Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives 9781138588875, 9780429492020

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Introduction: interdisciplinarity and epistemic diversity in congregational music studies
Part I Methodological Perspectives
1 In case you don’t have a case: reflections on methods for studying congregational song in liturgical history
2 Worshipping “With Everything”: musical analysis and congregational worship
3 Mediating religious experience? congregational music and the digital music interface
4 Ethnography in the study of congregational music
5 Re-sounding the history of Christian congregational music
6 Music Theology as the mouthpiece of science: proving it through congregational music studies
Part II Key Issues
7 Political economy and capital in congregational music studies: commodities, worshipers, and worship
8 Congregation and chorality: fluidity and distinction in the voicing of religious community
9 “We just don’t have it”: addressing whiteness in congregational voicing
10 Researching Black congregational music from a migratory point of view: methods, challenges, and strategies
11 Studying Byzantine Ukrainian congregational music in Canada: considering community and diaspora
12 Congregational singing and practices of gender in Christian worship: exploring intersections
13 Searching for a metaphor: what is the role of the Shaliach/Shalichat Tzibur (leader of prayer)?
14 Ecclesioscapes: interpreting gatherings around Christian music in and outside the church through the Dutch case of the “Sing Along Matthäuspassion”
Index

Citation preview

Studying Congregational Music

Studying the role of music within religious congregations has become an increasingly complex exercise. The significant variations in musical style and content between different congregations require an interdisciplinary methodology that enables an accurate analysis, while also allowing for nuance in interpretation. This book is the first to help scholars think through the complexities of interdisciplinary research on congregational music-making by critically examining the theories and methods used by leading scholars in the field. An international and interdisciplinary panel of contributors introduces readers to a variety of research methodologies within the emerging field of congregational music studies. Utilizing insights from fields such as communications studies, ethnomusicology, history, liturgical studies, popular music studies, religious studies, and theology, it examines and models methodologies and theoretical perspectives that are grounded in each of these disciplines. In addition, this volume presents several “key issues” to ground these interpretive frameworks in the context of congregational music studies. These include topics like diaspora, ethics, gender, and migration. This book is a new milestone in the study of music amongst congregations, detailing the very latest in best academic practice. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, music, and theology, as well as anyone engaging in ethnomusicological studies more generally. Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music industry, and popular music studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) and Book Review Co-Editor of the journal Ethnomusicology. Jeffers Engelhardt is Professor of Music at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology focusing on community-based ethnography, music and religion, voice, and analytical approaches to music and sound. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion and Digital and Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Monique M. Ingalls is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Church Music at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, USA. She is the author of Singing the Congregation  (Oxford, 2018), coeditor of three books on congregational musicmaking, and series editor of Routledge’s Congregational Music Studies Series.

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

Studying Congregational Music Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives Edited by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls

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, Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt and Monique M. Ingalls; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt and Monique M. Ingalls 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 utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-58887-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-49202-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresvii Notes on contributorsviii

Introduction: interdisciplinarity and epistemic diversity in congregational music studies

1

ANDREW MALL, JEFFERS ENGELHARDT, AND MONIQUE M. INGALLS

PART I

Methodological Perspectives9   1 In case you don’t have a case: reflections on methods for studying congregational song in liturgical history

11

LESTER RUTH

  2 Worshipping “With Everything”: musical analysis and congregational worship

25

JOSHUA KALIN BUSMAN

  3 Mediating religious experience? congregational music and the digital music interface

39

ANNA E. NEKOLA

  4 Ethnography in the study of congregational music

64

JEFF TODD TITON

  5 Re-sounding the history of Christian congregational music

81

SARAH EYERLY

  6 Music Theology as the mouthpiece of science: proving it through congregational music studies BENNETT ZON

103

vi  Contents PART II

Key Issues121   7 Political economy and capital in congregational music studies: commodities, worshipers, and worship

123

ANDREW MALL

  8 Congregation and chorality: fluidity and distinction in the voicing of religious community

140

JEFFERS ENGELHARDT

  9 “We just don’t have it”: addressing whiteness in congregational voicing

156

MARISSA GLYNIAS MOORE

10 Researching Black congregational music from a migratory point of view: methods, challenges, and strategies

174

MELVIN L. BUTLER

11 Studying Byzantine Ukrainian congregational music in Canada: considering community and diaspora

193

MARCIA OSTASHEWSKI

12 Congregational singing and practices of gender in Christian worship: exploring intersections

209

TERESA BERGER

13 Searching for a metaphor: what is the role of the Shaliach/Shalichat Tzibur (leader of prayer)?

230

JEFFREY A. SUMMIT

14 Ecclesioscapes: interpreting gatherings around Christian music in and outside the church through the Dutch case of the “Sing Along Matthäuspassion”

246

MIRELLA KLOMP

Index266

Figures

2.1 Visual representation of “With Everything” roadmaps 14.1 Rehearsal prior to performance on April 6, 2012, at Geertekerk, Utrecht 14.2 Hand-made ribbon that was wrapped around a chocolate in cellophane

33 250 252

Notes on contributors

Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, USA, where she also holds an appointment as the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. Her recent publications include an edited volume, Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (Liturgical Press, 2019) and a monograph @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2018). Joshua Kalin Busman is Assistant Dean of the Esther G. Maynor Honors College and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA. His research focuses broadly on music in contemporary evangelical Christianity with a particular interest in issues around worship, affect, and mass media. Melvin L. Butler is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, USA. He is the author of Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Jeffers Engelhardt is Professor of Music at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA. He  teaches courses in ethnomusicology focusing on communitybased ethnography, music and religion, voice, and analytical approaches to music and sound. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion  and Digital and Multimedia Editor of the  Journal of the American Musicological Society. Sarah Eyerly is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Early Music Program at Florida State University, USA. She is the author of Moravian Soundscapes: A  Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania (Indiana University Press, 2020). Monique M. Ingalls  is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Church Music at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, USA. She is the author of  Singing the Congregation  (Oxford, 2018), coeditor of three books on congregational music-making, and series editor of Routledge’s Congregational Music Studies Series.

Notes on contributors  ix Mirella Klomp is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is the author of Playing On. Re-staging The Passion After the Death of God (Theology in Practice 10), Leiden: Brill 2020. Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music industry, and popular music studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) and Book Review Co-Editor of the journal Ethnomusicology. Marissa Glynias Moore  is an ethnomusicologist who focuses on crosscultural singing in predominantly white spaces, with publications in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, The Hymn, and several forthcoming edited collections. In addition to her scholarship, Dr. Moore is the Executive Director of Piano Cleveland, an arts non-profit organization. Anna E. Nekola  is Assistant Professor of Music at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and a keen oboist. She coedited Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age (Ashgate, 2015). Currently she is collaborating on a volume of essays on university-level music pedagogy titled Teaching and Learning Difficult Topics in the Music Classroom. Marcia Ostashewski  is Founding Director of the Centre for Sound Communities, an arts-led social innovation lab at Cape Breton University in Canada. Currently, her efforts are focused on collaborative research for reconciliation with indigenous communities and Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical singing in diaspora. An Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology, she teaches music, dance, and cultural tourism. Lester Ruth  is Research Professor of Christian Worship at Duke Divinity School, North Carolina, USA. He is a liturgical historian with specialization in American evangelicalism. Ruth has also taught at Yale Divinity School, Asbury Theological Seminary, and the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. Jeffrey A. Summit holds the appointment of Research Professor in the Department of Music at Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA. He is also Director of the Innovation Lab at Hebrew College Rabbinic School. His research and writing focus on music and identity, music and spiritual experience, Jewish worship, music and advocacy, and the impact of technology on the transmission of tradition. Jeff Todd Titon is Professor Emeritus of Music at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA. Author or editor of nine books, numerous articles, recordings, and films, he is known for developing and practicing collaborative ethnographic field research based on reciprocity and friendship. He is

x  Notes on contributors also a pioneer in establishing an applied ethnomusicology based on social responsibility. Bennett Zon  is Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for ­Nineteenth-Century Studies at Durham University, UK. He is Director of the International Network for Music Theology, General Editor of the Cambridge journal Nineteenth-Century Music Review and the Routledge book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and a General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology.

Introduction Interdisciplinarity and epistemic diversity in congregational music studies Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls Congregational music-making has long been one of the most potent and portable Christian religious practices, holding immense significance for Christian communities worldwide. Congregational music ranges across boundaries of region, nation, and ecclesial tradition, creating sonorous ways for its participants to create, maintain, and challenge individual and communal identities. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the advent of new media technologies, the mass migration of Christian populations domestically as well as internationally, and the avenues of distribution widened by global capitalism have rendered many Christian musical traditions eminently mobile. Now, the sounds and images of musicking bodies—whether transmitted via sound recordings, radio waves, or binary code—are taken up as embodied worship practices in new places. Congregational music-making is a rich and multifaceted social practice, and as such, scholars seeking to understand how participatory musicking forms Christian community and subjectivity must address an often bewildering array of questions: inquiries into historical transmission and traditioning, processes of mediation, multilayered social dynamics, liturgical contexts, and analyses of lyrics, music, and movement each contribute insights to congregational music’s social and spiritual efficacy. The numerous questions to be addressed when studying congregational music-making, as well as the increasingly diverse backgrounds of the potential scholarly audiences, create methodological challenges. The past decade has seen efforts within the emerging field of congregational music studies to identify and address these challenges (Ingalls, ­Landau, and Wagner 2013; Porter 2014; Nekola and Wagner 2015; Ingalls, ­Swijghuisen-Reigersberg, and Sherinian 2018). In the inaugural volume of the Congregational Music Studies Series, Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner (2013, 10) write that the field aspires to “a multi-voiced dialogue between methodological approaches, disciplinary perspectives and the positioning of scholars in relationship to the communities they represent.” As congregational music studies have expanded beyond what Mark Porter (2014) describes as its “natural homes” within musicology and theology

2  Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls to include contributions from communications studies, ethnomusicology, history, popular music studies, religious studies, and sociology, among other disciplines, it has become increasingly interdisciplinary but also at times increasingly fragmented. In this rich interdisciplinarity, congregational music studies finds its strengths: for example, the field’s theoretical perspectives and research methodologies benefit from researchers’ varied backgrounds and reflect a diverse array of epistemologies and approaches to gathering, interpreting, analyzing, and presenting data. Within the field’s growing body of published research, such intersecting perspectives yield insights into congregational music and praxis that similarly demonstrate the value of enabling (and encouraging) multiple points of entry for intellectual inquiry (see, for example, Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013; Porter 2014; Nekola and Wagner 2015; Porter 2016; Dueck 2017; Ingalls, Swijghuisen-Reigersberg, and Sherinian 2018). And yet, because it is not grounded within a single scholarly discipline, congregational music studies can pose challenges to scholars and scholar-practitioners who enter the field with a set of theoretical and methodological norms and assumptions carried from their home disciplines as they encounter unfamiliar terms, methods, and modes of discourse. Against this interdisciplinary backdrop, Studying Congregational Music examines key theoretical perspectives and research methodologies within the emerging field of congregational music studies. Though originally conceived following the 2015 “Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference,” this book is a product of ten years in the making. Its genesis dates back to the initial steps to build a collective and sustained conversation about Christian musicking out of the many isolated conversations going on in different academic arenas. Though congregational music studies may overlap with the ethnomusicology of Christianity (Engelhardt 2009) and music theology (Zon, this volume), it is not coterminous with either of these. Rather, it is a sustained conversation with growing areas of emphasis and exciting possibilities for a multifaceted scholarly toolbox. We present congregational music studies as a coherent—if complex—area of study and seek to make its variety of available perspectives, methods, and limits more comprehensible to scholars and practitioners alike. Studying Congregational Music is not a prescriptive methodological handbook; rather, it is a guide to help readers think through the challenges of interdisciplinary research on congregational music-making by critically examining the theoretical lenses and methodological toolkits that leading scholars are using to interpret the phenomenon and its communities. Through case studies within individual chapters, contributors also comment upon the potential value of specific literatures, theories, and methods to congregational music studies. Contributors include established and early career scholars from several disciplinary backgrounds, including ethnomusicology, historical musicology, liturgical studies, media studies, music theory, religious studies, sociology, and theology.

Introduction  3

Constituting the congregation Before considering these perspectives, it is valuable to examine more fully the resonances of “congregation,” itself the central term of this emerging conversation. The varying ontologies of the congregation complicate the theoretical and methodological approaches to studying congregational music. Researchers encounter diverse and shifting definitions and theologies of congregation, both within the academic literature and in their research contexts. Extending ecclesiological reconfigurations of congregation to music-making, Ingalls (2018, 5) has proposed a music-centered reconceptualization of the congregation drawing from lived experiences of Christian community as “a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through a set of communal practices. . . . By extension, ‘congregational music-making’ is reconceived as a participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community inside and outside institutional churches.” To shift the emphasis of “congregation” from product to a performed process, she (2018, 22) introduces the concept of “musical modes of congregating” to describe “the active creation of various social formations that have gathered for the express purpose of worship.” These musical modes of congregating include but also extend far beyond weekly Christian worship, encompassing home group Bible studies, worship conferences, music festivals, social media, college campus ministries, intentional communities or communes, and many other contexts. For some scholars, to frame a particular community or collective as a “congregation” necessarily enables a reconsideration or redefinition of the latter (see particularly Klomp, this volume). But for all scholars of congregational music, interrogating the congregation is a prerequisite to understanding how to research and analyze congregational music.

Epistemological diversity within congregational music studies If the resonances and meanings of “congregation” within congregational music studies are multivalent, then the knowledge and data constituted within and produced by congregational music studies have multiple interpretive frames as well. Indeed, given the diverse array of disciplines represented in this volume, it should come as little surprise that these multiple frameworks emerge not only during the analysis and interpretation of knowledge but, even more fundamentally, at the level of agreeing on what constitutes valid knowledge about our objects of study in the first place. What counts as “knowledge” within congregational music studies, in other words, and what counts as appropriate ways to collect, generate, produce, and reproduce knowledge? As in other interdisciplinary areas of study, the work of congregational music scholars and scholar-practitioners inflects each individual’s

4  Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls disciplinary background. At a practical level of comprehending the significance and contributions of individual scholarly works, this interdisciplinarity can be challenging. Scholarly disciplines and fields of cultural production often privilege different methodologies and artistic practices; their intellectual and creative products can reflect assumptions and biases that are inaccessible or indecipherable without similar disciplinary bases. Within congregational music studies, this dynamic is complicated by varying religious identities and theological distinctions. As with their disciplinary backgrounds, congregational music scholars and scholar-practitioners represent a variety of religious backgrounds, beliefs, practices, and traditions. As Mall discusses in this volume, one’s particular religious identity (or lack thereof) shapes (and shades) the knowledge one has access to and produces. Yet another complicating factor is that the different disciplines, institutions, and professions represented within congregational music studies can have diverse uses for knowledge. As individual scholars and scholar-practitioners within this interdisciplinary field, then, we each approach congregational music studies with different assumptions about—and needs for—the knowledge we produce individually and collectively. Following Michel Foucault (see, e.g., 1970 [1966], 1980), these a priori assumptions, biases, methods, and needs comprise distinct “epistemes” that necessarily prescribe the kinds of knowledge that we produce and challenge. As popular music scholar Robin James (2019, 3) explains, the rules of an episteme constitute its “methods of abstraction, parameters for translating or compressing rich sensory data into words, numbers, images, and other kinds of information.” Epistemes function as intellectual secret decoder rings; without access to (or training in) a particular episteme, one’s ability to comprehend a work’s rich sensory data, the significance of its analysis, and the purpose to which it can be put is curtailed. Within the epistemic diversity of an interdisciplinary field such as congregational music studies, we risk talking past each other when our work is grounded in discipline-specific bodies of literature, theoretical discourses, research methods, creative practices, or keywords unfamiliar to colleagues who would otherwise engage in our topics. Even worse, we risk criticizing or dismissing scholarship not on its merits but because of fundamental differences in the value of knowledge rooted in particular epistemes. Epistemes can be politicized, wielded as weapons to rebuff criticisms from outside a prescribed (and proscribed) set of approved discursive trajectories. The broader effects of epistemic violence can be devastating, particularly within contexts in which the imbalance of power is a defining characteristic (colonialism or imperialism, systemic racism or sexism, or capitalism, for example), silencing entire social groups or classes, reducing opportunities for unknown numbers of individuals, and erasing huge bodies of knowledge amassed over generations (Spivak 1998; cf. Dotson 2011). Within academic discourse, epistemic violence is insidious, whether the result of naïvely implicit or intentionally explicit silencing. Perpetrators enforce a standard for the production and

Introduction  5 interpretation of knowledge that is inherently privileged by defining the parameters of debate as strictly as possible around a limited set of accepted ways of understanding and comprehending objects of study. By enforcing and following a tautological logic of insular self-affirmation, such standards within scholarly contexts can disincentivize one from learning, practicing, and perfecting a diverse array of methodologies and ways of knowing. (This danger is more pronounced in contexts where opportunities for career advancement depend upon discipline-specific peer assessment of one’s scholarly and/or creative output, a common component of professional academe.) In this way, epistemes can be mutually exclusive, self-perpetuating and self-replicating, homogeneous and homogenizing. Within congregational music studies, however, we consistently encounter a productive strength directly attributable to this field’s disciplinary and epistemological diversity. The contributors to this volume are just a small sample of the wide array of perspectives we encounter at conferences, lectures, workshops, concerts, and worship services; in universities, divinity schools, seminaries, and places of worship; and through reading an evergrowing body of literature written for a variety of audiences. The work of congregational music scholars and scholar-practitioners is made better through encountering ways of collecting data on, thinking about, and interpreting our objects of study. Instead of silencing through epistemic violence, interdisciplinary fields like congregational music studies enact amplification through epistemic diversity: we promote work from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives because congregations and their musics, however defined, are too complex not to do so. Instead of being confounded by these confrontations, we celebrate them. Ultimately, congregational music studies’ rich epistemological diversity provides a fertile intellectual basis to which we all contribute and from which we all benefit.

Volume organization Studying Congregational Music is situated squarely within this diversity. Our goals in this volume are twofold: (1) to introduce readers to several key theoretical perspectives and research methodologies from recent and emerging scholarship in congregational music studies, and (2) to consider the larger contributions and issues that emerge from the interactions of epistemologies, theories, and methods within this interdisciplinary space. The first part of this book, “Methodological Perspectives,” is best conceived and used as a corridor with windows opening out onto a vista and soundscape. Each opening is distinctive, providing a point of access for scholars to experience how a discipline very different from their own might approach the same research subject. Lester Ruth situates the analysis of congregational song lyrics within the field of liturgical history, which, he notes, has not been a traditional emphasis of the discipline. Many undergraduate music theory students cut their teeth analyzing the harmonic structures of J. S.

6  Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls Bach chorales, but applying similar methods to analyzing contemporary worship music usually cannot account for these songs’ complexities and efficacies. Turning from analyzing lyrics to analyzing music and structure, Joshua Kalin Busman centers “sensational forms” (Meyer and Verrips 2008) as an alternative to harmonic analysis in his discussion of Hillsong United’s “With Everything.” Shifting from examining individual songs as texts to considering digital encounters with music as a text, Anna E. Nekola advocates for and models a media studies approach to the study of religion and music (and religious music). Jeff Todd Titon describes the objectives and methods of ethnography, drawing from the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and his long engagement with Old Regular Baptists in the United States. Sarah Eyerly, in her chapter and monograph (Eyerly 2020), demonstrates the value of integrating the relatively recent methodology of digital sound mapping with historians’ bread-and-butter archival research to comprehend and represent more fully the sonic environments of religious communities lost to history—specifically, the Moravian community in eastern Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Closing Part I, Bennett Zon contextualizes congregational music studies within music theology, which he then relates to scientific approaches to apprehending and understanding both the natural world and the metaphysical. The second part of the volume, examining key theoretical issues, illustrates how these varied methodological and epistemological approaches may be synthesized and how multiple modes of research can construct a vibrant understanding of congregational music-making in all its complexity. Some of these issues present concerns at the heart of studying congregational music. Andrew Mall, in discussing the capitalist systems and infrastructures through which much contemporary worship music circulates, advocates for the importance of political economy in the study of musical worship experiences at the macro and micro levels. Jeffers Engelhardt centers the study of voice and vocality in considering both fluidities and distinctions between musicking congregations and choirs. Other key issues, no less important, expand congregational music scholars’ interpretive repertoire by emphasizing focused approaches to addressing sociocultural distinctions. When considering the voicing of choir singing in a largely white US church through the lens of critical race studies, Marissa Glynias Moore demonstrates that foregrounding questions of race and racialized identities in congregational musicking can provide important insights into the relationships between musical practices and racial privileges. Melvin L. Butler considers congregational musicking among African American and African Caribbean Christians framed within the study of migration. Experiences of migration are also central to the congregational lives of Byzantine Ukranian Catholics in Canada. In her collaborative ethnographic fieldwork within these communities, Marcia Ostashewski demonstrates the value of diasporic studies to the scholarship of congregational and liturgical music

Introduction  7 (and vice versa). Teresa Berger addresses the embodiment of liturgical practice and worship, turning to contemporary gender theory in examining the ways congregational singing has been (and remains) inflected by gender. Doing so, she argues, can provide insight into the broader cultural understandings of gender within particular contexts. At the end of Part II, our last two contributors address congregational musicking outside of church. Jeffrey A. Summit addresses the role of the prayer leader in Jewish congregational worship, paying particular attention to the phenomenology of interaction between leaders and congregations. Mirella Klomp addresses Christian congregational singing that occurs within participatory “sacro-soundscapes” (Klomp and Barnard 2017) that move fluidly through (and beyond) the physical and social boundaries of church. Addressing Sing Along Matthäuspassion events in the Netherlands, she argues that liturgical ecclesiology can contribute to understanding communal practices of Christian music in public spaces.

Studying congregational music: a toolbox of theory and method Together, the contributors to this volume offer readers a toolbox for studying congregational music from multiple disciplinary vantage points and positions as scholars and practitioners. On the one hand, these chapters take stock of congregational music studies as it currently stands; on the other hand, they imagine its future trajectories in conversation with core theoretical and methodological concerns. There are multiple ways of encountering these chapters and the toolbox of approaches they model and reflect on. Some (Busman, Eyerly, Klomp, Moore, Ostashewski, and Summit) center on discrete ethnographic and historical examples to model approaches to congregational musicking. Others (Berger, Butler, Engelhardt, Mall, Nekola, Ruth, Titon, and Zon) reflect on how broad issues in music studies and beyond bear on the interdiscipline of congregational music studies. Across chapters, there are specific points of contrast and resonance that bring critical nuance to the volume. Reading Mall and Nekola together foregrounds how music industries and media infrastructures and interfaces shape encounters with God and the political economies of researching congregational music. Reading Ruth and Busman together points to the shifting textual and sonic grounds of religious affect within distinct denominational traditions and moments of worship performance. Reading Moore, Engelhardt, and Berger together emphasizes the raced, gendered, and embodied aspects of individual and congregational voices as they shape liturgy, community, and identity. Reading Ostashewski, Butler, and Eyerly together illustrates how changing relationships to place and time through diaspora, migration, and encounters with historical soundscapes assemble memories and worshiping/researching bodies in congregation. Reading Zon and Titon together articulates the varied epistemological terrain of congregational

8  Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls music studies as it ranges across methodologies grounded in theology and etic representation. Finally, reading Summit and Klomp together intensifies questions of musical leadership and participation in the performance of worship and public religion within conditions of secularity. All told, the toolbox for a praxis of congregational music studies represented here shows not only how congregational music studies intersects with multiple fields and disciplines, but also how it stands to make transformative contributions to those fields and disciplines.

References Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26 (2): 236–57. Dueck, Jonathan M. 2017. Congregational Music, Conflict, and Community. New York: Routledge. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2009. “Right Singing in Estonian Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Music, Theology, and Religious Ideology.” Ethnomusicology 53 (1): 32–57. Eyerly, Sarah. 2020. Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press. ———, Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience. Surrey, England: Ashgate. ———, Muriel Swijghuisen-Reigersberg, and Zoe C. Sherinian, eds. 2018. Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide. New York: Routledge. James, Robin. 2019. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. Klomp, Mirella and Marcel Barnard. 2017. “Sacro-Soundscapes: Contemporary Ritual Performances of Sacred Music. The Case of ‘The Passion’ in the Netherlands.” International Journal of Practical Theology 21 (2): 1–19. Meyer, Birgit and Jojada Verrips. 2008. “Aesthetics.” In Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 20–30. London: Routledge. Nekola, Anna E. and Tom Wagner, eds. 2015. Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1 (2): 149–66. ———. 2016. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 66–111. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Part I

Methodological Perspectives

1 In case you don’t have a case Reflections on methods for studying congregational song in liturgical history Lester Ruth Introduction As a liturgical historian, I think it is best to say that my fellow liturgical historians and I have an eye for music, but not necessarily an ear for music. By disposition, training, normally employed methods, and the primary materials usually available to us, liturgical historians tend to access music by what we can see—most normally the lyrics—rather than by what we can hear. Of course, this approach has significant limitations in studying congregational worship song, as any scholar from a variety of musicological disciplines would tell you. I  readily admit that music is meant to be heard and performed, not just read or looked at. Nevertheless, at the risk of using my own work on American evangelicals as a positive example (Ruth 2000, 2013; Park, Ruth, and Rethmeier 2017), I want to suggest that liturgical historians and other scholars who employ their methods make a useful contribution when they investigate the lyrics of congregational songs. Specifically, what lyrical analysis contributes is a sense of what people value and love about the God they are worshiping. After reviewing the reasons why liturgical historians usually do not consider the auditory aspects of congregational song and examining a few examples of the work of liturgical historians in analyzing lyrics (mine included), I will focus on the poetic quality of song lyrics—how lyrics express theology as poetry rather than prose—as the rationale for this method. Appreciating congregational song lyrics as poetry enables us to use them as windows into a worshiping people’s piety regarding what they love and adore about God. This quality is especially useful for studying Christians who otherwise reject written texts—other than the Bible—in worship.

