritual that, nowadays, is situated between the sacred and the secular, think for example of New Year’s Eve fireworks, originally meant to chase away evil spirits and to appease the gods. 9 Watching the documentary itself gradually becomes a meditative, spiritual, or religious experience: it unfolds in relative silence and irresistibly draws one’s attention to details within the sparse storyline. One experiences a growing awareness of the ordinary environment, both within and outside the film. In this heightened state of awareness, the ordinary becomes less and less ordinary, less and less obvious, perhaps even less and less profane, as these common things, events, actions, and sounds come to matter. 10 For Agamben, religion can be defined as “that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere” (2007, 74). 11 In his seminal book Village Bells, historian Alain Corbin argues that church bells also help(ed) to create a territorial identity, to raise alarm, to ensure the preservation of a community, and to orient travelers and/or sailors, especially during bad weather or darkness (2004, 117–22). 12 Agamben distinguishes profanation from secularization: whereas the latter only displaces certain forces and thus leaves them intact, the former neutralizes what it profanes (2007, 77). 13 Whereas the sacred takes center stage, the para-sacred happens in the margins; it is the minor element (here: the minor sounds), drawing attention to the repressed excess; uncovering the before, after, and beyond; occupying the non-definable place between inside and outside; and reconfiguring the sacred as heterogeneous (Taylor 2000). 14 As Deleuze states, “the distant cause is no more: rocks, flowers, animals and humans equally celebrate the glory of God in a kind of sovereign an-­a rchy” (2007, 266). This “sovereign anarchy” refers to an ethics that does not rely on transcendent rules or values. Ethics involves living in one’s nature, joined with agents that agree with your nature, rather than imitating rules of behavior. Deleuze rereads God’s warning to Adam in the Garden of Eden not to eat the apple in exactly this sense. It is not so much a moral precept as a natural consequence of ingesting the fruit: it will not agree with Adam’s nature. In that sense there is no Good or Evil, but there is good and bad (Uhlmann 2011, 157). With Rosi Braidotti, one could call this an affirmative ethics. 15 In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter briefly discuss the aural architecture and acoustic traditions of holy places. Most (Catholic) churches—and this also applies to the chapel in the ­Carthusian monastery—are considerably large, enclosed spaces with “irregular geometries, randomly shaped surfaces, minimal acoustic absorption, and uniform diffusion of sound arriving from all directions” (Blesser and Salter 2007, 89). Visually and acoustically, these buildings are clearly separated from their external environment, demonstrating wealth and power and expressing the grandeur of God’s home. Although Blesser and Salter persuasively argue  that the reverb resulting from these huge buildings with their high ceilings and hard materials had no directly intentional theological relevance, they acknowledge that the combination of reverberation and sounds seemingly coming from everywhere envelop those who attend services, stimulating the feeling that the sounds have a concrete and direct religious meaning. Sounds can thus, in the nature of their sounding and reception, take on

Silence of the monks 49 a sacred or magical character, all the more so when the cause of their appearance is uncertain or cannot immediately be rationalized, as is also confirmed by recent research into acoustic archeology (Bonnet 2016, 204). The authors also see a clear connection between these religious spaces, with their rather unique acoustics and a reverb time sometimes approaching 10 seconds for midrange frequencies, and Gregorian chants (Blesser and Salter 2007, 90). They state that the relatively slow, monotonous, and unaccompanied chants were “an inevitable consequence of the high reverb of […] monasteries” (Blesser and Salter 2007, 93), as only this kind of singing could avoid complete aural unintelligibility. Hence, although the hard and acoustically reflective surfaces of these buildings were incidental—a by-product of the architectural necessity of using stone to avoid fire and to support heavy ceilings over large floor areas (Blesser and Salter 2007, 90)—their aural architectures also act as both a manifestation of religious power, the magnified sounds demanding respect and calling for the obedience of the faithful, and a cultural filter, excluding those music that are sonically inappropriate. 16 For Rosi Braidotti this is a “posthuman ethics” involving the formation of alliances between “nonhuman agents, technologically-mediated elements, earth-others (land, waters, plants, animals) and nonhuman inorganic agents (plastic, wires, information highways, algorithms, etc.)” (Braidotti 2019, 51). 17 Also, the human body should be regarded as a transducer of vibrations instead of a detached listening subject isolated from its sonic objects. 18 Before they are cognized and categorized into schemas of knowledge, (sonic) events are prehended, consciously or unconsciously perceived and incorporated. According to Goodman, the sonic encounter even does most of its affective work “before cognitive appropriation by the sense of audition” (Goodman 2010, 72).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Profanations. New York: Zone Books. Augustine. 1955. Confessions and Enchiridion. Edited and translated by Albert C Outler. Louisville, KY: WJK Press. http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon10. htm#chap33. Barthes, Roland. 1985. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bijsterveld, Karin. 2004. “The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900–1940.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 165–89. Oxford: Berg. Biserna, Elena. 2020. “Ambulatory Sound-Making: Rewriting, Reappropriating, ‘Presencing’ Auditory Spaces.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, edited by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen, 301. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Blesser, Barry and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonnet, François. 2016. The Order of Sounds. A Sonorous Archipelago. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media Ltd.

50  Marcel Cobussen Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6: 31–61. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0263276418771486 Corbin, Alain. 2004. “The Auditory Markers of the Village.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 117–25. Oxford: Berg. Corbin, Alain. 2018. A History of Silence. From the Renaissance to the Present Day. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. “Zones of Immanence.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 266–9. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Han, Byung-Chul. 1997. “Derrida’s Ohr (Derrida’s Ear).” Musik & Ästhetik 1, no. 4: 5–21. Heckert, Jamie. 2010. “Listening, Caring, Becoming: Anarchism as an Ethics of Direct Relationships.” In Anarchism and Moral Philosophy, edited by Benjamin Franks and Matthew Wilson, 186–207. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Maas, Sander van. 2002. “Doorbraak en idolatrie. Olivier Messiaen en het geloof in muziek.” PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle. net/11245/1.194609. Marneros, Christos. 2019. “Gilles Deleuze: Ethics and Morality.” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), January 4, 2019. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/01/04/ gilles-deleuze-ethics-and-morality/#fn-24053-5. Massumi, Brian. 1987. Translator’s Foreword to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ix–xv. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Scarry, Elaine. 2006. On Beauty and Being Just. London: Duckworth. Spinoza, Benedict de. 2001. Ethics. Translated by WH White and AH Stirling. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Taylor, Victor E. 2000. Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture. London: Routledge. Uhlmann, Anthony. 2011. “Deleuze, Ethics, Ethology, and Art.” In Deleuze and Ethics, edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, 154–70. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

3

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter Aesthet(h)ic(al) negotiations in black gospel’s Afro–Asian crossings Bo kyung Blenda Im

Introduction How do modern racial processes inform conceptions of what makes music “good” in Christian worship? This chapter explores an often-neglected area within Christian congregational music studies: the intersections between musical style, ethics, and racial formation. Musical styles deployed in Christian communal ritual shape, and are shaped by, believers’ conceptions of self and self-in-relation-to-Other. In particular, the Christian ethical self is formed in relation to the “racial imagination,” which Radano and Bohlman define as “the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity” (2000, 5). That is, Christian ritual is a key site in which understandings of the modern racial self are learned, reproduced, and even challenged; through communal negotiation of musical values, worshipers construct understandings of self and Other in racial terms that reverberate across liturgical and paraliturgical contexts. The present inquiry into the relationship between Christian ethical self-fashioning and racial formation sheds light on the ways in which worshipers come to terms with modern ideological impingements that obtain in newly emergent cross-racial and transnational social formations. Transpacific evangelical communities have not been immune from the interpellations of modernity: within the historical trajectory of Korean Protestant music-making, “church music” has become practically synonymous with Euro–Western classical and rock styles. As such, Koreans’ recent adaptation of black gospel music provides a striking aesthetic intervention for local audiences and serves as a crucial catalyst for believers to question the racial bases from which “good” music has been conceived and practiced in Christianity. Koreans’ adaptation of black gospel aesthetics, in other words, disrupts the transpacific dominance of Euro–Western music styles in ethically significant ways. The process of black gospel’s localization in Korea is characterized by what I call a delay between breath—a set of aesthetic possibilities engendered under the rubric of black gospel style—and encounter, the synchronous,

52  Bo kyung Blenda Im face-to-face interactions between Korean and African American faith practitioners. Ashon T Crawley theorizes extensively on the critical intervention of breathing “from within the zone of Blackpentecostalism” (2017, 34). He writes, There is a vibration, a sonic event, a sound I want to talk about, but its ongoing movement makes its apprehension both illusory and provisional… It is the gift, the concept, the inhabitation of and living into otherwise possibilities. Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is (2). Rather than specify—and thus calcify—the sonic signatures that merit classification under the rubric of “otherwise possibilities,” Crawley emphasizes that breath is defined by its fundamental departure from the normative. He thus leaves the aesthetic code itself open-ended and susceptible to infinite variation. Similarly, apprehension of gospel style’s transformative place as “breath” is provisional. Black gospel stylistic gestures afford otherwise possibilities for Korean Christians precisely because they facilitate differentiation from the constrictions imposed by Euro–American normativity in transpacific Christian musicking spaces. Breath, furthermore, precedes encounter. In contrast to Euro–Western Christian musical styles, whose interpretations were systematized under the watchful direction of a critical mass of North American missionaries physically present in the peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, black gospel aesthetics arrive in Korea separated from human originators. Gospel sounds, and the bodily orientations required to produce those sounds, are received through mediated channels—that is, via CDs and VHS in the 1990s, and today primarily through mp3s, online streaming services, and social media. Black gospel circulates transnationally in segments through new media technologies that enable sounds to cross social and physical boundaries in ways not equally granted to black American practitioners. This chapter specifically unpacks the implications of this delay in black sacred music’s transpacific migration. Using the concept of delay, or deferred encounter, between Afro– American and Korean Christians, I consider the multifaceted ethical implications of black gospel’s localization in 21st-century Seoul. As I will elaborate throughout this chapter, Korean practitioners of black gospel articulate new understandings of worship in the delay between breath and encounter. Delay facilitates critical interpretive possibilities for Korean Christians. These alternative modes of embodying faith, however, are tempered by limitations that stem from the absence of black Christians in Korean worship. In his study of dancehall and reggae performance in Japan, Marvin Sterling claims that “In Asia… blackness today is often more purely shadow, stripped of its human substance” (2010, 41). Similarly, when African American gospel music migrates across the Pacific Basin, it is largely presented as audiovisual commodity disembodied from its human

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 53 originators. As such, black gospel music practice in Korea not only provides an alternative means for Christian musical practice, but also raises concomitant ethical questions about the mobilization of sounds that originate from communities socially and geographically removed from one’s immediate circles. Rather than assert a one-dimensional narrative that either celebrates or condemns cross-racial “performance of ‘blackness’” (Johnson 2003) by Korean evangelicals,1 I propose that black gospel in Korea makes possible an articulation of a re-historicized Christian musical ethics in creative, complex, and contradictory ways. On the issue of appropriation, E Patrick Johnson pointedly asks, is all cross-cultural appropriation an instance of colonization and subjugation? Have not there been instances where the colonized have made use of the colonizer’s forms as an act of resistance? Has not the colonizer become more humanized by the presence of the colonized? I suggest that some sites of cross-cultural appropriation provide fertile ground on which to formulate new epistemologies of self and Other (2003, 6). Similar complexities obtain in the cross-racial movement of black gospel styles. Such performance sites always present the risk of reinscribing colonial epistemologies, but are also critical in the interruption and subversion of inherited structures. Thus, while I maintain that diverse contextual specificities must be taken into account when addressing the ethical implications of cross-racial musical performance, here I draw on history, media analysis, and ethnographic interviews to argue that embodiment of black gospel aesthetics of possibility (Crawley 2017) invites Korean Christians into an (albeit limited) allied project of religious decolonization. I propose that the translocal adaptation of black aesthetics across the Afro–Asian racial line engenders two mutually informing and important interventions into Korean Protestant ethics and musical practice. First, the shift in bodily technique required in gospel music performance carves out space for Korean practitioners to articulate a modern Christian subjectivity that departs from constrictions imposed by the Euro–Western model. Secondly, by bringing African American experiences closer to home, black gospel destabilizes the ways in which Korean Christians have negotiated proximity (Rommen 2007) to the postcolonial present, and counters the historical amnesia induced by universalist claims of white evangelicalism. These interventions make possible new formulations of the Korean Christian ethical self.

Protestant amnesia In the early 21st century, long after missionaries’ mass departure from the peninsula, Euro–Western evangelical modes of hearing continue to shape the boundaries of acceptable Korean Protestant musical practice. In

54  Bo kyung Blenda Im his inquiry into the meaning of the sŏngak (bel canto) voice in Korean churches, concert halls, and music conservatories, Nicholas Harkness has argued that the teleology of Christian progress has come to be represented in the aesthetics of sŏngak. According to Harkness, upper-class Korean Presbyterians in Seoul associate the “clean” sŏngak voice with the ideal of progress, which is critically based on the narrative of panjŏn (reversal)—for instance, from poor to riches, sickness to health, and dictatorship to democracy. In this process, tradition gets left behind (2014, 230). The “clean” voice, furthermore, is emblematic not only of ethnonational and spiritual enlightenment, but also of a clean maŭm (heart-mind complex) (Harkness 2014). We will return to the issue of maŭm below. While Harkness focuses on the juxtaposition between sŏngak and p’ansori that operates in Protestant Korea, his analytical insights offer a relevant point of departure for our current consideration of Korean engagements with popular musical styles in worship. In particular, Harkness highlights the entanglements between Euro–Western musical (vocal) aesthetics and the modern progress narrative that together operate normatively in Korean Christian spaces. However, Harkness leaves unattended the contextually specific roots—the Enlightenment’s system of racial governance—that undergird the Euro–Western basis of transpacific evangelical aurality. I outline its shape briefly here. From its inception, Korean Protestantism was shaped by white American missionaries who benefited from geopolitical power differentials between the United States and late Chosŏn states, and from these privileged positions exercised authority over new local converts. Horace N Allen, the first Protestant missionary to Korea, was officially dispatched to Chosŏn in 1884 by the Presbyterian (PCUSA) Board of Foreign Missions. Allen and other American evangelicals active in the Korean mission field during the turn of the 20th century, a period of US imperialist expansion in the Pacific arena, propagated a wholly different conception of normative humanity through the establishment of Western hospitals (Lee 2011), churches, and educational institutions. Early 20th-century Presbyterian missionaries, furthermore, controlled official church membership and governance by keeping a tight rein on baptism (Cha 2014). As they took on leadership roles within new modern institutions, missionaries perceived Korean sonic practices, including musical practices, through the aural lens of racializing Other. North American religious leaders promulgated a program of cultural uplift in which they “‘heard’ the success of their evangelization in the Koreans’ vocalization” (Chang 2019, 12). The violent modern project of racial and civilizational “uplift” of the non-West was executed not only through military interventions and unequal trade agreements (Chang 2003), but also in spaces of Christian ritual that disciplined bodies to adhere to new distinctions between music and noise, holy and profane. Such audile techniques of differentiation were inevitably bound up with the subjective values that white American

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 55 missionaries themselves practiced and carried into the peninsula. Most importantly, Euro–Americans presented their own biased aesthetics as universal: embodiment of Euro–American aesthetics was taught as a necessary step toward becoming a “modern” or advanced Christian subject. By disavowing the contingency of white aesthetic normativity, missionaries installed a transpacific epistemic system in which Christians would continually conflate Euro–American cultural production with holiness. The history of US intervention and control in Korean religious practice, exacerbated by unequal geopolitical relations between the two nationstates, is occluded in both primary and secondary literatures, which quickly bypasses Christianity’s colonial and imperialist past to provide more generous accounts of religion’s positive social functions (Lee 2010; Kim and Kim 2014). Motokazu Matsutani, however, writes against the tendency in Korean church historiography to assume such a close partnership between Korean churches and anti-colonial nationalists during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945). He instead emphasizes that, because foreign missionaries were either indifferent or hostile toward Korean nationalists, missions institutions were often at odds with Korean intellectual elites (2012, 20). Anti-colonial nationalists active during the Japanese colonial era found their political commitments irreconcilable with the model of non-interference espoused by the missions church. In addition to Western encroachment, Korean modernity took shape under the intensely violent conditions of Japanese colonization (1910–45). The national trauma of colonization both implicitly and explicitly informs recent Korean memory; in the words of Carter Eckert, even the idea of Japanese agency in Korea’s modernization is “psychologically wrenching” (1991, 2). The suggestion that South Korean economic growth might be attributable to colonialism comes uncomfortably close to the Japanese Imperial State’s paternalistic claim—that of bringing “progress” to Korea’s so-called stagnant early modern economy—through which it justified colonial aggressions on East and Southeast Asian neighbors prior to and during the Pacific War. More recent scholarly attempts to redress (the understandably) defensive nationalist impulses in postcolonial Korean historiography highlight the uneven effects of colonial modernity amongst the Korean populace (Shin and Robinson 1999). The fact of the matter, contends Eckert, is that Korean modernization did occur under Japanese colonialism, and that the Japanese in Korea were simultaneously both oppressors and agents of socioeconomic change; he claims, “Korean capitalism thus came to enjoy its first real flowering under Japanese rule and with official Japanese blessing” (Eckert 1991, 6). The Japanese imperial machine conscripted Korean colonial subjects into modernity, and some Koreans played an active role in colonial industrial growth. Thus, contrary to the reductive “Koreans versus Japanese” binary upon which Korean nationalist history was constructed, colonization was “selectively oppressive and affected different classes of

56  Bo kyung Blenda Im Koreans in different ways” (Eckert 1991, 6). Modernity did not have a uniform effect on all Koreans, but was rather experienced unevenly amongst different social groups. The overall story of Korean modernity is, therefore, complicated by imperialist rivalry between Western and Japanese forces. The Korean Christian voice engaged in singing and prayer, according to Hyun Kyong Chang, thus “can be understood as a kind of technology through which Korean converts negotiated their way into a ‘global history’ not as full agents or subjects, but in their markedly compromised positions, within multiple shifting power relationships” (2019, 4). Yet, there is little room to process historical trauma within normative boundaries of contemporary Korean Protestant worship, whose emphasis on buffered personal piety obfuscates religious subjects’ entanglements within wider webs of social and political relation. Korean Protestantism, in this sense, falls within the normative parameters of a Western modern project that insists on religion’s essential transhistorical difference from law, science, and politics—that is, from spaces in which power can be brought to task (Asad 1993, 28). Protestant emphasis on personal devotion in the absence of successful gestures to situate religious formational processes within colonial and postcolonial Korean contexts, I argue, exacerbates historical amnesia toward the fraught and power-inflected material conditions under which Korean Christian belief has been formed. Politically contentious narratives are regularly trivialized, displaced, and rendered inaudible in songs and sermons that instead normalize the triumphant progress of Western modernity across the Pacific; meanwhile, with little recourse to channels through which grievances might be addressed, politically disenfranchised religious subjects who remain in the pews address the inevitable void between church ideology and lived reality by redoubling their efforts to further personal devotion and internal metaphysical change. The triumphalism of Pax Koreana induces amnesia, inhibiting modern Christian subjects from confronting the historically traumatic weight of Western and Japanese imperialisms that continue to shape Korean national consciousness and geopolitical position. In particular, I suggest, the dominant egocentric and metaphysical conceptualization of maŭm (heart-mind complex) reinforces Korean Protestant amnesia. First of all, I must point out that maŭm is frequently referenced in Korean-language conversations, but the term has no direct English-language equivalent; any attempt at translation is always already an approximation. Maŭm, simjang, and kasŭm all correspond to the English-language term “heart” and centrally inform the ways in which Korean speakers conceptualize emotion and cognition (Yoon 2008, 214). Within the specific context of Korean Protestantism, Harkness posits that for his upper- and uppermiddle-class Presbyterian interlocutors, a clean maŭm is conveyed in the clean voice (2014, 224). That is, Harkness argues, Korean Presbyterians conflate Christian spiritual enlightenment and ethnonational progress with the vocal “cleanliness” that they hear in bel canto singing. Indeed, the

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 57 transformation of maŭm is a major ethical project for Korean Protestants. Deploying multiple explanatory maneuvers, Harkness offers that maŭm is “the location and experiential source or instrument of human emotions, feelings, morality, desire, and sincerity” (2014, 204). Furthermore, Harkness adds, “When combined with other terms, the maŭm forms the basis of personality traits and characteristics according to disposition or temper” (Ibid.). For the purposes of this chapter, I clarify that in its current dominant usage amongst Korean Protestants, the maŭm is located primarily in a personally accessible, metaphysical place. Although Harkness identifies the process of vocalizing “cleanliness” as an example of “how the voice is used to create, maintain, and transform social spaces” (203), I offer that the maŭm itself (for sŏngak singers) remains the sanctified place of private communication between individual believer and God that resists social negotiation, even when exposed in public vocalizing. That is, while the maŭm can be loosely defined as (1) a heart-mind complex, the location of emotion, intellect, and consciousness, and (2) the central site for ethical change and transformation, in everyday Korean Christian discourse and practice maŭm is conceptualized individually (or egocentrically) and metaphysically, outside the purview of social ethics. As maŭm is relegated to the deep recesses of one’s soul, it is simultaneously rendered ahistorical and impervious to sociopolitical negotiation. However, through identification with black gospel music practitioners, some Korean Christians have begun to re-conceptualize maŭm within a larger sociopolitical and historical complex. I close the current section by emphasizing that contemporary Korean Christian occupations with private devotion and comparative silence on postcolonial global politics is a tradition rooted in the inchoate years of Korean Protestantism, which was marked by the North American mission’s insistence on expunging politics from church and refusal to relegate religious control to local converts. Meanwhile, missionaries themselves enjoyed American imperialist privileges, and exercised significant power in both secular and sacred spaces. Korean Protestants’ general reticence on matters of local inequality and injustice—wealth gaps, poverty, housing crisis, enduring class structures, gentrification, discrimination based on racial, ethnic, and gender identities and sexual orientation—can, I suggest, be traced back to local Christianity’s (unrecognized) reliance on a transpacific hierarchy that buttresses the disembodied theology of the US metropole.2 In addition, I am reminded of Crawley’s incisive critique of the ways in which the project of ahistorical “theologizing” is closely linked to the Western Enlightenment’s constriction of thought itself:3 Thought, through desired categorical distinction, is made to not breathe. The possibility for distinction that is categorical, that is in the end pure, is the problem of Enlightenment thought. Pure difference. This is what theological and philosophical thought attempt to

58  Bo kyung Blenda Im achieve. Thought from within its own delimitation, purely different from—through excluding—other thought (2017, 11). Crawley deftly summarizes the problem inherent in universal theology that has no recourse to history. As a result, the most amplified voices in Korean Christianity are those that align with inherited tradition—personal and pious, and concomitantly devoid of that which has been deemed too “political” for spaces in which theology—“pure difference”—rules supreme. The continued disjuncture between everyday life and religion is exacerbated by Enlightenment-based Euro–American evangelicalism’s self-proclaimed universality, which deploys self-veiling processes that mask its own contingency. The unnamed specter of race not only governs Korean Christian worship, but also imposes a formidable blockade to imagining a sociohistorically engaged Christian ethical paradigm. Within this particular constellation of forces, the move to practice a musical style that deviates from the white aesthetic norm presents a critical avenue to re-imagine Christian relational ethics.

“Gospel worship” Heritage (originally “Heritage of Faith”) is a South Korean mixed vocal quintet of Christian practitioners who specialize in black music genres including gospel, R&B, and soul. Formed in 1998, Heritage is the earliest known Korean group to professionalize in urban contemporary gospel. Heritage, Heritage Band, and Heritage Mass Choir (HMC) perform in a wide variety of venues including local churches, concerts, and nationally televised popular music shows. Heritage also trains laypeople in gospel performance practice through its six-month Heritage Mass Choir School (HMCS), the graduates of which, after enrollment in the four-month-long Royal Priesthood School, qualify to audition for soprano, alto, and tenor sections of Heritage Mass Choir. Heritage Mass Choir has thus far released four live gospel concert albums (2007, 2009, 2012, 2020). In this section, I draw from interviews to highlight the multifaceted ways in which ethical priorities inform Heritage’s efforts to localize African American gospel in Korea. Formal interviews from which I draw were conducted during an extended period of fieldwork (2015–2018) in Seoul. While I present key interview excerpts to illustrate how black gospel is being understood in Korea, I also provide the caveat that gospel music reception is not monolithic. However, Heritage members who have thought extensively about black gospel music and its place within the wider network of Korean music ministries are able to offer significant insights based on decades of experience navigating both secular and religious music scenes in Korea. By adapting black gospel aesthetics, Heritage members also redefine “worship.” That is, the expressive possibilities engendered through black gospel practice afford new conceptions of the self in relation to God.

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 59 A few minutes into my interview with Lee Cheolkyu sŏnsaengnim,4 tenor vocalist and director of Heritage Mass Choir, we begin discussing the differences between Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)5 and black gospel. When prompted to describe the general style of worship that Cheolkyu sŏnsaengnim experienced at church in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he details the limitations that CCM places on vocal range: BI: 

So, you mentioned that back then [as you were just starting out in black gospel], when you went to church, instead of Notorious B.I.G. or Boyz II Men, the worship was in a different style? Could you explain what that style was? What kind of music was it? LCK: First of all, there is a limitation to the vocal range. How should I approach this first […] Korean CCM, instead of individuality, [places emphasis on] melodies that are easy to follow. And, because it borrows from Korean kayo form, there is a narrative arc (kisŭngjŏngyŏl). In the verse, the vocal range is low, and in the high parts, the range goes a little higher. And because men and women need to sing this together in unison, the highest a woman’s range can go is about this high, like in the hymns. And men will sing “mi” an octave lower. If you think about it, men’s vocal cords, just like everyone’s voices, are different— the shape of the vocal cords are all different—but there is a tendency to see them as a monolith. So men end up singing low, and because women have to sing that an octave higher they end up having to use falsetto. […] So this aspect naturally lends itself to comparison with black gospel. Black gospel is a genre in which you can shout everything aloud but, as you know, Korea has many churches that are quite conservative. […] Even in Presbyterianism, the really conservative factions are resistant toward raising your voice like that, and also are resistant toward strong beats […] Limits have been placed on everything. I think CCM is music that has had many limitations placed on things like pitch range and musical characteristics (Interview, Lee Cheolkyu, April 20 2018, Seoul)6 Throughout our interview, Cheolkyu sŏnsaengnim frequently returns to the term “limited” (chehantoen) to describe Korean Contemporary Christian Music (KCCM). In the above excerpt, he indicates that the practice of singing only in the low register (for men) and in falsetto (for women) stands in for normative Christian aesthetics. In contrast, as I have observed through my work as participant-observer in HMCS, Heritage members emphasize the use of chest voice across one’s entire vocal register—from the lowest to highest notes, regardless of one’s assigned vocal part (soprano, alto, tenor)—when teaching HMCS students how to sing black gospel. For Cheolkyu sŏnsaengnim, the use of chest voice even in one’s uppermost range counters normative musical limitations and expands the range of Christian expressive possibilities.

60  Bo kyung Blenda Im Kim Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim, tenor vocalist and leader of Heritage, also affirms the need for stylistic alternatives in Korean churches. In an interview accompanying the third Heritage Mass Choir album He Will Answer (2012), he states, KHS:  When

we worship and praise, sometimes we want to come to God in this way [as an honest outpouring]. Sometimes because of the cultural characteristics that we [Koreans] have, we become more still, become quiet, and even though we feel frustrated, I think there is to a certain extent something about our culture that inhibits expression. So though not all the time, sometimes when we want to pour out everything through praise, I think it’s really helpful to be strengthened in worship by the tool called black gospel. […] So, not everyone can worship through black gospel but I hope for a more diverse worship culture in Korea, too. As you know, God did not create all of us the same, and I thought that it would be good to be able to praise according to what fits the characteristics of a culture (Kim Hyo Sik, in Kim et al., The Gospel 3: He Will Answer, 2012).

“God did not create all of us the same,” asserts Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim, who identifies black gospel as a model to foster a more diverse worship culture in Korea. The search for stylistic diversity is not a superfluous endeavor; his investment in reforming Korean church music aesthetics is closely linked to a perceived need for congregants to worship in non-reductive ways that speak to their myriad life situations. For those who seek an honest outpouring of the maŭm in worship, but find their preferred modes of expression inhibited or invalidated, black gospel presents a fortifying alternative that helps worshipers to sidestep unnamed but present performance conventions of stillness and quietude. Black gospel not only presents a method for South Koreans to depart from dominant stylistic paradigms, but also proposes a space to forward different conceptions of God. In our interview, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim recalls how participation in the African American gospel tradition has informed his reconceptualization of Christian worship: KHS: 

There are still plenty of [Korean] churches like that, especially when it comes to things being named “worship” in church. It’s very—how can I put it?—heavily suppressed? [People are] extremely careful. Of course, our God is great and awesome, and so we should take care not to mess around or treat God’s name in vain. But, when the joy and laughter and thrill of human experience becomes suppressed and barred from expression, it comes across as if God is… a dictator? That’s how I felt about it. So when I first went to a black gospel church it felt so freeing. That these people raise their hands and respond freely before God, or clap before God, it isn’t because someone makes them do these things,

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 61 but I think it’s because it’s springing up from the inside. And the clapping wasn’t just clapping but rhythmic clapping. [I thought,] “Wow, this is what worship can be like!” (Interview, Kim Hyo Sik, November 4, 2015, Seoul). Like Cheolkyu sŏnsaengnim, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim carefully problematizes the restrictions that established Korean church music paradigms impose on worshiping bodies. As mentioned above, his black gospel music practice is strongly motivated by a conviction that there are more ways to worshipfully engage with the utter range of human experiences represented in church pews. For Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim, reclaiming worship’s expressive potential necessarily involves fuller incorporation of the bodily materiality from which Enlightenment modernity attempted to depart (Steuernagel, Chapter 1, 2021). The body, for Korean gospel musicians, is not a mere problem to be resolved; on the contrary, it is a vitally welcome component to fuller Protestant worldmaking. Expanding the range of expressive possibilities in worship, therefore, directly relates to Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim’s theological convictions about God: God is not a distant dictator who imposes stillness. Rather, the exaltation of God involves diverse kinetic gestures such as kneeling, raising of hands, and clapping. In sum, black gospel music offers a new paradigm through which local congregants can claim previously disavowed modes of embodiment as worshipful. Both Cheolkyu and Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnims acknowledge that the practice of black aesthetics in Korean church transgresses traditional norms, but legitimate the aesthetic intervention by invoking a poetics of conviction (Rommen 2007) that points out a need for individual voices to break through normative standards of CCM. In short, Korean gospel musicians elucidate the ways in which gospel music diversifies the range of human experiences that can be brought before a relatable, present God in worship. Gospel music in Korea relativizes normative Western church music aesthetics, and fosters new ways of understanding the relationship between self and Other.

Historicizing the maŭm The cross-racial movement of black gospel style, furthermore, complicates Korean Protestants’ “negotiation of proximity.” Writing from the context of Trinidadian engagements with North American gospel music, Timothy Rommen defines the negotiation of proximity as “an exercise in deflection and disfiguration whereby the near is made far and the far becomes immanent and useful” (2007, 89). Rommen further states, “I call this relation between the local and the nonlocal, this process by which the far becomes near and usable and the near becomes far and serviceable, the negotiation of proximity” (2017, 103). For Rommen’s Full Gospel interlocutors, North American gospel music facilitates sonic and theological participation in the

62  Bo kyung Blenda Im global invisible church, and simultaneously allows them to deflect from the reality of local interdenominational and interethnic divisions (2007, 2017). The negotiation of proximity operates as default in Korean Christianity, which, as I mentioned above, favors the production of historically and politically disengaged subjects who have internalized the false equivalence between Euro–Western rock and classical aesthetics and Christian holiness. Korean Protestants, who constantly look toward white American evangelicals for inclusion in an “invisible church” (Rommen 2007, 72), engage in an act of forgetting that glosses the painful traces that imperialist and colonial legacies have left in their wake. Korean gospel practitioners carve out space to depart from this milieu, and thereby begin to destabilize white evangelicalism’s hold on Korean Christian cultural production. In more specific terms, I suggest that black gospel practice promotes anamnesis, which can be defined as “a collective remembering of the past across generations to suggest a possible collective healing and national reconciliation that must pass through the repressed of culture and history in all of its violence” (Donadey 2011, 76). The cross-racial movement of black gospel aesthetics facilitates Korean Christian anamnesis by making possible the artistic representation of the “historical unrepresentable” (Ibid., 79), and thus initiates a collective remembering through which participants may confront the multilayered violence of transpacific modernity. Here black gospel mediates new intersubjective relationships between believers of color situated in disparate geographic and social locations. Through its performance, Korean Christians articulate modern subjectivity from a historically informed place, and recognize shared traumas rooted in global systems of racial governance. On this front, the authorizing discourses that inform gospel’s localization in Korea merit particular attention. Korean gospel music performance does not occur within a domestic vacuum, but rather, is punctuated by intermittent face-to-face Afro–Asian encounters. The Korean-produced 2013 documentary film Black Gospel provides glimpses into such interactions. The film chronicles the journey of eleven Koreans and Korean Americans who travel to Harlem in search of gospel music’s roots. Iconic sites—the arrival lobby of John F Kennedy International Airport, the Apollo Theater, a New York City subway train, the green reprieve of Central Park, and Sunday worship at Mt. Hermon Baptist Church—emplace viewers in a route through New York City curated by the film’s producers, who invite audiences to join the Korean visitors as they trace the origins of gospel music’s “soul.” The interracial group of Asian and black Christians featured in the film—actors, producers and arrangers, singers, organists, choir directors, and composers based variously in Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York— have been tasked with putting together a performance for the upcoming Sing! Harlem Festival. Although these face-to-face encounters are framed within the main narrative of “discovery” pursued by the filmmakers, nonetheless, several scenes in the film pointedly record moments in which the

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 63 group of Koreans, in dialogue with new African American acquaintances, come to a heightened awareness of the historical and cultural pieces that constitute gospel “soul.” In one particularly memorable scene, themes of suffering, slavery, white Christian terror, and interracial empathy come together at Charlie’s, a cozy soul food restaurant in Harlem. Kim Yumi, Jung Jun, and Park Suyong enter the restaurant and are greeted by Rev. Henry V Harrison, introduced by the off-screen narrator as a prodigy who played in Carnegie Hall when he was nine years old. The camera pans across hot trays full of fried chicken, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, okra, yams, rice, and collard greens before it briefly settles on the face of Rev. Harrison. After a few seconds, the camera zooms out to contemplate the four people, each with a plateful of food, seated together around a naturally lit table by the storefront window. When Jung Jun asks, “Is this the only place with soul food?” Rev. Harrison begins to share the meaning and history behind African American culinary culture: HH:  Soul

food is in many places at once. [JJ: Ah, Harlem.] Many places in Harlem, and around the country. You know, the term soul food only like started in the 1960s. [KYM: 1960s?] Yes. Before that, it was just called southern cooking because so much of our foods originated in the south of America where the large population of African Americans was. But, today we call “soul” food that is good for the body and the soul. JJ:  Why “soul” music, “soul” food? Why? HH:  Because it comes out of our culture, out of our trials, out of our suffering, out of our pain. And as I said, they would give us the food that they threw away. But, we took it and we made something good out of it. KYM:  [In Korean:] Ah so in this food, their suffering and joy and victory and tears, I think, are all contained in there. Kind of like our [PSY: Yeah it’s similar] han? Back in the day, us too during war, kind of like we made pudaetchigae, and mixed things up, and put this and that on there (hisMT Ministry, Black Gospel, 2013). When Rev. Harrison refers to pain and hardships faced by African Americans, and connects this to the creative agency practiced in black cuisine (“we made something good out of it”), Kim Yumi responds by drawing a comparison to han and invoking a dish—pudaetchigae, which literally translates to “army stew”—created by Koreans who salvaged ingredients from US Army bases in 1950s wartime Korea. Han and pudaetchigae function as quick semiotic gestures that enable Kim, Jung, and Park to coempathize with historical traumas that inform the African American present. Han performs the metonymic work of bringing into the conversation Koreans’ individual and collective feelings of oppression when they reflect on the peninsula’s susceptibility to interpellations of more powerful imperial dynasties and regimes. Psychological and social repression results in the formation of han, which describes the tumor-like entity that can occupy the

64  Bo kyung Blenda Im maŭm when one accumulates a sense of having undergone repeated injustices for a significant length of time. By illuminating such moments of dialogue and encounter, Black Gospel emphasizes, primarily for its Korean audiences, the generative place of gospel music in mediating Afro–Asian relationships. The same scene offers an example of black witness to Christianity’s complicity in systems of racial subjugation. Rev. Harrison recounts to his new acquaintances, HH:  Being

brought here as slaves, the one thing that we were forced to do as well was to go to church. We had to take our master—I’m driving the buggy with the horses and the family’s in the back—they go into the church. I go to the church because I’m driving. But, I have to sit upstairs in the gallery, the balcony. I can’t sit downstairs with the family because I’m black. But, I can sit up there. But as I’m sitting up there I’m looking at the preacher who’s preaching and he’s preaching from the Bible and he’s telling them, God sent Moses to deliver the people of Israel when they were slaves. And we’re in the balcony and we’re saying, “Hmm, we’re slaves. Maybe God will send a Moses to us. Free us.” Or they talked about Daniel, and he was taken from Jerusalem, to Babylon, and they said, “Hmm, we were brought from Africa to America. God delivered Daniel. Then maybe he’ll deliver us.” So, they began to sing, “Kumbaya my Lord…” (Ibid.)

The sterilized feel-good version to which Kumbaya has been reduced at contemporary American campfires is clearly alien to Rev. Harrison’s account. Instead, the reverend’s oral recollection of Kumbaya’s history affirms its place as a cry for help in the midst of legalized racial terror, when white Christians rationalized the systematized kidnapping and sustained oppression of people forcibly removed from the African continent. The significance of Euro–American Christians’ violent suppression of African Americans is not lost on Korean musicians, as they form connections with traumatic aspects of black history in their own interpretations of gospel music. In a 2005 interview, two years after the release of Heritage of Faith’s debut album, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim states, KHS:  I

was intrigued by black gospel, which passionately sang about the hope of heaven in the midst of historical, institutional, and racial pain (ap’ŭm), and I wanted to convey the message and faith melted in these songs to young people of Korea (Kim 2005).

Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim locates the appeal of black gospel in the message of hope conveyed in the face of institutional, historical, and racial pain. Notably, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim’s awareness of systematized racial violence against black Americans precedes the 2013 Black Gospel documentary by almost a decade, which indicates that a knowledge of black marginality in

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 65 America already circulated in Korea during Heritage’s formative period. Indeed, although Heritage first learned gospel sonic techniques through mediated channels, in the early 2000s, they received spiritual and musical mentorship from Bishop Nelson Williams, who at the time had been stationed at an army garrison in Korea (Interview, Kim Hyo Sik, November 4, 2015, Seoul). More importantly, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim observes a parallel between the maŭms of black Americans and Koreans. Alluding to the history of New World slavery in accounting for the emotional impact of black gospel on South Koreans, he states, KHS: This

music, called black gospel, is really the worship culture of African Americans living in the United States. There are some special characteristics of this minjok (people) that come from the past, from history, and I think some parts of those characteristics dovetail with our [Korean] minjok. Maŭm that were repressed for a long time […] they are praises that emerged from situations in which people could not express their wills as they desired, and would have had nothing else to grasp other than God. So these songs are explosive, and black gospel is a worship culture that is an honest outpouring, expressing those repressed emotions in church (Kim Hyo Sik, in Kim et al., The Gospel 3: He Will Answer, 2012).

Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim uses the word “repressed” (ŏgaptoen) to describe the condition of black Americans’ maŭm under institutionalized racism. He draws a clear cross-racial connection between the social maŭms of black Americans and Koreans, foregrounding the darker side of modernity within an explicitly Christian discursive framework. Here, black gospel’s role in mediating Afro– Asian historical resonances is reminiscent of the concept of transcontinental intimacies proposed by Lisa Lowe. Re-reading late 18th- and early-19thcentury colonial archives to highlight the connections between European liberalism, American settler colonialism, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades, Lowe proposes that modern liberalism promises universal equality even while differentiating racial Others as subhuman. “To investigate modern race,” contends Lowe, “is to consider how racial differences articulate complex intersections of social difference within specific conditions” (2015, 7). Similarly, Euro–Western Christian modernity promises universal salvation, yet governs precisely through mechanisms that rationalize differential treatment of modernity’s racial Others. By emphasizing that both African Americans and Koreans share similar yet differentiated experiences of oppression, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim articulates a minor-tominor relational poetics that highlights a shared history of differential inclusion in modernity. Finally, the process of localizing black gospel style prompts Korean musicians to articulate their marginalized positions vis-à-vis the white

66  Bo kyung Blenda Im dominant transpacific worship mainstream in explicitly racial terms. That is, the discourses through which Korean musicians legitimate black gospel performance in the peninsula renders visible the specter of race that has shaped Korean church music practice. Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim recounts: KHS:  But

then I asked myself, “Why did I get into black gospel, even though I’m not black?” I took it upon myself to find answers to that question, and thought, “Let’s flip that around: Why do Koreans do modern rock, why white people’s culture, even though we’re not white?” Then, we’d always have to wear hanbok, live in hanok houses. But that’s not it. What we call “our culture” doesn’t necessarily mean we have to wear hanbok or live in hanok to qualify as “ours.” We can always optimize [gospel] to make it suitable for that land, even though, of course, black people are the originators… (Interview, Kim Hyo Sik, November 4, 2015, Seoul).

First of all, the contingency of Euro–American cultural dominance, which had operated in the background of the Protestant imaginary, is finally rendered historically legible and susceptible to critique. Secondly, Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim raises the pointed question: What makes a certain set of bodily disciplines “Korean”? Long-term engagement with gospel music has motivated Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim to adopt an anti-essentialist stance on Korean cultural production. He not only grapples with transpacific worship’s Euro–American basis, but also challenges its epistemic structures that, by circumscribing the boundaries of aesthetic possibility, sustain the myth of categorical ethnoracial difference between social groups. Yet, within Hyo Sik sŏnsaengnim’s anti-reductionist stance seems embedded a paradox: the redefinition of “Korean culture” is enmeshed with a particular understanding of stylized “blackness” whose provisional nature can be lost in the delay between breath and encounter. That is to say, the performance sites of black gospel do indeed provide the “fertile ground on which to formulate new epistemologies of self and Other” (Johnson 2003, 6); aesthetically mediated relations between African American and Korean Christians destabilizes the totalizing presence of Euro–American aesthetics and epistemology, and thereby opens up Korean Christian subjectivity as a culturally negotiable site. However, such potentially revolutionary interventions are accompanied by the risk of redoubled imposition of essentialized expectations on black bodies. A decolonized transpacific Christian epistemology, I therefore suggest, necessarily recalibrates relationality to begin from and to sustain acknowledgment of the Other’s infinitude.

Conclusion Black gospel music in Korea thus destabilizes normative processes of subject formation in transpacific evangelicalism. In black gospel performance,

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 67 the Korean Protestant maŭm is not just a personal, metaphysical concept; rather, Korean musicians re-conceptualize the maŭm as a site influenced and shaped by very real, and also very physical, imperialist power dynamics that continue to inform the present. Accordingly, black gospel music brings the far near. And as the distant becomes proximal, the mirror of African American modern experience sheds new light on Koreans’ compromised position in the modern transpacific evangelical order, urging believers to articulate new understandings of self-in-relation-to-Other. This chapter has demonstrated that when Korean music practitioners hear the distant Other prior to face-to-face encounter, they are prone to interpret sounds according to established listening habits. Yet, even though breath precedes encounter in black gospel music’s transpacific localization, historical and theological resonances between African American and Korean experiences of Christian modernity decidedly mark the ways in which Korean practitioners come to understand black sacred musical aesthetics. Style’s transpacific migration, therefore, presents a corrective to Protestant amnesia: practical, embodied efforts to expand the stylistic boundaries of Korean worship beyond traditional Euro–Western boundaries have, in turn, opened cross-racial conversations that highlight comparative experiences of Enlightenment modernity’s violences. Transpacific gospel practice demonstrates that these parallel histories are markedly distinct yet intertwined. In the case of black gospel music’s Afro–Asian crossings, musical aesthetics informs, and even transforms, local Christian ethics to initiate a decolonizing critique of Christianity’s past and present. I conclude with some final thoughts on the paradox of black gospel’s intervention in Korea. Black aesthetics can foreshadow alternative networks of solidarity, but these networks are rendered possible via forces of globalization that propagate transcontinental inequalities. If anything, the black gospel case study demonstrates the highly uneven, heterogeneous effects of 21st-century globalization—it diversifies narratives and socialities that may emerge from Christian contexts while it simultaneously threatens to flatten the representation of black Americans into the stylized gestures. The establishment of equitable communities calls for collective mobilization on all fronts of knowledge production—well-researched historical narratives that would sustain interracial solidarities, for instance—to pivotally inform the interpretations of sounds that have oftentimes preceded and laid the groundwork for face-to-face interactions. While I have spent a significant portion of this chapter highlighting the potential for shared gospel embodiment to herald new religious intimacies and interracial alliances, the larger project of decolonizing transpacific evangelicalism (and the related phenomenon of global Christianity) requires sustained dialogue that addresses current limitations of mobility and language. Intermittent face-to-face cross-racial encounters, for the most part, involve costly international travel, which brings us full circle

68  Bo kyung Blenda Im back to the problem of delay between breath and encounter. Delay reminds us of the ways in which socioeconomic status continues to restrict geographic mobility on both nodes of the Pacific Basin. Furthermore, geopolitical power differentials reflected in the transnational dominance of English language hinders the development of nuanced conversations critically needed to refashion transpacific Christian epistemologies. 21st-century Christian musicians—those involved in sonic performance, interpretation, and dissemination—always already involve themselves within the shifting dynamics of a global relational poetics. Black gospel’s particular poetics and politics continue to be negotiated in the latent space between breath and encounter.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I use “evangelical” interchangeably with “Protestant” when discussing 21st-century Korean Christian contexts. 2 This emphasis on personal morality over social reform has strong parallels in the work of the late-19th-century American evangelist Dwight L Moody. Moody eschewed common markers of “worldliness” in favor of inner personal piety that, in practice, actually reasserted middle-class capitalist ideals (Nekola 2016). 3 Here I read Crawley alongside Walter Mignolo, who argues that coloniality and Western modernity are co-constitutive sides of the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo 2011). 4 Sŏnsaengnim directly translates to “teacher,” but is also commonly used as an honorific for an individual with more experience in a particular area of expertise. I deploy the term here because of the relationships I developed with my interlocutors during fieldwork (2015–18). 5 While distinctions between Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) are clearer in the US marketplace, in Korea, CCM is often used interchangeably with CWM. 6 All Korean-to-English translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.

References Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cha, Paul S. 2014. “Unequal Partners, Contested Relations: Protestant Missionaries and Korean Christians, 1884–1907.” In Critical Readings on Christianity in Korea, edited by Donald Baker, 233–66. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Chang, Gordon H. 2003. “Whose ‘Barbarism’? Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States-Korea War of 1871.” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March): 1331–65. Chang, Hyun Kyong Hannah. 2019. “Singing and Praying among Korean Christian Converts (1896–1915): A Trans-Pacific Genealogy of the Modern Korean Voice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, edited by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel, 1–19. Oxford Handbooks Online. 10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199982295.013.18.

Delay, or, when breath precedes encounter 69 Crawley, Ashon T. 2017. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press. Donadey, Anne. 2011. “Postslavery and Postcolonial Representations: Comparative Approaches.” In The Creolization of Theory, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 62–82. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Eckert, Carter J. 1991. Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism 1876–1945. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Harkness, Nicholas. 2014. Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. hisMT Ministry, dir. 2013. Black Gospel. Seoul, South Korea: STORYSET Co., Ltd. YouTube. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kim, Chin-yŏng. 2005. “Genuine Brown Gospel is born only amidst hardship,” Christianity Today, August 29, 2005. http://www.christiantoday.co.kr/view. htm?id=134302. Kim, Sebastian CH and Kirsteen Kim. 2014. A History of Korean Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Yŏng-min, Yi Chi-ŭm, Pak Mi-ae, and Kim Kang-hŭi, dirs. 2012. The Gospel 3: He Will Answer; Seoul, South Korea: Heritage Production. DVD. Lee, Timothy S. 2010. Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lee, Young Ah. 2011. “A Study on Horace N. Allen’s Medicine and Recognition of Korean Body.” Korean Journal of Medical History 20 (2): 291–325. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Matsutani, Motokazu. 2012. “Church over Nation: Christian Missionaries and Korean Christians in Colonial Korea.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Nekola, Anna E. 2016. “Negotiating the Tensions of U.S. Worship Music in the Marketplace.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Jonathan Dueck and Suzel Ana Reily, 1–22. Oxford Handbooks Online. 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199859993.013.33. Radano, Ronald, and Philip V Bohlman. 2000. “Introduction: Music and Race, Their Past, Their Presence.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V Bohlman, 1–53. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. “Mek Some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rommen, Timothy. 2017. “Sounds Transcendent: Gospel Music and the Negotiation of Proximity in Trinidad.” In Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, edited by Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip V. Bohlman, 97–110. New York: Oxford University Press. Shin, Gi-Wook, and Michael Robinson, eds. 1999. Colonial Modernity in Korea. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press. Sterling, Marvin D. 2010. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

70  Bo kyung Blenda Im Steuernagel, Marcell. 2021. “Praise, Politics, Power: Ethics of the Body in Christian Musicking.” In Ethics and Christian Musicking, edited by Nathan Myrick and Mark Porter. Abingdon: Routledge. Yoon, Kyung-Joo. 2008. “The Korean conceptualization of heart: An indigenous perspective.” In Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs Across Cultures and Languages, edited by Farzad Sharifian, René Dirven, Ning Yu, and Susanne Niemeier, 213–43. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Part II

Fulfilling responsibilities and negotiating values

4

“That worship sound”: ethics, things, and shimmer reverberation Jeff R Warren

“That worship sound” In October 2019, Hillsong Worship released the album Awake, reaching number one (for the seventh time) on Billboard’s “Top Christian Albums” chart and number 39 on the “Billboard 200” chart (Asker 2019a). Hillsong Worship has released 46 albums since 1992, and claims their songs are “sung by an estimated 50 million people in 60 languages” each week (Hillsong 2019). Hillsong Worship is complemented by the groups Hillsong United and Hillsong Young and Free, with a combined 66 albums from the church organization that reported over 94 million dollars revenue in 2014 (Hillsong 2014). In the media surrounding the release of Awake, Billboard interviewed Brooke Ligertwood, songwriter and creative director for the album. Responding to a question about worship music on Christian radio, Ligertwood stated that in a time of volatility, “worship music, that style, makes people feel invited and welcomed” (Asker 2019b). Ligertwood emphasizes the style of worship music. And indeed, there seem to be recognizable songwriting and production elements within Contemporary Worship Music (CWM), a term following others I adopt here to identify the genre of music dominant in evangelical churches (i.e. Ingalls 2018). To get a sense of “that style,” one could listen to top songs sung in churches as reflected in the Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) charts, or listen in particular to the Hillsong Worship style in their past few albums. Hillsong’s influence has begun to make it an area of inquiry for scholarship (i.e. Ingalls et al. 2013, Riches and Wagner 2017), but often the concern with the musical sound is not as pronounced in scholarship as it is for those who produce the music and perform and sing it every week in churches around the globe. While many elements of these songs and the style could be discussed (and I detail some of them in Warren 2019), here I focus on a type of pitch-shifted reverberation called “shimmer,” often applied to electric guitar and keyboard sounds in CWM. Abel Mendoza is a “sound designer” who creates and markets products for church keyboardists. The flagship product on Mendoza’s website “That Worship Sound” is called “Worship Essentials 2,” a keyboard template for the live performance computer application MainStage 3 (Mendoza 2019).

74  Jeff R Warren While all thirty included patches conjure sounds from popular CWM recordings, the patch “That Worship Sound” condenses the sound of CWM to six instruments with several switchable parameters that can be combined and blended to create a wide range of popular CWM sounds, complemented by a specialized script that generates “tonic drones” in the selected key. In each patch, one of the global parameters that can be changed is the amount of shimmer. The Hillsong Worship album and worship sound design products provide examples of the importance of musical sound for creators and consumers of CWM. It is sound, and in particular the sound of shimmer, that I want to take seriously in this chapter. The question I explore is how the musical sound of CWM relates to the ethics of CWM. Or, to put it another way, what do the sounds of CWM have to do with how congregants respond to other people and God? I pursue this question through two philosophical threads: the relation of ethical responsibility to other people and responsibility to God as described by Emmanuel Lévinas, and the argument from Alphonso Lingis that things present us with perceptual imperatives. In looking specifically at shimmer, these threads do not weave into a generalized theory of shimmer. Instead, it leads to looking closer at the strangeness of shimmer that can only be understood by doing things with it, supporting Lingis’s argument that things must be described separately, and resisting easy responses that shimmer fits into a causal structure or that it is simply what human beings make of it. In short, I argue that closely describing shimmer, including describing how we interact with shimmer, contributes to a richer discussion about how worship music relates to ethical responsibilities to other people and God.

Shimmer reverberation Shimmer fits within the history of reverberation enabled by speaker technology. Jonathan Sterne calls “detachable echo” the phenomenon where sound and reverberation “no longer had any necessary, given relationship” (Sterne 2015, 111). Detachable reverbs include analogue circuitry, algorithms, reverbs based upon impulse responses, and hybrid approaches involving physical panels and speaker arrays such as those found at IRCAM (Carpentier et al. 2016). The reverb sound that eventually became known as “shimmer” was developed by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Shimmer is created by running a signal through a pitch-shifter modulated up an octave, a reverberator, and then running part of the resulting signal back through the effects chain to create a feedback loop. Typical sounds from this signal chain have been compared to string pads, choral “oohs” and “aahs,” steel drums, and organ sounds. Shimmer is featured in Eno’s 1983 “Deep Blue Day,” and was brought to a wider listening audience through The Edge’s guitar sounds in U2’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire, where Eno and Lanois served as producers.

That worship sound 75 Two major influences on the sonic properties of the shimmer are the input signal (that is, the sound from the guitar or synthesizer or other source) and the algorithms used for pitch shifting and reverberation. Pitch shifters work by splitting the waveform into segments, and then applying the selected pitch shift to each segment of the waveform. Key to the sonic result is how the waveform is spliced. Sean Costello, developer of the acclaimed digital audio workstation (DAW) plugin Valhalla Shimmer, describes how shimmer’s sonic characteristics rely upon randomization from this process (Costello 2010a). The pitch shifter attempts to splice the signal based upon finding similarity in the waveform (called autocorrelation). Reverberation introduces randomization of signal phases (decorrelation) in an attempt to mimic the physical process of reverberation where temperature and other elements affect the scattering of the signal (Blesser and Salter 2007, 240–1; 268). By the time the signal has gone through pitch shifting and reverberation and is fed back into the pitch shifter, there are few points of correlation for the pitch-shifting algorithm to select. The pitch shifter still needs to create splice points, so often selects random splice points. Costello writes: “the result is a HUGE amount of sonic complexity generated from a simple system. Put a sine wave into this type of feedback system, and the output can approach near orchestral levels of thickness” (Costello 2010a). This brief description highlights how the sonic complexity of shimmer is shaped by the autocorrelation algorithms of the pitch shifter and decorrelation algorithms of the reverberation, and that different approaches to these processes can result in different sounds. The often emulated Eno and Lanois sound, for example, used an AMS pitch shifter paired with Lexicon 224 and EMT250 reverbs (Ibid.). Over the past decade, shimmer has grown in use across several genres of popular music. Contributing factors to this growth are the continued influence of The Edge’s guitar sounds, continued production work by Eno and Lanois, a return to select synthesizer and production sounds of the 1980s, and the availability of high quality shimmer hardware and software. Two of the most used and highly reviewed shimmer generators are the previously mentioned Valhalla Shimmer plugin (released in 2010) and the Strymon Big Sky pedal (released 2012–13). Both reduce complexity and live performance risk, as detailed in a trade review of the Big Sky’s shimmer setting: “conjuring this Eno-esque mix was a tricky balancing act, involving pricey Lexicon and AMS units, half a dozen mixer channels and the risk of screeching feedback. But the Big Sky’s Shimmer delivers it flawlessly at the touch of a button” (Kiang 2014). These two popular shimmer generators have also become highly used in CWM. If rock ‘n roll can be crudely described as a combination of blues and country (Frith 1981, 26), CWM in 2019 might be described as a combination of U2 and 1990s acoustic guitar led bands filtered through Coldplay. U2’s influence is found in the delay and shimmer of The Edge’s guitar. Acoustic guitar’s influence came through the folk revival and the

76  Jeff R Warren Jesus movement, and remained a prominent lead instrument in 1990s rock and indie music. The 1990s and early 2000s CWM (often called “praise and worship” at the time) often featured a singer with an acoustic guitar accompanied by delayed electric guitar, with Vineyard Worship—and especially Brian Doerksen’s sound—leading the way. In the early 2000s, Coldplay reintroduced shimmer on both delayed guitar and keyboard sounds. Additionally, Coldplay often featured piano or keyboard as lead instrument. Hillsong Worship draws heavily upon these sonic influences. Across their latest album releases, layered piano and synthesizer sounds dominate, with shimmer drenching synths and electric guitars. To look closer at how “That Worship Sound” and shimmer relates to ethics, I move to philosophical ethics before returning in more detail to shimmer.

Lévinas, ethics, and god In my book Music and Ethical Responsibility, my emphasis was on ethical responses to other people. In a nutshell, I argued that since music involves other people it involves ethical responsibilities. I noted that we may have responsibilities to non-human things, but limited my inquiry into ethical responsibilities to other people (Warren 2014, 138–9). By narrowing the scope of my argument, I did little to explore two interpretive paths of the work of philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas that move beyond responsibilities to other human beings: responses to God, and responses to non-human things. A common element to both paths is that Lévinas breaks with past positions and emphasizes separation. Graham Harman summarizes that “what Lévinas most abhors is the model of the world as a totalized system, each thing defined by its relations to the others” (Harman 2009, 408). Lévinas challenges the systems of Heidegger and others, finding them based upon a totality wherein “the whole and the parts determine one another” (Lévinas 1999, 49). Lévinas’s concept of separation is core to the argument of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), especially as articulated in the arguments of Harman, Ian Bogost, and Timothy Morton. Separation, however, does not mean that everything remains cordoned off in its own solipsistic world, as we know that everyday things are bumping into each other. We bump into our neighbors, raindrops bump into pavement, and birds bump into branches. This separation, or “alterity” as Lévinas often calls it, means that transcendence is required when encountering others. The key problem for OOO is that Lévinas spends all his effort on one particular case of encountering otherness: how one person encounters another. In particular, Lévinas is interested in how proximity to others leads to responsibilities. Lévinas describes proximity as “difference which is non indifference” (Lévinas 1981, 139; for more, see Warren 2014, 135). For Lévinas, ethics does not come from reason or a thought experiment. It comes from the other, and the other remains other, wholly different from me. Yet despite this separation between me and the other, the other calls upon me to respond. One Lévinas

That worship sound 77 commentator writes that “the other makes a hole in the world” (Peperzak 1998, 123). And yet, I can never respond in a way that will satiate the infinite responsibility to the other, and the other always remains separate from me. In grounding ethics in separation and proximity, Lévinas provides a compelling structure for ethics and for how separation can be maintained without solipsism. OOO follows Lévinas’s structure, but following Derrida criticizes Lévinas for anthropocentrism that results in—as I discuss later— limited inquiry into non-human things. Much of Lévinas’s work focuses on the response of me to the other in the imaginary situation where all that exists is me and the other. But, Lévinas’s painstaking detail about this situation is not naïve to wider social contexts. Lévinas writes in the wake of the Holocaust, where his family members were among the millions of Jews killed. How could such a thing happen in a country famed for its philosophers of ethics? The first sentence of Totality and Infinity frames the book with questioning “whether we are not duped by morality” (Lévinas 1969, 21). Lévinas is interested in grounding ethical responsibility in the response to the other before moving outward to other others. One sort of other other is another person, and this puts us in the situation of having to figure out how to respond to more than one person: “it is the third man with which justice begins” (Lévinas 1981, 150). But Lévinas is also interested in the other other beyond the social. Lévinas reportedly said to Jacques Derrida that “one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy” (quoted in Purcell 2006, 1). Levinas writes that God is “other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with another and different from every neighbor” (Lévinas 1987, 165–6; also see discussion of this passage in Benson 2002). How, then, is there any relation with God? Lévinas speaks of the “relation with God who is in excess of the relation with the Other but is however in the relation with the Other” (Wyschogrod 1989, 116–7). In a book on the implications of Lévinas for Christian theology, Michael Purcell writes that Lévinas is “terribly incarnational” as “the way to God can only start from a here which is wholly human” (Purcell 2006, 155, 63). Lévinas argues: “in concrete phenomenological terms this means it is a God that has sent you the other human being” (Wyschogrod 1989, 107). Lévinas sees these ideas coming out of Isaiah 58 (Ibid., 110) where response to God is loosening the chains of injustice and feeding and clothing the needy (verses 6–7), and Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies that what is done for the needy is done to Jesus (verses 35–40). In an interview, Lévinas states: I cannot describe the relation to God without speaking of my concern for the other. When I speak to a Christian, I always quote Matthew 25; the relation to God is presented there as a relation to another person. It is not a metaphor: in the other, there is a real presence of God. In my

78  Jeff R Warren relation to the other, I hear the Word of God. It is not a metaphor; it is not only extremely important, it is literally true. I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God. (Lévinas 1998, 109–10) Asked to clarify whether the other is therefore a mediator between us and God, Lévinas responds: “Oh, no, not at all, it is not mediation—it is the way the word of God reverberates” (Ibid., 110). And with this statement, we lead from Lévinas’s ideas about the relation to other and God back to reverberation. Lévinas does not provide much insight as to his idea of reverberation, but the relation of the other person and God seems to maintain the separation of detachable reverb even while reverberation provides a trace of the signal. For Lévinas, then, response to God is through ethical response to the other. Applying Lévinas’s ideas to CWM, we might argue that the common view of CWM as a worship response directly to God misses that CWM responds to other people and God at the same time. Some think that through this emphasis on the other and God, Lévinas does not look at things carefully enough.