Worship is musical? Before looking at the explanations for why it is reasonable to investigate lyrics, we should first note a critical factor as to why most liturgical historians can make only a limited contribution to the study of Christian congregational music: the only term among those three (Christian, congregational,

12  Lester Ruth and music) these historians regularly engage is the term “Christian.” Liturgical historians tend not to study congregations—with some notable exceptions such as the Church at Worship Series—and they necessarily do not have to deal with music as a topic, especially when it comes to the sound of the music. Congregations tend not to be the focus because these historians are not confident about their ability to gather enough primary sources for any one time, place, and people to describe in detail the worship of historic congregations. To state it bluntly, liturgical historians tend not to do case studies of specific worshiping assemblies, particularly from early church history, which is the period that so enamors this guild. Instead, liturgists like to describe changes over time. If you give cameras to liturgical historians, they are more likely to produce movies that have a sense of chronological development rather than photo albums with a limited time frame. But, considering the critical and nearly pervasive role music has played in Christian worship across traditions, how is it possible for liturgical historians to ignore or downplay music? The reasons are multiple: a tendency to focus on rites as the central objects of investigation, especially the Eucharist, a fascination with liturgical texts, the sheer difficulty in replicating sound from past centuries, and a dearth of primary sources that document this dimension for some histories. (See my discussion of early Methodism in the following pages.) Among the other possible reasons liturgical historians overlook music, the simplest may be that many liturgical historians have little or no formal musical training. The result can be a wariness to study an area assumed “to require special knowledge and skills” as Mark Porter has recently stated (2014, 155). Beyond this lack of training, a more compelling, comprehensive reason for ignoring music comes from the larger background movement that stands behind the development of this field, namely the Liturgical Movement. Driven by historical studies and aimed toward the renewal of congregational worship, this movement contributed much to the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, to the recent, official reforms of worship in mainline Protestant denominations, and to the development of many of the graduate programs in liturgical studies.1 Its tenets tend to dominate the perspectives of many members of academic liturgical guilds. What the Liturgical Movement has emphasized will be what most liturgical historians likewise emphasize: sacraments, ordo (or order of worship), liturgical texts, rhythms of time, participation, the meaning and understandability of acts/ texts/symbols, and the connection between worship and justice. And the historical period that the Liturgical Movement prioritized—the early church—helped reinforce an ability to overlook music. As others have noted, documenting the music of the early church can be especially problematic because the sources are not abundant and what they tell us is limited, especially with respect to musical practices (McKinnon 1987, 108). Consequently, it is quite possible to be a leader in the field of liturgical history and disregard the musical dimensions of worship. Consider the

In case you don’t have a case  13 treatment of antiphonal psalmody in the Byzantine rite by Robert Taft, a renowned scholar of that rite (2001, 187–202, esp. 196). In an essay on his research method, Taft attempts to re-create the original shape and sequence of antiphonal psalmody as it originally existed in the Byzantine rite. One can read his description of how to reach this goal and hear little about musicality; how the psalmody sounded as music is irrelevant to his concerns. Paul Bradshaw, another leader in the field of worship in the first centuries of church history, follows a similar path in his examination of psalmody and hymnody in daily prayer services in the early church (Bradshaw 1982).2

An eye for music: the importance of song texts for liturgical historians Not all liturgical historians, however, have ignored music. Perhaps the most striking thing about many who linger with the musical aspect is the emphasis upon the musical text, that is, the song lyrics. These lyrics captivate our eyes. This approach has limits, but I suggest, too, that it has something to offer as part of a complex of methods for understanding the dynamics of historical and contemporary congregational music. There is a straightforward reason why liturgical historians often go this route of focusing on the lyrics: it is often the nature of the available primary material. Sometimes the song text is all the historian has to work with. Liturgical historian Karen Westerfield Tucker of Boston University is one example of a scholar who regularly employs close attention to various collections of worship song texts as part of her larger body of work. Although the particular bodies of songs differ as do the specific questions she raises, there are common elements in her method. As she develops bodies of songs that have internal cohesion, she pays special attention not only to the words of individual songs but also to the manner of their presentation and labeling. She applies these emphases when considering a single theological topic across a range of hymn texts in comparable collections of songs, for example, a study of Christology in recent Protestant hymnals (Tucker 1996, 2008, 327–41).3 Westerfield Tucker has also pursued theological analysis of a single collection from one composer. An example of the latter is her study of Charles Wesley’s hymns on the earthquakes that struck London in 1750 (Tucker 2004). My own work is both similar and dissimilar to that of Westerfield Tucker. Like her, I have focused on determining reasonable bodies of song texts and brought explicit theological questions and categories to them, which is commonplace among liturgical historians since this guild regularly assumes the Church’s worship to be a kind of primary theology—actual divine–human encounter—and not just a secondary, distanced reflection upon God and the things of God.4 Unlike Westerfield Tucker, however, I have tended to think they help me understand the piety (what people love and enjoy about God) rather than the theology (what people might think about God) of a people.5

14  Lester Ruth I stumbled into the practice of studying song lyrics as I began to gather primary sources for my dissertation to document the worship of early American Methodists in its first half century, that is, the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century. My goal was to push the understanding of this worship beyond the caricatures then rampant in the secondary literature, a failure based on the use of limited primary materials. Specifically, I was looking to provide a fuller, more accurate portrayal by focusing on a single, critical setting for worship: the Quarterly Meeting. I hoped to expand in detail the grid developed by groundbreaking liturgical historian, James White, as the best way to document Protestant worship, namely to focus on piety, time, place, prayer, preaching, and music as well as on sacraments (White 1989). (Because of the guild’s Roman Catholic roots, the tendency of liturgical historians has been to focus on the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.) To that end I collected every shred of primary material (mostly unpublished) from the first fifty years of American Methodism that spoke of its worship, especially at Quarterly Meetings. To be quite frank, I  did not know the songs I  found and used in my research even existed prior to doing my archival searching. By the end of my searching, however, I had accumulated multiple handwritten compilations of hymns6 as well as numerous hymns sprinkled throughout various unpublished journals and diaries.7 In addition, I gathered several printed compilations, all organized and edited by American Methodists in the movement’s first fifty years.8 The sources rarely gave authorship nor was there frequent indication of the tune. I  had the text of their music, but not the sound. My eye was engaged, but not my ear. But I had enough texts to get a sense of what American Methodists thought was important enough concerning God that they wanted to sing about it. Consequently, ample use of hymn texts became a central feature in my two books on early American Methodism (Ruth 2000, 2005). In both books I used the texts at judicious places and provided collections on critical topics, gathered through my archival research, in order to break a strict narration-based description and give readers a chance to hear the early Methodists’ own voices. The song texts also provided the closest approximation to providing the words for the early Methodists’ worship practices, which were largely extemporaneous. Without the song texts, it would have been much more difficult to have known the likely content of their worship. Consider the example of the exhorters who spoke after the sermon. (Being an exhorter was a licensed office for a kind of liturgical speaking in early Methodism.) A sermon was often followed by an exhortation that gave to the congregation a rigorous, pointed application of the sermon and its inherent appeal (Ruth 2000, 57–67; Wigger 1998, 29–31). Exhortations were extemporaneous and not written. Descriptions of exhorting, however, noted that they often started with a hymn. And so in my narrative I  used a hymn that matched how many exhorters described what they emphasized while exhorting: “Stop, poor sinner, stop and think/Before you farther go/Will

In case you don’t have a case  15 you sport upon the brink/Of everlasting woe?”9 This hymn provided a reasonable example of likely worship content as well as enabling the reader to feel the impact of that content. Since that first foray into Methodism, I have continued to assess bodies of worship songs as part of a way to write the history of Christian worship. Some of that work continues the general approach first used with the Methodists. One example of a general continuation is the inclusion of the hymnody from Charles Price Jones, the founding pastor and dynamic music composer of Christ Temple in Jackson, Mississippi, the mother church of a Black Holiness denomination, the Church of Christ (Holiness) USA, at the beginning of the twentieth century (Ruth 2013). Jones’s lyrics open the window to what he valued about God and how he sought to negotiate the difficulties of living faithfully in an era of Jim Crow racism. Thus, my use of the hymnody written by Jones is generally comparable to the use I followed for the Methodists in showing Jones’s piety and, seemingly, that of his congregation. Similarly, song texts give a sense of the piety of Baptists in northwest Argentina (Ruth and Mathis 2017). My other work with worship song has tended either to take the focus on individual congregations to the next level by assessing active core repertoires as part of writing history or in a completely different direction by focusing on songs as a distinct corpus without any reference to specific congregations at all. With respect to individual congregations and core musical repertoires, my first work along that line was part of the Living Worship DVD, an openended teaching resource in which students were enabled to envision themselves as a worship-related staff person in a specific congregation (Johnson, Caccamo, and Ruth 2010). To that end the research team found a congregation willing to be documented on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. Part of that historical documentation noted the evolving core repertoire of songs for this church. More recently I have been part of a team writing the history of worship in John Wimber’s Anaheim Vineyard congregation in its first few years, the central congregation in an influential neo-charismatic church network known for its worship music recordings (Park, Ruth, and Rethmeier 2017). Another way I  have utilized a corpus of congregational song lyrics has been to read the lyrics closely to get a sense of the piety of a larger liturgical phenomenon, not simply that of a solitary congregation or even a single liturgical tradition. For example, one of my recent projects has been to assess the content and language of all the songs that have appeared on the top-25 Christian Copyright Licensing International lists for the United States that appear twice a year in conjunction with CCLI’s royalty payout periods. For over a decade I have been keeping several documents that keep track of these songs. The documents contain the information for the 123 different songs (as of February 2018) that have appeared on a top-25 song list since 1989. I attempt to quantify in multiple ways the content of

16  Lester Ruth the songs: a document that has all the words to the songs (approximately sixteen thousand words in all the lyrics), a spreadsheet listing cumulatively the songs which have appeared on one of these lists with ranking by royalty payout period (“Lord, I  Lift Your Name on High” has both the longest run on the top-25 lists [18½ years] and the longest run as a #1 song [7½ years]), a spreadsheet on every name or term that is used for a divine being in the songs (references to Jesus greatly predominate), a spreadsheet that notes every divine or human action in the entire corpus (humans get more instances of action than do the divine [about 850 human vs. 450 divine] and a greater range of actions [about 250 human vs. 200 divine]), a spreadsheet that organizes the songs by their structural features, such as verse/chorus/ bridge (a major change in typical structure took place after 1995), and a spreadsheet that identifies the type of prayer sentiments expressed by the lyrics (confession of sin as human action, intercession for others, and lament are very minimal). To study comparisons, I also have similar spreadsheets on names and actions for the seventy hymns that Stephen Marini has identified as the most-republished evangelical hymns in America from 1737 to 1860 (Marini 2002).10 Working with early Methodist songs influenced my sense that examining lyrics can be a helpful window into understanding the piety of a worshiping people. I  have published several articles and essays to that end, examining the most-used contemporary worship music (Ruth 2007, 2008, 2015a, 2015b, 2016).11 Various works have explored their Trinitarian piety, their sentiments about divine and human activity, the types of prayer found within them, as well as an assessment of the quality of their language in three respects: the loss of archaic English, the level of colloquial speech, and the structures of the songs. To facilitate my analysis of the latter two linguistic aspects, I imitated comparable studies of the lyrics and structures of pop and rock songs. Other scholars have also begun to press the lyrics of contemporary worship songs to assess their theological piety (Tapper 2017; Parry 2012; Longhurst 2015; Cowan 2017).

A window into piety What can we learn from analyzing the lyrics of worship songs? Lyrical texts give us a critical first step in understanding a worshiping people’s piety. I  much more prefer this term to theology per se as the latter is normally understood. Song lyrics are not typical theology since theology is normally written in prose. Prose has its own set of rules and aims, but poetry has another. That difference affects what a song lyric can—and does—offer a liturgical historian. Theology normally is expressed in prose which strives to achieve clarity and precision. A  prose-based theology uses an amplitude of words to expand thought to achieve that clarity and precision. Thus relationships are explained, terms are defined, and objections are answered. A prose-based

In case you don’t have a case  17 theology has an abundance of words to keep opening up the concepts until the theological case is made. Song lyrics, because they are poetry, cannot and do not use the same rules of expression. Nor do they strive for the same ends. If one brings the same expectations from prose-expressed theology to poetically expressed theology, then one will be disappointed if not just plain confused.12 The proper goal in approaching poetry, as Andrew Louth rightly has stated, is not to aim for “a restless attempt to solve problems” or “reach a kind of clarity” (Louth 1983, 67–68). Rather, poetry evokes and creates emotion and experience through word games. Limited in the number of words, song lyrics as poetry play with rhyme and meter, misdirection, lack of definition, and the stretching of words beyond what one would expect in order to evoke emotion and create experience. For example, it is one thing to say with respect to the Incarnation of Christ that the latent potency of divine power for human salvation was found complete and full even in Jesus as a small child and another, as did Charles Wesley in his Nativity Hymns (1745), to write that “Those infant hands/Shall burst our bands,/And work out our salvation;/ Strangle the cruel serpent/Destroy his works forever.” Song lyrics are thus “compacted theology” to use Richard Mouw’s phrase (Mouw 2004, xiii– xiv) that uncompact a worshiper’s heart. Another way to affirm this quality is that song lyrics are what I would consider to be a kind of poeticized theology that offers a window into a people’s piety.13 Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry is helpful at this point because it not only speaks of these poetic qualities but does so in a way which achieves them. This is how she defined poetry: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” (Dickinson 1870). So what can liturgical historians reasonably expect to find when they research a corpus of worship song lyrics? We can expect to find what it is about God that tends to make a people very cold and with the top of their heads taken off. In other words, we expect the words to help us see the fluid, loosely defined parameters of what it is about God that evokes emotion and creates experience in worshipers. That is what I mean by theological piety.14 The fifth-century bishop and theologian, Augustine, helps us cast this notion in another way: a song lyric is theology in the form of love expressed. I derive this notion from his sermon on Psalm 72 (73). At the beginning of this sermon, he offers a definition of a hymn. Dissecting the term, he notes that three elements are necessary for a hymn: praise, praise of God, and praise of God that is sung. He then goes on to distinguish between praise of God and praise of God that is sung. The latter has two extra dimensions for Augustine: joyfulness and love. Here’s how he preached it: The person who sings praise, not only praises but also praises joyfully; the person who sings praise, not only sings but also loves the One about

18  Lester Ruth whom the person is singing. In the praise from the person who is confessing there is public statement (about God); in the song there is the affection of someone who is loving God. (Augustine 1956, 986)15 In Augustine’s definition, song, loving, and enjoying God seem intertwined. I admit my presumption: the enjoyment and love of God can be found in the text whether or not it is being sung. The text’s emotional intensity may increase and become more obvious in the singing, but because of a lyric’s poetic nature the enjoyment and love of God are already there. Those elements are a lyric’s theological piety. If a song lyric is theology in the form of love expressed, then what is a body of congregational worship songs? A corpus of songs provides a parameter of worshipers’ theological piety. The corpus shows the fluid boundaries of what it is they love about God and the main concentrations within this love. These boundaries and concentrations may have specific sentiments about God although usually not precise ideas. And so, back to the earlier question: what can a close analysis of only the words of worship songs show? The words of lyrics can show theological piety, that is, what the worshipers enjoy and love about God.

The legitimacy of studying lyrics Of course, this definition still begs the question as to whether it is methodologically reasonable to look independently at song lyrics as texts. Is there a case that can be made that a congregational case study is not always necessary? There are two elements to this question: the legitimacy of studying song lyrics as texts and the legitimacy of isolating the texts. The answer to both elements is a cautious yes as long as the historian knows the limitations of the questions that can be answered, the substance of what song lyrics by themselves can offer, and understands that looking independently at lyrics is a method that complements methods that investigate the musical aspects of a song, especially as heard in actual use. Hopefully, the way I have framed the method answers some of the harsher critiques that can be made of studying lyrics alone. For example, consider Mark David Parsons’s complaints about a text-only approach in inquiring into worship music, what he describes as the logocentric-conformist model. He fears the basic problem in this approach is that “the text is theologically normative, making the music an ancillary feature” (Parsons 2005, 55). We can avoid the worst of Parsons’s critique, however, by emphasizing theological piety rather than theology (i.e., emotionally muted articulation in prose form), by highlighting the lyrics’ poetic nature rather than presuming discursive prose and by acknowledging that hearing the music in actual congregational use and seeing the songs within an entire service would indeed open other dimensions. The definition of a worship song

In case you don’t have a case  19 lyric as theology in the shape of expressed love can answer some of his discomforts about seeing text and music only in a hierarchical or subservient relationship, even as a researcher explores only text. I  argue it is not text that is theologically normative in worship. Rather, the love of God is what is theologically normative in worship. The words of the songs, because they are poetic, give expression to this love, an expression that is fullest, most obvious, and most dynamic in the actual singing. The lyrics as text are dependent upon the music for fullest expression, but that dependence does not mean the piety is not also in what the text expresses and how it does so poetically. Thus, eyes can access something essential in Christian congregational music. A congregational case study—hearing a song as used—is not absolutely necessary to answer every potential question a researcher might have about music in Christian worship. Moreover, something of the history of the specific song texts that liturgical historians like Westerfield Tucker and I  have used can support the legitimacy of examining song lyrics as texts and the legitimacy of isolating those texts. At a very important level, it was easy to access the texts solely as texts because that was how they were presented to worshipers. It is rare in early Methodist hymn collections, for example, for the music to be included with the lyrics or even for a tune to be named. What a historian has are the words, laid out in poetic form. It is not as if we are intentionally opening our eyes and closing our ears. In many instances there is nothing for our ears to hear, only something for our eyes to see. In addition, the way in which compilers and producers organize and label worship songs can highlight their theological connection. The collections John Wesley intended for general use by the Methodists, for example, organized hymns according to the order of salvation. It would be an injustice to the historical record itself not to be able to consider these text-only collections according to the theological labels presented with them. Indeed, John Wesley labeled the large 1780 hymnal in its preface a “little body of experimental and practical divinity.”16 Today, the emergence from US and UK evangelicals of CD collections gathered by theological topic indicates that song writers and music producers recognize the connection of their songs’ lyrics to standard theological topics. Perhaps, standing behind the sense of propriety to such collections is the widespread notion that people learn more theology from the songs than they do from the sermon. Perhaps it will not be long before contemporary songwriters compose lyrics toward specific theological topics, not unlike what Charles Wesley did in the eighteenth century. For evangelicals who belong to the Free Church worship traditions I have studied, the use of song lyrics as expressions of theological piety is not only permissible but necessary to understand those traditions. I have been studying traditions that generally reject liturgical texts with one exception: song texts. These worshipers may regard written prayers as illegitimate, lectionary systems as constraining, and responsive liturgical texts as utterly boring,

20  Lester Ruth but the whole question about the propriety of using something written down is set aside when it comes to singing a song. The propriety of allowing songs to be pre-written and non-extemporaneous is the major exception to how they approach worship generally. A liturgical text is permissible in these traditions if it is poetic. A text is allowable in these traditions if it is a song. A text is acceptable in these liturgical traditions if it taps the heart and expresses what the worshipers love about God. Augustine did not realize it, but in his quote given earlier he described the worship world of Protestants who otherwise shun liturgical texts. An essay entitled “Conversations with Nathan” makes the same point but in a humorous way. The essay is a condensed transcription of a father and son who were coming from a text-using liturgical tradition but were visiting an evangelical church which did not. Seven-year-old Nathan noticed they were not using liturgical texts and so asked his father, “why not?” The father replied, “They think that if they read something that’s written down, they won’t really mean it.” But the boy was perceptive; he noticed that this rule did not apply when it came to songs, asking, “You mean that they can agree with a song that they read, but they don’t know how to agree with a prayer that they read?” The dad said, “Yes, that’s right.” And Nathan wanted to know why a worship song was so different. And the father answered, “they think music is different. You can read or memorize a song and still mean it” (Chilton 1985, 163–64). How true. My work with song lyrics as windows into piety has been an attempt to get at this “it” that those worshipers are willing to be written down. And the eyes have “it.”

Notes 1 For an overview, see Fenwick and Spinks (1995). 2 It should be noted that other scholars who fuse the concerns of historical musicology with liturgical history often work in the same period and regions and do focus more on musical issues. For an example of this type of work, see Jeffery (1994). For another example, see Fassler (2001). 3 Another example of examining a theological topic across a variety of hymnals is Duck and Wilson-Kastner (1999, 87–93). 4 While it is commonplace for liturgical scholars to see and work out of a connection between worship and theology, the precise nature of that relationship is one of the recurring questions of liturgical studies. To sample the range of options, see Vogel (2000), especially the essays by Kavanagh, Kilmartin, and Wainwright. 5 On this point the distinction between myself and Westerfield Tucker is a r­ elative— not absolute—one. For example, even though in the title of a very recent essay she speaks of hymnals as “theological texts,” she explores in the essay many of the same issues I would label as “piety.” See Tucker (2016). 6 Bradford (n.d.); Hills (n.d.); Dromgoole (n.d.); and Gatch (n.d.). 7 Jones (n.d.). 8 Allen (1801); Humphrey (1991); Mead (1811); Mudge (1818; Pocket Hymnbook (1786). 9 This hymn by John Newton is found in Dromgoole (n.d.).

In case you don’t have a case  21 10 For Marini’s list of the most printed hymns from 1737 to 1960, see Marini (2004). 11 For the prayer analysis, see also Lim and Ruth (2017, 94–96). 12 For a helpful discussion of what can be expected of song lyrics as “poetic theology” or, better, “theological poetry,” see Lunn (2015). Lunn launches her examination from the foundational work on Wesley by S. T. Kimbrough. See especially Kimbrough (2011); compare Berger (1995). 13 Some scholars have used a variety of adjectives to name the theology found in worship music, especially as it is experienced and felt by worshipers. Pentecostal Nick J. Drake (2008, 11, 53), using the terms of Rowan Williams, speaks of the theological dimension—the actual encounter with God—of sung worship as “informal theology” whereas Roman Catholic Mary E. McGann (2002, 11, 17) prefers the term “embodied theology.” Rather than search for the right adjective, I would just prefer to use an alternative term: piety. 14 Compare the discussion of piety in Luckman (2005, 491–92). Luckman’s historical review emphasizes piety’s aspects of devotion, tenderness, affection, warmth, desire, and love, especially as Christian piety has been understood since the Reformation and the rise of Humanism. Please note that I do not expect song lyrics to give us an exhaustive exposition of theology, tightly reasoned and precisely clear, particularly if applied to a limited scope. In other words, my study does not show that any one composer, whether it be Charles Wesley or Matt Redman, is theologically orthodox in their thinking, just that their theological orthodoxy is not what makes their songs popular. 15 The translation given here is my own. Another English translation can be found in Johnson (2009, 4:29). The original Latin reads “Qui enim cantat laudem, non solum laudat, sed etiam hilariter laudat; qui cantat laudem, non solum cantat, sed et amat eum quem cantat. In laude confitentis est praedicatio, in cantico amantis affectio.” 16 The ascription is found in the preface to the original printing of this hymnal. For a fuller discussion, see Berger (1995).

References Allen, Richard. 1801. A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Philadelphia: T. L. Plowman. Augustine. 1956. Enarrationes in Psalmos LI-C. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 39. Turnhout: Typographi Brepols. Berger, Teresa. 1995. Theology in Hymns? A Study of the Relationship of Doxology and Theology According to a Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780). Nashville: Kingswood. Bradford, Henry. n.d. “Hymn Book.” Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bradshaw, Paul F. 1982. Daily Prayer in the Early Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Chilton, David. 1985. “Conversations with Nathan.” In The Reconstruction of the Church: A Symposium, edited by James B. Jordan, 163–76. Geneva Ministries: Tyler. Cowan, Nelson. 2017. “ ‘Heaven and Earth Collide’: Hillsong Music’s Evolving Theological Emphases.” Pneuma 39: 78–104. Dickinson, Emily. 1870. “Letter 342a.” www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/read_ poem.

22  Lester Ruth Drake, Nick J. 2008. “Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Charismatic Sung Worship: The Mediation of God’s Presence Through Corporate Singing.” Master’s thesis, King’s College, London. Dromgoole, Edward. n.d. “Spiritual Songs.” Edward Dromgoole Papers. Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Duck, Ruth, and Patricia Wilson-Kastner. 1999. Praising God: The Trinity in Christian Worship. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Fassler, Margot. 2001. “The First Marian Feast in Constantinople and Jerusalem: Chant Texts, Readings, and Homiletic Literature.” In The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West, edited by Peter Jeffery, 25–87. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell. Fenwick, John R. K., and Bryan D. Spinks. 1995. Worship in Transition: The Liturgical Movement in the Twentieth Century. New York: Continuum. Gatch, Philip. n.d. “Papers.” Archives of Ohio United Methodism. Ohio Wesleyan University Library. Hills, Ebenezer. n.d. “Hymnal.” Ezekiel Cooper Papers. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary Library. Humphrey, Richard A., comp. 1991. “History and Hymns of John Adam Granade: Holston’s Pilgrim-Preacher-Poet.” Commission on Archives and History, Holston Annual Conference, The United Methodist Church. Jeffery, Peter. 1994. “Παράδοξον Μυστήριον: The Thought of Gregory the Theologian in Byzantine and Latin Liturgical Chant.” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39 (3–4): 187–98. Johnson, Lawrence J. 2009. Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources. CD-Rom. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Johnson, Todd E., James F. Caccamo, and Lester Ruth. 2010. Living Worship: A Multimedia Resource for Students and Leaders. DVD Set. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Jones, Sarah Anderson. n.d. “Diary.” Special Collections Research Center, William and Mary University Library. Kimbrough, S. T. 2011. The Lyrical Theology of Charles Wesley: A Reader. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Lim, Swee Hong, and Lester Ruth. 2017. Lovin’ On Jesus: A  Concise History of Contemporary Worship. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Longhurst, Christine. 2015. “The Words We Sing: An Exploration of Textual Content in Contemporary Worship Music.” Direction 42 (2): 158–72. Louth, Andrew. 1983. Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Luckman, Harriet A. 2005. “Piety.” In The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake, 491–92. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Lunn, Julie. 2015. “What Is Truth? Charles Wesley’s Poetic Texts as Bearers of Theological and Spiritual Truth.” Proceedings of the Charles Wesley Society 29: 29–42. Marini, Stephen A. 2002. “Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion.” Church History 71 (2): 273–306. ———. 2004. “American Protestant Hymns Project: A  Ranked List of Most Frequently Printed Hymns, 1737–1960.” In Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in

In case you don’t have a case  23 American Protestant History and Theology, edited by Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll, 251–64. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McGann, Mary E. 2002. Exploring Music as Worship and Theology: Research in Liturgical Practice. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. McKinnon, James, ed. 1987. Music in Early Christian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mead, Stith. 1811. A General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Now in Use. 2nd ed. Lynchburg, VA: Jacob Haas. Mouw, Richard J. 2004. “Introduction.” In Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History & Theology, edited by Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll, xii–xx. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Mudge, Enoch. 1818. The American Camp-Meeting Hymn Book. Boston: Burdakin. Park, Andy, Lester Ruth, and Cindy Rethmeier. 2017. Worshiping with the Anaheim Vineyard: The Emergence of Contemporary Worship. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Parry, Robin A. 2012. Worshipping Trinity: Coming Back to the Heart of Worship. 2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Parsons, Mark David. 2005. “Text, Tone, and Context: A  Methodological Prolegomenon for a Theology of Liturgical Song.” Worship 79 (1): 54–69. A Pocket Hymn-Book. 1786. Designed as a Constant Companion for the Pious. Collected from Various Authors. 5th ed. New York: W. Ross. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesial Practices 1: 149–66. Ruth, Lester. 2000. A Little Heaven Below: Worship at Early Methodist Quarterly Meetings. Nashville: Kingswood. ———. 2005. Early Methodist Life and Spirituality: A Reader. Nashville: Kingswood. ———. 2007. “How Great Is Our God: The Trinity in Contemporary Christian Worship Music.” In The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise and Worship, edited by Robert H. Woods, Jr. and Brian D. Walrath, 29–42. Nashville: Abingdon Press. ———. 2008. “Lex Amandi, Lex Orandi: The Trinity in the Most-used Contemporary Christian Worship Songs.” In The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer, edited by Bryan D. Spinks, 342–59. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. ———. 2013. Longing for Jesus: Worship at a Black Holiness Church in Mississippi, 1895–1913. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ———. 2015a. “How ‘Pop’ Are the New Worship Songs? Investigating the Level of Popular Cultural Influence on Contemporary Worship Music.” Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith 3 (1). ———. 2015b. “Some Similarities and Differences between Historic Evangelical Hymns and Contemporary Worship Songs.” The Artistic Theologian 3: 68–86. ———. 2016. “A Full Diet of Prayer: Are We Over Singing Our Comfort Foods?” Worship Leader 25 (4): 12–14. Ruth, Lester, and Eric Mathis. 2017. Leaning on the Word: Worship with Argentine Baptists in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Taft, Robert F. 2001. Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding. 2nd Rev. and enlarged ed. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute. Tapper, Michael A. 2017. Canadian Pentecostals, The Trinity, and Contemporary Worship Music: The Things We Sing. Boston: Brill.

24  Lester Ruth Tucker, Karen B. Westerfield. 1996. “ ‘In Thankful Verse Proclaim’: English Eucharistic Hymns of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Studia Liturgica 26 (2): 238–52. ———. 2004. “ ‘On the Occasion’: Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the London Earthquakes of 1750.” Methodist History 42 (4): 197–221. ———. 2008. “ ‘But Who Do You Say That I Am?’ Christology in Recent Protestant Hymnals.” In The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer: Trinity, Christology, and Liturgical Theology, edited by Bryan D. Spinks, 327–41. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. ———. 2016. “Hymnals as Theological Texts: The Case of Civil War Publications.” In Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s: Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, edited by Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks, 251–72. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Vogel, Dwight W., ed. 2000. Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. White, James F. 1989. Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Wigger, John H. 1998. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

2 Worshipping “With Everything” Musical analysis and congregational worship Joshua Kalin Busman Introduction On the evening of Monday, January 4, 2010, Hillsong United took the stage in front of nearly twenty thousand attendees at the Passion Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The Australian worship band has risen to worldwide prominence in the praise and worship community since their debut in 1999. Between 2007 and 2019, the band released eleven full-length albums (five studio recordings and six live worship concert albums), all of which peaked in the top five on the US Billboard Christian Albums chart and eight of which hit the number one spot. Since 2002, the band has been led by Joel Houston—the oldest son of Hillsong Church founders Brian and Bobbie Houston—who also writes the majority of their songs. Toward the end of their set, Hillsong United led the gathered crowd in singing “With Everything,” a song written by Houston. Over the course of four minutes, the band slowly built up to an earsplitting climax, when suddenly the lyrics of the song completely disappeared. Instead of a text, the band and worshippers all began to chant a simple diatonic melody loop on the vocable “oh.” This moment was almost immediately captured and disseminated by numerous YouTube users, including “Richi Thomas,” who appears to have been seated in the upper deck of Philips Arena on that January evening. In the comments section for Thomas’s video, as well as many others like it, fans and attendees of Passion 2010 comment on this particular climax, often linking to specific timecodes in order to direct others to this same moment of the song: “1:42 was like a big punch in the face.!!:-) Amazing,” “Try pausing it at 1:46, it’s just like having a glimpse of God’s Glorious Light,” or simply, “1:42. . . . wow!”1 This final comment is particularly interesting because of the response it generated from the video’s creator. User “liveyourlife17” was the first to link specifically to this moment of the video and Thomas responded to her by saying “Yeah I knew it was coming . . . wanted to capture it!” As brief as it is, this comment exchange perfectly encapsulates the two primary arguments of this chapter. First, I argue that moments of the highest spiritual intensity and musical significance in congregational music are often

26  Joshua Kalin Busman the result of specific sonic gestures rather than clear textual referents. As I was speaking with Matthew, a twenty-four-year-old Passion attendee from Tennessee, he quickly raised the textless moment of “With Everything” as one of his personal favorites across all of his worship experiences. I mentioned that I wasn’t familiar with this particular performance of the song from the 2010 Passion Conference event, and he responded: Oh, you’ve got to check out that song. That was my first time at Passion and the first time I ever heard Hillsong [United] play. I just couldn’t believe how powerful God was in that moment. I still think about that experience every time I listen to [the recording]. I just remember everyone going totally crazy when they hit the “ohs.” (Interview with author, 2013) In this as well as many other performances of “With Everything” by Hillsong United, the wordless diatonic melody initiated at this climax actually continues for another five minutes without the text ever returning; in fact, the song reaches a second climax with the same musical shape, but without any need for a textual verse/refrain structure. The idea that Hillsong could effect, such a clearly anticipated moment of climax without any recourse to lyrical content brings me to my second argument. I contend that these textless musical experiences are enmeshed within a repertoire of established forms that are well understood by both parishioners and worship leaders. YouTube user Richi Thomas claims that he captured this particular moment of the song on video because he “knew it was coming,” even during the initial performance. This knowledge is undoubtedly related to Thomas’s familiarity with an earlier recording of the song and/or with other songs by Hillsong United, but also to the entrained musical conventions of certain forms of post-1980 popular music that allow him to predict that a significant musical climax is imminent. Increasing volume, rising vocal register, and rhythmic diminution serve as important musical cues to signal the upcoming climax in the song. But even more than signaling the shape of a particular performance, these parameters actually instruct fan-worshippers when and how to invest themselves in the spiritual content of a song. Just as with fans of electronic dance music and “the drop”—or what writer Daniel Barrow has evocatively called “the soar” in contemporary pop songwriting—a real-time negotiation of deferring and fulfilling expectations is a core part of the sensational forms of worship performance. Barrow, too, connects moments of “soar” with moments of textlessness (or, at the very least, extreme textual simplicity), calling it “pop’s signature glossolalia . . . as if her artificial joy were bursting the constraints of language” (Barrow 2013). By taking up both of these arguments through an analysis of Hillsong United’s “With Everything,” this chapter makes a case for the discipline of musical analysis as an indispensable part of the toolkit for any scholar

Worshipping “With Everything”  27 of congregational music. Because of the textual nature of theology and the significance of “worship” as a theological category in recent years (especially within American evangelicalism), there has been a semantic over-investment in lyrics on the part of critics and scholars which is not necessarily reflected in the piety of most parishioners. In fact, many scholars of Christian congregational music seem to argue that worship music is responsible for shaping evangelical belief primarily through its ability to preserve or present theological texts in uniquely attractive containers. But if praise and worship music is offering its listeners compelling theological content, that content is intimately bound up with their personal experiences of musical sound. To clarify, I am not suggesting that lyrics do not play a significant role in the construction and reception of praise and worship music. For proof of just how important lyrics can be, one need only examine the 2009 controversy surrounding songwriter John Mark McMillan’s hit single “How He Loves.” At one point in the song’s climatic bridge, McMillan uses a particularly evocative poetic image to describe the human–divine relationship, saying that “heaven meets earth like a sloppy, wet kiss.” A large number of people in the evangelical community objected to this image because they found it indecent or off-putting in the middle of a song directed toward God. The song was prominently covered by the David Crowder*Band on their 2009 Church Music album, where Crowder changed the line in question to “heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss.” Many worship leaders lined up on both sides of this debate and argued over the theological and practical implications of each set of lyrics. As this particular case shows, music and lyrics in praise and worship are deeply conjoined in a dialectical relationship, but cases like Hillsong United’s “With Everything” force us to consider the unique role that music plays above and beyond its textual counterparts. Simply contending that lyrics are over-invested with meaning in musical analyses is, of course, not an observation that is restricted to the narrow field of praise and worship music. Robert Walser has pointed out in the context of heavy metal that, while critics and analysts are most frequently drawn to more “literate” modes of communication, “musicians and fans alike tend to respond primarily and most strongly to musical meanings,” or what he calls “oral” modes of communication (Walser 1993, 39). Even when lyrics are used as a reference point for fans, they are often standing in for a much broader complex of meaning-making processes that have their roots in the entire aural experience of the music. In a similar way, when religious music plays a role in shaping religious belief, it is not primarily through its ability to preserve theological texts but rather through its ability to convey theology through sound. That is, even when music conveys or contains textual elements, it is not reducible to those elements, and thus any analysis of religious or liturgical music must account for theology that is being constructed at a sonic, nonverbal level.

28  Joshua Kalin Busman

Sensational forms Undergirding my approach in this chapter is the notion of “sensational forms” developed by cultural anthropologists Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips to discuss the broader organizational logic that is present at the level of the musical performance/text itself. Sensational forms help to describe how praise and worship music uses commonly held formal structures to organize access to the divine at the level of sensory experience. Meyer and Verrips describe sensational forms as: [t]hose religious forms that organize encounters between human beings and the divine, as well as with each other, and make individual religious experience intersect with transmitted, shared forms. . . . We understand these forms as relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking and organizing access to the transcendental, thereby creating and sustaining links between believers in the context of particular religious regimes. (Meyer and Verrips 2008, 27) For Meyer and Verrips, the most central forms of religious life are experiential and aesthetic, operating at the level of sensory experience in order to bring about religious formation. Sensational forms construct a set of specific sense-based modalities through which access to the divine is authorized and controlled (see Busman 2015). In the case of praise and worship music, this includes not only the privileging of music as uniquely suited to the task of “worship” but also the use of specific musical techniques in the processes of composition and performance. Specific levels of musical density, volume, and textual complexity give worshippers a sense of which songs—and which parts of which songs—are most conducive to spiritual experience. Oftentimes, the most spiritually meaningful moments are those that combine the highest levels of musical intensity with the lowest levels of textual complexity, with some songs eschewing the use of any text at all in favor of singing on vocables like “oh” or “whoa.” These climaxes or moments of soar are the moments that fans and worshippers intensely anticipate, the phenomenological “payoff” so to speak, and worship leaders structure songs to strategically manipulate this expectation. In this capacity, the climax music is designed to elicit a more intense embodied response from the gathered congregation. People may have been singing or had their hands raised before, but at this particular moment that embodied action goes into overdrive. Sensational forms also help to construct the boundaries around particular communities by consistently affirming a commonly held religious-aesthetic style. Not only does community music-making, especially group singing, generate sensory feelings of togetherness, it also gives concrete expression to a shared religious identity. This sense of shared identity that is embedded in aesthetic material culture allows religious communities to negotiate their experiences

Worshipping “With Everything”  29 of the divine in a variety of public and private spaces as well as with a variety of religious and non-religious interlocutors. This shared identity often exists alongside a shared vocabulary for musical analysis that is used by parishioners and practitioners to understand how these sensational forms unfold and how they might be most effectively manipulated and controlled. In evangelical praise and worship music, such practitioner analyses typically unfold along two axes. First, leaders often refer to a chord chart providing a guitar-centered rubric for the song’s harmonies. Like in comparable forms of contemporary popular music, chords in worship songs are typically deployed in predictable sequences that rotate at fixed time intervals to define the harmonic progression for each formal section of a song. Four-chord sequences are particularly common in worship music because phrases typically run four measures; the various sections of the song are typically demarcated by a change in the order of presentation of these harmonies rather than a change in the harmonic building blocks themselves. Consulting a number of chord charts and YouTube tutorial videos for any worship song will reveal a strong penchant among leaders for selecting a particular variation of the primary chords—tonic, subdominant, dominant, and submediant, (or 1, 4, 5, and 6 using Nashville Numbers)—in the key of G major and simply using a guitar capo to adjust those chord shapes into adjacent keys. These are not the standard chord shapes one might find in a guitar method book, but rather a variation (almost all with added 7ths or 9ths or with suspended 4ths) that allows the player to keep their ring and pinky fingers stationary on the upper strings throughout any sequence involving these four chords. Along with the added ease for amateur players, the drone on the higher strings and soft dissonances from added notes contributes to a codified “worship sound” that is tied to the particular way these chords are voiced on the guitar in the key of G major. In fact, this particular set of simplified G major chords has become so normative for the worship sound that one can even find these specific chord voicings parodied in various forums and YouTube videos.2 Second, and perhaps more importantly, worship leaders develop a “roadmap” for how to deploy the various formal sections of the song to maximum effect with their congregation. Worship leaders and band members use the word “roadmap” to refer to the overarching musical trajectory of a piece that is realized in performance. In a way, the chord chart is simply an ingredients list for creating the worship experience contained within the song. The roadmap explains how to combine those ingredients to the greatest effect: in what order and in what proportions. The “roadmap” is not only about sequencing the individual sections of the piece into a coherent whole, but also about controlling the relative “size” of the song at each moment. For example, a roadmap might instruct a player to begin with the chorus and then return to the first verse before progressing through the pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge, but it would also specify that the song

30  Joshua Kalin Busman should start at medium volume with a unique chorus or tremolo effect and slowly introduce a clean fingerpicked guitar sound at the verse before building toward a more vigorous strumming pattern or slight overdrive effect in the chorus. Because of the myriad ways that pastors and musicians conflate high levels of volume or density with high levels of spiritual sincerity, sonic intensity is one of the most important “sensational forms” used to organize and sanction access to divine power in evangelical worship. Creating coherent musical trajectories to and from these moments of maximum intensity is one of the central functions for a roadmap. The “roadmap” is a kind of head arrangement of the song that is typically established verbally by a worship band in rehearsal, but it will almost always make at least a passing reference to a particular recorded instantiation of the song. These recorded performances of songs serve as a kind of super-pattern that is trained by repetition into musicians and worshippers alike and becomes capable of effecting repeated and repeatable responses in live worship through a series of relatively stable and predictable forms. Within the praise and worship community, Hillsong United’s recordings— and Joel Houston’s songs, in particular—have a reputation for their ­complicated formal structures that are uniquely well suited to fluid roadmapping and climax-building.3 Even the barest chord charts for one of Hillsong United’s songs sprawl across multiple pages to accommodate the numerous bridges, tags, pre-choruses, post-choruses, and “endings” that are so indicative of their style. Hillsong United’s consistent departure from a simple verse-chorus format does not, however, deter many local worship leaders from taking up their songs on a weekly basis. Worship leaders particularly vaunt Hillsong United’s ability to “build a song like no other band out there.” Their fluid formal approach demonstrates the primacy of the roadmap as the organizational principle in praise and worship music, and their songs are ultimately designed and recorded with these large-scale roadmaps in mind (Busman 2017).

“With Everything” One of the most important issues that applying the tools of musical analysis can help us think through is a degree of specificity about what text we are analyzing when we set out to understand a worship song. Are we analyzing a chord chart or score? Are we analyzing a particular recording? Are we analyzing a live performance? Are we analyzing an ur-text idea of the “song” that has been abstracted from some combination of these elements? Theodore Gracyk has argued that the central “works” in rock-influenced popular music are “commercial recordings created for consumption as recorded music” and that “the song, cover versions of the song, or the song in live performance,” while not totally incidental variables, “are not the central occasions for critical response and critical dialogue” (1999, 206). But when dealing with worship music, it is often the sensational forms of

Worshipping “With Everything”  31 worship captured on live recordings that sketch out the boundaries of a song for fans and worshippers. By closely examining “With Everything,” we quickly discover the wide range of musical and formal possibilities that can exist under the heading of a single song. Let’s take, for instance, the three most widely available versions of “With Everything” performed by Hillsong United, all of which are available on most major music streaming services: (1) the initial Sydney, Australia performance captured on the 2008 Hillsong Live album This Is Our God, (2) the performance at the 2010 Passion Conference included on the Passion: Awakening album released the same year, and (3) the performance from the 2012 CD/DVD concert experience Hillsong United: Live in Miami. In each instance, the runtimes and roadmaps for the song vary wildly with two of the recordings including lyrical and musical materials that aren’t found on either of the other two. In the first version of “With Everything” from 2008, the song opens with two “verses” that are comfortably in the home key of B major (although every chord chart I  could find specified that this should be accomplished using “G major chords with a capo on the fourth fret,” as discussed earlier). The harmonic progression at this particular moment contains a simple sequence of four primary chords and places the 1 or “tonic” chord at the beginning of each rotation. These two relatively stable verses then lead into a much more propulsive pre-chorus section in which the tonic chord is shifted to the third position in the four-chord sequence and each rotation begins with a minor submediant (or -6). In the pre-chorus, each harmonic rotation begins with a deceptive movement from the dominant at the end of the previous cycle to the submediant at the beginning of the next. This, combined with placing the tonic chord in the structurally weak third position of the rotation, gives the pre-chorus a forward momentum that pushes the performance into the next section. The subsequent chorus is both the biggest musical moment we have encountered so far and a return to the more stable chord progression of the verses. From a standard music-theoretical perspective, this analysis comports with all of our expectations: the symmetry between verse and chorus, the propulsive pre-chorus sequence that moves us forward, and the stability of the chorus paired with a marked increase in volume and sonic density to create a moment of arrival. I suspect that no one who actually listened to the song, however, would identify the “chorus” as anything other than a waypoint on the journey to our ultimate destination. Following the chorus, we get multiple bridge sections which return to the propulsive chord progression used in the pre-chorus and which slowly build in volume and intensity way beyond where the song had arrived with the original chorus section. Additionally, these so-called bridge sections are the only portions of the song that actually contain the title in the lyrics—something we might expect from the “moment of arrival” at the chorus. After multiple times through each bridge, the song finally erupts and arrives at the ecstatic and textless tag section which is chanted on the syllable “oh.” Unlike the YouTube video

32  Joshua Kalin Busman mentioned earlier, the audience on this initial recording does not seem to anticipate this moment, which does not arrive until nearly 80% of the way through the song’s roadmap and only lasts for a total of 85 seconds. When given the opportunity to sing over the fading outro of the song without Houston’s explicit leadership, the congregation spontaneously returns to the first “bridge” section that contains the lyrics from which the song’s title is taken rather than continuing the wordless chant. Because the This Is Our God version of “With Everything” was the first to be released, it forms the basis for the majority of the chord charts and video tutorials related to the song, but subsequent versions of the song make substantial changes that have become indelible to the song’s overall effect. In the 2010 performance from Passion, Houston completely eliminates the opening verses of the song and replaces them with brand new lyrical material built over top of the propulsive pre-chorus/bridge chord progression rather than the more stable verse progression used in the original. Among all publicly available recordings of the song, these two verses only appear in this Passion performance and may represent a kind of transitional moment in the song’s evolution from This Is Our God in 2008 to Live in Miami in 2012. Furthermore, the wordless tag of the song (indicated on the chart shown in Figure 2.1) arrives just over halfway through the song and lasts for nearly three-and-a-half minutes, even containing its own build and climax without any lyrical sections of the song ever returning. As the band reaches the second wordless climax, Houston returns to the microphone only to offer encouragement to the Passion crowd by shouting “From the front to the back, let’s lift the roof off this place with a shout of praise!” In this moment, the textless refrain of the song becomes the “shout of praise” described by Houston, providing the opportunity for worshippers to perform and experience their own levels of spiritual sincerity through sound. By the time we reach the Live in Miami version, not only has the song itself changed, but it has been woven into a tightly road-mapped worship set that unfolds over the two full discs of the audio release. The builds and climaxes are structured throughout the album to arrive like waves crashing on the beach. In fact, the first sound one hears when calling up the “With Everything” track in the middle of disc two is the wash of thundering guitars that seem to still be dissolving from the crash of the previous wave. The previous song was “From the Inside Out,” another sprawling and anthemic Houston composition with a similar approach to road-mapping and climax. But rather than allowing the climax of “From the Inside Out” to dissolve into an applause “coda” like he does for nearly a minute at the end of “With Everything,” he simply brings the energy level down and continues the chord progression of the previous tune under a new track heading. By postponing the full resolution of the propulsive musical texture after “From the Inside Out,” Hillsong United is able to carry over deferred energy from one song to the next, making the builds and soars of “With Everything” all the more intense. This carry-over is set aside as a transitional track, titled “A Song to Sing,” which consists primarily of Houston verbally exhorting the crowd, presumably without prior

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Worshipping “With Everything”  33

34  Joshua Kalin Busman planning, to sing and pray over their communities as the gradually intensifying backing music eventually climaxes in a swirl of reverb and overdrive. These overdriven sounds almost immediately give way to a new chord progression and soft, slow build associated with the tag section of “With Everything,” and without any prompting, the assembled crowd immediately begins chanting the wordless tag on “oh.” Houston allows the chanting to continue for nearly a minute before finally starting the song with the prechorus. In this version, the band does not attempt to include any verses (new or otherwise); instead, they focus the nearly eleven minutes of this performance on a constant cycle between the pre-chorus, bridge, and tag sections of the song. The song is almost three full minutes longer than any other song on the Live in Miami double album and more than two minutes longer than Hillsong United’s 2010 Passion performance; the wordless tag now occupies nearly half of the track’s total runtime. Rather than building to a clear climax in the transition from bridge to tag, however, this performance features no less than three such climaxes (not including the spontaneous singing of the wordless tag before the song even properly begins). Hillsong United guitarist and producer of Live in Miami Jadwin Gillies commented on the crowd’s enthusiastic response to the song in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network immediately following the album’s release. One of the things that really stick in my mind is the moment when we sing “With Everything.” At the end of that song, pretty much we finish the song, but they keep singing it. They keep singing the chant. That room was so loud; it was deafening. I was blown away because it was so loud. To be honest with you, when you experience just people so passionate, so excited about God, about the presence of God, it really does something to you. (Goodwyn) Gillies and the rest of the band are clearly attentive and responsive to the movement of the Holy Spirit during their worship sets, and sonic intensity of the crowd serves as a sensational form which is used to organize and sanction experiences of divine intensity.4 Here, we see sound becoming theology becoming body politics becoming sound in very real and tangible ways.

In singing Being specific about our object of study brings clarity to both our questions and our conclusions, and it also opens opportunities for comparative analysis between multiple iterations of the same song. For instance, in each of the three subsequent performances of “With Everything” listed earlier, Hillsong United’s performance of the song was longer than the previous version despite each version being formally simpler. That is to say, each version used fewer distinct musical sections with smaller variations in harmonic

Worshipping “With Everything”  35 content but found ways to repeat and extend this ever-smaller body of materials. In retrospect, the 2008 version of the song now appears to be cast in a fairly standard pop song format with the build and climax a fairly minor structural feature that is restricted to the terminal bridge and tag sections (Osborn 2013). The 2010 Passion performance attempts to integrate the body of the song with the “soar” by swapping out the initial verses for material that more naturally forecasts the bridge and tag to come. But by the 2012 Live in Miami performance, any vestige of the original form has disappeared and the song has been completely re-rendered as consecutive moments of pure soar and enmeshed with the sensational forms conditioned by evangelical worship experiences. The song no longer exists as a separable single to be released for worship-oriented radio or streaming services, but rather as a smaller sensational form to be deployed as part of a tightly controlled two-hour worship experience like the one showcased on the Live in Miami DVD. By focusing their energies on finding the most effective ways to conduct their congregation through an ever-escalating set of builds and climaxes, the Live in Miami album and concert film seem to go from strength to strength with the most formally minimal versions of every popular song in the Hillsong catalog. It is not surprising that with the four years of rehearsal between the first version of “With Everything” on This Is Our God and the Live in Miami concert that Hillsong United would have clarified and refined their performance of the song. In any context, one would expect rehearsal to sharpen a performance’s effects. Given how radically the formal content of the song changes among these various versions, however, it becomes clear that the thing being sharpened is not a faithful rendering of some platonic “song” existing on a score or chord chart or even on an originary studio recording. Rather, the thing being sharpened is precisely Hillsong’s ability to affect “the soar” to spiritually meaningful ends. Regardless of the planning or road-mapping done ahead of time, worship music is left structurally open to the spontaneous movement of the Holy Spirit, especially among those musicians who, like Hillsong, hail from the most Pentecostal corners of the evangelical world. Like any good musician, worship leaders are sensitive to the needs of each gathered crowd and make split-second determinations about musical direction that are largely based on the levels of physical and emotional engagement with the music among the gathered community. One can easily imagine the four-year journey undertaken by “With Everything” as congregational engagement slowly transformed the song in practice from a standard verse-chorus radio single to a sprawling, anthemic worship experience. Interactions with the sensational forms of transcendental encounter become a kind of amplifying feedback loop in which band and congregation alike reinforce and expand those moments that most effectively bring the gathered body into communion with the divine.

36  Joshua Kalin Busman Any worthwhile analysis of contemporary worship music will need to account for this broader shift in the unit of pop music analysis from the rockist prejudice for the “song” or “album” toward the pop and EDMinspired focus on the “set.” As music theorist Mark Butler has argued in the case of electronic dance music, “the set is a unity” and the primary focus of a DJ’s efforts is in both musical composition and source material curation (2006, 49). Butler has also compellingly described the ways in which the unfolding of a successful set is a dialogic process between persons and places, necessitating much more complicated notions of origin and authorship in analyzing the specific musical compositions in question. All [DJs] emphasized the importance of shaping energy or intensity within a set. Intensity, more than any individual musical factor, is the glue that holds a set together. Although the DJ must manipulate the intensity level in a way that a makes sense within the conventions of electronic dance music, within the context of live performance, intensity remains contingent upon the audience’s interaction. In the absence of recurring motives, themes, and keys, this give-and-take is the primary source of coherence in a DJ set. . . [T]he sense of musical coherence associated with a well-done DJ set derives from an integrated mixture of “purely musical” compositional choices and on-site physical responses. (Butler 2006, 254) In this way of thinking, songs are merely building blocks for the broader movements of bodily and spiritual intensity orchestrated by DJs and worship leaders. Some worship bands, including California-based charismatic standard bearers Jesus Culture, take an incredibly flexible approach to “songs” in their live worship events, moving fluidly between individual segments of multiple songs in order to achieve their larger musical and spiritual trajectories. Even within Christian congregations that do not embrace all the stylistic trappings “modern” worship exemplified by Hillsong United or Jesus Culture, attention to the ways that a multi-song set creates opportunities for an emergent, continuous, and dynamic musical whole is crucial to understanding parishioners’ worship experiences. In her discussions of singing in the Civil Rights Movement, musician, scholar, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon makes a strong demarcation between “songs” as objects and “singing” as an activity. You grow up in a culture that is threaded through not with songs as much as with singing. You are singing, and in singing, you collect songs. So when you need—you don’t need songs, you need to sing. When you need to sing, the songs that fit why you need to sing, come to your mind. (Conan 2010)

Worshipping “With Everything”  37 The primary function of a song for Reagon is to place a gathered group “in singing.” The song is merely a tool that enables the coordination of group singing and the production of sensational forms, rather than a result in and of itself. In this way, the practice of road-mapping comes to have primacy even outside the bounds of the songs themselves by drawing worship leaders to attend to issues of flow and intensity over much larger time scales (Busman 2017).

Conclusion When I asked about his favorite worship song, Peter, a twenty-three-yearold worship leader from Tampa, Florida, responded by talking about the 2013 Brett Younker song “Burning in My Soul.” The chorus pack[s] a lot of power and emotion without having actually said very much. It’s praise to God more through our emotions then by actually verbally declaring it. The “whoa” part has so many layers to it as well. I feel it is more than simply a placeholder. It is what I imagine an angelic choir might sound like when singing. There is a little dissonance and mystery in the tone which gives a sense of reverence (within myself); as if I  were in the presence of God and I  am humbled and amazed at Him at the same time. The crescendo builds in a way that is very captivating as well. It’s like an exclamation point sitting in the heart of the song. (Interview with author, 2013) Peter’s comments here reiterate two of the crucial points I outlined earlier. First of all, he reiterates the sentiment that true worship happens uniquely at the level of sensational form, here explicitly excluding textual paradigms of theological understanding in favor of a musically constructed experience of “power and emotion.” And second, he identifies a specific portion of the song that triggered this experience particularly well, namely the chorus which includes an extended moment of textless singing—“the ‘whoa’ part.” This also coincided with “the crescendo,” which indexes together a number of different sonic parameters to define the most spiritually potent portion of the song. The importance of textless moments in contemporary worship should remind scholars of the inability of language to capture the depth and complexity of congregational music-making. By using Meyer and Verrips’ notion of “sensational forms” and the tools of musical analysis, I hope to move the study of congregational music away from the notion that religious belief is primarily propositional or even rational and toward an examination of how belief consists in the affective, lived experiences of the religious life. Understanding how contemporary evangelicals worship “with everything” in their sensory toolkit offers us new ways of understanding embodied religious

38  Joshua Kalin Busman experience as well as the formations of community and identity that Christian congregational music provides to so many.

Notes 1 “Hillsong United—With Everything // Passion 2010,” www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9IWD-gDOuaw. 2 See in particular, Blimey Cow, “Messy Mondays: How to Write a Worship Song (In 5 Minutes or Less),” February 3, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhYuA0Cz8ls. 3 This is especially true of the ways that Houston and the other Hillsong writers use vocal register in their songwriting. Hillsong writers consistently ensure that climactic sections on “oh” or “whoa” lie in comfortable unisex vocal ranges. Similarly, the bridge sections that build to these climaxes are frequently constructed such that they can be can be transposed up an octave as the section builds toward the climax. 4 My usage of the ideas and language of “intensity” is inspired by the fifth chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, in which he puts forward “intensity” as a form of ontological difference-making that is independent and prior to “sensory distortion” (1994, 222).

References Barrow, Daniel. 2013. “A Plague of Soars—Warps in the Fabric of Pop.” The Quietus, April  13. Web. https://thequietus.com/articles/06073-a-plague-of-soarswarps-in-the-fabric-of-pop. Busman, Joshua Kalin. 2015. “ ‘Yet to Come’ or ‘Still to Be Done’? Evangelical Worship and the Power of Prophetic Songs.” In Singing a New Song: Christian Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Tom Wagner and Anna Nekola. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ———. 2017. “ ‘Songs Are Sermons That People Actually Remember’: Homo Liturgicus and Hymnody in the 268 Generation.” In Exploring Christian Song, edited by M. Jennifer Bloxam and Andrew Shenton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Butler, Mark J. 2006. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Conan, Neal. 2010. “A Freedom Singer Shares the Music of the Movement.” www. npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123599617. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Goodwyn, Hannah. “Hillsong United’s Jad Gillies on Worshipping God Live in Miami.” http://www1.cbn.com/music/hillsong-uniteds-jad-gillies-worshippinggod-live-miami. Gracyk, Theodore. 1999. “Valuing and Evaluating Popular Music.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (2): 205–20. Meyer, Birgit, and Jojada Verrips. 2008. “Aesthetics.” In Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, edited by David Morgan. London: Routledge. Osborn, Brad. 2013. “Subverting the Verse—Chorus Paradigm: Terminally Climactic Forms in Recent Rock.” Music Theory Spectrum 35. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

3 Mediating religious experience? Congregational music and the digital music interface Anna E. Nekola Faith in technology is central to American culture. —Patrick Burkart and Tom McCourt in Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (2006, 1) We are our playlists. —Clive Marsh and Vaughan S. Roberts in Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls (2012, 111)

Introduction In many ways, the digital music experience feels almost unmediated. The earlier materiality of music—the CD, the LP—disappears, and it is just us and our music when we listen. On Spotify we are our playlists, or at least we appear as playlists first and actual humans second. In the case of worship and sacred music, the concern of this collection, this shift in musical technology is not merely a media issue; it is also a religious issue: if music is meant to be a medium through which God can be encountered, changes to interfaces and listening practices are co-constitutive with changes to spiritual and religious experience. Therefore, we need a methodological and theoretical approach that integrates media studies with the study of religion and music. This chapter seeks to provide congregational music scholars with a guide to the questions a critical-cultural media studies perspective ought to engage and the wide array of cultural questions that this perspective can illuminate, while providing an introduction to digital music media interfaces. It explores issues of access and personalization via digital radio and on-demand streaming: how we encounter and interact with digital music technologies and how the sites of musical encounter and listening mediate the religious experiences of worshipers and worship leaders. Digital music services offer access to vast quantities of music while simultaneously presenting playlists and channels tailored to one’s personal taste, but this easy access to musical resources— and the promises surrounding it—can convince us that, via the best and

40  Anna E. Nekola latest technology, our lives (including our corporate and personal worship) will be somehow “better” than before. But what are the human, social, and spiritual consequences of going digital, for both listeners and musicians? What choices are and are not possible? How do the distribution and circulation patterns of commercial music and our interactions with recorded music technologies participate in shaping our doctrines, theologies, and expectations for worship practices? Digital interfaces are significant in the study of congregational music for the ways they shape the expectations that worshipers bring to congregational experiences and, in turn, how expectations for worshipful engagement shape how people listen to and participate with a range of music in their everyday lives. In what follows, I  argue that by integrating criticalcultural media studies—going beyond the musical text in order to examine issues of economic and cultural power—with the study of religion, congregational music scholars will be better equipped to investigate not just digital music but all mediated religious phenomena.