That shimmer thing To summarize, Lévinas describes how encountering another human being calls me to respond, and how that response also responds to God. But Graham Harman thinks that moving from separation to ethics to God “may be aiming needlessly high, and needlessly quickly. As Lingis has shown in The Imperative, there is something like an ethical dimension even in the merest imperative to focus our eyes a certain way to see a certain object correctly, or to treat specific objects in specific ways” (Harman 2009, 410). Harman thinks that instead of God, Lévinas would have been better to look carefully at objects. Like other OOO philosophers, Harman builds upon the works of Alphonso Lingis, who is best known as the English translator of Emmanuel Lévinas. The main argument of Lingis’s 1998 book The Imperative “shows sensibility, sensuality, and perception to be not reactions to physical causality nor adjustments to physical pressures, nor free and spontaneous impositions of order on amorphous data, but responses to directives” (Lingis 1998, 3). In this short sentence, Lingis dismisses two major explanations of the world: scientific naturalism and social relativism. Ian Bogost writes: “it doesn’t take much squinting to see that both positions are really cut from the same cloth. For the scientific naturalist, the world exists for human discovery and exploitation. And for the cultural relativist, humans create and refashion the world” (Bogost 2012, 13–14). Bogost calls these both “correlationist conceit,” as they only imagine that the world exists in relation to human beings (Ibid., 14). These are what Lévinas calls “totalizing” views, either reducing the world to what we can access and explain, or reducing the world to the workings of power and

That worship sound 79 human meaning. Contemporary and historical ideas about church music have often fallen to these extremes, by either claiming a causal effect of music on people or claiming that music is what people make of it. Lingis’s simple insight is that things shape how we perceive them. A rock shapes how we touch it. A tall tree leads our eyes and head upward to look at it. Describing the ways things shape us does not lead to generalizable claims, but instead “the directives we find in [things]…have to be described separately” (Lingis 1998, 3). An oft-cited section of this text uses the example of a grapefruit: “The inner ordinance which makes the grapefruit coagulate with its rubbery rind, its dense dull yellow, its loose inner pulp, its acrid smell and sour savor, its own size and shape regulates our handling of it and perceptual exploration of it” (Ibid., 63). Our experience of a grapefruit is not just whatever we make of it, but also responds to the grapefruit itself. Lingis charts a course between physical causality and social construction, where real things influence each other. Lingis extends the structure of imperatives in both Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Lévinas to an analysis of how things present us with imperatives: “The reality of things is not given in our perception, but orders it as an imperative” (Ibid.). A key argument of OOO is all things are equal and need to be described. As Bogost puts it, “anything is thing enough to party” (Bogost 2012, 24). And so as I explore shimmer in CWM, I want to consider things beyond human beings. Yet at the same time, the things I have set out to examine in this chapter includes people making music together to respond to God, so I am also interested in how the carpentry of things in Lingis and OOO both complement and challenge the work of Lévinas. Graham Harman identifies two important ideas that Lingis raises in The Imperative: levels and things, and, in what follows, I argue that shimmer seems to be both a level and a thing. Harman states: “in the most general possible terms, beings collide with one another in a field, in a series of levels that connect them with one another” (Harman 2005, 70). Things bump into each other not out in the ether but in a field or level. One example Lingis uses to describe how we adjust our perception to enter a level is a loud room filled with the din of multiple conversations. When we strike up a conversation, “our hearing adjusts to the noise level and we find ourselves picking out effortlessly what she is saying” (Lingis 1998, 25–6). Known in psychoacoustics as the “cocktail-party effect” (Everest and Pohlmann 2009, 63), this shows our perceptual ability to adjust to a level where encounters can take place. Lingis also uses the example of coming out of the dark and entering a brightly lit room where our eyes take a moment to adjust to the level of the light. Although without reference to Lingis, I also described levels of listening in musical performance (Warren 2014, 113–16). Lingis argues that in these examples, we are adjusting to the levels around us, and levels shape the ways we encounter the things in them. The main point here is that levels are independent of us, but we can adjust to the levels. Music has multiple levels, and, like objects, those levels

80  Jeff R Warren need to be described separately. Shimmer cannot be thought of as one level, just as light cannot be thought of as one level. There are many lights, and even different levels within one light. And shimmer is never by itself as a level, but joins in with other sounds to make a level. The shimmer in Eno’s “Prophesy Theme” for the Dune soundtrack that acts as a level for the film needs to be described differently than the shimmer on the synthesizer pad in a Hillsong Worship song and the shimmer in Eno’s startup sound for Microsoft Windows 95. When CWM musicians discuss shimmer synth drones as not getting in the way of song transitions or not creating a distraction, they seem to be talking about these shimmer drones as levels. Shimmer is a level, but can also be examined as a thing. Ian Bogost provides some approaches to considering music as a thing in his book Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing (Bogost 2012). Bogost uses the 1982 Atari game E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as an example to show that a thing cannot be reduced. Bogost’s non-exhaustive list of what “E.T. is” includes “a flow of RF modulations,” “a consumer good,” and “a system of rules or mechanics” (Bogost 2012, 17–18). The point is that there isn’t one E.T., but that “all of these sorts of being exist simultaneously with, yet independently from, one another” (Ibid., 18). In short, the list of what the thing is cannot be exhausted, and this includes musical things. Shimmer is grains of pitch-shifted reverberated digital audio; it combines with The Edge to create part of the U2 sound; it is an echo of the input signal; it combines with Brian Eno and microprocessors and relief in finally rebooting in the Windows 95 startup sound; it combines with people and musicians and MIDI signals and computer processors and churches to create “That Worship Sound.” People interact with parts of shimmer but not all of shimmer. Lingis argues that our actions with a thing are shaped by the thing and that is how we understand it: “what a grapefruit really is and means is something we understand in touching, smelling, chewing, savoring, without ever ending at something like the definitive key to it” (Lingis 1998, 55). To understand a thing does not mean that we have captured its essence; rather, Lingis argues that we understand things through action rather than through abstracted concepts. But what, then, does the level and thing of shimmer have to do with ethics, especially as it is used in CWM? It is worth spending more time understanding shimmer before attempting to answer.

Carpentry of shimmer If understanding things requires action, that changes how we investigate things. Bogost calls for philosophers to go beyond writing books (and notes that most are lousy writers anyways!) and do “carpentry,” that is, the “practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice” (Bogost 2012, 92). Carpentry involves “making things that explain how things make their world,” blending the conventional idea of carpentry as making

That worship sound 81 things with the idea from Lingis and Harman of the “carpentry of things,” that is, “how things fashion one another and the world at large” (Ibid., 93). Bogost’s call here is for philosophers to expand their work, but in the process values the work of making things. If philosophers who do carpentry “must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy” (Ibid.), then music making must also be carpentry. And indeed, many philosophers who are known for their books make music. François Noudelmann’s book The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano takes seriously the ways that making music shaped written work: “When playing the piano, this trio composed, in ways discrete and active, the philosophical contours of their thought” (Noudelmann and Reilly, 2012, 5). Andrew Bowie writes of the influence of performing jazz improvisation on his written philosophical work, along with suggesting “that one of the best philosophical things one can do is to listen to and play more good music” (Bowie 2007, 14). Making music is a carpentry undertaken by many philosophers, and even if they still write books, music is one of the things that shapes how they do philosophy. Bogost claims that “real radicals, we might conclude, make things” (Bogost 2012, 110). If we look closer, we might find that many radical philosophers do indeed make things, even if they are only known widely for the books they write. But if philosophical radicals make things, then it is also worth looking at music makers. Music makers “contend with material resistance” as they make things, and make things that “fashion one another and the world.” Applied to shimmer, then, songwriters, patch designers, sound engineers, keyboardists, guitarists, worship leaders, hardware makers, and software engineers are all part of making the thing shimmer that is part of fashioning many other things, including performances of CWM and how congregants respond to others and God. Following the challenge of Bogost, then, I took a step into the “alien phenomenology” of shimmer by making something that makes different types of shimmer, with the aim of enriching the discussion of CWM and ethics through describing how shimmer interacts with things, including the musicians who make it. I began by exploring how CWM musicians make sounds, narrowing my inquiry into keyboardists ranging from Hillsong band members to worship pastors to sound designers for products for use by worship bands. I read blog posts and watched online videos where keyboardists share their setups (often in excruciating detail), and examined available commercial products. The most common CWM setup is one or more MIDI keyboards connected to a computer running Apple’s MainStage 3 performance software. MainStage is inexpensive ($30 USD, introduced in 2013) and includes software instruments, emulations, and effects that are also included in the DAW Logic Pro X. While Ableton Live seems to be increasing in use by CWM keyboardists, the combination of included sounds, price point, ease of use in live settings, customization, and the ability to

82  Jeff R Warren incorporate other plugins make MainStage the software of choice for both professionals and local church musicians. The flexibility of MainStage 3 involves a considerable learning curve to design sounds, map them to a visual interface, and assign parameters to hardware controllers. To fill this gap, several companies make templates and sound sets for MainStage for CWM musicians. Three such companies I reference here include the afore-mentioned That Worship Sound (Mendoza 2019), SundaySounds.com, and MultiTracks. These companies have distinctions but several similarities. One similarity is that each offers multiple levels of products. For example, “That Worship Sound” offers two versions of their flagship product “Worship Essentials 2.” One uses only sounds that are included in MainStage, and the other requires significant investment in additional plugins with the promise of higher-quality sounds. The plugins required are used in many professional CWM keyboard setups, including piano (The Giant) and electric piano (Scarbee Mark 1) sounds from Native Instruments, Spectrasonic’s Omnisphere 2 for synthesizer sounds, and— most notably here—the Valhalla Shimmer plugin. In addition to MainStage templates and patches usable across a large range of CWM songs, it is becoming more common to market “song specific patches;” that is, patches that replicate some or all of the keyboard sounds on a recording. Sunday Sounds markets these patches as follows: “Sound just like the recording with song specific patches expertly designed for today’s top worship songs” (Sunday Sounds 2019). A distinctive of MultiTracks is that their patches are sometimes created by the original artist, and patches are complemented by licensed stems (original recording tracks separated by instrument) that can be downloaded or played through an accompanying iPad app. In my own carpentry work, I built a project in Logic Pro X that explores the different ways of making shimmer common in these setups along with a couple additional approaches. This project is available for download so that readers can listen to examples and take part in carpentry themselves (https://ln2.sync.com/dl/a33e7f890/bpe2gcvm-h2xc9c7h-x37gcvzwhu5mit79). In what follows, I describe keyboard shimmer types in CWM, incorporating descriptions of what I built along the way. In CWM setups, shimmer is most often applied to synth pads, pianos, and sampled electric guitar. Three main approaches are: 1) building shimmer from core effects components, 2) using or sampling outboard gear, and 3) using the Valhalla Shimmer plugin. The basic setup is a track with a software instrument controlled by a MIDI keyboard. I selected a synth pad instrument sample played through Logic’s sampler EXS24, and applied a channel EQ with some low-frequency roll off and reverberation. I also created additional tracks running EXS24 with piano and electric guitar samples. From the instrument track, each of the shimmer approaches are run through a bus to a separate auxiliary track with the shimmer effect.

That worship sound 83 A basic approach to creating shimmer within a DAW is to forgo the feedback loop and send the signal through a pitch shifter up an octave and a reverb, as can be found on bus 1. Multiple parameters including equalization can be used to adjust the sonic properties of the reverb. The feedback loop of Eno and Lanois is removed here, making the effect much more controllable and at the same time requiring less computing power. This is the approach that Worship Essentials 2 takes, and is also demonstrated in a Sunday Sounds video. Some of the characteristics of shimmer are created, but higher-frequency swirling is lost without the feedback loop. Worship Essentials 2 uses shimmer on the pad sound, and maps the keyboard modulation controller to a low-pass filter frequency cutoff of the pad, giving the performer that ability to control the frequency content of the signal that drives the shimmer. As noted earlier, the pitch-shifting algorithm affects sound quality, so bus 2 provides an example of this by using the same settings as bus 1 with the exception of a change of pitch-shifting plugin. The approach above can come closer to the Eno/Lanois sound by creating a feedback loop, and this is done in bus 3. Here, the settings from bus 2 are copied, and a feedback loop is created by using a send back into bus 3. In other words, after moving through the pitch shift and reverb, the sound is re-input into the pitch shifter and reverb in bus 3. Likely due to increased complexity and penalty in computing power and latency, I have not found this approach used in CWM setups. The Valhalla Shimmer plugin (used on bus 5) is attractive to users in comparison to the above approaches for several reasons including simplicity, efficiency, and sound. Rather than building shimmer from components, Valhalla Shimmer is one plugin with several presets and sonic variety well beyond the approaches to shimmer described thus far. Valhalla Shimmer is also more efficient in terms of CPU usage and latency. Parameters include four pitch-shifting algorithms, diffusion control, and a feedback control that determines how much of the signal fed back into the inputs. Creator Sean Costello writes that: “By setting the Shift amount to +12 semitones, and the Feedback to 0.5 or greater, the classic “shimmer” sound is produced, as heard on Eno/Lanois productions for U2 and others” (Costello 2010b). A variation is to “freeze” a reverberation so that it loops indefinitely. The Strymon Big Sky pedal, for example, allows the player to freeze the reverb so that there is no decay, and has modes where new notes played either bypass or add to the existing reverb. Hillsong keyboardist Peter James includes a frozen reverb in his Ultimate MainStage Collection 3 (James 2019). In the video accompanying the product, James shows how the tape delay plugin is used to create a non-decaying loop that continues to feed through a reverb. James discusses how a shimmer-like pad can be created at any time from what is being played, and notes this can be used for transitions between songs. Bus 6 has a variation of this tape-delay shimmer pad. In the same video, James notes how each of the sounds is carefully replicated from patches he used on an album using what is built into MainStage.

84  Jeff R Warren When sounds cannot be replicated, instruments and even reverbs are sampled. For example, James’s Ultimate Shimmer Pad Collection includes reverbs that were sampled with impulse response (Ibid.). While one selling point of these pads is their inclusion in recordings, other commercial MainStage templates provide options for shimmer effected synth pad tonic drones, a continuous note on the tonic (and sometimes fifth) of the selected key usually triggered separately from the main MIDI keyboard. Sometimes these tonic drones are created through custom scripts that include some sort of motion or variety in the drone. Other approaches are to pre-record drones in each key. James, for example, has a product made up of recorded shimmer drones played through the Strymon Big Sky pedal called “OB Ambient Pads” (James 2019). Shimmer involves pitch shifting the original signal, but MIDI keyboard input provides the ability to transpose without audio pitch shifting. The MIDI input can trigger multiple tracks using different samples, including the main instrument track and another track using a different sample pitch shifted up an octave and reverberated. For example, the Sunday Sounds song-specific patch design for Hillsong Worship’s lead single from Awake, “King of Kings,” is approached with shimmer provided by a different signal than the main signal (Sunday Sounds 2019). Logic’s “chord trigger” is programmed so that bass notes simultaneously trigger chords octaves above the bass note on their tracks. These tracks use samples of a piano and electric guitar that are then sent through pitch shifting, reverberation, and other effects. In my project, on channels 3 and 4 I use a clean electric guitar sample on the EXS24 sampler that is triggered alongside a chosen input (in this case, a piano). Each note is transposed up two octaves, arpeggiated to pulse and create movement, and then passed through a combination of effects including pedal board and amplifier, pitch shifter, stereo delay, multiple reverbs, and equalization. The result differs from shimmer in that the original signal is not the same as the shimmer signal, but retains a similar sound. Understanding shimmer by making it opens possibilities for considering how shimmer in turn works on us and other things. This carpentry work also confirms the earlier argument that shimmer is not one thing nor made of other things, even as it is a thing, part of other things, and made up of other things. While writing this chapter, for the first time I began playing a keyboard setup in church like the one described above. I am personally fairly ambivalent to much CWM, and only began listening to CWM recordings during research on the topic. It took some time for me to adjust to the sonic level of the layered keyboard sound, and as I adjusted to the level, things (including shimmer) began to shape my playing. Not only did it shape my own playing, but also the playing of others in the band, and perhaps the singing of the congregation and how they responded to others and God. Shimmer seemed to pull every song into its sonic level, affecting tempos and reducing the musical range of an already limited set of CWM songs. At very least, from my place on stage shimmer masked the singing

That worship sound 85 of the congregation, and that was reason enough for me to use it less frequently. Taking part in making things that make shimmer is learning more about how things shape us as we shape things. It helps us to avoid generalized claims and should lead us to think about how we might respond.

Shimmer, CWM, and ethics In this chapter, I moved between ethical theory, musical practices within CWM, and close description of shimmer, a particular sonic element of CWM. Taken together, I argue that describing the carpentry of shimmer contributes to a richer discussion about how worship music relates to ethical responsibilities to other people and to God. Lévinas’s philosophy finds that ethical responsibility is responding to the face of the other. Lévinas also recognizes that responding to the other only happens in a world with other people, and so the response to one person is limited by responsibilities to others, leading to justice. Lévinas, however, does little to describe how non-human things participate in the ways that we respond to other people. Doing carpentry with musical things and describing the results help us better understand things. Understanding things helps us more carefully consider the ways these things affect our interactions with other people and things, and provides ways to criticize too easily made explanations about how things work and what they mean. Attention to a musical thing like shimmer in CWM helps us consider the ways that CWM affects the responses to other things and people. As we describe the inexhaustible interactions of things, we can ask about their role in our ethical responsibilities to others. So, we are now at least in the place to ask better questions about shimmer, CWM, and ethics than we were at the start. There is and can be no general answer, but we must follow Lingis in describing the directives of each thing separately and evaluate how to respond to the things around us. If Hillsong’s numbers are correct, each week 50 million people sing songs in churches that features shimmer as a sonic component. Pursuing questions about CWM and ethics needs to carefully consider how sound as level and thing participates in the ways people respond to others; to think with Lévinas and Lingis about how shimmer configures alterity in the transcendent presence of the other and the other other.

References Asker, Jim. 2019a. “Hillsong Worship Interview: Brooke Ligertwood Talks ‘Awake.’” Billboard. October 11, 2019. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/chart-beat/ 8532803/hillsong-worship-interview-brooke-ligertwood-awake. ———. 2019b. “Hillsong Worship’s ‘Awake’ Is No 1 On Top Christian Albums.” Billboard. October 23, 2019. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/chartbeat/8540086/hillsong-worship-awake-no-1-top-christian-albums. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2002. Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

86  Jeff R Warren Blesser, Barry and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Posthumanities 20. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Carpentier, Thibaut, Natasha Barrett, Rama Gottfried, and Markus Noisternig. 2016. “Holophonic Sound in IRCAM’s Concert Hall: Technological and Aesthetic Practices.” Computer Music Journal 40 (4): 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1162/ COMJ_a_00383. Costello, Sean. 2010a. “Shimmer: Modulation, Auto-Correlation, and Decorrelation.” The Halls of Valhalla (blog). May 12, 2010. https://valhalladsp.com/2010/05/12/ shimmer-modulation-auto-correlation-and-decorrelation/. ———. 2010b. “Introducing ValhallaShimmer.” The Halls of Valhalla (blog). August 30, 2010. https://valhalladsp.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/introducingvalhallashimmer/. Everest, F Alton, and Ken Pohlmann. 2009. Master Handbook of Acoustics. Fifth Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Professional. Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock “n” Roll. New York: Pantheon Books. Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing. ———. 2009. “Lévinas and the Triple Critique of Heidegger.” Philosophy Today 53 (4): 407–13. Hillsong. 2014. “Hillsong Annual Report Two Thousand & Fourteen.” Baulkham Hills, NSW: Hillsong Church. https://d9nqqwcssctr8.cloudfront.net/wp-content/ uploads/2015/11/15233735/AnnualReport14WEB.pdf. ———. 2019. “Fact Sheet.” Hillsong. 2019. https://hillsong.com/fact-sheet/. Ingalls, Monique, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner, eds. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience. New York: Routledge. Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. James, Peter. 2019. “Peter James | MultiTracks.” 2019. https://www.multitracks. com/producers/Peter-James/. Kiang, Ingmar. 2014. “Strymon Big Sky.” Sound on Sound. January 2014. https:// www.soundonsound.com/reviews/strymon-big-sky. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1981. Otherwise Than Being, Or, Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ———. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. Lingis, Alphonso. 1998. The Imperative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mendoza, Abel. 2019. “That Worship Sound.” 2019. https://thatworshipsound.com.

That worship sound 87 Noudelmann, François, and Brian J Reilly. 2012. The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano. New York: Columbia University Press. Peperzak, Adriaan. 1998. “Lévinas’ Method.” Research in Phenomenology 28: 110–25. Purcell, Michael. 2006. Lévinas and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riches, Tanya, and Tom Wagner, eds. 2017. The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sterne, Jonathan. 2015. “Space within Space: Artificial Reverb and the Detachable Echo.” Grey Room, no. 60 (July): 110–31. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00177. Sunday Sounds. 2019. “Song Specific Worship Patches.” Worship Patches and Templates from Sunday Sounds. 2019. https://sundaysounds.com/song. TC Electronic. 2019. “Fluorescence Shimmer Reverb.” 2019. https://www.tcelectronic. com/product.html;jsessionid=810DDE567C928C4561A4C6768CB01910? modelCode=P0CQ5. Warren, Jeff R 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. “Performing Spiritual and Ethical Values in Contemporary Worship Music – Verge.” Verge: A Journal of the Arts & Christian Faith 3 (September). https://create.twu.ca/verge/2019/09/25/performing-spiritual-and-ethical-valuesin-contemporary-worship-music/. Wyschogrod, Edith. 1989. “Interview with Emmanuel Lévinas: December 31, 1982.” Philosophy and Theology 4 (2): 105–18. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtheol19894221.

5

Amateurism-withoutamateurishness, or authenticity as vanishing act in evangelical worship music Joshua Kalin Busman

During the summer of 2012, I found myself at lunch with several musicians who had taken part in a Christian recording project called On The Incarnation. When speaking with musicians during my fieldwork, I often start with a standard opening question about how they discovered their vocation as musicians and how this has related to their personal “faith journeys” as evangelical Christians. In this particular instance, Dan, the lead singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist on the project, was the first to answer. But just as he started to speak, the other two artists at the table, both frequent collaborators of Dan’s, started laughing. Dan explained that when he was hired to lead worship at Providence Baptist Church, an evangelical mega-church of nearly 5,000 in Raleigh, North Carolina, he hadn’t ever actually played the guitar. Instead, Dan described how he had felt a calling to lead worship and had decided to put his name in for the position despite the fact that he could not yet competently play an instrument. After accepting the job leading worship for Providence’s college ministry, he approached his friend Mike—one of our laughing lunch companions—who taught him some basics on the guitar. These rudimentary skills, along with his divine calling, were apparently more than enough to get Dan started and had since provided the necessary momentum to carry him through two full-length recording projects as a lead writer and performer. Throughout my fieldwork, I heard numerous musicians tell some version of this story. After finding themselves in a position where they felt God was calling them into worship, they stepped into a role of musical leadership in spite of—or in some cases, because of—a near-total lack of musical facility. The relationship to conspicuous displays of musical skill is often markedly different among African–American evangelicals, who are more inclined to interpret musicians’ virtuosic displays as a demonstration of their divine blessing (Hinton 2011). But for many white American evangelicals, musical skill is not only NOT a requirement for musical engagement, but can actually pose a potential obstacle to true musicality. Andreas Karlstadt, theologian and teacher to Martin Luther, already articulated this tension well at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Karlstadt reasoned that if we are to present music to God as part of worship, we would clearly want this

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 89 music to be of the highest quality. And yet, the musical performance of the quality, which God clearly deserves, would require the performer to focus so fully on the execution of the music that they would no longer be focusing on God, ultimately defeating the purpose of the exercise. Thus, any musical presentation which might be good enough to count as “worship” would necessarily negate its ability to be properly “worshipful” (Sider 1974, 161). Within worship music, these anxieties about agency and skill most frequently manifest themselves in the tension between the categories of “worship” and “performance” (Ingalls 2018). The goal of music in an evangelical setting is almost always to achieve “worship,” which is usually defined as a kind of unmediated encounter with God. If worship is the ideal, “performance” is the scapegoat, instantly carrying with it connotations of pretense or artifice. In part, this anxiety about “performing” grows out of an anxiety about agency and embodiment which lies at the core of the “New Calvinist” theology permeating so much of white American evangelicalism at the moment. In fact, this theological orientation has been so essential to white evangelicalism and white evangelicalism so essential to American political life that in 2009, Time Magazine actually ranked “New Calvinism” third on their list of “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now” (Biema 2009). Ethnomusicologist Maren Haynes has carefully analyzed this framework at the now-defunct New Calvinist Seattle megachurch, Mars Hill, observing that “lyrics [in worship] never emphasize personal choice in the conversion experience, but instead bear out a Calvinist understanding of elective salvation where agency exists with God alone” (Haynes 2014, 212). At a worship album release party at an evangelical mega-church in which I did fieldwork, pastor JD Greear even went so far as to remark, “Worship isn’t something you do, it’s something that happens to you in the presence of God.”1 In this case, even the activity of “worship” itself, presumably the one thing that humans are expected and allowed to do freely, is something that still occurs beyond the cusp of human agency. In short, properly “worshipping” is a vanishing act: a process by which leaders, musicians, and congregations alike are rendered invisible as part of an unmediated encounter with the invisible God. In this chapter, I examine the ethical dimensions of musical skill, agency, and bodily presence as it relates to the “vanishing act” of American evangelical worship. First, I examine the performance/worship dialectic and how this is used to guide ethical discernment around these questions. Next, I propose Hegel’s concept of the “vanishing mediator” as a productive model for theorizing worship and presence in evangelical communities. Finally, I turn my attention to Worship Tutorials, a popular portal for these local leaders, as a case study to explore how these issues are worked out among amateur musicians serving local congregations. An examination of Worship Tutorials uncovers the myriad ways that musicians attempt to square the ethical circle between musical skill and spiritual sincerity. I argue that many of the “pedagogical” resources designed for worship

90  Joshua Kalin Busman leaders attempt to alleviate these tensions by providing a supplement that renders the musicians and even the congregations ever more absent from the musical frame.

The performance/worship divide The praise and worship subculture is not entirely unique in its anxieties about “performance” or “skill” among musicians. Within a wide variety of popular music subcultures, there exists a fraught relationship between obvious technical facility and emotional sincerity. One can imagine, for instance, that conservatory training would be seen as an impediment to punk rock’s insistence on raw emotional expression. Media studies scholar Roy Shuker has observed that punk musicians and fans frequently associate musical skill with a “glibness” that is incompatible with authenticity. He goes on to observe that “the frequently alleged musical incompetence of punk bands, however, was largely a myth, often fueled by the band themselves” (Shuker 2001, 162). In punk, as in worship music, disavowal of skill among musicians is an essential part of the mythology for performers and fans alike. Both communities share a concern with the potential of musical skill to cloud or impair sincerity or emotional directness. Furthermore, punk has an ethical commitment to amateurism that is often born out of a critique of capitalism. To avoid “selling out,” punk musicians must continue to make music as amateurs rather than leveraging their musical skill for financial gain. While worship musicians and punk musicians are unlikely to share precisely the same critiques of capitalism (even though both might bemoan similar excesses), I have suggested elsewhere that the rise of worship music can be seen as a reaction against the “crossover” ethos of previous decades in which Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists like Amy Grant or dc Talk achieved success on mainstream charts by deploying “religious” images that were vague enough to attain broader appeal (Busman 2015, 61–71). Similar to the fear of “selling out” among punk musicians, the crossover phenomenon was perceived by many evangelicals to be surrendering the important pulpit of Christian music to the major labels and market forces who now controlled the Christian music industry. The two most prominent producers of praise and worship recordings of the last twenty years, the Passion Conference’s sixstepsrecords and the Australian mega-church-owned Hillsong Music, are independent labels owned by church or parachurch organizations. 2 There is also a strong commitment to amateurism in local churches. The majority of worship musicians, particularly those not in a “worship leader” role, are not compensated for their services. And even worship leaders, especially those working in the service of smaller or younger congregations, regularly serve on a purely volunteer basis. Even in those cases where musicians (including leaders) are actually paid, this compensation is almost never enough to allow worship to be one’s only employment.

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 91 But punk’s ethical insistence on amateurism is matched by an aesthetics of “amateurishness.” Punk musicians are not encouraged to cultivate traditional or conspicuous skill on their instruments or in their voices because looking and sounding like amateurs is a positive aesthetic value in punk communities. Despite the fact that worship music is primarily performed by a network of amateur and semi-professional musicians, these amateurs are not afforded the “amateurish” aesthetics of punk. Rather, worship musicians are expected to perform precisely and competently, so as not to distract their congregations from the activity of worship. If the songs being performed are simply a mediator between the congregation and the divine, it makes sense that they would need to be as transparent as possible, unclouded by sloppy or insensitive playing. And alongside rendering the music with sufficient transparency, worship bands are also expected to reproduce or represent the sounds of the professional praise and worship recordings that parishioners have come to know and love. In fact, these local worship bands tend to function a bit like cover bands insofar as they are largely expected to reproduce or at the very least evoke the sounds of the professional worship recordings that parishioners use in their personal devotional practices. But, of course, they must find ways to do this without compromising their amateur status. That is to say, without violating the ethical strictures of the amateur, they are still aesthetically compared to multi-platinum-selling worship bands who are regularly selling out stadiums full of devoted fans. Worship musicians must cultivate a kind of amateurism-without-amateurishness: carefully calibrated for both aesthetic clarity and ethical authenticity.3 On the forums of WorshipTheRock, a social media platform for worship leaders, this performance/worship problem is an exceptionally common topic of conversation in relation to both worship musicians and their congregations. In March 2011, a UK-based worship leader named Jordan Neudorf began a thread called “Worship De-railed” in which she expressed her frustration with how technically challenging many worship songs had become. She asked: Am I the only one who’s noticed a shift in popular “worship”? I’m finding it increasingly more difficult to find congregation appropriate songs. By that I mean simple choruses that can be quickly and easily learned without requiring extensive musical training or an impeccable memory to keep up with the four verses, 10 line chorus, pre-chorus, bridge and tag. It seems to me that many of the most popular worship groups have turned worship into a performance, not a personal experience with God. I’d like to know how other churches and worship leaders are dealing with this (Neudorf 2011). In her comments, Neudorf establishes a clear break between worship and performance. Performance is equated with musical complexity while worship

92  Joshua Kalin Busman is associated with “a personal experience with God.” Her post spawned over eight pages of responses, many of them simply affirming that they had personally worried about this same issue (or lamenting the number of times that this exact conversation had been raised previously on the site).

Talent from God So, if what they’re doing isn’t “performance,” how do worship musicians come to understand their own embodied practice of the more technical aspects of their craft—particularly, those who are capable of musicianship on a very high level? Ethnomusicologist Tom Wagner has observed one strategy among some worship leaders in the Hillsong Church network. He observes that, frequently, Hillsong leaders are not actually compensated for any of the “performance aspects” of their jobs, including singing, writing songs, or playing guitar for worship gatherings (Wagner 2019). Rather, they are paid for other activities such as providing pastoral care, carrying out various administrative duties and training other members of their worship team, which prompts them, in return, to offer their skills as performers on a volunteer basis. As Wagner observes: “This important distinction ingrains the notion of worship as a lifestyle (as opposed to a ‘job’) into the ethos of the worship team” (Wagner 2019). Pastoral care and administration are callings that set one apart from the broader flock, but worshipping is such an essential and inseparable function of the Christian life that payment isn’t necessary (or maybe even possible). In this way, even the best-compensated worship leaders can maintain a literal amateur status even while drawing a paycheck from their church. This also raises the question: how are the “most popular worship groups,” which Neudorf derides as the source of her problem, accommodated in light of this skill/sincerity dialectic? Many recording-oriented worship bands like Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Hillsong United, and Jesus Culture are Grammy-award-winning and multi-platinum-selling artists, and they are certainly all professionally compensated and highly skilled performing musicians. In part, these artists are assimilated through a discourse of “talent” or “gift” rather than one of “skill” or “virtuosity.” In light of New Calvinist theology, these bands are understood as existing at the end of a long teleological process of development in which God is the sole driving force; one simply can’t practice hard enough to achieve that status. Discussing someone like Chris Tomlin as “skilled” or “virtuosic” might seem to imply that his exceptional ability resulted from his own personal effort or determination. Discussing Tomlin as “blessed” however, places the origin of his skill with his creator. Despite all the hard work that Tomlin undoubtedly puts in, he is talented because God made him that way. Artists like Tomlin are also able to disavow their unique skill because of a counterintuitive authority afforded by the skill itself. In a 2013 CCM Magazine feature called “Chris Tomlin: He’s No Hero,” magazine editor

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 93 Caroline Lusk perfectly illustrates this trope. When asked about his most recent record, Burning Lights, Tomlin explained: I think people might think I have a special connection to God, I’m no hero. Obviously, King David was out watching over his sheep, singing and pouring out to God long before he’s given a platform. And even when you have it, you’re still just a shepherd boy, singing a song to God. To the people reading this, you are the burning lights. I’m hoping to sing over the people a song that will lift them up. There’s something special about music (quoted in Lusk 2013). In this statement, one can clearly see Tomlin’s attempt to minimize his own involvement in the stratospheric fame and success he has enjoyed, even if he tries to do so by comparing himself to the most famous songsmith in the Jewish and Christian traditions. His album, Burning Lights, was the number one best-selling album in the United States the week it was released— due in no small part to its availability for exclusive pre-order at Passion 2013—but Tomlin clearly wants to deflect any attention back to God. Perhaps even more telling, however, is the way that the author responds to Tomlin’s assertions. Immediately following his deferential statements, Lusk continues: And who better to make such a statement than one of the most sung songwriters in the world, which Time Magazine asserted in 2006. But it’s not the numbers or accolades or awards that drives Chris. Rather, it’s his unshakable belief in the power of song to give our hearts the words of praise that navigates his world—from the songs he writes and sings to the artists he works with. For Lusk, it is precisely Tomlin’s status as a world-renowned musician, and one acknowledged by mainstream press like Time Magazine, that gives him the credibility to renounce himself as uniquely gifted. Whatever the outside world might perceive as “skill,” Lusk and Tomlin quickly naturalize as the workings of the divine. In the final lines of her profile, Lusk makes this equation clear when she observes that “Tomlin may not be a hero by his standard, but for sure, he is in great pursuit of the mightiest hero of all.” Tomlin’s uniqueness, if it exists at all, is not in his own power, but in his desire to seek a higher power. The complex and essential interplay between “celebrity” artists like Tomlin and the local congregations who invest themselves in his songs— described as the “Celebrity Model” by ethnomusicologist Nathan Myrick (2018)—means that these same disavowal strategies are undertaken by worship leaders in individual parishes as well. After a host of responses to Neudorf’s inquiry, one WorshipTheRock user ventured a “devil’s advocate” counterargument suggesting that preparing thoroughly was the most

94  Joshua Kalin Busman respectful and “worshipful” thing one could do. Neudorf responded to his objection by saying: I am what one could call a “highly trained musician” and played classical piano for many years earning honours with the Royal Conservatory of Music. However, when I’m leading worship, singing and playing, I don’t have the time to think about a G#m7sus chord. I need to be able to just play. And in another post from just a few minutes later, she continued: I like the simple stuff. If a member of the congregation can grasp a song the first or second time we sing it, odds are that they are going to be able to remember it throughout the week. It’s the simple songs like “Jesus Loves Me” that stick with us forever and they become a part of our life’s worship. In some sense, the argument she is making would not work the same way if she was not a trained musician. It is precisely because she has already undergone formal musical training that she can now successfully disavow its usefulness in the worship context and advocate for the embrace of “the simple stuff.” In her research on “popular music teaching and learning” among amateur praise and worship bands, music educator Laura Benjamins has observed that “a different definition of musical ability is adopted, one not necessarily focused on the end product, but instead on student and praise band participants’ engagement in musical activity” (Benjamins 2019, 422). She observes that the standards of music-making in praise and worship contexts are almost-always a relational (rather than performative or competitive) endeavor. One of the most enlightening aspects of Benjamins’s research regards the ways in which a shared aesthetic goal of “corporate unity” among worship leaders and congregants is often directly opposed to the individual agency of musicians within the group. Many of the worship leaders with whom she spoke for her research discussed the format and venue of worship in terms of how it closed down opportunities for musical skill or “performance,” saying: It’s not just a matter of approachability, I think in terms of performance that’s kind of […] a four-letter word in the church. We’re not on stage to perform. So people purposely “dumb down” the quality of what they’re capable of often for fear of standing out too much. (427). Another leader lamented: We definitely put a lot of care into not coming off as “performing”. Our group believes that church music is intended to serve the church’s

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 95 ability to worship together primarily in the act of singing, not being performed to. So this limits church musicians from really opening up with their skills (428). These comments suggest that worship leaders are intentionally restraining the natural instincts of their musicians in order to conform to this “different definition” of musical competency and success and they see demonstrations of their musical prowess and presence as distinctly opposed to the efficacy of worship as an activity (Porter 2016, 105–11). Over the last three decades, my own father has served as pastor for several different Southern Baptist and non-denominational churches in the American South and he has commented on this same type of dialectical relationship to skill or expertise in the sphere of preaching. He has remarked that his congregations clearly expect him to come to the issues in his sermons as a type of expert, with knowledge of theologians’ perspectives, Biblical commentaries, and perhaps even the particulars of the original Greek or Hebrew texts. He is not, however, expected to use any of this expertise to validate his reading of the text within the context of a sermon. As with musical expertise above, it is precisely his knowledge of these sources that allows him to cast them aside and provide his congregation with the pragmatic life application, which typically grounds his presentation of the text. Like Tomlin or Neudorf above, it seems that his expertise lies in an ability to “strip away,” providing an unmediated encounter between the congregation and the divine with the biblical text serving as a mediator rather than a song.

The vanishing mediator In one of the lengthier responses to Neudorf’s question on the WorshipTheRock forums, a user named Carl W Carlson explained: Our worship team is sometimes guilty of playing a new song that is difficult to learn. And if the congregation finds it tough to learn they tend to quit worshipping due to the effort focused on learning the song. (Same concept applies to instrumental solos … is the congregation still praising the Lord, or are they admiring your talent?). Song selection is really quite important, as well as the arrangement. I like to keep in mind why is there a worship team instead of just a stereo …. we are there as a tool of the Spirit to bring the congregation into a worshipful experience with God (Carlson 2011). In this post, Carlson seems to demonstrate clearly how the performance/ worship dialectic works. He suggests that there is a tipping point of musical complexity past which the materials of “worship” might begin to revert back into “performance.” If the congregation is expending too much mental or bodily effort trying to learn or accurately sing the song, they might

96  Joshua Kalin Busman quit worshipping. The job of the worship leader then is to find a balance in this relationship. Unlike “just a stereo,” which indiscriminately reproduces the sounds on recordings, the worship leader is supposed to be more sensitive to the needs of their community and the movement of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Carlson identifies the primary function of worship music and musicians: they are to function as “a tool of the Spirit to bring the congregation into a worshipful experience with God.” I argue that worship bands and the songs they sing serve as “vanishing mediators” between their congregations to the divine. The concept of a “vanishing mediator” is an idea that originates in the dialectical thought of GWF Hegel, but has been brought to prominence in recent years by the work of Marxist thinkers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Both Jameson and Žižek use the term “vanishing mediator” to describe a person, idea, or institution that transforms one social order into another and immediately disappears once the transformation is completed. In fact, the transformation of one sociality into another is often predicated upon the disappearance of the mediator. As Jameson puts it, the vanishing mediator “permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms…[it] serves in its turn as a kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over” (Jameson 1973, 78). In the essay in which he coined the term, Jameson uses the example of Protestantism mediating between feudalism and capitalism. He argues that Protestantism was the “catalytic agent” for universalizing the foundational “work ethic” necessary for capitalism to take root in feudal society. But with the rise of capitalism, Protestantism “vanished” as an explicit part of the social order, being reabsorbed into capitalism as just one of many religions in the open marketplace. Even though Protestantism provides the ideological material necessary for capitalism to emerge, any explicit or exclusive connection between Protestantism and capitalism would have precluded its ability to be accepted as feudalism’s replacement. In short, the foundational role of Protestantism is predicated on its ability to vanish, allowing capitalism to occupy center stage for itself. Žižek takes the role of the vanishing mediator even further, identifying it as a kind of truth event: a crucial guarantor of legitimacy and efficacy for everything from the structures of political revolution to the emergence of consciousness itself (Žižek 2008, 185–8).4 I argue that songs and musicians in praise and worship music serve as vanishing mediators in precisely this way, occupying a catalytic position between their congregations and the divine, which is most effectively achieved by their erasure.

Worship Tutorials The growing body of pedagogical resources for worship leaders provide a glimpse into the ways that musicians attempt to negotiate this relationship between performance and worship or skill and sincerity, particularly in light

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 97 of the “vanishing mediator” function just described. Worship Tutorials was created by Durham, North Carolina-based worship leader Brian Wahl, in 2008. It is one of a growing number of websites designed to provide musical resources to local worship leaders. As of my last check, Wahl engages over 650,000 subscribers through his website YouTube channel, social media, email list, etc. As the name implies, one of the main resources that Wahl provides on the site are guitar-based musical tutorials. These tutorials fall primarily into one of four categories. The first is a repository of guitar lessons, which teach basic guitar technique. These videos range from an “introduction” which shows viewers how to hold the guitar and the names of the strings as well as how to read a chord diagram like those they provide on the site. From there, the videos expand under several headings to teach new chords, strum patterns, finger picking techniques, and scales to use in lead guitar lines. The second is a series of gear demonstrations for guitars, pedals, amplifiers, and microphones that are particularly relevant to the worship musician. The third is a series of resources for worship leaders designed to provide help navigating the administrative demands of the job: managing a team, creating a setlist, utilizing social media, rearranging songs for vocals of different ranges and genders, etc. Parenthetically, one piece of guitar technology which Wahl seems to focus an inordinate amount of attention on is the capo. In the few years that his site has been up, Wahl has created five different tutorial videos and a printed “reference sheet” explaining the use and selection of capos for worship. This focus seems to reveal at least two distinct aspects of the anxieties I’m attempting to describe in this chapter. First, the capo makes a guitar an easier technology to navigate without overdeveloping skill. Many worship leaders learn the primary chords in the key of G major and then simply capo to transpose into other keys. But along with this added ease for players, this consistency also contributes to a codified “worship sound” that is tied to the way that chords are voiced on the guitar. In fact, a particular set of simplified guitar chords in the key of G major have become so normative for the “worship sound” (at least in the United States) that one can even find these chord voicings parodied in various forums and YouTube videos.5 The capo is a perfect object lesson for precisely the type of ethical dilemmas that are faced by worship leaders: a piece of technology that extends their musical possibilities without requiring additional demonstration of skill. Both practically and conceptually, the capo is designed precisely to “vanish” in its usage for both player and audience. The fourth, and by far the most popular category, is a series of tutorials that are specifically designed to teach musicians how to play and sing some of the most popular contemporary worship songs. Wahl has created more than two hundred of these song-specific tutorial pages typically consisting of four distinct parts. First, Wahl includes video and audio of him playing the song on an acoustic guitar, designed to give people a sense of how it goes. Second, there is a video of him teaching the song on acoustic guitar with visual chord

98  Joshua Kalin Busman charts, which accompany his explanations. Both of these resources are available to stream on the website for free, but two additional resources are available behind a paywall. The third resource is a “Chord Chart kit,” which includes both Nashville Number charts (using Arabic numerals to indicate chord positions relative to the chosen key) and lyric charts in various keys. The fourth resource Wahl provides is only available on some songs and is one of Wahl’s most recent additions to the Worship Tutorials resources. Under the name of “Worship Tutorials Studios,” Wahl creates professionally recorded multi-track backing tracks for worship leaders to use while performing the song. A download of one of these multi-track packages includes: (1) “Stem” files—individual instrument tracks which may themselves consist of multiple microphone, overdub, and/or effect layers—for each instrument in the mix; (2) a full stereo mix file, (3) a “Click and Cue” track, in which a click track is paired with verbal cues about when to move between sections of the song; and (4) a “Click Split” track which includes “Click and Cue” panned to the left and the full mix panned to the right. While the resources provided by Worship Tutorials are nominally pedagogical, they might seem less straightforwardly so when considered in tandem with these multi-track recordings. The video performances of songs on the website are almost always Wahl and his acoustic guitar playing along with the Worship Tutorials Studios backing tracks, and his “Chord Chart Kits” strictly chart out the arrangement of the song accounted for in the accompaniment. Wahl also states explicitly that the backing tracks he created were designed to emulate the most popular commercial recordings as closely as possible. Now, of course, playing along with commercial recordings is widely used as an important mode of musical training among amateurs. But, the effect of these tracks is different than that. To make the analogy to popular music work, one would have to imagine not simply “playing along with your favorite Beatles records,” but “playing along with your favorite Beatles records in front of an audience as the house band of your local Beatles fan club with someone whispering the song forms into your ear.” While an acoustic guitar player might benefit from using these resources to learn the song that certainly doesn’t seem to be their primary function. This effect is perhaps even more profound when considering the bevy of patches Worship Tutorials sells which are “designed to mimic the guitar sounds for specific worship songs.” These patches, the majority of which are designed to work with Line 6 Helix guitar processors, allow guitarists to achieve exact replicas of the sounds used on their favorite worship songs without needing to buy expensive gear or learn how to properly operate it. There are also seven “artist series” patches that are designed to more generally emulate the signal-chain of guitarists with Hillsong, Jesus Culture, and Bethel worship bands. So, with the click of a button, worship guitarists can download professionally built audio components that need only to be installed on their Line 6 Helix pedalboard in order to give them studio-quality replicas of the guitar sounds on the recording. Elsewhere in

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 99 this very volume, Jeff R Warren discusses a similar phenomenon among keyboard signal-chains, particularly with respect to the elusive quality of “shimmer” that so dominates worship accompaniments. On the Worship Tutorials site, there are currently 43 songs with a song-specific patch, but this seems to be one of the portions of the site that is expanding most rapidly since it launched during the summer of 2016. Given their purpose to outsource or even downplay the role of musical skill, the name Worship Tutorials might ultimately seem counterintuitive, since it seems as though the site is more-or-less shirking the “tutorials” part of its name. However, I would like to suggest that the “worship” in the name is not meant to refer to a musical genre—like MetalTutorials or JazzTutorials—but rather to an activity that the website is trying to teach—as if the name of the website were CookingTutorials. These are not lessons on “how to play worship music,” but rather on “how to worship within a specific New Calvinist theological framework” that is operative at so many of the churches I attend as part of my fieldwork. Given the theological/ideological context of contemporary American evangelicalism, it makes sense that worship pedagogy would involve learning to vanish by following the movements of something external to one’s self. In other words, the tutorial isn’t something you do, it’s something that happens to you in the presence of God (Abraham 2018, 9). Or as Warren quips later in his consideration of keyboard shimmer, “We can work on things, but things work on us as well.” And there are now a host of software programs that serve a similar purpose to Worship Tutorials multi-track accompaniments. “FlyWorship” claims to revitalize one’s passion for the worship experience by instantly providing professional-sounding results. A featured testimonial on their website from UK worship leader Mark Bryan claims: Just practicing with Fly has revived a tired and somewhat weary worship leader! With unlimited possible arrangements, songs we’ve sung for years take on a fresh new feel. And to instantly transform from a single acoustic guitar to a full, rounded band sound has helped create an atmosphere in our church where people can really draw closer to God. The result: a renewed passion for worship… Another similar product called “Worship Band In Hand” provides tracks that can be manipulated from the company’s proprietary tablet-based app. In this case, the designers assert that having multi-track accompaniments eliminates the stress associated with the complicated “practice sessions” and “replacement musicians,” allowing the worship leader to focus on the most important aspects of the job. In a short essay titled “How Worship Band In Hand Helps” on their website, the MediaComplete team argues: If your worship team or youth group has new musicians, Worship Band in Hand can help develop your team into a dynamic force of worship that

100  Joshua Kalin Busman sounds like a professional band…instead of complicating your life, you’ll save loads of time with shorter practice sessions and less time searching for player replacements. If someone can’t make it to the service, just unmute that Band Track to have Worship Band in Hand fill-in for the musician. And, since the app is so easy to use, you won’t have to spend all your time figuring it out. You can focus on what’s important: Worship. In both of these cases, the pre-recorded “band in a box” is presented as a disembodied solution to an embodied problem. These resources provide a more professional-sounding result, which is connected with more dynamic and passionate worship, but without needing to bother with an embodied band of musicians. These products erase anxieties about musical skill or performance by erasing the need for either one. They allow worship leaders to truly “worship,” serving the same vanishing mediator function for them that the worship leader serves for the congregation. With the presence of this technological supplement, the worship musicians real and imagined begin to vanish as worship comes fully into view.

Mediat(iz)ed worship In 2013, Wahl also began producing a resource called “Pads.” On his website, he explains the product thusly: In most modern worship music, you can hear an atmospheric ambient texture that sits underneath everything. It gives the music a sense of depth and weight and it helps glue everything together. With Pads, you can have that sound present in all your songs and other service elements with a tap of a button…When you finish a song, let the pads continue. Let them play during prayer moments. Bring them in towards the end of a moving sermon or talk. Crossfade between pads in different keys for smooth transitions from a song in one key to a song in another key. During your worship sets, you can have a music bed that never stops playing, which makes for a much more cohesive worship experience. When Wahl comments that you can hear this pad texture “in most modern worship music,” one can presume that he’s talking about the sound of modern worship recordings and concert-type gatherings. These pads may logistically help “glue everything together” by getting the transitions and key changes to be “seamless,” but they also make the entire worship gathering more closely resemble a professionally produced live album. And now, one can gain all the “depth,” “weight,” and “cohesion” of one’s favorite worship albums with just the “tap of a button.” By this point, Wahl has produced 12 different collections of pads, each of which features at least 12 tracks to fit any key in which one might need transitional material. In 2017, Wahl also began producing a new resource called “Bumper Music” that serves

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 101 a similar purpose: providing a soundtrack for “announcements, offering, communion, prayer, etc.” and “available in a variety of styles to suit your church culture, and every set comes in all 12 keys, which allows you to create seamless transitions from other musical elements of your service.” Practically, it seems reasonable that Wahl’s fascination with “transitions” comes from the fact that he serves in a multi-campus mega-church in which music is often used to streamline the mixture of live and pre-recorded or simulcast elements across a variety of church campuses, but it also relates to the broader ethical concerns around the “vanishing mediator” that have guided this essay so far. The mere existence of large-scale professional productions at megachurches and parachurch events is one driving force in the creation of resources like those produced by Worship Tutorials; but another is certainly the growing importance of recordings in the personal piety of so many evangelicals. In my fieldwork, several people explained that attending massive mediatized worship concerts and events and immersing themselves in the associated recordings had actually impaired their ability to truly “worship” at their smaller home churches. As one attendee of the 2013 Passion Conference in Atlanta, Georgia described it to me: I attend a fairly small church and we do have a band that does an amazing job, but I don’t think that they could ever hold a candle to [the] Passion [Conference]. Our staging is done on a much smaller scale and we work with what we have available with the talent of volunteers within the church and the funds available. I do have the privilege of working on the worship team as a lighting operator so I am able to see what happens behind the scenes of our little operation and can’t even imagine how much goes into putting on Passion 2013. I feel like there are some stylistic things that are similar in the way in which the songs are played and sung; however, I think that the style comes a lot from how the crowd is responding and 200 people is going to be quite different from 60,000-plus people (interview with author). She went on to explain that this disconnect between the production she found at events like the Passion Conference and that of her home church had actually led her to rely even more heavily on worship recordings in her personal religious practice. Others with whom I spoke explained how they had left their small churches to find larger, more media-savvy churches that could more accurately reproduce the specific and high-production standard for worship that they had come to expect. In his “Open Letter to Praise Bands,” philosopher James KA Smith referred to this highly produced effect as “that weird sort of sensory deprivation that happens from sensory overload, when the pounding of the bass on our chest and the wash of music over the crowd leaves us with the rush of a certain aural vertigo” (Smith 2012). But for many of the worshippers I talked with, the aural size

102  Joshua Kalin Busman and scale of Passion, Hillsong, and Bethel Music became the only way of bringing about the vanishing self-dissolution associated with true worship.6

Conclusion If songs and musicians in praise and worship music serve as vanishing mediators, then a good musical performance or recording actually strips itself away, leaving only a fully transparent and seemingly unmediated encounter between worshippers and God. But, of course, because this mediating function is intended to be wholly unmarked, it is inevitably bound up in discourses of privilege. Spaces in which the individual bodies of musicians and worshippers are effaced by divine presence also inevitably reinscribe the cis-het, white, male body as normative. And because of the ways in which worship constitutes an erasure of the self—in particular, notions of the self as an agent which are often at odds with New Calvinist ideas of divine sovereignty—worshippers are not encouraged to think of themselves as embodied agents. Even those few worship leaders or worshippers I spoke with who were able to articulate something of the way that music acted meaningfully on their bodies did not imagine that the experiences of other bodies might be different than theirs. Anxieties about musical skill, agency, and bodily presence are written into the source code of Protestantism from its earliest days, and these concerns have been renewed in the past several decades as churches figured out ways to embrace new forms of mass-mediated pop- and rock-based music. Understandably, worship musicians have sought to minimize their role in this increasingly personality driven system and redirect congregational attention to the true object of Christian devotion. But in so doing, this liturgical vanishing act has become reinscribed upon congregations as a kind of ethical maxim. Per the original definition by Hegel, thinking of worship music as a “vanishing mediator” reminds us that the escape and self-erasure so often associated with worship music isn’t simply a convenient by-product of crackling speakers, darkened rooms, and open hearts. Rather, the act of vanishing is an essential and on-going part of what keeps worship music functioning in its current form. And if this vanishing effect misfires or malfunctions, congregations will suddenly have to contend with the mountain of bodies, technologies, and individual choices that come cascading back into view. Ultimately, I wonder, if worship is a form of collective disappearance, where are we vanishing to? And, will anyone miss us when we’re gone?

Notes 1 At the time of my primary fieldwork (including this quote), Greear was simply an author and the pastor of a multi-site megachurch called “The Summit” based in Durham, North Carolina. But now, Greear also serves as the president of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States: the Southern Baptist Convention.

Amateurism-without-amateurishness 103 2 Though their independent ownership is much touted in promotional materials, both Hillsong and Passion’s sixstepsrecords have been distributed by Capitol Christian Music Group (formerly EMI Christian Music Group) since their earliest days, so the terms of their financial or institutional “independence” are murky at best. 3 An historical analogue to this concept might be the Renaissance concept of “sprezzatura,” which was defined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione as a kind of “studied carelessness” whereby great effort was expended to make something appear to be without effort and almost without any thought. 4 At times, this more expansive notion of the “vanishing mediator” utilized by Žižek comes close to the Derridean language of “supplementarity” first employed in Of Grammatology (1968). Thinking through the Worship Tutorials resources discussed below as a “supplement” in precisely this way deepens and clarifies the analysis I’m proposing. 5 My personal favorite parody of this kind is probably “Messy Mondays: How to Write a Worship Song (In 5 Minutes or Less)” by the Nashville-based sketch comedy group, Blimey Cow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhYuA0Cz8ls. 6 These stories and others like them also seem to lend credence to the work of James K. Wellman on the potent psychological effects of mega-church attendance. Wellman and his team in the Comparative Religion Program at the University of Washington found that mega-church attendance, particularly during musical worship times, functioned as a powerful “oxytocin cocktail” in the brains of attendees that closely resembled the addictive properties and effects of some narcotics. See James K Wellman Jr., Katie E Corcoran, and Kate Stockly–Meyerdirk, High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

References Abraham, Ibrahim. 2018. “Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music.” Religions Vol. 9, No. 6: 1–21. Benjamins, Laura. 2019. “Learning through praise: How Christian worship band musicians learn.” Journal of Popular Music Education, Vol. 3 No. 3. Biema, David Van. 2009. “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now,” Time Magazine, Last modified March 12, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/ article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884760,00.html Busman, Joshua Kalin. 2015. “(Re)sounding Passion: Listening to American Evangelical Worship Music, 1997–2015” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Carlson, Carl W. 2011. “Worship De-railed,” WorshipTheRock, 21 March 2011, http://www.worshiptherock.com/forum/topics/worship-derailed Haynes, Maren. 2014. “Heaven, Hell, and Hipsters: Attracting Young Adults to Megachurches Through Hybrid Symbols of Religion and Popular Culture in the Pacific Northwest, USA,” Ecclesial Practices 1, 207–28. Hinton, Mary. 2011. The Commercial Church: Black Churches and the New Religious Marketplace in America. United Kingdom: Lexington Books. Herl, Joseph. 2004. Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingalls, Monique. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1973. “The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber,” in New German Critique 1 (Winter 1973).

104  Joshua Kalin Busman Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lusk, Caroline. 2013. “Chris Tomlin: He’s No Hero,” CCM Magazine, 11 November 2013 http://www.ccmmagazine.com/article/chris-tomlin-he-s-no-hero/ Myrick, Nathan. 2018. “The Celebrity Model of Music Ministry: Characteristics and Considerations,” The Hymn, Vol. 69, No. 3. Neudorf, Jordan. 2011. “Worship De-railed,” WorshipTheRock, 21 March 2011, http://www.worshiptherock.com/forum/topics/worship-derailed Outka, Elizabeth. 2009. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. New York: Oxford University Press. Porter, Mark. 2016. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. Sider, Ronald J. 1974. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: Development of His Thought, 1517–1525. Leiden: EJ Brill. Shuker, Roy. 2001. Understanding Popular Music, 2nd. ed. New York: Routledge. Smith, James KA. 2012. “An Open Letter to Praise Bands,” 20 February 2012, http:// forsclavigera.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-letter-to-praise-bands.html Wagner, Tom. 2019. Branding and Consumer Culture in Church: Hillsong in Focus. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso.

6

Music business, ethics, and Christian festivals: progressive Christianity at Wild Goose Festival Andrew Mall

Christian musicking and economic marketplaces have long been intertwined. European churches, monasteries, papal courts, and other religious institutions supported composers and musicians through systems of patronage well before aristocratic courts started doing so during the Renaissance period. In Western Europe and North America, musical composition and performance shifted from a patronage to a marketplace economy during the nineteenth century, and sacred music and hymnody—which had long been common and even popular—became salable genres, their sheet music key components of music publishers’ commercial catalogs. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Christian music has remained an important market sector for the multinational music industries. Large entertainment conglomerates, including Universal and Sony, have invested heavily in many genres of Christian music since the early 1990s.1 For these conglomerates, which operate as for-profit businesses, Christian music is one among many categories of commodity goods, individual songs and albums earning revenue through complicated licensing relationships governed by modern intellectual property regulations enmeshed within neoliberal capitalism (Taylor 2016). Christian music’s consumers—not audiences, fans, or listeners, but yet another cog of capitalist marketplaces—generate data as they buy, stream, watch, and listen (Drott 2018). The conglomerates know their consumers by these data and devise complex methods of segmenting and marketing to them. Although the marketplace for recorded music has changed dramatically during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, as consumers have largely shifted from purchasing CDs to streaming digital music, revenue in other music industry sectors has increased. 2 For example, music publishing has become a major source of income, particularly for writers of contemporary worship music, who license certain uses of their songs to churches through the Christian Copyright Licensing International (or CCLI). 3 The live music sector has also grown (Holt 2010); in the US Christian market, as in other markets, festivals have become an increasingly visible (and audible) phenomenon, especially those that cater to conservative white evangelical audiences such as Creation (in Pennsylvania), Lifest (Wisconsin),

106  Andrew Mall SonRise (Virginia), and SoulFest (New Hampshire), among others. While Christian musicians have professionalized, skilled at creating music that creates profit, intermediaries (those who connect musicians to their audiences) have increasingly come to rely on large and complex sets of data about their consumers to inform both business and creative decisions, which are necessarily interrelated and not easily disentangled.4 Musicking under neoliberal capitalism includes creating the appropriate conditions to promote and support the production, distribution, and consumption of music. Consumers, intermediaries, and musicians are all involved in processes of circulation and exchange—usually exchanging money, but, as Timothy Taylor reminds us, also exchanging other resources such as time, work, attention, and privacy. “Acts of exchange,” he writes, “contribute powerfully to social reproduction on broad scales and in small aggregations such as local music scenes” (Taylor 2020, 255). The ethical questions that accompany these acts of exchange are already problematic when considered solely within capitalist contexts, and those problems are magnified when Christian belief is also an integral component and amplified, again, by social reproduction both broad and small. Consider, for example, to what degree should musicians consider business goals over artistic (or religious) ones? What are the impacts of celebrity culture on individuals’ physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health? When is it appropriate to use consumers’ belief systems as marketing data? What limits, if any, should we place on the technological surveillance (and subsequent commodification) of consumers’ actions? What values does capitalism itself reward and incentivize? If business decisions and creative decisions are interrelated in the culture industries, then so are religious decisions similarly intertwined with business decisions in the Christian industries, making it impossible simply to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s when they are inextricable from the things that are God’s.5 When the objectives of capitalism and Christian ethics are at odds, which prevails? In this chapter, I consider the ways in which the business of music complicates the ethics and objectives of Christian music. In the following pages, I address some effects of yoking Christian music to the for-profit imperatives of multinational entertainment conglomerates, but I quickly turn my attention to Christian festivals, which are unique places in which competing ethics find an equilibrium, albeit one that is always temporary and often uneasy. At Wild Goose Festival, which takes place annually in Hot Springs, North Carolina, United States, organizers have deprioritized standard business practices in favor of an event that promotes progressive Christianity as a viable and generative movement. Wild Goose claims to be “a transformational community grounded in faith-inspired social justice,” and the festival provides the tools to do so through its seminars, speakers, and pre-festival events.6 Festival staff, speakers, musicians, and attendees come together at “the conference in the woods,” both reflecting and projecting a shared vision of biblically grounded social justice. In its

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 107 programming, organization, and ideals, Wild Goose provides a refreshing contrast from other Christian festivals that cater to mainstream conservative Christians in the United States. And yet, as I discovered when I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the festival in 2017 and interviewed Jeff Clark, Wild Goose’s director, despite the event’s radically inclusive identity, it can be downright exclusive; furthermore, through its branding and design, the festival capitalizes on progressive values in ways similar to how other for-profit companies and events capitalize on conservative values and religious identities. The tensions between music business and ethics at this Christian festival reproduce in microcosm the larger tensions at work in the for-profit Christian music industries.

Ethics and aesthetics in Christian music The central consequence of the entertainment conglomerates’ investments in Christian music for Christian musicking more broadly is that the latter increasingly must account for—and, indeed, is increasingly compelled to enable—the conglomerates’ commercial priorities. Ethics and aesthetics are intrinsically connected and mutually co-constitutive: while it is important to understand what musical characteristics are valued in particular contexts and why they are valued, we must also consider the ways that extra-musical values impact musical sound—“right musicking,” as I discuss elsewhere (Mall 2021, cf. Engelhardt 2015). These values include modes of production, distribution, and consumption that prescribe and constrain sonic aesthetics, both implicitly and explicitly. Capitalist marketplaces incentivize professional musicians and songwriters to write, produce, and perform music that meets the expectations of advertisers, music publishers, radio stations, record labels, and/or streaming services if they want access to these corporations’ resources, networks, and audiences. For many professional musicians, building a sustainable career involves currying favor with A&R representatives, festival promoters, music supervisors, radio program directors, streaming playlist curators, and other cultural intermediaries who (still) function as gatekeepers to a notoriously exclusive industry in which commercial success is often fleeting and always difficult to obtain. Many consumers—particularly those who rely on radio stations and major streaming services to discover new music—will never encounter music that is not promoted by these commercial infrastructures. Importantly, however, ethics in music industries is not only about the business of music but also includes values that are not necessarily (or explicitly) tied to economic systems of exchange. In the Christian music industries, for example, Christian beliefs and morals grounded in Christian faith are central, even as the business of Christian music is oriented toward for-profit corporations and prioritizes commerce. These values are also embodied within practice: Christian music consumers do not merely expect musicians to claim faith as central to their identity proudly (and loudly) but

108  Andrew Mall also to model Christian morals and ethics in all aspects of their daily lives, no matter how private. When musicians transgress this expectation, their careers can suffer backlash from (now former) fans and business partners, including the cancelation of recording contracts and the disinvitation of live appearances and performances.7 As an ethical requirement of the Christian music industries, adherence to a public religious identity is incentivized and rewarded, while diverging from dogma is often punished. At times, these ethics come into conflict with the needs and expectations of capitalist marketplaces. When Amy Grant promoted her albums Unguarded (1986) and Heart in Motion (1991) to non-Christian audiences, she had to contend with a secular market that had been hostile to Christian musicians’ overt expressions of religious belief in the past. The writer of a Rolling Stone profile that preceded her first crossover attempt described Grant as “hardly your stereotypical goody-goody Christian singer”: she is sexy but not promiscuous, playful and not condemning, inflexible with her faith and yet eager to please a new (secular) audience (Goldberg 1985). But Grant also faced intense criticism from many of her Christian fans, who perceived her to have watered-down or even hidden her Christian identity to achieve commercial success.8 For Grant and other crossover musicians, this backlash is predictable: fans can be very critical of musicians whom they perceive to have “sold out” their values for a chance at greater commercial success. But this criticism also seems incommensurate with Christianity’s mission to reach non-believers, particularly for musicians such as Grant, whose success, according to Jay Howard and John Streck (1999, 97), enabled her to promote a version of “sanctified entertainment,” serve as a (very) public witness for Jesus Christ, and articulate and model a Christian worldview for believers and non-believers alike. Pursuing a secular audience beyond that of Christian consumers might be consistent with Christ’s Great Commission to preach the Christian message as broadly and widely as possible.9 Amy Grant’s example illustrates that comprehending and negotiating outwardly competing interests demands a nuanced perspective of how ethics are articulated and put into practice at the institutional, communal, and individual levels. To do so, we must recognize that people often act in incoherent ways, seemingly at odds with their stated ethics. This incoherence complicates the interrelatedness of ethics and aesthetics: the relationships between the two cannot be condensed to simple one-to-one expressions between causes and effects or signifiers and referents. Within music industries, ethics can strategically signify and bolster marketplace positioning and branding. This is true of individual musicians and bands who carefully craft their public personae. This is also true of organizations and companies, such as record labels and festivals, whose brands and reputations are significant among professionals (musicians and intermediaries) and consumers. The ethics of institutional and individual stakeholders in neoliberal capitalist markets are not necessarily diametrically

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 109 opposed to those of Christian musicking, but neither are they wholly commensurate. Charlie Peacock (1999, 162), an influential Christian musician, songwriter, and producer, has noted that for-profit corporations (including record labels) often serve the work of Christian communities by reinvesting profits into ministerial or philanthropic causes or enabling and supporting the careers of musicians who emphasize ministry as an integral component of their career. Billy Ray Hearn, who founded Sparrow Records in 1976 and later served as chairman of EMI’s Christian Music Group, cited similar reasoning to justify selling Sparrow to EMI in a 1998 interview: “A lot of people though[t] it was the devil taking over our industry, but what it was, it was the devil’s money giving us money to grow with and really become a tremendous, better witness. We’ve taken that money and done miracles with it. And none of us are sorry” (Hearn 1998, 31).10 John Styll, the founding editor and publisher of CCM magazine, a publication that has documented and promoted the Christian music industries since 1978, reminded readers who were critical of commercial Christian music that business and ministry need not be in opposition; indeed the latter might rely on the former: “Without positive income, the capability to minister is impaired.”11 But if Christian musicians’ ministries depend on sustainable careers, and if those careers require a particularly public religious identity, it is less clear if the business of Christian music rewards Christian ethics in the absence of measurable commercial success. In my interviews with Christian record company executives in 2009 and 2010, I heard repeatedly that corporations often make business decisions about Christian music and musicians solely based on commercial results (or the lack thereof) without considering other aspects (such as, for example, ministerial impact). As a result of this pressure, record label executives primarily invest in musicians who largely confirm and conform to the marketplace’s expectations. Wayne Kusber, an executive at a major Christian record label, told me that the advice he gives aspiring musicians is to listen to the radio: “If you don’t like any of those artists [musicians] that are being played on the radio, and you can’t hear yourself being played before or after one of those artists, then don’t pursue the labels that those artists are on, because that’s how those labels function.… They’re going to want to put you in that system to some degree. And if that system’s just going to tick you off and frustrate you, don’t waste your time.”12 Even though ethics and aesthetics are interrelated, these examples demonstrate that they are not equally weighted: within music industries, the relationships between religious values, aesthetic values, and business needs appear to be lopsided in favor of satisfying commercial needs. Festivals, however, are uniquely able to challenge and even disrupt this balance. Record labels, radio stations, music publishers, and other for-profit companies are constrained by their need to meet the near-constant expectations of their marketplaces and stakeholders. Festivals must appeal to stakeholders

110  Andrew Mall and consumers too: musicians and sponsors (among others) depend on some major events that attract thousands (or tens of thousands) of attendees. But because festivals operate on an annual cycle, temporally limited to only a few days (at most) every year, the pressures they face are concentrated on a different time-scale. Audiences and musicians alike idealize festivals when they think about them, which is not often: even though most festival promoters operate year-round, for most attendees the festival only exists when they are physically present. But those moments are intensely significant, largely because their heterotopic spaces disrupt daily life and, in doing so, clarify and amplify the conditions of daily life.13 Festival organizers take advantage of this significance to design and promote an idealized ethical vision, often in stark relief to quotidian lived experience; the ethical potential of festivals is thus greater than it might otherwise appear to casual observers. The physical places of festivals are “sensational forms,” in Birgit Meyers’s sense (2009), where imagined communities are not only made real but made more real: attendees who might not normally interact with each other on a daily basis together experience an event whose affect is intensified by its compressed and condensed temporality and bounded geography (Mall 2020b, 55). At Wild Goose Festival, a progressive Christian event that has been held in North Carolina since 2011, that affect derives from and contributes to a strong commitment to the work of social justice rooted in biblical perspectives on difficult conversations about class, gender identity, income inequality, race, and sexuality, among other issues.

Wild Goose and social justice Wild Goose takes place in the Appalachians of western North Carolina, northwest of Asheville. The festival’s organizers promote a Bible-centered and faith-inspired perspective of social justice via music and the arts. They describe the event’s emphasis using the shorthand “progressive Christianity,” which they define in part as a commitment to working for justice and compassion for the marginalized and oppressed, and integrating this work into a belief-centered life.14 For many who attend Wild Goose, this perspective is grounded in biblical scripture, particularly the lessons that Jesus Christ shared with his followers in the Sermon on the Mount.15 Wild Goose promotes the acceptance of all; as its website notes, “We fully affirm and celebrate people of every age, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual identity, education, bodily condition, religious affiliation, and economic background, particularly those who are most often marginalized.”16 Through its branding, particularly in excerpts like this one on its website, Wild Goose thus presents itself as an attempt to redress systemic biases and exclusionary practices within US Christianity. In particular, the event publicly values all sexualities and gender identities—notably at odds with conservative US Christianity, which largely condemns non-heterosexual relationships and non-cisgender identities. In some evangelical circles,

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 111 Wild Goose is derided as the festival for gay Christians. At the event itself, that identity is reclaimed and celebrated. This explicitly inclusive message, however, attracts a relatively exclusive niche audience: mostly self-identifying Christians whose tastes, politics, and/or theologies diverge from paradigmatic conservative values. This exclusivity is further reinforced by festival programming that skirts the peripheries of the Christian music industries and the dominant political ideologies of white US evangelical Christianity. Dogmatic, aggressive voices claiming to represent conservative US evangelicalism loudly proclaim progressivism to be anti-Christian and an assault on religious liberties. From this perspective, progressive Christianity is duplicitous at best; at worst, it is intentionally misleading and evil. In conversation with other attendees at Wild Goose in 2017, I learned that these ideas are present in many of their home church communities. Participants at a day-long, pre-festival “Justice Camp” learned strategies for activist organizing from speakers involved in social justice work in Chicago, southern California, and Washington, DC.17 But we also discussed strategies for introducing social justice ideas into local congregations and communities without triggering a political backlash. Although the audience generally welcomed these strategies, which we practiced and workshopped that afternoon, there were some tense moments: among the audience, I sensed timidity, an unwillingness or perhaps an inability to engage with difficult, time-consuming, and potentially alienating activism. One of the speakers, a young Black pastor from Chicago named Julian (a member of Wild Goose’s Board of Directors who also performed a Main Stage concert on Thursday evening as the rapper J Kwest), spoke unapologetically about his inability to work with other churches and Christians who never move from talk to activism: “I have no interest in your solemn assemblies,” he said, dismissing vocal solidarity without accompanying action as virtue signaling, ineffective participation by “well-meaning folks.” What marginalized populations need, he said, are “not allies, but accomplices.” The largely white audience nodded in assent, but where we individually take—and how we act upon—Julian’s message remained an open question at the end of the day. Although Wild Goose is a much smaller event than the largest Christian festivals, its emphasis on social justice and progressive issues provides a counterweight to the social and political conservatism of mainstream white US Christianity.18 Many of the festival’s featured speakers’ perspectives and seminar topics are at odds with what attendees encounter and hear in their church communities at home. Social justice at Wild Goose is about neither raising money for progressive causes, nor promoting musicians’ pet political issues. Instead, social justice at Wild Goose is about educating and empowering attendees to address inequalities in their own communities upon returning home. This approach, which privileges activism, building relationships, organizing, and skills training over mere awareness or

112  Andrew Mall financial support, sets Wild Goose apart from many other Christian festivals. The event’s Christian identity distinguishes it from most other events that emphasize social justice causes: faith and biblical scripture provide the principal framework through which participants—attendees, musicians, organizers, and speakers—understand and experience the event. At Wild Goose 2017, many speakers argued that Christ’s teachings compel believers to support and promote social justice issues and solutions to inequality. In their featured (separate) Main Stage talks, for example, Jim Wallis and the Rev. Dr. William Barber II taught that Christians’ necessary commitment to addressing racial injustice and income inequality (for example) are rooted in scripture. In other words, speakers, ministers, and religious leaders frame progressive Christianity at Wild Goose as biblically consistent. From the perspective of conservative Christianity, however, the chasm between political conservatives and progressives is so deep that it is insurmountable, no matter how biblical progressives’ social justice concerns may be. To accomplish this emphasis on biblically grounded social justice activism and education, and to do so in a manner consistent with the serious reflection and attention that these issues demand and deserve, Wild Goose’s organizers have intentionally organized their program around a broad and deep series of seminars throughout the day. Similarly, the speakers booked for Main Stage in the morning and evening sessions are highly anticipated by attendees—sometimes even more than the musicians featured each night are. These seminar leaders and speakers address a wide variety of topics, some of which focus on outright activism and skills for implementing social justice reforms. At Wild Goose 2017, for example, attendees could have spent their Friday learning about racial justice in a series of otherwise unrelated seminars: “The Intersection of Faith and Racial Justice,” “Coming to Terms with Your Own Whiteness,” “Privilege, Power, Racism and Other Biases,” and “The Quest for Interracial Justice,” among many others. Other seminars, split across Friday and Saturday, promoted the normalization of LGBTQ identities within Christianity: “Transgender 101: Beyond the Binary,” “Queer the Church,” “Discussing the Bible and LGBTQ Inclusion,” and “(Trans)gender, Spirituality and Music: A Conversation with Namoli Brennet,” among others; the session “Being Queer and/or Trans in a Scary World” was available for teenagers.19 At Wild Goose 2017, there were at least ten different tent venues hosting seminars and workshops throughout the day (9 am–6 pm), but only one venue for music performances. 20 This runs counter to the standard programming practice at most other Christian festivals in the United States. For example, Creation—the largest US Christian festival, with almost five times as many attendees as Wild Goose—did not have a dedicated venue for seminars that year, with only a handful of sessions throughout the event. Lifest had a single seminar venue that competed against three or four music venues and several other activities. SoulFest, which promotes itself as addressing injustice, offers several workshops each day as part

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 113 of “Soul University,” but this is nowhere near the scale of Wild Goose. Programming at Wild Goose, in contrast to these and other Christian festivals, prioritizes edification over entertainment: attendees come because they learn new skills and perspectives in sessions that are not tangential to music concerts but, in many ways, are the event’s primary emphasis. Steve Knight, who has worked in marketing for Wild Goose, told me, “Wild Goose has always had music, and in fact has had some incredible music. Even though it’s art and music, spirituality, justice, it’s in that intersection in that list of what the Wild Goose Festival’s about. Wild Goose, from the beginning, has been a speaker-dominated, speaker-focused, festival.”21 If seminars and workshops are peripheral at other festivals, at Wild Goose speakers get rock star billing and are a key reason why attendees come and return. While this programming difference distinguishes Wild Goose as a functional alternative to other Christian festivals, in the United States there is a long history of religious retreats and conventions that prioritize edification, education, and training, such as revival meetings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Billy Graham’s “crusades” (traveling revivals) in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, worship conferences such as Passion and Urbana have proven to be very popular events and serve similar functions as revivals did in prior decades and centuries (Ingalls 2018). Wild Goose, the event’s organizers, and their speakers thus participate in a lineage of periodic yet intense events of religious training. But its focus distinguishes it from many of these other events. While revivals and religious conventions often emphasize theological teaching, evangelism and ministry training, worship, and on-site conversion, at Wild Goose these are tangential to providing attendees with resources to address social justice and inequality in the United States. At its founding, Wild Goose was inspired by Greenbelt, a long-running Christian festival in England (founded in 1974) that similarly emphasizes “commitment to the arts, faith and justice, [and] also our underlying values of tolerance, dialogue and hope.”22 According to Jeff Clark, Wild Goose’s director, the festival does not pursue social justice issues directly: “We try to sort of intentionally not be activists . . . as the organization itself.”23 Rather, Wild Goose’s organizers view the event as a platform and venue where a like-minded community can learn from and engage with each other. As Clark told me, “We seem to have a gift of convening. So we convene, and in some form we want to have conversation. . . . A conversation speaks on a lot more levels than just word. Because a conversation says, people are talking to and among and with, and that means they’re listening, that means they’re respecting, that means they’re scratching their head and contemplating.” If Wild Goose is a religious revival, it is not one that awakens attendees to the importance of living faithful and spiritual lives but rather one that awakens attendees to the potential for Christians to couple the teachings of their faith with the resources of progressive activism to

114  Andrew Mall effect real and substantive changes on behalf of marginalized populations. Importantly, the ethics that inform its design and programming reinforce these goals while also colliding with its materiality: social justice and progressivism have become core components of Wild Goose’s brand identity and designed experience.

Festivals as designed experiences Festivals are “designed” experiences in multiple senses: organizers make intentional decisions about their programming and scheduling, branding and visual language (such as in advertisements, posters, program books, social media accounts, and websites), location, use and layout of physical space, relationships with external stakeholders (including sponsors, vendors, and local municipalities), and other aspects that illustrate their objectives. These decisions have ethical stakes themselves—simultaneously reflecting and reproducing organizers’ shared values—that accumulate over time and scale. They also inflect the relationships that attendees have with the festival: an event’s ethics are a core component of its brand, signaling to stakeholders and ticket-buyers alike what values are important to organizers as well as the overall festival community. From this perspective, ethics are transactional: strategically deployed (or obscured) to make the festival more attractive to its targeted audience. Social justice, as an element of design at Wild Goose, is both a reflection and a projection. It reflects the event’s values, and it also projects a vision for how the political, social, and theological goals of the community might be achieved. Social justice at Wild Goose, thus, is at least partly aspirational, acknowledging that the work of social justice is always ongoing and vigilant. Wild Goose’s Board of Directors, the festival director Jeff Clark, and his staff work conscientiously to create an inclusive place for a community that is actively engaged in educating and advocating for reform. Non-white, non-cisgender, and non-heterosexual speakers and performers are conspicuous. Clark—a white, cishet man—discussed a child of his who is trans on Main Stage and in our interview; in discussing the Board of Directors to me, unprompted, he identified members who are gay and those who are Black; he mentioned a married lesbian couple responsible for some of the music programming; he told me that, of the Main Stage evening programming, “out of four preachers this year [2017] there’s actually not a straight white guy.”24 If these attempts verge on tokenizing, they indicate an objective to pursue a more just world intentionally; as Clark reminded me, “we want to create the world in which we want to live,” and at Wild Goose that often starts with programming and staffing decisions. 25 Wild Goose’s location in a wooded campground alongside the French Broad River in Hot Springs, North Carolina is idyllic, and many find it to be a welcoming and restful place. But no matter how beautiful the location, it is not ideal for everyone who might want to attend. Although Hot Springs

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 115 is only about thirty-five miles (or fifty-six kilometers) from Asheville, North Carolina, there are no public transportation options and few accommodations aside from the campgrounds. As Gina Arnold (2018, 84) points out, this dependence on cars (what she terms “automobility”) marks festivals as privileged spaces. And if Wild Goose’s Appalachian location in a southern US state endears it to many potential attendees, there are others who might find it oppressive or intolerant, even if the festival itself is not. Arnold writes of the romantic appeal of nature, common to many festivals, as indexing attendees’ privilege, “particularly those who partake of American idyll fantasies about nature, wildness, and a kinder, gentler, rural past.” For many progressives, appealing to a romanticized past is ignorant, counter-productive, and hurtful, as doing so whitewashes the naked and unashamed biases of violent perpetrators who conducted violent acts against marginalized people. The potential for Wild Goose’s organizers to examine and reflect publicly on its location represents a missed opportunity both to acknowledge how the event’s location complicates its inclusive ideals and ethical perspectives and to initiate a restorative justice movement to repair relationships between Christians and marginalized communities. Those who do come to Wild Goose nevertheless find a welcoming environment that encourages what Jeff Clark calls “co-creating”: ways in which attendees can be actively involved in the event’s structure, design, and content. Clark and his team value the contributions of the Wild Goose community: many speakers and performers every year are booked through a self-submission process. 26 The campsites are a flurry of activity and creativity, often bleeding into the event itself, easily audible and visible from the festival grounds. Church groups, ministries, and denominational organizations sponsor tents, book speakers, and cook free meals for volunteers and campers. The seminar and workshop sessions are meant to be engaging in ways that facilitate relationships, according to Clark: “If we’re trying to converse and co-create and connect people . . . they basically find their tribe sometime, they create alliances.”27 Wild Goose is not necessarily unique in enabling co-creation, but Clark and his staff view co-creation as essential to the ideals and work of progressive Christianity, particularly with respect to social justice. By encouraging and enabling attendees to have some agency within the festival’s defined parameters, Wild Goose also empowers them to own the good and the good will that Wild Goose instills in its community.

Music at Wild Goose The music programming at most US Christian festivals typically features musicians who are products of the Nashville-based mainstream Christian music industries, or aspire to be so. These musicians’ professional success depends, in part, on a public faith identity that largely conforms to the expectations of conservative white US Christianity. 28 In the United States,

116  Andrew Mall this often equates to political and social agendas that are anti-abortion, homophobic, pro-gun rights, transphobic, and (particularly in the Trump era) anti-#BlackLivesMatter, anti-antifa, and apologists for police violence, among others. Not all musicians are vocal about supporting these causes, but choosing not to confront these harmful perspectives and remaining silent when sharing stages and merchandise tents with those who do support them is an act of complicity. Wild Goose’s organizers intentionally book musicians from outside the mainstream Christian music industries and use music to articulate the event’s ethics. Some musicians publicly embrace a Christian identity but choose not to withdraw from secular culture, performing for audiences of diverse religious identities: what Howard and Streck (1999, 16) would identify as “integrational.” Others might not publicly identify as religious at all, but their values and identities resonate with those of the Wild Goose audience. Many musicians use their time on stage to advocate for pro-choice, gay and trans rights, anti-racism, and other progressive causes that would be anathema at other Christian festivals. Wild Goose books several musicians who would be unwelcome in the Christian music industries because of their sexuality: the Indigo Girls performed at Wild Goose in 2013 and again in 2016; in 2017, the final evening’s programming featured Jennifer Knapp, who was a rising Christian music star until she publicly came out as a lesbian. Ostracized from mainstream Christian music, Knapp continues to perform and advocate for religious inclusion of LGBTQ people of faith through her organization Inside Out Faith. 29 One result of Wild Goose’s approach to music is that the evening programming can feel calculated to appeal more to the ideals of progressive Christianity than to musical fandom and discovery. Over three nights of programming in 2017, audiences are treated to an eclectic lineup including J Kwest’s hip hop, the Chicago blues of Big Ray and Chicago’s Most Wanted, The Collection’s melodic indie folk, the spazzy indie rock of twopiece Illiterate Light, and John Mark McMillan’s rootsy arena-ready rock, among others. It is a programming strategy that seems designed not to offend the diverse sensibilities of the self-identifying progressive audience— music as virtue signaling, edifying, and indexing diversity and openness (even if aspirationally). Steve Knight told me he thinks that the event’s organizers could “try harder when it comes to music, to introduce people to really original creative people [musicians]. . . . It’s not an afterthought, but it’s not that important.”30 The implication is that, because the festival’s organizers are experienced at booking seminars and speakers that introduce attendees to new ideas or new ways of thinking about and doing biblically centered social justice, they should also be able to book musicians who are similarly interesting, boundary-pushing, and thought-provoking. Because attendees are largely drawn to Wild Goose’s seminar and speaker programming, however, the music programming will always be secondary:

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 117 as Knight pointed out to me, the organizers have little incentive to improve or expand the music programming. Music at Wild Goose is indeed important, largely because it helps reinforce the event’s ethics and distinguishes it from other Christian festivals and the mainstream Christian music industries. But ultimately, Wild Goose’s music is not as important as its seminar programming: much of the education and empowerment that occurs at the festival takes place not at concerts but in hearing speakers and working together in seminars. Promoting Christian identity as an entertainment brand or commodity confuses faith and religious belief for commerce and profit, or promotes religious beliefs that posit material wealth as evidence of God’s favor (as in the prosperity gospel movement). Some argue that faith itself is in danger of being reduced to a mere (if conspicuous) fashion or lifestyle, divesting it of any greater significance (McCracken 2010). In the United States, these tensions are complicated by a political system that has become increasingly polarized over the last few decades. Conservative white US evangelicals have become more and more active in electoral and legislative politics during this time, supporting politicians and legislation that align with their religious beliefs (Shires 2007). Their overall objective, it seems, is to enshrine conservative Christian values as (secular) laws, thus imposing their culturally specific ethical framework on a diverse and plural society. Any objection to this goal is dismissed as an attack on religious liberties, a core value that is guaranteed by the US constitution. As a result, political and religious identities are increasingly intertwined and inseparable for many, even when they may appear to be incommensurate. The business of marketing to these Christians is one that cannot disrupt conservative political agendas, and indeed may profitably engage the most divisive or polarizing agendas for strategic (if cynical) commercial purposes. Religious identity, in other words, has been transparently co-opted to achieve business and political objectives in transactional relationships. It may seem like overreach to tie consumption choices, religious identities, and divisive political issues to each other so explicitly. But doing so echoes strategies that marketing professionals, politicians, and religious leaders have been perfecting for many years—strategies that are even more insidious in an age of big data analysis and “data doubles” based on the tracked activity (both digital and real-life) of actual consumers. 31 In other words, an individual’s consumption habits, political preferences, and religious beliefs cannot be disentangled—they are mutually constitutive and, from a marketing perspective, mutually informative. In a type of consumption politics familiar to anyone who has ever intentionally “shopped local,” bought handmade products at an artisan fair, purchased organic produce at a farmers’ market, or joined a boycott, how and where consumers choose to spend money often reflects and expresses their ethics, both implicitly and explicitly. It is a curious fact of capitalism and

118  Andrew Mall democracy in the United States that the former so frequently stands in for the latter—we “vote with our dollars,” sometimes with greater enthusiasm (and certainly with more frequency and at higher rates of participation) than the votes we cast at our local polling places. Certainly not all Christian consumers have the same political beliefs and goals, just as not all Christians follow the same theological and scriptural interpretations. But ignoring the conflation of these identities and their values on the part of business, political, and religious leaders will not solve these problems, and indeed without countervailing voices this perception of overlapping identities may worsen and harden into a self-fulfilling and -perpetuating cycle.

Concluding thoughts If mainstream Christian festivals signal their appropriateness for conservative Christian audiences by booking musicians and bands that affirm (even if only tacitly) the political and ideological goals of conservative white US Christians, then Wild Goose’s programming signifies its organizers’ attempts to distinguish it from those other festivals as intentionally divergent, reclaiming Christian festivals as places that welcome progressive Christians and what Shawn David Young (2015) and others have called the “evangelical left.” And yet, Wild Goose’s organizers are not immune from the fraught ethical implications of collapsing religious morality into consumer capitalism. They can afford to deemphasize the event’s music in favor of its speaker series, but music cannot be absent. Social justice is not only a primary emphasis and a key to understanding Christian musicking at the festival, but it is also the event’s brand: every designable element of Wild Goose must take into account the ways in which it promotes or supports (or, at least, does not distract from) the social and political issues important to progressive Christians. Failing to do so would alienate the community that convenes at Wild Goose every summer, thus endangering its fiscal stability.32 In this way, as at other festivals, consumption and religion collapse into each other. If Wild Goose is built on an ethical platform of progressivism and social justice, it risks commodifying those movements as readymade and necessary components of an annual festival with a not-insignificant budget. Wild Goose, after all, exists in a capitalist marketplace in which attendees have abundant choices for where to spend their disposable income and, indeed, construct and reinforce their identities through acts of consumption (Taylor 2016, 41–2). The business of Wild Goose, in other words, trades on progressive identities—much as those of other Christian festivals and Christian record labels trade on conservative and religious identities. The challenge for Wild Goose’s organizers is to navigate a path forward that honors and furthers the values of its community without corrupting them, taking them for granted, or treating them as disposable.

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 119 Wild Goose functions, in part, as a place of renewal. For some attendees, this is a renewal of faith, a reminder that the progressive ideals in which they so strongly believe have a basis in biblical scriptures. For others, this is a renewal of purpose that manifests in sessions where they learn about inequalities and inequities in the United States and abroad. For yet others, this is a renewal of energy, a place to relax with others who share similar ideologies and theologies. Attendees draw upon their memories and anticipations of the previous and coming summers as resources to sustain them through other seasons when they feel the lack of a like-minded community particularly acutely. They return to their daily lives with new ideas, biblically grounded resources, and a renewed commitment to engage their local communities in enacting progressive change. I returned to my own daily life with a renewed sense of hopefulness. On the festival’s final day in 2017, I wrote in my fieldnotes: Wild Goose gives me hope—hope that believers calling themselves Christians are working within their churches and communities to educate, change hearts, change minds, and address social inequities, inequalities, and injustices from a faith-based perspective that is explicitly grounded in biblical theology. Nonetheless, Wild Goose remains a marginal space and place within the larger realm of conservative Christianity and Christian festivals. The hope I felt while at the festival in 2017 is tempered by the recognition that Christians’ ability to support progressive causes are complicated by their political and consumer identities, in addition to their religious identities. Wild Goose operates from a template similar to that of the mainstream Christian music industries, conflating these strands into a brand whose grandiose vision can only ever be aspirational and selling that aspiration to its attendees and stakeholders. But progressive Christianity is a niche market, and until it can be profitable at a much larger scale, other Christian music festivals and companies will not be incentivized to follow suit.

Postscript: Summer 2020 As I finish writing this chapter in the summer of 2020, both the worlds of festivals and social justice are convulsing. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which originated in the United States and spread globally, has grown as more and more people protest against the police violence that has killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and countless other Black people. In any other year, this inflection point would prompt significant reflection, discourse, and activist energy at Wild Goose and its pre-festival events.33 But, 2020 is also the year that COVID-19 has shut down public gatherings; almost every festival in the United States and around the world has been canceled or postponed in an effort to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. In the United States, mitigation efforts largely appear to have failed as the virus’s spread accelerates; one result of the United States’ systemic inequality is that Black

120  Andrew Mall communities have experienced much higher COVID-19 infection and mortality rates than the rest of the population. This pandemic has been worsened by the failure of many political leaders, including President Trump, to follow the recommendations of public health experts and prioritize a united, coherent response to the greatest public health crisis the country has faced in a generation. The two pandemics—one a global health crisis, another the irredeemably racist violence of US police—have clarified the need for an event like Wild Goose: a platform and venue where progressive Christians can learn strategies and find resources (including those grounded in biblical scripture) to campaign for and create a more just, healthy, peaceful, and anti-racist society. Wild Goose’s organizers announced in an email on May 5 that the 2020 festival would be canceled.34 In the following weeks, they pivoted to expanding their online presence to community gatherings and seminars, such as “The Racial Reality of America” and the eight-week series “Solidarity: How to Be the Right Kind of Ally,” which includes sessions on “White Fragility” and “How to be an Anti-Racist.” But in a moment when many cultural intermediaries (including festivals) are using their resources to promote the recordings and live streamed concerts of musicians, particularly Black musicians—many of whom have lost a major revenue source with the cancelation of live concerts and festivals—Wild Goose’s email list and social media accounts have been strangely silent. This silence is as disconcerting as it is powerful. The ethical basis of Wild Goose is alive and well, as its organizers plan online seminars that address many of the social justice issues that speakers would have discussed at the festival in North Carolina. And yet, its online musical aesthetics—or the lack thereof— explicate further music’s secondary status at the event. When—if—Wild Goose returns in future years, one can only hope that the musicking of progressive Christianity returns also, alive and well, ready to confront, confirm, and reinforce its ethical ideals.

Notes 1 Three Christian record labels control the majority of their market: Capitol Christian Music Group (or CCMG, a subsidiary of Universal), Provident Music Group (a subsidiary of Sony), and Word Entertainment (formerly a subsidiary of Warner, owned by Curb Records since 2016). See Mall (2020c). 2 See Mall (2020a) for a conversation with several Christian music industry executives, who discuss broad impacts of this transition. 3 See, e.g., Kelman (2018). According to the CCLI, three Christian music publishers account for the majority of this market: Bethel Music, CCMG’s publishing division, and Essential Music Publishing (a division of Provident) (Bjorlin 2019). 4 On cultural intermediaries and the work of cultural intermediation, see, e.g., Bourdieu (1984), Negus (2002), and Powers (2015).

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 121





5 Mark 12:17. 6 Via https://wildgoosefestival.org/wild-goose-invitation/, accessed July 1, 2020. 7 I discuss several such examples in Mall (2021). 8 I examine this controversy in detail in Mall (2020c). Also, see Romanowski (1993). 9 Matthew 28:19. 10 Hearn sold Sparrow to EMI in 1992. EMI’s Christian Music Group was renamed Capitol Christian Music Group after Universal acquired EMI in 2012. 11 John Styll, “Ministry or Industry?,” CCM 8, no. 9 (March, 1986), 4. 12 Interview with the author, September 17, 2010. 13 Several scholars have used Foucault’s (1986) theory of heterotopia to examine the particular conditions and contributions of festivals. See, for example, Howell (2013) and Wilks and Quinn (2016). 14 Via http://wildgoosefestival.org/wild-goose-invitation/, accessed December 19, 2018. 15 See Matthew 5–7. 16 Via https://wildgoosefestival.org/wild-goose-invitation/, accessed July 1, 2020. This language is also reprinted, word for word, in the event’s official program book distributed to all attendees. 17 In addition to Justice Camp, in 2017 Wild Goose also offered a pre-festival “Wisdom Camp” that emphasized self-care in the work of social justice activism. 18 In 2017, Wild Goose’s attendance was over 3,200 people. By comparison, Creation—the largest Christian festival in North America—attracted around 15,000 attendees. In contrast, tens of thousands of attendees travel to the largest non-Christian festivals: Bonnaroo (Tennessee) welcomed 65,000 attendees in 2017, Coachella (southern California) welcomed 125,000 attendees to each of its two weekends in 2017. 19 Namoli Brennet is a folk-rock singer/songwriters who is trans. 20 Other venues at Wild Goose include an open art studio, a live podcasting studio, and tents for children’s programming. 21 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 22 Via https://www.greenbelt.org.uk/greenbelt-festival/about-greenbelt/#whatis-greenbelt, accessed August 9, 2020. 23 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 24 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 25 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 26 The normal industry practice is for festival organizers and promoters to invite and book the large majority of performers. 27 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 28 The Christian music industries are dominated by major music publishers and record labels headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Programming decisions at the two largest US Christian radio networks—Fish and K-LOVE—also play significant roles in the Christian music industry. I write more about the ethical and moral expectations of mainstream Christian artists and musicians in Mall (2021). 29 See http://insideoutfaith.org and Knapp (2014). 30 Interview with the author, July 14, 2017. 31 Eric Drott (2018) has written compellingly of the various ways in which consumers’ data—indeed, digital data doubles of consumers themselves—function as commodities for companies who track their lives digitally, such as online retailers, music streaming services, and social networks.

122  Andrew Mall 32 According to Jeff Clark, Wild Goose is financially self-sustainable. 33 In 2020, Wild Goose had planned to offer Activist Theology, Justice Camp, and If You’re a Pastor, You MUST Be Political, among other pre-festival events. 34 In an earlier email on April 24, 2020, the festival organizers announced that they were considering the possibility of postponing 2020’s event, usually held in July, to mid-September.

References Arnold, Gina. 2018. Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Bjorlin, David. 2019. “Consumerism and Congregational Song.” Sing! The Center for Congregational Song. September 3, 2019. https://congregationalsong.org/ consumerism-and-congregational-song/. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Drott, Eric A. 2018. “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12 (3): 233–67. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2015. Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22. Goldberg, Michael. 1985. “Amy Grant Wants to Put God on the Charts.” Rolling Stone, June 6, 1985. Hearn, Billy Ray. 1998. Oral Memoirs of Billy Ray Hearn, Third Session Interview by Ray F Luper. Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Holt, Fabian. 2010. “The Economy of Live Music in the Digital Age.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (2): 243–61. Howard, Jay R, and John M Streck. 1999. Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Howell, Francesca C. 2013. “Sense of Place, Heterotopia, and Community: Performing Land and Folding Time in the Badalisc Festival of Northern Italy.” Folklore 124 (1): 45–63. Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelman, Ari Y. 2018. Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America. New York: New York University Press. Knapp, Jennifer. 2014. Facing the Music: My Story. New York: Howard Books. Mall, Andrew. 2020. “Selling Out or Buying In? CCM Magazine and Anxieties over Commercial Priorities in Christian Music, 1980s–1990s.” Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 9 (3): 301–25. ———. 2015. “‘This Is a Chance to Come Together’: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Anna E. Nekola and Tom Wagner, 101–21. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ———. 2020a. “‘As For Me and My House’: Christian Music Executives Roundtable.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32 (1): 10–25. ———. 2020b. “Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival.” Journal of the Society for American Music 14 (1): 51–69.

Music business, ethics, Christian fests 123 ———. 2021. God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Markets. University of California Press. McCracken, Brett. 2010. Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Meyer, Birgit. 2009. “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding.” In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 1–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Negus, Keith. 2002. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16 (4): 501–15. Peacock, Charlie. 1999. At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers. Powers, Devon. 2015. “Intermediaries and Intermediation.” In The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, 120–34. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Romanowski, William D. 1993. “Move Over Madonna: The Crossover Career of Gospel Artist Amy Grant.” Popular Music and Society 17 (2): 47–67. Shires, Preston. 2007. Hippies of the Religious Right: From the Countercultures of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Taylor, Timothy D. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2020. “Circulation, Value, Exchange, and Music.” Ethnomusicology 64 (2): 254–73. Wilks, Linda, and Bernadette Quinn. 2016. “Linking Social Capital, Cultural Capital and Heterotopia at the Folk Festival.” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 7 (1): 23–39. Young, Shawn David. 2015. Gray Sabbath: Jesus People USA, the Evangelical Left, and the Evolution of Christian Rock. New York: Columbia University Press.

7

The ethics of adaptation in hymns and songs for worship Maggi Dawn

The world of music and song, like all the arts, has regularly seen work adapted and re-worked for different contexts. Handel’s Messiah started life as a much longer work than the version popularly known today, but through successive performances was significantly edited and shortened until it arrived at its established form. Gounod created his Ave Maria by playing Bach’s C-Major prelude in a new key as the accompaniment to his melody. More recently, recording techniques gave rise to new forms of musical adaptation; remixes are an obvious example, although their origins in the “dub” technique of 1960s Jamaica is less well known (Veal 2007). All these instances illustrate the fact that almost no writer works in a void. The line is somewhat blurred between the direct (though possibly unconscious) borrowing of someone else’s idea, and work that is deemed original despite an acknowledged debt of influence. The difficulty in distinguishing between them is the stuff of plagiarism cases, but also indicates that the practice of repeated editing and adapting is as old as music itself. Paul McCartney famously said that no writer is ever completely original, while all four Beatles were noted for their magpie tendencies. McCartney defended the inevitability of being influence by other writers, but also joked, “We were the biggest nickers in town— plagiarists extraordinaire.” (McCartney 1985). His point, in part, was that even work that seems to be completely original never begins from a blank sheet; writers and composers are inevitably inspired and informed by what they hear. The legal and ethical issues that surround adaptation in the world of songs and hymns for Christian worship mostly have less to do with distinguishing between originality and plagiarism than with the common, though much-debated, practice of subjecting existing hymns and songs to multiple changes, not for a new writer to claim the work as their own, but either to improve or to update the hymn for its usage in worship. Such changes, made for reasons of culture, theology, or taste, are driven by the fact that hymns are sung by church communities for whom the creation of meaning is at least important, and at times highly contentious. A hymn with an inspiring tune and well-structured lyrics is desirable enough not to

Hymns and songs for worship 125 be excised from a church’s repertoire, but when single lines or stanzas cause considerable cultural or theological angst, churches will often respond by attempting an edit to suit their own situation. Some of these are enacted through official and legally verified publishing processes, but others are attempted in local settings where there is either minimal awareness of publishing rights, or a kind of folk-belief that copyright laws do not or should not apply to music for worship. In addition, the repertoire of church music includes many hymns and songs that are old enough no longer to be within copyright. Although they are subject to the same legal restrictions as any other musical form,1 hymns and songs for worship operate to some extent in a unique context. In assessing whether changes to hymns are justified, it is arguable that ethical questions are at least as important as legal ones, and that ethical judgement applies not only to authorial integrity or ownership, but also to aesthetic and poetic concerns. These questions came into sharp focus for me when I served as the Dean of Marquand Chapel at Yale University, a place that sparkles with theological innovation and artistic creativity. Talented and thoughtful students would regularly rewrite a favorite hymn or song to reflect their own particular theological leanings, and bring it to our liturgical design meetings. I quickly discovered that while many were aware of copyright and licensing agreements for acknowledging the use of songs, they did not know these same laws limited the re-writing of those songs. But, studying their proposed adaptions, and the reasons behind them, I also began to consider issues around this practice that extend beyond mere legal correctness. The first was to question the ethical issues around changing a work against the writer’s express wishes, on the one hand asking whether authorial integrity and ownership should be paramount, or—conversely—whether there are circumstances under which it might be unethical not to change a song in certain contexts. But the second, which became even more pertinent, was to ask whether it is ethically acceptable to rewrite the work of skilled songwriters in such a way that, while the version may satisfy a perceived cultural, linguistic or theological need, it diminishes the poetic and musical quality of the song. It is these ethical conundrums that I want to explore in this chapter.

Is it ethically acceptable to alter a writer’s work against their wishes? This question may depend to some extent on when a hymn was written. This is partly because the copyright laws that now exist to protect the intellectual property rights of a writer did not exist when some of the greats of hymnody were writing, and partly because copyright on any work eventually expires, after which a work is considered to be in the public domain. 2 Because of this, discussions around what someone should

126  Maggi Dawn or should not do in terms of adapting and updating hymns are often limited to whether it is legal. But beyond the legalities, what are the ethics of re-writing someone else’s work? Four examples help to tease out some of these complexities. In Christ Alone: a demand for the right to make changes One of the most noted examples of this was the controversy over the popular contemporary hymn “In Christ Alone,” whose writers, Stuart Townend and Keith Getty, specifically identify as a hymn rather than a song, in order to emphasize their intent to promote congregational singing, rather than a performance style of worship. (Getty and Townend 2002). Viewed as a whole, this four-verse hymn is a poetic unfolding of a classic Christological progression, beginning with an implicit placement of the Word in the eternal Godhead, followed by a chronological progression through Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and coming again in glory—a progression familiar not only as a theological exploration but as the central statement in the eucharistic prayer of the liturgical traditions. The controversy erupted over the interpretation of a single couplet in the second of the hymn’s four verses—“Till on that cross as Jesus died/The wrath of God was satisfied.” In 2012, a hymn committee of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was nearing the end of three and a half years of preparations for a new hymnal, Glory to God (2013). The committee had included “In Christ Alone” in the collection, but they had been working from a version from an earlier hymnal, Celebrating Grace (McAfee et al., 2010), in which the original lyric been changed to “Till on that cross as Jesus died/The love of God was magnified”. As copyrights were being cleared, it emerged that the 2010 hymnal had published this adaptation without the permission or knowledge of the writers (an error they later sought to address, see Hansen 2013). When consulted by the PCUSA committee, the authors did not give permission for the altered lyric as they felt it departed too far from their original meaning, so the committee were faced with the stark choice either to include the hymn with its original text, or to drop it from the collection—which, by a vote of 9–6, is what they decided to do (Smietana 2013). Mary Louise Bringle, a member of the panel, expressed their regret at “losing its otherwise poignant and powerful witness” but expressed the concern that the “view that the cross is primarily about God’s need to assuage God’s anger” might prove to have a negative effect on the faith formation of future generations (Bringle 2013). The controversy that followed was widely reported in national journals. For most critics of the hymn, it was the word “wrath” that is problematic— the worry that God is seen as angry rather than loving; others dismissed these worries as “trying to airbrush out the wrath of God” (George 2013).

Hymns and songs for worship 127 The theology of atonement expressed in the hymn could be interpreted as a classical atonement theory addressing God’s wrath against evil in a universal sense, rather than the specific sins of an individual person, but some have taken it to be an expression of a penal substitutionary theory—Mary Louise Bringle, for instance, noted that it is not wrath, but rather the word satisfied, that places the hymn in Anselmian theology (Smietana 2013). Although the discussion focused principally on theological concerns—or, as some suggested, mere church politics (Erasmus 2012)—its non-inclusion in the published volume was ultimately governed by the matter of legal permissions. But as anyone who regularly attends worship in a wide variety of settings knows, the adapted version of the lyric is still widely used, despite the objection of the writers. When advising churches on the legal limits of reproducing songs, I have often heard the response that worship leaders could satisfy the law by printing the original version, but publicly encouraging a congregation to sing alternative words. It would seem that churches are faced with more than one ethical question surrounding the law—first, should they obey the law in full for its own sake;3 second, might they respect the law to the extent of ensuring the livelihood of the writers but thereafter assume the freedom to make whatever changes they deem best; or third, should they use the song only if they are prepared to sing it as written out of respect for the wishes of the writer? For large publishers, such as in the case of Glory to God, the question of how to respond to the law is easily answered. But, it is well known that in local practice, churches take the liberty of adapting words as they wish, and that many practitioners feel no pangs of conscience either at flouting the law or ignoring the intellectual property rights of authors. Such is the tension between the love of a particularly good song, and the dislike of a single line, that there is a remarkable strength of feeling that churches should be at liberty to change the work of a writer if they wish. Amazing Grace: an objection to change Curiously, the belief that a church has a right to change a hymn regardless of its author’s wishes co-exists with a completely contrary but equally strong sense of outrage towards writers who alter, re-set, or add to, older hymns already in the public domain. The story of how John Newton’s 1773 hymn, “Amazing Grace,” grew from inauspicious beginnings to America’s favorite song is a story in itself. It remained little-known in the United Kingdom, although it was sung in the United States, but it was not until 1835, when it was set to its now-famous tune NEW BRITAIN that it began to grow in popularity through successive generations. It featured in the 1960s folk revival, since when several Presidents have memorably sung it a capella at moments of national importance, its place was cemented as a national song (Turner 2002).

128  Maggi Dawn Chris Tomlin’s adaptation, “Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)” (Newton et al. 2006) has not raised the same level of controversy as “In Christ Alone,” but has received a range of critical comments. Some of this criticism comes from those who object to what they see as a cynical move by contemporary writers to “cash in” on royalties against traditional hymns. But others object simply because they feel Tomlin has “messed about” with a hymn they know and love. It is intriguing, given the strength of feeling among those who feel they must have the right to change a hymn such as “In Christ Alone,” that such a strong objection should be levelled at a writer who does dare—entirely within the law—to adapt existing material. Outrage might be a reasonable response if a classic hymn were rearranged merely to scoop the royalties, but by his own account Tomlin’s song was far from a cynical move, and not only that, it is also closer than one might first realize to Newton’s original hymn. At the New Song Cafe, Soulfest 2007, 3 Tomlin recounted that he was commissioned to create a version of “Amazing Grace” for the movie of the same name, adding some contemporary material of his own to re-tell Newton’s own story (see Tomlin 2017). Tomlin was at first over-awed at the impossibility of such a task, but on reading the story behind the hymn, he was drawn into the drama of its origins, and overwhelmed at the depth of grace Newton had sought to express. Together with co-writer Louie Giglio, Tomlin made only three noticeable changes to Amazing Grace. The first was to add a new refrain, per the commission; the second, while keeping the New Britain tune, was to shift the time signature from 3|4 to 4|4. But the third was to remove an existing adaptation in favor of restoring Newton’s original lyrics. Generations of hymn books have included as the final verse, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years…,” which itself is a later addition.4 In their reworking, Tomlin and Giglio reinstated Newton’s original final verse: “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine, but God who called me here below will be forever mine.” Tomlin’s adaptation of “Amazing Grace” raises more than one conundrum in the discussion of the rewriting of hymns. It touches at least in part on the ethics of remuneration, in something like the same ethical territory as asking whether, if the gospel is free, a preacher or minister should be paid for their ministry. It also demonstrates that while objections to changes are often justified on the basis of respecting “the original”, in many cases, by the time a hymn reaches its established form, it has already undergone substantial changes. In addition, this illustrates the fact that the ethics of rewriting are not only complex, but also highly emotive. A congregation may vehemently insist on a change to a hymn such as “In Christ Alone” in order to excise a word that offends them, and at the same time resist changes that disrupt a sense of familiarity over long established and wellloved hymns.

Hymns and songs for worship 129 Hark the Herald Angels Sing: Not as original as it seems The controversy over “In Christ Alone” was settled legally, but both that story and the discussions over “Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)” left multiple unresolved questions around the ethics of intellectual property and the writer’s wishes. The issue raised by the first was whether a living writer’s wishes should be respected or ignored; the second raised the contrary question as to whether the integrity of a long-established hymn deserves more or less respect. For some, there seems to be an instinctive sense that, while new compositions are fair game, something old and established should not be tampered with; this is interesting given that it is the polar opposite of the legal position. Some of that instinct seems to be guided by a sense of reverence for writers such as Wesley or Watts, a respect that is seemingly not afforded to living writers. But while these questions are, to some extent, interconnected with present-day copyright laws, they are by no means new; controversy over alterations and authorial consent is as much in evidence in hymns and songs that we readily assume we are encountering in their original form. Take, for instance, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” one of the best-loved Christmas carols in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It would be easy to suppose that anyone would baulk at the idea of it being changed or adapted, but this hymn went through multiple changes and alterations both to lyrics and music, to become the stirring, majestic carol we know today. The story of its evolution shows not only how attitudes have changed towards what we now call intellectual property, but also raises a further question as to whether it is ethically acceptable within Christian worship to make use of resources written outside that context. The lyrics, penned by the prolific Charles Wesley and published by his brother John in the 1739 hymnal Hymns and Sacred Poems, started life as ten 4-line stanzas entitled “Hymn for Christmas Day,” with the opening line: “Hark, how all the welkin rings, ‘Glory to the King of Kings’.” Even when it was fresh off the press, the Wesleys’s co-worker George Whitefield suggested a change to the first line. The word welkin (meaning sky; firmament; vault of heaven), which is now completely obsolete, was already archaic in 1739, and Whitefield argued for more contemporary language. JR Watson suggests that Wesley’s line may have been drawn from William Somerville’s poem The Chase, which begins: The welkin rings, Men, Dogs, Hills, Rock, and Woods, In the full consort join. Watson notes that “to have altered Somerville’s lines would have been in keeping with Wesley’s habit of appropriating images from other poems and using them to proclaim the gospel. Here the cries of the huntsmen and hounds become the sounds of the multitude of the heavenly host…” (Watson 2000, 80). Whitefield, however, remained convinced that the

130  Maggi Dawn archaism was a mistake, and when he published his Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (1754), he included Wesley’s hymn with some changes, one of which is the opening line we know today: “Hark! the herald angels sing.” Wesley himself made some further revisions, and Martin Madan, in his Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1760) changed lines 3–4 of the original stanza 2, from “Universal Nature say/Christ the Lord is born today,” to “With th’angelic host proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem.” These examples show that it was not unusual at the time for hymns to go through multiple revisions, only some of which accorded with the author’s wishes. But a further change, even more significant both to the evolution of the hymn and this discussion of intellectual property, occurred when the hymn was set to a new tune. It was originally paired with SALISBURY (best known today as the tune to “Christ the Lord is ris’n today”) in line with Wesley’s clear statement that he wanted his hymn set to a dignified and thoughtful tune, to engage worshippers with the seriousness of the Christmas message.5 Over time, as many as 28 different musical settings have been used (DudleySmith, The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology). But the version we know today did not emerge until more than a century after Wesley wrote his original hymn. In 1855 Dr William Cummings, who was a Mendelssohn enthusiast, decided to set Wesley’s hymn to the tune of the second chorus from Mendelssohn’s 1840 cantata, Festgesang. An earlier adaptation of Wesley’s lyrics already had the hymn arranged in 3 stanzas of 8 lines; Cummings’ innovation was to add the repetition of the opening two lines at the end of each stanza, so that the lyrics fitted Mendelssohn’s ten-line melody.6 What is interesting in the context of this discussion is that, in addition to Wesley’s sensibilities not being observed either with regard to lyrics or music, the single stipulation Mendelssohn had made about this particular chorus was that it should not be used for sacred purposes. Both Wesley’s and Mendelsohn’s wishes, then—the equivalent, in their time, of their intellectual property rights—were completely overridden. Yet, had they not been, it is extremely unlikely that the hymn would be in currency today. While it was eventually recognized as one of Wesley’s greatest hymns, or as Percy Dearmer claimed, “perhaps the most popular English hymn in the world,” (Dearmer 1933, 50), in its original form it did not “make the cut”—John Wesley did not even include it in his 1780 Collection of Hymns for Use of the People Called Methodist, a decision reinforced in 1904 when A&M proposed restoring Wesley’s original text, and the suggestion was met with ridicule (Dudley-Smith, The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology). By that time, the hymn had reached a “settled state”; the idea of authenticity was of less interest than excellence, and perhaps familiarity. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” then, is a prime example of a hymn that, from inauspicious beginnings, became one of the church’s best-loved hymns, yet arguably would not have survived into successive centuries but for the alterations and rewritings of later editors, arrangers, and adaptors.

Hymns and songs for worship 131 O For A Thousand Tongues: When is it unethical not to change? We have seen that some of our best-loved hymns have undergone unauthorized changes without which they might have been lost in the mists of time. One could perhaps argue that if Watts adapted the Psalms, and Whitefield edited Wesley, present day writers should have no compunction about updating old hymns. Yet there is also a compelling counter-argument that you should no more rewrite George Herbert than you would Shakespeare. Here I think it is important to note that hymns are experienced in a dramatically different context from other musical and literary works. Encountering Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, or Bach’s St John Passion, the audience in a theatre or concert hall can engage critically with the social and moral worlds of 1594 or 1724, and with themes within those works that now appear distressingly misogynistic or anti-semitic. The worlds of music and theatre regularly engage in necessary discussion around whether and how such works can be performed with proper attention to those issues; but in a theatre setting an audience always retains a level of critical distance—one can listen and observe, consider and ponder, agree or disagree with how effective a performance was in treating the issues. Hymns, conversely, are sung in the context of worship, which is not an arena for the critique of previous social attitudes, but for the expression of the faith of the church in the present tense. For this reason, there are occasions when it would seem not only acceptable, but mandatory to take an editor’s pen to older hymns. O For A Thousand Tongues is another Wesleyan hymn (from the 1740 edition of Hymns and Sacred Poems) that has survived the test of time. Originally a hymn of 18 stanzas, the original verse 12 often still appears in hymn books: Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb/Your loosen’d tongues employ. While these words seem unproblematically metaphorical to some, they can be read as offensive in an “ableist” world, and are therefore usually printed with the option of omission. But the 17th stanza is now almost unknown because its imperialistic and racist overtones led to it being excised entirely from hymn books: 17. Awake from guilty nature’s sleep, And Christ shall give you light, Cast all your sins into the deep, And wash the Æthiop white. There may in some instances be good reasons for preserving poetic archaisms – for instance, if they express beauty in a way a modernized line cannot, or if they encapsulate the sense of continuity of tradition. But there are cases where archaic language reflects earlier social attitudes that are now recognised as unacceptable, and other instances where the inherent

132  Maggi Dawn meaning of language has changed so much that the meaning in its original context is significantly different to present day usage. In cases such as this, if the hymn is to be preserved at all, the only ethically acceptable moves are to edit out, or to rewrite, the offending stanza. Ethics, edits, and the elapse of time What light might these examples throw on the way we navigate current clashes of opinion between a writer’s right to expect a reasonable degree of respect for the authenticity of their work, and the desire of congregations or others to rewrite at will? Maybe what exists legally has also some ethical consonance. Modern-day copyright rules and intellectual property rights were designed chiefly to protect legal ownership and remuneration, though perhaps there is a corresponding sense of ethical justice in respecting the integrity of authors and composers, and the authenticity of their work, during their lifetime, and for a period of time thereafter. But even that is not the whole story; changes to songs are not always deliberate, and adaptations are not always controversial. Author Susan Hill noted the sense writers often have that “…any piece of writing is never really finished” (McCrum 2011), but while a novel rarely accommodates later amendments and adaptations, the performative nature of songs does allow for repeated updates, sometimes by the songwriter’s own hand,7 and sometimes because the process of aural transmission allows spontaneous adaptations to develop. Present-day hymnwriters have acknowledged the way in which congregations can unwittingly affect the settled state of a hymn, by “editing” new hymns—especially melodically—as they are learned. Graham Kendrick has often referred to “road-testing” a hymn, saying that even when a song seems ready he will not finalize its form until he has heard congregations sing it. Kendrick points out that a congregation, by consistently singing a hymn differently from how the writer intended, is showing the writer what they are actually able to sing, and the writer should seriously consider adopting the changes.