Critical-cultural media studies meets the study of religion in everyday life A critical-cultural approach to religious media, instead of assuming that the media text is the sole locus of meaning, emphasizes active audiences and dynamic multidirectional flows of ideas and information; this meaningmaking activity occurs within relations of social and economic power, requiring us to also examine the ways people are experiencing and enacting religion within and outside of traditional top-down systems of power (see Hoover 2006; Morgan 2008). British theorist Raymond Williams (1958) argued that culture is created through ongoing daily shared and interactive processes of communication whereby people seek to make sense of the world. Building on this concept in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars associated with the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies paid particular attention to the ways class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality contributed to how audiences made meaning from media representations and texts. Thus, rather than thinking about media as a noun referring to a stable set of forms or technologies that produce a series of effects in passive media consumers, a critical-cultural perspective looks instead at how the interactions of audiences within social contexts and relations of power actively create multiple, possibly even conflicting, meanings (Grossberg et al. 2006).1 Overall, a “cultural” approach to studying media means examining the circulation of meanings and ideas in human societies and cultures, while a “critical” approach to media studies examines the systems of power, value, domination, and resistance that are part of the politics of culture. Two crucial points are central to a critical-cultural approach to media and religion: an emphasis on audiences playing an active role in the ongoing creation and

Mediating religious experience?  41 negotiation of religious media cultures and a broadening of previous understandings of what constitutes “religion” and “media.” Rather than treating religion and media as “separate and separable entities,” Stewart Hoover explains that religion and media exist together in multiple, complex, interconnected ways (Hoover 2002, 1–3). In the words of sound historian Emily Thompson, “culture is much more than an interesting context in which to place technological accomplishments; it is inseparable from technology itself” (Thompson 2002, 9). Rather than focusing on media objects in isolation from culture, a critical-cultural approach looks at the practices and processes of cultural mediation. For congregational music, this means investigating how media texts, economies, and technologies mediate lived, everyday experiences of music, faith, and personal and collective identity, while also examining the (often unspoken) assumptions about social dynamics and relationships, particularly as they relate to systems of influence and power. Consider this brief example of what a critical-cultural approach to media can look like in the study of Christian hymns. Approaching hymns as media texts (and hymnals as media technologies) could begin by situating textual and thematic content within theological and social trends, as well as individual patterns of belief and identity. But it would also pay attention to industrial production and audience reception, examining patterns of access, distribution, and use of hymnals, investigating who published them, where they were for sale, how much they cost, and how people used them. We would want to know not just the content but who put the hymnal together, using what social and spiritual criteria, for what intended audiences, within which institutional, cultural, and economic structures, and with what responses and practices from which congregants. John Bawden’s examination of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ role in hymn composition and hymnal publishing demonstrates what a critical-cultural investigation of hymns can illuminate, revealing how the print media of hymnals not only influenced congregational singing but also mediated Britons’ combined sense of national and Christian identity (2004, 2). In other words, Bawden explains not just what the hymn and hymnals “say” as media artifacts but also the practices and processes of cultural mediation: how these hymns and hymnals were involved in rich processes of theological and national differentiation and identity-making. The job of media analysts of congregational music, then, and the value of a critical-cultural approach, is to better understand how technologies used to facilitate worship practices—from hymnals to musical instruments to fog machines—are not simply the products of a particular set of attitudes toward the processes and goals of worship, but sets of practices that reflect and afford ideas, choices, and possibilities about what worship can and should do for congregants. This shift from products to practices resonates with recent calls across music studies to reconceptualize music not as text but as process, from Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” that

42  Anna E. Nekola regards music as less of a “thing” and more of “something that people do” (1998, 2) to Nicholas Cook’s definition of music as the “enaction of social relationships” (2003, 213). In the corresponding sphere of audiences and musical reception, Nina Eidsheim makes the crucial point that we cannot simply note a listener’s habits but must pay attention to the “set of values that has produced that listening practice” (2015, 6). This means turning one’s attention, as Bawden did in the case of British hymnals, to an enculturated subject in ways that reveal values, politics, and ideology (see Fenimore 2012; Boone 2015). In short, the study of music and religion requires the study of how humans constitute their world through ongoing reciprocal processes of mediation and cultural negotiation (Frith 1996). To summarize, a critical-cultural approach provides insight into the complications and contradictions in lived experiences and reveals religion to be dynamic and constantly negotiated rather than monolithic or unitary (Ammerman 2016). It prompts us to consider how people interact with media technologies and, in its attention to power, helps us understand struggles over meaning, including the stories of those who have been excluded from dominant histories. In the rest of this chapter, I will try to model this approach as I  explore how digital music technologies and twenty-firstcentury listening practices are tied to our ideas and expectations for what congregational music is and how we relate to it.

Music goes digital I: changes to listening practices and worship expectations In order to understand transformations in religious musical practice, we first need to understand the shifts occurring in digital music consumption. Corporate or organized practices of congregational music have long depended on various technologies and media, from manually operated pump organs and hand-scribed antiphonaries, to amplified guitars, lead sheets, and projected slides. Practices of home musicking have also changed along with sound-creation and playback technologies. In the twenty-first century, people around the world increasingly encounter their music not just as digital audio files (AACs, MP3s, etc.) but through digital streaming, including livestreaming digital radio (“internet radio”) and on-demand streaming services such as Spotify.2 The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reports an overall double-digit decline in downloads and physical album sales in 2016, while digital listening increases across the globe. Europe and North America are seeing the largest growth in streaming revenue (with 73% and 84% growth, respectively). Even more significantly, Mexico, China, and India—countries that the music industry had not previously considered profitable markets for recorded music—are showing remarkable 20% growth rates in streaming revenue (“IFPI Global”; “Global Music Report 2017” 15, 21, 28–30). Data also show that ever more listeners are streaming via their mobile phones, and the convenience

Mediating religious experience?  43 and portability of listening technologies suggest that many of these people may be multitasking—listening to music alongside other activities (“Internet Radio Trends” 2015). Streaming practices are beginning to change people’s conceptions of how music is organized, distributed, and shared, with some customers increasingly thinking and talking in terms of “playlists” rather than “albums” (“Playlists Overtake”). Exploring recorded music’s shift to digital streaming, Jeremy Morris explains that we have gone from experiencing music as a material object— a disc with artistic and informative packaging that became part of a personal music library—to an intangible digital commodity that has been “retuned by the efforts of software designers, rogue digital start-ups, entrenched industry players, and everyday hobbyists and users” (2015, 4). Changes in listening practices have accompanied this shift; as Kate Lacey says, “listening is not changed by media technologies, but it does change in relation to changing technological constellations” (2013, 9). Here Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of “remediation”—that “new digital media are not external agents” that come from outside a culture but instead “emerge from within cultural contexts,” affecting and affected by other media (1999, 19)—prompts us to ask some important questions: What does digital musical media do that is similar to what old media promised? What are its new promises, and what does it deliver? Who benefits from particular media practices and in what ways? By asking such questions, and with a basic understanding of streaming technology, we are better positioned to apprehend the changing practices and relationships that emerge around congregational music and digital music. This returns me to my earlier claim: that changes to interfaces and listening practices are co-constitutive with changes to spiritual and religious experience. Music is a feelingful art that engages us physically and emotionally, which is part of why we surround ourselves with music in so much of our lives, including our congregational worship. The special question for studying media and Christian congregational music, then, and the special value of a critical-cultural media studies perspective, lies in the recognition of both music and media’s particular affordances for affective experience and transcendence. In that vein, I suggest that the primary significance of various streaming digital music platforms for Christian listeners may reside in these media’s heightened qualities of liveness and immediacy as well as the physical and spiritual intimacy of the experience of sound. It is not that these qualities were previously absent, of course, but putting on an LP or a CD calls attention to the recorded and mediated nature of the sound as recorded and always referring to an event distant from the present moment in both time and space. In contrast, John Durham Peters (2001) and Andrew Bottomley (2016) argue that media like radio appeal through a sense of liveness: connecting to an event and “witnessing” something as authentic, true, and intimate. Importantly, the actual “liveness” of the content is secondary to the liveness of the medium; as Bottomley argues, “it is

44  Anna E. Nekola less a matter of the content literally being produced in real-time than it is of the radio signal being endlessly co-present” (60). Unlike physical media, then, turning on the radio or tuning into a digital stream feels like connecting to something eternally and persistently present—a kind of eternal choir. Even the metaphors of “the cloud” and the “celestial jukebox” carry connotations of something heavenly, omniscient, and perhaps even divine (Morris 2015, 176). Within the context of Christian music, which for years has been marketed as a medium for encountering God’s presence, the apparently live, unmediated (“im-mediate”), and celestial quality of the digital music encounter can amplify these feelings of divine intimacy for listeners (Nekola 2013). In other words, in listening to or making congregational music we often seek to transcend the medium, to go beyond the words and sounds, to leave that intermediate state of being. In worship, these special qualities of music can enable people to experience unity with the divine and to find meaningful connection with a human community of believers, whether real or “imagined” (in Benedict Anderson’s sense). Together, then, digital music technology and a religious impulse can reinforce each other in reciprocal ways. This reciprocality of immediacy, intimacy, and divinity has profound implications for the subjective and social processes of religious musicking: when media appear invisible, we can often underestimate the ways they shape our ideas, experiences, and identities through the opportunities they afford us (and through those they don’t). Digital listening operates as what Tia DeNora calls a “technology of the self,” a way people create and understand themselves as individuals (DeNora 2000, 46–47). And digital music’s easy availability offers more opportunities for people to live their lives with and through music (Morris 2015, 191). In the case of congregational music, several scholars have explored how congregants bring expectations from their everyday experiences of music listening to organized worship and other practices of faith; digital listening experiences can help shape what people seek in corporate worship practices, even as corporate worship practices reciprocally influence the expectations people have for what sacred music might bring to their everyday lives outside of church. For example, Clive Marsh’s study of U.S. and UK listeners suggests that people create a “musical-spiritual social imaginary” through their everyday musical experiences (outside of worship) that they also bring with them to their understandings of and expectations for “how music in worship is received and interacted with” (2014, 204). In particular, Marsh claims, people are likely to want congregational music to engender particular moods and emotional states and contribute to making church a “safe space” for experiencing intensities of feeling. The challenge for those leading and crafting congregational worship, says Marsh, is in how to work with worshipers’ expectations, especially the hard task of reinforcing ecclesial community at a time when listening practices favor individualized experiences (see also Porter 2017). Even as churches and religious institutions may influence worshipers’

Mediating religious experience?  45 expectations for what they will hear and sing on a Sunday morning, so too may worshipers’ musical choices as they commute, work out, do housework, and relax shape their expectations for how organized worship services will make them feel and act.

Music goes digital II: changes to economic and cultural relations in music commodification The foregoing exploration of the intersection of digital technology and religious music is, I argue, an important illustration of the ways that interfaces and listening practices can be co-constitutive with spiritual and religious experience. However, a critical-cultural media studies approach encourages us to also consider music as an industrial commodity and as an economic and legal relation. As I will discuss in more detail in the sections that follow, digital music media represent an ongoing shift in music’s commodity status that prompts further questions of intellectual property for music’s creators, restrictions on consumers’ use and circulation of music, and negotiations of music’s commercial value that raise even larger questions about the control of wealth and power (Sterne 2012, 182–92; Morris 2015, 1–29). Many media scholars have proposed that the internet offers the potential for a fundamental “democratization” of culture that upends traditional paradigms of passive users and creative producers, ushering in a new “participatory culture” with varied and dispersed content flows (for overview of scholarship, see Bottomley 2016, 6–9). Yet, what happens when the music itself comes with new limitations and restrictions or when listeners themselves become the (data) commodity being exchanged on the music market? The broader cultural context within which these technological and economic changes are occurring can impact our engagement with religious music, including myths of technological and social progress. As Burkart and McCourt have discussed, a tenet of modernity is the faith that technology brings progress and improvement to our lives, that technology will make things somehow better, whether through improved quality or easier access with cheaper costs—and that these improvements will produce social benefits such as more leisure time and personal freedom, greater social equality, and perhaps even greater social justice. Similarly, in our personal and corporate worship, many people have faith that adopting new technologies in music’s performance and playback, and in our personal listening, will enhance the experience by making worship practices more attractive to outsiders and more meaningful to insiders. In this sense, faith in technology can support the cultural and spiritual mission, not to mention the economic underpinnings, of religious institutions. Alternatively, technological and social change can be viewed with suspicion and hostility, with each innovation contributing to a sense of cultural decline and loss of traditional values. Rather than falling into a binary of praising or denouncing technological change, we need to examine the complex interplay of media technology

46  Anna E. Nekola within specific cultural contexts, including our religious lives. The digital interface may seem neutral, yet a closer analysis reveals complicated dynamics of taste and learned musical preferences, of community and identity, and of economics and power. In the two sections that follow, I will explore these dynamics within two key modes of encounter with music: digital/online streaming (also known as internet radio) and on-demand music platforms (e.g., Spotify, Deezer). I will focus specifically on two competing values—access and personalization— that dominate the discourses around these different but related digital interfaces while raising additional questions about the musical and ethical worlds within which these digital platforms play significant roles.

Inexpensive and easy access: livestreaming Christian music via internet radio Radio is significant for congregational music scholarship because radio, both terrestrial broadcast and online streaming, remains the most common way that listeners around the globe encounter music in their everyday lives (“2014 Nielsen”; “RAJAR Data Release”). In the twenty-first century, Christian music is widely available via radio, although Christian radio’s portion of terrestrial broadcast radio stations around the globe varies widely not only because of population demographics but also because of substantial differences in national communications policies. Within the United States, Christian radio stations have more than doubled since the 1980s and listenership has grown by a third; in a 2015 report the Gospel Music Association (GMA) claimed that Christian radio is the United States’s “fastest-growing radio format” (Williams 2015; “GMA Presents”).3 Reasons behind this robust growth are tied to a history of loose federal regulation that allowed the establishment of many small stations run by churches and religious organizations, as well as the fast growth of commercial stations that delivered a religious message within their broader entertainment programming (Lochte 2007). US policy changes in 1977 also made it possible for religious stations to move from AM to FM signals, trading geographic reach for audio quality. In contrast, nations with a history of state-controlled media systems have only recently seen the establishment and growth of commercial Christian radio stations. For instance, although Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity now dominate the commercial airwaves in Ghana, leading to questions about an overly Pentecostalized public sphere, these religious stations have only proliferated since deregulatory changes in the 1992 constitution (De Witte 2011). In the UK, legal commercial radio broadcasting began in 1973, but commercial religious radio stations are still not allowed on the AM or FM bands, with the exception of a few low-powered FM stations given permission to broadcast ultra-locally starting in 2004. The first widely available Christian radio station in the UK is run by the international United Christian Broadcasters

Mediating religious experience?  47 and has been broadcasting a digital radio signal since just 2009 (Cooper and Macaulay 2015). The story of Christian radio around the globe is also complicated by playback technology—modern mobile phones are both radio receivers for terrestrial broadcast radio and portable computing devices capable of accessing digital music streams. Many North American and European mobile phone owners may not realize that their devices have, for many years, contained a (usually unactivated) FM radio receiver; however, in many parts of the world people regularly use their phones for tuning into terrestrial radio broadcasts (Matthews 2017). For instance, in South Africa 51% of mobile phone users reported using their phones to listen to FM radio (“Technology Trends”). Cultural norms shape mobile phone use, but so do things like electrical grid stability and telecommunications infrastructure. For instance, across the African continent, smartphone adoption has been slower than in other markets, and instead the most sought-after qualities in a mobile phone have been affordability, long battery life, a flashlight/torch, and a broadcast radio receiver (Shapshak 2012). Clearly, listening practices involve larger issues of technology, access, and economics: What kind of device can you afford and what kinds of access (broadcast radio or wireless data signal) are more available, more convenient, more affordable, or, perhaps, just more normalized in the culture? In addition, the differences in how users around the globe listen to music on mobile phones remind us that new media forms are perpetually interacting with existing ones, not just replacing them. Promising cleaner sound without the interference of terrestrial radio and without the worry about finding space on the crowded broadcast spectrum, digital content delivery was hailed as a form of media democratization that would “see a rise in the diversity and creativity of radio programming,” plus increased global “perpetual access” for listeners (K. Lacey 2013, 10). Although a digital radio signal has been expensive to implement for both broadcasters and listeners, for existing terrestrial radio stations, internet streaming provided a much cheaper means for broadcasters to reach listeners. Streaming ostensibly provides the same clarity and access as digital radio and requires some technological investments for the station, but it ultimately costs little in terms of expanded staffing or programming, since most stations just replicate their live terrestrial broadcast via an internet simulcast (Bottomley 2016, 62). For listeners with computers, tablets, or smart phones, tuning into internet radio requires no additional hardware. Both terrestrial radio and live digital streaming appear inexpensive, with access to free terrestrial broadcast radio possible on even simple mobile phones and access to livestreaming having no additional fee beyond the costs for data and the device itself. In addition, unlike with proprietary streaming services such as Spotify, listeners need not register or log in: just turn on the radio or open the app and listen. Live internet streaming offers listeners additional benefits compared to terrestrial broadcasting, including convenient access to a clear signal and

48  Anna E. Nekola significantly more channels including global stations. For instance, KCMS “Spirit” 105.3 from Seattle has, at this writing, a local radio stream as well as four additional streams, including talk station KCIS AM 630 and three internet-only radio channels: SkyCountry Radio “God and Country,” Pure Music Radio “Faith Meets Rock,” and Quiet Time Radio “Soothing Instrumentals.” Similarly, listeners in the United States can tune into one of 117 local Salem Media Group terrestrial radio stations—Salem’s music station is branded The FISH®—while listeners around the world can access the same content via live webstreams on Salem’s website or the CR (Christian Radio) app. Radio aggregator apps like iHeartRadio and ChristianRadio+ allow U.S. listeners to choose from a range of terrestrial stations with internet streams as well as digital-only channels. Aggregators Tunein.com and Streema.com enable listeners to search stations by name, call sign, genre, city, or country, finding channels such as “Hymns Radio,” “Country Crossroads,” and “Bluegrass Gospel.” Importantly, these aggregator sites do not restrict (or “geo-block”) listeners based on their IP address locations, allowing global access to their internet radio channels while also offering Christian music radio from commercial and listener-supported channels across the world in a variety of vernacular languages and musical genres. Livestreaming usually shares much with terrestrial radio in its offerings, interfaces, and overall audience practices (Bottomley 2016, 10). Content is organized primarily by genre categories that are created and maintained by media companies, providing what some might find to be a limited degree of user personalization for musical choices, since listeners cannot choose to listen to a specific song at a specific time. Instead, radio and livestreaming media potentially enable a different kind of personalization based on community connection, often to very specific communities and groups. For instance, Chennai (India) Christian Radio’s stream is available to listeners around the globe, but its stated purpose is local: it “exists to reach out to the Chennai community with Christian music and programming . . . where local churches, ministries, and businesses in Chennai can have a platform to talk about and promote their programs and services.”4 In addition, noncommercial internet-only “radio” stations allow amateur broadcasters to create a sound stream without the expense of terrestrial broadcasting. Internet radio distributors such as LIVE365 enable individuals and groups, community organizations, and churches to broadcast content by providing, for a fee, everything from software, file storage, and web stats, to handling necessary royalty payments.5 For example, FuelRadio, a “Christian/positive hard music” station established in 2006 and hosted on SHOUTcast, promises its listeners music “seldom heard on the FM band” as well as new music from unsigned bands. By contrast “Christian Church Classic Radio,” an “outreach mission” of the tiny Saint Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bergenfield, New Jersey, plays “inspirational music from 1970 through today” and broadcasts via LIVE365 and a Facebook page. Livestreaming options offer relatively inexpensive and easy access for a range of

Mediating religious experience?  49 organizations or individuals wishing to broadcast their own message, giving them a literal channel for their ministry and mission. This wide variety of broadcasters, however, does not necessarily result in a wide variety of musical content, another reason why it is important to consider the economic structures within which content is produced and distributed. Although internet radio offers the potential for local organizations to broadcast local musical practices and to respond to local needs, it should interest congregational music scholars to note that, in practice, much of the Christian radio streaming in the 2010s reveals itself as fairly uniform in musical content and style, with (white) Western rock and pop styles the most common and seemingly popular across the globe. Bo kyung Blenda Im argues that the presence of these kinds of worship musics in churches in Asia participates in “re-centraliz[ing] a white hegemony in evangelical worship” (2019). The dynamic between broadcasting and the music happening in organized corporate worship is further complicated by the power of the CCLI’s Top-100 list. The privately-owned company, Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), administrates copyrights (and distributes royalty payments) to musicians who have chosen to license their work through the agency. Scholars and worship leaders alike have raised pointed questions about the CCLI’s role in “homogenizing” the sounds of worship around the globe (see, for instance, Muir 2017; Bjorlin 2019). Significantly, the musical content that has dominated Christian digital radio and on-demand streaming in the 2010s appears to mirror the continued rise of global corporatism and the dominance of Western popular music styles in the Christian music industry.

Promises of personalization: on-demand streaming platforms Increasing numbers of listeners are turning to free and paid-access ondemand digital streaming sites that sell themselves not just on easy access but on personalization of content. Data on US and UK audiences point to exponential growth in on-demand streaming services, particularly for the most sought-after audience demographics of youth and young adults.6 Pandora Internet Radio, founded in 2000, the most popular on-demand streaming service in the United States, has chosen not to extend itself in the global marketplace, cutting its Australia and New Zealand service in July  2017 (Selsick 2017). Spotify, however, launched from Sweden in 2008 and as of this writing available in the Americas, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Asia, reported fifty million subscribers and ninety million free users in 2017 (Singleton 2017). Around the globe, on-demand streaming continues to increase its share in the music market. Compared to radio and livestreaming, these celestial jukeboxes promise everything: immediate access to vast quantities of music yet with specialized and personalized channels and playlists, the power to listen to anything at any time, from anywhere. But

50  Anna E. Nekola this supposed access, freedom, and control comes with a range of visible and hidden costs. Users can generate playlists for themselves and to share with others, yet artists and record labels also control what music is released to streaming services, and complex algorithms make some music more visible than others. Furthermore, the levels of personalization promised by ondemand platforms require greater levels of interaction and attention from listeners during the listening experience, including the requirement to register personal information in exchange for the media service, raising crucial questions about commodification, privacy, and power. On-demand digital streaming services promise greater value than radio via curated listening experiences tailored to the individual listener. Most use computerized “recommendation systems” that suggest music using mathematical algorithms: “content-based” formulas use a variety of “acoustic” categories (such as tempo and major mode) to suggest songs with similar musical elements, while “collaborative filtering” formulas suggest songs based on what similar listeners have liked (Xing, Wang, and Wang 2015, 445). Pandora’s “Music Genome Project,” a computer program that identifies, organizes, and recommends music via hundreds of sonic traits (or musical “genes”) is marketed as a means to provide listeners with all the “good” music and none of the “junk.”7 On-demand platforms have different music libraries to offer listeners, based on what they have negotiated with record labels (with additional differences in which libraries are available to different payment tiers), and they also compete via featured playlists curated by celebrity tastemakers. The search for better recommendation systems that can replicate more of the human social characteristics of music sharing and taste-making, particularly the ability to balance just the right amount of novelty with safe familiarity, continues to drive software designers and the companies they work for.8 Whether they provide a diversity of music, artists, and listening options depends greatly on what is accessible on these platforms—who controls the content—and also how musicians and listeners interact with the digital interface, further personalizing their experience. For instance, Pandora’s algorithms need users to rate tunes with thumbs up or down in order to build a user’s taste profile. For some listeners user interaction is a key positive feature of on-demand streaming, allowing greater control over what they hear and when they hear it. Yet, for listeners who want to simply turn on the music and either immerse themselves in a mood or engage in background listening, such interaction, even if it is just voting a song up or down, may be too much active engagement (Stark and Weichselbaum 2013). On-demand platforms also give users the option of taking on the role of DJ, creating playlists that other listeners can access, and thus the playlists themselves become a form of social media as users interact with each other online. Some platforms even make it possible to effectively follow the intimate patterns of another person’s day via their musical choices, enabling users to feel connected to others through shared music tastes but

Mediating religious experience?  51 also similar habits and routines. Using another person’s playlist for one’s own daily routines of waking up, studying, working out, or worshiping has the added benefit of engendering feelings of emotional connection, providing virtual company even when we are alone. But although digital streaming platforms may enable new manifestations of community around listening, they also raise critical new questions about the role of musical choice in subject formation, not to mention social power relations and privacy, a point I return to in the following paragraphs. A critical-cultural media studies approach reminds us that economics are also bound up in these debates over digital music. The early hope that moving music online would enable musicians to bypass both the music industry and rights organizations, delivering their products directly to consumers, seems to be fading. Commercial on-demand streaming platforms operate as gatekeepers not just via promoted playlists and computerized recommendations but via copyright and licensing, as these sites play only music available via labels, distributors, or private music aggregators such as Tunecore or CD Baby. Although copyright offers some economic protections to creators, critics argue that copyright serves corporations more than artists as the majority of rights are controlled by the largest music industry companies (Barr 2013, 4–5).9 Higher barriers to entry for musicians can also translate into less diversity of choice for listeners (Burkart and McCourt 2006, 32). User-upload site SoundCloud (based in Germany) offers musicians direct access to audiences but, in addition to lacking brand-appeal compared to Spotify or Apple Music, it requires greater interaction and engagement from listeners, while paid reposts and “fake” listens have prompted users’ ire (Deahl and Newton 2017). Digital music may improve convenience and promise a personalized experience but, as an impermanent and intangible form of media, it may also bring hidden economic and social costs. Smartphone ownership rates in the United States in 2016 were close to 80% with significant growth rates in lowincome and elderly populations, yet broadband internet access varied widely depending on race, income, region/location, and education level (Burger 2017). If they are not connected to WiFi, digital streaming users often pay for data service as well as for their expensive playback devices—streaming music for eight hours from the high-quality option on an on-demand app uses about 1 GB of data, effectively burning through some data plans’ onemonth cap in a single day (Aguilar 2014). Software updates and changes to the hardware of ports and cables mean that many playback devices, such as iPods, are obsolescent. And while on-demand platforms might collect up to $240 in a year from a customer (the 2017 subscription rate in the United States for Tidal’s Hi Res Audio service is $20 per month), once a customer quits the service or a platform closes, listeners usually lose their music—they have traded “ownership” for licensed “access” (Morris 2015, 175; see also Barr 2013). Burkart and McCourt argue that “the purpose of this political economy of the Celestial Jukebox is to encourage more consumption, faster

52  Anna E. Nekola production cycles by artists. . . . You use it once and throw it away” (134). Although millions of users have clearly found streaming to be a convenient way to consume music, without ownership rights or the tangible object of a record, cassette, or CD, listeners may have less freedom to remake and recirculate musical texts. As with embedded restrictions (DRM, or digital rights management) that prevent digital music files from being copied, the streaming technology and licensing agreements of digital music platforms prohibit listeners from keeping a copy of the music to make further uses of—including “fair use/fair dealing” applications such as non-commercial transformative works.10 Rodman and Vanderdonkt argue that these restrictions effectively turn culture into “a privately owned, c­ommerce-driven phenomenon, rather than something ordinary, ubiquitous, and shared in common,” and do great damage to the social and affective fabric of culture (2006, 259–60). Indeed, this shift toward disposable-yet-restricted music comes from the fact that most on-demand music platforms are not really in the business of music or even social media: for businesses like Pandora and Spotify, the most valuable commodity is customer data (Morris 2016, 180).11 Indeed, when Liberty Media invested in Pandora in 2017, the company’s primary interest was not in how Pandora curated a personalized musical experience, nor how it responded to “consumer demand for innovation” (Helmore 2017), nor what specific content it could provide (Ingraham 2017). Instead, executives at Liberty “made it clear that they admire Pandora’s core advertising business but have little interest in the rest” (Sisaro 2017). As Morris explained two years before the Liberty–Pandora deal, music is a means to “draw traffic” to a site and it “ceases to drive the conditions, interfaces, and features of the service” (Morris 184). In other words, although on-demand music platforms appear to be in the business of music, their appeal to investors actually has little to do with music. For scholars studying music in the digital age, the case of Pandora (like the 2018 furor over Facebook’s consumer data-sharing practices)12 indicates that focusing primarily on the music of “music services” risks missing what is really at financial stake: selling advertising and trading in consumer information. As Eric Drott argues, digital music platforms may be doing more than just personalizing our listening experiences; they may be collecting information on our habits and moods in order to “track who we are, how we feel, and what we do outside this digital enclosure” (Drott 2018, 256). If, as Marsh and Vaughn say, we are our playlists—if our music is a powerful and intimate means for ordering our actions and managing our identities—we need to be concerned about how these playlists are increasingly attractive to for-profit corporations as ways not only to track our past actions but to predict our future behaviors, not only for what we might buy but for how we might act or be persuaded to vote (Drott 2018, 261). Thus the hidden cost of personalization may be our privacy and—given policy trends against net neutrality, toward greater corporate consolidation,

Mediating religious experience?  53 and toward copyright maximalism—the loss of free and open cultural and democratic online spaces outside of corporate influence and surveillance. And so we return to some of the opening questions of this chapter. We usually assume that new technology makes things better. But better in what way? For whom? Are we willing to trade our (and our contacts’) personal data in order to get more better musical experiences? If we investigate digital music platforms as multidirectional media (rather than one-way broadcasters of music), operating in a complicated political economy, what are the ethical questions we must wrestle with? Are these power dynamics and ethical questions around secular on-demand streaming platforms important to consider for religious musicking? In the last section of this chapter, I will apply these questions to the case of explicitly Christian streaming music services.