Ethics, poetics, and aesthetics We have seen that the practice of altering hymns raises as many ethical questions as legal ones, calling for a fine balance between respect both for authorial consent and the integrity of tradition on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the recognition that hymns (in the context of sung worship, as opposed to their treatment as historical artefacts) have a creedal function, sung as acclamations of current belief. Writers, editors, and musical directors are not designing performances for entertainment or education. They are putting words into the mouths of believers. As Mike Harland of LifeWay Worship has pointed out, “The faith of current generations and future generations is shaped by what we say and what we sing… That’s why you stress over every word” (Smietana 2013). But alongside these issues

Hymns and songs for worship 133 lies a further ethical question that extends the issue from the mere ownership of meaning and tradition to include the consideration of aesthetics and poetics. Aesthetics, poetics, and inclusive language One current practice in the adaptation of hymns is in response to resonances that seem—at least to some worshippers—uncomfortably anachronistic. We have already noted that there are clear-cut cases where the reason for a cut or edit is beyond question. It is more difficult to judge where there is ambiguity over the resonances of certain phraseology. Hymns that consistently name Christian disciples with male language—men, brothers, fathers—can feel oppressively exclusive of women as equal partners in the church, while hymns in which God is depicted in royal or military terms to an overbearing extent can seem to carry the unstated yet implied suggestion that the Kingdom of God correlates to a particular nation. There is by no means universal agreement on the extent to which such language needs to change, in everyday settings as well as theological usage. In a liturgical context, it is not unusual to see language created or adapted to make it clear that all people are included in references to Christian disciples, regardless of gender, though there remains more fierce debate regarding the gendered or characteristic language of the Godhead.8 It is too easy, when one wants to defend familiar and beloved hymns, to dismiss such concerns as too fussy or trivial, or belonging to what has been termed the “snowflake” generation. But a closer look at the language and use of hymns in various contexts indicates that there are moments in history when hymns have served to endorse national interests, rather than spiritual ones—Lionel Adey argues that, partly due to the militaristic imagery that was central to hymn singing practices in Edwardian public schools, a generation of young men marched to war in the belief that God was on their side (Adey 1988). When it comes to re-gendering (or de-gendering) the language of hymns, the debate usually revolves entirely around cultural, theological, or political concerns. It is, however, surprisingly rare to find any extensive attention given to the poetic and aesthetic issues that flow from the practice of changing pronouns in hymns. I would want to assert that ethical concerns include artistic decisions, just as much as cultural, political and theological ones. It is, perhaps, stating the obvious to say that the motivation to update a hymn always begins with the tacit recognition that the hymn is a good one. Hymns judged to be of only moderate quality are not updated, they simply get left behind. But when hymns are considered so good they cannot be dispensed with, it should surely be of paramount importance that re-writes are judged, not only on whether they satisfy the particular demands for new language, but on their poetic quality, and on the sympathetic relationship between language and music. Here I am not arguing

134  Maggi Dawn for the imposition of some culturally embedded assumption as to what constitutes good taste; neither am I arguing for a preference for high art over popular music. The point, rather, is to recognize that musicians with a vocation to Christian worship have a responsibility to create the best possible environment in which people can engage in worship. For that to happen, a hymn or song, whatever its genre, needs to be the best possible singing experience for the worshipper. This means the musician is searching not merely for hymns and songs that fit the theme of the service, or satisfy particular theological or musical preferences, but attend to the actual experience of the worshiper. Poetic quality in this context is less a barometer of taste than as a judgement as to how deeply the worshiper is enabled to participate. When words feel right in the mouth and fit effortlessly with the melody, the song “sings” well; this is not merely an artistic achievement for its own sake, but a responsibility in enabling worship. What kind of language does a hymn require? First, concerning the poetics, hymns need to do more than merely make intellectual sense (although they should do that) because precision of propositional meaning is not the only factor at play in worship. Second, because the language we use in worship functions in a complex interrelationship with the other factors in any act of worship: space, atmosphere, light, sound, symbol, placement of power, the shaping of community through the experience of a building, and so on. Like advertising language, or like theatrical language, the words find their interpretation on a far broader canvas than that of syllogistic arguments. And third, because while doctrine seeks to abstract and define what we believe about God, doxological language seeks both to address God directly and listen for the resonance of reply. The language of doctrine is as different from that of worship as the language of lawyers is from that of lovers—while both claim to be true, they are functionally and expressively different. Doxological language expresses love and adoration; to do so, in addition to being doctrinally accurate, it needs to be lavish and imaginative, metaphorical and poetic, and further, it needs to marry well with the music it is sung to. In the adaptation of hymns, the criteria for creating new language seems too often to focus purely on meaning in propositional terms, which misses the wider meaning-making perspective of songwriters who seek to create meaning not only in those terms, but also through the sound and feeling created by each word, phrase, and musical sound. To manipulate language with the sole purpose of avoiding political incorrectness or cultural gaffes is not enough, in itself, to create the richness of meaning that should be expected of the poetic and musical work that a hymn is. Otherwise, why sing at all?—why not merely recite phrases that sum up a doctrinal position? The language a good hymn demands is exceptionally difficult to define, even within a single genre or culture, and there is a huge variation between

Hymns and songs for worship 135 cultures and genres in what criteria are used to judge a work as “good.” Even within the specific parameters of English language hymns and songs it is not easy to define the parameters. There are nonetheless some clues in the long history of writing about language. A hymn needs to make sense (or at least not to seem like nonsense) and yet tease the imagination, to have theological depth yet sound with a clarity that seems deceptively simple, and every word and phrase must marry together with its musical setting in such a way that they become a life-giving whole, rather than struggling against each other. Not for nothing did Alfred, Lord Tennyson, write that “A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write. In a good hymn you need to be commonplace and poetical. The moment you cease to be commonplace and put in any expression at all out of the common, it ceases to be a hymn.” (Tennyson 1897 (2012), 401) “Commonplace and poetical” is the tension that orators and songwriters alike strive for. Centuries earlier, Cicero pointed out that even in spoken language, clarity is not achieved by the kind of plainness that leaves the language “dry”—he was adamant that although clarity may be clouded by excessive poetic decoration, “dry” language is not necessarily clear either. The delivery of language that seems plain and unfussy, yet still communicates clearly, may seem easy to create, but according to Cicero, “nothing is more difficult” (Cicero 2004, 58). And Isaac Watts, the grandfather of English hymnody, had the same struggle. Watts wrote that it cost him considerable effort to make his language plain and clear, rather than excessively poetic—to the extent that he sometimes “un-wrote” his lines to make them sing more readily. …if the Verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incure [sic] the Censure of Feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me labour to make it so: Some of the Beauties of Poesy are neglected, and some willfully defaced: I have thrown out the Lines that were too sonorous… (Watts, 1707, iii–xiv) Watts was not merely stating a preference for simple rather than florid language; his point was that if language is too mannered, too distractingly unlike everyday language—or even, in an Augustinian sense, too beautiful9 —the worshipper’s attention is taken up with the language of the hymn rather than with God as the focus of worship. From this, we can see that there is no absolute measure for what can be judged “good” in creating arts for worship. Plenty of theologians and aestheticians have discussed whether bad art can communicate good theology. Andrew Sullivan once argued that the very tackiness of some Christian expression is evidence of something greater beyond itself, while Frank Burch Brown noted, “It is virtually inconceivable that the Jesus of the New Testament would ever have driven people out of the temple on account of their having decorated it in bad taste,” (Brown 2003, 4) a view further endorsed by David Brown and Gavin Hopps, who argued that it is

136  Maggi Dawn not necessary for creative work either to be “high art” or necessarily even to be of high quality in order to speak of God (Brown and Hopps 2018). It is one thing to acknowledge that work can be appreciated because of its sincerity, or because it is offered by a particular worshipper, or within a local congregation—such work is no less valuable in the context of worship than work of great artistic merit. This, however, is not a good justification for taking hymns that are widely recognized as the great hymns of the church, and making artless adaptions that render them less good than they were to begin with. There is, I would contend, a difference between allowing that varying levels of taste and accomplishment might speak of God, and justifying on theological grounds the musical and poetic diminishment of an existing song by clumsy rewriting. How, though, is that difference to be judged? Music matters There are multiple examples of adaptations that by satisfying an ethic of inclusion do violence to the artistic merit of a hymn, not only to its poetics but to the marriage of music and words. This recurs frequently when the pronoun “His”—used to refer to God—is replaced with the genitive “God’s”. Used in prose, with enough skill, this formulation can be effective in retaining ambiguity of gender in reference to God. But as a replacement technique in a hymn, it has particularly high potential for disrupting the musicality of a melody. This is because, poetically, the pronoun “His” is almost always unstressed, and consequently it usually lands on an unstressed note in a melody, thus almost disappearing in terms of vocal stress. “God’s”, by contrast, with its combination of guttural and dental sounds, cannot be anything other than stressed. A simple replacement of one word with the other, then, affects a hymn musically as much as poetically. One example of this, from a church bulletin in 2011, was an adaptation of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind—a hymn that presented a triple problem for a worshiping community committed to inclusive language for humanity, and to non-feudal, gender-neutral language for God. The replacement line printed was: Dear God, Creator of Humankind, which— on paper at least—seems to solve all three theological and cultural issues. Sung out loud, however, the awkward diction, the surplus syllable, and the mis-match between strong and weak stresses, disrupted the sonorous musical line with percussive sounds. This is only one example of an adaptation that is created through a word-by-word replacement, rather than by attending to the poetic and musical flow of a whole line or stanza, resulting in a clumsy sound that is awkward to sing. A hymn lyric can never be anything other than stylized language, but Watts’s view—somewhat prescient of Wordsworth’s idea of poetic language—was that a hymn should seem to sound as close as possible to natural, everyday speech. For Watts,

Hymns and songs for worship 137 the concern was that hymns should not be so poetically florid as to draw attention to themselves, and thus become a distraction from, rather than an aid to, worship. But, a similar argument, I think, can be applied to adaptations that are so taken up with the objective of reshaping the language to reflect particular political or theological positions, that they sound so curiously unnatural as to absorb the attention of the worshipper in the form of words, thus distracting them from the purpose of worship. This is not at all an argument against writing hymns that embrace “inclusive” ideas, but it is to suggest that adaptations that attend solely to political concerns, and not to poetics, fall short not only artistically, but ethically. Why?—because to present the worshipper with material that hinders, rather than assists, ease of worship is a failure of purpose. The liturgical writer’s task is to draw people into worship, and while theological acuity is one vitally important thread in that task, worship is not merely a matter of intellectual assent, or of political or academic statement positioning; it is a physical, voiced act. Singing in worship can and should invite responses such as adoration, challenge, contrition, commitment, inspiration, joy, and wonder; these responses are unlikely to be invoked through singing songs in which the diction is almost impossible, or in which the lyrics sit awkwardly with the melody. Adaptations made by replacing individual words without attending to the flow of the whole song may produce something that looks intellectually pleasing on the page. But worship is not words in a book: it is physical, voiced, and most often enacted by groups of non-expert singers; for these reasons its words must be in singable language—which is not to say crude or simplistic, rather that it needs to come off the tongue with ease. In the case of Dear Lord and Father, the discussions that surrounded this and other similar adaptations led to sharp divisions within that particular community. Many in the congregation objected to the language, not for theological or cultural reasons, but because they found the language awkward and clumsy, and did not enjoy the experience of singing it. But, the proponents of the adaptations quickly assumed that those who rejected the adaptations were also rejecting the theological impulse behind it—they had become so committed to “inclusive” language that they gave scant attention to aesthetic considerations. When hymn-lovers object to new language, then, it may not be that they are die-hard conservatives who will not countenance change, it may be that they are reacting—as Whitefield did to Wesley’s “welkin,” perhaps— to a line that just doesn’t sound right to the ear, or feel comfortable in the mouth. As noted above, there is much more to this argument than taste or preference for one genre over another. The aesthetic and poetic qualities of a song are more than matters for abstract discussion by experts or aficionados; they affect the lived experience of the worshipper, making it more or less possible for them to enter with ease and joy into an experience of beauty. A song that is awkward in the mouth may be justifiable as a piece

138  Maggi Dawn of doctrinal correctness, but it will never be a transporting experience. Wesley envisaged the worship of heaven as being “lost in wonder, love and praise;” while we have our feet on the earth one of the most transporting possibilities for this is to be invited into music that envelops the whole person. Awkward aesthetic missteps are the equivalent of asking the worshiper to dance with their shoelaces tied together. It is this that leads me to believe that there is an ethical dimension to our attention to aesthetics in worship. This is not a matter of judging between musical genres or worship styles—whether a congregation prefers Tomlin and Baloche or Watts and Howells, a congregation’s perception and experience of worship as beautiful to hear and lovely to sing is by no means a trivial matter. To aspire, as Watts once did, to the creation of hymns that are not only theologically rich, but also satisfy a need for poetic and musical aptness is as much ethical concern as are other issues of truth and power that affect the life of the church.

Conclusions While adapting hymns often leads to highly polarized debates, then, there are more issues at stake than immediately meet the eye, with the ethical questions they throw up being even more significant in the long run than the legal ones. While respect for the intellectual property of a writer is a strong ethical consideration, there are also cases where it is ethically indefensible not to make a change, and history also demonstrates that adaptations can improve a hymn immeasurably. Additions and adaptations have long been part of the landscape of hymnology; the question is not whether hymns should change, but what should inform those changes when they occur. This is a challenge to the progressive and the traditionalist in equal measure. For a traditionalist who is committed to continuity and historicity, it draws attention to the fact that archaic language cannot be deemed beautiful in instances where it is distractingly anachronistic in its exclusion of women, or overtones of imperialism or racism. But, for the theological progressive, who is passionate about updating gendered or political language, it demands acknowledgement that merely replacing pronouns does violence to both poetics and musicality. To allow cultural or political demands to overwhelm the importance of poetics and musicality both does a disservice to authors and composers, and robs congregations of experiences of beauty. When it comes to making adaptations, then, I would argue that the responsibility of editors extends both beyond the technicalities of the law, and even further than cultural and theological integrity, vital though these matters are. They must also ensure that whenever changes are introduced, they not only make a hymn’s lyrics acceptable to current sensibilities but also pay a close attention to the poetics and musicality of each work, ensuring that words marry with music in such a way that stresses do not jar,

Hymns and songs for worship 139 and—following Watts’s observation—that curiosities of language will not be so distracting as to draw attention more to the hymn itself than to the God for whose worship it was designed. Any alterations must take into consideration more than mere political correctness, but a deeper engagement with the poetic and aesthetic values that are bound up with the ontological status of a particular church community. Accepting that the hymns change over time, then, need not fill any hymnlover with fear, so long as we seek out the Watts and Whitefields of our age—for as we have seen, their own adaptations have served to improve, rather than diminish, the poetic quality of the hymn tradition. But the stories behind the evolution of our great hymns also stand as an argument in favor of commissioning poets, writers, and composers to adapt and update hymns, rather than editorial committees. Reducing great lyrics to committee-written prose, or inspiring music to a clumsy dirge, is not only an artistic failure, but—because these songs are voiced on the lips of human individuals in worship—also an ethical one. If the composition of hymns and songs are understood as enabling of acts of worship, it follows that the attention given to making those songs aesthetically pleasing and poetically accessible is driven not merely by artistic intent, but also by ethical obligation.

Notes 1 The extent to which adaptations of songs can be carried out is controlled to a large extent by copyright law, which protects the legal ownership of a song (by writer or publisher). A hymn or song may not be adapted and rewritten without the permission of its owner until that work has passed into the public domain, a definition that varies in the law of different countries and regions. 2 Once the intellectual property rights to a creative work has expired, it enters the public domain (which means it belongs to, and is available for use by, the public, and may be freely adapted, arranged, and translated, and new copyrights may even be claimed. The expiration date of copyright depends on the laws of the specific country. In the United Kingdom, copyright in a song currently expires 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which the last surviving writer or composer died. The expiration term is different for sound recordings, publications, film and broadcast in the United Kingdom, and both the definition of public domain, and the expiration date, is different in the United States and worldwide. See https://www.prsformusic. com/works/how-copyright-works and https://uk.ccli.com/about-copyright/ public-domain/ (accessed 14 January 2020). 3 Soulfest is a three-day Christian Music Festival, founded in 1998 by Dan Russel, President of NewSound Artist Management and NewSound International, first at Loon Mountain, Lincoln, New Hampshire, USA, and since 2005 at Gunstock Mountain Resort in Gilford, NH. (Bartlett 2013). 4 The author of this verse is unknown; its origins are believed to be from African–American communities, and disseminated orally. Harriet Beecher Stowe put these words in the mouth of Uncle Tom, in her 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and they were subsequently adopted into numerous hymn collections.

140  Maggi Dawn 5 The first stanza of Hark how all the welkin appeared, with the Hallelujahs, interlined with melody and bass, in the tunes appendix to A Collection of Hymns and Sacred Poems (Dublin 1749). 6 The second chorus “Gott ist Licht” (“God is Light”), was part of the 1840 cantata Festgesang (“Festival Song”), written to commemorate Johann Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. 7 One example is Paul Simon’s The Boxer. Simon’s original version included a verse beginning “Now the years are rolling by me…” which was cut in the finalized version of the 1969 single. Simon and Garfunkel reinstated the verse for their tour the same year, and Simon has subsequently oscillated between the two versions in live performances. 8 Mary Daly, Sally McFague, and others are renowned for their arguments for gendered theological language. Elizabeth Achtemeier attempts an argument that remains feminist while rejecting the use of feminized language for God, particularly in hymns (Achtemeier 1992). Janet Soskice skillfully treads a line between these extremes (Soskice 2007). 9 Augustine valued works of art, but expressed concern over the danger that they could become the object of worship, rather than fulfilling their function as a conduit through which the ultimate beauty of God is appreciated.

References Achtemeier, Elizabeth. 1992. Exchanging God for “No Gods”: A Discussion of Female Language for God. In Kimel Jr., Alvin Speaking the Christian God (1992). Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Adey, Lionel. 1988. Class and Idol in the English Hymn. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Bartlett, Drew. 2013. Soulfest 2013 All You Need to Know (July 10). Accessed April 17, 2014. http://altrocklive.com/blog/2013/07/soulfest-2013-all-you-need-to-know/ Bringle, Mary Louise. 2013. Debating Hymns. The Christian Century, May 1. Accessed 11 December 2019. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-04/ debating-hymns Brown, David, and Gavin Hopps. 2018. The Extravagance of Music: An Art Open to God. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Frank Burch. 2003. Good Taste, Bad Taste & Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cicero. 2004. Orator. ed. Merklin, Harald. Stuttgart: Reclam. Dearmer, Percy. 1933. Songs of Praise Discussed London: Oxford University Press. Dudley-Smith, Timothy. “Hark! The herald angels sing.” The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Canterbury Press, accessed April 26, 2020, http://www.hymnology. co.uk/h/hark!-the-herald-angels-sing Erasmus (BC), 2012. The Economist, 12 August. Accessed 12 January 2020. https:// www.economist.com/erasmus/2013/08/12/spoiling-the-wrath Getty, Keith, and Stuart Townend. In Christ Alone. 2002. Thankyou Music (PRS) Adm. worldwide at CapitolCMPublishing.com, excluding Europe, Adm. by IntegrityMusic.com George, Timothy. 2013. No Squishy Love, in First Things (29 July). Accessed 11 December 2019 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/07/nosquishy-love

Hymns and songs for worship 141 Hansen, Collin. 2013. Keith Getty on What Makes ‘In Christ Alone’ Accepted and Contested. The Gospel Coalition (December 9). Accessed 14 January 2020. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/keith-getty-on-what-makes-inchrist-alone-beloved-and-contested/ McAfee, J Thomas, John E Simons, David W Music, Milburn Price, Stanley L. Roberts, eds.; and Mark Edwards, contributor. 2010. Celebrating Grace Hymnal. Macon, GA: Celebrating Grace Inc. McCartney, Paul. 1985. Musician magazine, February. McCrum, Robert, 2011. Susan Hill: I was never good at anything else, The Observer, 16 Jan. Accessed 30 February 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/16/ susan-hill-interview-kind-man Newton, John, John P Rees, Edwin Othello Excell, arr. Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) from Amazing Grace (Movie), © 2006 worshiptogether.com Songs/sixsteps Music/ASCAP (EMI CMG Publishing) Smietana, Bob. 2013. Presbyterians’ decision to drop hymn stirs debate. USA Today, Aug 5. Accessed 11 December, 2019 https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/ nation/2013/08/05/presbyterians-decision-to-drop-hymn-stirs-debate/2618833/ Soskice, Janet Martin, 2008. The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tennyson, Hallam. 2012. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, Vol. 2 (first published 1897) New York: Cambridge University Press. Tomlin, Chris. 2017. Amazing Grace Story Behind The Song. https://www.facebook. com/christomlin/videos/10155340357236070 Turner, Steve. 2002. Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song. New York: Harper Collins (Ecco Press). Veal, Michael. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Watson, JR. 2000. Welkins. Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Bulletin (July). Watts, Isaac. 1707. Preface, Hymns and Spiritual Songs London: J Humphreys for John Lawrence.

Part III

Identity and encounter

8

“Hillsong and Black”: the ethics of style, representation, and identity in the Hillsong Megachurch Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas

Introduction and background The musical output of Hillsong is so recognizable that it is effectively a genre in its own right (Riches and Wagner 2012; Wagner 2013; Evans 2017). However, in its hometown of Sydney, Hillsong is principally a church founded in 1983 by Brian and Bobbie Houston as two young immigrant New Zealanders. There is no doubt the local congregational musicking practices of Hillsong Church have contributed to the formation of its identity as well as name (Riches and Wagner 2012). Externally, its transportable music has played (and continues to play) a formative role for multiple strains of global Christianity.1 Many of Hillsong’s live praise and worship albums achieve mainstream and international success; for example, in 2018 What a Beautiful Name won three Dove Awards and a Grammy. But, there is now increasing cultural and linguistic diversity across its offerings; for example, in 2012 The Global Project featured several of their most popular songs translated into nine languages—thus representing a “confluence of sophisticated marketing techniques and popular music” (Wagner 2014, 61). Arguably, Hillsong has always been diverse in both congregation and leadership. 2 However, as the church expands internationally, it inevitably engages and incorporates new groups into its ecclesial identity. Therefore, the question arises: how do the musical aesthetics within Hillsong represent the church’s increasingly diverse (culturally, ethnically, and linguistically) worshippers? Or, is the “Hillsong sound” merely another example of a Western totalizing institution, as some argue? (Wade 2016; McIntyre 2007) Christian contemporary music is often considered representative of Western missionization and therefore cultural values that have maintained colonial inequities of power and voice (see Marchesini’s chapter 11 in this volume), which are now being placed under ethical scrutiny. European colonization compelled global movement, setting in place many of the world’s geographic boundaries. Initially a British colony, today’s Australian cultural consumption reflects the nation’s “super-diversity” due to later immigration

146  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas (Noble and Ang 2018; Vertovec 2014). Thus, questions around how congregants from non-Western ethnic minority or marginal communities are represented within Hillsong (both as its attendees/participants but also in cultural-musical terms) are particularly significant. These are heightened when considering the consequences or ramifications outside the Englishspeaking world—as, in some locales, Hillsong has seemingly replaced indigenous Christian sacred repertoire and musicking practices. Hillsong also continues to proliferate via an increasing number of satellite churches (“campuses”) in non-English-speaking countries (Russia, Israel, Mexico, etc.). However, what circumscribes the boundaries of this particular investigation is that it starts and finishes with Hillsong’s self-identification as an ecclesial community that welcomes persons from every conceivable type of demographic. Therefore, how “the Hillsong sound” is experienced by these church attendees encompasses more than a given set of sonics. Hillsong Church in Sydney is comprised of not only “dominant culture” white Australians but also a significant number of minority communities (notably Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian, African, and Aboriginal peoples) who worship regularly at its campuses. 3 Although not the topic of the present chapter, historically these groups have responded variously to the challenges arising from their invisibility (and inaudibility) in Australian society. Notably, however, African Americans are largely absent as an Australian migrant group. Nevertheless, Hillsong has congregations in American cities such as New York and Los Angeles, and its music draws Christians from other smaller and megachurches, including black4 churches in the United States, to its Australian campuses. For many Australians (as well as other groups), immutable links exist between African–American Christians and gospel music (for an exploration of gospel music and racial identity in the transpacific, see Im’s chapter 3 in this volume). However, rather than resorting to reified cultural stereotypes, this research sought to investigate the complexities of religious and racial identities through the lens of embodied participation in local worship musicking at Hillsong Sydney to ascertain what it has meant (and continues to mean) for a small group of attendees to be Hillsong and black.

The ethics of hospitality: personal and theoretical resonances At the heart of this investigation is an ethnographic encounter, the data from which offers some revealing insights—not only into how certain people of color experience being non-white and non-Australian across Hillsong’s locations, but also how certain white Australians who have chosen to become stakeholders in this discursive arena understand and address these same questions. Specifically, it sought to better understand the experience of African–American attendees who lived in Sydney and who were increasingly involved in musicking within the church, documenting their

Hillsong and Black 147 experiences of the aesthetic choices made in the church’s events and services as represented in performance and musical repertoire. Touring guest musicians have (and continue to) bring gospel music to Hillsong’s congregation (including Ron Kenoly, Alvin Slaughter, Cece Winans, The Kingdom Choir), and gospel is now a formal part of the college’s music course. At recent events, the Hillsong group performing under the name “Coco Collective” had performed a gospelized repertoire. The research sought to understand an African–American attendee’s experience of these events. There is precedent in the literature to frame a discussion of the ethics of style as it relates to the musicking of congregations. For example, Gerardo Marti’s volume Worship Across the Racial Divide highlights the difference between stylistic representation and inclusion. Importantly, he notes that style can be considered the result of other negotiations; of value, community, and meaning. The aesthetic dimension is a crucial factor in any ecclesial ethics of hospitality, but Marti goes further in insisting that corporate worship involving congregational diversity is in fact “world-building” (2008, 207–9). Mark Porter notes that a church’s core musical identity often signifies its priorities, which can function both “productively and problematically” for attendees who negotiate difference (2016, 4). Here, ethical considerations occur not only in everyday experiences but also through discourse about actions, processes, and relationships – particularly regarding musicking (Porter 2016, 13, 17). Adoption or assimilation to common musical styles often represents acceptance of the values and priorities of the group. Correspondingly, congregation dialogue or participation with new/ unfamiliar genres can result in the reshaping of both the institution’s and individual’s commitments. This was (and is) relevant to Hillsong’s engagement with gospel music. Additionally, in Mek Some Noise, Timothy Rommen investigates the stylistic choices of Christian musicians in the Caribbean, charting ways in which aesthetics represents ethics in the pursuit of crafting a Christian identity or self, within the communal context. In particular, he investigates how Western and African musical influences have become representative of distinct values and commitments for those undertaking the musicking. He notes a general resistance by the Caribbean church to musical innovation (particularly in spaces outside worship), stating that: [In] a community that has already come to a shared sense of what it values, then style can come to be controversial—subversive even—causing subjects to re-evaluate their relationships in light of new discursive formations. It is in this sense that I am appealing to the ethical—it is not the musical event, but rather the act of interpretation and judgement that instantiates an ethical point of view, and as I understand it, style cannot be judged in this way in isolation from community (Rommen 2008, 27–8).

148  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas In Trinidad, self-identification with the Full Gospel style results in wholescale acceptance or rejection by these ecclesial communities; therefore, the stakes are high.

Method This chapter is concerned with aesthetic-ethical questions arising as a consequence of transnational relationships within one globalizing megachurch. As such, it focuses upon a group of individuals with pre-existing sonic allegiances—African–American students drawn to Hillsong’s Sydney location, as well as others with significant interest in and identification with gospel music. By virtue of being birthed and maintained elsewhere, this genre represents the cultural values and commitments of a community “other” to the one in Hillsong Sydney. As such, this chapter focuses specifically on questions of black identity, agency, and representation within Hillsong’s ecclesial ecology, taking gospel music as a relevant/appropriate means of framing these issue/s in the specific context of the ecclesial activity Hillsong is most associated with—music. There is no assumption that “gospel music” is the only (or most important) Black Sacred Music tradition in either Western ekklesia or the global South. But given that it is a genre in which all research participants had (a) an active listening and/or participatory interest; (b) a conviction that this genre cannot be separated from its anthropological dimensions; and (c) something to say about its role within Hillsong, it made the most sense to ask questions from that starting point.5 The two authors inhabit different reflexive locations. One (white, female) has attended Hillsong for the majority of her Christian life, was previously a performer, and is a current staff member.6 The other (black, male) has engaged with the songs, but not the church itself. This facilitated differing perspectives (emic/etic) in the writing of the project. In line with the theme of this volume, this investigation took the position that musicking itself possesses ethical dimensions—to the extent of also constituting actual ethical praxis. Thus, although Timothy Rommen’s (2007) “ethics of style” was the initial conceptual starting point, Wittgenstein’s aesthetics also played a critical part in the process of thinking through how ethics and Christian musicking converge in this research. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of eight participants. Each lasted approximately forty minutes and covered an extensive amount of information, investigating the participant’s ethnic/racial, and cultural background, and their understanding of “black” and “gospel.” The interviewees all confirmed their commitment to and experience of gospel in other contexts. Further questions explored participation in musicking at Hillsong as well as how its aesthetics reflected their individual and wider-cultural identities (not least at events in which Hillsong had “gospelized” its repertoire and how the changed musical elements (e.g. harmonics, vocalizations, and movements) compared not only to their individual concepts of gospel music

Hillsong and Black 149 but also their individual accounts of Hillsong’s musical aesthetic principles). Participants were also asked whether Hillsong was a “white” church, which led to more than one opinion being offered on their perceptions of structural racialized inequality (as evidenced within the performance offerings and theologies they espoused). Finally, they were asked about their agency to change musical elements. This provided an in-depth review of their developing relationship to Hillsong as an organization in various forms (as tour group, music label, college, their church, etc.) in context of its continuing and evolving sonic values, as well as their own communal and individual worshiping identities. All participants were young cosmopolitans drawn to Hillsong through their love of its music and associated spirituality who became part of this investigation by virtue of their commitment to gospel music. Seven first came to Sydney as Hillsong College students. Some had become key volunteers, and three were now staff members. Others self-identified as part of Hillsong-as-church rather than Hillsong-as-learning-institution. Table 8.1 outlines the demographic data. Table 8.1  Participant demographics

SelfGeographic Pseudonym identification Origin Nyambi

Nigerian American (Black)

Garrett

White

Ida

Black

Rosa

South African Colored

James

South African Indian

Neil

White/ Pākehā

Maya

AfricanAmerican African– American

Shaunelle

Previous church affiliation (if any)

Length of time at Hillsong

Detroit, MI, Non-denom 2 years USA church in ML, college; USA; 3.5 years “Pentecostal attendee tendencies” Australian Sydney 2.5 years (lived in US) Anglican attendee Westchester Non-denom 3 years County, NY, college USA South None 3 years Africa college; 9 years attendee South Pentecostal 3 years Africa college; 4 years attendee New Baptist 3 years Zealand (charismatic); college; Pentecostal 24 years attendee Atlanta, Baptist / 2 years GA, USA COGIC college Portland, Black 3 years WA Pentecostal college; 1 year attendee

Hillsong Campus Performances City

City

Gospel Service (City Alexandria campus); Gospel Chapel None

Hills

None

City

Creative/ College leader

Extension Israel service Houghton chapel item Hills

Creative/ College leadership

Hills

Gospel chapel

Hills

Gospel chapel, Gospel items

150  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas Interviewees were selected for various reasons, but principally their knowledge about gospel music at Hillsong Church. Many were rostered as worship team participants; some at multiple locations. Interviews took place in person or via Skype and were recorded and then transcribed. Thematic analysis (from grounded theory method) was conducted in Excel by one author, and a critical discourse analysis was performed by the other author.

Is Hillsong a “white” church? One of the most meaningful tasks was defining the racial/ethnic identity of Hillsong church in the perception of these constituents. This set the tone of the relationship between the church as institution and the individuals within it and was therefore relevant in identifying ethical considerations. Participant opinions varied conspicuously; none of them knew the official demographics. For Rosa, the church was “extremely white” while Neil flatly disagreed: TR:  So, is Hillsong a white church? NEIL: No. TR: Why? NEIL: We’re not solely white because

our church is people and we have people all through our church who are not only white Caucasian from England, or Australia, or New Zealand, or United States. Do we have more white people than other races? Yes.

Ida felt the same way as Rosa: “overarchingly, Hillsong is a white church.” However, she later noted, “the [NYC] location is very diverse, and Pastor Carl is conscious to make sure it stays that way” (later she likened this to Sydney’s Greater West campus). Maya felt safe enough to be candid, offering a potentially startling viewpoint: Even when you were naming [the] people…on the board and their different ethnicities…I still see them as white … I know that may be a disrespect to them… Although people from minority communities in the diasporic West widely disagree on how assignations such as “black” are to be defined, Maya’s admission is a reminder that “white” is also loaded and contested. As a respected music-maker in the Hillsong student community (and beyond), her perspective on what motivates some black Christians to listen to Hillsong is potentially instructive: MAYA: 

back home…we have a thing like, all black people, we love Hillsong but they’ll say “ooh, that white worship just hit different,” … when

Hillsong and Black 151 you need the white worship, you listen to Hillsong… We love it. But to listen all the time, we would have to have, flavor, yeah. From these participant responses, a picture is already beginning to emerge of an ecclesial institution perceived as “white” by non-white non-Australians; a position contested by the white Antipodean research participants in this study. For example, Garrett asserted: “I think Hillsong’s more culturally homogenous than it presents…I wouldn’t say it’s white.”7 Thus, everyday experiences were distinguished from the wider discourses about racial identities and institutional church.

Racial identification in Australia Table 8.1 shows the participants’ self-identification. Maya and Shaunelle used the term “African-American” whereas Ida preferred “black.” Nyambi identified as both “Nigerian-American” and “black.” Rosa and James self-identified as “colored” (a consequence of the South African apartheid taxonomies; Rosa also referenced black grandparents). James clarified that he was of Indian descent but noted that generally in Australia, darker-skinned people were all designated black. Neil self-identified as a white New Zealander (therefore Pākehā). Garrett was a white Australian (undertaking his PhD in African–American studies). The complexities of ethnic/racial identification on the Australian continent became clear as participants reflected on the ethnicities/identities represented on the platform at church. Shaunelle stated that for her the term “AfricanAmerican” meant a loss of knowledge, adding: “…if I did know [more] I’d wear it with pride … right now, I have an Afro, so I’ll work with that.” Given the challenges involved in distinguishing between “having melanin” and “being black,” the solidarity espoused by many Australian minority groups created real tension for these black Americans. IDA: When

I’m saying black, I do mean black. I don’t mean people of color, because people that have melanin…don’t experience the same thing… When you grow up in a system where…no other race is trying to kinda overshadow you or push you out or criminalize [or] demonize you, then you don’t really understand. So… Bermuda has a lot of people of color, but being a black person [there] is different from the States.

JAMES:  It

took a couple of years to clarify, “James isn’t black, he’s South African Indian.” … I’ve come to understand [this is] Australian culture, just the Australian narrative. And…I’ve come to be understood as being “not black.”

This signified an evolving relationship between the African–American participants and their respective definitions of “black”:

152  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas IDA: I

would say [Pacific Islanders] shouldn’t [identify as black]. But I also know when I’m [in Australia], that’s the closest community to me…if they want to identify… We have this saying: “Everybody wants to be black until you’re black.” … You get the option to choose; we don’t have that option. So I’m like, “yeah, sure, if you want, I’ll say black.”

TR:  When

you hear the word black, what does it mean to you?

MAYA: 

I think it’s changed for me now since being here. ‘Cause first when I heard black, I just thought [of] my race, African-American. And even… when we were talking about Aboriginal [peoples, and] you referred to them as black, I was like, uh … cause I’d never heard of them being categorized as black…

TR:  So

“African-American” would have been your conception, and now?

MAYA: 

Now I see black as African, Caribbean, Jamaican, just, anyone that has this colored skin…

TR:  So

it’s melanin?

MAYA: Yeah. TR:  [D]o

you think that you will continue to expand [this definition]?

MAYA:  I

want to continue to expand it, ‘cause now…like, my worldview isn’t just Atlanta… I have a different perspective, and a lot of my friends are African…it actually offended them that I would just consider myself black and call them African. Like, when someone sees them they’re gonna be black…before they open their mouth, [they’re] black. So, yeah.

Nyambi extended “blackness” to Aboriginal peoples but drew the line at the Sri Lankan community. Neil said little as he felt unable to articulate his thoughts. However, Garrett was keen to offer his take: To me, “black” is a … systematic and cultural pushback against “whiteness,” which emerged probably three hundred years ago as a collective term to create a systematic power shift against anyone who wasn’t collectively white (of Eurocentric descent) … [Even so] we need more of what it means to be Aboriginal, we need more of what it means to be Māori, we need more of what it means to be ethnically Fijian. And then, see them all come together, rather than people just saying … “I’m from West Philadelphia, born and raised on the playground is where I spent most of my days, chillin’ out maxin’ relaxin’ all cool, and all shooting some b-ball.” Not all of Garrett’s viewpoints (including his pro-minorities advocacy) were well received by these Hillsong attendees. One reason was that for

Hillsong and Black 153 some of the non-white, non-Australian participants, the de facto reality of ethnic otherness continually rears its head. NYAMBI: The

things that I’ve experienced in Australia, they’re rarely, if at all, malicious. It was just, there are a lot of like comments or questions that people ask… people trying to touch your hair, or, people just assuming that I sing because I’m black, you know what I mean.

ROSA:  I’ve

found it really hard, particularly at the Hills campus … There’s this thing…if you go into a space…you know, when you’re little… and you can’t see an older black person in the room, you are nervous. And…even as a grown-up that feeling hasn’t gone away.

It is worth noting that Rosa’s “feeling” would not necessarily be shared by other people of color. Nevertheless, Ida was keen to emphasize that the overall experience of living in Australia was positive: I don’t have to deal with the weightiness of, you know, having to wake up to the news of someone dying today… I think a lot of us that are here are very grateful. We understand… there’s a certain lightness.

The Hillsong sound and gospel Maya was very clear that she had not come to Hillsong for Gospel, and therefore to expect it at Hillsong was disingenuous: I think every house, every local church, has a mandate … a thing that [particular] church was called to do. I just don’t think Hillsong was called to … create gospel music. I think this church is amazing at what it does… Nyambi first experienced gospel music as a college student in the United States. But, she later admitted she scheduled her interview between rehearsals for a well-known gospel concert: I think of stylistics … there’s the sound … It definitely evolved from struggle and hardship. So there’s a certain weight to it, and origin … it allows for a lot of freedom of expression … whether that’s musically, or how you move your body. So, you might have a bassline for a song, but the … bassist is probably doing a lot of crazy things … outside of that. And instrumentation, vocalization … with a lot of Hillsong music there’s like, “this is what you play,” … I think they’ve freed up a little over the last few years … they’ve allowed the drummer to do a little bit something more, but for the most part, when we’re doing Hillsong music, this is the standard.

154  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas Ida had similar ideas: For me gospel music …there’s a certain amount of pain, I guess … And …travailing and just a lot of emotion. I don’t know if that’s just because I was conditioned to …a lot more melodies, a lot more musical instruments … Like when’s the last time you heard, like, a saxophone or a flute, you know? …it brings you along the journey of what the composer or lyricist wanted to do … And then… I cannot hear music without thinking of movements … you know, [laughs], emoting in that kind of way. Here, one “Nigerian-American” and one “black” American make a direct connection between the sonic embodiment of gospel music and “emotions,” but specifically “struggle/hardship/pain/travailing.” Such an association might occur more often with the spirituals than contemporary gospel music. In light of this, the definition offered by the white Australian is particularly interesting: GARRETT: 

I would define gospel music as a spiritual lament to God about the black existence… [it] is deeply embedded within …the historical tradition and oppression linked to slavery, but that is manifested within the cultural context of the black church… I would even say, but I don’t want to talk zero-sum, it only exists within the black church…

This corresponds to Ida’s assertion that not all those possessing melanin can legitimately be called “black.” An aesthetic position began to emerge that privileged African–American gospel music over Hillsong in terms of its capacity to facilitate a wider spectrum of emotional expression and retain musical interest. MAYA: Gospel

music…came out of the African–American community… [but here] the music is just four chords, it gets boring…When I think of black music, I think of gospel, I think of hip-hop, I think of R&B… A lot of bass…[whereas] here even [with] the phrases, we cut off really quick. If we’re doing it at home, we’re gonna linger …Worship isn’t 20 minutes, it’s like 45, 50 minutes… We don’t sing too many Hillsong songs…and not because we have an issue with it; I just think they haven’t been exposed to it, yeah. It’s a weird dichotomy but…when I go home…people are on their last end …it sounds like their life is depending on it… when you feel… overcome with those moments of extreme gratitude and you want to express it with shouting or screaming to the top of your lungs, you feel like it’s not acceptable [here]… that would be the biggest thing…

Hillsong and Black 155 James invoked what appears to be a particular concept of “soul” pointing towards gospel music as “communication” as opposed to “expression”: Besides the actual music itself, ‘cause even the beats and tones… there’s soul involved … gospel music has soul to it that communicates… like, ebbs and flows … if you ever go to Hillsong Cape Town, you’ll see a group of women running around and dancing, like, that’s not the gospel way here, you very much stay in your seat and worship. But, there’s the sense of like, oh, I’m coming to church to worship God, so, it’ll be just wild… aesthetically you can see that. This group’s insight regarding the ontology of gospel music raises theological questions about the inter-relationship between struggle and victory in the context of Christian musicking as life praxis: SHAUNELLE:  A lot of our music is coming out of the struggle… I have a lot of

concerns with that… we keep saying that we want the struggle to disappear, but if it did… a lot of my culture would go away with it… Hopefully we would find it in victory, but I think it would take a long time.

Gospel in Hillsong services and events Reflecting on times gospel had featured in Hillsong services or events, seven of eight participants referenced performances by the “Coco Collective,” a majority Pacific Islander musical group led by vocalist Dee Uliurewa.8 NYAMBI:  the

first time I heard a song “gospelized” if you will, was when Coco Collective did their version of “Beautiful Name” at [Hillsong Creative] team night and I lost my mind, I was like, this is absolutely amazing. Like, just as someone who loves music …when you hear… runs or certain harmonies or whatever, it just does something for you. It was exciting …I hadn’t heard it live in a very long time. And it was just beautifully done in general.

JAMES:  I

don’t think the song was written…with a gospel purpose, but…it was an effort to include, and I think those that participated in singing it genuinely loved the project of trying to communicate something in a gospel genre…

Ida noted the Coco Collective’s contribution to the Hills Campus Easter celebration service in 2015. IDA:  It’s

not that I heard gospel, but it was the people of color singing [on] Easter Sunday 2015…it was probably the first time I’d seen them all on stage. And…it was such a good moment. I was like, “I am going to get to know those people…” Yeah. So I got to know all those people …

156  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas because… for me, I need to see people who look like me, you know what I mean, I need to, or else I’m just like [laughs]. Seeing people who looked like oneself corresponded to the desire to hear people who heard music the same way: ROSA:  I

don’t know how honest I want to be… like, do I want to raise my kids in this environment? ‘Cause they will be people of color! I want to give them pride in their heritage and their cultural identity. I see the heart…[but] it’s just a bit tone deaf, quite literally.

Conversely, the college’s Gospel Chapels were a contentious topic for many participants. Gospel music was a course requirement with people of color often being expected to teach “dominant culture” leaders how to “musick” appropriately in this context (reinforcing ethnic/racial stereotypes in an otherwise coherent community). The theological and cultural ethos of Hillsong College has been overviewed by Isaac Soon (2016); those insights need not be duplicated here. But, at times, these expectations were as musically as they were culturally bereft: MAYA:  Yeah

I love to sing, but …y’all asking me to hit these Tasha Cobb notes, and I’m actually destroying my voice trying to do it in the name of “oh you can do it, it’s in you, I’ve heard you do it before, just, just…”

Some participants noted that they staged meetings to express their views to more empathetic leaders following these events. Neil also admitted the church also often used Australian humor in attempting to diffuse racial tension: Unfortunately, there’s a thing in…Australian culture … we tend to make fun…not to hurt, but just make fun of what we don’t understand or we can’t do. Like…when somebody makes fun of a vocalist who can do a lot of raves, and…they do them purposefully bad. We have the potential to…make different choices based upon what we know now.

Strategies of “black peoples” in dominant space Hillsong’s multiplicity of locations and systems of organizing performance offers challenges in terms of how one “reads” different approaches to musical leadership and performance within an ecclesial ecology. Notably, Neil (the staff member from New Zealand) was particularly committed to helping African–American students bring their musical knowledge to the church’s platforms. He described advocating for gospel so often in creative planning meetings that his requests had become a joke; however, he noted this had increased the number of church performances utilizing hybridized styles.

Hillsong and Black 157 NEIL: People

say everything in life rises and falls on relationship. Some people …love it, they’re like, “everything in life rises and falls on relationship! Yeah, it’s not what you know but who you know!” But it’s not normally said with that air of joy, it’s normally said with, like the root of bitterness or sadness. “It’s not what you know but who you know.” I absolutely believe that to be true… God’s allowed it that way for a reason and purpose.

In contrast, Garrett (who had no engagement with any planning committees) believed the incorporation of gospel to be largely a marketing stunt, rather than a sign of true inclusion: I think there [is] strategic intent behind it…from a simple marketing and advertising perspective, understanding that Hillsong, to remain sustainable needs to embed itself in the North American market, where the church is … in inverted commas, “professional” and “financed,” there is a strategic intent behind putting people of color on screen. The remaining six (non-white, non-Antipodean) respondents side-stepped this continuum. However, four clear strategies for moving in the church’s dominant culture spaces emerged:

1.  Code-switching for survival All six non-Antipodeans referenced different modes of speech and behavior necessary to flourish across the church’s different socio-cultural contexts. While Garrett described this as “being manipulated” by the system, Maya felt otherwise: I think it’s okay… I feel like I’m pretty free, and I realise that may not be some other people’s experience, [but] I know how to code-switch. The participants described this as a process of careful negotiation of space and culture. Although James had very few places within Australian society in which he felt truly understood as a colored South African, he agreed that foreign students who learned these skills were more likely “well within themselves” and therefore able to contribute and serve in Sydney’s campuses. JAMES:  How

important is it [to be] culturally mobile? I think vital… it’s part of taking care of your personhood, you know… Some people, the skeptics, would say, oh you’re selling a bit of yourself to fit in. I don’t see it that way. I just see… the purpose … that makes me want to be part of it.

158  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas

2. Education Additionally, these participants actively sought to educate those around them in the church using both official and unofficial social media channels, and by pursuing leadership opportunities at Hillsong. NYAMBI:  I’ve

had at least one person come up to me and say thank you … because I’ve learned so much [about how to] navigate relationships with people of color and not be a ridiculous human being.

ROSA:  you

can’t just come together and have amnesia, you have to … have the hard conversations, you need to …not endorse people who say my experience [as a person of color] does not exist.

The participants saw this as a normal part of relationship-building at the church they loved. Nevertheless, their responses reflected a belief that the church’s worship team members and congregation needed to be initiated into a new aesthetic frame. NYAMBI:  [Some

people] think that gospel music is really about… showing off your musical gifts… they see it more as a performance versus worship, so people came into it with some misconceptions, which probably also [keep] them from… allowing themselves to…fully engage… with the music.

This strategy also appeared musically. NYAMBI:  The

thing with items… I think sometimes Hillsong uses items to introduce something first, so that they can kind of be exposed to it— get a little comfortable …before it’s a part of the church service.

3.  Increasing representation (via stage/sound) All interviewees believed the church wanted to engage its constituencies, and located participation as a key strategy towards better racial interaction. However, the leaders’ intentions weren’t always transparent (as in, participants didn’t always know who opened the opportunities they were given or why). NYAMBI:  I’ve

seen it become more diverse on platform, I think there has been an effort, to have, you know, a little bit more representation… it’s a combination, like obviously if there’s no people of color at church … where are you going to pull from?! There are obviously people, whether through college or just moving to Australia in general, wanting to be a part of team, and … I probably shouldn’t say it this way, “worthy” enough to be on platform. I do think people are gifted and talented and considered “platform-approved,” but I also think people are strategically picked for the purpose of representation…

Hillsong and Black 159

4.  Sustaining spiritualities What was most important to all interviewees, however, was that they continued the spiritualities that brought them to the church. Their Christianity was of utmost importance. NEIL: 

This is just hypothetical… I’ve got no issue with an African–American person adjust[ing] some things, shift[ing] some things with the delivery, no issue with that, at all. [But] if we’re talking, specifically, the brands of our church, and should we have different brands that better reflect gospel music …[in] the global expression of our church [to include] more people from different ethnicities or races… I would hope …that whoever is selected by God and by the senior leadership of our church (be those African-American people or not!)… [that] their heart be open to Christ would be as strongly considered as any style and any other people group.

Three participants from the United States (Ida, Nyambi, and Maya) were drawn to Hillsong through the lyrical content, two of whom soon became active participants in music creation. Despite having earlier typified Hillsong’s music of being at times “tone deaf,” Rosa now offers a more positive take on its potential for embracing the experiences of people of color: I’ve seen how [Hillsong music] gives people words … to … shape expression. It’s an act of God and I think that’s really powerful. It impacted me as a teenager and now obviously marrying a musician is full time, literally … when …the lyrics talk about, “you’re my amnesty, you’re my split wide sea,” I remember that God is a liberator of oppressed peoples and I feel my soul come alive. Although he might not have used these terms, Neil attempted to blend theological anthropology and liturgical theology: I think my leaning, for my own personal devotion time, towards music that is more gospel in nature, reflects who I’ve come to believe God is and what he’s like, in relation to suffering, resurrection, life, joy, celebration. …Bishop TD Jakes …speaking about worship recently [said] “we celebrate like we do more because of our theology than our skin color,” and he said “there are people who look upon us and say we worship like this because we’re black,” and he said “I do not worship like this because I’m black …we worship like this because of our understanding of what God has taken us from and where he’s taking us to.” This discourse emphasizes the individual’s spirituality as the site of Christian worship, rather than any practices formed by ethnic/racial, cultural, or lingual groups. This points to a critical intersection and epitomizes the kinds of tensions navigated.

160  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas For example, for one author, while the language is certainly familiar, such understanding contrasts the reality (and expectation) that participation in Hillsong’s services and ministries forms an individual in set ways. For the other author, such speculation is epistemologically suspect—because while it is important to emphasize that “worship” is not primarily about cultural identity, this issue is not solved by an unregulated assumption that “worship” is an anthropologically disengaged or objective reality that happens to be remarkably similar to the cultural-linguistic practices of “black” people. Regarding experiencing the music of the “other,” James was circumspect: I just don’t know to what extent people should be giving up their personal freedoms for accommodation. I think the heart of the church does lean towards people. We want people to be free and to create space for people. I also think there’s a responsibility from the [church] to say these are the parameters you [can] work with, and sure, I get the pastoral reasons … or maybe, creative limitations. But at the same time …if you track the development of the spirituals into what became gospel music … if they worked six days a week …Sunday was the freedom to express gospel, you know, before they went back … and …fit back into a mode or method. So, that alternative is vital for freedom, and I think maybe [there] needs to be [more] opportunity. These tensions expressed often juxtaposed the freedom to participate against limitations on personal autonomy and agency, within the aesthetics of the space. However, as can be seen, these African Americans were increasingly engaged in musical production.

Conclusion As has been noted above, Hillsong is an increasingly significant stakeholder in US Evangelical Christianity. As such, many feel that it has no scope for neutrality in relation to competing racial identities.9 This research was predicated on the understanding that gospel music is emblematic of a significant proportion of diasporic black Christians’ experience and identity. Therefore, for Hillsong to fully engage questions of black identity, agency, and representation is impossible—given the role of music in the ecology of Hillsong—without engaging gospel music. African–American migrants in Australia are relatively privileged socio-economically. However, they also describe experiences of marginalization and racial invisibility in wider public space (their experience and discourse being undergirded by the white Australian cultural context). This permeates their church engagement in Sydney with meaning. Therefore, various questions were raised about the sonic/aesthetic negotiations required for the felt inclusion of these African–American individuals. Within the research, various tensions or considerations emerged regarding the ethics of hospitality. On one hand,

Hillsong and Black 161 it might be argued that while a church is open to recognizing the differences between individuals, it cannot always be hospitable to the cultural and aesthetic preferences of such persons.10 Here, it was clear that students become part of an ecclesial community for reasons that have nothing to do with cultural “sameness.” Yet, they also become contributors and leaders of such communities (alongside others who are cultural beings extant in cultural spaces). On the other hand, it was evident that Hillsong’s cultural power had also grown to the extent that it could promote or market externally produced African–American gospel music from its platforms. How this translated into the weekly musical practices (or incorporated visiting African–American performers) was quite another thing. These research participants claimed that the ecclesial ecology of Hillsong largely succeeds in both exporting a specific brand of Evangelical Christianity and in being a church that welcomes diverse attendees. Participants were happily involved in various areas of the church, and increasingly influential in its local musicking. This highlighted the multidirectional nature of hospitality, which not only flows from the church as institution but also flows from its members back to the church. In this way, African–American congregation members were key participants in the success of the congregation, not least through broadening its aesthetic knowledge(s) to incorporate other contemporary sacred music beyond the familiar “Hillsong sound.” However, they admitted (often unspoken) underlying or competing values and commitments that represented global racial/ethnic tensions. In response, individuals were often forced into constant reflexive evaluations (or “code switching”), and formed other strategies to educate and change the church they attended and loved. While “transcendence” is frequently leveraged by aestheticism, in the context of this research the participants are increasingly overcoming liturgical segregation by offering local knowledges. Thus, within its evolving ecclesial ecology, Hillsong continues to grapple with issues found within broader Evangelical Christianity via the contribution and leadership of its black constituents.

Notes 1 The church still affiliates with the denomination Australian Christian Churches (formerly Assemblies of God Australia) although retains the ability to credential their own pastors. 2 Of 16 people listed on the board and eldership of Hillsong Church, at least five at the time of writing are people of color, representing over 30 percent (See https://hillsong.com/id/leadership/board/ and https://hillsong.com/id/ australia/eldership/). 3 Sydney’s suburban “Hills Campus” is global HQ. The urban “City Campus” meets in two proximal buildings serving as a secondary base in the same city. Other Sydney locations include “Greater West.” 4 This word was intentionally left uncapitalized. In addition, it is worth noting that since writing this chapter, Armaud Arbery’s death in the United States and the BLM conversation that emerged changed (and continues to change) many things.

162  Tanya Riches and Alexander Douglas 5 This necessitates acknowledgement of more “whitewashed” areas of the history of philosophy and ethics (e.g. John Locke’s defense of slavery, Berkeley’s ownership of slaves, Hume’s robust belief in the inherent inferiority of black people and Kant’s racist anthropology, etc.). 6 Views as published within this chapter do not reflect the organization as a whole, and neither authors nor interviewees are the official (or even representative) voice of Hillsong Church. 7 Later, he indicated preference for the more diverse urban City campus as opposed to the suburban “Bible Belt” Hills campus. 8 This group has performed across the Hillsong venues and on national television. The ensemble’s Instagram handle is @coco.collective. This appears an attempt to subvert Australian humor, utilizing the derogatory term “coconut” for Pacific Islander peoples, something also used in theological circles (e.g. Timon and Kaunda 2019). African–American pianist Kris Hodges was considered part of the group’s success by participants. 9 Campbell Robertson’s (2018) New York Times article A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshipers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches raises several related issues. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/us/ blacks-evangelical-churches.html 10 Many would find such an argument misguided at best and entirely reprehensible at worst: how could one imagine that one could welcome (say) a black person into a church community and then not welcome the aesthetic preferences of this person? However, some of the earliest African–American missionaries to the South such as Bishop Alexander Payne of the AME were not supportive of the Southern black liturgical practices, and many Southerners did not follow him in that regard; see https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ features/godinamerica-black-church/

References Evans, Mark. “Creating the Hillsong Sound: How One Church Changed Australian Christian Music.” In The Hillsong Movement Examined, pp. 63–81. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Marti, Gerardo. Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. McIntyre, EH. “Brand of Choice: Why Hillsong Is Winning Sales and Souls.” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 20, no. 2 (2007): 175–94. Noble, Greg, and Ien Ang. Ethnicity and Cultural Consumption in Australia. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. (2018) doi: https://doi.org/10.1 080/10304312.2018.1453464 Porter, Mark. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2016. Riches, Tanya, and Tom Wagner. “The evolution of Hillsong music: From Australian Pentecostal congregation into global brand.” Australian Journal of Communication 39, no. 1 (2012): 17. Robertson, Campbell. “A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshipers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches.” New York Times (March 9, 2018). https://www.nytimes. com/2018/03/09/us/blacks-evangelical-churches.html (retrieved March 6, 2020) Rommen, Timothy. 2007. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hillsong and Black 163 Soon, Isaac. 2017. “A Comparison of the Religious and Ethnic Ethos of Hillsong College with Paul the Apostle.” In The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters. pp. 107–24. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilghman, BR. 1991. Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View From Eternity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Timon, Tioti, and Chammah J Kaunda. “‘I stand in the Middle of the Ocean’: The Emerging Coconut Theology of Climate Change in Kiribati.” Pharos Journal of Theology (2019). Wade, Matthew. “Seeker-friendly: The Hillsong megachurch as an enchanting total institution.” Journal of Sociology 52, no. 4 (2016): 661–76. Wagner, Thomas J. “Hearing the Hillsong sound: music, marketing, meaning and branded spiritual experience at a transnational megachurch.” PhD diss., Abingdon, UK: Royal Holloway University of London (2013). Wagner, Tom. “Branding, Music, and Religion: Standardization and Adaptation in the Experience of the” Hillsong Sound.” Religion as Brands: New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality (2014): 59–73. Vertovec, Steven. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1024–54.

9

A worship-rooted lifestyle? Exploring evangelical ethics at Bethel Church, Redding, CA Emily Snider Andrews

Liturgical theology’s focus on Christian ethical practice and its relation to liturgical efficacy raises a complex challenge to thinking about how it is— or, as it is more frequently put, whether it is—that public worship provides the locus par excellence for ethical thinking and behavior among evangelicals (Vos 2017, 1–2). To use sacramental theologian George Worgul’s language, is the divine-human encounter of evangelical public worship the “root metaphor” guiding their faithful living (Worgul 2000, 184–5)? My studies focus on a liturgically guided ethos-center for locating North American evangelicalism, a model that identifies modern worship music (MWM) practice as providing identifying boundaries for the community. The ethos of contemporary evangelicalism is now largely characterized by MWM practices, rituals increasingly understood as the normative means of encountering God’s presence. Given the sacramental ramifications of evangelical worship and the associated “lifestyle” claims of evangelical worshipers, exploring the group’s ethical engagement is a necessary step to examining the congruence between the evangelical’s experience of God’s presence in public worship and its potential impact on the worshiper’s daily life. Certainly, though, evangelicalism’s political connotations in the United States makes an interlacing of evangelical liturgical efficacy and ethics a complex endeavor.1 In the current, post-2016 presidential election climate, awash with politically imbibed commentary on evangelicals who largely voted for Donald Trump (Martiínez and Smith 2016), there exists no consensus on the state of ethics among evangelicals. Many critics in various media spheres have questioned the ethical state of the group given their widespread support for Trump. More pertinent to my studies is the suggestion that evangelical MWM practice is more apt to render an “affective experience” than an effective divine-human encounter, a more direct questioning of the evangelical’s ability to derive a “kingdom” ethics from their liturgical practice (Lemley 2013, 261). While these questions and assessments are not without merit, the commentary that follows aims to provide a nuanced perspective that is guided by the postmodern-deduced premise that all talk of

A worship-rooted lifestyle 165 a Christian ethic must be situated within a particular community’s reality and context. This chapter explores evangelical understandings of Christian worship, mission, and discipleship operating at Bethel Church in Redding, California. How does Bethel Church understand its embodiment of Christian action? And, how does its public worship empower that vision of lived faith?

Renewalist evangelicalism and worship: Bethel Church as a case study Many evangelicals attest to encountering God in MWM. This encounter is often described as real, emotional, intimate, and intense. As noted above, many in the group now increasingly understand music as a normative means of entering God’s presence (Ruth 2002, 48–50).2 The focus here is on renewalist evangelical communities who have explicitly bought into the pneumatological core of Pentecostalism’s praise and worship theology and musical practice, while negotiating or expanding some of its particular emphases. “Renewalists” or “renewal evangelical” Christianity refers to those Christians who believe that God acts directly through the Holy Spirit in the individual lives of worshipers, playing a direct role in everyday life; public worship serves as the place where divine encounters are expected to occur (Luhrmann 2012, 33, 40, 130; Pew Research Center 2006). Bethel Church, in Redding, California, an influential megachurch with its own music label, serves as a case study through which to explore the renewalist evangelical relationship between worship, ethics, and discipleship. Founded in 1952 by Robert Doherty, Bethel Church was affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination until 2006, when the church voted with near unanimity to become an independent entity.3 Pastor Bill Johnson took over as lead pastor of Bethel in 1996, after which the church experienced significant numerical growth (Lepinski 2010, 31). Bethel Church’s large membership, significant yearly operating budget, prominent School of Supernatural Ministry, and music publishing arm have all bolstered its worldwide recognition. However, it is Bethel Music and Jesus Culture, Bethel Church’s “global movement” church plant and second music label,4 that have augmented its influence into wider spheres of renewalist evangelical and mainstream Christianity. In March 2016, Bethel Music’s album, Have It All, was number one on the overall iTunes Albums chart in the United States for six straight days, ranking above the likes of Adele, Justin Bieber, and Coldplay (Longs 2016). This is a rarity for worship albums. Bethel Music and Jesus Culture both maintain influential music labels through their management of annual worship and ministry conferences and by signing many worship leaders as recording artists.5 As of December 2019, musicians on the Bethel Music and Jesus Culture labels had songwriter credits for sixteen of the CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) Top 100 chart songs.6

166  Emily Snider Andrews At the center of Bethel’s promotion of its “supernatural” music is its association with divine presence. MWM is privileged as a particular means of fostering a relationship with God, since it “creates that space for encounter with God’s presence” (Heiligenthal 2015). While earlier Pentecostals attested to assessing both a song’s lyrics and its musical sound and performance to determine its ability to foster true worship, Bethel worship leaders suggest that it is the sounds themselves that enable a “face-to-face” encounter, the space where one experiences “His presence” (Heiligenthal 2015). This is particularly apparent in their promotion of the instrumental worship album, Without Words: Synesthesia. The process of encountering divine presence via musical sound results from a divine “pedagogy [that] transcends punctuation. [God] speaks—but the very Word that became flesh is not confined to pen and paper, black and white, print and re-print.… [God] may be known in…rhythm, rhyme, shade, scale, song, crescendo, contrast and color” (Heiligenthal 2015). The stated purpose of Bethel Music Publishing is explicit in its reference to divine presence: “to equip the church with worship songs that carry God’s presence and bring Him glory” (Bethel Music, n.d.). The record label “exists to carry the culture of Heaven to the world through song” (Bethel Music, n.d.). Similarly, Jesus Culture Music is promoted as “a community of worship leaders and musicians whose heart is to see a generation impacted by…releasing music that brings people into encounters with God” (Jesus Culture, n.d.). The music, leaders instill, provides a passage into God’s presence, into God’s “Shekinah glory cloud” (Jones 2016, 33),7 the phenomenon of divine presence associated with fruitful corporate worship. Bethel Senior Worship Pastor, Jenn Johnson, teaches that worship8 is uniquely important in Christian faith, since that is the place where one will encounter God, where “God will speak to you about [supernatural and prophetic] things” (WorshipU 2015). The worshiper who achieves intimacy with God in worship can receive the rhema word of God, or God’s revelation to an individual in the moment.9 This is a central goal of Christian discipleship and sanctification, according to Jenn Johnson, since the worshiper is always seeking to become a “best friend” of God, one who not only “can see who God is from the outside, but…can [also] feel His emotions and know His nature” (WorshipU 2015).10 For disciples at Bethel, MWM practice is central to maturing in one’s faith.