Investigating Christian music media within dynamic and co-constitutive systems of power Digital music platforms appear on the surface to empower the listener, delivering both greater access and personalization. Digital media have enabled listeners to become broadcasters, curators, and tastemakers allowing more people, particularly amateurs, to create everything from a single playlist on Spotify to an entire internet radio station via LIVE365. As we have seen, however, such affordances bring with them a range of economic, legal, political, and cultural concerns. The remaining question for critical-cultural scholars of Christian music is: what is the position of Christian artists within these industrial arrangements and what alternatives, if any, can we point to as an ethical way forward for Christian musical practices around streaming media? There are Christian-identified livestreaming and on-demand music streaming sites and Christian-themed niches within secular platforms. For example, Spotify and Deezer (a secular platform that originated in France) both offer a large selection of Christian music and “expert” and usergenerated playlists of worship music, including Christian music for worship, workouts, commuting, dance parties, and even for sleeping. Deezer’s Hillsong and Chris Tomlin channels are among the Christian music channels with the most fans; Spotify’s “Spread the Gospel,” playing contemporary Black gospel and praise music, and “Sucessos Gospel,” playing Brazilian Christian music in a Western soft rock and pop style, also draw thousands of followers. However, these platforms require Christian musicians, like their secular counterparts, to participate to some degree in the commercial music industry, favoring major labels and requiring music to be distributed through one of their partnering organizations. This gatekeeping has enabled corporate control over music to persist, not just disempowering musicians but also restricting listeners’ choices; the result is that most Christian digital

54  Anna E. Nekola platforms around the globe in 2017, both livestreamed and on-demand, offer fairly homogenous playlists of commercial Anglophone Christian pop music, playing the same top hits and the same roster of artists. For example, the top Spotify Christian music channels—those with over half a million followers including “Top Christian Hits” and “Praise & Worship Music”— mostly stream the same artists that appear on mainstream Anglophone Christian radio stations. Theoretically, digital music could enable greater democratization and decentralization of music and media, redistributing power within the musical word. But as David Hesmondhalgh points out, the “dominance of oligopolies of vertically integrated corporations, based on systems of copyright ownership and exploitation, are likely to remain intact” (Hesmondhalgh 2009). Although the celestial jukebox promised seemingly endless choice, the economics and legal structures of digital music still favor the domination of certain music around the globe, and this holds true for Christian music on these secular platforms as well. For several years, listeners in the United States had the option to subscribe to Christian-identified, paid on-demand streaming services with catalogs of only Christian music, such as VictoryOnDemand and The Overflow.13 The Overflow, whose 2015 launch made headlines in the digital media world and the Christian music world, sold itself on personalization, pledging to deliver the best music one needs to live a Christian lifestyle. Its blog touted its access to exclusive content from Christian artists ahead of other platforms (“Exclusive Christian Music”) and site users’ ability to easily find Christian genres that aren’t as readily available via Christian radio, such as hip hop, metal, and EDM (“Top 10 Reasons”). But more than access to diverse and exclusive Christian content, The Overflow sold itself as providing content of high moral quality. The site’s cycling web banner advertised “peace” and personal transformation via “His presence” and the means to participate in an overall life of worship.14 It defined itself as “100% family friendly” insofar as it promotes “music consistent with Christian Values,” obviating the need for parental filters for explicit content (“The Overflow vs Spotify”). The Overflow also claimed to benefit listeners by offering a streamlined path to maintaining their personal spiritual commitments by “remov[ing] every influence that would distract us” (“Should Christians”). Partitioning Christian music from other music was a driving force for The Overflow’s founder, Stephen Relph, who argued that much of mainstream popular music is “in blatant opposition to scripture” and thus “sinful.” Relph stated that while he believed some Christians could listen to certain kinds of secular music without damaging their “relationship to Jesus,” Relph curated The Overflow to offer an alternative option for Christians: “I simply find I don’t have time for secular music, and certainly would rather invest my time and energy in God’s kingdom” (“Should Christians”). The Overflow seemed like the perfect personalized answer for Christians who want to keep their musical world narrowly bounded, in what Relph praises as a “walled garden” free from secular distraction (“Industry Update”).15

Mediating religious experience?  55 Furthermore, Vickie Nauman, a media consultant who helped develop The Overflow, explained it as created to meet the specific needs of an underserved niche audience in a way that other on-demand platforms simply cannot: “There are certain lifestyles that require more depth of understanding about who people are” (Peoples 2015). Relph also argued for the economic necessity of The Overflow, making the bold but unsubstantiated claim that Christian music gets lost amid all the secular content on mainstream platforms, and thus “the Christian music artist’s share of revenues gets depressed,” resulting in the “long-term impact . . . that niche music markets like Christian and Gospel will have significantly less quality art developed.” Thus, The Overflow was founded also to support the overall market for Christian music by maintaining Christian music’s economic viability in an era of choice (“Industry Update”). Christian media companies and the GMA continue to paint a rosy portrait of the Christian industry, but Christian media outlets are indeed wrestling with digital music’s economic changes, as well as Christian consumers’ changing relationships with Christian media. The shift from physical album sales to digital downloads and streaming has stressed U.S. Christian and secular media retailers alike (Crosby 2008). The secular digital marketplace has itself been uneven, with digital streaming giant Spotify’s economic numbers only going into the black in late 2018, after years of continued losses (Hardy 2018; Dredge 2019). Although its largest percentage of listeners are from Europe and North America, Spotify has high expectations for its recent launches in Africa and the Middle East (Dredge 2019). In 2019, The Overflow ceased operation as an independent music streaming service. In an early draft of this chapter, I wrote: Are Christian music fans ready to pay for a narrow single Christian service or manage multiple platforms for their listening? At a time when secular on-demand music platforms are struggling to turn profits and have turned their customers’ personal data into their core business, will Christian streaming services like The Overflow be able to survive without data-mining their users or being bought out by a secular media company? Perhaps the money is really in the technology and not the music, after all. The Overflow Ministries Group now advertises their business as media technology solutions (including websites, apps, and databases) for Christian ministry and mission organizations. Those looking for Overflow curated musical content can now find Overflow playlists and podcasts housed on Spotify. The answer to the above questions about the viability of a separate Christian music streaming service is “no.” Such issues—cultural freedom, artistic diversity, data-harvesting, etc.— raise ethical questions that become (or ought to become) particularly acute for Christian music, even as these issues reveal the inadequacy of scholarly

56  Anna E. Nekola approaches to Christian music that focus solely on musical texts or congregational practices. To what extent can music that seeks to espouse and propagate “Christian values” ethically participate in current technological and economic systems of digital musical distribution and consumption? Clearly there is much yet to explore in the realm of on-demand music streaming, worship practice, and Christian community. A  few key questions that should drive future analysis include: To what degree is the tension over consuming exclusively Christian content also one of personal spiritual autonomy and resistance to secular power structures? In other words, how has the unique blending of American democratic ideology with free-market thought translated in Christian music listeners’ minds into the belief that consumer freedom equals personal freedom? Is Christian music just a lifestyle tool? Questions of access are relevant here, too, since the personalization of digital music streaming usually requires more financial resources than digital radio: if freedom is conceived of in economic terms, is it only the privilege of a few? And if the real commodities being sold by on-demand music platforms are the personal data of consumers (including not just our listening habits but also our political leanings), do Christian consumers need to consider a greater range of ethical, political, and privacy questions when they tune into their music?

Conclusion This chapter has sought to provide congregational music scholars with an overview of a critical-cultural media studies perspective by exploring the cultural, political, economic, and religious implications of the rise of the digital streaming music industry and its relationship with Christian musicking. Simon Frith writes that music “describes the social in the individual, and the individual in the social” (1996, 109); in that spirit, a criticalcultural perspective pushes us to look deeper at how musical practices and processes are ontological: our musical lives (and our playlists) are ongoing assemblages of our selves. And it is through these constructive processes of self, which always involve interaction with the social, that we negotiate our understandings about God—our theologies—and our understandings about the world around us. With digital streaming technology, music has become more accessible, portable, and ubiquitous in our everyday lives. As we listen, we may feel more connected to others and to God through this listening. Yet as digital music platforms seek to become increasingly personalized and tailored for individual needs, perhaps the “we” in “we are our playlists” is becoming increasingly an “I”; the affordances of digital music platforms further reinforce the individual over the collective. Furthermore, given the economics and industrial structures of on-demand as well as digital radio, the opportunities for non-corporatized, non-commercialized musical productions of a religious self are shrinking. If we are our playlists, we have increasingly fewer options for our individual and collective subject

Mediating religious experience?  57 formation outside a capitalist system and, as Christian worship practices further reinforce ideas of Christian lives as radically personal, the walls of our “walled gardens” may become higher and harder to reach across.

Notes 1 Mass media theories of “media effects,” to which a critical-cultural approach is in opposition, emphasizes the power of the text in shaping the beliefs and behaviors of relatively passive and vulnerable audiences. Yet in seeking to identify direct, coherent, and measurable “effects” of media, such approaches may dismiss subcultural or individual differences of understanding, interpretation, and use as aberrations in the data rather than as significant indicators of complexity or contradiction. Thus, these approaches are often criticized for assuming a one-way direction of meaning from source to audience, rather than a complex dynamic, oversimplifying the operations of meaning-making and contributing to moral panics over the supposedly damaging effects of certain kinds of culture (N. Lacey 2002, 145–48). Within studies of religion, Stewart Hoover critiques this “instrumental” transmission approach to media studies “where communication is thought of only in terms of its causes and consequences for known autonomous and independent actors and receivers,” arguing instead that communication is interactional (2002, 4). Similarly, within the context of music studies, Nicholas Cook argues that meaning-making is a dynamic process; he contrasts “meaning” with “effect,” saying that “what distinguishes the concepts of meaning and effect is that the former is predicated on communication, on human agency, whereas the latter is not (that is why we talk about the effects of sunlight, not its meaning)” (Cook 1994, 28). 2 Unlike digital audio files that one downloads onto a computing device or into one’s iTunes library, streamed music is data delivered via a network connection but not permanently stored or recorded onto the device (Bottomley 15). One challenge of investigating internet music is that the word “streaming” is applied broadly to encompass a variety of means of internet music listening, referring to paid or subscription on-demand streaming services, advertisingdriven on-demand streaming services, some “digital locker” services like Google Play Music, and digital radio broadcasting. Organizations like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) think instead of broad revenue streams and present their information in umbrella categories of “physical revenue,” “digital revenue,” and revenue from “performance rights.” Significantly, the IFPI and the BPI (British Phonographic Institute) do not include activity at “user upload” sites such as YouTube within their accounting of music streaming practices, making it difficult to compare its statistics against those by companies like Nielsen that do include YouTube. In this connection, the IFPI takes a hard stance against “piracy,” although it is careful not to use this term and instead claims to be creating a healthy music industry: “Success requires resolution of the market distortion known as the ‘value gap’—the growing mismatch between the value that user upload services, such as YouTube, extract from music and the revenue returned to those who create and invest in music.” In 2016 the IFPI made over three hundred million requests to Google to “delist” websites, including many streaming digital locker sites, that, they asserted, contained “infringing content,” essentially making these sites unfindable by search engines. 3 The GMA claims that Christian/gospel music makes up 6.6% of U.S. music sales, while the 2014 Nielsen report puts that share at a significantly lower 3.1%. This disparity can potentially be explained by growth in the Christian/gospel music

58  Anna E. Nekola market or by statistical margins of error. Yet, there is reason to take these talking points from the GMA with a grain of salt, especially when a popular and widely publicized bullet point from the 2015 report is the rather questionable claim that (even with only a 6.6% share of the U.S. music market) a whopping “68 percent of Americans listened to Christian music in the past month.” Unfortunately, the full GMA report, presumably containing more methodological information, is available only with a paid membership to the GMA. The report also claims that Christian/gospel music “generally lags 2–3  years behind mainstream trends,” particularly the listener shift from physical to digital formats (Williams 2015; “GMA Presents”). 4 Although listeners to Chennai Christian Radio are likely to hear Newsboys, Matt Redman, and Chris Tomlin in heavy rotation on the station, the station writes that “we will also play local English music as long as it fits CCR standards.” “Why Does CCR Exist?” http://chennaichristianradio.com/sponsor.php 5 For an overview of how different countries have different royalty rates for broadcast, and for an explanation of how 2016 changes to royalty rates for webcasters have made it more challenging for small organizations to create their own internet radio streams, listen to Episode 93 “The Return of Live365 Boosts Indie Internet Radio” of the Radio Survivor podcast (dated May 31, 2017) at www. radiosurvivor.com. 6 Nielsen reports that while album sales (digital and physical) are down in the United States, on-demand music streams increased by over 50% between 2013 and 2014 (“2014 Nielsen U.S. Music Report”). The Recording Industry Association of America states that in 2017 digital streaming revenue accounted for 62% of the retail music marketplace in the United States (Friedlander 2017). According to the “Music & Millenials” study by Music Biz and LOOP, the general population listens to terrestrial radio 35% of the time, giving it a slim lead over other listening formats. However, only 12% of fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds listen via terrestrial broadcast (“Music Biz/LOOP study”). In the UK, streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer, and Tidal have grown substantially, accounting for over 50% of all recorded music consumption (“BPI Official”; “UK Spending”). 7 The origin of this phrase is difficult to trace further than Pandora’s Wikipedia entry. However, as many websites quote this Wikipedia entry to describe Pandora, the phrase seems to be taking on a life of its own, becoming a powerful discourse through repetition even if it was not founder Tim Westergren’s own words or sentiment. 8 Behind every algorithm and computerized recommendation system are very human analysts who build the systems and control the data (Bottomley 2016, 298–99). Furthermore, the power of music-industry marketing to guide and shape listeners’ inputs into those algorithms should not be discounted. See also Seaver 2017. 9 Individual artists and small independent labels are rarely in a position to sue successfully for copyright infringement, making IP protections meaningless to many of those working outside the corporate-label system; meanwhile, many independent artists have built thriving careers without depending on traditional rights models. In contrast, the EU Copyright Directive (full name: “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market”), under debate in 2018, illustrates well the complicated questions of who benefits from copyright. Article 13 of the Directive, if passed, would require all online platforms to monitor and take down infringing content or to obtain proper licenses. On its face, this would appear to be a positive move, set to protect rights holders. The concerns about Article 13, however, range from restrictions on speech and creativity, to increased surveillance, to the further consolidation of corporate power and profit, with artists

Mediating religious experience?  59 seeing little or no benefit. For instance, YouTube’s Content ID system—an example of the kind of content-monitoring system that Article 13 would require— took eleven years to create, indicating the ways that creating and deploying these systems demand heavy investment that smaller companies and entities may not be able to afford (Collins 2018).   For more general critiques of copyright as benefiting corporations over individual musicians, see Fiona Macmillan, “Copyright and Corporate Power,” in Copyright in the Cultural Industries, ed. Ruth Towse (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), 99–118. 10 On SoundCloud and other platforms, non-infringing remixes and mashups can trigger copyright-infringement software and automatic deletion, and the posters of such content are subject to removal from the platform. 11 Terms of service usually permit the site to collect and sell users’ personal information, as well as their listening habits and tastes (and sometimes the data and tastes of their friends and contacts). 12 Facebook’s data sharing practices, particularly regarding the British political consulting and data firm Cambridge Analytica, came under public scrutiny in 2018, prompting a US Congressional hearing, record fines in the UK, and potential lawsuits from other nations. For more see Maya Kosoff, “ ‘Cambridge Analytica is Just the Tip of the Iceberg’: Why the Privacy Crisis is Bigger than Facebook,” Vanity Fair, April 16, 2018 (web). 13 Music’s “Christian” status can come from a range of identifiers, including the content of the lyrics, an artist’s identity or affiliation, production and distribution via a self-identified Christian media industry, and fans’ categorization of an artist (Ingalls, Mall, and Nekola 2013). Also, although there is a range of Christian-music-only apps available around the globe in 2018, these provide digital radio streaming and are not on-demand platforms. 14 The Overflow’s daily “song devotional” email used a popular Christian commercial song as a starting place for engaging scripture and prompting prayer and included a link for the reader to hear the song through the app. For more on the marketing of Christian lifestyles via music advertising, see Nekola 2013. 15 Further complicating The Overflow’s personalization/curation model, in practice many U.S. Christian adults actively reject isolation from secular media, even while they argue that Christians, particularly children, require protection from secularism’s threats (Hoover and Coats 2015, 75–84).

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60  Anna E. Nekola Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Boone, Will. 2015 “We Can’t Go Back: Liturgies of Worship and Consumer Culture at One African American Church.” In The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, edited by Monique M. Ingalls and Amos Yong, 247–61. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bottomley, Andrew J. 2016. “Internet Radio: A History of a Medium in Transition.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. “BPI Official UK Recorded Music Market Report for 2016.” www.bpi.co.uk/home/ bpi-official-uk-recorded-music-market-report-for-2016.aspx. Burger, Andrew. 2017 “Pew: U.S. Smartphone Ownership, Broadband Penetration Reached Record Levels in 2016.” Telecompetitor, January 13. www.telecompetitor. com/pew-u-s-smartphone-ownership-broadband-penetration-reached-recordlevels-in-2016/. Burkart, Patrick, and Tom McCourt. 2006 Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Collins, Katie. 2018 “Article 13: Europe’s Hotly Debated Revamp of Copyright Law, Explained.” Cnet, July 5, 2013. Cook, Nicholas. 1994 “Music and Meaning in the Commercials.” Popular Music 13 (1): 27–40. ———. 2003. “Music as Performance.” In The Culture Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 204–14. New York: Routledge. Cooper, Martin, and Kirsty Macaulay. 2015. “Contemporary Christian Radio in Britain: A New Genre on the National Dial.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 13 (1–2): 75–87. Crosby, Cindy. 2008 “How to Save the Christian Bookstore.” Christianity Today, April 11. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/april/18.22.html. Deahl, Dani, and Casey Newton. 2017. “How SoundCloud’s Broken Business Model Drove Artists Away.” The Verge. July 21. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Witte, Marleen. 2011. “Business of the Spirit: Ghanaian Broadcast Media and the Commercial Exploitation of Pentecostalism.” Journal of African Media Studies 3 (2): 189–204. Dredge, Stuart. 2019 “Spotify Financial Results: Revenues up by 30% as Premium Subs reach 96m.” Music Ally, February 6. Drott, Eric A. 2018. “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12 (3): 233–67. Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. “Exclusive Christian Music.” The Overflow Blog, August 4, 2016. Fenimore, James. 2012 “Boys and Their Worship Toys: Christian Worship Technology and Gender Politics.” Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 1 (1) (January). Friedlander, Joshua P. 2017. “News and Notes on 2017: Mid-Year RIAA Revenue Statistics.” www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/RIAA-Mid-Year-2017News-and-Notes.pdf.

Mediating religious experience?  61 Frith, Simon. 1996. “Music and Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 108–27. London: Sage. “Global Music Report 2017: Annual State of the Industry.” International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. https://gmr.ifpi.org/2017-overview. “GMA Presents Christian  & Gospel Music Industry Research to Association Members.” The Gospel Music Association. www.gospelmusic. org/2015-industry-overview/. Grossberg, Lawrence, Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and J. Macgregor Wise. 2006. MediaMaking: Mass Media in Popular Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hardy, Rich. 2018. “Is Spotify Too Big to Fail or is Subscription-Based Music Streaming Doomed?” New Atlas.com, March 1. Helmore, Edward. 2017. “Spotify Hopes Going Public Will Cement Streaming as Music’s Future.” The Guardian, May 27. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2009. “The Digitalisation of Music.” In Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Economy, edited by Andy C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt, 57–73. London: Routledge. Hoover, Stewart M. 2002. “Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Religion in the Media Age.” In Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media, edited by Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, 1–6. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. Religion in the Media Age. New York: Routledge. Hoover, Stewart M., and Curtis D. Coats. 2016. Does God Make the Man? Media, Religion, and the Crisis of Masculinity. New York: New York University Press, 2015. “IFPI Global Music Report 2017.” International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, April 25, 2017. www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2017. Im, Bo kyung Blenda. 2019 “Global Church?: Worship and Differential Inclusion in Transpacific Evangelicalism.” Paper Presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology Meeting Bloomington, Indiana. “Industry Update: The Overflow CEO Stephen Relph on Why Christian-Specific Streaming Services Are Needed.” Gospelmusic.org, April 9, 2015. Ingalls, Monique, Andrew Mall, and Anna Nekola. 2013. “Christian Popular Music.” In Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnody, edited by J. R. Watson and Emma Hornby. www.hymnology.co.uk/. Ingraham, Mathew. 2017. “Taylor Swift and Spotify Get Back Together: Music Catalog Comes Back to Streaming.” Fortune, June 9. “Internet Radio Trends Report 2015: The State of Internet Radio and Streaming Services.” January  2015. https://xappmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ Internet-Radio-Trends-Report-2015_january.pdf. Kosoff, Maya. 2018. “ ‘Cambridge Analytica Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg’: Why the Privacy Crisis is Bigger than Facebook.” Vanity Fair, April 16. Lacey, Kate. 2013. “Listening in the Digital Age.” In Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, edited by Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes, 9–23. New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis Group. Lacey, Nick. 2002. Media Institutions and Audiences: Key Concepts in Media Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lochte, Robert. 2007. “Contemporary Christian Radio in the United States.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 5 (2–3): 113–28.

62  Anna E. Nekola Marsh, Clive. 2014. “Preparing for Worship: How Music-Listening Outside of Congregational Life Influences Expectations Within.” Ecclesial Practices 1: 192–206. Marsh, Clive, and Vaughan S. Roberts. 2012. Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Matthews, Kayla. 2017 “How to Unlock the FM Radio Hidden on Your Smartphone.” Makeuseof.com, July 21. Morgan, David. 2008. “Introduction: Religion, Media, Culture: The Shape of the Field.” In Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 1–19. New York: Routledge. Morris, Jeremy. 2015. Selling Digital Music: Formatting Culture. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Muir, Pauline. 2017. “Sounds Mega: Musical Discourse in Black Majority Churches in London.” PhD Dissertation, University of London, London. “Music Biz/LOOP Study: Millenials Turn From Radio to Embrace Streaming.” Music Business Association, July  12, 2016. https://musicbiz.org/news/ music-bizloop-study-millennials-turn-radio-embrace-streaming/. Nekola, Anna. 2013. “ ‘I’ll Take You There’: The Promise of Transformation in the Marketing of Worship Media.” In Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience, edited by Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner, 117–36. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate. “The Overflow vs Spotify vs Pandora vs Apple Music.” The Overflow Blog. Accessed August 23, 2017. Peoples, Glenn. 2015. “David Beside Goliath: New Christian Music Streaming Service The Overflow Points to a New Strategy.” Billboard, January 5. Peters, John Durham. 2001. “Witnessing.” Media, Culture, & Society 23: 707–23. “Playlists Overtake Albums in Listenership, Says LOOP study.” Music Business Association, September  22, 2016. https://musicbiz.org/news/ playlists-overtake-albums-listenership-says-loop-study/. Porter, Mark. 2017. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. London: Routledge. “RAJAR Data Release Quarter 1, 2017.” Radio Joint Audience Research. www. rajar.co.uk/. Rodman, Gilbert B., and Cheyenne Vanderdonckt. 2006. “Music For Nothing or, I Want My MP3: The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect.” Cultural Studies 20 (2–3): 245–61. Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems.” Big Data & Society (July–December): 1–12. Selsick, Jonathan. 2017. “Pandora Media: Stuck in the Mud, Pedal to the Metal and Wheels Spinning.” SeekingAlpha.com, February 24. Shapshak, Toby. 2012. “Africa Not Just a Mobile-first Continent—It’s Mobile Only.” CNN.com, October 4. “Should Christians Listen to Secular Music?” The Overflow Blog. Accessed January 8, 2017. Singleton, Micah. 2017. “Spotify Now Has 140 Million Active Users.” The Verge, June 15. Sisaro, Ben. 2017. “Turmoil Continues at Pandora Media as Its Chief Executive Resigns.” New York Times, June 27. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Mediating religious experience?  63 Stark, Birgit, and Philipp Weichselbaum. 2013. “What Attracts Listeners to Web Radio? A Case Study From Germany.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 11 (2): 185–202. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. “Technology Trends: The Use of Mobile Devices in Africa.” Tribe Global, May 14, 2014. Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. “Top 10 Reasons to Listen to Christian Music [on The Overflow].” The Overflow Blog, January 19, 2016. “UK Spending on Recording Music Grew by 9.6% in 2017.” Music Ally, January 3, 2018. Williams, Lindsay. 2015. “16 Things We Learned at The Music Biz 2015 Gospel/ Christian Music Meetup.” The Sound Opinion: Collective Musings on Christian Music, May 14. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Chatto  & Windus. Xing, Zhe, Xinxi Wang, and Ye Wang. 2015. “Enhancing Collaborative Filtering Music Recommendation by Balancing Exploration and Exploitation.” Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2014), Taipei, Taiwan, edited by Hsin-Min Wang, Yi-Husan Yang, and Jin Ha Lee, 445–50. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8ab1/b1b8096c 41f9c77b36064e6644e42c3f76c4.pdf.

4 Ethnography in the study of congregational music Jeff Todd Titon

Introduction Ethnographic approaches do not dominate in the recently coalesced field of Christian congregational music studies (see Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013; Porter 2014) nor is ethnography appropriate for historical, theological, and certain other kinds of research. Nevertheless, ethnography is useful for students of contemporary congregational singing because it affords information and invites grounded analyses and interpretations—of local beliefs, practices, and meanings—that cannot be obtained as reliably, or at all, by any other means. A student of Methodist hymnody, for example, would not need ethnographic methods to describe and analyze the musical structures of the songs appearing in The United Methodist Hymnal (United Methodist Publishing House 1989), nor would ethnography be helpful to the scholar performing a content analysis on their lyrics or the history of their composition. But the scholar interested in what these hymns sound like in ecclesiastical performance, how and why they are sung, what they mean, and how they affect the singers would find ethnographic methods invaluable (Titon 2006). Briefly, ethnography is the name sociocultural anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists give to the systematic description of the culture, or some aspect of the culture, of a social group.1 The unit of study, the social group, may be as small as a family or as large as a nation. A religious congregation is one example of a social group. Culture is the name given to that part of a social group’s way of life that is learned and transmitted from one person, and one generation, to the next. Culture, conceived thus, is carried by individuals. It is distinguished from what is inherited biologically in the genome; culture is the product of nurture, rather than nature. Culture is what makes one social group of human beings think and do things differently from another social group. But culture is not the same as behavior; rather, it is the learned component of what causes behavior. It can be thought of as a combination of ideas with principles or rules for behavior in given social situations and settings. Ethnography is produced by field research or fieldwork.2 An ethnographer must visit a social scene (the field site) in person to witness what is

Ethnography in the study of music  65 being said (or sung) and done.3 Usually, but not always, the ethnographer is not a member of the local group under study. A single visit is insufficient; traditionally, ethnographers spent a year or more in or near the community under study in order to observe the full seasonal round of life. Fieldwork and hence ethnography is possible therefore only with contemporary social groups and then only with those that grant access to the ethnographer.4 Ethnographers participate in events they document to an extent ranging from full participation to none. An ethnographer studying congregational singing might find it helpful to sing along with the congregation, in those situations where not singing might appear to the congregation more awkward than participating. Ethnographers observe behavior and document it, then try to understand it as the members of the social group they observe understand it. This means describing and understanding the group’s ideas and behavior on its own terms before coming to any interpretative conclusions that might not be available to the social group or that differ from the way the members of the social group understand it. It also means attempting to translate native terms into terms that the researcher or readers of the ethnography understand.5 This is congruent with the phenomenological approach to religion advocated by the Dutch philosopher of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw. Van der Leeuw suggested that the observer adopt Husserl’s epoché so as to suspend or “bracket” personal beliefs about the sacred so as to describe a religion in a way that is consistent and empathetic with how their adherents understand it (Van der Leeuw 1938). Ethnography requires a variety of methods. These include observation, conversation, interviews, and the means to preserve these for later study and reexamination: audio documentation and visual documentation with still pictures and video. A diary or field journal containing detailed notes to oneself, made as soon as possible after events occur, is essential (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). Observation, conversation, and interviews lead to taxonomic classifications of culture in terms of native categories and descriptions of the principles upon which it is organized (Spradley, McCurdy, and Shandley 2005). Ethnographic inquiry usually reveals that members of a social group do not always agree on what they do, how they do it, why, what it means to them, and how it feels. Conflicting narratives about the group’s origins, history, and purposes may emerge. Sometimes ethnographic inquiry reveals divisions that affect the functioning of the social group (Peacock and Tyson 1989). It is important for an ethnographer to ascertain and describe the range of variation, along with the majority consensus. Congregational singing is an aspect of culture; it is learned and transmitted from one person and generation to the next. To accomplish an ethnography of congregational singing, the field researcher would first pick out the field site (usually a single congregation, but occasionally for comparative purposes, two or more), then observe the singing, document it (for study

66  Jeff Todd Titon and reexamination), and at length describe it, using native terminology. Ethnography today goes beyond description and drives toward the meanings of the cultural activities as the subjects of the ethnography experience them. Ethnography is not only about “what do they do” and “how do they do it” but also “why do they do it,” “what does it mean to them,” and “how do they feel when doing it.” In answering “what do they do?” in congregational singing, ethnographers often include much that historical musicologists and other students of religious music study, such as the different occasions for singing, repertoires, musical analyses, the organization of singing groups, the place of music in the praxis of the religious group, and so on, all in relation to belief and doctrine. However, where a historian would direct attention to hymnals as a whole in order to analyze repertoire, an ethnographer on account of observation would first divide repertoire into active repertoire (those songs that actually are sung) and passive (those that are in the song books but are not sung). Then the ethnographer would concentrate on the active repertoire. An ethnographer also observes and describes social behavior involved in congregational singing. Does the congregation sit or stand? Do they have a song leader? Are there song books? If so, are they used? (Some churches have them but do not often use them.) How does the leader lead? How did the singer learn to lead? Does everyone sing? Do the singers move their bodies in time to the music? Does anyone shout? Dance? Do women play the same roles as men or different? What about children? Elders? Do men and women segregate themselves by gender, do they sit according to family, do officers of the religious organization place themselves differently? How are they dressed, and are there obvious differences in social class? Are there racial markers within the group? Some of these may seem like obvious or even trivial questions, but the answers begin to distinguish one religious culture’s practice from another. What one observes in a Primitive Baptist congregation in North Carolina would of course be different from what one observes in a Protestant congregation in Tanzania. Some congregations accompany singing with musical instruments, others do not. The kind of musical accompaniment differs significantly, from piano or organ, to string ensembles with tambourines and small orchestras, not to mention other instrumental combinations. Who plays the music? Members of the congregation? Others? Are they professionals or amateurs? How have they learned? Do they rehearse? Are they paid? To describe social behavior in its full context, an ethnographer would also want to describe the interior of the church or other space of worship or celebration, the social organization of the people in that space, the times and places for music within the order of worship, and so on. On what occasions is singing observed, and when are people silent? Readers may have concluded, by this time, that an almost infinite number of questions may be asked in order to produce a description of “what do they do” and “how do they do it?” Ethnographers must draw the line

Ethnography in the study of music  67 somewhere. An ethnography of congregational singing may not provide much information about praying. Or it may: among some congregations, prayers are sung (Collins 1988).6 Readers may also be coming to realize that it can be advantageous, in formulating questions about “what do they do,” if the ethnographer is unfamiliar with the social group and its beliefs and practices. Too much familiarity leads an ethnographer to take important things for granted and therefore omit them in any description. What, for instance, defines a “congregation” and who has the authority to define it? Is the congregation everyone who is gathered, or does it consist of only people who are official members of the religious group? If a family sings gospel hymns on the porch after supper on a hot summer’s day, do they think of themselves as a congregation? What are the boundaries of a song event? Some song leaders introduce songs; some talk about the meaning of a song before or afterwards. Are these conversations part of the song event? What do the members of the congregation usually call the songs they sing: songs? Hymns? Something else? These are important kinds of questions to ask, but has it occurred yet to the reader to ask them? If not, it may be on account of the reader’s familiarity with congregational singing. On the other hand, ethnographers completely unfamiliar with the scene would scarcely know what they were observing and would have to spend a great deal of time learning what was going on. Someone new to the sport of curling, for example, would upon observing it be very puzzled—and yet in the long run this could be an ethnographic advantage, because the description would take nothing for granted. To answer “why do they do it” from the native point of view requires, first, paying close attention to what they say about congregational singing. Some remarks may be given during the song event itself, such as remarks of encouragement or directions that will make the singing more effective. These are in-group cues that help answer “what do they think about it” and, once properly understood, they offer good clues. For that reason, full documentation of song events is necessary. But most information about “why do they do it” is learned in conversation or ethnographic interviews of congregation members, church officers, and so on. Interviews offer an excellent opportunity to learn many things about beliefs and behavior, including the principles or rules of appropriate behavior and the reasons for them. One congregation may discourage demonstrative behavior; interviews could reveal that the members believe in decorum. Interviews that ask “why do you sing” or “what is the purpose of congregational singing” will yield different, but related, insights. Ethnographic interviews are an art and a science. Some people are talkative, others aren’t. Some are analytical by nature; they may already have thought about the questions the ethnographer asks. For others, interviews may be uncomfortable. Sometimes, group interviews enable the talkative, analytical ones to speak while the others can participate more quietly. Some respond best to specific questions, while others do better when encouraged

68  Jeff Todd Titon to tell about personal experiences. Often the leaders of the social group are the most helpful spokespersons, but not always. Sometimes local customs determine the possibilities for interviewing; gender may be a factor. Among certain social groups, some knowledge is restricted to members and may not be discussed with interviewers. Some members will have deeper knowledge than others; some will be more articulate about what they do know, others less so. The interviewer’s own reasons, expressed or inferred, for undertaking the ethnography often factor into people’s willingness to be interviewed. All of these concerns and more play a role in the success of ethnographic interviewing. Because ethnography attempts to describe culture from the native point of view, interviewing is the most direct way of eliciting this information. One of the most effective ways of conducting ethnographic interviews begins by eliciting the names of cultural categories and then explores the principles governing their use and what they mean to the interviewees. With congregational singing, for example, one might observe that the members of the social group call what they do “singing” and what they sing are “songs.” In an ethnographic interview, one might ask, “Are there different kinds of songs?” and get the reply that some songs are “spiritual” and others not. A next question might be, “What kinds of songs are spiritual?” This is a taxonomic question, and the answers might be terms like “hymn,” “sacred song,” “gospel song,” “praise song,” “special song,” and so on. Or one might ask instead, “What makes a spiritual song a spiritual song,” and the answers would indicate attributes of a spiritual song. Or one might ask for comparison and contrast: “What makes one song spiritual and another not?” Answers will determine the meaning of “spiritual song” as a cultural category. Taxonomic questions, attribute questions, comparison and contrast questions, and other kinds of questioning help interviewers elicit cultural categories and rules from the point of view of the social group under study (Spradley 2016). Interviews aimed at eliciting cultural categories will also help review answers to “what does it mean to them.” Meaning often follows from the way the particular attributes of cultural categories are combined to form larger wholes. If one of the attributes of “spiritual song” as a cultural category is that spiritual songs are sung by people who are inspired by spirits, then that will suggest a line of ethnographic questioning concerning what are spirits, what spiritual inspiration is, and how it works. If on the other hand spiritual songs are sung by humans who are possessed by spirits, then that will suggest a different line of questions whose answers will reveal meaning. Or if a spiritual song is one “sung under the demonstration of the Holy Spirit,” a third line of questions arises. The most reliable information about meaning usually resides with leaders and those who have been in the social group for a comparatively long time. Meanings that obtain for the social group sometimes are distinguished from those that are personal only, but in some instances personal meanings

Ethnography in the study of music  69 become models, shared among several members and come to represent the congregation as a whole. An example from the author’s research illustrates how personal meanings spread through the group through narrative. In a Baptist worship service, the song leader selected the gospel hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and led the congregation in singing it. Immediately afterward, he told them the following: [My] daddy left us five years ago tomorrow. But thank God he just moved out of this old house and went on to get a new one. Left this old world of sin and sorrow and heartaches and went on to be with the Lord. I’m looking forward for the day when I can see him again. I’ve told you before, I’ve seen him sit in a cornfield. I’m the worst grumbler I guess in the world. I complain about every little ache, every little pain that I have. And I’ve seen daddy—I’ve shucked corn on one side of the pile and him on the other—you that used to shuck corn in the field you know what I’m talking about—frost all over it and everything, I’ve seen his hands crack open, blood would run down on the corn. I never one time heard daddy say my hands is a-hurting. If it’d been me I’d have been setting there, and probably a-crying. But thank God he’s gone to a place where hands won’t crack anymore. Where labor and pain will never come. A  place of rest. My bible tells me in Hebrews, chapter 4, “There remaineth therefore a rest unto the children of God.” And that song . . . we sung, “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” that was one of daddy’s favorite songs that he always liked to sing. I’ve seen the tears run down his eyes so many of a time when he’d sing “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Thanks be to God I believe we can sing it again in glory one day. He won’t shed no tears when he sings it over there. (Sherfey 1977) This narrative is one that the congregation has heard before. In its retellings, its locus of meaning has been extended from the personal, family group to the church congregation as a larger social group. The members of the larger social group may draw many meanings from it: the ideal of stoic endurance when faced with hard work and the idea of the heavenly homecoming reunion both are embedded in the story. Some listeners may think of a father’s sacrifice for his family, identifying the narrator’s father’s bleeding hands in the cornfield with Jesus’s blood on the Cross. A narrative like this, not elicited in an interview but, rather, spoken publicly to the congregation, reveals a great deal about the song’s local meaning—meaning that could never have been obtained by analyzing the song’s lyrics from a hymnal. Narratives like this also point out the advantages of interviews where the questions are more open-ended. The author was successful in eliciting this same life story from the song leader during an interview not by asking for it specifically, but by asking him how he remembered his father—what image

70  Jeff Todd Titon came to his mind? Often, in other words, ethnographers are well served by asking very general questions also, when interviewing—questions like, “Tell me about how you became a song leader?” for example. Interviews that begin with general questions may turn into conversations, either in which information is shared or in which the ethnographer spends the time listening to one life story after another, occasionally interposing a general question after a period of silence. Life stories always will contain a great deal of unasked-for-information that may be very valuable to the ethnographer interested in meaning, for even though they may not contain as much factual truth, they always tell a lot about who the speakers think they are (Titon 1980). The relationship between personal identity, the social group, and meaning is an important aspect of the “native” point of view. “ ‘Tis better felt than told,” the gospel hymn lyric by H. R. Jeffrey, alludes to the ineffable experience of spiritual presence. Yet insofar as that experience drives toward expression—bodily sensations and movements, tears, shouts, and so on—feelings are talked about, told in that way, by witness, testimony, and other verbal means (including song). Ethnographic approaches to “how do they feel when they’re doing it” are informed by phenomenology, a line of inquiry directed to experience that is present to consciousness (Ihde 2012). Normally, this inquiry is made in the first person; that is, the subject examines his or her own experience. But the ethnographer normally inquires and reports from a third-person viewpoint, undertaking what Daniel Dennett terms heterophenomenology (Dennett 1991, 2003). The ethnographer collaborates with singers who talk with them about their first-person experiences in singing and listening, who tell ethnographers “what it is like” and “how they feel” in an effort toward understanding singing as present to consciousness. And, some of it may be ineffable. As Dennett writes: You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. And if you complain that some parts of how it seems to you are ineffable, we heterophenomenologists will grant that too. What better grounds could we have for believing that you are unable to describe something than that (1) you don’t describe it, and (2) confess that you cannot?” (Dennett 1991, 96–97) Just as sound is bodily felt through vibrations in the eardrum and elsewhere, so is consciousness; indeed, as physical phenomena, sounds vibrate bodies. Congregational singing, as a felt, bodily, vibratory phenomenon, exemplifies the melding of sound with thought, music with word. The task of the phenomenologist of sound, in the words of F. J. Smith, is to correct the mistaken dichotomy of thought and feeling “by a return to the basic

Ethnography in the study of music  71 unity of experience and expression thereof. . . . [for] the live word that we speak to one another every day is a sound word, a word that sounds in ‘musical’ cadences” (Smith 1969, 143, 139). Societies differ in the extent to which people think about, let alone speak to others about, their personal experiences and feelings; and within societies there may be further differences that fall along age, class, region, and gender lines. Many people are reluctant to speak about feelings except to close friends. Interviews that turn to conversations often provide openings to questions about “how do they feel,” because the stories told in them are by nature experiential. In cases where a social group expects that certain experiences will be accompanied by strong feelings, and especially when time is set aside for their public display, it is easier for the ethnographer to pursue that line of inquiry. Among many religious social groups, authentic experiences are accompanied by powerful feelings. When Christian congregational singing is the object of study, an interviewer might begin by asking for a description of an entire song event from a singer’s point of view rather than from an observer’s. Gradually a more experiential line of conversation might follow, with questions about which songs bring forth feelings (and if any don’t), and about what sorts of feelings—for example, “Can you tell me about a time a song brought you to tears?” Some answers may be general and vague—“I felt good”—while others may be much more specific, filled with visceral descriptions and metaphors. A question that leads to a memory of when singing a song brought out powerful feelings can help people answer thoughtfully and in some detail. ** Ethnographic research on Christian congregational music predates the coalescing of this subject into a field of study of its own early in the current century, but not by long. Cultural anthropologists did not, as a rule, research modern, developed societies until late in the twentieth century, when they began “studying up” (i.e., studying middle-class and elite social groups in the West). Until then, they concentrated attention upon indigenous (“primitive” as they were called) social groups and folk (“peasant”) and minority groups within larger societies.7 Primitive religion and its rituals, including music, were of considerable interest to early cultural anthropologists, folklorists, and comparative musicologists. (Comparative musicology combined with cultural anthropology in the 1950s to become ethnomusicology.) E. B. Tylor, the founder of modern cultural anthropology, wrote that the constant element within religions, no matter the culture, was a “belief in spiritual beings”; his generation of anthropologists regarded tribal peoples to be contemporary ancestors of civilized societies and considered animism, magic, and mythology to represent earlier evolutionary stages (Tylor 1970 [1871]; Royal College of Surgeons 1874; Durkheim 1915). Fifty years after Tylor, anthropologists preferred to define religion as the transcendent experience

72  Jeff Todd Titon of the supernatural (e.g., Lowie 1924). Bruno Nettl’s Music in Primitive Culture surveyed music and ritual (Nettl 1956), a major object of research in ethnomusicology, while in 1962 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the distinguished British cultural anthropologist whose specialty was indigenous African belief systems, gave a series of lectures on “theories of primitive religion.” In his book derived from those lectures, he wrote that the study of primitive religion is not merely of historical interest; it “may help us to reach certain conclusions about the nature of religion in general.  .  .  . To fully understand the nature of revealed religion, we have to understand the nature of so-called natural religion” (Evans-Pritchard 1965, 2). The traditional religious beliefs and practices of folk and peasant groups located within or in proximity to developed societies also attracted the ethnographic attention of cultural anthropologists (e.g., Redfield 1930) including those with a special interest in music (e.g., Waterman 1952), as well as folklorists and ethnomusicologists (Rosenberg 1970; Yoder 1974; Clements 1974; Titon 1982). Beginning about 1985, scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology published book-length, in-depth ethnographic studies of Christian singing, congregational and otherwise. Some are devoted principally to music (e.g., Lornell 1988; Allen 1991; Patterson 1995; Summit 2000; Lange 2002; Barz 2003; Smith 2004; Dargan 2006; Rommen 2007) while others embed music within the context of their larger studies of sound, voice, sacred language, and religious communities among minority populations and folk groups (e.g., Titon 2018 [1988]; Peacock and Tyson 1989; Dorgan 1989; Hinson 1999; Engelhardt 2015). Most of these ethnographies offer “thick description” (deeply layered description of surface appearance and subsurface meanings) that reflects the anthropological view that religion is a system of sacred symbols that offers a social group a view of the world, how the universe came to be, how it developed, how it is structured, patterned, and ordered; and that also provides a set of principles congruent with that worldview upon which to base their behavior. Religious belief and practice was thus an expression of a cultural text to be enacted and interpreted (Geertz 1973).8 Some have made out the Greek historian Herodotus to have been the first ethnographer, because he traveled and spoke with natives of foreign lands about their ideas and observed their behavior before writing about it. Although the word “ethnography” was known to Continental scholars during the enlightenment, as the study of the people and their customs in a particular geographical region, it is the Polish social anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, who is credited with inventing the modern ethnographic method, in his studies of South Sea Island societies in the first decade of the twentieth century.9 Notable was his fieldwork and systematic pursuit of every aspect of culture, including food, clothing, shelter, material culture, social organization and kinship, beliefs and rituals, sexual relations and family life, mythologies and cosmologies, and so forth. To learn about this required a lengthy stay, either in the native village or nearby, rather

Ethnography in the study of music  73 than a field expedition of limited duration meant to collect materials for later analysis. The native language must be learned, and that in itself took time. Relations must be established with the tribal members so that it would be possible to observe their lifeways, document them, and describe them in detail from the native points of view. Malinowski’s books about Trobriand Islanders and other indigenous groups not only presented this information in a way that showed it to be coherent and functional, but Malinowski also sought meanings in their cultures, both for themselves and for Westerners interested in exotic ways of life. He speculated on cultural evolution, from primitive to civilized; he advanced theories concerning the development of beliefs from primitive magic, to more sophisticated religion and mythology, and finally to science, along with literacy thought to be a mark of civilization (Malinowski 1948 [1923]). The ethnographic methods Malinowski invented and adapted, and the information he gathered, described, and organized systematically, have outlasted his Eurocentric theories concerning the evolution of cultures and beliefs, indicating the permanent value of careful documentation and description. Despite differences in the way it was practiced in the United States, Britain, and Europe, it was not long before in-depth fieldwork employing ethnographic methods became standard procedure for research in social and cultural anthropology, as information was gathered from indigenous and folk societies throughout the world, with some urgency as they were considered endangered. Although singular aspects of a culture may appear odd to the non-native, when considered in the full cultural context they appear functional and normal. The renowned anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote: If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as it is stressed in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture. (Bateson 1958 [1938], 1) The two world wars caused most Western anthropologists to question theories of cultural evolution and to reconsider how rational were modern, developed nations after all. Ethnographers looked again at Malinowski’s early work, where he insisted that sociocultural anthropology represent the structures and functions of a society’s culture from native viewpoints.10 Eurocentrism no longer seemed appropriate, if it ever had been. A growing relativism, coupled with the growth in the academy of comparative religious studies, led ethnographers of indigenous societies to embrace van Der Leeuw’s phenomenological approach and set aside the question of whether a set of beliefs in a transcendent supernatural was true or false in any ultimate sense, while granting that the beliefs functioned more or less well within the

74  Jeff Todd Titon social groups holding them. Ninian Smart developed this idea in the 1950s as a means toward the comparative study of mainstream world religions (Smart 1973a, 1973b). In the second half of the twentieth century, objectivity itself came into question within the social sciences. Social constructionists, historians of science, post-structuralists, and postmodernist thinkers such as Kuhn, Berger and Luckmann, Foucault, Shapin, Lyotard, Haraway, and others revealed ideological biases within Western science, concluding that scientific truths were not eternal verities, but rather were instances of knowledge production always contingent upon social conditions. The most influential cultural anthropologist writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Clifford Geertz, pointed out that ethnographers are authors and that their interpretive writings are, ultimately, “fictions in the sense that they are ‘something made’ ” although not “false, un-factual or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments” (Geertz 1973, 15). These developments led anthropologists to examine the conditions under which ethnographic knowledge gains authority and acceptance. The resulting reflexivity, or a reflexive self-consciousness, caused ethnographers to examine their own subject positions, biases, privilege, purposes, effects upon, and careers in reference to the research they were undertaking and to acknowledge and integrate these reflections into their ethnographic work, both in their relations with members of the social group under study and in their ethnographic productions (Scholte 1974; Ulin 1984; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Geertz 1988; Clifford 1988). The reflexive moment in cultural anthropology resulted in experiments with auto-ethnography—that is, the ethnographer examines the culture of a social group of which he or she is a member. Here, the ethnographer observes, documents, and describes a culture that is familiar from the inside. In addition to observing others’ behavior and speaking with them, the ethnographer may also introspect. The auto-ethnographer is of course advantaged by direct first-person access to his or her own experience. Another advantage is the potentially large amount of information that is at hand, can be known, and could be described without a need for a third-person interrogator. The auto-ethnographer is nevertheless disadvantaged in significant ways, chiefly in the subjective tendency to take one’s own observations and insights as both representative and authoritative; and moreover in failing to pursue and “translate” for outsiders important cultural terms and concepts whose place and meaning is taken for granted because it is so well known to members of the social group. An auto-ethnographer in partnership with another ethnographer, one who is not a member of the social group under study, may produce an ethnography that is richer and more reliable than one produced by either singly. During the second half of the twentieth century colonial liberation movements changed the political dynamics that enabled anthropologists to come and go and to study “others” more or less as they pleased. Indigenous and

Ethnography in the study of music  75 formerly colonized peoples asserted their rights to refuse interference from outsiders or to accept it only on their own terms. Ethnographic information, they came to learn, had been used by colonial regimes to control local populations. US anthropologists had served the nation in wartime, in efforts to understand enemy cultures and anticipate their movements or (as in Vietnam) to “win over their hearts and minds.” The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) led to the International Bill of Human Rights (1976) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) which states that they have the right to control and maintain their culture. More specifically, “Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons” and: Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains. (Articles 11 and 12) Meanwhile, in the United States and elsewhere, legal instruments were put in place to guarantee their right to privacy and the requirement that human subjects give informed consent to research, medical, ethnographic, and otherwise. Ethnographers responded to these changes in several ways. Reflexivity and cultural relativism have already been mentioned. First-person ethnographies are another. Ethnographers traditionally began by describing in the first person their fieldwork and their relationships with the people in the social groups under study, but then they would remove themselves from the scene while going on to present the people and culture under study. In the current century, however, many ethnographers remain in their ethnographic writings throughout, revealing how they came to know what they learned, and how it is contingent. Exploring this process reflexively by means of narrative foregrounds the contingency of the ethnographic enterprise and in becoming dialogical, emphasizes the interpretative possibilities inherent in ethnographic description (Tedlock 1991; Tedlock, D. and Mannheim 1995). Many anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists began, also, to assume a sense of social responsibility and to work on behalf of cultural justice. Alan Lomax’s appeal for cultural equity (1972) was an early sign of a movement that would strengthen in applied anthropology, public folklore, and applied ethnomusicology in the following decades. At the same time, as access to indigenous populations became more difficult, anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists increasingly turned attention to folk, minority, and even to privileged social groups within developed societies.

76  Jeff Todd Titon In most cases, social responsibility called for a change in the ethnographer’s role. No longer an investigative scientist, or a reflexive humanist necessarily, the ethnographer often became a partner or collaborator with co-equal subjects in order to coproduce ethnographic knowledge (Lassiter 2005). In addition, the collaborators must agree on the uses to which that knowledge would be put. Instead of chiefly serving the accumulation of “knowledge for its own sake” inside the world of museums, libraries, colleges, and universities, it could also be put to practical use to advance cultural equity and cultural rights. Under these conditions, it became possible for cultural outsiders to work together with insiders in collaborative efforts to further different, but related, goals. These collaborations characterized much research in congregational singing, also, and helped to reduce insider/outsider problems and tensions posed by ethnographic study here and elsewhere. Ethnography today is not in the business of deciding whether a particular group’s beliefs are true or false, practical or inconsequential. Ethnographers are interested in describing and understanding the values of a particular social group, but ethnographers do not themselves make value judgments about them. Finally, ethnographic methods lead to conclusions that reveal, represent, and encapsulate the coherence and complexity of native points of view. To take an instance, the author had observed that Old Regular Baptist congregational singers are able to maintain an organized heterophony when their songs do not have a pulse beat nor do they have an instrumental accompanist to cue them or a song leader to direct them. How were they able to do this, why, what did it mean, and how did they feel when singing this way? When the leader of their Association assembled a group and asked them to speak to one another in my presence about the meaning of the singing, one church elder volunteered: When we stop and think of the words that’s in these songs, then we talk about getting tuned up when we really feel the presence of God and the Holy Spirit, then the singing begins just to catch like wildfire. . . . Of course, you know, we don’t have any music[al instruments] or anything, but we believe in being tuned up with the grace of God and his Holy Spirit, and when that begins to, it makes a melody, makes a joyful noise; and I’m sure the Lord’s pleased with it because we feel good in doing it. (Back 1997) As another elder put it, “It’s a participatory way of singing. Hopefully everybody joins in and it becomes a part of me and whoever is singing. So it gives each individual the opportunity to be themselves, in the midst of the whole group singing” [Cornett 2007]. Tuned up together with the grace of God, the singers proceed in heterophonic unison, each “curving” the m ­ elody a little differently—“curving” is their word for melodic elaboration— conscious of themselves as spiritual, sounding individuals, and simultaneously

Ethnography in the study of music  77 bonded as members of their spirit-filled social group, within the felt spiritual presence of God.