Exploring Bethel’s worship-rooted lifestyle Outside of its public worship gatherings and Bethel Music publishing arm, Bethel understands its School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) [Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. n.d.] to be at the heart of its missional and Christian praxis life. In 2019, BSSM graduated over 2,500 students, representing over seventy countries (Rancano 2019).11 At BSSM, as at Bethel Church, students are “empowered to bring revival [a key theme in

A worship-rooted lifestyle 167 Bethel’s theology of worship] in whatever [they are] uniquely called to” (BSSM,  n.d.). “As you encounter God,” leaders state, “we believe your personal transformation will lead to global transformation” (BSSM, n.d.). BSSM training is “in the ministry style of Jesus: to enjoy the presence of God, say what He is saying, and do what He is doing” (BSSM, n.d.). Worship gatherings, the chief site for enjoying “the presence of God,” are explicitly understood to be a primary place from which one is empowered to act as a ­“revivalist” (BSSM, n.d.).12 BSSM encourages active pedagogies, particularly worship, since worship’s focus is “not only head knowledge… [it is] sometimes like open-heart surgery” (Rancano 2019).13 The unconventional religious school is less about studying traditional theological disciplines than it is developing a “lifestyle” students come to live into.14 Part of the lifestyle students are trained to embrace, though, is not far off from fairly traditional models of evangelical missions, evangelism, and outreach efforts. This includes practices that run across the “evangelism” and “social ministry” spectrum, polarities that have been debated within the larger evangelical sphere.15 For instance, students are encouraged to find strangers on the street, people believed to need “a touch from God, prayer, or even a simple kind word,” a practice referred to as a “treasure hunt,” and one that is in keeping with some evangelical “evangelism” efforts. At the same time, Bethel encourages civic engagement that is promoted like social activist jargon, to love not only God, but also the place where you live. Referred to as the “Bethel Effect,” Bethel has devoted itself to the city of Redding, one of California’s poorest, changing and influencing the community on a variety of fronts. As several have reported, Bethel Church is engaged in a number of local social efforts: Bethel “donates money to the police department [which was laying off workers]. It buys out public buildings [as in reviving the community’s failing civic auditorium]. It nurtures local businesses [some of which are intentionally supported and managed by Bethel worshipers and BSSM students]. It sends armies of students to clean the city’s trash- and syringe-strewn riverbanks [joining homeless services and weekly city cleanups to public parks and trails].…[As Bethel sees it, T]he city’s rebirth is one of the church’s most urgent missions” (HensleyClancy 2017).16 This vision of “full-time ministry [advancing] His Kingdom into every area of society” (Bethel Church, n.d.) is understood to be an extension of public worship and an embodiment of Christian action for Bethel insiders. While particular political involvement or activism does not feature prominently in Bethel’s official vision of the “Kingdom lifestyle,” Bethel leaders do enter political conversation in public ways, and this involvement is notably increasing. Their political commentary is always couched in the language of and motivated by their faith-world. This was widely noted when Senior Leaders, Bill and Beni Johnson, publicly endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2016. In a lengthy blog posted after the 2016 presidential election, Bill Johnson explained why he voted for Trump rather than

168  Emily Snider Andrews Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, offering biblical support for each reason given (Johnson 2016). Beni Johnson, Bill’s wife, also posted her support of Trump on Facebook (see Woods 2016).17 In 2018, church leaders again gained widespread attention when they called Californians to contact state legislators to protest a bill that would have banned profiting off the sale of sexual orientation change efforts such as gay conversion therapy, efforts that Bethel engages for remuneration (Scheide 2018). Senior Associate Leader, Kris Vallotton, preached a sermon calling for these efforts on March 25, 2018, titled, “What Would Jesus Do in a Politically Correct World?” He soon clarified his stance in an editorial in which he expressed feeling a “responsibility to teach Biblical truth…that same-sex sexual behavior is unhealthful…” and that the proposed legislation “ultimately seeks to restrict and control many voices, not only ours” (Vallotton 2018).18 Still, in response to the backlash his sermon received, Vallotton hopes that he and his church live as “lovers of people…not haters” (Vallotton 2018). Vallotton, perhaps more than other senior leaders at Bethel, has regularly engaged politics. For example, he publicly endorsed Bethel elder and Redding mayor, Julie Winter, for Redding City Council (Vallotton 2015),19 and First District Assemblyman, Brian Dahle, in his bid for the First District State Senate seat (Vallotton, n.d.).20 More recently, in December 2019, he preached a sermon, “Sovereign Providence,” in which he suggested that God is not in the mood for Trump’s impeachment, that every tongue that accuses Trump will be condemned, and that God will give Trump another presidential term. Vallotton “prophesied” that “the Lord is gonna step into the impeachment process [on Trump’s behalf]. I mean, I know it’s gonna happen” (Vallotton 2019). This sermon was described as a “powerful prophetic message,” which Bethel leadership teaches supernatural, divine-given insight into the unknown or generally something of import. As was the case with Bill and Beni Johnson’s endorsement of Trump’s presidency, Vallotton framed his sermon biblically, identifying a number of passages to support his ideas. He repeatedly prefaces his statements with the caveat, “This is not about politics” (Vallotton 2019). He clarifies, “This is not about Republicans or Democrats…it’s time to step up and have our loyalty to the Kingdom. If you have a political spirit, you will miss this…moment.…You don’t want to be the one resisting a [divinely-ordained] movement” (Vallotton 2019). The overarching message is clear, if not explicit: God supports Trump’s presidency. Since God stands with Trump, we must, too, lest we fail to follow God’s leading in “this…sovereign moment” (Vallotton 2019). Vallotton, though, is not alone in his political activism. In September 2019, Bethel worship leader, Sean Feucht, announced that he is running for Congress in California with a campaign video featuring a Bethel Music song with the lyrics, “We won’t stop singing until the whole world looks like heaven.” Sean’s wife, Kate, describes him in the campaign clip as “a man of faith, a man of mission, a man of character and integrity, not driven

A worship-rooted lifestyle 169 by ego but purpose. A man…fighting for one’s beliefs…” (Feucht 2019). Feucht’s campaign centers on his faith and how it supports his particular political views. In late December 2019, several prominent evangelical pastors and worship leaders prayed over and laid hands on President Trump in the Oval Office as the impeachment process intensified on Capitol Hill (Parke 2019). Bethel Senior Worship Pastors, Brian and Jenn Johnson, were among those who led the administration’s “faith briefing” in musical worship. Feucht posted a clip from the worship gathering, which he attended, to Facebook, adding, “IN CASE ANYONE OUT THERE IS WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF AMERICA TODAY … WE’RE INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT NOW #WorshipTakeOver #DontLoseHope” (Feucht 2019). This was preceded by the releasing of a public letter to Timothy Dalrymple, the president of Christianity Today, in which several evangelical faith leaders condemned editor-in-chief, Mark Galli, for his calling for the removal of Trump from office. Bethel leaders Kris Vallotton, Brian Johnson, and Jenn Johnson were signatories of the letter (Barnhart 2019). Nearly all public political statements and endorsements are framed explicitly in a lens that understands it as living into the faith-world Bethel inhabits.

Cultivating “kingdom culture” at Bethel Bethel’s social and political influence is catalyzed by Bethel Music’s success. Efforts, though, go far beyond their musical practices. More ubiquitously, the church’s work to “cultivate Kingdom culture” is understood to be the chief means for practicing Christian faith in the world.21 That work begins in public worship, the space where worshipers experience God’s manifest presence. In the “culture” work, worshipers carry that presence into the wider world. In a blog post that corresponds to a collection of audio-recording teachings on the subject by Bill Johnson, “culture” is described as “the system of beliefs, disciplines, practices, and relational boundaries that reveal how life is lived among a particular group of people. Movements of any kind succeed when they have created a culture that can sustain it” (Bill Johnson 2013). Music and the arts are a chief means of cultivating Bethel’s “revival” culture. While the revival initiated by worship “empowers people to invade society,” the “transformation in the world system around us” does not end there (Bill Johnson 2013) since, in Bethel’s vision, “church was never meant to end in a room” (@Bethel 2019).22 “Activat[ing]…a revivalist lifestyle” effects the advancement of “His Kingdom” into every area of society (Bethel Redding, n.d.). Bill Johnson’s son, Eric Johnson, a Senior Pastor at Bethel Redding, describes this cultural work in his 2016 sermon, “Creating Context for Culture.” While it is rare for an evangelical pastor to address postmodern culture in sermons, particularly in a favorable way, or at least in a way

170  Emily Snider Andrews described as one in which Christians should be “immersed,” Eric Johnson urges followers to embrace the current “post-postmodern” context in order to adhere to the gospel’s mandate to contextualize the “Kingdom” within it. In the current culture, we see a “reaction to big narrative telling me what to do” and realize, positively, that “we are no longer spectators, but that we actually are contributors to something.” He goes on to exhort listeners to actively “contextualize” the Kingdom within culture: Let’s flow with it and find out how does the Kingdom manifest in this? How does the Gospel get into this? How does it, instead of us being critical and throwing stones at culture and the advancement of society, why don’t we go, “God, what’s going on here?” Because Jesus did it, and the apostle, Paul, did it brilliantly.…[Paul would] pick up on the cues of culture, and then when he’d go to preach—it’d cause mass tension. Jesus did the same thing.…He absorb[ed] a culture…[so that] at thirty years old, he knew what to talk about.…We’ve got to stop being critical. We’ve got to stop standing [at a] distance from culture.…we actually need to be immersed into it.…We’ve got to help a generation of people get context for everything that they’re experiencing.…Once you begin to understand culture, God will begin to give you insight in how to actually deal within the culture and bring the authentic gospel (Eric Johnson 2016). How does Bethel envision this pervasive culture-cultivation? Central to the operation is Bethel Music, whose recordings sit regularly at the top of iTunes and Billboards charts, and whose YouTube channel draws millions of viewers annually. Bethel.TV broadcasts worship services, teaching segments, conferences, and other original content through a subscription service that costs $9.99 a month, or $19.99 a month for premium features. Bethel.TV is self-described as a “front row seat to all that God is doing at Bethel” and a meeting place for the “thriving community of revivalists… all across the globe.” Bethel hosts a variety of conferences each year centered on diverse subjects including music and worship; particular life-stages, such as children, single adults, and married adults; and specific career-professions, including education, business, and medicine. 23 Training and education for the lifestyle of this culture feature prominently, even outside of conferences. Besides BSSM, Bethel oversees a School of Technology, a Conservatory of the Arts, a Business School, an online learning center of their Global Legacy leadership network, and Bethel Christian School, a pre-­kindergarten through eighth grade school for youth. Common threads throughout descriptions of these various projects all highlight the importance of worship and, in particular, the God-encounter that is central to worship gatherings, as the means of fostering a kingdom culture in which all are committed to the “personal, regional and

A worship-rooted lifestyle 171 global expansion of God’s kingdom” in everyday life, as Bethel Business School (Bethel Business School 2020) explicitly aims. For example, Bethel Christian School advertises its interlacing the “academic standards” of education with the students’ call to “become world changers…[who] experience His presence.” “Worship” is listed as a core school subject. The Business School purports to enable students to “carry the presence of God into their environments” by “activat[ing] and equip[ing] entrepreneurial leaders to demonstrate the Presence and power of God.” Similarly, the medical conference describes its gathering as one where participants should “be ready to encounter Jesus and become a catalyst of His transforming presence” by joining “like-hearted professionals from around the world who are pursuing the practical manifestation of the Kingdom of God…” If numbers are a factor in measuring success, 24 Bethel is effective in motivating worshipers toward Christian practice by encouraging a worship-oriented lifestyle that affects their daily living: the local church boasts 11,000-plus members, its Bethel Music arm tops a variety of musical charts, its weekly podcast has twenty million-plus downloads a year, its annual report reflected over $60 million in income in 2018, and their conferences bring more than 25,000 people to Redding annually (Pierce 2019).

Some question Bethel’s vision This brief summary intends to illustrate Bethel’s vision of ethical practice, models for Christian action rooted in their worship platform and resulting lifestyle. Of course, some will find these practices ethically problematic and the notion that they are rooted in public worship unconvincing. Progressive or liberal Christian perspectives will likely find incongruous Bethel’s conservative political leanings and the notion that their vision promotes virtuous ethics or just living. Others will see the selling of “ministry” in a commercial space, such as Bethel.TV, WorshipU, and other Bethel programs, as more of the worst of evangelical televangelism and other religious marketing in which beautiful, wealthy and, mostly, white people are selling the “abundant life” God wants to offer all—for a price. Related, mainline Christians might look askance at a congregation that raises the bulk of its funds from sources outside of its members’ giving. Still, others will question Bethel’s non-profit IRS status, given its income sources and political advocacy. A simple Google search reflects that Bethel critics are easy to locate, and their disapproval of Bethel teachings and practices is broad. Like its theology of worship, Bethel has no theologically systematized approach to “Christian living.” While some criticize their vision, it is worth exploring for three particular reasons. First, as highlighted above, Bethel explicitly aims for a holistic method of Christian practice, of a “new breed” of “revival” living, that embodies actions that evangelicals might classically label as “evangelism” and “social ministry.” While Bethel remains decidedly conservative in its political leanings, this orientation does not preempt

172  Emily Snider Andrews certain social actions and services that are not typically associated with conservative evangelicals. Second, Bethel’s vision of social change and its methods for accomplishing transformation should be noted for how influential they have become, particularly during the past decade. Bethel lacks the infrastructure of traditional ecclesial models, like the Catholic Church, for instance. Roman Catholicism grounds its vision of Christian living in a systematized theology of liturgy and social justice. Their vision is promulgated in accredited universities and seminaries, and associated lobbying arms that together seek to influence Christian living and public policy. Nevertheless, Bethel (and congregations like it) have leveraged new media, structures, rituals, and networks to effect their “culture” and “lifestyle” in ways that give it an advantage, relative to traditional ecclesial structures. 25 Third, Bethel represents what musicologist Monique Ingalls refers to as a “networked mode of congregating [that] challenges boundaries between public and private worship, between worship and other types of religious activities…” (Ingalls 2018, 32). While certain Bethel practices remain similar to classic Pentecostal and evangelical modes of Christian faith, the glocal scale on which churches like Bethel operate identifies it as a new form of Christianity. Worship-rooted practices, actions, and projects like the ones described here indicate Bethel’s desire to go beyond a “ministry,” “movement,” “denomination,” or “organization” to create a culture that is adopted as a lifestyle by adherents. Sociologists Richard Flory and Brad Christerson identify churches like Bethel as a “new form of Christianity that could reshape the global religious landscape for years to come” due to their “influence through media, conferences, and their relationships with other individual leaders in religious and secular professions” (Christerson and Flory 2017, 11). According to Bethel’s own standards and perhaps, even, criteria utilized by some mainline Christian congregations, 26 it is difficult to challenge Bethel’s explicit connection of their worship and living—particularly in their official teachings. Worship is, then, a “root metaphor,” which, according to leaders, grounds the life, faith, and culture-cultivation of Bethel ministries, particularly through its ritual-practices of MWM. The congruence between the beliefs, worship, and life of those who adhere to and participate in Bethel’s vision invites a sympathetic analysis when evaluating the relationship between Bethel worship, God-encounter, and Christian practice. 27

A sympathetic proposal: evangelical construction of a worship-oriented habitus Part of the challenge in offering a clarifying perspective on renewalist evangelical worship rests in their reluctance to offer systematized and scholarly clarified models of theologizing. Christian leaders like those found at

A worship-rooted lifestyle 173 Bethel are much more likely to understand theological and religious work as active play, particularly through the practice of specific activities related to spirituality, experience, narrative, affections, and embodiment (Vondey 2018, 12). The embodied physicality of renewalist worship via MWM practices contributes to a deep sense of experiencing a divine-human encounter, a sacramentality, 28 that challenges the West’s classic penchant for systematic and constructive theological frameworks. Read sympathetically, evangelicalism ultimately results from an interlacing of both individual and communal embodiment in worship, from practices that are inherently material, physical, aesthetic, and social, and do not easily conform to rational and coherent methods of theologizing. Because it is embodied and performed in a form of worship that is embraced as a “lifestyle,” this style of sacramentality “offers the narrative structure—and the mood that underpins it—into which life-worlds and experiences can be inserted…” (Meyer 2004, 105). Adherents of MWM, like those found at Bethel, have a ritual practice that effectively forms the basic structure of their religious life. What’s more, worship becomes the space that is able to hold much more than what is properly considered “religious.” This is especially due to worship’s mediatization and realization in a style that embraces popular “lifestyle” culture, allowing for worshipers to see a wide spectrum of their lives as related to, and even centered in, the practices of worship, such that any talk about the identity of renewalist evangelicalism “outside of this framework is secondary” (Vondey 2018, 11–12). This is in keeping with readings of evangelicalism that see the group as manifesting a particular type of religious identity, a way of being-in-theworld, that is constructed through a number of music-centered worship practices that effectively promote “new spheres of activity, cognition, and being” (Mellor and Shilling 2014, 141). As a result, the worshiper comes to inhabit a world that is all-encompassing and taken for granted. A number of cultural theorists have commented on the increasing unstable, fragmented, and even contradictory nature of the contemporary person’s identity and self-construction. 29 Yet, the liturgically guided habitus of the evangelical worshiper has given way to a lifeworld that is more whole that minds the gaps between the ritual event and everyday life. Permeable boundaries enable the worshiper to live more fully into his or her faith-world, without the identity crisis that results in part from the highly segmented lives of contemporary people in postmodernity. Tanya Luhrmann posits a “participatory theory of mind” thesis, in which the evangelical attains the skill of hearing God in his or her thoughts (2012).30 To be sure, that kind of penetration affects the lives of worshipers in tangible ways, as Luhrmann demonstrates. But, the habitus thus created spans far beyond the psychological; the ritual event transforms everyday orientations, including personal, interpersonal, domestic, civic, and geographic spaces (Csordas 1997, 69–72). Because MWM and its overarching worship culture saturate the very “lifestyle” of its participants, transformation results in the kind of rituals that Roy

174  Emily Snider Andrews Rappaport describes as attempting “not only to regulate daily behavior, but to penetrate to the motivational bases of that behavior.…High frequency… may be instrumental in rooting whatever dicta are encoded in the ritual so continually and routinely in everyday life that they seem to be natural, or at least of ‘second nature,’…To abandon them…would be painfully self-­ alienating” (Rappaport 1992, 18). To borrow Judith Becker’s framework, this is the “habitus of listening” fostered in MWM, where self and community are surrounded by a porous, aural membrane, contributing to an inclusive reality in which meaning is made not only for the particular worship event, but for life more generally (Becker 2004, 85). This comprehensive view is made explicit in such talk of a “new breed” of revivalists at Bethel church, the artists who aim to “transform every sphere of society” (Dedmon 2012, 55), especially through their “global movement” music labels. This approach is more in keeping with H Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ the Transformer of Culture” than his “Christ Against Culture” (Niebuhr 1951), the latter of which might be more akin to classic descriptions of renewalist forms of Christianity, which are sometimes described as calling for “discontinuity in [the worshipers’] personal and social lives,…[and] in the cultural realm…Pentecostalism is frequently a culture ‘against culture’” (Robbins 2012, 12). Renewalists at Bethel, though, speak of the cultural work of MWM as being holistic and comprehensive, since revivalists are called to “shape culture,” bringing revival to “every realm of society” (Cummings 2016). Their habitus of listening has contributed to a soundscape that is, as Becker suggests of her model, both “private and public, interior and exterior, individual and communal” (Becker 2004, 85). A sympathetic analysis affirms Bethel’s engagement of public work as motivated, in part, by the lifestyle of worship their gatherings and its media-centered accoutrements support.

Lingering questions and critiques Bethel leaders speak explicitly and in the affirmative of the relationship between public worship and the worshiper’s resulting lifestyle. As I have aimed to briefly demonstrate, there are theoretical models that sympathetically clarify this relationship and take seriously the insiders’ claims and practices. Still, for outsiders, questions on the relationship between evangelical worship and ethics linger. As noted earlier, evangelicals themselves have found no consensus on “the good,” and any talk of their ethical state is particularly complicated in today’s hyperpartisan climate. What’s more, while evangelicals such as Bethel leaders explicitly and officially connect their “kingdom culture” lifestyle to their experiences of a God-encounter via MWM, some have questioned whether deep connections actually exist. Does the habitus of listening constructed by renewalists effect a liturgical God-encounter undergirding effort toward a “kingdom culture”? While classic visions of liturgy and ethics see the two spheres as

A worship-rooted lifestyle 175 mutually reinforcing one another (Saliers 1979), some might see the habitus of MWM and a kingdom lifestyle as actually competing. This critique rests in an understanding that, fundamentally, sees the God-encounter of MWM practice as chiefly inward-focused. It may effectively lead to holiness, to an efficacious “flow” experience, or the experience of becoming “undone,” to use insider Bethel-lingo, but not necessarily to ethics. This is particularly the case if ethics is defined by the public, world-impacting life of the worshiper. If the practice is chiefly an interior one, it can be difficult to trace and validate how this experience, even the intensely experienced, affectively sensed, efficacious God-encounter, automatically moves one into a larger paradigm of Christian living of “the good.” Thus, a valid question remains for further consideration: are there other motivating factors behind the “kingdom culture” and lifestyle-efforts that have little or nothing to do with public worship? For instance, the millennials that comprise the bulk of Bethel’s following are already leaning into a culture that values social activism, political action (especially post2016 US election), and societal change (Feldmann 2017). Large segments of this population are passionate about improving their world, one with which they are increasingly dissatisfied, and they no longer look primarily to traditional structures or institutions to call for action or effect change. “Millennials are quickly normalizing the change-making lifestyle—one in which cause engagement is embedded in their everyday lives and identity— while at the same time losing faith in government and other established groups to make a meaningful impact,” as described by one cultural commentator (Masuda 2017). Given this state, are Bethel’s “lifestyle” efforts motivated by cultural expectations that are already vital, more than they are an intrinsic outflowing of their worship theology and practice? Related is the view that understands Bethel’s moves as more of the same pragmatism that is said to have guided evangelicals historically in their faith-practice (Lathrop 1998, 533), rather than a liturgically centered Godencounter that provides the overarching metaphor for a particular faithworld. Certainly, evangelicals like those at Bethel have capitalized on new digital communication technologies, innovative financial and marketing strategies, and modern organizational structures that allow for its flourishing in American Christianity. As sociologist Peter Berger argued back in the 1960s, churches like Bethel democratize the sacred. The subjective turn evidenced through MWM practices and made possible by new media constructs grounds the reality of God in one’s feeling and, as it is assumed, everyone now has unmediated access to a full, authentic, and attractive experience of God. This, according to Berger, led to a competitive religious “market situation,” where religious groups “must organize themselves…to woo a population” by producing “results” (Berger 1969, 138–9). For some, then, the social economy, rather than the supernatural, provides a better clarifying framework for understanding the relationship between Bethel’s liturgical practice and lifestyle ethic.

176  Emily Snider Andrews These questions are not intended as a moral or doctrinal critique of either Bethel’s theology of worship or their vision of Christian living. It does suggest that there is a need for further exploration of the relationship between evangelical MWM practices and the rest of their ministry and faith-life efforts. Nevertheless, as this study evidences, it remains clear that evangelicals like those worshiping at Bethel espouse a worldview and corresponding lifestyle in which life’s meaning and identify is found in their faith, a relatively rare phenomenon in contemporary Western society (Pew Research Center 2018). This phenomenon especially results from the complexities of a faith-world that hinges on the evangelical’s encounter of God through the practices of MWM. The “successful” habitation of this world results, in part, from the holistic way in which evangelical leaders address adherents’ immanent reality, reducing tension between one’s social and cultural reality and one’s faith-world, leading to the worshiper’s understanding of the faith-world as the “real” world. In spite of evangelicals focus on the inner, spiritual self and what is, at times, an explicit insistence on unmediated access to the divine, 31 it is clear that one’s access to God and thus one’s faithful living is made possible via materials. 32 Without media such as MWM fostering these experiences, evangelical faith and its public practice would not matter much in our world; indeed, it may not exist.

Notes 1 Admittedly, the fluctuating focus of evangelicals on national political issues might call for modifications in both how outsiders understand the group and in how evangelicals narrate their own identity. 2 This is highlighted by the evangelical use of the term “worship” to refer to the congregational music practices of public worship, a move designating the evangelical’s penchant for understanding music as a means by which worshipers access God. 3 Jones reports that Johnson came to Bethel from a local congregation in a nearby town and accepted the position “on the premise that the church would support his…vision of revival, one that emphasizes God’s supernatural presence through signs and wonders.” The church lost a thousand members over this controversial agenda (Jones 2016, 36). 4 Jesus Culture began as a youth outreach ministry of Bethel Church under the leadership of youth pastor, Banning Liebscher. Liebscher launched a conference ministry in 1999, which evolved into an annual conference focused on public worship, eventually drawing thousands each year. In 2014, Liebscher was sent out from Bethel to Sacramento to plant a local church, effectively relocating the Jesus Culture ministry. Jesus Culture and its leaders maintain ties to Bethel Church, although they are distinct worshiping communities. Here, I highlight their origins as a Bethel “church plant,” one that maintains many theological, liturgical, and operational similarities as Bethel Church and has further bolstered Bethel’s influence. 5 In 2017, Jesus Culture hosted the “Jesus Culture Encounter Conference” in Sacramento, California, described as “a place to gather with people…to encounter God. . . for life changing experiences of His presence.” Later that

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year, Bethel Music hosted the “Heaven Come Conference” in Los Angeles, California, where they “explore(d) what it looks like for Heaven to come to earth.” 6 While maintained by several songwriters, this number rivals that of Chris Tomlin and the Hillsong Music Publishing label, who had eleven and sixteen on the CCLI Top 100 list, respectively. 7 One can find the now infamous YouTube videos that seem to show glittering clouds of material falling from the ceiling during the worship gathering at Bethel, glitter worshipers identify as “gold dust” and evidence of God’s “shekinah glory cloud” (Bethel TV 2011). 8 While not stated explicitly, it is implied in almost all uses of the term “­worship” surveyed here that this references the musical time of the public worship gathering. 9 Jenn Johnson, among other Bethel leaders, advocates the “rhema doctrine,” understood to refer to a specific revelation from God to an individual, usually occurring in public worship, and normatively associated with an emotional experience (WorshipU 2015). 10 Jenn Johnson describes a three-tiered progression of divine-human relationship. Upon being “saved,” one becomes an “acquaintance” of God and can recognize “who God is.” After pursuing God, the Lord becomes a “friend.” The ultimate goal is to become a “best friend” of God, the level of intimacy, chiefly attained through worship, where “God puts you on like a glove, so you that you don’t have a thought process…,” where God’s thoughts become your thoughts (WorshipU 2015). 11 According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, in 2017 Bethel enrolled more international students than any other comparable school (BSSM is a “vocational school”) in the country (U.S. Immigration 2017). 12 Worship is described as the foundation for the “atmosphere of the school.” 13 As quoted by one BSSM graduate, Henk Van Diest (see Rancano 2019). 14 Curriculum descriptions state that students will “learn to…‘do’ the Bible, how to practice His presence…” (BSSM n.d.). 15 Mark Galli’s editorial provides concise insight on this debate in e­ vangelicalism (Galli 2018). 16 Several have reported on Bethel’s civic engagement (See Mathews 2019; Avery 2018; Scheide 2019; Medina 2017; Duin 2017). To be clear, not all welcome Bethel’s service in Redding. Among critics, a frequent concern is Bethel’s lack of “separation between church and state,” an understanding that Bethel is engaged too deeply in civil affairs. 17 She later deleted the post. It has been preserved (see Woods 2016). 18 Out of respect for the LGBTQ+ community, Vallotton said that this sermon would not be archived on Bethel TV Podcast. 19 In his endorsement, Vallotton wrote: “Julie’s candidacy is motivated by divine providence.” 20 Vallotton stopped short of “endorsing” the candidate, although he spoke favorably of him throughout the interview. 21 Kris Vallotton describes the concept in his sermon, “Kingdom Culture” (Inspired Daily 2018). 22 So stated in Instagram marketing of Bethel’s Kingdom Culture Conference: “church was never meant to end in a room…but instead to change the world. Come get…empowered to be a world-changer…#kingdomculture19” (@Bethel 2019). 23 Examples of conferences and events include the worship conference, “Heaven Come”; the children’s conference, “Firelife School for Young Revivalists”; one for single adults, “Single Life Workshop”; and the marriage gathering,

178  Emily Snider Andrews











“Love After Marriage.” Examples of professional gatherings include one for educators, “Kingdom Educators Conference”; and for medical professionals, “Medical Healing Conference.” 24 And, according to Bethel leaders, numbers are an explicit measure of success. One reporter who gained access to Bethel’s 2017–2018 annual report notes church leaders’ emphasis on membership growth, income through a variety of sources, and campus expansion as explicit confirmation of success and “God’s faithfulness” (Pierce 2019). In 2018, Bethel Church recorded an annual income of $60 million, which does not include royalties from the books written by Bethel leaders, or the fees paid for leaders’ numerous speaking engagements. The bulk of funds in 2018 came from sources outside their congregation, i.e., not traditional “tithes and offerings.” 25 Sociologists Flory and Christerson posit that the methods of churches like Bethel provide a “competitive advantage in terms of growth, yet at the same time limit the possibility that these groups will have a powerful influence  on society over the long term.” This limitation results from Bethel’s ­“inattention to social structures that help to create a sense of belonging… and to focus the energy of the group in a way that…reliably influences longterm social change…” (Christerson and Flory 2017, 146). Their point is helpful, although I would suggest that Bethel actually is attempting to create ­“long-term” structure, particularly through its schools and its collaboration with p ­ articipant-leaders from non-religious disciplines. 26 Do not many churches measure congregants’ spiritual and ethical health by how well they live into the Christian vision officially espoused, especially in their public worship gatherings? 27 This standard, of “congruence,” is inspired by Johnson’s model, in his discussion of liturgical theology, method, and free church worship (Johnson 2019, 77–93). 28 Understood here to reference a comprehensive expression referring to human access to God’s presence in the world. Hall provides a concise introduction to this view (2004). 29 This was classically put forth by Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner in The Homeless Mind (1973). More recently, cultural theorist Stuart Hall described the composition of contemporary identity as consisting of “several, sometimes contradictory or unresolved, identities” (Hall 1996, 598). 30 In keeping with Luhrmann’s description, evangelicals learn to train their minds “in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God” (Luhrmann 2012, xxi). 31 The researcher’s taking seriously “insider” language and a world which is not one’s own is not to accept each perspective and claim at face-value. To only accept insider perspectives may be scholarly ambiguous. In this case, simply calling the experience “God” is clarifyingly misleading. 32 “Materials” here is understood broadly to include rituals, things, sounds, persons, and spaces.

References @Bethel. 2019. “church was never meant to end in a room…”. Instagram, April 15, 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/BwSzbbaAaVP/ Avery, Julia. 2018. “Advance Redding board member, Bethel member responds to ­statement.” ABC 7 KRCR News, April 24, 2018. https://krcrtv.com/news/­shastacounty/advance-redding-board-member-bethel-member-responds-to-statement

A worship-rooted lifestyle 179 Barnhart, Melissa. 2019. “Nearly 200 evangelical leaders slam Christianity Today for questioning their Christian witness,” The Christian Post, December 22, 2019, https:// www.christianpost.com/news/nearly-200-evangelical-leaders-slam-christianitytoday-for-questioning-their-christian-witness.html Becker, Judith O. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berger, Peter, Brigette Berger, and Hansfriend Kellner. 1973. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House. Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Anchor Books. Bethel Business School. n.d. “Bethel Business School.” Accessed July 20, 2019. https:// bethelbusinessschool.com/ Bethel Church. 2020. “Core Values.” Accessed July 20, 2019. https://www.bethel. com/core-values/. Bethel Music. 2020. “About.” Accessed July 20, 2019. https://bethelmusic.com/ about/ Bethel Redding. 2020. “Kingdom Culture and the Revivalist Lifestyle.” Accessed July 20,2019.https://bethelredding.com/get-involved/classes/kingdom-culture-andrevivalist-lifestyle Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry [BSSM]. 2020. “About.” Accessed July 20, 2019. http://bssm.net/school/introduction/. Bethel TV. 2011. “Glory Cloud @ Bethel.” YouTube. Video, 3:08. December 19, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvJMPccZR2Y&t=73s Christerson, Brad, and Richard Flory. 2017. The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders are Changing the Religious Landscape. New York: Oxford. Csordas, Thomas J. 1997. Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cummings, Tony. 2016. “Jesus Culture: Chris Quilala speaks about the revivalists’ album.” Cross Rhythms, January 29, 2016. http://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/ music/Jesus_Culture_Chris_Quilala_speaks_about_the_revivalists_album/57581/p1/ Dedmon, Theresa. 2012. Born to Create: Stepping into Your Supernatural Destiny. Shippensburg: Destiny Image Publishers. Duin, Julia. 2017. “Buzzfeed takes the time to dig into Bethel Church and gets this complex story right.” Get Religion, October 25, 2017. https://www.getreligion. org/getreligion/2017/10/25/buzzfeed-takes-the-time-to-dig-into-bethel-churchand-gets-this-complex-story-right Feldmann, Derrick. 2017. “Millennials are Engaging in Political Action Now More than Ever.” Vice, October 11, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gy57km/ millennials-are-engaging-in-political-action-now-more-than-ever Feucht, Sean. 2019. “CONGRESS.” Facebook video, 1:00. Accessed June 15, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/sean.feucht/videos/congress/462859250979318/ ———. 2019. “IN CASE ANYONE OUT THERE IS WORRIED.” Facebook video, 0:55. Accessed June 15, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/sean.feucht/ videos/2485708801676699/. Galli, Mark. 2018. “Evangelism Is a Work of Social Justice.” Christianity Today, September 13, 2018. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/september-webonly/keeping-social-justice-ministries-vibrant.html Hall, Christine. 2004. “Introduction.” In The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramentality, edited by Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall, xv–xix. New York: Continuum.

180  Emily Snider Andrews Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 595–634. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Heiligenthal, Kalley. 2015. “Soaking in His Presence.” Bethel Music Devotional, August 7, 2015. https://bethelmusic.com/blog/soaking-in-his-presence-kalleyheiligenthal/ Hensley-Clancy, Molly. 2017. “Meet the ‘Young Saints’ of Bethel Who Go to College to Perform Miracles.” BuzzFeed News, December 6, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed news.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/meet-the-young-saints-of-bethel-who-go-tocollege-to#.kdDrjdmP8 Ingalls, Monique M 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Inspired Daily. 2018. “Kris Vallotton 2018—Kingdom Culture—(Bethel Church Sermon),” YouTube. Video, 1:22:35, June 22, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aZYgxflJQFs Jesus Culture. 2020. “About Jesus Culture Music.” Accessed March 13, 2017. https:// jesusculture.com/music/ Johnson, Bill. 2013. “Building a Kingdom Culture.” Bill Johnson, January 14, 2013. http://bjm.org/building-a-kingdom-culture/. ———. 2016. “Opinion: Bethel Church Pastor Bill Johnson: Why I Voted for Donald Trump,” The Gospel Herald, November 10, 2016. https://www.gospelherald.com/ articles/67882/20161110/bethel-churchs-bill-johnson-why-i-voted-for-donaldtrump.htm Johnson, Eric. 2016. “Creating Context for Culture.” Bethel Podcast. Podcast audio, MP3 audio, 41:25, November 13, 2016. https://www.bethel.tv/en/podcasts/ sermons/episodes/205 Johnson, Todd E. 2019. “Liturgical Theology and Ritual Congruence.” In We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee: Essays in Memory of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, edited by Porter C Taylor, 77–93. Eugene: Pickwick Publications. Jones, Martyn Wendell. 2016. “Kingdom Come in California?” Christianity Today 60, no. 4 (May): 31–7. Lathrop, Gordon W. 1998. “New Pentecost or Joseph’s Britches? Reflections on the History and Meaning of the Worship Ordo in the Megachurches.” Worship 72 (6): 521–38. Lemley, David Aaron. 2013. “Liturgies of Word and Turntable: Social and Sacramental Effectiveness of Contemporary Worship Music.” PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary. Lepinski, Jon Paul. 2010. “Engaging Postmoderns in Worship: A Study of Effective Techniques and Methods Utilized by Two Growing Churches in Northern California.” DMin diss., Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. Longs, Herb. 2016. “Bethel Music’s ‘Have It All’ Becomes Worship Ministry’s Highest Billboard Top Album Debut.” The Christian Beat, March 21, 2016. http://www.thechristianbeat.org/index.php/news/1810-bethel-music-s-have-it-all-­ becomes-worship-ministry-s-highest-billboard-top-albums-debut Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2012. When God Talks Back. New York: Vintage Books. Martiínez, Jessica, and Gregory A. Smith. 2016. “How the faithful voted: A­ preliminary 2016 analysis.” Pew Research Center. November 9, 2016. https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-apreliminary-2016-analysis/

A worship-rooted lifestyle 181 Masuda, Rai. 2017. “Research Shows Millennials See Activism in Different Way than Previous Generations.” Achieve, March 15, 2017. https://www.achieveagency.com/ research-shows-millennials-see-activism-in-different-way-than-previous-­generations/ Mathews, Joe. 2019. “Can Bethel Church Make Redding, California, Heaven on Earth?” Zócalo Public Square, March 18, 2019. https://www.zocalopublicsquare. org/2019/03/18/can-bethel-church-make-redding-california-heaven-earth/ideas/ connecting-california/ Medina, Tiffany WongNoelle. 2017. “Redding City Council approves Bethel donation to keep Policing Unit.” ABC 7 KRCR News, April 19, 2017, https:// krcrtv.com/news/shasta-county/redding-city-council-approves-bethel-donationto-keep-policing-unit Mellor, Philip A., and Chris Shilling. 2014. Sociology of the Sacred: Religion, Embodiment and Social Change. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications Inc. Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “‘Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (2): 92–110. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1951. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper & Row. Parke, Caleb. 2019. “Pastors, worship leaders pray for Trump in Oval Office amid impeachment fight.” Fox News, December 11, 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/ politics/pastors-worship-leaders-pray-for-trump-in-oval-office-amid-impeachmentfight ———. 2006. “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals.” Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life. October 5, 2006. http://www.pewforum. org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/. Pew Research Center. 2018. “Where Americans Find Meaning in Life.” Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life. November 20, 2018. https://www.pewforum. org/2018/11/20/where-americans-find-meaning-in-life/ Pierce, Annelise. 2019. “The Really Big Business of Bethel Church, Part 1: Show us the Money!” A News Café, May 13, 2019. https://anewscafe.com/2019/05/13/ redding/the-really-big-business-of-bethel-church-part-1-show-us-the-money/ Rancano, Vanessa. 2019. “How Redding, California, became an unlikely ­epicenter of modern Christian culture.” Cal Matters, June 18, 2019. https://calmatters.org/ california-dream/2019/06/bethel-church-redding-california-modern-christianculture/ Rappaport, Roy A. 1992. “Ritual, Time, and Eternity.” Zygon 27 (1): 5–30. Robbins, Joel. 2012. “Transcendence and the Anthropology of Christianity: Language, Change, and Individualism.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 37 (2): 5–23. Ruth, Lester. 2002. “A Rose by Any Other Name: Attempts at Classifying North American Protestant Worship.” In The Conviction of Things Not Seen, edited by Todd E. Johnson, 33–52. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. Saliers, Don E. 1979. “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings.” Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (2): 173–89. Scheide, RV. 2018. “The Truth Behind Bethel’s Gay Panic.” A News Café, April 3, 2018. https://anewscafe.com/2018/04/03/redding/the-truth-behind-bethels-gaypanic/. ———. 2019. “The Interventionist: Bethel Pastor Kris Vallotton Tests the Boundary Between Church and State.” A News Café, March 19, 2019. https://anewscafe. com/2019/03/19/redding/the-interventionist-bethel-pastor-kris-vallotton-teststhe-boundary-between-church-and-state/

182  Emily Snider Andrews US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. n.d. “2017 All M-1 Schools by Number of Active Students.” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Accessed July 20, 2019. https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/data-All-M1Schools_2017.pdf Vallotton, Kris. 2015. “What Would It Look Like to Have a City Transformed by God?” Kris Vallotton, November 12, 2015. https://krisvallotton.com/what-wouldit-look-like-to-have-a-city-transformed-by-god/?fbclid=IwAR0W0oZsGcu2fJx Bog3nBuPIw0rrLDvJhd2xmUgkYxHaxA-bW0rab_U3vnk ———. 2018. “Opinion: Redding’s Bethel Church clarifies stance on LGBTQ+ proposed legislation.” Record Searchlight, April 27, 2018. https://www. redding.com/story/opinion/2018/04/27/reddings-bethel-church-clarifies-stance-­ lgbtq-proposed-legislation/558817002/. ———. 2019. “Sovereign Providence.” Bethel Podcast. Podcast audio, MP3 audio, 46:48, December 8, 2019. https://www.bethel.tv/en/podcasts/sermons/episodes/ 478 ———. 2019. “Awesome interview with Brian Dahle- help Facebook keeps taking this post down.” Facebook video, 7:09. Accessed July 17, 2019. https://www.­ facebook.com/kvministries/videos/2319261294792760/. Vondey, Wolfgang. 2018. “Religion as Play: Pentecostalism as a Theological Type.” Religions 9 (80): 1–16. Vos, Pieter. 2017. “Introduction.” In Liturgy and Ethics: New Contributions from Reformed Perspectives 33, edited by Pieter Vos, 1–15. Boston: Brill. Woods, Mark. 2016. “Bethel Church’s Beni Johnson backs Trump: Here’s why she’s wrong.” Christian Today, April 4, 2016. https://www.christiantoday.com/article/ bethel-churchs-beni-johnson-backs-trump-heres-why-shes-wrong/83293.htm Worgul, George S. 2000. “Root Metaphors and Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Age.” Questions liturgiques 81, (3): 184–97. WorshipU. 2015. “Hearing from God-Jenn Johnson.” YouTube. Video, 29:14. January 7, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4dZBeYLicA

10 Applied ethnomusicology in postmission Australian Aboriginal contexts: ethical responsibility, style, and aesthetics Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg Introduction In 1964, ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam wrote that the challenge of applied ethnomusicology was the tension that exists between the desire to uncover knowledge for its own sake and the aim to provide a solution to specific, practical problems. Sounding somewhat skeptical of applied endeavors, Merriam wrote: Ethnomusicology has seldom been used in the same manner as applied or action anthropology, and ethnomusicologists have only rarely felt called upon to help solve problems in manipulating the destinies of people… (1964, 43) By using the word “manipulating,” Merriam seems to imply that: (a) there might be some form of malintent involved on the part of the applied researcher or at the very least some unintended negative consequences which the researcher, in their enthusiasm to do good, may not foresee; (b) it is the researcher who is the manipulator; and therefore (c) those working with the researcher have no agency, power or authority to influence the applied course of action. Since Merriam’s statement and due to the influence of feminist theory, the field of ethnomusicology has moved away from the belief that disinterested research is possible or preferable over applied research. Various publications attest to the fact that if done sensitively, ethnomusicological research can help sustain and (re-)invigorate musical traditions, languages and other artistic practices. Theoretical discourse and case studies include Sheehy (1992); Harrison, Mackinlay and Pettan (2010); Swijghuisen Reigersberg (2010, 2011) Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Lloyd (2019); Harrison (2012); Barney (2014); Pettan and Titon (2015), and Schippers and Grant (2016), to name but a few. Applied ethnomusicology is now a thriving approach to exploring musical cultures and solving problems. Sheehy notes: If ethnomusicology is an approach to the study of the music of the world’s peoples, then applied ethnomusicology is an approach to the

184  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg approach to the study of the music of the world’s peoples. It is a larger frame of reference, a state of mind, something more fundamental that informs all one’s actions as an ethnomusicologist. (1992, 323) As an “approach to an approach,” applied ethnomusicology is therefore more akin to a method rather than discipline or subdiscipline. In her 2012 article, Harrison formulates an epistemological basis for understanding a complex series of applied ethnomusicologies. She explores their diversity as a conceptual and discursive approach to research and practice. Referring to Hofman’s (2010) work in Yugoslavia, Harrison reminds us that when employing collaborative, intersubjective ethnomusicological research methodologies, the socio-political positioning of the research subject interacts with the researcher’s subjectivities and articulations (2012, 508). As I and others have also pointed out, these subjectivities and articulations are then captured in academic writing and the articulation and performance of new knowledge and must be carefully examined as part of any academic and/ or applied endeavor (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1999; Nakata 2007; Tuhiwai-Smith 2012; Corn and Gumbula 2006; Swijghuisen Reigersberg 2019; Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Lloyd 2019). As I will demonstrate, the ethics of socio-political positioning and knowledge performance, intentionality and the motivation behind creation, formulation and dissemination of Christian knowledge and music are especially relevant to researchers active in applied, post-colonial, and post-mission contexts in America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa where arguably the colonizer never left. Indigenous communities in these nations often assert that there is no “post” to the “colonialism” and they are still subjected to oppressive regimes, which fail to acknowledge Indigenous contemporaneity, diversity, rights, and the value of Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing.1 Concerns that researchers might be meddling in and damaging local Indigenous communities through their research are not uncommon still, especially when work involves a focus on Christian topics, given Christianity’s close links with colonization and the forced removal of children. What I shall illustrate, however, is that any superficial similarities between approaches to Christian music facilitation and my own applied ethnomusicological practice as research in Hopevale, Northern Queensland, must be carefully examined. Comparisons should address questions of motivation and intent in order to better understand the context in which Christian musical worship operates and how this might affect negotiations related to performance style(s) and the ethical implications of stylistic choices made in differing research contexts. We must heed Geertz’s advice and make room for those thick descriptions, which allow us to understand that similarities of practice may in fact mask much deeper differences related to intent and conversations and robust research enquiries must complement observations (Geertz 1993).

Applied ethnomusicology 185 I suggest here that while applied ethnomusicology generally may have been vindicated of its “manipulative” charge, applied research in Christian post-mission contexts has not. Through the lens of my own atheist perspective and applied, collaborative research approach to facilitating the Lutheran Australian Aboriginal community choir of Hopevale, Northern Queensland (2004–2005), I will show, however, that it is possible to ethically accommodate Indigenous Christian beliefs, histories and the “ethics of style” (Rommen 2007). I illustrate it is possible to work ethically even when changes to musical style are introduced in Christian contexts using an applied, ethnomusicological practice as research methodology. I demonstrate how I approached the introduction of new styles and performance aesthetics in the highly politicized context of post-mission Australia when performing for a diversity of audiences with the Hopevale Choir and how this impacted positively on community members and singers alike. I also propose that in applied post-mission, (post)-colonial Christian contexts the ethics of style married with the ethical responsibilities inherent in the facilitation of musical performance (Warren 2014) and the relationship between ethics and authenticity (Taylor 2018 [1991], and Bereza in this volume) have an important role to play in how we rationalize the ethical implications of applied research in Christian contexts generally. They allow us to think through questions of academic secularism, atheist and Christian diversity alongside questions of authenticity, intentionality, and professional and personal motivations, and their implications for Christian musical worship and the academy.

The ethics of style First, it is instructive to explore how I intend to use concepts such as “ethics” and “style” in the Hopevalian context and to demarcate my areas for discussion. This will avoid disappointing those hoping to find alternate readings of these concepts here. Like Rommen (2007, 35), I am not attempting a properly philosophical analysis of ethics. Neither am I trying to discover a single, essentialist ethical truth. In fact, I believe there to be many ethical truths when we interpret style in a performative context. Therefore, this chapter does not present a universal narrative of ethical or aesthetic value related to choral performance and its ethical implications. 2 Additionally, it is not necessarily appropriate to apply Western universalizing frameworks to Australian Indigenous contexts such as the one I will present here. What I will illustrate, however, is how the aesthetic dimensions of art could not drive my approach to style alone. My own personal, learnt desire for a Western choral sound and aesthetic did not always align with my ethical responsibility to facilitate my Indigenous choir well. Instead, at times, I had to accommodate local performative traditions, aesthetic preferences, and musical abilities to ensure choristers were able to showcase their musical prowess and perform their Christian choral repertoire with pride (see also,

186  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg Swijghuisen Reigersberg, 2010, 2012b, 2020). As in Rommen’s Trinidadian context (2007, 37), it would be better to conceive of ethics as the antecedent of aesthetics in the Hopevalian context. In other words, if something is good and ethical, it will override aesthetic and stylistic concerns. Ethical considerations must take precedence over other forms of judgement. Within “style” as a concept, I include a broad range of performative characteristics such as dress, tempo, timbre, language, and choice of repertoire in relationship to performance contexts. This broad definition of “style” and a variety of performative considerations allow me to explore how Hopevalian choristers chose to present themselves in front of different audiences and how their agency and preferences informed my approach to choral facilitation dialogically. Style, broadly defined, can illustrate how the performance of Aboriginal Christian identities is ethically negotiated in different contexts. As Rommen points out, musical style can be deployed to achieve certain goals informed by ethical concerns (2007, 35). In the Hopevalian context for example, an ethical reason for performing Christian hymnody and repertoire was to showcase Indigenous choral talent to counter the negative or romanticized stereotypes of Indigenous people often seen in the Australian media (Langton 1993; Ginsburg 1993). Another ethical goal was to share the local traditional language Guugu Yimithirr with non-Indigenous audiences to represent Indigenous ownership, survival, and history of the local area.

Hopevale history, religious politics of style, and ethics The Hopevale community is an old Lutheran mission settlement in tropical northern Queensland, Australia. It was created in 1886, lies 45-km north of Cooktown, and is now managed by an Aboriginal council. The population largely consists of Aboriginal people of Guugu Yimithirr descent who are fourth- or fifth-generation Lutherans. Following Rommen (2007, 34), I would argue, therefore, that any account of Hopevale history must include and take seriously local religiosity and Christianity in order for it to be accurate. In fact, I would agree with Stewart (2001) that scholarly secularism is somewhat of a Western scholarly impediment and in its more militant form does nothing to accommodate Indigenous Christian agency and understandings of their beliefs and how these are rationalized in relation to their local histories. Local Indigenous Pastor George Rosendale put it in this way: See, the Aboriginal people always spiritual. They never worshipped wood and stone like the China man or worshipped animals like the Indians. No. They worshipped this unseen Creator Being. …I said to the hierarchies: “How can you say, that God was never in Australia?… And tell us Aboriginals that God was in Australia?” Now I said: “That’s bullshit.”…I said: “God been in Australia since His Creation. If He made

Applied ethnomusicology 187 the world He was here. He was with our people everywhere.” …None of you white people could ever convert a person, whether they are white or black. No! Only Holy Spirit does that.” (Interview, March 23, 2005) Many older community elders at the time of my research were also members of the Stolen Generation: children of Aboriginal descent who were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal families3 and communities as a result of state and national protectionist policies such as the Queensland’s 1897 Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Under the Act, Queensland Aboriginal people could legally be confined on mission stations and reserves. This legislation aimed to “protect” Indigenous people from the harms of settler society such as venereal disease, alcohol misuse, slave labor, and sexual exploitation. The relationship between Hopevale’s history as a mission and its musical practices has not been unproblematic. Historically, hymnody was used by missionaries to discredit what they perceived as “non-Christian” practices and create rifts between Indigenous elders and their mission-born children (Swijghuisen Reigersberg 2012b). As a result, and unlike in other areas in Australia (Magowan 2001, 2007; McDonald 2001) formal Christian worship and hymn-singing in Hopevale contain no references to pre-mission understandings of Christianity. Local, Indigenous scholar and politician Noel Pearson writes: [w]hile painting, song and dance do have a place, because of the lack of strong public traditional beliefs, these do not occupy a significant place in that culture. They essentially exist as “curios” in Hope Vale’s culture and they will remain so as long as the culture denies them cultural or religious significance (1986, 8).4 In Hopevale, Lutheran and Anglican hymnody, Christian choruses, Country and Western, Country Gospel, Reggae, and R&B are most frequently engaged with through performance, composition, and listening. There is no pre-colonial song material being performed regularly, although during the bi-annual Laura Dance Festival children are taught dances to perform. These though, for the children, carry little religious significance. Most of the other genres are consumed in English, although the local language Guugu Yimithirr is still spoken and used in church hymnody. Hopevale has a long tradition of harmonized congregational hymn-andchoral singing, which was introduced during the community’s enforced removal in 1942 to Woorabinda.5 Hopevalian church organist, June Pearson, commented: “Quite a lot of the old fellas they learnt to sing in the churches in Woorabinda, because they sang a lot to stay happy to come back home” (November 29, 2004). After the community’s return to Hopevale in 1949 a group of men and later women formed the nucleus of a group of singers who would lead the

188  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg congregational and choral singing for special occasions and visitors. Historical accounts demonstrate that Hopevale had a lively choral tradition (Lohe 1977, 14–15). A fieldwork transcript of a speech given by local Indigenous Pastor George Rosendale from the December 2004 Hopevalian Christmas celebrations illustrates how deep in some cases the connection with Lutheranism is, and what it means to local elders in terms of choral and hymn singing: You know, to me, we have lost that pride in ourselves … who we are. We’re Lutherans from Germany. We have to sing all English … ­[correcting himself] no German songs. We have no more pride in ourselves. Praise God in our Language! This very moment, throughout the world, every nation, country, thank God for the Savior in their Language. Why not we? I think it would be good if we could revive that, especially at times like this, when there’s joy in our hearts, to know that we have a Savior. Why not thank him from our hearts… I think we Aborigines of today need to look at ourselves, and try and find out who we are. We seem to copy white man everywhere. We’re just like copy cats. We want to act like them and get drunk and sit in the pub on high stools and cause ourselves suffering and pain, and that’s not the way to go… [Sings “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in Guugu Yimithirr] Choral singing and congregational singing, therefore, are very much part of the Hopevalian musical tradition and engaged in by the community either as participants or as listeners. When I therefore arrived in Hopevale, far from introducing a new musical style or faith as the community’s new choral facilitator or “choir lady,” I was in fact engaging with a rich history of familiarity with Christian hymnody and the Christian gospel. As an atheist it was I instead, who was introduced to the finer points of the Christian doctrine during my discussions with local Hopevalians and Pastor, and it was the community who through song and engagement with me hoped that I would eventually join them in Christian fellowship as a convert. It became quite clear to me that it would be ethically inappropriate and neo-­colonialist to enforce my atheism during musical facilitation while in Hopevale. Equally, it raised interesting questions relating to the choir’s political motivations when engaging with style during my participatory action research (PAR) project, which included practice as research using choral facilitation.

Participatory action research (PAR) in Hopevale and ethics My decision to use PAR6 as a methodology stemmed from my desire to form a reciprocal relationship with members of the Hopevale community. In return for their collaboration to help me fulfil the requirements of my PhD research, I would offer them something of their choice in return. My applied

Applied ethnomusicology 189 ethnomusicological project asked what the influence of Christian choral singing is on the construction of Australian Aboriginal identities. Themes included the role of music in missionization; colonization and Australian Aboriginal Christianity, diversity and agency in post-mission contexts. To answer my question, and in consultation with Hopevalians, my methods included facilitating the local choir, interviewing members of the choir and spending time with their families and other community members undertaking (music-related) community activities. I also used standard methods such as participant observation, ethnography, filming, photography, and kept a field diary and performance journal to document my work with the choir. My desire for reciprocity was informed by the Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIATSIS] 2012). These stipulate under principle twelve that “Research outcomes should include specific results that respond to the needs and interests of Indigenous people” and “Researchers should be aware that research outcomes of interest to Indigenous peoples, including any community and individuals directly involved, may differ from those envisaged by researchers” (2012, 16). Principle eight also states that “consultation and negotiation should achieve mutual understanding about the proposed research” and the act of consulting should not merely be “an opportunity for researchers to tell the community what they, the researchers, may want.” (2012, 11). To determine what local goals might be, I sent a letter and my CV to Hopevale, asking if the community would assist me with my research and what I might do for them in return. Based on this letter, Hopevalian church elders, the Hopevale Community Council and local Pastor at the time decided to engage me as a choral facilitator, or, as they called me, “choir lady.”

Christian choral facilitation, agency, intentionality, and academic rigor Initially, it had not been my intention to facilitate a Christian choir. Perhaps ironically, although choral singing had historically been associated with the Lutheran church, it was the local Pastor at that time, a white non-­ Indigenous man, who initially wanted the choir to be a secular one. Its main role was to have been to provide a secular past-time for younger community members. In fact, the Pastor initially actively discouraged me from affiliating with the church too closely and was at pains to emphasize that the choir should not be a church choir. Despite the Pastor’s announcements, however, although younger members of the Hopevalian community enjoyed listening to choral music, they associated the genre with their female elders and the church. They themselves much preferred other genres such as R&B, Country Gospel, Hillsong, and Reggae. As a result, younger people did not want to join the choir. So, after several failed attempts at hosting rehearsals in the local community

190  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg center with younger singers, I was advised by senior elders to move my rehearsal venue to the church and work with older members of the community, many of whom were regular church attendees. The youngest member of my choir at the time therefore was 55 years of age and out of the fourteen regular members only one was male.7 Membership was fluid and dependent on family commitments, fishing opportunities, and performance occasions. Although I had arrived in Hopevale with a box full of various show songs, easy classical pieces, and arrangements of one or two spirituals, the choir’s repertoire ended up being a mix of old Protestant favorites from The Australian Lutheran Hymnbook with Tunes (1950); the ecumenical Together in Song (Ecumenical Songbook Committee, Australia 1999); local Pastor Rosendale’s 1986 Gunbu Guugu Yimithirrbi which contained hymn and chorus translations; several items from the Christian song collection Altogether OK edited by Robert Mann (1996), and the classroom choral series of Doreen Rao 1993. Some of the above material the choir already knew well and enjoyed singing, such as the beautiful hymn Ngalan Gadaayga (King of Creation, translated in Guugu Yimithirr by Rosendale 1986) whereas other songs I introduced such as the South African song Marching in the Light of God, which was included in the Altogether OK series, endorsed by the Lutheran Church of Australia (Mann 1996). This mix of songs, old and new, brought to the fore some interesting aesthetic and stylistic phenomena which I will discuss later. The choice of specific songs was mainly determined by singer requests, preferences, and, in some cases, musical ability. The choice of suitable repertoire was very much an iterative process of myself trying out new music and determining what was liked, what suited the choir’s ability, and what might be appropriate for the contexts in which we performed as an ensemble, which included funerals, fundraisers, church services, tourist locations, an Indigenous rehabilitation center, and a correctional facility, among others. I am not a Christian or music minister and have no deep knowledge of liturgical music or the Christian liturgy itself to help me make liturgically informed musical choices. I was therefore also more than happy to have others advise me. When the Pastor asked the choir to perform during church services, for example, it was he who determined which musical materials might be most appropriate for a service, which I then trialed with the choir. Unlike Marchesini and others in this volume, my work was also not religiously motivated or designed to aid worship in the first instance, although it will have done so, in some contexts and for Christian listeners and choir members themselves. Neither was my intention to impose my atheism on the Hopevale Community Choir, as doing so would be reverse colonialism. Instead, what motivated me was to 1 Answer my thesis question: “How does choral singing impact on the construction of Christian Australian Aboriginal identities?” using practice as research choral facilitation methods.

Applied ethnomusicology 191 2 Facilitate and conduct the choir well and create musical pleasure and community pride for the singers and their audiences both within and external to, Hopevale as initially envisaged by the Pastor. 3 Provide a service of their choice to my host community as a form of reciprocity for their help with completing my thesis research and my interviewing, filming, and general “being around.” 4 Adhere to the 2012 ethical guidelines of the AIATSIS mentioned above which advocate for a reciprocal approach to research which addresses local Indigenous needs, concerns, and interest. The underlying intentionality of a musical undertaking is critically important in terms of the ethics of style. Warren, referencing Cross’s “floating intentionality” (2012, 23) reminds us that “music’s meanings” and, I would add, the intentions of performers, “appear intimately bound to the contexts” in which they are experienced, but nevertheless remain flexible, to be negotiated with and by others (Warren 2014, 180). This floating intentionality meant that my motivations and intentions were not always fully understood by the singers or our audiences and academic colleagues. Many people assumed my work was religiously motivated since it was often performed in contexts of Christian religious significance. My reciprocal, applied practice as research methodology, has been likened to ethnodoxology, which it was not. My underlying intentions were not religious and my performative choices not determined by a specific exegesis of the Christian liturgy. Instead, my decision to conduct the choir was guided by levels of musical competency and a desire to promote wellbeing (Swijghuisen Reigersberg 2010, 2012b and 2020). This, as it transpired, involved conducting what turned out to be a choir singing mostly Christian repertoire. My identities as a (n atheist) researcher and choral facilitator also do not run in parallel to one another. I am always both a researcher and facilitator at once. It is not possible to “switch off” my reflexive ethnographic training and thinking when I perform music of any kind. In fact, my taught reflexivity helped me better understand the musical needs of my Hopevalian choir assisting me with contextualizing our musical and religious differences, and how to respond to these. Although a senior researcher prior to my fieldwork did suggest I should not declare my atheism, I felt this would be tantamount to covert research, disingenuous and disrespectful to my host community. Some audiences and colleagues have also wondered why, when they discover I am an atheist, I should choose to conduct a Christian choir, given Christianity’s links with colonialism and Indigenous Australian oppression. They feel my choice of method could be read as disingenuous too, and by implication less ethical. In response, I argue that by not responding to the community’s request for a music facilitator I would be denying the possibility of Aboriginal conversion and their agency to decide whether they would like to sing in a Christian choir. Although my interviews indicated that church attendance

192  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg and, in some cases, choral singing were compulsory in Hopevale in the past, during my time as facilitator there between 2004 and 2005, neither were compulsory nor enforced.8 I was therefore not perpetuating or ­enforcing oppressive practices. The community did also not display evidence of what Im (in this volume) calls “historical amnesia” where politically contentious issues are rendered inaudible. Choir members and their families were aware of the historical damage organized religion has done to their community and how historically the more authoritarian Pastors enforced what was an oppressive mission regime. Hopevalians I spoke to, though, professed to believing in the doctrine of equality, and often displayed a desire for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as opposed to the more militant stance sometimes taken by liberation theologists. It was remarked that due to many community members also having white ancestry, reconciliation was desirable, although not always enacted due to the community’s turbulent history. My atheism then, once known in the community, was also helpful in that I was not by default associated with the church in Hopevale during my time there, despite conducting what became a Christian choir. This fact may have encouraged some Hopevale community members to be frank about their views with regards to the local history of the church and the conduct of its various Pastors, in particular. On many occasions, however, my Christianity was erroneously assumed, leading to some occasionally awkward conversations. I therefore suggest here, it is always useful to question what the underlying intentions and motivations of a researcher and community are and establish the context in which Christian music facilitation occurs. This will allow the field of ethnomusicology to retain its academic rigor through applying Geertz’s thick description, ensuring observations and interpretations remain insightful and informed by local practice and context, not unexamined assumptions.

The ethics of style in Hopevale As an atheist then, I initially knew almost none of the repertoire which I eventually taught, including the three-part harmonies to accommodate a choral setup of soprano, alto, and bass. There were no tenors due to a shortage of men or extremely low female voices and most female singers had in the past already been allocated a voice range, so indicated themselves which parts they preferred to sing. I myself joined the alto section when the choir performed songs in Guugu Yimithirr, temporarily relinquishing my role as choral facilitator and allowing jointly nominated choir members known for their singing prowess in Hopevale to lead the singing. I taught all songs by rote as nobody in the choir could read music.9 My specific approach to teaching by rote also led to some changes in vocal timbre, which did not go unobserved. The timbral changes facilitated discussions

Applied ethnomusicology 193 between myself and community members centering on vocal aesthetic preferences. Through these conversations, it became possible to question whether I was indeed “meddling” with things I should not, or whether the musical changes I introduced were perceived as positive additions to the local musical style and therefore good and ethical. Other performative choices centered on the use of language. The use of the local language Guugu Yimithirr was a defining feature of the local style choice and while Indigenous Pastor George Rosendale vigorously advocated for the use of Guugu Yimithirr in song, other members of the community were slightly more ambivalent and preferred to allow the performative language to be determined by performance context. During an interview with chorister Auntie Daisy Hamlot, I discussed language use and her own preferences. MURIEL SWIJGHUISEN REIGERSBERG: We

should do a few Guugu ones, actually for the tour. DAISY HAMLOT: Because them people in Cooktown like us singing in Language [in Guugu Yimithirr]. MSR:  Well, you should do it more often. Remember what Pastor George said at the Carols by candlelight? DH:  What he said now? MSR:  He said we need to sing in Guugu more. What do you think about that? Do you like singing in Guugu? DH:  Yeah…I don’t mind. MSR:  Do you prefer it to English? What’s easier for you? DH:  I like it in English because, some words I don’t know too, in Guugu you know. MSR:  The ones in the yellow book [Pastor Rosendale’s translated hymns 1986]? DH: Yeah. MSR:  Is it old Guugu, or too difficult? DH:  Yeah some words there I can’t pronounce it properly see? Most of them I know, [but] the hard ones… (February 4, 2005) During the same interview, Daisy also said: DH:  They

[the predominantly white audience at the Carols by Candlelight ceremony] liked that “Silent Night” we sang, in Guugu!… MSR:  So, on the whole, do you prefer singing in English, would you say? DH:  Yeah. (February 4, 2005) This is an important example of how within one community stylistic preferences differ and the implications of style changes will vary. As an applied researcher, I had to be mindful of this to ensure I did not inadvertently cause political upset through choosing the wrong type of language or genre.