Notes 1 Among the numerous introductions to ethnography, the author recommends Wolcott 2008; also Spradley, McCurdy, and Shandley 2005. Atkinson et  al. 2001 is an overview, history, and discussion of ethnography as practiced internationally. 2 Ethnographers distinguish field research (fieldwork through direct observation at the site of the activity under study) from library, archival, and museum research. Of course, ethnographers engage in both kinds of research. Barz and Cooley 2008 is the standard treatment of fieldwork in ethnomusicology, meant for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. 3 Some researchers today supplement in-person observation with virtual observation by means of the internet. Others have claimed that internet communication by email, on a listserv, etc. can establish sufficient copresence to qualify it for ethnographic research; an interview, for example, might be conducted over the internet today. The author believes that performance events such as congregational singing are best observed in person, face to face. 4 To be sure, historians interested in the culture carried by individuals and social groups in the past examine documents such as diaries, travelers’ accounts, court testimony, material culture artifacts, works of art, notes in the margins of books and manuscripts, and so forth, much as an ethnographer pores over documents generated from fieldwork in order to understand a social group in its own terms as much as possible. The difference is that historians cannot enter the past except imaginatively; they cannot converse with the individuals or examine the behavior of the social groups directly. Historians can observe the past but cannot interact with it. 5 Translating not only between different languages, but also by explaining the special meaning ordinary words acquire in native terminology, when the native term is identical with a common word in the researcher’s language. Christian terms like “assurance,” “blessing,” “saved,” and so forth have special meanings among evangelical Protestants, for example, that are outside of the understanding of researchers who are not members of these groups. 6 Sung prayers are traditional in African American Baptist congregations, for example, and also among (white) Old Regular Baptists in southeastern Kentucky. See Collins (1988). 7 Of course, they did encounter Christian music among indigenous peoples, the result of missionary activity; and they wrote occasionally about musical acculturation. But pre-European contact music and culture interested them more. Social groups in modern, Western societies were (and remain) the chief research province of sociologists, some of whom have used ethnographic methods. The majority of contemporary sociological studies of music come from its subfield, cultural studies, whose practitioners seldom undertake ethnographic fieldwork. 8 Geertz’s explication of the Javanese concept of rasa, as experience that combines feeling and meaning, was especially influential on my ethnographic research and writing (Geertz 1973, 134–38). 9 Malinowski 1922, Chapter  1, “Subject, Method, and Scope,” summarizes his view of the ethnographic method. 10 Malinowski wrote that the ethnographer’s “final goal” is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of the world” (1922, 25).

78  Jeff Todd Titon

References Allen, Ray. 1991. Singing in the Spirit: African American Sacred Quartets in New York City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Atkinson, Paul, Sara Delamont, Amanda Coffey, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland. 2001. Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage. Back, I. D. 1997. “The Meaning of Singing” (Spoken). In Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, edited by Elwood Cornett, Jeff Todd Titon, and John Wallhausser. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways CD SFW 40106. Barz, Gregory Frederick. 2003. Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania. New York: Rodopi. Barz, Gregory Frederick, and Timothy J. Cooley, eds. 2008 [1997]. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1958 [1936]. Naven. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Clements, William L. 1974. “The American Folk Church.” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, Indiana. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George L. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Willie. 1988. “Moaning and Prayer: A Musical and Contextual Analysis of Chants to Accompany Prayer in Two African-American Baptist Churches in Southeast Alabama.” PhD thesis, Music, University of California at Los Angeles. Cornett, Elwood. 2007. Interviewed by Josh Noah for Community Correspondence Corps, Appalshop Podcast. Whitesburg, KY: WMMT-FM. Dargan, William T. 2006. Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. ———. 2003. “Heterophenomenology Explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9): 19–30. Dorgan, Howard. 1989. The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: William Unwin. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Field Notes. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2015. Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. New York: Oxford University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. London: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” “Religion as a Cultural System,” and “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Clifford Geertz, 3–30, 87–125, and 126–41. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ethnography in the study of music  79 Hinson, Glenn. 1999. Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ihde, Don. 2012. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Stony Brook: State University of New York. Ingalls, Monique, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner, eds. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience. London: Routledge. Lange, Barbara Rose. 2002. Holy Brotherhood: Romani Music in a Hungarian Pentecostal Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lomax, Alan. 1972. “Appeal for Cultural Equity.” The World of Music 14 (2): 3–17. Lornell, Kip. 1988. Happy in the Service of the Lord: African American Gospel Quartets in Memphis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lowie, Robert. 1924. Primitive Religion. New York: Liveright. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge. ———. 1948 [1923]. “Magic, Science, and Religion.” Reprinted in Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, edited by Robert Redfield, 1–71. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1956. Music in Primitive Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, Beverly Bush. 1995. The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Peacock, James L., and Ruel W. Tyson. 1989. Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and Experience among the Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Porter, Mark. 2014. “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies.” Ecclesiastical Practices 1: 149–66. Redfield, Robert. 1930. Tepotzlán: A  Mexican Village. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. “Mek Some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosenberg, Bruce. 1970. The Art of the American Folk Preacher. New York: Oxford University Press. Royal College of Surgeons. 1874. Notes and Queries on Anthropology: For the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands. London: Edward Stanford. Scholte, Bob. 1974. “Toward a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 430–57. New York: Vintage Books. Sherfey, John. 1977. “Spoken During Worship Service, Fellowship Independent Baptist Church, Stanley.” Virginia. July 9, 1977. Recorded by the author. Smart, Ninian. 1973a. The Phenomenon of Religion. New York: Herder and Herder. ———. 1973b. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, F. Joseph. 1969. “Further Insights into a Phenomenology of Sound.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 136–46. Smith, Therese. 2004. “Let the Church Sing!”: Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

80  Jeff Todd Titon Spradley, James P.  2016 [1979]. The Ethnographic Interview. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Spradley, James P., David McCurdy, and Diana Shandley. 2005. The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society. 2nd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Summit, Jeffrey A. 2000. The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. New York: Oxford University Press. Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Anthropology.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1): 67–94. Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim, eds. 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1980. “The Life Story.” Journal of American Folklore 93: 276–92. ———. 1982. “Powerhouse for God. 2 12” LP records, booklet. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Reissued in 2015 as Smithsonian Folkways CD SFS 60006. ———. 2006. “ ‘Tuned Up with the Grace of God’: Music and Experience among Old Regular Baptists.” In Music in American Religious Experience, edited by Edith L. Blumhofer, Philip V. Bohlman, and Marie M. Chow, 311–34. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018 [1988]. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Tylor, Edward. 1970. Primitive Religion. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith [Reprint of chapters 11–19 of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). Ulin, Robert C. 1984. Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory. Austin: University of Texas Press. United Methodist Publishing House. 1989. The United Methodist Hymnal: Book of United Methodist Worship. Nashville, TN: United Methodist Publishing House. Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. 1938. Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, trans. J. E. Turner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Originally published in 1933 as Phänomenologie der Religion. Waterman, Richard A. 1952. African Influence on the Music of the Americas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolcott, Harry F. 2008. Ethnography: A  Way of Seeing. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Yoder, Don. 1974. “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion.” Western Folklore 33 (1): 2–15.

5 Re-sounding the history of Christian congregational music Sarah Eyerly

Introduction The study of historical repertories of Christian congregational music is built upon a foundational understanding common to the broader field of historical musicology: although past auditory frequencies are no longer extant, historians can still understand and interpret historical soundscapes and musical traditions without the auditory experience of sound. The fields of historical musicology, and more recently historical sound studies and audible history, have focused almost exclusively on evidence conveyed through writing and musical notation. There is, of course, a plethora of written evidence for past perceptions of sound, but what is missing from this type of historical scholarship is the sounds themselves—the acousmatic experience of hearing, listening, sounding, and the attendant learning that comes from physical contact with sound. In this chapter, I argue that new technologies, such as digital sound mapping and soundscape composition, in addition to older methodologies such as historical performance, can allow contemporary historians to reorient the historical study of sound and music to include an aural, tactile, spatial, physical, and vibrational practice of history. The re-sounding of past sound environments in a modern context allows sensory data and knowledge to become an important part of the research process itself. Perhaps more importantly, the “sounding” of research also allows historians to communicate in ways that are especially encouraging of participatory and place-based learning. When approaching the history of sound and music in religious communities, this type of imaginative, experiential, and place-based approach to historical research is particularly important to consider. In many historic as well as modern Christian communities and traditions, music, rituals, communal and natural soundscapes, and acoustic environments serve as sonic markers of history, place, and identity. In addition, ideas about sound often intersect with the imagined or more experiential elements of religious practice, including theology and ritual. Studying Christian musical practices and the broader soundscapes that encompass them is important to understanding concepts of social and religious identity. Religious experiences may be variously sounded

82  Sarah Eyerly through person-to-person exchanges or heard within the confines of a meeting space, worship hall, family home, or tradesman’s shop. And, these more intimate environments are also bounded by the wider soundscapes of communities or the acoustic ecologies of the natural environment, superseding and enveloping musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Study of the complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic soundscapes of religious practices can also help to define the local or lived experience of religion, as well as issues of class, race, gender, and geography. Understanding historical perceptions and ideas about sound and music is obviously an important task in studying past traditions of Christian congregational music. This is certainly not a new idea. What I am advocating for in this chapter is a different approach—the use of sound as a research process and the presentation of research on sound through the spatial interface of sound mapping. In my own research on the Pennsylvania missions of the Moravian church in the mid-eighteenth century, GIS technologies, sound mapping, soundscape composition, and historical performance have been useful as methods to convey the emphasis in Moravian theology on sound and music. In this chapter, I will discuss the digital sound mapping project, Moravian Soundscapes ( Eyerly and Sciuchetti 2020), and the potential benefits and pitfalls of sound mapping for interpreting the past history of sound and music in religious communities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.1 In the eighteenth century, the Moravian practice of Christianity was centered on the belief that sound, whether human or non-human, spanned the divide between humans and the natural environment, structured and clarified human-to-human relationships, and inhabited the spiritual space between human and divine. The singing of hymns and broader perceptions of sound were central not only to the Moravians’ missionary philosophies but also to daily Christian practice and life-ways in mission communities stretching from the Danish West Indies and Paramaribo in Dutch Suriname to British North America (Georgia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York). To capture these sounded aspects of Moravian Christianity, the Moravian Soundscapes project encompasses a wide variety of methodologies (sound studies and audible history, composition, historical performance, and mapping and spatial humanities), as well as musical and technological approaches (soundscape compositions, field recordings, and historically informed recordings of spoken texts and hymns in Delaware, Mohican, English, and German). These elements are brought together through interactive sound maps containing the GPS coordinates for locations important to the history of the Moravian missions in Pennsylvania. In undertaking this project, I  have been inspired by musicologist and Baroque cellist, Elisabeth Le Guin, to reconsider the capacity of applied musicology and historical performance to generate embodied historical knowledge through the physicality of playing an instrument or singing (Le Guin 2006). The ideas that I present in this chapter follow in this vein, but also take advantage of newer technologies beyond acoustic instruments and the human voice to encompass embodied forms of knowledge that arise

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  83 from re-sounding historic sound environments through spatial and sonic reconstruction. Soundscape composition and historical performance are two sides of the same coin: one side is aimed at reconstructing broader soundscapes, and the other side is bent toward reconstructing musical traditions. Like all modes of historical performance, sound reconstructions have limitations. They are modern experiences and can only speculatively represent historic audible phenomena. Still, for researchers interested in historic sound-ways, sound reconstructions can usefully simulate an informed and academically rigorous sense of past acoustic environments. It is also my contention that we might think more creatively about the practice of history, drawing inspiration from Native literary critic Craig Womack’s vision of interactive, imaginative historical work: History means very little until we develop a relationship with it that in this cyberage we might call “interactive” . . . I am talking about more than developing a capacity to empathize with people from our pasts. This has to do with placing ourselves inside their stories, becoming participants in history, more specifically, turning ourselves into characters in a story. History must be dreamed. It has to be authored. It must be turned into a fiction before it can ever be true. . . . This is the responsibility of any human being who desires an ethical relationship to her past. History is a vision quest, the quintessential religious experience. How else, if not through vision, can we access these experiences from the past so we may also experience them? This is how we approach the paradox we are up against. How can we ever know what experience is in its original forms, apart from mediation, interpretations, our perceptions? We cannot. Reality may exist with or without us, but whatever we can know is affected by our thoughts, no matter how spiritual the message. But we can imagine the places where experiences originate. (Womack 2008, 372–74)2 The creation of histories that are immersive and story-based are facilitated by the use of digital technologies. For scholars interested in creatively resounding historic traditions of Christian congregational music, this chapter presents a demonstration of sound mapping and provides a potential toolkit for those who wish to engage in sound reconstruction and geo-humanities research. It is my hope that this chapter and the Moravian Soundscapes project will provide inspiration for further sonic explorations of the diversity of historic sound-ways that once constituted Christian traditions both temporally and geographically.

Sound and song in Moravian life In creating the sound maps for the Moravian Soundscapes project, I began with an understanding that there was already a direct link between the religious soundscapes and worship practices of a Moravian mission community

84  Sarah Eyerly such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and its built and social environment. Founded in 1741 along the boundary between the Pennsylvania colony and Delaware lands in eastern Pennsylvania, Bethlehem was the first North American settlement to be planned and built entirely according to Moravian architectural principles.3 Larger Moravian towns all followed a predictable schema that was drafted on-site and then sent for approval from the church’s leadership in Europe. Heerendijk (The Netherlands), Herrnhaag (Germany), and Bethlehem were Moravian Anstalt [institution, establishment] communities that consisted initially of a main building, called the Gemeinhaus or Anstalthaus, around which additional buildings were grouped. Bethlehem was intended to be a central hub for missionary activities, as well as the financial and the industrial center for North America. The Bethlehem community was responsible for supporting the spiritual and economic activities of outlying missions in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, such as Pachgatgoch, Shekomeko, and Gnadenhütten. As an industrial center, Bethlehem’s residents worked at crafts and industries that turned raw goods into finished products for themselves and the nearby agricultural Moravian settlements of Nazareth, Nain, Lititz, Emmaus, Lebanon, and Hope (Peucker 2015, 21). From 1741 to 1762, Bethlehem operated as a cooperative, communal society referred to as the Economy. Under this system, individuals did not own their own land or businesses. The profit of trades and individual work was committed to a common church account (Levering 1903, 182–83).4 This social and economic system dictated the way people lived, studied, worked, worshipped, and sang, but it also served other purposes. The strict scheduling of worship and work sustained early economic growth in the new and sometimes difficult environment of the Pennsylvania colony. The Economy also helped to define the social relationships of those who lived in the Moravian Gemeine [community, congregation]. The community was divided into two groups: the missionaries’ or pilgrims’ community, called the Pilgergemeine, and the home community, called the Hausgemeine. This division of labor allowed the members of the pilgrim’s community to fulfill their missionary duties without the worry of childcare or financial support. Those tasks were fulfilled by the Hausgemeine. All members of the Economy were supplied with food, housing, an education, community support, and a place to worship. Individuals, therefore, possessed little personal property. The majority of individual needs were provided by the church (Engel 2011, 48). The Gemeine was also subdivided into communal housing groups called “choirs” which were defined by age, gender, and marital status.5 Moravians believed that differences in gender and life-stage influenced the way that each individual perceived and approached their religious faith. Children were divided into choirs for nursing babies, infants, and then into gendered choirs for five- to twelve-year-olds. At puberty, they were initiated into the sacrament of Holy Communion and transferred to the Older Boys’

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  85 and Older Girls’ choirs. At age twenty, young adults moved into the choir houses of the Single Brothers and Single Sisters until they married.6 Married adults lived within the Married Mens’ and Married Womens’ choirs. Widows and widowers shared communal quarters again with those of their gender. Members of the same choir ate, worked, worshiped, and slept in communal houses together. This living arrangement strengthened the unity of the choirs as a whole because members relied on their choirs for support rather than their biological families. Life in Bethlehem was therefore characterized by a carefully maintained social and spatial order which ascribed religious meaning to the organizing of people and the regulated construction and layout of common areas, communal residences, and industrial sites. Like other colonial settlements throughout North, Central, and South America, Bethlehem reflected the town planning practices that settlers brought with them from Europe. Often, these detailed plans for new communities were designed to provide structure and impose order on what settlers viewed as contested frontier spaces. As Geoffrey Baker has written of Spanish urban planning in Cuzco, Peru, “the physical concord of the European town plan was a spatial ideal created in the abstract, a bold attempt to construct a harmonious world from scratch” (Baker 2008, 22–23).7 Settler communities, such as Bethlehem, often imposed European spatial planning ideas with little regard for topography or previous cultural ways, controlling both lands and people by ordering them into defined spaces designed to reflect the worldview of European settlers. Moravians were no different from many other settler communities in this respect. Even among other German intentional religious communities in early Pennsylvania, such as the Hermits of the Wissahickon or the Ephrata Cloister, Moravians were not alone in employing strict social, economic, and spatial systems that dictated the way people lived, studied, worked, and worshipped. It is also important to recognize the importance of sound to European settlement and colonization efforts throughout the Americas. In European towns and cities, sound had marked and delineated conceptions of civic time and space, and so it naturally became a basic principle of the design and marking of social order in colonial areas. The soundscapes of settler places (bells, musical instruments, town criers, industrial machinery), like the spatial planning of new towns and cities, were intended to impose order on colonized territories and people (Baker 2008, 49).8 Although Moravian communities can certainly be studied in combination with theories of sound in other colonized areas of the Americas, the Moravian church was unusual for its conscious and direct emphasis upon the significance of sound in social and religious life. All community members, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, were required to sing hymns throughout the day and to improvise new hymns as a demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s action in their lives. The role of hymns in eighteenth-century Moravian life accomplished what musicologist Gary Tomlinson has termed “songwork,” which he defines as the place and efficacy of song in given societal circumstances

86  Sarah Eyerly (Tomlinson 2009, 5). Moravian hymns did cultural work. They were sung at weddings, funerals, and baptisms; they accompanied manual labor; they served as forms of greeting and celebration; they comforted the sick and dying; and, they regulated personal mental health. Hymn singing was not confined to the sacred space of a worship hall but integrated into daily life. Moravians envisioned hymns as powerful tools to integrate people into their communities and to communicate ideas that were important to Moravians more effectively both inside and outside of their communities.9 Beyond hymnody, though, Moravians were also interested in broader communal soundscapes. Church and school bells, trombone choirs, the bells of communal homes, and the daily sounds of life-ways in towns such as Bethlehem were also essential to a shared sense of time and social responsibility. Cooking, washing, brewing, milking, gardening—all of these activities created sounds that were perceived, interpreted, and acted upon. In this context, the natural sounds of thunder, wild and domestic animals, birds, streams, rivers, and wind took on meanings that were complex and important to the functions of everyday life in Bethlehem. The soundscapes of Bethlehem’s communal and industrial buildings, gardens, orchards, and fields assumed great importance in defining both internal and external social relationships.10

Re-sounding the Moravian missions In seeking to replicate the diversity of sound environments and perceptions of sound in eighteenth-century Bethlehem, the spatial frameworks provided by Geographic Information Systems software (GIS)—ArcMap and ArcGIS Online—have proved to be particularly useful.11 The process of working with these technologies, including the preparation of the sonic and spatial data, is worth discussing in detail, because the data collection and research process itself has greatly informed my own understanding of sound in historic Moravian communities. Like many large digital humanities projects, the Moravian Soundscapes project benefited from the expertise of a number of different collaborators, including geographer Mark Sciuchetti (Jacksonville State University) and electronic composer and sound technician Andy Nathan (independent scholar, Tallahassee, FL). For my collaborators and I, the initial stages of the project involved collecting the GPS (global positioning system) locations for all of the sites that existed in Bethlehem around the year 1758 and all known Moravian mission locations in Pennsylvania, in addition to other neighboring settler and Native communities.12 Since it has been over 275 years since Bethlehem was founded, we had to first establish the physical locations of many of the buildings and spaces that had been built over or destroyed since the mid-eighteenth century before we could re-create the acoustic environments and singing practices that characterized life in eighteenth-century Bethlehem. This involved two years of fieldwork to map and then spatially

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  87 reconstruct Bethlehem based upon archival documents, archaeological data, and geo-rectification of historical maps against modern satellite data. Once we had prepared detailed digital maps of eighteenth-century Bethlehem in ArcGIS, we began to conduct acoustic studies and produce field recordings in locations and buildings that were still extant, such as the eighteenth-century Gemeinhaus on Church St. in modern-day Bethlehem. We also produced a field recording of the farm bell at Burnside Plantation, a former Moravian farm that is now a museum on the outskirts of Bethlehem. We also visited various other museums in modern-day Bethlehem to examine their collections of historic tools, musical instruments, cookware, and other elements of Moravian material culture and were able to record some sound samples using these historic implements. Bethlehem’s current blacksmith, Philip Trabel, allowed us to record his work preparing horseshoes, nails, and other metal products at the forge in the re-built Blacksmith’s shop on Main St. in Bethlehem. We also obtained permission to do field recordings of hymn singing inside of several eighteenth-century worship spaces such as the Old Chapel, the Single Sisters’ House, and the Gemeinhaus.13 During the process of field recording, we collected decibel readings at approximately 5-feet intervals from the various sound sources we recorded (singers, bells, forge, etc.). Then, we processed the decibel readings through a mathematical formula designed for studies of noise pollution. The particular formula we chose was capable of taking into account sound decay over distance utilizing the various types of landscapes in Bethlehem over which sound might have traveled, including agricultural fields, coniferous and deciduous forests, grasslands, shrublands (low trees and bushes), water, and urban or built environments. Our assessment of the historical topography around Bethlehem was based upon a rasterized image of a 1758 map by the Moravian cartographer, Christian Gottlieb Reuter. Reuter had helpfully designated varying terrains by type on the map, including particular species of trees. We were able to assign terrain values based upon Reuter’s markings to individual pixels of the rasterized image to create a fairly accurate representation of Bethlehem’s terrain. The resulting “sound boundary” maps allowed us to understand what the geographic limits of Bethlehem’s soundscapes might have been, and how people might have understood the boundaries of their community by listening; see Eyerly and Sciuchetti (2020, ch. 2.2), Interactive and static maps: “Sound Boundaries of Bethlehem.”14 Since Bethlehem was built around a spatial core that included various worship spaces and communal choir houses, the sound boundary maps helped us to visualize and demonstrate that Moravians were deliberately employing sonic separation between those internal spaces and external spaces marked as “strangers’ areas” on Moravian maps. An important component of the Moravian Soundscapes project was also the representation of sounds and places that were no longer present and

88  Sarah Eyerly for which it was not possible to create field recordings. After collecting the spatial data necessary to reconstruct the built environment of Bethlehem, it was only one further step to add sound to the maps. However, it perhaps goes without saying that there were inherent challenges involved in representing acoustic environments that no longer existed.15 In the case of the sound maps created for the Moravian Soundscapes project, we turned to the work of electronic composers and sound designers for inspiration. Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “imaginary soundscapes” or “virtual or simulated soundscapes” became the framing methodology for creating the reconstructed soundscapes of Bethlehem (Truax 2012, 193, 196–97). Both Truax and Westerkamp have simulated acoustic environments through “soundscape compositions” created from digitally layered field recordings or prerecorded sound samples, creating what Truax has termed a “representation of acoustic environments” (Truax 2002, 12).16 To represent the historic soundscapes of Bethlehem, we created soundscape compositions that incorporated our own field recordings of available industrial and agricultural machinery. But, as the soundscapes of Bethlehem have changed dramatically since the eighteenth century, we also used digitally sampled environmental and historical sounds from the sound libraries of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). These sound libraries were originally recorded by BBC recording engineers for film and radio broadcasts and represent the soundscapes of various natural places and communities around the world. Of particular interest for our purposes was the BBC sound libraries’ “Industrial Sounds” collection which preserves the sounds of rare historic machines and tools such as a wooden lathe, a doublehandled wood saw, and even a butter churn. Multitrack editing of these samples into soundscape compositions facilitated the re-creation of the Moravians’ acoustic environments. Our soundscape compositions also incorporated field recordings of hymn singing that had been recorded in Bethlehem and several Mohican and German dialogues and sermons that were read and recorded by Paul Peucker and Christopher Harvey—historical researchers familiar with eighteenthcentury Mohican and German pronunciation. Finally, to complete the sound elements of the project, early music students in the historical performance program at Florida State University also assisted us in recording hymns in German, Mohican, and Delaware. The hymns were mixed into various soundscapes and also used to re-create a Mohican-Moravian Singstunde [singing meeting], a worship service based upon improvisation of hymn verses; see Eyerly and Sciuchetti (2020, ch. 3.1), Sound recordings: “Mohican-Moravian Singstunde.”17 The end result was a series of historically informed electronic compositions that provided a descriptive sense of the historic acoustic environments of eighteenth-century Bethlehem. We embedded these compositions into various GPS points in our digital maps, with the goal of creating a spatial framework for the sounded experiences of eighteenth-century Moravians.

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  89

Bethlehem in 1758 To illustrate the process of sound mapping, I’ll discuss in detail a particular interactive sound map from the Moravian Soundscapes project: “Bethlehem in 1758” (Eyerly and Sciuchetti 2020, ch. 2.1). The map follows the spatial plan of central Bethlehem and allows readers to explore different “social” soundscapes, including industrial/trade soundscapes, communal soundscapes, and the soundscapes of “strangers’” (or non-Moravian) areas. These soundscapes are represented visually on the map by color-coded GPS points: blue for the soundscapes of Moravian communal areas, purple for strangers’ areas, and red for industrial areas. Locations that do not include soundscapes are marked in green. The map also incorporates three interactive mapping layers: a modern satellite-based map of Bethlehem and two historic Moravian maps (a map of central Bethlehem by Georg Golkowsky and a larger map of the area around Bethlehem by Philipp Christian Gottlieb Reuter). The Golkowsky map is programmed to appear as the principle mapping layer. The other layers can be turned on and off to reveal the intersections of the various soundscapes with places in modern-day Bethlehem. One of the most important “communal” soundscapes for eighteenthcentury Moravians would have been the Common Area, an open lawn near the communal choir houses that was used for community gatherings and was also a main thoroughfare between the choir houses and various agricultural and industrial buildings. The Common Area was bordered on the south by the Single Brothers’ House and on the east by the Doctor’s House, a medical laboratory and apothecary, as well as the Kinderanstalt [Older Boys’ House]. The northern side of the Common Area was bounded by the farm and stable complex, called the Hof [courtyard]. These agricultural buildings contained horse stables, a barnyard, cow and pig stables, the stablehands’ house, and other agricultural buildings. Near the Hof was the site of the first building in Bethlehem, a log house called the First House and several industrial buildings, including the wheelwright, hatter, joiner, currier, nailsmith, weaver, and cooper. Adjacent to the Hof and running along the bluff above the Monocacy creek and along the western side of the Common Area were other trade buildings in the Moravians’ “industrial quarter”: the blacksmith, locksmith, potter, cabinetmaker, and turner. The Common Area was a sonically rich space, due to its central location in the middle of Bethlehem.18 Almost all of the sounds emanating from the communal housing areas and the industrial and agricultural areas of Bethlehem would have intersected in this location. When first envisioning a potential soundscape composition for the Common Area, my collaborators and I mapped all of the surrounding buildings and open spaces and created lists of sounds that would have been generated in those locations. We also took into account whether those sounds would have had enough acoustic presence to carry into the Common Area space. For instance, although the smithy was a stone building, we knew from our field experience with the

90  Sarah Eyerly re-created Blacksmith’s building in modern-day Bethlehem that the metal tools, bellows, and anvil of the smithy could be heard outside of the stone walls, and that those sounds in fact carried over a long distance. We also theorized that the whirring of the potters’ wheel and the lathes, iron molds, and finishing tools of the cabinetmaker and turner, although much quieter, nevertheless would have resonated beyond the walls of the wooden buildings that housed them. The blended soundscape of the Common Area would have also incorporated various other human and non-human sounds: swallows and house sparrows, sheep, chickens, cows, roosters; wind in the branches of the trees; the apothecary’s mortar and pestle; and the murmur of people talking, playing, working, and singing hymns. So, we chose to incorporate all of these sounds into the soundscape composition for the Common Area. In representing industrial soundscapes, we chose to re-create the sonic experience of daily work life in Bethlehem’s industrial quarter. Along the western side of the Common Area was the Monocacy creek and the Moravians’ Spring House, built by Moravian carpenters over the original spring source at the former Delaware village of Menagachsuenk. The creek and spring provided an important water source for Bethlehem’s industries and trades: the water works, oil mill, fulling mill, grist mill, tannery sheds, slaughterhouse, dye house, and brewery. Nearby, along the Lehigh River where it joined the Monocacy creek, was also a separate industrial area with a flax house, called a Brecher [building for breaking and drying flax], a soap boiling house, and the sawmill. The trades and industries practiced by Moravian men and women were important contributions to the communal economy. Within six years of Bethlehem’s founding in 1741, there were thirty-two different trades and industries operating in Bethlehem. This number would grow to sixty-two separate occupations by 1762. The industrial soundscapes of Bethlehem were important and omnipresent aspects of the community: the layered sounds of mills, smithies, carpentries, and tanneries formed a perpetual wall of sound along the creek and river, echoing up into the town during daylight, early morning, and evening hours. In creating the soundscape compositions for industrial spaces in Bethlehem, we were particularly drawn to the sounds of the grinding machinery of the grist mill and the rotating wheel of the water mill, both of which created rhythmic ostinatos of sound underlying almost all daily activities in Bethlehem. Hymn singing was also an important component of spiritually directed work in Moravian communities, and almost all trades had specific hymns that celebrated the tasks of laborers, including meal preparation in the choir house kitchens, child-care, tanning, weaving and spinning, threshing, grinding, milking, and washing clothes. The soundscape of the grist mill is therefore based upon sound samples of the historical wooden and metal machinery typical of a grinding mill, layered with an English Moravian work-hymn: “In thy five holy wounds so wide.”