194  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg Choices on what genre and style to use were also influenced by my own musical background. I, for example, could not play the guitar or piano and am classically trained. This somewhat restricted my ability to introduce other forms of musical engagement. Many choir members, for example, enjoyed Country and Western, Country Rock, or Country Gospel, but with a few exceptions, disliked reggae, hip hop, and R&B music due to the profanities often used in song texts, which did not accord with the choir’s desire to be perceived as upstanding senior Lutheran elders. Instead, therefore, I opted to introduce South African Christian songs from the Altogether OK bundle. The choir’s knowledge of and liking for older hymnody and their enthusiasm for singing older songs did not preclude them being open to the introduction of newer materials, and their stylistic preferences with regard to choosing new Christian repertoire were mainly driven by a desire to learn something new rather than making a political statement. MURIEL SWIJGHUISEN REIGERSBERG:  Now

tell me, what did you find interesting and nice about choir? DORA DEEMAL:  Learning African… VIOLET COBUS:  …African songs, yeah DD: Songs VC:  Different songs hey? VC:  We enjoyed them very much MSR:  What was it about the African ones you liked the best? DD:  All of them. MSR:  Was it because they are lively or…? VC:  Yes, it is…sounds lively. MSR:  Did it make you also feel happy on the inside when you were singing them? DD: Yes. VC:  Always, we happy. MSR:  But what about the old hymns? You still enjoy singing those as well? DD AND VC: Yes. MSR: What about those new ones that Pastor wanted us to learn from Together in Song (1999) what did you think of those? VC:  That was… DD:  Lovely too…something new you know? MSR:  So really it’s something new you are after? VC AND DD (LOUDLY, IN UNISON):  Yeah! (June 3, 2005) Statements such as these reassured me as an applied researcher that I was not intervening in a way that was likely to cause political upset through asking the choir to perform in styles with which they were not yet familiar or disliked. Elements of style, which were not as easy to maintain, were vocal timbre and aesthetic. As I taught the choir by rote and I myself am a classically

Applied ethnomusicology 195 trained mezzo soprano, it was observed that I passed on some of my vocal timbre and vibrato to the choir, through oral transmission and using vocal exercises. DAISY HAMLOT:  Yeah,

and the other day [laughs] my niece was saying that I was shaking. “Hey that’s because Muriel was shaking,” you know, your voice. You know you shake [laughter] MURIEL SWIJGHUISEN REIGERSBERG:  So, you sounded like me, did she say? DH:  Yeah, and she think I was putting it on, but it just you know… MSR:  Came out, did it? DH:  Yeah. I notice that my voice shakes a little bit. MSR:  So when niece commented on it, what did she think of it? Did she like it? DH:  Yeah, they liked it, only they think I was, you know, imitating you [laughter]. (February 4, 2005) Although this unintended change in vocal timbre was received well by many audience and choir members, not all in the community were in favor of the change in sound or blending of styles. For example, an absence of vibrato was associated by some with historical renditions close to their hearts. My field diary contains the following excerpt: When Philip [Baru], Henry [Warren] and I sang [the carol “Silent Night”] together Philip said it did not sound right. He felt our voices were different…He also commented on my wobbly voice (vibrato) and the fact that I could sing the notes clearly and make jumps from high to low, whereas he and Henry could not. Philip also suggested that Henry had a good voice (which he does) but that he needed to work on his notes because the little dips at the beginning of phrases did not sound right. It was interesting, this conversation, because it demonstrated that Philip was highly aware of the different sound qualities of everyone’s voice. Mine is an operatic, classically trained lyrical mezzo sound with a natural, untaught, vibrato. Philip wanted me to stop singing with “the wobbly voice” and to sing the carol “like in the old times” without the opera sound. Philip himself is a tenor and he has a very robust outdoor voice on the Country [and Western] side, but he seems to strain his voice in the upper register. Henry has a good baritone but needs to work on his intonation. Henry has problems pitching notes sometimes, but once he is on the right one, he can hold a tune well. When the three of us sing together, it does sound rather odd and acoustically, we don’t blend well, which is, I think, what Philip was referring to. (Fieldtext, November 26, 2004)

196  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg Neither Philip nor Henry were able to join the choir due to work commitments and in Henry’s case the fact, he lived in Cairns mostly so I was not able to benefit from their insights more often. However, it did make me wonder whether vocal timbre was deterring some people from joining the choir and the exercises were introducing too much change, for some. General attendance at our concerts, however, was excellent and the feedback the ensemble received was extremely positive, leading me to assume that although the community was not unanimous in their liking of the new vocal aesthetic, I had not unwittingly caused harm or touched on some timbral taboo. Another element of performance aesthetic, which seemed hard to change was tempo. My fieldnotes read as follows on the subject: During Sunday’s service it became clear that some of my own observations were similar to those being made by my neighbors on the church benches. During one of the songs Dora turned to me and asked in a whisper: “Are we dragging?” We were in fact, so I said: “Yes we are, but it does not matter much now.” And it did not. This was a church service, not a choir concert, but she was right in observing the songs were getting slower and slower. I have noticed over the past month through church attendance that almost every song is performed very slowly here in Hopevale, no matter what its original tempo indications (if there are any), time signatures or religious topic. Every song feels and sounds like a funeral dirge to me. I suppose I could call these observations on tempo and hymn choice evidence of local performance practice. (Fieldnotes, November 1, 2004) The same, as it turned out, was true for the local choral style, which tended to get slower, and slower as a song progressed, incorporating many glissandi (another local performance feature), especially when older Guugu Yimithirr renditions of hymns were performed.10 The local Hopevalian choral performance aesthetic, however, was deemed very pleasing to local listeners. Youngsters explicitly said they did not want to join the choir because it was for gamba gamba (older women) and the songs were “too slow,” but professed they enjoyed listening to the choir singing slow songs. I therefore opted to compromise and decided that older, well-known hymn favorites might be sung at a slower tempo, using glissandi, and that for newer African repertoire, I would try to keep a steady, faster tempo. Tempo also had little to do with the ensemble’s desire to emphasize the hymn texts to a greater or lesser extent and the topic of the liturgical meaning of a text was not something I discussed with the singers or Pastor. My own classical Bel Canto training led me to encourage Italianate vocal techniques, which prescribe how singers should create and modify their vowels and consonants according to vocal register so as not to interfere with the vocal apparatus, and support the voice with good breath control. As a facilitator, my primary interest was to teach the singers new vocal techniques

Applied ethnomusicology 197 and exercises to help them perform their repertoire well and avoid vocal damage. As an atheist, my concern for the religious meaning of the text was secondary to my concern for vocal health and sound quality.11 Tempo, vocal timbre, linguistic choices, musical genre, and (the absence of a) liturgical exegesis were all influenced by my own musical training and atheism alongside the local aesthetic. The generational and historical preferences and practices I observed, documented, interpreted and tried to follow helped me facilitate the choir in a way that created musical enjoyment, pride, and wellbeing. This, for the singers and some of their audiences, will have included an element of fellowship through their shared Christian faith.

Conclusion Far from merely “manipulating people’s destinies” then, as Merriam would have it, applied researchers must undertake a delicate balancing act, which ensures local performance traditions are understood in their historical and political contexts. When an applied researcher engages dialectically with Christian repertoire and Indigenous singers, they must understand the need to balance aesthetic choices of style with ethical considerations. This last point is pertinent to both scholars of faith and those who, like myself, are atheists, since ultimately it is not what the researcher thinks is right to perform because it sounds good, but what singers want to perform because it is good. In the applied, PAR context, the ethical responsibility lies not only in what the ethical standards of musical meaning are, but also what standards through style and performance are being created in response to the needs, abilities, and sensitivities of others, including audience and community members. Those who believe that it is ethically more neutral to not influence Christian musical practices where they already exist as a tradition and are actively engaged with, forget that musical genres and styles are not unchanging, or monolithic. As Warren points out “Imposing a single meaning is an exercise of power that is closed to negotiation and discussion with others, and thus closed to ethical responsibility” (2014, 65). Gaining a better insight into multiple meanings and consequently Indigenous Christian diversity through applied approaches is in fact ethically desirable. This was certainly the case in my own situation where I had been asked specifically, and without prompting, to take up the post of “choir lady.” The multiplicity of musical styles and meaning in Hopevale allowed me to better understand local diversity and Indigenous concepts of Christianity, which in turn improved my approach to choral facilitation while enhancing choir and audience satisfaction. The above shows that applied research in Christian, post-mission contexts, although laden with ethical pitfalls, can have positive outcomes. To achieve these a researcher should be willing to embrace Indigenous stylistic diversity, agency and the reality of the Indigenous Christian faith. Applied

198  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg processes, instead of seeking to manipulate, must include a sensitively contextualized approach designed to create musical and social opportunities, which seek to enhance wellbeing through dialogical agency, mutual respect and curiosity. This may mean, in some cases, setting aside one’s own beliefs (or absence thereof) in order to accommodate the musical aesthetic and faith of others in order to help foster a mutual understanding of the ethics of style.

Notes 1 Assertions that colonialism persists are corroborated by studies which show that many Indigenous populations still suffer from disproportionately high levels of incarceration, racism, early mortality including death by suicide and social, economic disadvantage (cf. Carson, Dunbar, Chenhall, and Bailie, 2007; and Tatz, 2005). 2 Some might argue it would also be inappropriate to use Western philosophers and ethicists here, since as Riches and Douglas (in this volume) point out, European philosophers and ethicists were also demonstrably racist. 3 Hopevalian oral history indicates that not all children were forcibly removed (Pearson 1986: 42). Some were left at the mission by their parents to ensure they remained out of harm’s way. Hopevalians recognize this and prefer not to view missionization as an entirely negative aspect of their history. 4 This situation is vastly different to the one encountered in the Northern Territory by Magowan (1999, 2001) among the Yolngu. Here, the Indigenous understandings of Christianity are practiced in formal worship and Yolngu have been able to synchronize their spirituality with Christianity in diverse, locally appropriate ways, based on theological, emotional and embodied understandings of their local geographical area and all it contains (Magowan 1999, 2001, and 2007). 5 Woorabinda lies in the state of Queensland, west of the city Rockhampton. The climate is considerably colder there. The community lost a quarter of its members in the first month due to an influenza epidemic to which they had no biological immunity. The epidemic was exacerbated by the fact that Hopevalians were removed from their homes without warning and thus had not been able to adequately prepare themselves for the different climate. 6 Trotter and Schensul (1998: 693) define the PAR as the “continuous interaction of research with the action through joint researcher/ actor data collection, analysis, reflection; and use. In other forms of research…, the means (research) leads to an end (an evaluation, a program, a policy change, etc.) In participatory action research (PAR), the means is the end, and the conduct of research is embedded in the process of introducing or generating change. PAR is, first and foremost, locally specific and is intended to further local goals with local partners.” 7 The absence of male singers can be attributed to work commitments away from Hopevale and the high mortality rate of men at an early age, either through ill health caused by social disadvantage, substance misuse or sadly, suicide (Swijghuisen Reigersberg, 2012a). Younger men, like younger women, also preferred different genres such as reggae, hip hop, and Country Gospel or Country and Western to choral hymns. 8 In fact, the church was finding it difficult to attract younger community members even though all people I spoke to, young and old, professed to being Christian.

Applied ethnomusicology 199 9 In at least one case, I suspected a singer of not being able to read text either, as they consistently held their hymn text sheet upside down, but knew all the songs by heart. 10 This contrasts with Bereza’s fundamentalist context (this volume) where slow tempi and drawn-out vocalizations can be perceived as too virtuosic, detracting from the text and Christian message, especially during vocal solos. 11 It is entirely possible that my teaching may have led to clearer diction and audiences being able to better understand the words of songs. I had no way of verifying this though at the time.

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200  Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg Lohe, Paul. 1977. “Focus on Hopevale.” The Lutheran 11 (16): 14–15. Lutheran Church of Australia. ed. 1950. Australian Lutheran Hymn-Book with Tunes. Adelaide: The Lutheran Publishing Company. Magowan, Fiona. 1999. “The Joy of Meaning: Resacralising ‘The Sacred’ in the Music of Yolngu Christianity and an Aboriginal Theology.” Anthropological Forum 9 (1): 11–36. Magowan, Fiona. 2001. “Syncretism or Synchronisity? Remapping the Yolngu Feel of Place.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12 (3): 275–90. Magowan, Fiona. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Aboriginal Australia. Oxford and Santa FE and Crawley: Oxford University Press and School for Advanced Research Press and University of Western Australia Press. Mann, Robert, ed. 1996. All Together OK: A Collection of Christian Community Songs. Adelaide: Openbook Publishers. Marcus, George E, and Michael MJ Fischer. 1999. Anthropology as a Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. 2nd edn. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. McDonald, Heather. 2001. Blood, Bones and Spirit. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Nakata, Martin. 2007. Disciplining the Savages and Savaging the Disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Pearson, Noel. 1986. Ngamu-ngaadyarr, Muuri-bunggaga and Midha Mini in Guugu Yimidhirr History (Dingoes, Sheep and Mr Muni in Guugu Yimidhirr History): Hope Vale Lutheran Mission 1900–1950. History Department. Sydney: University of Sydney. Unpublished BA Thesis. Pettan, Svanibor, and Jeff Todd Titon, eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Doreen. 1993. We Will Sing: Choral Music Experience for Classroom Choirs. New York, London, Toronto, Bonn, Sydney, Tokyo: Boosey and Hawkes. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. “Mek some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Rosendale, George, trans. 1986. Gunbu Guugu Yimithirrbi. Hopevale: Hopevale Lutheran Congregation. Schippers, Huib, and Catherine Grant, eds. 2016. Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective. New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press. Sheehy, Daniel. 1992. “A Few Notions about Philosophy and Strategy in Applied Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 36 (3): 323–36. Stewart, Charles. 2001. “Secularism as an Impediment to Anthropological Research in Secularlism, Personal Values and Professional Evaluations ed. Charles Stewart.” Social Anthropology 9 (3): 325–28. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2010. “Applied Ethnomusicology, Music Therapy and Ethnographically Informed Choral Education: The Merging of Disciplines during a Case Study in Hopevale, Northern Queensland.” In Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches, edited by Klisala Harrison, Elizabeth Mackinlay, and Svanibor Pettan, 51–74. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Applied ethnomusicology 201 Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2011. “Research Ethics, Positive and Negative Impact, and Working in an Indigenous Australian Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 20 (2): 255–62. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2012a. “Christian Choral Singing in Aboriginal Australia: Gendered Absence, Emotion and Place.” In Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music, edited by Fiona Magowan and Louise Wrazen, 85–108. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2012b. “‘We are Lutherans from Germany’: Music, Language, Social History and Change in Hopevale.” Aboriginal History 36: 99–117. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2019. “Ethical Scholarly Publishing Practices Copyright and Open Access: A View from Ethnomusicology and Anthropology.” in Whose Book is it Anyway? A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity, edited Janis Jeffries and Sarah Kember, 309–45. Cambridge, UK: OpenBook Publishers. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E. 2020. “Choral Singing in Australian Indigenous Christian Contexts and its Implications for Intergenerational Wellbeing.” In The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing: Volume 3 Wellbeing, edited by Rachel Heydon, Annabel Cohen, and Daisy Fancourt, 327–41, New York, London: Routledge. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel E, and Jessie Lloyd. 2019. “To Write or not to Write? That is the Question: Practice as Research, Indigenous Methodologies, Conciliation and the Hegemony of Academic Authorship.” International Journal of Community Music 12 (3): 383–400. Tatz, Colin. 2005. Aboriginal Suicide is Different. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Taylor, Charles. 2018 [1991]. The Ethics of Authenticity (originally published in 1991 under the title The Malaise of Modernity, an extended version of the 1991 Massey Lectures). Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. Trotter, Robert D, and Jean J Schensul. 1998. “Methods in Applied Anthropology.” In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by H Russell, Bernard, 691–735. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Alta Mira Press. Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin, Otago University Press. Warren, Jeff, R. 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. New York and Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press.

11 Singing together as global citizens: toward a musical ethic of relational accompaniment Maren Haynes Marchesini

Introduction This song, “Ameni,” originates in South Africa. This song was a part of a New Song movement in the Catholic Church in 1960s South Africa, writing new church music in indigenous styles. I teach the song in two parts—a rhythmic bass line with vocables and a flowing melodic line with the word “amen”—using call-and-response and gesturing with my hands to show the direction of the pitches. We rise to our feet and I tell a brief story, I learned this song from Pastor Diakonda Gurning who learned it through the Lutheran church’s Glocal Musician-Educator training. As he tells it, black and white Christians met to worship together in the aftermath Apartheid’s brutal regime of segregation. The community gathered met with a tense peace. Pain still hung in the room. Black and white congregants did not feel ready to greet each other with hugs and kisses as the community of Christ. They settled on a compromise, greeting one another with an adapted Kiss of Peace: I invite a friend up to help demonstrate. We hold our palms parallel to one another, rolling our hands from fingertip to wrist in a kind of high-five. With this gesture, it is possible to greet one another intimately with grasped hands, but also to greet someone with minimal contact. It is even possible to pantomime the gesture without touching one another at all. I now invite singers to choose the part they most enjoy singing, and we layer the parts together, low first, then high. As we settle into the song, we begin to move, greeting one another with this adapted Kiss of Peace. Through the song and gesture, we move and music together in a complex

Singing together as global citizens 203 dance, allowing a variety of levels of intimacy and contact in our room, held loosely together as a community across our varying experiences, identities, and relationships.

The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship The scene above describes a yearly tradition from a worship service during the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship’s Annual Conference. This is the Foundation’s flagship event, held at a camp and conference center in Eastern Washington over Memorial Day Weekend. The conference features workshops, recreational activities, a keynote speaker, and opportunities to connect and network. Community and congregational music weaves a thread through the Annual Conference with group singing initiating every plenary session. The conference planners also organize two worship services, Saturday evening and Sunday morning, where the majority of attendees gather. For the past four years, I have organized or participated with the Krista Foundation’s music and worship for the annual conference. I then joined the foundation’s member board, the Colleague Council, in 2017 with the intent of formalizing and clarifying our organization’s engagement with music, worship, and other expressive arts in alignment with the organization’s broader ethical commitments and framework. In this chapter, I unpack the considerations, processes, and methods I employed to discern an ethics of congregational musicking for this particular and unique community, and richly describe some examples of what I, or we, consider ethical musicking for our context. In a turn toward autoethnography, this chapter represents my first attempt to bring together my parallel professional competencies in ethnomusicology and music ministry which, respectively, privilege observation and practice, inquiry and action, and description and prescription. My background as an ethnomusicologist affords me tools as an observer. In my dissertation chronicling music at a Seattle megachurch, I utilized participant-observation and interviews to discern the community’s identity, purpose, and values, and translated emic discourses through broader themes and theories in American music and Christian worship. In my parallel life, I have served in music ministry at churches and seminaries for over a decade. There, I hold core theological commitments in common with the congregation and clergy, and commit my professional life to communicating, ritualizing, and inculcating these commitments to my choir members and congregants in a way that is emotional, enchanting, and worshipful. Each of these roles—researcher, practitioner—informs the other. As a scholar of Christian Congregational Music, albeit largely around traditions not my own, I understand the value of gathering with people week after week to sing songs, recite liturgies, wear vestments, and move in familiar patterns, understanding intimately that these ritual actions matter. As a

204  Maren Haynes Marchesini music minister, I integrate an understanding of ritual efficacy, entrainment, boundary-drawing, polyvalence, and heterodoxy, even as I hold commitments to progressive Christian doctrines. Yet, in spite of this co-influence, I have not yet undergone any rigorous evaluation or investigation of their intersections until now. A helpful bridging frame between ethnomusicological theory and ministry practice is outlined by Leonora Tubbs Tisdale in her homiletic text Preaching Local Theology as Folk Art. Drawing from subcultural theory, Tisdale claims that each congregation has a distinctive idiom, symbols that communicate a particular, contextual subcultural social identity (Tisdale 1997, loc. 254). Tisdale advocates for an ethnographic approach to pastoral leadership, drawing from methodology and theory in anthropology, encouraging preachers to discern the sociocultural makeup of a congregation inclusive of seemingly superficial aspects (buildings, songs, demographics) and the deeply held values, ethos, and worldviews animating the community (ibid., loc. 50). Tisdale calls this process congregational exegesis, extrapolating from the process of Biblical exegesis, the study and interpretation of the Bible. Congregational exegesis encourages church leaders to take a posture of “priestly listening,” defined by Leander Keck as “listening/hearing in solidarity with the people” (ibid., loc 197). Priestly listening transforms clergy into dialogic partners with the congregation, rather than chief agents, co-creating worship and theology as a “proclamation of local theology and folk art that is integrative and capable of capturing the imaginations of its hearers” (ibid., loc 1196). The hermeneutic of interpretation begins with the community and continues in dialogic process with the leaders, sacred texts, and with other relevant resources like poetry, movement, and music. This exegetical process of studying and interpreting the congregation is meaningful to a music minister, as well. Dialogic listening enables the curation of mutually significant worship music and experiences concordant with the community’s sense of self and values, but is also capable of enlarging, clarifying, and redefining the story of the community through cultural texts, including songs, postures, perspectives, leadership arrangements, pedagogies, and other aspects of congregational ritual. A background in ethnomusicology provides useful tools for such an exegesis, utilizing multiple cultural texts and senses to discern the deep story of the community—particularly elements that initially seem to lie outside the contours of music-making—and responding intentionally with a meaningful music culture. This chapter represents a congregational or community exegesis of the Krista Foundation, listening to community members and our texts, discourses, stories, and our struggles, both acknowledged and buried, to discern an ethics of music-making. Cobussen and Nielsen (2012) broadly define “ethics” as an orientation toward “doing the good thing,” or “doing the right thing” (16), recognizing that the bounds and definitions of ethics

Singing together as global citizens 205 are varied and situationally contingent. In this chapter, I aim to elucidate how a community exegesis illuminates a rich contextual ethics. I then show how I, as a music minister, have subsequently curated worship in order to ritualize our ethical commitments as a dialogic partner. The process of creating an ethical framework for use in our music, worship, and expressive arts has involved significant collaborative work with other colleagues in the conference planning team and colleague council (especially Richard Murray, Ambar Sabino, and Ursula Magsayo) with our staff (especially program staff Stacy Kitahata and Rediet Mulugeta), and interviews with colleagues. Together, my collaborators and interlocutors represent diverse ages, races, ethnicities, gender and sexual identities, religious backgrounds, and work or career paths. Because I am an active and invested member of this organization, though, my own perspectives as a white, middle-income, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender woman carry significant weight in this chapter. While my voice is dominant in the resulting essay, I hope my views represent those of my collaborators and interlocutors.

Exegeting the community: our stories, our people, and our struggles Community exegesis is a fitting image, as Tisdale draws it from the context of cross-cultural and global ministries, traditionally referred to as missions, a field and historical context at the root of the Krista Foundation’s core identity and contemporary challenges. The Krista Foundation takes its name from Krista Hunt-Ausland who, at age 25, died suddenly and tragically in a rollover bus accident while volunteering with a faith-based social service mission in Bolivia. Krista’s parents, Jim and Linda Hunt of Spokane, Washington, USA, founded the Krista Foundation in 1999, honoring the commitments Krista made during her life by supporting and networking young adults in the Pacific Northwest who dedicate a year or more to full-time service or volunteer work in conjunction with commitments to faith. Colleagues are encouraged to attend events and retreats, and receive a $1,000 grant to use for self-development, broadly defined. The inaugural cohort of Krista Colleagues consisted of nine young adults, including Krista’s widow, Aaron Ausland, recent Krista Foundation Board President, and her best friend, Valerie Norwood, the current Executive Director. Each year, a new cohort of fifteen to seventeen Colleagues joins the foundation, each hand-selected by the Foundation’s staff and boards through a nomination and interview process. In 2020, the Krista Foundation has grown to over 300 Colleagues. Colleagues serve both domestically and internationally with a variety of organizations including faith-based volunteer organizations such as the Lutheran Volunteer Corps and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and secular programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and a variety of local projects. As a condition for membership, prospective

206  Maren Haynes Marchesini colleagues must articulate the role of Christian faith in motivating their service, though in recent years, broader definitions of faith are also accepted. The Krista Foundation staff and colleagues grapple with a broader paradigm of service that shares a history with colonial missions. The era of colonialism and Protestant mission coincided and conspired, with missionaries from Europe traveling worldwide with the objective of converting and “civilizing” people, inclusive of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. This violent project of Christian mission, particularly in the Americas and global South, was thus “tantamount to a cultural imperialism operating in the interests of colonial power” with missionaries seeing themselves as “the intermediary of the highest level of culture” (Lund 1981, 116). Through Christian mission, the cultural work of colonialism—transforming and often suppressing traditional religion, styles of dress, political and social hierarchies, and so on—proceeded. Missionaries inculcated European cultural values, such as “technology, rationality, and religion” while characterizing non-European cultures as backward or traditional, “awkward, savage, and irrational” (Babo 2017, 124). The continued practice of Christian mission in the present era remains contingent on this colonial history, albeit in transformed ways. Persistent inequalities between European-descended people and cultures and the “majority world” of non-Western nations and peoples have produced a “helping” missions industry among European-descended American Christians, predicated on transactional, mono-dimensional charitable giving. For instance, mission groups from North American churches regularly travel to the global South to participate in short-term projects like house building, the creation of wells for clean water, and other projects. Many of these mission projects proceed from an understanding that the receiving country’s people—often black and brown, and of lower economic classes— are poor, incapable, and dependent, while the travelers—usually white and upper-middle class—are resourced, able, and solution-bearing. The structure of the projects reflects unequal power dynamics, often with limited input from local people, and shallow relationships built between locals and travelers, which reinforce and exacerbate inequalities (Brooks 2015, 143). The Krista Foundation joins a broad movement among Christian denominations and mission organizations in reforming the ideology and structure of mission work to resist historical colonial paradigms. Among Catholics, the Second Vatican Council, convened in the 1960s, foregrounded “solidarity and partnership as expressions of mutual encounter, exchange, and enrichment,” encouraging the flourishing of indigenous cultural practices (Pope Paul VI 1965). Protestants, following Scottish Presbyterian missionary Lesslie Newbigin, convened the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, resulting in a commitment to value the “multi-racial, multi-national, multi-ethnic community” amid mission projects (Lausanne 1978). Confession, atonement, and repair of the systemic undermining of non-Western societies under Christian mission continues.

Singing together as global citizens 207 Yet even with these transformations of ideology, the global church remains highly segregated along fault lines forged in the colonial era, and such discourses still often imply a white “us” and a non-white “them.” The Krista Foundation’s genesis in the milieu of Christian mission shares this history and structure. From its founding until the mid-2010s, the Krista Foundation recruited a near-majority of white, Christian-identified members, many of whom participated in a “helping” service ministry in some way. For example, I, a college-educated white woman from an upper-middle class family, served with a Presbyterian mission organization aiding Latinx immigrants entering the United States from Mexico with no documentation, primarily providing food, clothing, minor medical care, and shelter. Many of my cohort peers, entering the Foundation in 2007, share this kind of background and much of our Board of Directors first became active with the Krista Foundation under this paradigm. However, the Foundation critically reevaluated this demographic and cultural homogeneity and historical missions’ orientation. In the past five years, just under half of the new colleagues identify as people of color, changing the power dynamics of the “server-served” relationship. Further, the Foundation prioritized recruiting colleagues who serve in their own local contexts. The organization’s discourses and training resources have shifted, too, with intercultural competency, as well as post-capitalist, post-colonial pedagogies, animating the broader perspectives of many Colleagues, especially as they transition from full-time volunteers into “global citizens,” an emic discourse within the Krista Foundation that imagines a year of service expanding into a broader lifelong commitment. Today, the strategic goal of the Krista Foundation reads, “transforming service experiences into lives of service leadership” through mentoring, a colleague community, transition retreats, and intercultural and leadership development (Krista Foundation 2019, “Mission, Positioning Statement, Values”).

Community exegesis: a messy “us” Taken together, the Krista Foundation community coheres as a messy and loosely networked “us.” The source of many internal conflicts—largely hidden from the majority of our colleagues, but affecting the staff and Board of Directors—originates in divergent and evolving approaches to mission and service. The demographic shifts and resulting cultural realignments among our incoming colleagues have not fully translated to concomitant changes in institutional culture. In recent years, six women of color in our organization resigned from the Board of Directors and staff, including Kitahata and Mulugeta. These significant departures reveal the Foundation’s institutional perpetuation of a culture of white supremacy, instrumentalizing and consuming black and brown people in overworked, under-resourced positions with minimal executive power. This has left a wake of hurts, angers, and fractures that affect the coherence of our community and endanger our

208  Maren Haynes Marchesini future. Beginning in March 2020, the Krista Foundation leadership took an organizational pause to thoroughly examine these dynamics, and the future of the organization is unknown. This deep story of cultural transformation within a Krista Foundation at the precipice of radically different orientations toward mission and service, as well as an increasing diversity across many intersecting axes, are aspects of our culture that I hold with open hands as a curator of worship and music experiences. Our ethos—our character—arises from a deep story of diversity. “We” are a dispersed community, gathering in different iterations annually, and assembled longitudinally over the course of 20 years. “We” are rooted in a colonial missions’ framework, but actively reevaluating our origin story through post-colonial critiques and our own lived identities. “We” are still majority-white, but we are also racially and ethnically diverse across a wide variety of cultural and economic backgrounds. “We” have a variety of physical and intellectual abilities, and are neurodiverse. “We” have roots in a Christian tradition, but we span divergent (and sometimes conflicting) ecumenical expressions, and are also very unconventionally Christian, as well as non-Christian. “We” are largely liberal, progressive, and radical, but “we” also have politically and theologically conservative and moderate members. “We” span a rainbow of gender identities and sexual orientations, and are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, heterosexual, and cisgender. “We” have served in placements all over the country and world, and we bring along the stories and perspectives of people to whom we feel accountable. “We” are intergenerational—when “we” assemble, “we” are mostly young (in our 20s and early 30s), but older colleagues, mentors, and Board members span into “our” 70s. This complex story of a collective self must be held aloft when we curate music or community ritual aimed toward representing the many intersectional diversities of our community. In so doing, music and community ritual provides a space to practice skills of mutuality, exchange, and intercultural communication through modes that feel connectional and spacious, polyvalent and joyful. It also assures each person occasionally feels uncomfortable, unrepresented, or challenged by aspects of art and spirituality, a tension we seek to embrace if it is centered in equity.

Emic discourses of ethics: reappropriating service, practicing accompaniment Our deep story of intersectional diversity animates our emerging ethical discourses in the Krista Foundation. Stacy Kitahata joined the Krista Foundation staff in 2011 and led the foundation in endeavoring a reappropriation of the term “service” from its roots in colonial mission. In its place, the Foundation today emphasizes a paradigm of service ethics, which encourages colleagues to “change the dominant narratives and values of service through reflection and practice opportunities, to sustainably

Singing together as global citizens 209 and responsibly serve our communities” (Krista Foundation 2019, 21). In an interview with the author (2019), Krista Colleague Douglas Orofino emphasized that this orientation to service is fundamentally relational and mutual, rather than instrumental or transactional. Orofino, a music teacher in Portland, Oregon, spent his service year working in housing projects with Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos in Honduras, and described mutual and relational service thusly: If you’re working with folks in housing […] it’s like, let’s sit down at the table and have a conversation. I’m going to eat with you and we’re going to talk together, and it’s more than just here’s some stuff that you maybe do or don’t need, because I didn’t bother to ask (Orofino 2019). Service ethics encourage a deep engagement with other people and communities, learning and responding to their perspectives, stories, and felt needs. In this definition of service, space opens for deep encounters with people who are different from oneself in a way that fundamentally changes one’s interactions with and perspectives toward others across many axes of difference. Colleague E West, who served as an interfaith community organizer with the United Church of Christ’s Justice Leadership Program, defined service ethics simply as, giving unto others through time, talent, and treasure in an interview with the author (2019). For West, service ethics encompass a posture of relationality characterized by humility, empathy, mindfulness, compassion, self-awareness, curiosity (defined as a willingness to learn), open-mindedness, and collaboration. Giving is not a mono-directional nor transactional act, but space for encountering others with willingness to interrogate the self—to learn and change as a result of encounters with the Other. Colleague Chasity Jones’s story demonstrates the power of service to reorient perspectives toward the Other. Jones was raised in a conservative Baptist family in Louisiana, but experienced a radical change in her worldview while serving with the United Methodist Church’s Global Mission Fellows program in Seattle as an Interfaith advocate and organizer. During her service year, she encountered people of many faiths, genders, sexual orientations, and political viewpoints, but the major catalyst for her transformation occurred during an anti-racism and anti-­ oppression workshop that introduced her to theories of systemic and institutional racism. The workshop left her, as a black woman, stunned and angry, realizing she had only previously understood racism on an individual level, leaving her tacitly identifying with white communities. According to Jones, “this gave birth to a new consciousness of identifying strongly with my community,” and a commitment to doing “everything I can to improve our experience in this country for black people.” This perspective grew, extending toward many diverse marginalized groups. According to Jones,

210  Maren Haynes Marchesini At the same time I was growing in my pro-blackness, I was growing in my [compassion for] immigrants, [and] the LGBTQ community. I had a moment where I realized, especially in the LGBTQ community, that we are both fighting for liberation. I don’t want to be a part of hindering someone from their liberation, especially when mine is so important to me. By embracing and nurturing parts of her own story previously neglected, she grew in compassion for people she once feared and rejected. As Jones’s story demonstrates, many colleagues serve in cross-cultural contexts, whether domestically or internationally. Thus, the Krista Foundation staff provides resources for nurturing colleagues’ growth in intercultural communication. Kitahata utilizes the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, developed by sociologist Milton Bennett, which proposes a continuum of increasing sensitivity to cultural difference (Hammer, Bennett and Wiseman 2003, 423). All colleagues, staff, and board members regularly take Bennett’s Intercultural Development Inventory, a questionnaire that determines an individual’s placement along the intercultural sensitivity continuum. The Foundation’s events, mentoring community, and Colleague Council and Board meetings regularly include training modules in intercultural competency. Kitahata contends that volunteer service involves meaningful experiences across difference and, with continued development, aid in moving people further along the continuum. Per Bennett’s model, intercultural competency ranges from a monocultural mindset, where a person is entirely unaware of cultural differences, to a multicultural mindset, where a person is capable of moving adeptly from one cultural context to another (see Table 11.1). Kitahata’s hypothesis that colleagues’ service experiences and training help develop their intercultural competencies is born out in the results of a decade of surveys. In April 2018, the Krista Foundation Board of Directors, staff, and Colleague Council all placed between minimization and acceptance, with the Council leading toward acceptance by a small margin. Prioritizing service ethics and intercultural competency, the Krista Foundation claims a fundamental ethic of accompaniment, drawn from Latinx liberation theology. As Colleague Douglas Orofino explained to me, “the idea of accompaniment and walking with people is the pillar of what the Krista Foundation means.” In Krista Foundation resources, accompaniment is defined as, “walking together in solidarity that practices mutuality and interdependence,” a definition borrowed from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Global Mission resources (Krista Foundation 2019, 19). Accompaniment provides a richly layered metaphor for building a framework of musical ethics. This concept of accompaniment originates with Archbishop Óscar Romero in the 1970s who long served the Catholic elites in El Salvador but began to turn his attention to the campesinos, rural peasant farmers.

Table 11.1  Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, adapted from the work of Dr. Milton Bennett by Kristina Gonzalez. Utilized by the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship Colleague Council and Board of Directors, and provided to the author during training. MONOCULTURAL MINDSET MINIMIZATION View others as basically “like us” or believe others operate on some basic set of values Learn more about one’s own culture and avoid projecting cultural values onto others

ACCEPTANCE ADAPTATION INTEGRATION Acknowledge and Ability to “take the Sense of self includes respect cultural perspective” of the movement in difference and see another to behave and out of different complexities of differently in other cultures difference cultures Avoid being a victim Look at the world Link cognitive of cultural through the lens of abilities to behavior confusion another without to achieve “natural” losing one’s cultural behavior in more ground than one culture

Singing together as global citizens 211

DEFENSE DENIAL View the world as Characteristics: “us” and “them” Disinterest and Become more avoidance of tolerant and difference Developmental Task: recognizing Recognize commonalities differences escaping among cultures one’s notice

INTERCULTURAL MINDSET

212  Maren Haynes Marchesini Instead of evangelizing, he began to listen and understand their perspectives, relationships, which catalyzed Romero’s transformation (Watkins 2019, 84). As a civil war raged in El Salvador, which pitted campesinos against ruling elites, Romero urged fellow clerics to unequivocally take the side of the poor saying, “Accompany them. Take the same risks they do” (ibid.). According to liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, accompaniment requires a practical stance of solidarity, “placing one’s life alongside others for the common purpose of addressing injustice,” and demands not a “generous relief action,” but a common building of a new, mutually liberating social order (ibid.). Thus, the ethic of accompaniment grows out of postcolonial Christian theology. Theologian Roberto Goizueta centers an ethic of accompaniment around “popular” Latinx conceptions of Jesus as an incarnation of God, embodied and in-dwelling in human community, who “reveals to us not only who God is (theology) also who we are (anthropology)” (Goizueta 1995, 67). The existence of Jesus’ real human self in the midst of horizontal relationships animates the idea of accompaniment. According to Goizueta, Jesus “is the one who accompanies us in our suffering and whom we, in turn, accompany in his” (ibid.). Relationality is not an abstract concept, but a physical, embodied reality—an intimacy that may be understood by the metaphor of standing with or walking with. Because relational accompaniment roots in lived experience, it does not demand a “belief in” Jesus Christ, but rather a commitment to mutual conversation, deep listening, and responsiveness across difference—accompaniment is a practice of intercultural competency and service ethics.

Music and an ethic of relational accompaniment As an example of an ethic of accompaniment extracted from its theological root, academics Tomlinson and Lipsitz advocate for their discipline of American Studies to take a stance of accompaniment with marginalized communities in US society, defining it as “a disposition, a sensibility, and a pattern of behavior” understood through two key metaphors: 1) Walking together as a “community of travelers on the road,” and 2) “accompaniment as participating with others to create music,” each of which “offer devices for individuals from different backgrounds with different experiences, perspectives, and interests to recognize and reinforce each other’s dignity by working together” (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013, 10). In the ambiguously sacred and secular interrelationship of these metaphors, a musical ethic of accompaniment relevant to the Krista Foundation context arises (ibid., 9). Accompaniment, as flesh and blood relationship, begins with an acknowledgement of music as a richly textured human activity that carries and expresses layers of embedded social relationship. The turn to understanding music as a relationship resists the objectification of music, or a reliance on products and “quick fixes,” like curating the

Singing together as global citizens 213 “right” repertoire, as the main locus of a musical ethics. As Nathan Myrick elucidates in his dissertation around music and ethics, music itself has no inherent ethical agency (Myrick 2018, 102). Christopher Small’s 1998 neologism musicking points us back to music as an action, at once created and interpreted by people (Small 1998, 9). To discover an ethics of music requires a turn to the primacy of people as the progenitors, practitioners, adapters, and interpreters of musical pieces, instruments, genres, and other “objects” or artifacts. Accompaniment as a musical practice demands a mutual musical listening, resonant with a framework of aural ethics proposed by Cobussen and Nielsen (2012). Because the act of listening requires a focus of attention predicated on “openness and curiosity,” the authors argue for a musical ethics rooted in the concept of hospitality, drawing on the ethical framework of Emmanuel Levinas (among others). They propose that “the attentiveness inherent in adopting a hospitable, caring attitude creates a space between music and listener where ethics can happen” (ibid., 10). In congregational music-making, however, each participant is both a music-maker and a listener, opening a space for hospitable exchange among gathered participants. Lipsitz and Tomlinson’s description of accompaniment augments this idea of aural ethics. They explain, In music, to accompany other players entails more than simply adding new sounds to the mix. Accompaniment requires attention, communication, and cooperation. It means augmenting, accenting, or countering one musical voice with another. […] Sometimes accompaniment means saying less so that others can be heard. […] [M]usicians know that every player has important work to do, that when music sounds good it is because of the many people who are doing different kinds of jobs well (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013, 12). Playing together, accompanying one another, may be a practice of service ethics. Another layer of social relationship pertains to the people gathered in a given musicking moment, and the perspectives, stories, and experiences each individual carries that patterns and informs their experience and interpretation. In a diverse context like the Krista Foundation, music operates as a multivalent mediating sign “that gives rise to a complex and infinite web of interpretants” which may or may not be shared among participants (Rommen 2007, 36). This understanding resists presumed universalized meanings of musical signs (e.g. the major scale is happy), recognizing that such meanings are learned through cultural inculcation, and instead presuming polysemy, “the ambiguous nature of the signifier and the possibility (likelihood, actually) that any given signifier would be interpreted as linked to a different signifier by different people” (Gottdiener 1995, 20).

214  Maren Haynes Marchesini As a diverse community, musical signs are both deployed and interpreted in many different ways. Lastly, a musical ethics of accompaniment acknowledges and makes visible the identities, values, and perspectives of individuals, communities, and cultures who gather as a congregation, as well as those many originators and practitioners who lie outside and beyond our congregation or context. A musical ethics of accompaniment resists a practice of appropriation, the practice of taking and using aspects of another’s culture without permission. This extends beyond the concept of copyright and other legal permissions. Accompaniment involves a conscious interaction with the various individuals and constituencies who meet as stakeholders within a given musical event or object, taking into consideration a variety of points of view on the use/misuse of that musical artifact to either elucidate and nurture a mutual social relationship, or erase and obscure one. On a personal level, I regard the permission-based dimension of accompaniment the most challenging to implement. Mediating resources like song collections, transcriptions, and videos tend to disrupt interpersonal relationships, and operate as authoritative resources that often give the illusion of use-by-permission. Too often, full “permission” is an aspirational objective. That said, in curating pieces of art, poetry, music, and liturgy for our publications and events for the Krista Foundation, we together seek to deepen a mutual connection with the composers, communities, and cultures from which each piece originates, and between our diverse selves who interpret and experience each work of art and spiritual practice in different ways. Further, we seek to understand where a piece originates, who wrote or created it (or what community ordinarily practices it), why and how it is utilized in its context, and its significance. A Krista Foundation community who sings and prays together in mutual relationship amid diversity woven with tensions, antipathies, and polyvalences requires each of us, as colleagues, friends, and founders, to claim our choice in remaining invested in the relationships and its rituals. Thus, a musical ethics of accompaniment for our context necessitates an explicit ethic of consent. Participants are invited, but never required, to participate in arts, music, and worship, to have input in our future practices, and/or to adapt and interpret practices, postures, words, and so on in ways that feel like an authentic and wholehearted “yes.” In our gatherings, choosing not to participate (whether in one song or ritual, or in the entire practice of songs and rituals) is regarded as a valid option. I also seek to weave dimensions of consent and choice into our music and ritual in creative, innovative ways, so consent is an ongoing praxis.

Ritualizing “us”: moving from theory to practice Given our identity, story, and cultural texts, we are faced with a challenge in finding resources and practices that adequately reflect our community,

Singing together as global citizens 215 especially those that reflect the diversity of our members and service placements, evince an ethic of accompaniment, and participate in the practice of intercultural communication. For many years, the Krista Foundation has prioritized singing diverse music, largely drawn from Christian repertoires around the world. But Christian musical resources, too, are embedded in a complicated history of missions. In the colonial period, missionaries brought forms of music, particularly four-part hymn singing in diatonic tempered scales privileged in the West, to non-Western contexts, introducing these as proper sacred vectors for worship, and often repressing or banning indigenous musical styles and instruments (Okigbo 2010, 42–3). In response to post-colonial critiques, contemporary movements in music ministry have initiated new projects, including the “global song” repertoire in Euro–American church examined by Marissa Glynias Moore in her 2018 dissertation. Moore explains that the global song repertoire especially took root in “those communities that had little to no racial or cultural diversity of their own,” idealizing “global song” as an inclusive gesture, largely by incorporating the “music of previously missionized people” (Moore 2018, 24–26). While often upheld as a post-colonial practice of encounter with the Other, Moore argues that “global song is a Western construction that makes use of specific non-Western musical expressions, often controlled by EuroAmerican publishers and institutions,” and grounded Western imagined ideals about the purity and authenticity of the so-called indigenous music (ibid. 26). Recent Protestant hymnals, supplements, and song collections feature selected songs from places like South Africa, South Korea, and Trinidad. Songs like the South African “Haleluya! Pelo tsa rona,” printed in many mainline hymnals including the ELCA’s Evangelical Lutheran Worship, are often multiply decontextualized, rendered in four-part harmonies for accompaniment on the piano or organ, printed as authoritative melodies and harmonies obscuring the variety of versions utilized in context, and included without meaningful background as to their origins, use, or performance practice (ELW 535). Thus, the simple introduction of global song repertoires does not reliably result in relational cross-cultural encounters. As a model, the Krista Foundation has borrowed materials, repertoires, and frameworks from the ELCA’s Annual Musician-Educator Training, informally called “Glocal” (a portmanteau of global and local). In 2015, the Krista Foundation invited leaders from Glocal to attend and lead music at our Annual Conference, thus initiating a formal relationship between the two entities. The Krista Foundation has since sent colleagues to the Glocal training every year with the intent of building a cohort of leaders within our community who model the Glocal orientation and priorities. I attended the Glocal training in January 2018. Glocal trainings bring together a plurality of non-white ELCA leaders in music and ministry. The ELCA is among the whitest American

216  Maren Haynes Marchesini denominations (at around 96%), so the training provides a countercultural space for people of color to gather, share repertoires and pedagogies, and develop leaders (Pew Research Forum). The Glocal leadership team, consisting of around ten multicultural leaders, each experienced musicians with backgrounds in diverse styles, teaches a repertoire of songs to around 300 gathered participants. Trainees receive a resource booklet with transcriptions of Christian songs from diverse cultures and contexts. In 2018, this included songs from Nigeria, Estonia, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Suriname, South Africa, Ireland, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, the United States, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea, united by their Christian genesis and/or use. Songs originated from a wide variety of resources and publications (some cited and others not), and occasionally included some brief context explaining a song’s origins. Throughout the resource, the transcriptions were varied as well, with some only including the text or a simple melody, while others included instrumental accompaniment, chord charts, and multi-part harmonies. A goal of the training is to teach each song in the resource through an established pedagogical method that prioritizes rote teaching of the text and melody, as well as contextualization. A leader begins by singing a verse of the song, then pauses for a moment of storytelling, intended to explain the song’s origins and intention. If the song is in another language, the leader will often speak short segments of the text, encouraging the crowd to repeat it, and may provide a translation. Then, the leader sings the song in short phrases, inviting the congregation to repeat the melody. When this teaching is complete, the leadership team leads in singing the song through with instrumental accompaniment. This pedagogy is broadly useful in the Krista Foundation context, providing a tidy checklist for ensuring that music is accessibly taught and explained. In practice, though, I did not observe the Glocal leadership’s preparation to be adequate in storying or contextualizing the musical pieces, often resorting to personal anecdotes about what the song meant to the individual teaching it rather than introducing details about the originating culture or composer/s. I encountered the neglect of an ethic of musical accompaniment when I sought to locate the origins of a longtime Glocal favorite, “Salaam Aleikum, Hoya!” I wrote to one of the Glocal leaders to inquire about the background of the song, and received a reply that it originated and circulated in the Middle East. Noticing the song’s call-and-response form, diatonic harmonies, and accompanying cross-rhythms, I intuited a West African origin, and thus continued to search. I eventually discovered that the song originated in Ghana and was popularized through hymnwriter John Bell, a widely published editor of global song resources (Moore 2018, 2). Further, I found it difficult to utilize most of the songs I learned at Glocal in Krista Foundation worship. In addition to inadequate contextualization, I did not feel equipped to lead a song beyond the lyrics and melody, with

Singing together as global citizens 217 no attention paid to teaching musical accompaniment or performance practice. Also, much of the music simply could not be utilized in the Krista Foundation context because it does not evince an intersectionality suitable to our members. Most of the songs draw from exclusively Christian theology, use he/him/his language for God, or otherwise describe theologies, like penal substitutionary atonement, that many of our members do not share.

Ritualizing accompaniment: examples from the Krista Conferences Rather than attempting to curate the “right” repertoire, I regard the broader view of ritual as a more comprehensive starting point, drawing from ritual theorist Catherine Bell. Bell defines ritual as “first and foremost a strategy for the construction of certain types of power that are displayed in the relationships between members effective within particular social organizations” (Bell 1992, 197). Her definition of “ritual” encompasses the constitutive process of differentiating and privileging particular activities; deliberately manipulating time and space; restricting codes of communication; endowing distinct and specialized personnel, objects, texts and dress with power; inducing particular physical or mental states; and the involvement of a particular constituency. In Bell’s view, ritual is fundamentally practical—that is, a practice of values and priorities intended to be generalized to a broader context. Individual sedimented actions, when shared within a semiotic and regulatory context, become—as Foucault argued (and Bell quotes)—“the place where the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large scale organization of power” (ibid., 202). This renders ritual inherently political, as a series of acts and events repeated to produce the appearance of hierarchical relationships as essential or natural. Bell’s ritual theory shows that community rituals are rich practice sites for the formation of normative relationships, and thus an ideal place to experience and enact accompaniment rooted in service ethics. An understanding of ritual practice as a site of ethical formation that incorporates self and other animates the Krista Foundation’s prioritization of music, worship, and other embodied expressive arts and practices (for instance, photography, poetry, and yoga) in recent years. These are explicitly understood as performative rituals that iteratively inform and express our institutional identity. But, how can musicking possibly hold so much diversity and polyvalence, practicing interrelationship, encouraging mutuality and listening, and also engaging with tradition? In interviews with colleagues, several mentioned an experience of an aleatoric version of “Wade in the Water” as an example of a ritual that exemplified our values. I first learned this practice from Bay Area-based pianist and composer Andrew Jamieson.

218  Maren Haynes Marchesini I began by recounting the song’s story, poetically offering intersecting religious and non-religious rationales for its use: “Wade in the Water” is a spiritual originating in the time of slavery, and holds a double-meaning in many African American contexts. The text references Biblical passages relating to the Exodus story and water as a healing agent as described in the Gospel of John. The story is also fabled as containing instructions for people escaping slavery, encouraging them to travel by water to avoid leaving a trail of scent that could be traced by slaveowners’ hunting dogs (Maryland Public Television 2002). Knowing most, but not all, of the Krista Colleagues had some familiarity with the song’s chorus, I introduced its four-line melody briefly by call-andresponse. My co-leader Ambar Sabino then invited the congregation to participate in a ritual, writing burdens or frustrations on a piece of dissolving paper, bringing it forward and placing it in a bowl of water where it would liquefy and vanish. While we did this ritual, we sang the chorus to “Wade in the Water,” but not in unison. I instead encouraged them to sing it in their own preferred tempo, timing, and style. Some sang soloistically with melismas, microtonal slides, and blues thirds, while others sang the main melody plainly. Some hovered on one word or phrase in repetition, or labored through it at as though a dirge, while others sang it through at a quick and spritely tempo. Indeed, some knew the melody in iterations quite different from the one I taught, and I encouraged them to sing their most familiar version. In the course of the ritual, I welcomed people to sing for part of the experience, and to listen at other times, as they felt led. The song’s haunting minor pentatonicism and wailing cries of “wade in the water, children” filled up the room, tentatively at first, but building to a polyphonic texture as people milled around the room, writing, wandering, and approaching the font of water. This new experience of a wellknown song introduced a performance of multivocality rooted in mutual listening, an appropriate musical accompaniment ritual for our context layered into its already-dense set of meanings communicated by story and tradition. Congregational musicking may also expand beyond group singing or playing. In 2018, Sabino and I planned a worship service around the theme of joy. We ritualized a musical ethic of accompaniment through curating shared resources that evinced our community’s wide variety of interpretations and beliefs. Though Sabino and I represent different cultural and regional backgrounds, religious views, racial identities, and ages, we both recognized that the spectrum of songs we regard as “joyful” could only represent our two perspectives. We issued a call by email to every person

Singing together as global citizens 219 planning to attend the conference, soliciting suggestions for songs from any genre or tradition that our community members regarded as joyful. We received nearly 20 submissions to this ask, and I used Garageband to create a sonic art piece that incorporated nearly all the submissions. Our resulting piece interspersed artists like Beyoncé, Chance the Rapper, Estelle & AJ Michalka, Mali Music feat. Jazmine Sullivan, the Jackson Five, Bruno Mars, Kirk Franklin, Zahara (South Africa), and Juan Luis Guerra (Dominican Republic) that represented a diverse and varied joyful “us” through sound. The piece served as the sonic backdrop to the centerpiece of the service where people were invited to write, draw, create a collective art piece out of papier mâché, or dance and sing during its playing. It played for twenty minutes, in place of a sermon, and started with lower-energy contemplative songs intended to encourage more introverted responses like writing and drawing. The piece built in intensity, ending with high-energy dance-oriented songs. The creation of this art piece and the larger ritual experience that framed it encouraged a widely varied set of options for participation, with attention to equitable, diverse representation. The ritual also invited a wide range of ways to participate, inclusive of various learning styles, sensory engagements, energy levels, novice/expert levels, and so on. Our community responded to this broad invitation by sitting, writing, drawing, painting, getting very messy (a large tarp on the floor made messiness possible), moving, singing, and dancing. And, admittedly, some simply left because this kind of ritual did not communicate something joyful—also a valid response! An ethic of musical accompaniment can also be taught through pedagogies, postures, and leadership structures. In 2017 and 2018, I taught the song “Standing Stone,” written and taught to me by the Bay Area artist-activist Melanie DeMore.1 It consists of a single line of text, “I will be your standing stone. I will stand by you,” a lyric that communicates the metaphor of accompaniment. When I teach the song, I try to limit spoken instruction, beginning by singing the main melody while gesturing the direction of pitch with my hands, a method of teaching I learned through workshops with the organization Music that Makes Community. I then indicate for the congregation to echo back the melody. By gesturing a circle, I encourage a chant-like repetition of the short song, eventually dropping my hands when it seems most people can comfortably sing from memory. DeMore’s song is built in three layers, each of which I teach individually by the same call-and-response and gesture method as the first. Then, I take a moment to introduce the song: To fully embody this simple song, as taught by its composer Melanie DeMore, it requires a story. DeMore is a leader in the San Francisco

220  Maren Haynes Marchesini Bay Area lesbian music and African American heritage choir movements. This song, written for a friend dying of cancer, comes from DeMore’s time in the Threshold Choir where singers visit the bedsides of people dying or infirm to provide friendship and comfort. The song embodies a pedagogy of presence. I then sing each individual melody as I explain their unique role in practicing and embodying accompaniment: The first melody (beginning and ending on the tonic pitch) as DeMore explains it, represents a rootedness and consistency. The higher melody, part two (moving in parallel thirds with the first but ending with a repetition of a high open fifth), represents our facing forward with courage. The lower melody, part three (originating the tonic, then climbing down the scale—but ending above the original melody on the third of the chord), represents a lifting up, intended to be sung with effortlessness. I continued, Standing with someone in their pain requires intention, and singing invites us into this practice. As DeMore says in a YouTube video where she teaches the song in her characteristic style, “sometimes, all we can do is stand by each other. Nothing else matters” (MUSE Choir 2012). After telling this story, I return to the song, inviting each person gathered to choose the part that suited their vocal range and or whatever part resonates for them, confident that we will spontaneously divide well enough to distribute each part. I hold up one finger and begin to sing the first melody. Some voices join me, and I rotate my finger to indicate a repeat. When the singing has gone on enough times to feel its cycles and grasp its unmetered rubato, I hold up two fingers and lean into the microphone to layer on the second part. More voices join in a harmony with the first part, and we continue the chant in more uncounted cycles, unhurried, and centered. Finally, I hold up a third finger, lean into the microphone to help guide the harmony, and the remainder of the singers in the room join in. From three short, simple melodies, we produce a complex harmony, at times beautifully consonant and spacious, and at times intentionally dissonant and uncomfortable. The combination of our voices holds the wisdom of mutual accompaniment taught in the telling of the song’s story. We sing in a relationship with its originator, a person whose identity stands proudly at the intersections of queerness and blackness, and herself a minister of sorts, an artist-activist. In the song’s dissonances, though, it also holds the tensions of this metaphorical act of standing together. Indeed, the room

Singing together as global citizens 221 felt full of sound, yet it is clear that some have made the choice not to sing, but rather sit and listen, or walk around the room, or hum, or check out entirely. This is a part of our standing together: any mode of participation is explicitly made welcome. As the community gains confidence, I slowly back away from the microphone and step off the stage, letting the song cycle through over and again with no leader, allowing us to focus on the sound that we generate as a body. Finally, when it feels right, I step back up and hold up a fist to indicate a final cycle. I gesture a ritardando. Then, slowly sweeping my hand to stretch out the last tonic chord, I drop my hand in a gentle cutoff. Our sound echoes into silence.

Note 1 I do not include a transcription here because DeMore explicitly discourages their use in learning her music.

References South African Traditional. Date unknown. “Hallelujah! We Sing Your Praises (Haleluya! Pelo tsa rona).” Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 535. Babo, Alfred. 2017. “‘Civilization’ and ‘Mission,’” Society 54(2): 124–5. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Andrew. 2015. Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. London: Zed Books. Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Goizueta, Roberto S. 1995. Caminemos Con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Gottdiener, Mark. 1995. Postmodern Semiotics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hammer, Mitchell R., Milton J. Bennett, and Richard Wiseman. 2003. “Measuring Intercultural Sensitivity: The Intercultural Development Inventory,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 27: 421–43. Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship. 2019. “Krista Colleague Leadership Council.” Tending the Garden: Embracing Our Living Stories, Annual Service Leadership Conference. Program Booklet. ———. 2019. “Mission, Positioning Statement, Values.” Accessed February 23, 2020. https://www.kristafoundation.org/mission-and-vision “Lausanne Occasional Paper 2—The Willowbank Report: Consultation on Gospel and Culture: 8. Church and Culture, a. Older, Traditional Approaches,” 1978. Lausanne Movement. Accessed October 18, 2017, https://www.lausanne.org/ content/lop/lop-2 Lund, Søren. 1981. “The Christian Mission and Colonialism,” in Temenos – Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion, 17, 116–23.

222  Maren Haynes Marchesini Maryland Public Television. 2002. “Music.” Pathways to Freedom: Maryland and the Underground Railroad. Accessed February 23, 2019. https://pathways.thinkport. org/secrets/music2.cfm Moore, Marissa Anne Glynias. 2018. “Voicing the World: Global Song in American Christian Worship.” PhD diss., Yale University. MUSE Choir. 2012. “I will be your standing stone.” YouTube video, 7:58. Myrick, Nathan. 2018. “The Relational Ethics of Church Music.” PhD diss., Baylor University. Okigbo, Austin C. 2010. “Musical Inculturation, Theological Transformation, and the Construction of Black Nationalism in Earth South African Choral Music Tradition.” Africa Today, 7(2): 42–65. Pew Research Center. 2014. “Racial and ethnic composition among members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA),” Religious Landscape Study. https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-denomination/ evangelical-lutheran-church-in-america-elca/racial-and-ethnic-composition/ #demographic-information Pope Paul VI. 1965. Ad Gentes [Decree on the Mission Activity of the Church]. Vatican Website. Accessed October 18, 2017, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_ad-gentes_en.html Rommen, Timothy. 2007. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Tisdale, Leonora Tubbs. 1997. Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press. Kindle. Tomlinson, Barbara, and George Lipsitz. 2013. “American Studies as Accompaniment.” American Quarterly, 65(1): 1–30. Watkins, Mary. 2019. Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Interviews Jones, Chasity. 2019. (Krista Colleague). Interview with the author. October 28. Orofino, Douglas. 2019. (Krista Colleague). Interview with the author. October 2. West, E. 2019. (Krista Colleague). Interview with the author. August 15.

Part IV

Valuing the Self

12 Deceitful hearts and transformed lives: performing truth and truthfulness in fundamentalist Christian vocal music Sarah Bereza Vocalists across evangelical Christianity, as worship leaders and other soloists, intentionally deploy particular performance practices to communicate both the doctrinal truthfulness of their sung words, as well as each vocalist’s personal belief that the words are true. Beyond this, in many evangelical circles, vocalists are also expected to convey personal authenticity as they sing, in the Rousseauian sense of being spontaneous and emotionally self-expressive. That is, they are expected to look and sound like they are actually worshipping as they sing—because they are in fact worshipping. But not all evangelical vocalists strive for performative authenticity, as revealed in my fieldwork with self-identified fundamentalist Christians. While fundamentalist vocalists, like more mainstream evangelicals, are deeply concerned with expressing doctrinal truth as well as personal truthfulness in their singing, they reject performance practices that typically read as personally authentic in more mainstream evangelical circles. The main and sometimes only explicit reason fundamentalists give for eschewing these practices is their sexual connotations in secular music. However, on a deeper level, fundamentalists’ beliefs about salvation and worship also motivate their performance choices. For fundamentalists, while a bornagain Christian is truly and eternally transformed, that person’s heart is still “deceitful” and “desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9; KJV) while on earth. In this sense then, personal authenticity would not edify other believers in the context of corporate worship. So, instead of personal authenticity, fundamentalists prioritize another model of personal truthfulness in their singing: sincerity. Similarly, because they understand corporate worship to be primarily about knowledge and personal response to that knowledge, vocalists do not focus on conveying an in-the-moment worship experience since they do not need to be perceived as worshipping in the way that many mainstream evangelical vocalists do. To make these arguments, this chapter presents models of truth-telling, focusing especially on authenticity and sincerity, to show how an emphasis on sincerity shapes fundamentalists’ vocal performance practices. In so doing, it highlights how persona complicates perceptions of sincerity

226  Sarah Bereza and authenticity, and discusses strategies that vocalists use to manage that issue. Finally, it examines how the issues of conveying doctrinal truth and personal truthfulness intersect with fundamentalists’ beliefs about the nature of salvation and of corporate worship. The microcosm of fundamentalists’ vocal practices has ramifications for scholars of today’s Christian congregational music because of how it reveals a broader tendency in evangelicalism: the louder arguments for and against popular musical styles often rely on a sacred-profane, good-bad model, but underlying motivations reflect differing emphases on sincerity and authenticity, and differing beliefs around what worship actually is. But first, an overview of fundamentalists’ place within evangelicalism: fundamentalists are conservative evangelical Protestants historically linked with dissent in, and subsequent separation from, mainline Protestant denominations in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and England in what was called the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. From the 1950s to the present, they have grown increasingly militant in their separation from non-fundamentalists (i.e. they actively work against people, entities, and ideas they disagree with, including other conservative evangelicals that outsiders might consider to be very close-to-indistinguishable with self-described fundamentalists) to the point that militant separation defines fundamentalism. While fundamentalists do not have a formal denominational structure, many parachurch entities function as denominational surrogates. My research is with people who are in independent Baptist and baptistic churches loosely connected with one such surrogate, Bob Jones University (BJU) in Greenville, South Carolina, USA, people who self-describe as fundamentalists or who note that their churches and/or many of their fellow congregants would self-describe as such. Throughout this chapter, my use of “fundamentalist” specifically refers to this subset of conservative evangelical fundamentalists, whose extensive theological discourse on music explicitly sets their musical views and practices in direct contrast with mainstream evangelicals’ acceptance and incorporation of popular secular musical idioms into the music they use for church services.

Ways of conveying personal truthfulness Among the many concepts of personal truthfulness and the appearance of it, authenticity and sincerity are helpful here because many mainstream evangelicals cite authenticity as a goal for their music used in worship (Ingalls 2018, 46–9; Busman 2015, 229–37). Typically their usage draws on a model of authenticity that questions whether music or a musician is true to itself or him- or herself (in the senses of being self-realized or true to their origins) or if such a thing is possible (Moore 2002). Fundamentalists, on the other hand, reject this type of authenticity as a goal, especially the moral relativism it implies (Taylor 1992). Often in fundamentalist sermons warnings against self-realization such as in the colloquial expression

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 227 “following your heart,” I have heard the scripture quoted, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” (from Jer. 17:9, KJV), to make an explicit argument against this conception of authenticity. Indeed, one fundamentalist composer I interviewed noted that their music, despite their best intentions, was inevitably “tainted” by their sin nature. Instead, fundamentalists seem to more closely align with values expressed in concepts of sincerity, though they do not usually explicitly use that term. Sincerity’s meaning shades toward being without hypocrisy or dissimulation, or, to phrase it positively, being who you say you are (Trilling 1972, 58). In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling defines one conception of sincerity as “communication without deceiving or misleading” and “a single-minded commitment to whatever dutiful enterprise [one] may have in hand,” along with being “oneself, in action, in deeds” (1972, 58). As I use the term sincerity here, I emphasize especially the sense of “communication without deceiving or misleading”—saying true words and believing them to be true. This angle on sincerity sheds light on how fundamentalists conceptualize ideal vocal performance practices (discussed below) and their disallowal of what they refer to as “distractions from the message” (that is, anything extraneous to the truth). Danny Sweatt, writing as a music director in the early 1980s, summarizes this viewpoint on the role of vocalist: “A performer’s style can also help or hinder the audience’s comprehension of the message. The more attention focused on the performer, the less that will be focused on his message. … When good sacred music is properly performed, the listener’s attention is drawn to the text” (1981, 14). In the cases of both authenticity and sincerity, vocalists’ ability to convey personal truthfulness is directly related to their ministry in worship events like church services, since, in both mainstream evangelical and fundamentalist circles, every leader’s personal testimony of being born-again and living a transformed life is directly relevant to their ministry in the service. Fundamentalists’ solo vocal performance practices Fundamentalist vocalists shape their performance practices in response to their emphasis on personal sincerity and corresponding rejection of personal authenticity, but on the surface, most of their performance practices are based in a rejection of popular musical idioms and an embrace of classical vocal training. Fundamentalist texts on music are replete with comments on how not to sing, calling out many practices as inappropriate: vocalists should avoid most movements; they must not scoop or slide into pitches, bend notes, or delay or intentionally slow their vibratos; and they must not use breathy, groaning, sighing, or gravelly vocal techniques (Bachorik 2012, 101–3; Fisher 1999, 103; Garlock and Woetzel 1992, 92–7; Hamilton 2013, 39–46; Smith 2005, 95–7). Though fundamentalist

228  Sarah Bereza writers rarely give explicit directives on how to sing, their praise of classical music and musical training presents that general style as the obvious, even binaristic, alternative to popular vocal idioms music in popular styles. Shelly Hamilton, for example, sets “the pop singing style” in direct contrast “to what is called a legitimate singing style” (by which she means a more classically trained vocal style), later describing the “legitimate” and “pop” styles as being on opposite ends of a spectrum (2013, 14, 39). As a result, they restrict their vocal timbres, striving for uniformity. And while minimizing body movements with arms at their sides and their torsos still, they make eye contact with the congregation or give the impression of that, they open their eyes wide (sometimes raising their eyebrows), and they nod their heads to emphasize words. And, because fundamentalist vocalists emphasize the music’s text, they train to enunciate words clearly and phrase musical lines to prioritize the text over the musical line, especially if there’s a misalignment of emphasis in a strophic hymn. Fundamentalist vocalists also limit their affective range. For example, they don’t express anger or fear while singing sacred music. Their reasons for avoiding the vocal sounds of these emotional and physical states are primarily about avoiding practices that are coded as sexually expressive or entertaining in secular music. But, the performance practices that fundamentalist vocalists train to avoid are also those which can aid listeners’ impression of vocalists’ truthfulness. Fundamentalists avoid paralinguistic utterances like cry breaks, bent notes, and whispers—what Simon Frith describes as the “vocal noises that seem expressive of [singers’] deepest feelings because we hear them as if they’ve escaped from a body that the mind—language—cannot control” (1996, 192). Serge Lacasse argues that, because of the way vocalists can replicate the verbal sounds of “everyday” language and “stylize” them, they can express emotions that seem truly their own (if the vocalist sings as themselves) or their song’s character (2010, 226–7). Such techniques give the impression of a vocalist’s authentic emotions, but they are particularly singled out by fundamentalists for criticism. Similarly, Nicola Dibben shows how movement can be a seeming window into the true self of a popular vocalist, but these movements, like paralinguistic utterances, are almost all ones that fundamentalists find distracting to a song’s message (2009, 321–8). The movements she discusses include pantomiming and dancing, but the category of “adaptors”—“small movements of which one is often unaware, such as tossing the hair or scratching the face”—are particularly important because they are often perceived as showing a vocalist’s authenticity since they seem out of a vocalist’s conscious control. Because adaptors are in fact out of the control of many amateur vocalists (think of a repetitive hand movement), fundamentalist vocalists strive to avoid them as a matter of professionalism, meaning that even this way of conveying personal authenticity is removed for fundamentalists with vocal training.

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 229 Historical context of vocal performance practices Criticism of American popular vocal music of the 1920s and 1930s provides necessary background for understanding the break between mainstream evangelicals’ and fundamentalists’ emotional range, as well as why fundamentalists perceive so many vocal effects as sexual. When crooners’ “soft, trembling, often sensually breathy sounds” and their sliding and scooping approach to melodic realization began to be heard on recordings and on radio, music critics were quick to make similar complaints to fundamentalists later ones: “In addition to effeminacy, crooners were subject to a range of contradictory descriptors, including being immoral, immature, sensuous, base, coarse, profane, imbecilic, primitive, untalented, abnormal, insincere, artificial, pretentious, and corrupting of the nation’s youth” (McCracken 2015, 3, 5). Effeminacy, Allison McCracken argues in her work on crooners in the 1920s and 1930s, was the foremost charge against crooners, and their “popularity…instigated the imposition, for the first time, of masculine norms for voices on a mass scale in American society” (2015, 4). At the same time, the vocal practices that were praised by authorities like the American Academy of Teachers in Singing— namely, classical practices—were comparable to “other forms of masculine body-building or self-discipline in vogue at the time” (McCracken, 2015, 19). These authorities argued that “public singing was intended not primarily for self-enjoyment or as a means of personal expression but for the appreciation and erudition of others. It was to be the product of long-term study and professional training, where it could be carefully developed and monitored” (McCracken 2015, 19). While fundamentalists’ own writings on music are rarely explicitly concerned with effeminacy, these other values permeate their approach to vocal performance, demonstrating the reach these values have across a century. In contrast, evangelicals using popular styles have rejected this older viewpoint, both in its disapproval of crooning performance practices and in its historical ramifications in which, as McCracken’s book title makes clear, Real Men Don’t Sing. Mainstream evangelical lead vocalists are often men, likely even more often than women (fundamentalist soloists are roughly split between sexes), and vocalists frequently intend to express personal authenticity through vocal idioms that fundamentalists find sexually connotative. Facial expressions are an especially vivid example of mainstream evangelicals’ break with older interpretation, as when evangelical vocalists furrow their brows while tightly closing their eyes and narrowing their cheek and mouth muscles. While this facial expression can accompany intense activities like weight lifting, it is particularly iconic of orgasm. Its use by secular artists seems unremarkable, but mainstream evangelicals’ adoption of it demonstrates the gulf between their and fundamentalists’ understandings and uses of popular performance practices.

230  Sarah Bereza Persona Vocalists who are trying to communicate with sincerity or authenticity have to grapple with their persona (that is, the way other people perceive them), which can become problematic because it can read as not as truly them, but as a fake performance persona—what is sometimes called a “star persona.” Some scholars think that star persona is a necessary condition of singing solos or soloistically in church services. For example, in discussing persona as it pertains to evangelical vocalists who use a popular style, Allan F Moore argues that singing (unlike speech) necessarily involves a vocalist and the vocalist’s persona (2015, 184–5). He further argues that evangelical popular music styles cue listeners to interact with vocalists’ personas as they would with secular popular vocalists’ personas, with the implications of commercialization and entertainment (2015, 184–5). He maintains that this is the case even when these evangelical vocalists are leading congregational singing—a situation that he calls in his title an “inherent contradiction in worship music” (2015). Moore’s emphasis on the connection of popular music styles with the necessity of a vocalist’s star persona seems to accord with fundamentalists’ thinking that popular music styles always constitute entertainment. Regardless of whether a mainstream evangelical vocalist must always have a star persona, it does seem to be a perpetual tension that vocalists negotiate when leading events like concerts and festivals that are not specifically church services. This tension centers on trust in music makers’ authenticity: “Are songwriters writing for the good of the church or to make a (considerable) profit? Are record labels promoting worship music that will promote spiritual growth, or are they simply churching out what will sell?” (Ingalls 2018, 48). Performing musicians in particular must show that they have not “sold out” and are still true to themselves and their faith even though they are likely wealthier and more famous than attendees: “audiences must trust that the musician still identifies and lives within their community, and their music must resonate with the audience’s experiences and expectations” (Ingalls 2016, 440). Fundamentalists, on the other hand, in eschewing popular vocal techniques, remove what they would consider a barrier to their ministry and, in so doing, further the understanding of vocalists as not having a performance persona when singing in a church service. Yet even for fundamentalist vocalists, persona remains an unconscious barrier to solo vocalists. They, as well as many mainstream evangelicals, use two main areas to combat persona’s potential negative effects: using their personal testimony (or, reputation) as evidence of their truthfulness, and minimizing their display of skill while singing. Testimony In addition to the star persona, Simon Frith suggests two other areas that relate to the perception of authenticity or sincerity in a vocalist’s

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 231 performance—that of the vocalist’s own self (i.e. a singer being “personally expressive”) and of their “song personality” (the persona of a song’s character) (1996, 186, 212). While the first is least likely to be accessible to listeners in a popular music setting, it is the most relevant to the context of fundamental church services, especially in the form of the vocalist’s reputation or what is commonly referred to as their testimony. As members of the congregation or another similar congregation, vocalists strive to be “personally expressive” as they sing, in the sense that their testimony must accord with their singing. The emphasis on testimony led multiple vocalists that I interviewed to only choose songs that they had personally found to be spiritually beneficial before sharing them with their fellow believers in church services. Star persona and song persona, while likely factors in a fundamentalist vocalist’s performance, are far less apparent in their circles compared with mainstream evangelicalism since both are taken to be one and the same as the vocalist’s true self. In the relatively small world of fundamentalism, if a congregant does not personally know a vocalist, they are still relatively connected, and even musicians who are famous in fundamentalist circles remain quite closely connected to their communities—likely two, or at most three, degrees separated from people in even smaller fundamentalist congregations. Minimizing apparent musical skill In addition to using testimony to mitigate a star persona’s potential negative effects, vocalists with training may minimize the display of their skill. As a corollary strategy, they may sing repertoire that is appropriate for congregational singing, rather than technically difficult music. Fundamentalists, as well as mainstream evangelicals, live in cultural worlds where musical virtuosity reads as entertainment. This is largely because musical skill (regardless of the hard work that it takes to acquire the skill) is culturally coded as talent, an inborn musical gift. So, when musical skill is deployed conspicuously, listeners are culturally primed to hear its difficulty as an exhibition of the musician’s talent (see Joshua Kalin Busman’s chapter, this volume). The result is that the musical event is coded as entertainment— something that is fake rather than sincere or authentic. For example, in his work on the evangelical Passion conferences presented in this volume, Joshua Kalin Busman connects punk musicians’ amateuristic musicality and their corresponding authentic image with evangelicals’ own need to project authenticity—even though their music’s technical demands are actually quite high in comparison with punk. This conflict, Busman argues, leads some evangelical musicians to downplay their abilities by eliminating showiness in their performances and even to describe their musical training as practically non-existent. Fundamentalist vocalists also limit their virtuosity, but unlike the evangelical musicians in Busman’s research, fundamentalists do not treat

232  Sarah Bereza musical training itself as a problem. Rather, they understand it as a means of achieving the musical excellence they desire. As one fundamentalist author put it—“God demands excellence and skill in worship (Ps. 33:1–3). But to show off one’s talents through virtuosic or ‘flashy’ performance draws attention to the performer and away from worship” (Aniol 2009, 214). As a corollary to minimizing the appearance of their skills, soloists generally sing repertoire that could conceivably be a congregational song, an unexpected pattern given fundamentalist leaders’ praise of classical music, which would likely lead one to expect sacred art music in their church services, perhaps even to the exclusion of anything else. But, this is not the reality: vocalists typically sing fairly simple music and many purposefully avoid anything that could read as showy, like quick vocal ornaments, scales, and notes high in their register. Vocalists that I interviewed said they want congregants to be able to participate in their music: music that a congregation cannot sing could be construed as entertainment because the congregation cannot expect to participate in it, in contrast to hymn arrangements or newly composed songs that a congregation could learn. The goal is for congregants to participate in the moment by listening and/ or singing internally, but possibly also to carry their participation into the future by singing the hymn aloud, at home or at another church service.

Truthfulness, born-again salvation, and worship At a deep level, fundamentalists’ beliefs about salvation and corporate worship influence what kind of truth vocalists strive to convey, since both areas of belief strongly emphasize the importance of doctrinal truth. While sincerity remains relevant, personal authenticity is unimportant, especially in the sense of emotional expressivity and spontaneity. This section examines fundamentalists’ belief in visible change after a person is born-again, connecting it with notions of testimony. Then, it shows the marked difference in beliefs around worship between fundamentalists and more mainstream evangelicals, connecting back to fundamentalists’ emphasis on clearly expressing words that are doctrinally true. Born-again salvation and sincerity Evangelicals, writ large, understand salvation as multi-faceted. A widely used commentary in fundamentalist circles describes the process like this: a person “is saved” in the moment of their instantaneous, born-again conversion. Then, a person “is being saved” throughout the rest of their life as they are sanctified. Finally, a person “will be saved” when they die and go to heaven (Ryrie 1986, 319). In this view of salvation, a person still has a sin nature (and thus will sin), and they live in a sinful world. The conservative evangelical theologian Charles C Ryrie describes it like this: “Salvation affects the whole person. Nevertheless, the removal of man’s fallen nature

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 233 and the receiving of a resurrection body awaits a future day. … In addition [in that future day], the curse that has been on the world will be removed… and the entire universe will feel the effects of Christ’s work of reconciliation” (1986, 322). As discussed in the above section on sincerity, these views on sin nature and sinful world shape fundamentalists’ perspective on self-expression, especially in the sense of authenticity as self-expression, influencing how vocalists prioritize performance practices perceived as sincere over and against those perceived as authentic. A focus on doctrinally true words— and conveying one’s personal belief in those true words—largely eliminates the potential for a person’s sin nature (their “deceitful heart”) to negatively affect their singing and how it is received by fellow believers. Born-again salvation and testimony Evangelicals generally agree that born-again salvation leads to a visibly changed life that includes an active witness to non-Christians through the testimony of their conversions, personal lives, and the support of missionary endeavors. The person still has a sin nature and still sins, but their conversion means that they, with God’s grace, can choose to live a godly life with a spiritual trajectory leading toward holiness that is manifested in the outward, visible signs of salvation (Ammerman 2005, 82–91). This belief that conversion will manifest itself in visible ways is founded on the premise that beliefs result in actions (Bachorik 2012, 76–9; Foster 2011, 92; Kurtz 2008, 254). Of course, outward actions might simply be social conformity without inner regeneration, but the reverse cannot be true. One fundamentalist author, Fred Moritz, writes, “The believer who refuses to conform to the standards of Scripture will always reveal the glaring lack of a right attitude toward God and His holiness,” while the one who “develops the proper perspective toward God and His holiness… will gladly live in conformity to the standards which God sets in His Word” (1994, 39). This is why a continual lack of visible virtue or a lack of growth toward the same causes concern among fundamentalists. For example, Jim Berg, who was the Dean of Students at Bob Jones University for over 30 years, paraphrases a list of Christian virtues found in 2 Peter, asserting that the biblical writer is “saying in effect, ‘If you do not have these virtues growing and developing in you, and you have no motivation to cultivate them, then you better check to see if you, indeed, possess any saving faith upon which these are built’” (2008, 10). Berg continues, “Many believers who show no evidence of growth in Christ still protest that they remember a time when they asked God to save them. Peter, however, wants them to understand that if there is no growth, there is no saving faith. … If there is no desire to develop and no evidence of these virtues, there is no saving faith” (2008, 10, emphasis his).

234  Sarah Bereza Music is a key area through which fundamentalists can show that they are born again, in two particular areas. First, while fundamentalists’ extensive literature on music and theology is, as a whole, outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that one of the main arguments made throughout this discourse is that salvation leads believers to reject “bad” music and embrace “good” music. If a person claims to be a Christian but does not choose the good music once they understand the difference, then there is a strong possibility that they have not been saved. One author describes a person’s choice of music as a “barometer,” an index of faith, showing to others “the condition of [their] spirit” (Smith 1997, 75). Other authors, like Tim Fisher, even go so far as to say that music is not only a visible sign of salvation or an important sign, but also “one of the most visible features of our new life. … The most visible aspect of our salvation will be seen in the new quality of music in our lives!” (1992, 12). Second, this literature argues that born-again salvation leads directly to enthusiastic congregational singing—“heartily, as unto the Lord” (from Col. 3:23, KJV) as they apply the generic biblical command to this specific act. Here again, the focus comes back to doctrinal truth and personal truthfulness, where an individual’s lack of enthusiastic participation in congregational singing suggests that they do not really believe the words they sing: at worst, this visible and audible lack of belief results from being unregenerate, and at best, it mars the singer’s testimony of faith to their fellow believers and to unbelievers. Music pastor and composer Tim Fisher writes, “Christians who don’t sing are out of fellowship with God,” and warns, “Those who will not sing in church are showing that they may have nothing to sing about” (1992, 110, 153, emphasis his). Author and professor Scott Aniol claims that Christians who do not sing are “immature” in their faith (2009, 170). Missionary and music professor Douglas Bachorik tells his readers that if they don’t feel like singing, they should ask themselves if they are in sin (2012, 55). And pastor and BJU seminary professor Gary Reimers places his commentary on the necessity of singing—“God’s Word says to sing, so people should sing”—within his greater argument that those who do not worship properly (such as by singing joyfully) are cursed, rather than blessed, by God (2009, 22–4). Reimers makes an even more pressing criticism of disengaged worshippers, asserting that “[b]oredom with the worship forms that God has ordained” brings “God’s curse instead of his blessing” (2009, 95). Like other fundamentalist authorities who urge self-examination for those who don’t sing enthusiastically, Reimers writes, “A worshiper who constantly checks his watch, wondering why the time is passing so slowly, needs to check his heart instead” (2009, 95). These are but a sampling of the pervasive claim that bornagain Christians will sing—and will sing eagerly and enthusiastically— in church with their fellow believers.

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 235 Worship and right knowledge While fundamentalist and more mainstream evangelicals both connect worship and music so closely that one term often stands in for the other, fundamentalists have a markedly different perspective on what corporate worship actually is, again connecting with the importance they place on doctrinal truth. Fundamentalists’ definitions of worship usually involve two components: an individual’s accurate knowledge of God, and that person’s subsequent response to the knowledge. Scott Aniol writes, “Worship is a spiritual response to God as a result of understanding biblical truth about God.” Dean Kurtz defines worship as “seeing God clearly for who He is and responding with heart, soul, mind, and strength in offering up sacrifices of praise and service to Him within the context of an obedient life” (2009, 30; 2008, 155). Music is inextricably linked to both components, given that fundamentalists believe music can reveal or reflect God’s nature (that is, music can transmit accurate knowledge of God) and that a person’s response to this knowledge may well occur through music in what Kurtz terms “sacrifices of praise” (2008, 15). Aniol also further specifies a definition of congregational worship: “a unified chorus of spiritual responses toward God expressed publicly to God, as a result of understanding biblical truth about God” (2009, 155, emphasis his). Aniol’s peers argue that music fulfills this definition as well, given that it unifies those who sing together (Garlock and Woetzel 1992, 158–60), or, similarly, results from their shared faith (Kurtz 2008, 240). This understanding of worship, with its emphasis on mental engagement, is among the many areas that sets fundamentalist congregational singing apart from broader evangelicalism. Gordon Adnams’s ethnographic description of “just singing” versus “really worshipping” highlights how, for many evangelicals, worshipping through congregational singing is not primarily about a congregant’s knowledge of God and subsequent response, but rather, about how individuals feel about their response—whether they feel that they are emotionally engaged with their singing, an engagement that could be compared with fundamentalists’ idea of response but which is not so strongly connected with and preceded by knowledge (2008, 191, 196–7). Even further away from fundamentalists’ conception of worship is that described by Busman in his ethnography of evangelical Passion conferences and megachurch worship music, where participants conceptualize worship “as an unmediated encounter with God,” though, he argues, worship music actually mediates it (2015, 145). Ingalls similarly describes mainstream evangelical vocalists as being more concerned with personal authenticity, and especially with using their music to foster “authentic worship,” than anything I have experienced in my fieldwork with fundamentalists (2018, 46–55).

236  Sarah Bereza Fundamentalists’ understandings of what worship is are one reason they insist on using the “right” kind of music for worship—“right” in the sense of appropriate, justified, and correct. If, as Reimers writes, worship style is equivalent to musical style, and if, as Reimers asserts through his monograph on worship, God is so deeply concerned with worship as to kill and curse people who do not worship in the right ways, then the importance of having a right musical style cannot be overstated. After briefly introducing worship styles through traditional, contemporary, and blended service types, Reimers lays out his views that “God punishes wrong worship” and “God blesses right worship” (2009, 52, 61). As proof for the first assertion, Reimers dwells on the Old Testament statement, “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (from Exodus 20:5, KJV), and an account of two men who disputed Moses’ and Aaron’s authority in worship and who were subsequently consumed by the earth along with their families. Later, Reimers discusses a passage from the Old Testament book of Malachi to argue: “There are consequences for wrong worship. [Malachi 1:9] is full of irony: after offering God such deficient worship, go ahead and try asking for His help. You will find that God senses no obligation to answer your prayers. In fact, He would prefer no worship at all instead of the emptiness of ongoing wrong worship” (2009, 94). Not only does Reimers consider some worship/music styles to be right and some to be wrong, but he also asserts that God’s displeasure with wrong worship/music is so great that he will punish the book’s readers who choose to worship in the wrong way, will punish their descendants, and likely will not heed their prayers. Because Reimers’s intended readership is presumably fundamentalist, any typical reader would know what worship/music style are the right kinds and which deserve God’s punishment. In case of any confusion, however, Reimers eventually cites music in popular styles with Christian lyrics as “a modern parallel to pagan worship,” the worship that he previously described as deserving a horrifying death (2009, 79–81). Reimers’s arguments are not anomalous. Rather, they are quite similar to those made throughout fundamentalist texts on music, though Reimers’s arguments are sustained at greater length (unsurprising, given that his monograph is specifically on worship). These texts frequently cite two stories from the Old Testament to make the case that God does not accept subpar, deviant, or otherwise unworthy worship: first, the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1–15), in which Cain’s sacrifice to God is not considered worthy (subsequently, Cain murders his brother and is cursed by God), and second, the story of Aaron’s sons (Lev. 10:1–2), Nadab and Abihu, who offered “strange fire” in the Tabernacle and were then killed by fire sent from God (Kurtz 2008, 29–33; Lucarini 2010, 168–71).

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 237 With stories like these so frequently highlighted as proof for the important place of the right kind of music used for the right kind of worship, fundamentalist texts give the overwhelming impression that worshipping God properly is an incredibly difficult, even dangerous, task. Kurtz calls worship “a daunting task worthy of our passionate prayer and careful consideration” and later says candidly, “It makes your head spin doesn’t it? Every worship choice, even our choice of voice inflection as we speak, makes a difference in our understanding of the Lord. Every choice we make either helps or hinders our ability to respond wholeheartedly” (Kurtz 2008, 83, 120). Reimers makes these feelings clear throughout his text as he repeatedly asserts God’s dissatisfaction with the worship Christians offer in statements like these: • •

•

“The Lord deserves better worship than He is currently receiving” (2009, 2). “The Father is actively, continually seeking people who will worship Him by following the pattern Christ has just described [in John 17:17]. It is appropriate to infer from this statement that God is not satisfied with the current quality or quantity of worship He is receiving. He is looking for something more and something better” (2009, 12–13). “Unfortunately, in spite of the clarity of His Word, God does not receive the worship He describes in the way that He demands. This constitutes a serious problem, not only because wrong worship has unpleasant consequences for us, but more importantly because God’s glory is our most important function” (2009, 99–100).

For fundamentalist vocalists, then, the importance of their sincere singing of truthful words could not be higher.

Conclusion In making their decisions about vocal performance practices, fundamentalists begin with the explicit norms of their musical tradition. But, as they navigate the tension of living transformed lives with still “deceitful hearts,” other areas of their beliefs have a significant influence on their performance practices. Sincerity, while a model that is not often explicit within their discourse, provides a way of understanding how fundamentalist vocalists convey their personal truthfulness without the negative potentials of authenticity. Though not usually directly connected with soloists’ performance practices (unlike practices of congregational singing), beliefs about salvation and worship shape how vocalists communicate doctrinally true words and how their daily lives and their singing relate. These beliefs show the seriousness of vocalists’ ministry within the context of their church’s “right worship.”

238  Sarah Bereza

References Adnams, Gordon. 2008. “The Experience of Congregational Singing: An EthnoPhenomenological Approach.” PhD diss., University of Alberta. Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. 2005. Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World. 1987. Reprint. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Aniol, Scott. 2009. Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship. Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books. Bachorik, Douglas. 2012. New Heart, New Spirit, New Song: A Collection of Talks, Lectures, and Sermons on Music. N.p.: Xulon. Berg, Jim. 2008. Essential Virtues: Marks of the Christ-Centered Life. Foreword by Layton Talbert. Greenville, SC: JourneyForth. Busman, Joshua Kalin. 2015. “(Re)Sounding Passion: Listening to American Evangelical Worship Music, 1997–2015.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. Dibben, Nicola. 2009. “Vocal Performance and the Projection of Emotional Authenticity.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, edited by Derek B Scott, 317–33. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Fisher, Tim. 1992. The Battle for Christian Music. Greenville, SC: Sacred Music Services. ———. 1999. Harmony at Home: Straight Answers to Help You Build Healthy Music Principles. Greenville, SC: Sacred Music Services. Foster, Mike. 2011. The Spiritual Song: The Missing Element in Church Music. Troy, OH: TBT Publications. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garlock, Frank, and Kurt Woetzel. 1992. Music in the Balance. Greenville, SC: Majesty Music. Hamilton, Shelly Garlock. 2013. Why I Don’t Listen to Contemporary Christian Music. Afterward by Frank Garlock. Greenville, SC: Majesty Music. Ingalls, Monique M. 2016. “Transnational Connections, Musical Meaning, and the 1990s ‘British Invasion’ of North American Evangelical Worship Music.” In Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Jonathan Dueck and Suzel Ana Reily, 425–48. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kurtz, Dean. 2008. God’s Word, the Final Word on Worship and Music: A Biblical Study. N.p.: Xulon. Lacasse, Serge. 2010. “The Phonographic Voice: Paralinguistic Features and Phonographic Staging in Popular Music Singing.” In Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, 225–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lucarini, Dan. 2010. It’s Not About the Music: A Journey into Worship. Darlington: EP Books. McCracken, Allison. 2015. Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore, Allan [F]. 2002. “Authenticity as Authentication.” Popular Music 21: 209–23. Moore, Allan F. 2015. “On the Inherent Contradiction in Worship Music.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Anna E Nekola and Tom Wagner, 183–98. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Deceitful hearts and transformed lives 239 Moritz, Fred. 1994. “Be Ye Holy”: The Call to Christian Separation. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press. Reimers, Gary. 2009. The Glory Due His Name: What God Says About Worship. Biblical Discernment for Difficult Issues Series. Preface by Steve Hankins. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press. Ryrie, Charles. 1986. Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth. Chicago: Moody Publishers. Smith, Kimberly. 2005. Music and Morals: Dispelling the Myth that Music is Amoral. Enumclaw, WA: WinePress Publishing. ——— with Lee Smith. 1997. Oh, Be Careful Little Ears. Enumclaw, WA: WinePress Publishing. Sweatt, Danny M. 1981. Church Music: Sense and Nonsense. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

13 Beyoncé Mass and the flourishing of black women Tamisha Tyler

I’ve been singing all my life. It is always something that brings me great joy. There is something that happens when you feel the vibration in your body, the way you smile as you join in with whatever professional singer is on the radio. It is magical. It doesn’t matter what type of song it is, what key it’s in, or how many times your brother tells you to shut up (I’ve been singing all my life … never said I always sang well), all you can feel is the magic that happens when you join your voice with others. When my mother introduced me to gospel music, it was no surprise that my experience of singing became extra special. If I thought singing was magical, imagine how I felt as a child to sing about GOD! After all, God invented the universe, and I’m pretty sure God also invented singing, so who wouldn’t want to sing to the one who invented music. As I began to find my way through my spiritual journey, singing was always a source of connection. One of the greatest points of connection for me when singing is singing in choir. In choir, you’re not just connected to God; you are connected to other people; who stand next to you and join their vibrations with yours. It is a moment of groundedness, of interconnection, and of joy. As much as I am a fan of choirs, I am also a fan of another form of singing: karaoke. Raised in a karaoke family, we sang any chance we got. Every holiday, birthday, random weekend, each of us took turns embodying our favorite singers as random photos of landscapes displayed as the background of lyrics. I always imagined I was Whitney, or Aretha, or Diana, or Mariah and later on Beyoncé, Erykah, or India. I wanted to embody the power and strength in their voices, and in their lives; expressed in each song. As time went on, these two experiences merged. Sometimes, choir songs like “Encourage Yourself” helped me through a tough spot. Other times it was “Strength, Courage, and Wisdom.” As I continued to grow and understand who I was as a black woman in America, I felt more and more drawn to the experiences found in what my elders called “secular music.” While others joked about what we listened to on Sunday vs Monday, I soon found that there was no distinction. My spiritual connection to God was not limited by genre, and I often resonated more with the deep, complex stories of the women at the top of the Billboard charts, than songs at the beginning of church services.

Beyoncé Mass 241 So, when I stepped onto the choir stand two decades later, in preparation to sing Beyoncé’s music in a church context, I experienced a connection in a way I could not initially articulate. In that space, Beyoncé Mass, I was able to step into the fullness of my complexity in song; a black woman who loves Jesus but didn’t always find spiritual fulfillment in church contexts. In that context, I felt seen and heard. My experience was acknowledged, not just through song choice, but also in centering the stories of black women as powerful tools for spiritual reflection and wholeness. It is the same centering that I’ve found as a scholar of womanist theology and ethics and represents the kind of embodied spaces created by black women for the sake of black women’s flourishing. My purpose here is to uphold Beyoncé Mass as an exemplary display of flourishing for black women. I further examine extra-theological sources (in this case, popular music) as a tool for female empowerment and spiritual formation. Through engaging womanist perspectives of ontology and epistemology, this chapter will locate Beyoncé Mass within a tradition of black womanist practices that use extra-theological sources as a means of religious and spiritual expression, freedom, and wholeness, which Emilie Townes argues is at the center of a womanist ontology (2011). By viewing this experience as an example of what Stacey Floyd Thomas calls “radical subjectivity” (Floyd-Thomas 2006, 8) and Anthony Pinn calls the “quest for complex subjectivity” (Pinn 2003, 157). I show the possibility of the transformative power of Beyoncé’s music when used in worship. In doing so, I show Beyoncé Mass as part of a tradition that highlights ethical questions about sacred congregational music and its ability to enable flourishing for black women. The concept of human flourishing is not a new one. As far back as the writings of Iraeneus (and, no doubt, beyond), philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have all wrestled with what it means to flourish. Though many would agree that the basis of flourishing is to live a good life, there are a diverse array of factors that contribute to that reality. Taking from Nicholas Wolterstorff, Danielle Sallade defines flourishing as a life lived in right relationship with God, with one’s environment, with neighbors, and with self, and further indicates that “[i]t is a life that both goes well and is lived well” (2013). Martin Singleman, considered to be the founding father of flourishing in positive psychology circles, offers the PERMA model of five factors that contribute to flourishing: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments (Ackerman 2018). Though each of these definitions signify a certain desire that humans have in living a good life, they fall short of naming the realities of systemic oppression and trauma that dominate the lives of some, while guaranteeing a certain promise of flourishing for others, often on the backs of those who build flourishing worlds, but are excluded from partaking of its fruits. Black scholars and theologians have named this truth, offering their own take on human flourishing.

242  Tamisha Tyler In his work on black men’s mental health, Nicolas Alexander Grier names racism and sexism as barriers for human flourishing. These injustices, “impede[s] human flourishing by threatening life-affirming covenantal relationships with the divine, other human beings, and ourselves.” (2016). He develops nine tenets of flourishing in light of these realities, which include understanding one’s heritage, being connected to something greater than oneself, acknowledging and valuing difference, and having fair opportunities. In engaging womanist concepts of play, Lakisha R Lockhart identifies an agency and meaning making as part of the ethical development that leads to flourishing for black women, and situates that development in embodied practices in community (2012). These contemporary examples of a womanist critique of human flourishing build on a history within womanist and black liberationist discourse. It is my hope to join this conversation in offering yet another perspective, one that engages in the practice of Christian worship. Before I can offer the argument that Beyoncé Mass is an example of flourishing for black women, I must first offer my definition for flourishing. For the sake of this chapter, I define flourishing as the process of ontology and epistemology fully realized.1 While the concept of ontology as it relates to flourishing may seem oblivious, it is my offering that a womanist perspective of flourishing is not complete without speaking to epistemological realities. The concept of being and being fully serves as a cornerstone or prerequisite to flourishing, however, in naming the presence of oppression and trauma, epistemological realities (or ways of knowing) play a crucial role in the ethical development toward human flourishing that Lockhart names. In other words, a womanist perspective of flourishing is as follows: Ways of being (ontology) + ways of knowing (epistemology) = ways of flourishing.

Ways of being Ontological discourse has a long-standing history within philosophy, yet this understanding of being (which is centered in Western thought) didn’t leave space for those who were neither white nor male. Womanist ontological discourse is not primarily concerned with deep philosophical pontifications of being; rather, womanist scholars began at the point of lived experiences, particularly of black women, and wrestle with what those experiences tell us about what it means to live fully. In developing a womanist ontology, I draw from three scholars: Emilie M Townes, Anthony B Pinn, and Stacey Floyd-Thomas. In “To be called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in Postmodern Refraction,” Emilie Townes defines a womanist ontology as a radical concern for is-ness in the context of African–American life, one that understands that all life is sacred and seeks to unify the relationship between body, soul, and

Beyoncé Mass 243 creation (2011, 185). Engaging the work of Toni Morrison, Townes states that ontology is a concern for the self but must be done within the self/ other relationship. This concept of self/other rejects dualism (self vs. other) and the abstractions of otherness, and instead focuses on relationship in context, particularly within a black social network. She states, “at the heart of womanist ontology is the self-other relation grounded in concrete existence and succored in the flawed transcendent powers of our spirituality” (Ibid, 200). The focus text is Morrison’s Beloved. In the pivotal scene, Baby Suggs gathers her community in the clearing space, and encourages them to laugh, cry, and dance. She encourages them to love their flesh; for in the world that would rather see black bodies hanging from trees, the clearing space becomes a space of freedom where necks are “unnoosed and straight” (Morrison 1991, 88). In this way, Townes reminds us that loving our hearts, necks, and bodies is not only a radical ontological statement, but a political act. Anthony B Pinn’s contribution to womanist ontology comes from his work in naming black religion as the quest for complex subjectivity. He describes this quest as a desired movement from being a corporeal object controlled by oppressive forces to becoming a complex conveyer of cultural meaning, within a complex and creative identity (2003, 158). This complexity seeks to hold many ontological possibilities in tension, uses religion as its impulse, and is situated in the body, which serves as its primary mode of expression. Like Townes’ self/other relationship, Pinn names subjectivity as individual fulfillment within the context of concern and responsibility for others. In Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics, Stacey FloydThomas defines four tenets of Womanist ethics (based on the four-part definition of womanism by Alice Walker): radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-love, and critical engagement. Engaging radical subjectivity through intergenerational relationships, a womanist can “wrest one’s sense of identity out of the hold of hegemonic normativity” and regain her sense of agency (Floyd-Thomas 2006). Resonating with both Townes and Pinn, traditional communalism names the accountability and collective resources made available to womanist scholars, even as they tell the stories of individual black women. Redemptive self-love reinforces the body (Love your Neck!) by demystifying black women’s bodies and reconciling them back to their truer selves. And critical engagement “obliges black women to critically engage their world at the intersection of their oppressions” (Ibid, 10). Each of these contributions highlight significant aspects of a womanist ontology. They focus on the role of relationship, community, and accountability in the self/other relationship. They situate this understanding of being in the body, both in articulation and expression. They recognize that a womanist ontology is dynamic, a process or quest. And, they name the realities of that quest as a political act, critically engaged from an awareness

244  Tamisha Tyler of intersectional oppression. These four tenets shape an understanding of a womanist ontology.

Ways of knowing In order to understand the fullness of a womanist concept of flourishing, we must understand a womanist ontology and a womanist epistemology. In developing this concept of epistemology, I bring Stacey Floyd-Thomas in conversation with Patricia Hill Collins. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins tracks the ways that black women develop alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge (Hill Collins 1991, 252). In developing this epistemology, Hill Collins addresses four aspects that are central to this formation of knowledge: lived experience, dialogue, an ethic of caring, and an ethic of personal responsibility. As stated above, Floyd-Thomas’s tenets of womanist ethics resonate with the ontological ideas brought forth by Townes and Pinn; namely, that ontology is a quest for complex/radical subjectivity within the context of the self/other relationship. In developing methodological resources for understanding a radical subjectivity (namely within the context of the black literary tradition, which will be key for us later), Floyd-Thomas employs ­biomythography. Originally coined by Audre Lorde, biomythography is a process that “locates the struggle for moral agency and self-identity in a context of social oppression” (Floyd-Thomas 2006, 21). Utilized in literary texts, including Morrison’s Beloved, biomythography allows for transformation, a necessary component of radical subjectivity. Floyd-Thomas lays out this process in five points: articulation of embodied testimony, re-­ memory of disremembered memories, demythologizing of normative ideologies, interrogation of internalized oppression, and remythologizing of life story. This five-point process, I argue, serves as touch points toward the quest for subjectivity. I connect the first four points to the four tenets of Collins’s womanist epistemology in order to help create the space and movement necessary to enter into the final stage of biomythography: remythologizing of life story. Articulation of embodied testimony (a lived experience): “Experience as a criterion of meaning with practical images as its symbolic vehicles is a fundamental epistemological tenet in African American thought systems” (Hill Collins 1991, 258). Upholding the lived experience of black women serves as the embodied authority, one often dismissed by Western (read: white) articulations of knowledge. The focus on embodiment is key, as Collins highlights two forms of knowing for women; “one located in the body and the space it occupies and the other passing beyond it” (Ibid, 259). Situating it within the practice of testimony, Floyd-Thomas identifies this as a nurturing space rooted in subjectivity. In other words, acknowledgement of the lived experience as a primary authority in producing knowledge is central to a womanist epistemology and is expressed in the offering of

Beyoncé Mass 245 testimony. Testimony serves as a way of both acknowledging and sharing knowledge. This serves as the threshold in the quest for subjectivity. Re-Memory of Disremembered Memories (the use of dialogue): If lived experience is situated in the testimony, re-memory is birthed through call and response. By stepping into the testimony space, one simultaneously unearths disremembered memories, and creates the potentiality for those memories to be re-membered. Because this is done in community (self/other relationship), the act results in an exchange of stories and speech. The process of recovery and discovery build off of one another, creating a dynamic that reverberates throughout the community. This process is important in that it acknowledges the role of connectedness as a central part of epistemological validation. Demythologizing of Normative Ideologies (an ethic of caring): FloydThomas describes the demythologizing process as one that is initiated by the act of re-memory and creates a space to wonder about one’s current situation, whether self-inflected or socially constructed. She writes, “in the process of demystification, the female protagonist decisively confronts theodicy and wrestles to discern what a true sense of divine justice is – that which is yoked with and facilitates social justice” (Floyd-Thomas 2006, 29). The three-point process of an ethics of care illustrated by Collins can serve as a way to nurture this process. The first point of an ethic of care is personal expressiveness, which names individual uniqueness as significant. Second, engaging in appropriate emotions creates space to respond adequately to the process of demystification. Finally, a capacity for empathy is not only built in the protagonist but is modeled in community by others offering empathic spaces to listen to what arises from this process. Womanist epistemologies encompasses more than just cognitive understandings and seeks to acknowledge the affective embodied aspects of the self in this process of demystification. An act of care in this process is done internally as well as in community. Interrogation of Internalized Oppression (an ethic of personal accountability): This interrogation can be defined as, “that process of critical self-reflexivity that leads to critical consciousness” (Ibid, 30–1). This process is critical if one is to be respected for their communal contributions, as “knowledge claims made by individuals respected for their moral and ethical connections to their ideas will carry more weight than those offered by less respected figures” (Hill Collins 1991, 265). Embedded in this process is the continued acknowledgement of the role of the self as well as the role of community. The combination of personal interrogation and communal accountability reinforces the self/other relationship and its importance in knowledge production. By going through this process; naming embodied realities, joining in the communal ritual of reconstructing memories and sharing stories, and dismantling normative ideologies (both internal and external) in spaces of care and accountability, one can move into a space of flourishing.

246  Tamisha Tyler

Ways of flourishing Black women’s flourishing is the space where a womanist ontology and epistemology is realized. The quest for complex/radical subjectivity is a dynamic process that is situated within community (self/other relationship) and is reinforced by a process of coming into the knowledge of oneself. This process of knowing creates the conditions of becoming, especially in light of the dissonance of a quest for subjectivity in the midst of structures built on the constructed reality of the inhumanity (or non-being) of black bodies. 2 When placed within the last stage of the biomythographical method, one situates their agency: in their ability to imagine themselves beyond how they are regarded by those around them. In this radical revisioning, they carve out a way of knowing and being that exists in spite of and counter to any other system or structure that seeks to define or circumfine them (Floyd-Thomas 2006, 32; emphasis mine) This concept of flourishing; housed in the “in spite of” encompasses the full reality of black women seeking and naming their agency in the midst of intersectional oppression. Flourishing then, becomes the space where black women can engage in the acknowledgement and practice of these realities. Now that we have a broader understanding of flourishing, let us now turn to Beyoncé Mass as an example.

Extra-theological sources and black woman’s flourishing In addition to the experiences of black women as a point of origin for womanist theology and ethics, womanist theology focuses on art (particularly black women’s literary tradition) as a theological source. The black woman’s literary tradition is a pillar in womanist discourse and is established in the foundational work Black Womanist Ethics by Katie G Cannon (1988). Cannon recognizes the black women’s literary tradition as a primary source for understanding black women’s stories and their ethical values. By documenting spaces in the midst of various points of oppression, and in honoring the values of black oral tradition, fiction serves as a way to symbolically convey values upheld by black women. In this same way, I argue that music written by black women operates in a similar mode. If the novel becomes the space for women to share their truth and work toward their own subjectivity, and song lyrics is also seen as a form of story, storytelling through song becomes another space for black women to speak their truth. An example of this can be found in the work of Kelly Brown Douglas, who utilizes the work of black women Blues singers to name the relationship between black women’s sexuality and spirituality. Whether through novel or song, black women tell stories of black women;

Beyoncé Mass 247 stories of pain and suffering, triumph and joy, strength and defiance, and everything in between. If music is to be understood in the same way that Cannon describes the use of black women’s literature, sources like Beyoncé become central to naming black woman’s lived realities. What’s more, through engaging this source in a worship setting, black women name and embody a complex array of sources for theological engagement. It is in this sense that I view Beyoncé Mass as an exemplar of black women’s flourishing.

Beyoncé Mass and black women’s flourishing The first Beyoncé Mass took place at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, CA, on April 25, 2018. Over 1000 people gathered to witness and participate in a service that started as an idea sparked in a course taught by Rev. Yolanda Norton. Rev. Norton currently serves as the Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible/H Eugene Farlough Professor of black Church Studies at Graduate School of Theology in San Francisco. It was in a class on Womanist interpretation of the Hebrew Bible that Norton encouraged her students to engage Beyoncé, and question what it meant to reinterpret songs like “Flaws and all” as a prayer naming the complexities of a relationship with God. Named a womanist worship service, Norton uses the music and life of Beyoncé in a way that seeks to name the realities of black women as well as to offer encouragement and hope to those in attendance. In a video interview Rev. Norton explains why she choose Beyoncé: For me what was important about teaching the Beyoncé and the Hebrew bible class was about giving black women a voice. [The fact] that we talk about how black women are marginalized, how our bodies are judged, but also that we talk about how black women are empowering, how we start movements, how we change the environments that we are a part of… People have asked me time and again why Beyoncé in a class that talks about the Hebrew Bible … I wanted to teach a class on womanist biblical interpretation and as someone who has grown up listening to Beyoncé, as my life has evolved, I’ve seen her life evolve and I’ve seen her step into her womanhood. I’ve seen her find more agency and that’s empowering for young people. (San Francisco Theological Seminary 2018, 00:23-00:47) She goes on to discuss the process in the classroom. This was not an immediate process. It started as conversations about what we wanted to say, about how black women are created in the image of God, about what we wanted to say about how black women worship. What came out of these explorations and these conversations was something that I think embodies the womanists identity, the

248  Tamisha Tyler womanist definition in the world….In talking about Beyoncé in worship, we are watching all of these other aspects of black women; the way that we’re forced to grow up early, the way that we have our own particular attitude and sass, the way that we take agency in situations, how we care for people. All of that comes out in the way that we talk about Beyoncé in class and the way that we’ve designed this worship service (San Francisco Theological Seminary 2018, 01:04-01:51) The website notes that the service does not worship Beyoncé, rather “The premise of this work is that if we look at the personal life, career trajectory, music, and public persona of Beyoncé, so much of her life reflects aspects of black women’s stories” (Darrisaw 2018). It is the centering of black women’s stories that marks an important aspect of the service. The purpose of Beyoncé Mass is to create spaces where many (namely black women) can enter into a worship space that honors the wholeness of self, and centers stories previously on the margins. In addition, the mass serves as a way to honor aspects of popular culture that create room for religious reflection not otherwise found in church settings. In speaking to its purpose as a source of wholeness for black woman Norton says, The Mass says to young black girls, you are part of what God had in mind when, during creation, God said, “It is good.” By making the stories and realities of young black women and girls central components of this liturgical art, we’re affirming their realities in a world that is persistent and dogged in its attempts to reject them. (Friskics-Warren 2019)

You’re part of something way bigger … Hundreds of people gathered in the auditorium at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. for the Martin Luther King, Jr, celebration. The organizers invited Beyoncé Mass to lead the service, and a small community choir was formed to support the Black Girl Magic Ensemble; a dynamic singing group made up of five young black women from Portugal. The Beyoncé Mass choir consisted of people from all walks of life. I, a 30 something PhD student, along with several other classmates from seminary were invited to join the choir by the choir director September Penn. We were joined by several students from the Claremont Colleges, a few faculty members, and people from the surrounding community. My reasoning for joining the choir was to get a chance to experience the point of integration within a worship setting. During our time of waiting for rehearsal, I had the chance to speak with a few members of the choir about their reasons. Many of the students were simply interested in engaging non-gospel music in a worship setting, while others just wanted the chance to sing Beyoncé songs in

Beyoncé Mass 249 community. Each of us knew that at the very minimum we were a part of something special. The service, centered on the theme of a dream, featured several of Beyoncé’s songs, testimonies from black women (several of whom were students at the college), and a powerful sermon entitled “Tell them about the Dream” preached by Rev. Norton. The sermon was followed by a time of passing the peace, and the choir joined the ensemble in singing “Bigger,” a song from the live action Lion King Soundtrack. Though each of the songs created a unique space of engagement in worship, something unique happened during this time of passing of the peace. As the congregation joined in singing the song with the choir and ensemble, there was a moment of acknowledgement of joining something bigger than ourselves. As we sang, I watched people who attended this service for different reasons embrace one another, offering peace. Black women from different generations sang and danced in the aisles. The song beautifully names Beyoncé’s own struggles, and the harsh realities of the world as she offers encouragement and heeds to wisdom. It is a call to remember that we are a part of something bigger than us, and also a reminder that we are not alone in the journey (I’ll be your sanctuary, you just don’t know it yet…). The song represents the embodied welcoming into wholeness that is essential in black women’s flourishing. It articulates the journey to radical subjectivity that Floyd-Thomas names. The offering of the body as sanctuary, and the reminder to not forsake one’s agency in the midst of oppression creates the space for congregants to step into the complex reality of the self/other relationship. As folk gathered from different backgrounds and embraced one another, singing “You’re part of something way bigger,” we were reminded of the power of the voice and experience of black women. From an ethical perspective, Beyoncé Mass creates space to wrestle with ethical questions about how we worship. The use of popular music in a worship setting raised questions of the role of music in the context of worshipping God in community. The question, however, is less about where the lines are drawn between sacred and secular, and more about claiming the sacredness of all life experience. The popularity of Beyoncé Mass alone speaks to this. In addition, worship services where black women’s voices and experiences are centered speaks to this tradition of honoring black women in church contexts. Examples of this include worship spaces like The Gathering, a womanist church in Dallas, TX lead by Rev. Dr. Irie Lynne Session and Rev. Kamilah Hall Sharp, 3 and The Pink Robe Chronicles,4 a womanist space that centers holistic healing, hosted online (via Facebook Live and YouTube) by Rev. Dr. Melva Sampson. They embody the brilliance and innovation black women bring to worship spaces, mainly because of the process of subjectivity and agency black women develop living at the intersections of their oppression. Beyoncé Mass is another expression that lives into this tradition.

250  Tamisha Tyler In the context of black woman’s flourishing, Beyoncé Mass becomes the clearing space similar to Baby Suggs in Beloved. Through song, we are reminded to love our hands, necks, and hearts. To engage in the life of Beyoncé through song in a worship context creates space for black women to honor their own complexities and fullness of their testimonies in ways that they have not been afforded otherwise. This is not to say that this cannot be done with traditional gospel music, but the ability to name the fullness of one’s experience without being bound to certain politics or limitations in writing gospel music for a church setting creates a freedom many black women do not have the chance to experience in worship. In fact, it creates the possibility to begin the conversation about addressing those very limitations. It allows us the opportunity to re-­member aspects of our lives once held in opposition, namely our church life and “everything else.” Honoring the embodied testimony of Beyoncé as sacred allows us to do the same for our own testimonies and invites us to reevaluate how the very memories that were rejected (usually by patriarchal church structures) can be re-membered into places of wholeness. It allows us to demystify normative ideologies within church contexts, highlighting ways that black women have been used, abused, then gaslighted to believe that we should hold the blame. Creating a church space that honors black women demonstrates that churches can be spaces that honor black women, and simultaneously challenges a history of lies that range from passive (and) aggressive attempts to normalize racist, sexist, ableist, classist, and heteronormative ways of being as closer to God, to blatant abuse and outright rejection of black women’s gifts, bodies, and voices. It gives women space to name their own internalized oppression, and find sanctuary in the bodies and embrace of fellow black women. It welcomes black women into the state of owning their own agency and complex subjectivity in community.

Notes 1 I’d like to give special acknowledgement and thanks to Dr. Lakisha R Lockhart for our conversations around flourishing and her insight and encouragement in getting me to explore the connections between epistemology and ontology. 2 For more on this topic, see Warren (2018). 3 https://www.thegatheringexperience.com/ 4 https://www.facebook.com/pinkrobechronicles/

References Ackerman, Courtney E. 2018. “Flourishing in Positive Psychology: Definition + 8 Practical Tips.” https://positivepsychology.com/flourishing/ Cannon, Katie G. 1988. Black Womanist Ethics. American Academy of Religion Academy Series, no. 60. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press.

Beyoncé Mass 251 Cannon, Katie G., Emilie Maureen Townes, and Angela D Sims, eds. 2011. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader. 1st ed. Library of Theological Ethics. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press. Darrisaw, Michelle. 2018. “San Francisco Church To Observe Beyoncé Mass To Lift Up The Marginalized Voices Of Black Women.” Essence, April. https://www.essence. com/entertainment/grace-cathedral-church-host-beyonce-mass-san-francisco/ Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M. 2006. Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press. Friskics-Warren, Bill. 2019. “A Church Service Inspired by Beyoncé, No Halo Required.” New York Times, October. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/arts/ music/beyonce-mass.html Grier, Nicholas Alexander. 2016. “Caring for the Mental Health of Black Men: A Critical Race and Womanist Critique of Culture and Psyche Toward Human Flourishing.” PhD diss., Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Hill Collins, Patricia. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Reprint. Perspectives on Gender 2. New York, NY: Routledge. Lockhart, Lakisha. 2012. “‘Womanish’ Modes of Play as a Cultural Signification: Womanist Tenets and Ethical Development for Black Female Human Flourishing.” PhD diss., Vanderbilt University. https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/­ etd-03282012-102039/unrestricted/Lockhart.pdf Morrison, Toni. 1991. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Signet. Pinn, Anthony B. 2003. Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Pinn, Anthony B. 2012. The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Sallade, Danielle. 2013. “Human Flourishing: Toward a Theology of Work and Rest.” https://henrycenter.tiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Sallade-HumanFlourishing.pdf San Francisco Theological Seminary. 2018. “Why Beyoncé.” 25 April 2018. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF1bA6xIJpI Townes, Emilie M. 2011. “To Be Called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in Postmodern Refraction.” In Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, edited by Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M Townes, and Angela D Sims, 183–202. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror. Durham: Duke University Press.

14 Ethics, experience, and western classical sacred music Jonathan Arnold

Gladys Wilson was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2000 (Memory Bridge 2009). She is elderly and almost completely non-verbal. She sits in her armchair with her eyes closed and a tear running down her cheek. Validation therapist Naomi Feil enters the room and begins to talk softly to Gladys, asking her if she is sad or in pain, and gently holds her face in her hands. As she engages with Gladys, Naomi begins to sing, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Gladys does not speak but her wordless response to the music is to beat time to it on the arm of her chair, gently at first but with increasing speed and intensity. As Naomi continues to sing, she responds to the force and tempo of Gladys’ arm movement in her singing. Gladys opens her eyes and with her own hands draws Naomi’s face close to her own. For a moment, they are almost one. Naomi begins to sing another song: “He’s got the whole world in his hands”. This time there is no arm movement. Gladys and Naomi are face to face and as Naomi begins the second verse “He’s got the mothers and the fathers …” Gladys opens her near toothless mouth and herself completes the verse whispering the words “in His hands” in perfect time with the music. Naomi then repeats the first lines of the verse and each time Gladys whispers “in his hands” and then when Naomi sings the whole line Gladys sings with her, “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” The transformation in Gladys’s face and body reveals the loving, trusting, believing person which the Alzheimer’s had almost obscured. You can watch this transformative scene for yourself on YouTube (Memory Bridge 2009). Others have done so and have added their own thoughts in response: What a wonderful gift this woman is giving to the elderly as they wait at God’s gate…It must be incredibly lonely…sitting, all day, everyday… waiting for God’s call…makes me want to give my time to the elderly. (Jennifer Colaizzi, 2014, comment on Memory Bridge 2009) ᷉ I watched the majority of the video with a tight slightly sick feeling of sadness and despair, but when Gladys started breathing the song words

Western classical sacred music 253 along with Naomi, the feeling turned into an emotional well of wonderment and hope. (segafox, 2014, comment on Memory Bridge 2009) ᷉ This is seriously one of the most beautiful, soul inspiring and powerful videos I’ve ever seen! Such a perfect example of how to love someone through this horrible disease! (Lisa Borders, 2014, comment on Memory Bridge 2009) It is not news that music therapy can work wonders for those with debilitating disease. In his study on music and those suffering with Parkinson’s disease, Oliver Sacks (1990) noted that in one sufferer, Edith, music aroused “her living-and-moving identity and will, which is otherwise dormant for so much of the time.” The responses of those who have watched the encounter between Wilson and Feil powerfully demonstrate touchingly the power of music to evoke relationship and response. One viewer is stirred to help the elderly, one is moved from despair to hope, and another recognizes the power of love to bring healing. The combination of visual and physical contact and the singing of music (in this case religious music) create response and relationship, which enlarges. These are ethical responses and unsurprising given the emotional power of the change in Gladys Wilson by the use of gentle human contact through sacred music. As Tia DeNora writes, music has the power to inspire social agency: “If music can affect the shape of social agency, then control over music in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to structure the parameters of action” (2000, 20). Musical encounter concerns relationships and responses, both to the music and others, that have ethical implications. The study which follows builds upon recent scholarship into how ethical issues are integral to the human experiences of music and explores ideas about the power of music to evoke self-reflection and social change. I use recently gathered contemporary data about modern attitudes to morality and selfworth in relation to the performance of Christian sacred music in the western tradition as experienced by the individual and the corporate listener in both secular and sacred contexts. Recent research has generated information regarding emotional, psychological, and spiritual responses of listeners to music performed in a variety of concert and liturgical settings in order to ascertain if and how sacred music evokes religious, ethical, emotional, and other responses in the listener. These studies have sought to explore the views of audiences and congregations, and to discover who is listening, and why, to different styles of classical sacred music. In so doing, they have suggested that music may evoke ethical questions and responses in the hearers. Research has demonstrated that in reflecting on the Christian themes of the music, listeners have recorded that music can significantly influence their own moral thinking and practices and their actions and reactions to the contemporary world. As the Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan has said, music gives us “a glimpse of something beyond the horizons of our materialism or our contemporary values” (2012).

254  Jonathan Arnold I wish, therefore, to explore here the extent to which it is true, as MacMillan believes, that western Christian classical music “when it speaks directly and profoundly to the human psyche, can provide a transformative sense to human life in all its corporeal, intellectual and spiritual parameters” (2012). This chapter will examine the particular contribution sacred music may make in facilitating virtuous character, whilst acknowledging how other styles of music may also invoke virtue and good human character. I begin by examining two strands of contemporary scholarship concerning music’s moral value: the first views music as an aesthetic object, and the second regards music more as process, experience, encounter, and ­relationship with the music experienced with other people. Sacred music has the potential to benefit our moral character and enhance our relationships and sense of self-worth, regardless of where or when it is performed. I will consider in what follows the distinctive nature of sacred music and its influence upon the human character, drawing upon statistical research data, anecdotal evidence as well as one case study, the Oxford Lent Concerts.1 By means of these investigations, I hope to provide new evidence which can help us to explore whether sacred music has the potential to increase moral conscience, compassion and action, as well as to bring an increased sense of well-being and a greater sense of social cohesion.

Scholarship: music as aesthetic object In their essay, “Music and Ethics: the very mildly interesting view?,” Damian Cox and Michael Levine argue that Music can make one a morally better person, but it does not have to. Nor is anyone a better person merely by virtue of appreciating or understanding certain kinds of music (2016). One of the many contingent connections is genre and this has raised questions in the minds of a variety of scholars. Richard Taruskin (2008, 168–80) has observed: “Is gospel [music] religiously and morally efficacious?”; and Donald Walhout (1995, 6) has asked: “Can music make us behave in a better or worse way?” Jeanette Bicknell (2001, 266) asks: “Can western ­classical Christian music, as an aesthetic object, appreciated in a classical sacred context with a clear performer/listener divide, influence our personal moral character and make us a better, or worse, person?” Cox and Levine’s answer to these questions is that music can make a moral difference to some people, but it does not have to, and certainly doesn’t happen to all people all the time. This viewpoint is “mildly interesting”, they claim, because it is a view denied by scholars, particularly Peter Kivy: “He points out the obvious: that morally bad, even repugnant, people like music as well” (Cox and Levine 2016; Kivy 2009). As Kivy wrote: “Love of Bach does not engender love of humanity, or of the good. Or, put another way, the music

Western classical sacred music 255 of Bach is not a moral force in the world” (2009, 216). However, just because Bach’s music does not automatically “engender a love of humanity” does not mean that it cannot do so, in a different circumstance and with a different listener: “But Kivy … is saying that music is not a moral force in the world at all” (Cox and Levine 2016). This, Cox and Levine argue, is not tenable. Staying with the idea of music as aesthetic object, another argument concerns music’s cognitive effect: “Music contributes to a better understanding of one’s place within the world, and thus, to an ethical sensibility” (Cobussen and Nielsen 2012, 2), an argument that Scruton (1999) and Kivy (2009) deny. Moreover, Kivy (1990; 2009) even denies that music can convey emotion. But, his view has been widely contradicted. For instance, Jeremy Begbie has argued that, in music “the expression of an emotion is also to some extent the creating of an emotion” (2000, 15). Moreover, he argues that emotions are usually about something. As such, Begbie reminds us, they can be both well- and ill-founded: “If it follows that emotions have this directional character, arising from beliefs about, and evaluations of, an object or objects, they can be appropriate or inappropriate” (2011a, 333, italics original). For Begbie, then, emotions may potentially be vital for how we perceive reality, how we see “truth” and how we make moral choices. Emotions may also motivate our actions, whether we react out of a fear or respond out of joy and happiness. With regard to such feelings, Roger Scruton argued that the performer externalizes emotions in relation to both the music and the listener, which evokes a “sympathetic response” from the hearer, who is encouraged to “dance” or move with the sounds: The great triumphs of music, it seems to me, involve this synthesis, whereby a musical structure, moving according to its own logic compels our feelings to move along with it, and so leads us to rehearse a feeling at which we would not otherwise arrive (1999). Scruton’s emphasis is on the music itself “moving according to its own logic” as an autonomous structure, that in turn moves us emotionally. But here, he fails to acknowledge the importance of relationship between composer, performer, and listener. When examining Adorno’s attack on popular culture, Scruton argues that some music can move us towards vice. For instance, he insists that “… the idiom of Gregorian chant is almost universally acknowledged to be spiritual and uplifting” (Scruton 2018, 51), without acknowledging that this is surely not the case outside a western European or North American context. He made similar claims for the work of Haydn, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, but condemns Death Metal as “… oppressive, dark, morbid. Indie music is complacent and self-satisfied; the American songbook is sentimental and nostalgic” (Scruton 2018, 51). Scruton’s condemnation is indicative of a common assumption that there is wide agreement on these idioms and that there is a consensus concerning

256  Jonathan Arnold the virtues of each. It assumes that courtly and well-mannered arts are intrinsically virtuous, whereas they might inspire sloth and gluttony or regard morbidity a vice; whereas for some, it may be considered a virtue. It is worth noting that it is unwise to assume that all western Christian classical sacred music has been employed for the purposes of moral good. Such music has, on occasion, been given a privileged status, been exclusive and elitist, been used to enforce power structures and as a means of discipline and doctrinal enforcement (see Steuernagel’s chapter, this volume). For Scruton, there are many such idioms outside of western classical sacred music, which can be considered whimsical, aggressive, self-indulgent, self-pitying, or narcissistic. His viewpoint is undoubtedly judgmental, but his emphasis upon the importance of listening to, rather than just hearing western classical music emerges as the real test for him of whether the experience can impart any moral benefit. To listen seriously involves being sympathetic to the virtue expressed within the music and responding to it. That is why expression in music really matters. It matters because it is a manifestation of the moral life, a way of inviting us to shape our sympathies in response to a character imagined in music form (Scruton 1999, 359). But Scruton here may be failing to recognize the importance of relationship in that he has not considered (or asked) who is “imagining” the musical form: the composer, the performer or the listener? If there is any truth to Scruton’s assertion that sacred music can be “spiritual and uplifting,” then we must ask why. And, does this spiritual up-lift amount to a moral improvement in the participant? If Cox and Levine are right in their assertion that “the principal connection between music and ethics is likely tied up with the expressive power of music: the power to express emotions, and in the right contexts, grant the listener insight into new possibilities of emotional experience” (2016), then might that “emotional experience” also allow for a spiritual element? Or, is the world of the “spirit” completely different all together? One answer to this is Nussbaum’s suggestion that tradition plays a large part in how music is received and what effect it may have: “I am unable to hear music from a tradition unknown to me and to identify securely its emotional content” (2013, 57). One such tradition is western Christianity. The music can be more morally meaningful if one is familiar with the religious tradition into which the music falls and if we are ourselves drawn into the spiritual process by our participation. In biblical terms, this implies the movement of the Holy Spirit working within and through us, making us more fully human—physically, mentally, and spiritually—as we are transformed into being more like the divine. As Jeremy Begbie (2011b, vii) puts it: “We are re-humanized by the Spirit, not de-humanized” (2011b, vii). Steven Guthrie has suggested various ways in which the spiritual and the aesthetic are closely related: as mystery and ineffability, where the arts help

Western classical sacred music 257 us to go beyond words and concepts. This is revealed in expression and emotion, because art expresses the depths of our beings as the counterpart to worship and religious practice, and because music in particular has, since the birth of religion, shared in the action of communal ritual. Mystery and ineffability are also evident as inspiration, in which the artist has a divinely instigated spirit-filled impetus for creativity, as well as in an eschatological sense (relating to the end times), as artists are those who can glimpse a foretaste of the heavenly kingdom. When the words “spirit” or “spirituality” are mentioned, one or more of these definitions may be implied. Guthrie makes it clear that these connections are all theological in nature because each one relies upon a certain understanding of (the Holy) Spirit, “in other words, a pneumatology” (Guthrie 2011, xv–xvi). Guthrie proposes one reason why there has traditionally been such a close relationship between aesthetics and spirituality which is deeply rooted in the biblical narratives of God’s Holy Spirit. Guthrie refers to the Pauline notion that a spiritual person is one who lives in the Holy Spirit, the work of which, through “creation, incarnation and redemption … is the humanizing Spirit” (Staniloae 2000). The breath or Spirit of God (the Hebrew Ruach ) creates life and humanity; the Spirit empowers the incarnation and humanity of Jesus; and the Spirit re-­humanizes us by the work of redemption and consummation (Guthrie 2011, xvi). Robert Scholl also believes that modern society needs so-called spiritual music, which, using imagery from Wagner’s Parsifal, he defines as “… music that seems to gnaw at the wound of modernity as much as it desires the spear that might close the wounds and overcome human alienations from God.” He suggests that there is in contemporary culture a longing for the absolute and for a reconfiguration of humanity which implies a kind of “secular theology that, though it would like to transfigure the past, may, to varying degrees, question or simply remain open to an unknown outcome” (Scholl 2011, 187). This “secular theology” arises when music that relates to the depth of the human condition is imbued with theological meaning by the listener, regardless of the intentions of the composer or performer. Conversely, explicitly Christian composers may welcome the performance of their music, full of intentional theological and moral resonance, in a secular space. Scottish Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan expresses this intent using the same terminology of humanization, because he is convinced that in what he calls a de-humanized world, music brings back a sense of our humanity: “I believe it is God’s divine spark which kindles the musical imagination now, as it has always done, and reminds us, in an increasingly dehumanized world, of what it means to be human” (2008). MacMillan has clearly expressed his understanding of the humanizing effects of classical sacred music and the dehumanizing effects of consumerist, materialist, and individualist living in the West as follows: Music is the most spiritual of the arts … Music has the power to look into the abyss as well as to the transcendent heights. It can spark the

258  Jonathan Arnold most severe and conflicting extremes of feeling and it is in these dark and dingy places where the soul is probably closest to its source, where it has its relationship with God, that music can spark life that has long lain dormant (MacMillan 2000, 17). To be fully human, for MacMillan, is to be inspired in the full meaning of that word—“to be filled with spirit”—as music re-energizes our sleeping potential as human beings. I now turn to consider whether, in the secular, or post-secular West, there is any evidence for this effect of sacred music.

Scholarship: music as process and relationship Despite their emphasis upon music as aesthetic, albeit expressive, object, Cox and Levine also acknowledge that music has a positive effect upon the human character because it connects the individual with other people (Higgins 1991), particularly by the transfer of emotions through performance and l­istening—emotions of a morally uplifting kind (see Levinson 1992). This notion of connection with other people through music is more fully explored in Jeff Warren’s recent work Music and Ethical Responsibility. Warren argues that ethics emerge from our encounters with other people, with music playing a contributory role in the experience of encountering others. He argues that ethical responsibility should be at the heart of musical practice. Warren warns that notions of “art-religion” or “the belief that art, though created by humans, is revelational” (Dahlhaus 1989, 88), “…  ­generally involve the claim that music needs to be treated with devotional reverence and that people have ethical responsibilities to art” (Warren 2014, 8). But this makes music an inhuman object, whereas Warren, in contrast to Dahlhaus, insists that music is always connected with people. Warren builds his argument upon two concepts proposed by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “proximity” and the “trace”: In proximity, two unique people come into relation. The festive nature of musical experience … wherein we actively share something with o ­ thers … enables the relation of proximity. In short, music can create a shared space that allows two unique people to encounter each other (8). With regard to “trace,” Warren argues that all musical encounter leaves a “trace” of another human being: Since music is always something human beings do, music is never separate from people. All musical experience, even listening alone, involves a “trace” of another person. (8).

Western classical sacred music 259 Thus, Warren’s main argument is that “musical experience involves encounters with others, and ethical responsibilities arise from these encounters” (1). That is, music is “inextricably linked” to human relationships and that such human encounter inevitably raises ethical questions: “We listen to music in a world shared with others, and the responsibilities we have to others place limitations on the ways that we experience music” (2). Encountering people requires response, Warren argues, and this is an ethical matter. He challenges the view—held by philosophers from Plato to Scruton, and theologians from Augustine to Luther and beyond—that some music is objectively “good” and some “bad.” This application of ethics to music has several problems, including that it does not take into account relationships with others and is limited to the listener/music relationship. I suggest that a more satisfactory account of music and ethics needs to consider the influence of music experience in the ways people experience and respond to other people (3). Warren makes five assertions concerning music. First, he debunks the idea that “music is completely separate from society” (24), a notion posited by Peter Kivy (1990) as we have seen above. The problem with this approach is that it fails to acknowledge the “inter-relational and hence ethical nature of musical meaning” (Warren 2014, 24): “Only a fool would argue that music exists in a vacuum” (Smith 2003, 24). Second, Warren argues against the assumption that ethical implications attach themselves to music either through some intention of the composer or performer or through common interpretation, and thus the music carries these meanings to all others who listen to the music (25). The third approach dismissed by Warren is the “Bono” approach, the idea that an idealist musician, such as the lead singer of U2, must be heeded because of popularity and/or musical prowess. The problem here is that music is treated as a “neutral commodity used to get people to pay attention to other causes” (28). In contrast, Warren argues that musical experience, in itself, reveals issues of ethical responsibility. Warren’s fourth dismissal of a false assertion is that “… the central relationship of music to society lies in its providing a model that can be adopted for larger-scale social relationships” (Warren, 29). Indeed, Kathleen Higgins has even argued that “music is a better model for human life” than models proposed by sociologists or ethicists (Higgins 1991, 7). But this is problematic: These arguments are helpful to the extent that they reveal the inter-­ relational aspects of music, but are problematic because they are examined as relationships that can serve as a model for other social

260  Jonathan Arnold relationships. As a result, such accounts are often idealised and do not focus on the relationships that are already taking place but on the ways that these relationships can serve other relationships (Warren 2014, 29). Warren replaces the four flawed arguments above with a fifth proposition: All musical activity involves encounters with others that give rise to ethical responsibilities … My use of the term “ethics” does not refer to systems of ethics or moral laws, but—following Levinas—refers to the responsibilities to other people that arise when we encounter them in the world (29–30). Thus, for Warren, the ethics of music is located more in the process of making music rather than the meaning of music in itself. It is through the process of musical encounter that meanings become possible (48). I find Warren’s analysis compelling as it appears borne out in the evidence of my own experience, and of others, which I shall explore now through case studies and survey material below.

Evidence—survey material My own experience of singing with professional choirs and directors, who specialize in performing sacred repertoire in both religious and non-­ religious contexts, is one source of evidence of the efficacy and power of sacred music. But statistical studies also bear it out. In the United Kingdom, attendance at Anglican cathedrals with a strong choral tradition has been on the rise for decades. Kathryn King’s current doctoral research, at Oxford University, on public responses to Choral Evensong has prompted thousands of responses from enthusiastic attendees across the United Kingdom (King 2020). This enthusiasm also exists in other countries. Hanna Rijken’s research reveals that there has been a huge rise in interest in Choral Evensong in the Netherlands, where over 150 new choirs have been formed singing Choral Evensong in Dutch Reformed and Lutheran churches up and down the country (Rijken 2020). For the United Kingdom, a report of 2012 gave evidence of a 30% rise in numbers (Church of England Media News 2012) and a more recent document, of 2018, confirms the continued rise in the number of people hearing sacred music in these ancient buildings (Church of England Research and Statistics 2019). Likewise, the UK Live Music Census of 2016, undertaken by researchers at Edinburgh University asked people, “What do you get out of live music? What would you say are the most important (intangible) things that you take away from live music?” (Webster et al. 2018, 28). With hundreds of responses the report concludes that music “… enhances social bonding, is mood-enhancing, provides health and well-being benefits, offers a unique experience, forms a fundamental part of people’s identity, is inspiring,

Western classical sacred music 261 engages all the senses, and offers the potential for transcendence” (28). For one respondent from Wales, “Music soothes the soul. It is more than entertainment, it is a communication and therapy, emotion and transcendence” (29). Whilst, for this Scottish respondent, spirituality and humanization are again combined: “Music is a profoundly spiritual comfort. Sometimes the performances can be disappointing, but it’s rare. Most of the time, the experience is uplifting, sometimes it becomes transcendent. While music can be made to this level, there is hope for humanity, and we learn to cope better with the atrocities that are heaped upon us every day” (31). From such responses, the report draws some conclusions: “From the above assertions, then, we can see live music’s potential to be socially and culturally valuable in a variety of ways, both intrinsically and instrumentally (and, frequently, both)” (31). Of course, the UK Live Music Census covered many types of venues with 31% of the performances surveyed taking place in places of worship. Whilst not all of this music performed in churches would be sacred, not all of the music performed in concert halls or other venues is secular. In two recent surveys of my own, I collected qualitative data from people who had attended performances of sacred music. One survey focused on those listening to sacred music in a liturgical context and the other survey collected responses from those listening to sacred music as part of a concert. The results from both surveys contained overlapping ideas: those claiming to have had a religious or spiritual experience were as evident in the concert audience survey as the church congregation survey. For instance, examples of responses from those attending concerts include this: I find that I can experience the transcendent power that I call God through the unique beauty of unaccompanied song such as this: the finest music of its time, performed in the architectural context for which it was written, and with the highest quality of vocal refinement (Arnold 2018). The quality of the performance, as expressed above, was also a common factor to both surveys. Another respondent wrote: Overall the experience was spiritually uplifting and the uplift was due partly to the performance. The quality of the choir and soloists was such that I felt confident in the performance. The sense of peace and awareness of having been in God’s presence remained for some days after the concert (Arnold 2018). For others, the musical genre was also a factor in the quality of experience: Sacred music always brings me back to the knowledge that I have a spiritual dimension. It enables me to be grounded in my prayer and

262  Jonathan Arnold meditation. For me, sacred music …is a bridge between our worldly existence and the wonder, power and awesomeness of God (Arnold 2018). Moreover, some respondents found that the venue was a contributory factor in their quality of experience: Sacred music and churches usually give me a space where I can be other than my quotidian self …To walk into any place of worship and find sacred music being performed, usually makes me feel particularly blessed (Arnold 2018). Likewise, in the congregation survey, a consecrated venue and a liturgical context was significant for some respondents’ experience: I have always loved evensong and will go to services and listen on the radio. I follow the psalm and make that a time for reflection. I appreciate the other music and often find it uplifting. I sing the hymns if there are any (Arnold 2018). Similarly, for this person, the liturgical and musical encounter helped to foster a sense of mental well-being and moral resolution: “I find the weekly evensong spiritually enriching and feel it provides me with mental strength to realise my duties.” Not everyone, however, had a spiritual or religious experience through music in a liturgical context: “My reaction is entirely musical and not spiritual at all. I find that I may be overwhelmed by church music … without having any spiritual or religious feeling at all.” However, the majority of responses, albeit from self-selecting participants of a largely middle class and educated background, were positive towards the religious or spiritual aspect of the musical encounter. Moreover, for others, vocal participation is an important factor that is present in worship but not in a concert hall, even if the congregational participant is not of the Christian faith: “I very much enjoy singing hymns, plainchant, etc., despite not connecting with (and actually opposing in some ways) what is said in the words and what it means, on account of practising Judaism and not Christianity.” For some of those who are practicing Christians, the liturgical and sacramental nature of a service is an essential difference from a concert performance, with regard to musical function: “What a joy it is when music is in a church—doing its JOB! This was much, much, better than a concert— concerts don’t include a Eucharist. With this, my soul could keep hovering, reaching in beauty to God.” Likewise, this respondent indicates why cathedral and chapel attendance at worship in the United Kingdom might have increased so much over the last few years: “I greatly value evensong and other liturgical offices in the public churches and cathedrals. It constitutes a real and valuable public service in offering a space of peace and meditation in the midst of life’s routine and cares.”

Western classical sacred music 263 One interesting response to music within the liturgy involved a two-yearold child: I had a two year old with me. He is riveted by this experience every time. He is just still and calm and listens for minutes at a time. He is also clearly fascinated by the action and movement within the liturgy. In turn, I am moved and inspired by his response to this music and it calms me too, drawing me, in a way I can only feel, and cannot articulate, closer to God (Arnold 2018). My own small survey, although the self-selecting participants were not representative of the population as a whole, indicated that such responses to sacred music aligned with Warren’s assessment of the ethical efficacy of music as relational, both the potential intrinsic value and practical benefits of sacred music, to at least some people. Sacred music had a positive effect on some individuals, helping them to feel “blessed,” “uplifted,” and “enriched,” as well as providing a “valuable public service” to the wider community. Having considered some of the similarities and differences between types and qualities of encounter experienced through both concert and liturgical settings, I wish to focus on a specific example of an annual event that deliberately seeks to straddle both contexts in a spiritually inclusive, multimedia, and inter-disciplinary way. I refer to the Oxford Lent Concerts, with which I have been involved for the past decade.

Case study—the Oxford Lent Concerts I believe that an investigation into the intention, motivation, rationale, and exposition of these events will bring insights into how sacred music, through experience, encounter and relationship, has the potential to increase moral conscience, compassion, and action, through spiritual healing, increased sense of well-being and greater sense of social cohesion. The concerts, which are free to attend, take place in the Chapel of The Queen’s College, Oxford on Tuesdays evenings in Lent. Each concert offers an hour of sacred vocal and instrumental music from many historical periods performed by professional and semi-professional musicians on a voluntary basis; the concerts are coordinated and conducted by Professor Owen Rees, Tutor and Fellow in Music at the College as well as Chapel Music Director. Added to the music are displays of contemporary visual art, often created specifically for the concerts to illuminate the music’s themes, by artists Roger Wagner, Nicholas Mynheer, Alison Barrett and Tim Steward, whose work serves as an additional focus for reflection during the concerts. Applause is reserved for the end of the experience after a period of silence and reflection. The audience/congregations are invited to observe the planned silence and stillness between pieces of music. Each annual series of concerts (usually around three in number) has its own Lenten theme,

264  Jonathan Arnold such as Lamentation, Sacrifice, or Prophecy and Passion. The themes are not there merely as an abstract idea in order to facilitate easier programming of repertoire, but are offered as subjects to be actively engaged with by all those present. For example, this quotation from Kathleen O’Connor (2002), used in the 2014 program booklet, gives an indication as to how the theme of Lament may be understood: Without coming to grips with our own despair, losses, and anger, we cannot gain our full humanity, unleash our blocked passions, or live in genuine community with others. Lamentations untangles complex knots of grief, despair, and violent anger that pervade this society – a society that refuses woundedness, weakness, and hurt. We need to access our passions to become true moral agents (131). The 2013 series of concerts featured different settings of the same text, Psalm 51, the penitential Miserere Mei Deus (Have mercy on me, O God). There are many settings of this Psalm and Jan Spurlock wrote concerning them: “Judging by their music, these composers appear to regard God as an active and dynamic presence in their world. But why should we bother here to speak of Lent or indeed of God at all if our culture is essentially secular?” (Spurlock 2013). She answers her own question with regard to the beauty of the music but also its meaning: “If there is any deeper meaning in the music we hear in these concerts beyond the purely (and gloriously) aesthetic beauty it brings us, then we may want to be attentive to the text which inspired these compositions” (Spurlock 2013). The concerts inspirational founder and organizer, Jan Spurlock, warns us away from approaching the music purely as aesthetic object and encourages us to consider our experience and relationship not only with the biblical text, via the musical process, but with the ethical consequences for our relationships with fellow human beings. Spurlock suggests that if one reflects upon the sacred music and its text, it can lead to contemplation of our ethical deficiencies, our lifestyles, our failure to act with moral good, and to improve our thought and our actions in relation to our community: Considered reflectively, the Miserere can lead us towards clarity about our own failure to live with integrity and love towards others, to ponder in a new way what our actions and inactions may be visiting upon our communities and the larger world (Spurlock 2013). This is regardless of our particular state of belief, because the music draws us to listen to the Psalmist who trusts God profoundly and, like us, is in need of forgiveness: Perhaps, then, we may dare to question whether it is wholly rational to treat talk of sin, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, and indeed God, as

Western classical sacred music 265 if they were functionally redundant and to ignore in our own heart the voice calling out for forgiveness and the renewal of relationship (Spurlock 2013). Spurlock’s question not only reflects Warren’s (albeit secular) argument, but also Tia de Nora’s assertion, also from a secular point of view, that music “… may serve as a resource for daily life, and it may be understood to have social ‘powers’ in relation to human social being” (2000, 151). This is relevant to Spurlock’s religious and ethical hope that by hearing Psalm 51 set to music “we may also glimpse a deeper truth in the psalmist’s profound conviction of God’s unconditional love and find ourselves both challenged and changed by music, word and silence” (2013). The concerts are non-liturgical, but they are, nevertheless, contemplative and devotional, multi-sensory experiences that have a spiritual, social, and ethical aim: “The concerts are for us a further opportunity in this season of Lent to ‘give up’—to turn aside, to withdraw from distractions, to master our self-indulgence” (Spurlock 2015). This move away from self-­ indulgence is combined with a hope that the experience of the music, art, and sacred space will also lead the participants, whether as performers, artists or listeners, to a greater sense of compassion: “As we sit together may we be given renewed hope, glimpsing in the beauty of the created, something beyond words, a beauty which will open the ‘eyes of the heart’ to greater compassion for others and for ourselves and strength to face the challenges of our days” (Spurlock 2019). Another positive dimension to the Lent concerts is the benefit to community cohesion: In coming to these concerts, sitting among friends or strangers, we are opening ourselves to a new community of people, daring to allow music and art, stillness and silence to envelop us in a space hallowed by centuries of prayer (Spurlock 2019). As a community experience, people are in relationship both with the music and with each other. The sacred music, whether by Palestrina, Bach, Tavener, or Pärt, is reflected in the imagery and sculpture, which potentially leads each participant, whether a listener or a performer, to a greater sense of the world’s suffering and injustice, leading to action: As we reflect on this suffering and on the wounds of Christ in his Passion, we cannot fail to recognize our own individual part in the countenance of such violence and injustice (Spurlock 2011). There is an important theme running through all the concerts that contemplation of suffering and sacrifice might lead us to respond to the needs of the world by a moral scrutiny of ourselves and others that leads to virtue.

266  Jonathan Arnold Amongst the ethical and social concerns of the concerts, there is also intended to be a personal benefit of well-being to each participant—that of finding a moment of inner peace: As we listen to the baroque music and contemplate the modern icons, both inspired by the words of the Old Testament Prophets viewed in the light of the Passion, we may enter into a rare experience of stillness (Spurlock 2018). This peace, enabled through the experience of sacred music and art in a sacred space is, for some at least, more than merely a warm feeling. Its intention is sacramental: For [George] Steiner, and for many of us here, music and art are central to this call into a deeper life. “I take music to be the naming of the naming of life”, he writes in Real Presences, “This is … a sacramental notion.” (Spurlock 2016). Because music can enter the heart and mind of the listener, it can be like a memory that takes us back time and again to the experience and to the conviction felt in a concert of sacred music, that we are morally responsible and can choose to act ethically. Moreover, the concerts present and communicate something ineffable that can help those present to better understand their human relationships and ethical responsibilities through the “means” of the art (i.e. process) rather than the “end” (the aesthetic object), as Jeanette Winterson relates: What art communicates, if it’s genuine, is something ineffable. Something about ourselves, about the human condition, that is not summed up by the oil painting, or the piece of music, or the poem, but, rather, moves through it. What you say, what you paint, what you can hear, is the means not the end of art; there are so many rooms behind (Winterson 1992, 277). The doors to these “rooms behind” can potentially be unlocked by the means of music, in which we can seek our true moral selves and find insights about how to be good. Likewise, the intention and effect of the Lent Concerts might be summed up in these words by Richard Rohr: We are not so much human beings trying to be spiritual. We’re already inherently spiritual beings and our job is learning how to be good humans! I believe that’s why Jesus came as a human being: not to teach us how to go to heaven, but to teach us how to be a fully alive human being here on this earth (Rohr 2018).

Western classical sacred music 267 Thus, the Lent Concerts combine sacramental spirituality with ethical and social concerns. The music and art are intended to evoke an ethical response to suffering and injustice in our world today, just as much as to enable an inner devotional peace. Musical settings of Lenten and Biblical texts about lament, persecution or death, bring all those engaged with the experience into a deeper realization of the urgent need for moral action within our own age.

Conclusion If we consider the potential ethical benefits of sacred music in an individualized, consumerist, and materialist western world, then we acknowledge the positive influence of sacred music for human self-worth and spiritual nourishment, regardless of where or when it is performed. In general terms, we have found that there are two overarching ethical themes linked with sacred music: a potential increase of moral conscience, compassion, and action; and a potential ethical benefit, through “proximity” and “trace” to individuals and communities, through the experience, encounter, and relationship of the musical process, promoting spiritual healing, increased sense of well-being, and greater sense of social cohesion. With regard to the first conclusion, we saw in the exploration of the Lent Concerts and my own surveys, that there is an ethical impact in the performance of sacred music, especially settings of affective religious texts, which can move a congregation or audience to consider, with greater compassion, the needs of the poor and the oppressed, and lead them to a response of action. Sacred music, in this sense, is sometimes capable of moving the listener and performer away from self-centeredness and towards an empathetic outlook towards others. Concerning our second finding, evidence from the Lent Concerts and other material also indicates that there is a significant potential ethical benefit of well-being and peace that can be engendered by engagement with sacred music, leading the listener or participant away from potentially destructive emotions of pride, anger, greed or envy, towards more benevolent feelings of humility, patience, temperance and generosity, to name but a few of the cardinal vices and virtues. In addition to these two general points, there are other areas in which sacred music can affect the ethical aspect of the human condition, such as the ways by which engagement with sacred music can highlight issues of suffering and injustice, and enable the participant, whether as listener or performer, to act more selflessly, sacrificially, with more compassion and humanity, bringing healing to both themselves and others. Hearts and minds can be transformed by music and the word in combination and this transformation can be encouraged by the shared experience. Listening to sacred music in community, even as strangers, can also inspire a broader sense of cohesion and socially committed resolve.

268  Jonathan Arnold

Note 1 I am deeply grateful to Jan Spurlock, not only for instigating and running the Oxford Lent Concerts, but also for her editorial assistance with this chapter.

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270  Jonathan Arnold Walhout, Donald. 1995. “Music and Moral Goodness.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (1): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333513 Warren, Jeff R. 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, Emma, Matt Brennan, Adam Behr, Martin Cloonan, and Jake Ansell. 2018. “Valuing Live Music: The UK Live Music Census 2017 Report.” February 2018. http://uklivemusiccensus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/UK-Live-MusicCensus-2017-full-report.pdf Winterson, Jeanette. 1992. “Jeanette Winterson.” In The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books That Inspired Them, edited by Antonia Fraser, 274–81. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate tables and those followed by “n” indicate notes. Ableton Live 81 aboriginal identities 189, 190; see also ethnomusicology in post-mission Australian aboriginal contexts Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 187 Achtemeier, Elizabeth 140n8 acoustic guitar 75–76 Adnams, Gordon 235 Adorno, Theodor W. 255 aesthetics 55, 60–61, 62, 91, 138, 147, 148, 254–258 African–American gospel music and Korean practitioners see black gospel music in Korea Agamben, Giorgio 42 agency: creative 63; ethical 212; flourishing of black women and 242–250; within Hillsong’s ecclesial ecology 149, 160; Indigenous Christian in Hopevale 186, 189–192, 197–198; moral 244; worship music and anxieties about 89 Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing (Bogost) 80 Allen, Horace N 54 Altogether OK 190, 194 amateurism-without-amateurishness see evangelical worship music, vanishing act in Amazing Grace (Newton) 127–128 American Academy of Teachers in Singing 229 anamnesis 62 Anglican cathedrals 260 Aniol, Scott 234, 235 Anselmian theology 127

anthropocentrism 77 anxiety 89 applied ethnomusicology 183–185; see also ethnomusicology in post-mission Australian aboriginal contexts appropriation 11, 53, 208, 214 Aquinas 31 archaic language 138 Arnold, Gina 115 arousal 26 “art-religion” 258 Augustine, St. 47n3, 47n4 aural ethics 213 aural reorientation 40–41 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) 189, 191 The Australian Lutheran Hymnbook with Tunes 190 authenticity 91, 228; see also vocal performance practices, truth and truthfulness Ave Maria (Gounod) 124 Awake (album) 73–74, 84 Baby Suggs 243, 250; see also Beloved Bachorik, Douglas 234 Bach’s music 124, 131, 254–255 baptistic churches 226 Barber II, William, Rev. Dr. 112 Barney, Katelyn 183 Barrett, Alison 263 Barthes, Roland 47n5 Becker, Judith 174 Begbie, Jeremy 24–25, 30, 255, 256 Bell, Catherine 217

272  Index Bell, John 216 Beloved (Morrison) 243, 244, 250 Benjamins, Laura 94 Bennett, Jane 41 Bennett, Milton 210 Berg, Jim 233 Berger, Brigitte 178n29 Berger, Peter 175, 178n29 Bethel Church, Redding, CA 176n4–178n25; Bethel’s vision of ethical practice 171–172; Bethel’s worship-rooted lifestyle 166–169; culture cultivation and 169–171; questions and critiques 174–176; renewalist evangelicalism and worship 165–166; worship-oriented habitus 172–174 Bethel Music 102; see also Bethel Church, Redding, CA Bethel.TV 171 Bethel worship: bands, guitarists with 98; leaders 166, 168; vision 172; worshipers and BSSM students 167 Beyoncé Mass and flourishing for black women: extra-theological sources 246–247; ways of being 242–244; ways of flourishing 246; ways of knowing 244–245 biblical exegesis 204 biblical scripture 110, 112, 119, 120 Bicknell, Jeanette 254 biomythography 244, 246 black Christians and Hillsong, Sydney see Hillsong Megachurch, ethics of style, representation, and identity in Black Feminist Thought (Collins) 244 Black Girl Magic Ensemble 248 Black Gospel (film) 62–63, 62–64 Black gospel music in Korea 51–71; “Gospel worship” 58–61; historicizing the maŭm 61–66; introduction 51–53; Protestant amnesia 53–58; stylistic gestures 52 #BlackLivesMatter movement 119 Blackpentecostalism 52 black religion 243 Black Sacred Music tradition 148 black social network 243 Black Womanist Ethics (Cannon) 246 black woman’s flourishing see Beyoncé Mass and flourishing for black women Blesser, Barry 48n15–49n15 Blues singers 246

Bob Jones University (BJU) 226 Bogost, Ian 76, 78, 80–81 Bohlman, Philip V 51 Bonnet, François 42, 43 book musicians 116 born-again salvation 232–234 Bowie, Andrew 81 The Boxer 140n7 Brad, Christerson 172 Braidotti, Rosi 48n14, 49n16 breath, delay between see Black gospel music in Korea Brennet, Namoli 121n19 Bringle, Mary Louise 126–127 British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) 4 Brown, David 135–136 Brown, Frank Burch 135 Bryan, Mark 99 “Bumper Music” 100–101 Burdick, John 31 Burning Lights (Tomlin) 93 Busman, Joshua Kalin 231–232, 235 Cage, John 40 Canadian Mennonite communities 7 Cannon, Katie G. 246, 247 capitalism: democracy and 117–118; neoliberal 105–106; Protestantism and 96; Punk and 90; religious morality into consumer 117–118 Capitol Christian Music Group (CCMG) 103n2, 120n1, 121n10 care ethics 7 Caribbean, Christian musicians in the 147 Carlson, Carl W 95–96 Carthusian rules 38 Carthusians of La Grande Chartreuse 39 CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) 73, 105, 165 CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) 59, 61, 68n5, 90, 116 CCM Magazine 92, 109 Celebrating Grace 126 Cha, Paul S. 26 The Chase (Somerville) 129 Cheolkyu, Lee 59, 61 Chicago blues of Big Ray 116 Chicago’s Most Wanted 116 Choral Evensong, Netherlands 260 choral facilitation, Christian 189–192 choral singing 188, 189, 190, 192, 260 “Chord Chart kit” 98 Christendom’s colonialism 27–30

Index 273 Christian beliefs 22–27; Indigenous 185–186; Korean 56; morals and 106–108, 110; promotion of 117–118 Christian communal ritual shape, musical styles in see black gospel music in Korea Christian Congregational Music 203–204 Christian discourse, Korean 57 Christian festivals: as designed experiences 114–115; music business and 109–110; see also Wild Goose Christian holiness 62 Christian identity 33, 108, 117; or self 147; Western soundscapes and see ethics of body in Christian musicking; of Wild Goose 112, 116, 117 Christianity Today 169 Christian lyrics 236 Christian musicians in the Caribbean 147 Christian Popular Music (CPM) 29–30, 34n8 Christian religious principles, ancient 41 Christian theology 77, 212, 216–217 Christ’s work of reconciliation 233 Chua, Daniel 24, 27 church music aesthetics, Korean 60–61; see also aesthetics Cicero 135 civic engagement 167 Clark, Jeff 107, 113, 114, 115, 122n32 Clement of Alexandria 23 C-Major (Bach) 124 Cobussen, Marcel 1, 5, 204, 213 “Coco Collective” 147, 155 cogitating ego 27 Coldplay 75, 76 A Collection of Hymns and Sacred Poems 140n5 Collection of Hymns for Social Worship 130 1780 Collection of Hymns for Use of the People Called Methodist 130 Collection of Psalms and Hymns (Madan) 130 The Collection’s melodic indie folk 116 collective self 208 colonialism: Christendom’s 27–30; cultural work of 206; Indigenous communities and 184; Japanese 55 commotio carnis 27 communal accountability 245

communal ritual 245, 257; see also rituals community cohesion 265 community exegesis 204, 205–208 community rituals 208, 217; see also rituals compensation for worship musicians 90–91 complex/radical subjectivity 244, 246 concept of sacrality 43 concept of separation 76; see also Lévinas Confessions 47n4 congregational exegesis 204 congregational musicking: embodied identity and 22; transformation in 24, 218 congregational singing 34, 126, 188, 230, 234, 235; see also singing congregational vocabulary 32 consumer capitalism and religious morality 107–110 contextual ethics 205 contextual subcultural social identity 204 copyright rules 132 Corbin, Alain 48n11 corporate listener 253 corporate worship 225–226, 232 cosmopolitanism 7, 9 Costello, Sean 75, 83 Country Gospel 189 Cox, Damian 254–255, 256, 258 Crawley, Ashon T 52, 57–58 Creation (in Pennsylvania) 105–106 critical thinking 39 Cross, Ian 191 cross-racial movement of black gospel styles see black gospel music in Korea cultural imperialism 206 cultural influences 29 cultural-linguistic practices 160 cultural relativist 78 cultural texts 204 cultural theorists 173 cultural values 145, 148, 206 Cummings, William, Dr. 130 CWM (Contemporary Worship Music) 68n5; carpentry of shimmer 80–85; Lévinas, ethics, and god 76–78; shimmer reverberation 74–76; That shimmer thing 78–80; That Worship Sound 73–74

274  Index Dahlhaus, Carl 258 Dalrymple, Timothy 169 Daly, Mary 140n8 DAW Logic Pro X 81, 83 DAW (digital audio workstation) plugin 75 dc Talk 90 Dear God, Creator of Humankind 136 Dear Lord and Father of Mankind 136, 137 Dearmer, Percy 130 decentering of humans 41 Deep Blue Day (Eno) 74 delay between breath see black gospel music in Korea Deleuze, Gilles 44–45 DeMore, Melanie 219–220 De Musica 47n3 demystification 245 demythologizing of normative ideologies 245 DeNora, Tia 253 Derrida, Jacques 77 Descartes 27 detachable reverbs 74 developmental model of intercultural sensitivity 210 de Villiers, Etienne 9 devotional musical practice 4, 7 Dewey, John 25 dialogic listening 204 Dibben, Nicola 228 diffusion control 83 digital material religious culture artifacts 33 Doerksen, Brian 76 Doherty, Robert 165 Douglas, Kelly Brown 10, 246 doxological language 134 Drott, Eric 121n31 dualism 243 Dueck, Jonathan 7 ecclesial ethics of hospitality 147 ecclesial identity 145–146 Eckert, Carter 55 ecstasy 24, 25–26 The Edge 75, 80 ELCA 215–216 embodied identity 22 emotional directness 90 Engelhardt, Jeffers 6 English and language of Christian worship 31

Enlightenment-based Euro–American evangelicalism 58 Enlightenment’s system of racial governance 54 Eno, Brian 74, 75, 80, 83 Epiphanius of Salamis 23 epistemological validation 245 Epstein, Heidi 26 Eryximachus 39 eschatological 257 Essential Music Publishing 120n3 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari game) 80 ethical benefits of sacred music see sacred music in the western tradition ethicality of the sonic 43–46 ethical justice 132 ethical responsibility of musical practice 258–259 ethical webs 28 ethic of inclusion 136 Ethics (Dewey and Tufts) 25 ethics in separation and proximity 76–77 ethics of body in Christian musicking: body, mind, and Christianity 22–27; current subjections of the body 30–33; musicking body ethics, problems in 27–30 ethics of everyday sounds 38–47; ethicality of the sonic 43–46; Ite, missa est 46–47; between the sacred and the profane 41–43; silence 38–41 ethics of socio-political positioning 184 ethics of style 185–186, 192–197 ethnomusicology in post-mission Australian aboriginal contexts: applied ethnomusicology 183–185; Christian choral facilitation, agency, intentionality, and academic rigor 189–192; ethics of style 185–186; ethics of style in Hopevale 192–197; Hopevale community, history and religious politics of style 186–188; Participatory action research (PAR) in Hopevale and ethics 188–189 ethnoracial social groups 66 Euro–American aesthetics 55 Euro–American church 215 Euro–American construction of immobility 32 Euro–American cultural production 55 Euro–Western Christian modernity 65 Euro–Western Christian musical styles 52

Index 275 Euro–Western evangelical modes of hearing 53–54 Euro–Western rock and classical aesthetics 62 evangelical(s): churches 73; conservative 226; construction of worship-oriented habitus 172–174; Euro-Western modes of hearing 53–54; for inclusion 62; televangelism 171 evangelical ethics at Bethel Church: Bethel’s vision of ethical practice 171–172; Bethel’s worship-rooted lifestyle 166–169; cultivating “kingdom culture” at Bethel 169–171; evangelical construction of a worship-oriented habitus 172–174; questions and critiques 174–176; renewalist evangelicalism and worship 165–166 evangelicalism’s political connotations 164 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Global Mission 210; see also musical ethic of relational accompaniment Evangelical Lutheran Worship 215 evangelical worship music, vanishing act in: mediat(iz)ed worship 100–102; performance/worship divide 90–92; talent from god 92–95; vanishing mediator 95–96; worship 89–90; worship tutorials 96–100 experience 8 EXS24 82, 84 facial expression 229 Farlough, H Eugene 247 feedback control 83 Festgesang 130 feudalism and Protestantism 96 Fish 121n28 Fisher, Tim 234 “floating intentionality” 191 Flory, Richard 172 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey 242, 243, 244–245 “FlyWorship” 99 folk art 204 folk-belief 125 folk revival 75–76, 127 Foucault, Michel 217 Frege, Gottlob 39

Frith, Simon 230–231 frozen reverb 83 Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy 226 fundamentalists, conservative evangelical 226 fundamentalist vocalists and personal truthfulness see vocal performance practices, truth and truthfulness Galli, Mark 177n15 gamba gamba 196 Garageband 218 Gardella, Peter 27 The Gathering 249 gay Christians 111 Geertz 184, 192 gender identities 110–111, 208 German Association for Protection from Noise 39 Getty, Keith 126 Giglio, Louis 128 The Global Project 145 global song 215; see also musical ethic of relational accompaniment global systems of racial governance 62 “Glocal” 215–216 Glory to God 126, 127 Goisueta, Roberto 212 gospel music, Hillsong’s engagement with see Hillsong Megachurch gospel sonic techniques 65 Gounod 124 Graham, Billy 113 Grant, Amy 90, 108, 183 Greek doctrine of ethos 23 Greek sophrosyne 25 Greenbelt 113 Gregorian chant 28, 255 Gregorian hymns 39 Grier, Nicolas Alexander 242 Gröning, Philip 38 Guattari, Félix 44–45 Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies 189 guitar-based musical tutorials 97 Gunbu Guugu Yimithirrbi 190 Gutenberg, Johann 140n6 Guthrie, Steven 256–257 Gutierrez, Gustavo 212 Guugu Yimithirr language 186, 187, 193 Guugu Yimithirr song 192, 196

276  Index Hall, Stuart 178n28, 178n29 Handel 124 Harkness, Nicholas 31, 54, 56–57 Hark the Herald Angels Sing 129–130 Harland, Mike 132 Harman, Graham 76, 78, 79, 81 Harrison, Klisala 183 Have It All (music album) 165 Hawn, C Michael 29 Haynes, Maren 89 Hear him 131 Hearn, Billy Ray 109 Heart in Motion (Grant) 108 Hebrew Bible 247 Hegel, GWF 89–90, 96, 102 Hellenistic ethics of the body 22, 24, 32 Herbert, George 131 Heritage Mass Choir 58, 60, 65 Hesmondhalgh, David 1, 5, 15 hierophany 43 Higgins, Kathleen 5, 259 High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America 103n6 Hill, Susan 132 Hill Collins, Patricia 244, 245 Hillsong 33, 102, 189; guitarists with 98; worship leaders in 92 Hillsong Megachurch, ethics of style, representation, and identity in: background 143–144; ethics of hospitality 146–148; gospel in Hillsong services and events 155–156; Hillsong sound and gospel 153–155; method 148–150; racial/ ethnic identity of Hillsong church 150–151; racial identification in Australia 151–153; strategies of “black peoples” in dominant space 156–160 Hillsong Music 35n10, 90, 177n6 Hillsong United 92 Hillsong Worship 73–74, 76, 80 Hodges, Kris 162n7 Hofman, Ana 184 home church communities 111 The Homeless Mind 178n29 Hopevale community, history and religious politics of style 186–188; see also ethnomusicology in post-mission Australian aboriginal contexts Hopps, Gavin 135–136 Howard, Jay 108, 116

Hunt-Ausland, Krista 205 hymnals 215 hymn lyric 126–130, 136–137 hymnody 135, 186, 187, 188 Hymns and Sacred Poems (Wesley) 129 hymns and songs for worship, ethics of adaptation in: aesthetics, poetics, and inclusive language 133–134; ethics, edits, and the elapse of time 132; ethics, poetics, and aesthetics 132–138; intellectual property rights of a writer, protection 125–132; language of hymns 134–136; music matters 136–138 hymn-singing in Hopevale 187 Hyo Sik 60–61, 64–66 Hyun Kyong Chang 56 idiom of Gregorian chant 255 Žižek, Slavoj 96 Ignatius of Loyola 47n1 Illiterate Light 116 Im, Bo kyung Blenda 10 The Imperative (Lingis) 78, 79 In Christ Alone (Townend and Getty) 126–127, 128 inclusive language 136 Indie music 253 indigenous cultures 184, 186; see also ethnomusicology in post-mission Australian aboriginal contexts Indigo Girls 116 Ingalls, Monique M 6, 8, 29, 172, 235 Inside Out Faith 116 institutionalized racism 65 intellectual property rights 125, 127, 130, 132 interconnected matrices of communication 29 intercultural communication 208, 210, 214 intercultural competency 207, 210 intercultural sensitivity, developmental model of 211 intergenerational relationships 243 internalized oppression of Black women 244, 245–246, 250 Into Great Silence 40, 43, 45 Iraeneus, writings of 241 IRCAM 74 Isaiah 58 77

Index 277 James, Peter 83–84 Jameson, Fredric 96 Jamieson, Andrew 217 Japanese colonization and Korean modernity 55–56 JazzTutorials 99 Jenkins, Philip 29 Jesus 75–76, 135, 212 Jesus Culture 92, 98, 165, 166, 176n4, 176n5 J Kwest’s hip hop 116 Johansson, Calvin M. 26 John Mark McMillan’s rootsy arena-ready rock 116 John of the Cross 47n1 Johnson, Beni 167–168 Johnson, Bill 167–168 Johnson, Brian 169 Johnson, E Patrick 53 Johnson, Eric 169–170 Johnson, Jenn 166, 169, 177n9, 177n10 Kant, Immanuel 79 Karamanolis, George 22, 24 Karlstadt, Andreas 88–89 Keck, Leander 204 Kellner, Hansfried 178n29 Kendrick, Graham 132 Kim Hyo Sik 60 Kivy, Peter 254–255, 259 K-LOVE 121n28 Knapp, Jennifer 116 Knight, Steve 116–117 Korean Christian vocality 31 Korean Contemporary Christian Music (KCCM) 59 Korean Protestant music-making see black gospel music in Korea Krista Foundation for global citizenship 203–205; see also musical ethic of relational accompaniment Kurtz, Dean 235, 237 Lacasse, Serge 228 La Grande Chartreuse 38 Landau, Carolyn 8 Lanois, Daniel 74, 75, 83 Lärmschutzverband, Deutscher 39 Latinx liberation theology 210, 212 Laura Dance Festival 187 Lenten 263–264, 267 Lessing, Theodor 39 Lévinas, Emmanuel 74, 76–78, 79, 213, 258

Levine, Michael 254–255, 256, 258 Liebscher, Banning 176n4 Lifest (Wisconsin) 105–106 LifeWay Worship (Harland) 132 Ligertwood, Brooke 73 Line 6 Helix guitar processors 98–99 Lingis, Alphonso 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85 Lion King Soundtrack 248 Lipsitz, George 212, 213 Listen. A History of Our Ears 47n2 literary tradition, black women’s 246 liturgy/liturgical 23; centered Godencounter 175; context 262; ethics and 174–175; exegesis 191, 197; guided habitus 173; language of 31; musicking in 29; theology 159, 164; traditions of Western Christianity 33–34 Lloyd, Jessie 183 local worship musicking see Hillsong Megachurch Lockhart, Lakisha R 242 Logic Pro X 82 logocentrism 39 Lorde, Audre 244 Lovelace, Austin C. 24 Lowe, Lisa 65 Luhrmann, Tanya 173 Lusk, Caroline 93 Lutheran Australian Aboriginal community 185 Lutheran Church of Australia 190 Mackinlay, Elizabeth 183 MacMillan, James, Sir 253–254, 257–258 Madan, Martin 130 MainStage 81–82, 83–84, 112, 114 Makujina, John 26 Malachi 236 male sexual desire 26, 32 maŭm (heart-mind complex) 54, 56–57, 65 Mann, Robert 190 Marchesini, Haynes 10 Marching in the Light of God 190 Mars Hill megachurch 89 Marti, Gerardo 147 mass mediation 29 Massumi, Brian 44 Matsutani, Motokazu 55 Matthew 25 77 McCartney, Paul 124 McCracken, Alison 229

278  Index McFague, Sally 140n8 McGann, Mary 33–34 meaning-making 10, 134, 204, 242 media and musicking web 29–30 MediaComplete 99–100 mediatization 31, 33, 173 mediat(iz)ed worship 100–102 Mek Some Noise (Rommen) 147 melodic realization 229 Mendelssohn’s 1840 cantata 130 Mendoza, Abel 73–74 mental well-being 262 Merriam, Alan 183 Messiah (Handel) 124 MetalTutorials 99 MIDI keyboards 81, 84 Mille Plateaux (Guattari and Deleuze) 44 mindful worship 32 Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Floyd-Thomas) 243 Miserere Mei Deus 264 missio dei 28, 34n3 missionaries 28–29, 52–55, 187, 206, 215 Moody, Dwight L. 68n2 Moore, Allan F 230 Moore, Marissa Glynias 215 moral identity 24 morality 3, 44, 57, 77, 107–110, 118, 226, 253, 262, 265 Moritz, Fred 233 Morrison, Toni 243 Morton, Timothy 76 mousike 24 Multitracks.com 82 multivocality 218 musical censorship 26 musical competency 95, 191 musical encounter 253 musical ethic of relational accompaniment: community exegesis 207–208; Emic discourses of ethics 208–210, 212; exegeting the community 205–207; introduction 202–203; Krista Foundation for global citizenship 203–205; music and an ethic of relational accompaniment 212–214; ritualizing accompaniment 217–221; from theory to practice 214–217 musical identity 147 musical idioms 227–229 musical listening 213

Music and Ethical Responsibility (Warren) 76, 258 music business, ethics, and Christian festivals: ethics and aesthetics in Christian music 107–110; festivals as designed experiences 114–115; general information 105–107; music at Wild Goose 115–118; summer 2020 119–120; Wild Goose and social justice 110–114 musicking under neoliberal capitalism 106 Music that Makes Community 219 MWM (modern worship music) practices 164–166, 173, 174–176 Mynheer, Nicholas 263 Myrick, Nathan 7, 93–94, 212 Native Instruments 82 negotiation of proximity 61–62 Nekola, Anna 29 neoliberal capitalist markets 108–109 Neudorf, Jordan 91–92, 93–94 Newbigin, Lesslie 206 New Calvinist theology 89, 92 New Testament 26, 135 Newton, John 127–128 Ngalan Gadaayga 190 Niebuhr, H Richard 174 Nielsen, Nanette 1, 5, 204, 213 Nietzsche, Friedrich 39 noise 39 nonhuman agents 44 North American Colonies 27 North American missionaries 52 North American religious leaders 54 Noudelmann, François 81 Nussbaum, Martha C. 256 object oriented ontology (OOO) 76–77, 79 O’Connor, Kathleen 264 ocular music traditions 33–34 Of Grammatology 103n4 O For A Thousand Tongues (Wesley) 131–132 Old Testament 236, 266 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) 45 ontological discourse 242 Other 51, 53, 54, 61, 66, 67, 77, 209, 215 Oxford Lent Concerts 263–267; see also sacred music in the Western tradition

Index 279 pagan worship 236 Parsifal (Wagner) 257 Participatory action research (PAR) in Hopevale and ethics 188–189, 198n6 Pascal, Blaise 38 Passion 102, 266 Passion Conference in Atlanta, Georgia 101 passions, visual and aural allures of 32 Passion worship conference 113 patristic theologians 31 Patristic thinkers 23 PCUSA committee 126 Peacock, Charlie 109 Pearson, June 187 Pearson, Noel 187 penal substitutionary atonement 217 Pentecostalism 165, 166, 174 performance/worship divide 90–92 PERMA model of five factors 241 personal authenticity 228 personal autonomy 160 personal interrogation 245 personal truthfulness, conveying 226–227; see also vocal performance practices, truth and truthfulness Pettan, Svanibor 183 The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano (Noudelmann) 81 physical causality 79 The Pink Robe Chronicles 249 Pinn, Anthony B 241, 242, 243 pitch shifting 75, 83 Plato 23, 24 plurality 10 poetic archaisms 131–132 political activism and Bethel 167–169 political identities 117 political polarization 9 polysemy 213 Poplawska, Marzanna 28 Porter, Mark 1, 7, 24, 147 praise and worship subculture 90–92 Preaching Local Theology as Folk Art 204 Presbyterian (PCUSA) Board of Foreign Missions 54 Presbyterian Church 126 Presbyterians, Korean 54, 56–57 Profanations 42 Protestantism 54–57, 96 Protestants: American 27; amnesia 53–58; conservative evangelical

226; Korean 56, 61, 62; mission 206; missionaries 28; movements of migration 27 Provident Music Group 120n1 proximity to others 76–77 Psalm 51 264 punk 90–91 Purcell, Michael 77 A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshipers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches 162n8 racial identification in Australia 151 racial justice and Wild Goose 112 racial subjugation 64 racial violence 64–65 racism 209, 242 Radano, Ronald 51 radical subjectivity 243, 244 Rao, Doreen 190 Rappaport, Roy 173–174 R&B 189 Real Men Don’t Sing (McCracken) 229 Real Presences (Steiner) 266 redemptive self-love 243 Redman, Matt 92 Redman, Robb 30 Reigersberg, Muriel Swijghuisen 10, 183 Reimers, Gary 234, 236, 237 relational accompaniment, music and an ethic of 212–214; see also musical ethic of relational accompaniment relationality 66, 209, 212 relationship 243, 258–260 religion, defined 48n10 religious decolonization see Black gospel music in Korea religious devotion 39 religious ecstasy 25 religious identity 117, 173 religious marketing 171; see also consumer capitalism and religious morality religious morality and consumer capitalism 107–110 religious texts 264, 267 “renewal evangelical” Christianity 165–166 “Renewalists” 165–166 “rhema doctrine” 177n9 Rice 24 Riches, Tanya 10 Rijken, Hanna 260

280  Index rituals 51; Bethel 173; of body discipline 54; communal 245; community 208, 217; congregational 204; defined 217; MWM practices 164; performative 217–219; sound 41–42 Robertson, Campbell 162n8 Rodenbach, Georges 40 Rohr, Richard 266 Rolling Stone 108 Roman Catholicism 172 Roman temperantia 25 romanticized stereotypes 186 Romero, Óscar, Archbishop 210, 212 Rommen, Timothy 1, 6, 61–62, 147, 148, 185–186 Rosendale, George 186–187, 188, 190, 193 Russel, Dan 139n3 Ryrie, Charles C 232 Sacks, Oliver 253 sacramental spirituality 267 sacred music in the Western tradition: evidence 260–263; music as aesthetic object 254–258; music as a process and a relationship 258–260; Oxford Lent Concerts 263–267 Sacrosanctum concilium 28 “Salaam Aleikum, Hoya!” 216 SALISBURY 130 Sallade, Danielle 241 Salter, Linda-Ruth 48n15–49n15 salvation: beliefs about 225–226, 232; born-again 232–233 Scarry, Elaine 45 Schippers, Huib 183 scholarship concerning music’s moral value see sacred music in the western tradition Scholl, Robert 257 Schopenhauer, Arthur 39 scientific naturalism 78 Scruton, Roger 253–254, 255–256 Sðnsaengnim 68n4 Second Vatican Council (SVC) 28 secular musical idioms 226 secular theology 257 self-affectivity 39 self-centeredness 267 self-conscious 15 self-control 25 self-expression 233 self-identity 244 self-love 243

self/other relationship 243, 244, 245, 248 self-realization 226–227 self-reflexivity 245, 253 self-veiling 58 self-worth 254 sense of agency 243 Sermo 29 47n3 service ethics 208–209, 210, 212, 213 sexism and human flourishing 242 sexual desire 23 sexualities 110–111, 208, 246 Sheehy, Daniel 183–184 shimmer reverberation 74–76 Shuker, Roy 90 silence 38–41 Simon, Paul 140n7 sin 233 Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling) 227 singing: choral 188, 189, 190, 192; congregational 34, 126, 188, 230, 234, 235; together see musical ethic of relational accompaniment Singleman, Martin 241 Small, Christopher 212–213 Smith, James KA 30, 101 sŏngak (bel canto) voice 54 social activism 175 social agency and music 253 social censorship 26 social change 253 social construction 79 social formations 51 social identity 204 social justice 106, 110–114, 172 social negotiation 57 social practices 217 social relationship 212, 213, 214 social relativism 78 Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) 4 Somerville, William 129 song persona 231 sonic communication with God 42 sonic ethics of relationships 45 sonic properties of the shimmer 75 SonRise (Virginia) 105–106 Sony 120n1 Soon, Isaac 156 Soskice, Janet 140n8 SoulFest 106, 112–113, 128, 139n3 Sovereign anarchy 48n14 Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? 48n15

Index 281 space-time multiplicity 44 Sparrow Records 109 Spectrasonic’s Omnisphere 2 82 Spinoza, Benedict de 44, 45 Spirit of God 257 spiritual hazards for musicking Christians 27 spiritual healing 263, 267 spirituality 159–160, 233, 243, 246, 256, 257, 262, 267 Sprezzatura 103n3 Spurlock, Jan 264–265 Ssempijja, Nicholas 28 “Standing Stone” 217–219 star persona 231 Steiner, George 266 Sterling, Marvin 52 Sterne, Jonathan 74 Steuernagel, Silva 10 Steward, Tim 263 Stewart, Charles 186 St John Passion (Bach) 131 storytelling through song 246 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 139n4 Streck, John 108, 116 Strymon Big Sky pedal 75, 83, 84 Styll, John 109, 110, 121n11 Sullivan, Andrew 135 Sunday Sounds 84 SundaySounds.com 82 Sunday Sounds video 83 Sweatt, Danny 227 Szendy, Peter 47n2 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare) 131 Taruskin, Richard 254 Taylor, Charles 6 Taylor, Timothy 106 Taylor, Victor 43 Tennyson, Lord 135 Teresa of Avila 34n1 testimony, practice of 244–245, 250 “That Worship Sound” 73–74, 80, 82 theological anthropology 159 theology: Anselmian 127; Christian 77, 212, 216–217; Latinx liberation 210, 212; liturgy/liturgical 159, 172; New Calvinist 89, 92; secular 257 Thomas, Stacy Floyd 241 Time Magazine 89, 93 Tisdale, Leonora Tubbs 204 Titon, Jeff Todd 183 Together in Song 190, 194

Tomlin, Chris 92–93, 128, 177n6 Tomlinson, Barbara 212, 213 Totality and Infinity (Lévinas) 77 touring guest musicians 147 Townend, Stuart 126 Townes, Emilie M 241, 242, 243 transpacific evangelical aurality 54 transpacific evangelical communities 51 Trilling, Lionel 227 Trinidadian and gospel music 61, 148 Tufts, James Hayden 25 TX 249 U2 75, 259 UK Live Music Census 260–261 Ultimate Shimmer Pad Collection 84 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 139n4 The Unforgettable Fire (album) 74 Unguarded (Grant) 108 United Church of Christ’s Justice Leadership Program 209 United Methodist Church’s Global Mission Fellows program 209 Universal 120n1 Urbana worship conference 113 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data 177n11 Uzukwu, Elochukwu 27, 32 Valéry, Paul 47n6 Valhalla Shimmer 75, 82, 83 Vallotton, Kris 168, 169, 177n18, 177n19, 177n20, 177n21 “vanishing mediator” 96–97 Village Bells 48n11 Vineyard Worship 76 virtues 24, 26, 111, 116, 233, 254, 256, 265, 267 vocal music 24 vocal performance practices, truth and truthfulness: born-again salvation and sincerity 232–233; born-again salvation and testimony 233–234; fundamentalists’ solo vocal performance practices 227–228; historical context of vocal performance practices 229; minimizing apparent musical skill 231–232; persona 230; personal truthfulness 226–227; testimony 230–231; truthfulness, born-again salvation, and worship 232; worship and right knowledge 235–237

282  Index “Wade in the Water” 217–218 Wagner, Roger 263 Wagner, Thomas 29 Wagner, Tom 8, 92 Wahl, Brian 97–98, 100 Walhout, Donald 254 Wallis, Jim 112 Warner 120n1 Warren, Jeff R 1, 5, 10, 99, 191, 258–260, 263, 265 Watson, JR 129–130 Watts, Isaac 135, 136–137 ways of flourishing 246 ways of knowing 244–246 Wellman, James K. 103n6 Wesley, Charles 129, 130, 138 Wesley, John 130 West, E 209 Western Enlightenment’s constriction of thought 57–58 What a Beautiful Name 145 white American evangelicalism 89 white American missionaries in Korea 54–55 Whitefield, George 129–130 white supremacy, culture of 207 Why Music Matters (Hesmondhalgh) 5 Wild Goose 121n17, 121n18, 121n20, 122n32, 122n33; as designed experience 114–115; music at 115–118; social justice and 110–114; see also music business, ethics, and Christian festivals Williams, Nelson, Bishop 65 Winterson, Jeanette 266 Without Words: Synesthesia 166 Wittgenstein’s aesthetics 148

Wolterstorff, Nicholas 241 womanist epistemology 244–246 womanist ethics 244 womanist ontology 243, 244–245, 246 Woorabinda 198n5 Word Entertainment 120n1 Wordsworth’s idea of poetic language 136–137 Worgul, George 164 World Council of Churches (WCC) 28 worship 176n2, 225–226, 232 Worship Across the Racial Divide (Marti) 147 “Worship Band In Hand” 99 worship bands, recording-oriented 92 worship conferences 113 worship culture in Korea 60 “Worship De-railed” 91 Worship Essentials 2 83 worship musicians 90–92, 92–95 worship-oriented habitus, evangelical construction of 172–174 worship’s mediatization 173 worship spaces 248 WorshipTheRock 91, 93–94, 95 Worship Tutorials 89, 96–100, 101 WorshipU 171 Wren, Brian 23 ye deaf; his praise 131 ye dumb/Your loosen’d tongues employ 131 Yolanda, Norton, Rev. 247–248 Yolngu 198n4 Yong, Amos 29 Young, Shawn David 118 YouTube 177n7