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  91 We also created soundscapes that represented the more private communal areas of Bethlehem—the choir houses. To the east of the Common Area was a street named Sisters’ Lane, and this was the location of many of the communal homes and related structures: the Single Sisters’ House and Kitchen, Mädgenanstalt [Older Girls’ House, also called the Bell House], Gemeinhaus, Gemein Saal [Old Chapel], the Pregnant Womens’ or Married Womens’ House, and the Married Mens’ House. One of the more important sonic spaces in this area was a small common area in front of the Bell House, which was bounded on the eastern side by the Single Sisters’ House and on the western side by the Gemein Saal. To the south, this common area faced Sisters’ Lane, the Single Sisters’ Kitchen, and the terraced communal gardens stretching down to the Lehigh river, forming a spatially bounded soundscape representative of Moravian communal life. Within this space, house and farm birds (house sparrows, finches, and swallows) and garden insects such as bees would have blended with the low murmur of people at work or play. The singing of hymns from the Bell House or the Single Sisters’ House would have likely carried through the wooden walls and floors of the choir buildings, creating a continuous sense of sounded prayer and meditation. The choir houses also had indoor bells that rang throughout the day to signal changes in work routines and worship times and to summon residents to their meals, and three large outdoor bells on the top of the Bell House and the Gemein Saal were used to mark the quarter hours and announce community-wide events.19 The soundscape composition for the Gemeinhaus Common Area therefore incorporates all of these sounded elements, from bells and hymn singing to natural sounds such as birds and wind. We also wanted to create soundscapes that would represent the importance of musical practices in eighteenth-century Bethlehem and especially the singing of hymns as an act of prayer and worship. Throughout the day, there were various times reserved for worship and singing in each choir Saal, as well as weekly worship services in the Gemein Saal. During worship, hymns could be sung into the wooden floorboards on the second floor of the buildings, which was the typical location of the choir halls. The timber frame structures and hardwood floorboards of the communal houses and the individual worship halls of each house were especially suited to amplify the sound of the singing voice. Although the Moravians had built Bethlehem from available natural materials, they were aware of the particular acoustic properties of the communal houses. Moravians often sang into the boards of the floor while lying face down around the edges of the room. Done in a large group, this produced a particular effect of transmitting the vibrations of many voices through the wooden floorboards. The wood also amplified the sound of the singing and could transmit the vibrations throughout the entire structure and outside of its walls. This practice of singing was known as “Prostration” and was an important part of community worship.20 To represent this practice, we recorded a sung Prostration in

92  Sarah Eyerly the surviving worship hall on the second floor of the Gemeinhaus in Bethlehem. The recording of the Prostration that is presented in the sound map, “Bethlehem in 1758,” is not altered. We felt it was important to accurately represent the vibrant resonances that are inherent to the Gemeinhaus worship hall itself. In additional to the spaces near the choir houses that were reserved for Moravians who were members of the Bethlehem Gemeine, there were also separate spaces on the outer edges of the Bethlehem community for travelers and visitors [Fremde, strangers] and “friends and neighbors” [Freunde, friends]. Some Moravians lived outside of the communal choir houses but were still considered a part of the Gemeine. This included people living in settlements near Bethlehem built specifically for Native Moravians such as Nain, and Moravian settler farms such as Burnside Plantation, both of which were sited along the Monocacy creek. Settlers and members of Native communities living in the vicinity of Bethlehem also sometimes attended Moravian worship services, or visited its taverns or store, and were considered “neighbors” (Engel 2003, 100, also see 2011, ch. 2). Studying the soundscapes of the Bethlehem community also helps to elucidate the relationships between Moravians and “friends and strangers.” It is important to recognize that in the mid-eighteenth century, the ability to become a Moravian was spiritually determined by a person’s commitment to the church and not their previous background, ethnicity, or race. Moravian mission philosophies deliberately eschewed the idea that race or ethnicity was important to determining a person’s faith. Ideally, any person could become a Moravian as long as they had truly experienced the calling of the “spirit.” Even this sense of calling was expected to manifest in different culturally determined forms. This broad approach to Christian practice allowed the Moravian church to become the most successful and multiethnic Protestant missionary enterprise of the eighteenth century. In the Pennsylvania State Archives, a census of the Bethlehem Economy dated November 29, 1756, records eighty-two Native American members of the Gemeine. Some of these Native members lived within the choir houses in Bethlehem, such as Martha, Theodora, Maria, and Christina, who were members of the Single Sisters’ Choir (Martin 1873, 14–16).21 Other Native Moravians lived in Nain, a community along the Monocacy creek north of the industrial quarter and Burnside Plantation. Daily life in the community of Nain was very similar to daily life in Bethlehem. According to Moravian historian Katherine Faull: The diaries of the mission village [Nain] reveal a life that centered around the services and liturgical life of many other Gemeinen. Devotional paintings depicting Christ’s life were displayed in the chapel, festival days were marked by trombone choirs, scriptures were read, hymns were sung, lovefeasts celebrated, in Mohican, some in Delaware

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  93 and some in German. Services were conducted bilingually, sometimes tri-lingually in Mohican, Delaware and German. (Faull 2014) Although sonically and spatially distant from the core soundscapes of Bethlehem, Nain was considered to be liturgically and spiritually a part of the Bethlehem Kmeende (Mohican translation of the word Gemeine). But, Moravians did make deliberate distinctions between Native affiliates of the Gemeine and those who were “neighbors” or “strangers.” Some spaces near the Bethlehem community were reserved for Native people who were not Moravian, and those spaces were not considered to be within the boundaries of the Gemeine. This was the case with the lodgings built for traveling or visiting Native Americans: the Indian Saal, Indian Hotel [Indianer Haus], and Indian Kitchen, located near a fording place in the Monocacy creek along the Minisink Path. Although very close to Bethlehem’s industrial area on the other side of the creek, and certainly within hearing range of the communal soundscapes of Bethlehem’s core, the Indian Hotel and its subsidiary buildings were designated as “strangers’ areas” and not considered a part of the community. Native travelers could have heard the ringing of the Bell House bells and the sounds of the Industrial quarter and the more distant sounds of the choir houses, but the sounds of food preparation and the chopping of firewood for the kitchen fires in the Indian Kitchen would have blended with the soundscapes of the fields and forests across the Monocacy. The murmur of the creek, forest birds, animals, and insects likely dominated the soundscape around the Indian Hotel, enfolding it within the outer soundscapes of the Bethlehem community. European travelers were similarly accommodated at separate lodgings for “strangers,” including the Crown Inn, or the Tavern Across the Water, located at a fording place along the Lehigh river. The new King’s Roads that connected Bethlehem to Philadelphia and Easton at the Forks of the Delaware were especially important in bringing “strangers” into contact with Bethlehem. The Crown Inn and a second lodging house, the Sun Inn, constructed in 1758, all hosted travelers on the King’s Roads.22 Like the Indian Hotel, the fording places of the Lehigh lay on the edges of Bethlehem’s communal soundscapes. Although the location of the ford near the Crown Inn was close to the central part of Bethlehem near the Single Brothers’ House, the natural sounds of wind, water, marsh and river birds, dominated the soundscape of the ford, connecting travelers or passing residents with the natural boundaries of the landscape that surrounded Bethlehem. Over time, the process of mapping and re-sounding the simultaneously spatial and sounded nature of the Bethlehem Gemeine allowed my collaborators and I to understand just how rigorously the boundaries of the Gemeine were maintained by the Moravian church. Bethlehem’s elders carefully monitored relationships between Moravians and outsiders. A special “Commission of the Brethren” was constituted to oversee the presence of

94  Sarah Eyerly strangers in the town. The most basic task of the commission was to establish a spatial system that designated appropriate places for visitors, such as a “Strangers’ Store” and the inns (the Crown Inn on the Lehigh river, the Sun Inn on the northern side of Bethlehem, and the Indian Hotel on the Monocacy creek). Church elders also established ways to welcome visitors to Bethlehem without disturbing religious ceremonies or the activities of the women’s choirs in particular. Curious visitors were greeted by a Fremdendiener [Stranger-servant], an older man appointed to give tours, handle questions, and supervise unknown individuals. Strangers were allowed into communal areas or the communal choir houses for special “outreach” worship services, but the “Commission of the Brethren” also oversaw behavior within the community as a way to monitor the relationships of Moravians with outsiders. Only adult men and married women could hold positions in businesses that welcomed customers from outside of the Gemeine, such as the inns. Children and unmarried women were not permitted to work in these locations (Engel 2011, 62). The Moravians’ plan for handling strangers also included limited access to certain religious teachings that were only appropriate for members of the Gemeine. For instance, when a Swedish visitor to Bethlehem inquired about an unusual text on the front side of the Single Brothers’ House—“Vater und Mutter und lieber Mann, habt Ehr vom Jünglings Plan [Father and Mother and dear husband, be honored by the young men’s plan]”—he was told that the meaning of the inscription would be kept among “the Brethrens’ secrets” (Peucker 2015, xi–xii).23 Becoming a part of the Gemeine and gaining access to its “secrets” was an intensive process reserved only for those who had displayed significant religious commitment. Many people of various backgrounds and ethnicities applied for membership in the Bethlehem Gemeine during the mideighteenth century, either for themselves or for their children, and were turned away. Some of those denied were allowed to live nearby, such as the Horsfield family who managed the “Strangers’ Store” on the outskirts of Bethlehem, but they were not given a place in the communal system. Bethlehem’s “neighbors” or “friends” sometimes participated in special services, but they did not participate in the daily worship activities of the Gemeine. In addition, visitors to the community were generally funneled into areas outside of Bethlehem’s communal core, such as the Indian Hotel or the Crown Inn. There, “strangers” may have had a certain distant perception of the soundscape that characterized life in the Gemeine, but they were not a part of it, nor permitted to truly hear the inner soundscapes of Moravian communal life.

Moravian soundscapes In conclusion, what can we learn from re-sounding past acoustic environments? What insights does the growing field of Christian congregational

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  95 music studies stand to gain from the spatial humanities and sound mapping? And, what are some of the limitations of this type of research? In the case of the Moravian Soundscapes project, GIS technologies and sound mapping have been invaluable research methodologies. They have allowed my collaborators and I  to more accurately convey the inherent emphasis in Moravian communities on sound, and sound maps have allowed us to directly, rather than abstractly, represent the sounds of a historic religious community like Bethlehem. They have also helped us to articulate the often intangible and elusive qualities of the Moravians’ sounded religious spaces and musical traditions. This has been especially important in our attempts to represent Moravians’ spiritual understandings of sound. According to composer Isobel Anderson, sound maps are particularly useful for mapping the “in-between spaces” of culture and society—the imagined and invisible relationships that constitute human experience of sound in the past and present (Anderson 2015).24 Moravian communities existed as much in sound as they did in space. This type of spiritual understanding of sound is certainly not unique to the Moravians. But, as scholars studying religious traditions of music, we are often tasked with representing conceptions of sound and space that are imaginative, theoretical, and spiritual. In our attempts to document the sound-ways of religious communities, we often discover that ideas about sound are more important than the sounds themselves. Sound maps are just one way we might more deeply explore the sensory and imaginative aspects of religious traditions and communities, whether historic or contemporary. Of course, these deeper insights are still governed by available technologies and their often-frustrating limitations. Like many digital humanities practitioners, my collaborators and I  faced frequent software failures or incompatibilities, lack of technical help from our various institutions, and expensive equipment purchases. Grant funding helped to alleviate some of these concerns, but we are still in the process of seeking funding to complete the last phase of the project: the addition of contemporary soundscape recordings for use by historic preservation groups in the city of Bethlehem. While I originally envisioned the project as a year-long endeavor, it has now been four years since we began, and I  anticipate that the final phase will not be completed for at least one more year. In addition, committing to the continuous maintenance and updating of the Moravian Soundscapes website is necessary to ensure the future availability of the project. The project’s metadata will be archived through the Florida State University Libraries, but it is still my intention to support, maintain, and update the project to ensure its relevance and accessibility in the future. In that sense, the production of a sound map is very different from a book or article publication. In the latter case, a publisher or database aggregator assumes responsibility for the future life of the work. But, in the case of a sound map or other digital project, it is the researcher themselves who must commit to the maintenance of the work.

96  Sarah Eyerly It should also be noted that this type of digital humanities project often demands a complexity of research process, critical inquiry, and technical skill that is unlikely to manifest into an actual product such as a sound map or website without significant collaboration from other scholars or community-based researchers. Digital humanities projects often naturally generate “research communities,” and these communities might helpfully be envisioned to include new categories of academic collaborators, as well as new audiences for academic research. It is my hope that the Moravian Soundscapes project will be useful for a number of different community partners interested in the preservation and presentation of Pennsylvania history, Moravian religious history, and Native American and Indigenous history, including the Pennsylvania Historical Association, the Lenni Lenape Historical Society, and the Moravian Archives and Moravian Music Foundation. In the case of the Moravian Soundscapes project, the fact that the sound maps exist in the digital space of a website permits engagement with people who might never pick up a traditional academic article or book, hopefully encouraging new groups of people to engage with and listen to the history of the Moravian missions.

Notes 1 The Moravian Soundscapes project is a digital companion to the book Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania (Eyerly 2020). 2 See also Collingwood (1946). 3 See Atwood (2004) for a detailed history of Bethlehem and religious life in the settlement. Outlying missions were also planned using preapproved structures. See Merritt (2003) for information on the physical structures of outlying mission settlements. Also see Wessel (2000). 4 For detailed descriptions of the economy system, see Engel (2003, 99–100; 2011, 35–38, and chapter 2). 5 The term “choir” denotes the separation of individuals into groups and does not refer to a musical choir. 6 Some sources indicate that seventeen was the age necessary for entry into the Single Sisters’ and Single Brothers’ Choirs. 7 Baker describes this process as it applied to the building of new Spanish towns in the Americas. Bethlehem can certainly be viewed within that framework as it lay in the mid-eighteenth century along a newly created boundary between the Pennsylvania colony and Delaware lands. This boundary had been established by the Walking Purchase, a deceitful stripping of Delaware lands in eastern Pennsylvania by the colonial government in Philadelphia. Bethlehem itself was built on the site of a Delaware town called Menagachsuenk. For further discussion of the urban planning of settler communities in early Pennsylvania, see Ridner (2011, 326). 8 For more information of the musicology of European and colonial urban spaces, see Baker (2008); Strohm (2003); Kisby (2001); Bermúdez (2001). 9 For more information on the daily integration of hymns into Moravian life, see Eyerly (2020); Wheeler and Eyerly (2017). Although hymnody has often been overlooked as a cultural and musical form, there has been a recent resurgence

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  97 in scholarly interest in hymnody from disciplines as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, performance studies, Native American and indigenous studies, and African American studies. Interdisciplinary methods of studying hymnody featured prominently in a recent roundtable at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Early Americanists, “The Hymn in Early America: A Roundtable,” chaired by Chris Phillips (Lafayette College). The roundtable featured presentations on revival hymn and the epic function in early America, poetry and hymnody in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Samson Occom’s hymns and the articulation of Native space, and two different discussions of Moravian hymns. For recent scholarship on music in the context of early missions in the Northeast, see Bloechl (2008); Diamond (2008); Leaver (2015); Erben (2012); Goodman (2012). Christine DeLucia has argued persuasively for greater attention to the aural encounters of colonialism in DeLucia (2013). Literary scholars have looked at Samson Occom’s hymnody for what it tells us about Native authorship. See Brooks (2003). 10 Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer’s definitions of “acoustic ecology,” “acoustic environment,” and “soundscape” have been especially helpful in building a framework for study of the acoustic environments of eighteenth-century Moravian missions. Based upon Truax’s call to account for all environmental sounds within a given landscape, the sound maps that form the Moravian Soundscapes project explore the complex and interrelated patterns of sound that surrounded Moravian Christians and how these soundscapes helped to construct personal, social, environmental, and religious identity. See Truax (1996, 1999, 2001, 2015); Schafer (1980, 2004). I have also benefited from path-breaking work in the field of sound studies by Richard Leppert (1995), Mark M. Smith (2004), Bruce Smith (1999), Douglas Kahn (1999), Alain Corbin (1998; 2004), David Samuels (Samuels et al. 2010), and Steven Feld (1982; Basso and Feld 1997). 11 There are a growing number of artists and researchers using GIS technologies to inscribe meaning onto space through sound. Some important examples include the soundwalks created by Hildegard Westerkamp and Frauke Behrendt; the “Under Living Skies” project by Eric Powell that recreates the soundscapes of Saskatchewan, Canada; Isobel Anderson and Fionnuala Fagan’s collaborative project entitled,  “Stories of the City: Sailortown,” which explores the soundscapes of the old docks area of Belfast, Ireland; Janet Cardiff’s soundwalks, such as “Her Long Black Hair” and “A Large Slow River,” that combine recorded voice with  composed soundscapes in order to map a narrative onto a specific sound journey; and Jennifer Heuson’s “Soundscapes of the Black Hills,” which records various locations in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 12 Since maps are best at representing particular points in time, the sound maps that form the Moravian Soundscapes project are sited in 1758. By 1758, most of Bethlehem’s communal and industrial buildings had been completed, with the exception of the Widows’ House and the final addition to the Single Sisters’ House in 1768. 1758 is also the year best represented by archival materials (maps, diaries, artistic representations) from the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem. The soundscape compositions embedded in the sound maps are more specifically representative of a typical mid-morning in the month of May 1758. Since the maps for Moravian Soundscapes are created with ArcGIS’s “Story Maps” function, they can also be adapted to include archival documents, pictures, and other data. 13 I wish to thank Philip Trabel, and Charlene Donchez-Mowers and the staff of the Historic Bethlehem Partnership and Burnside Plantation, for their assistance with this project. 14 For the purpose of this project, we were interested in how Moravians may have heard and understood their community. So, sound recordings were assigned a

98  Sarah Eyerly general weight in the calculations with an assumed range of human hearing set at 0 dB with a lower threshold at −9 dB. 15 For an excellent discussion of the difficulties involved in researching aural history, see Mark M. Smith’s “Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts” in the edited volume Hearing History: A  Reader (2004). There are not many researchers or composers experimenting with historic sound even though acoustic ecology is a growing field. In the field of archaeoacoustics, Miriam Kolar’s project on the acoustic architecture of Chavín de Huántar, Perú uses computer modeling to understand how this three thousand-year-old ceremonial center in the Incan Andes may have been acoustically designed (Kolar 2017). In terms of soundscape compositions based upon historic sound recreation, Maile Colbert’s sound projects, Passageira em Casa and Passageira australis, explore the sounds or locations in Portugal and Australia as heard and experienced through time. Several university-based research groups have published websites dedicated to sounding historical places, including the University of Cambridge’s “Seventeenth-Century Parisian Soundscapes Project,” and the “Sound of Paris in the Eighteenth Century” project at the University of Lyon. Some cities and cultural regions have also funded similar projects, including the “Vancouver Soundscape Project,” and the “Paisajes sonoros históricos de Andalucía (c. 1200–c. 1800) [Historic soundscapes of Andalucía project (c. 1200–c. 1800)].” 16 Soundscape compositions are a style of composition pioneered at Simon Fraser University by the World Soundscape Project. Some early examples include The Vancouver Soundscape (1973) and Soundscape Vancouver (1996). Hildegard Westerkamp defines soundscape composition as electronic compositions that are created with recorded environmental sounds (Westerkamp 2002, 51). Soundscape compositions might explore structures and perspectives that mirror real-world experiences, such as listening from a fixed spatial perspective or moving through a connected series of acoustic spaces. They are also meant to convey a sense of real sound environments. In this sense, they are similar to the soundtracks of wildlife films, which are typically a combination of sounds recorded in the wild during the filming or previously, as well as sounds that must be re-created in a studio. Wildlife film soundtracks are meant to provide insight into animal behavior and to create a sense of a wild place, as well as to heighten the emotion and drama of the film. As a result, wildlife filmmakers often turn to sound designers to simulate the sounds of wild places. The result is often a soundtrack that is in its essence true to nature, yet re-created from sound samples that may not have been recorded along with the film footage itself. This process is similar to the comprehension of visual materials advocated for by photographer Dorothea Lange. For Lange, the camera was a tool to learn how to see without a camera. In this way, recordings can also be envisioned as tools to hear places we have not experienced or cannot experience without the aid of recordings. See Krause (2013, 16). Barry Truax does draw a distinction between compositions based upon “sound effects libraries” and “soundscape documentation projects” (Truax 2015, 109). The soundscape compositions in the Moravian Soundscapes project are not documentation projects, but rather are historically informed re-creations. 17 For more information on the Mohican hymn recordings that are embedded in the Moravian Soundscapes project, please see Wheeler and Eyerly (2019). 18 Interestingly, this location is still considered to be the spatial center of Bethlehem. The location of the Common Area is now the section of Main St. between the Single Brothers’ House and the Bethlehem Hotel. Main St. is the principle thoroughfare through Bethlehem’s downtown area.

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  99 19 Before these outdoor bells were placed in position, the hours were marked by a bell suspended from a large tree. The use of bells in European towns and cities provided a type of temporal architecture and communal time-keeping at a time when public clock and private clocks were rare (Corbin 2004, 191). This practice continued in many European colonial areas. For more information on the influence of bells in Europe, see Corbin (1998). 20 There are numerous references to Prostration in The Bethlehem Diary, for example: “Then, during the singing of the stanza, Lord Jesus Christ, Your death, the congregation fell to the ground and commended itself and its new members to the wounds of the Lamb and closed with the stanza, Spread out both wings, etc.” See The Bethlehem Diary (1971, I, 18–19; II, 54; and I, 49) for additional descriptions of Prostration. 21 The census did not record Native Americans who lived in the vicinity of Bethlehem or who stayed within the community but were not part of the Gemeine. From 1742 to 1746, the Native congregation lived in Friedenshütten, near Wunden Eiland. In 1746, the majority of the congregation left to build the new community of Gnadenhütten. After the massacre at Gnadenhütten and the destruction of that mission, the congregation relocated to the vicinity of Bethlehem, and Nain was constructed and occupied by the Native Gemeine from 1758 to 1763. 22 According to a survey conducted by Moravian cartographers, Nicholas Garrison and George Golkowsky on October 2, 1760, a King’s Road crossed the Lehigh River at a fording place near the Bethlehem community. Please see the GPS point called “Ford of the Lehigh” in the sound map, “Bethlehem in 1758,” to view this survey. 23 The inscription comes from hymn 2157, verse 10 in the Herrnhuter Gesangbuch, which was written by Moravian leader Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf on September 19, 1745, for the birthday of his son, Christian Renatus. 24 See also Caquard et al. (2008, 1220).

References Anderson, Isobel. 2015. “Soundmapping Beyond the Grid: Alternative Cartographies of Sound.” Journal of Sonic Studies 11 (2015). www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/234645/234646. Atwood, Craig D. 2004. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Communal Bethlehem. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Baker, Geoffrey Howard. 2008. Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco. Durham: Duke University Press. Basso, Keith H., and Steven Feld, eds. 1997. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Bermúdez, Egberto. 2001. “Urban Musical Life in the European Colonies: Examples from Spanish America, 1530–1650.” In Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, edited by Fiona Kisby, 167–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Bethlehem Diary, vols. I  and II. 1971. Translated and edited by Kenneth G. Hamilton. Bethlehem, PA: Archives of the Moravian Church. Bloechl, Olivia A. 2008. Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Joanna. 2003. “Six Hymns by Samson Occom.” Early American Literature 38 (1): 67–87.

100  Sarah Eyerly Caquard, Sébastien, Glenn Brauen, Benjamin Wright, and Paul Jasen. 2008. “Designing Sound in Cybercartography: From Structured Cinematic Narratives to Unpredictable Sound/Image Interactions.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22 (11–12): 1219–45. Collingwood, Robin George. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004. “Identity, Bells, and the Nineteenth-Century French Village.” In Hearing History: A  Reader, edited by Mark Michael Smith, 184–204. Athens: University of Georgia Press. DeLucia, Christine. 2013. “The Sound of Violence: Music of King Philip’s War and Memories of Settler Colonialism in the American Northeast. In Music and Meaning in Early America.” Special issue, Common-Place 13 (2). www.common-placearchives.org/vol-13/no-02/delucia/. Diamond, Beverley. 2008. Native American Music in Eastern North America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Engel, Katherine Carté Engel. 2003. “The Strangers’ Store: Moral Capitalism in Moravian Bethlehem, 1753–1775.” Early American Studies 1 (1): 90–126. ———. 2011. Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Erben, Patrick M. 2012. A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Eyerly, Sarah. 2020. Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eyerly, Sarah and Mark Sciuchetti. 2020. Moravian Soundscapes. https://doi. org/10.33009/moraviansoundscapes_music_fsu. Faull, Katie. 2014. “Stories of the Susquehanna: The Nain Indian House.” http:// storiesofthesusquehanna.blogs.bucknell.edu/2014/01/24/the-nain-indian-house/ (accessed October 13, 2016). Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodman, Glenda. 2012. “ ‘But They Differ from us in Sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651–75.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 69 (4): 793–822. Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kisby, Fiona, ed. 2001. Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolar, Miriam A. 2017. “Sensing Sonically at Andean Formative Chavín de Huántar, Perú.” Time and Mind 10 (1): 39–59. Krause, Bernard L. 2013. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. London: Profile Books. Leaver, Robin A. 2015. “More than Simple Psalm-Singing in English: Sacred Music in Early Colonial America.” Yale Journal of Music and Religion 1 (1): 63–80. Leppert, Richard. 1995. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Le Guin, Elisabeth. 2006. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Re-sounding the history of Christian music  101 Levering, Joseph Mortimer. 1903. A History of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741– 1892. Bethlehem, PA: Times Publishing. Martin, John Hill. 1873. Historical Sketch of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania: With Some Account of the Moravian Church. No. 218. Philadelphia: J. L. Pile. Merritt, Jane T. 2003. At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Peucker, Paul. 2015. A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ridner, Judith. 2011. “Building Urban Spaces for the Interior: Thomas Penn and the Colonization of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania.” Early American Cartographies: 306–38. Samuels, David W., Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–45. Schafer, R. Murray. 1980. The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2004. “Soundscapes and Earwitnesses.” In Hearing History: A  Reader, edited by Mark Michael Smith, 3–9. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Mark M. 2004. “Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts.” In Hearing History: A  Reader, edited by Mark Michael Smith, ix–xxii. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Strohm, Reinhard. 2003. Music in Late Medieval Bruges. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tomlinson, Gary. 2009. The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Truax, Barry. 1996. “Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition.” In A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound, edited by Katherine Norman, 49–64. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. ———. 1999. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. Burnaby, BC: Cambridge Street. ———. 2001. Acoustic Communication. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 2002. “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon Fraser University.” Organised Sound 7 (1): 5–14. ———. 2012. “Sound, Listening and Place: The Aesthetic Dilemma.” Organised Sound 17 (3): 193–201. ———. 2015. “Paradigm Shifts and Electroacoustic Music: Some Personal Reflections.” Organised Sound 20 (1): 105–10. Wessel, Carola. 2000. “ ‘We Do Not Want to Introduce Anything New’: Transplanting the Communal Life from Herrnhut to the Upper Ohio Valley.” In In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in EighteenthCentury Europe and America, edited by Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson, 246–64. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2002. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.” Organised Sound 7 (1): 51–6. Wheeler, Rachel, and Sarah Eyerly. 2017. “Songs of the Spirit: Hymnody in the Moravian Mohican Missions.” Journal of Moravian History 17 (1): 1–25.

102  Sarah Eyerly ———. 2019. “Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives.” The William and Mary Quarterly 76 (4): 649–96. Womack, Craig S. 2008. “Theorizing American Indian Experience.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, 353–410. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

6 Music Theology as the mouthpiece of science Proving it through congregational music studies Bennett Zon Introduction Daniel Chua describes music as “the Mouthpiece of Theology” in an important contribution to a collection of essays edited by Jeremy Begbie and Steve Guthrie called Resonant Witness (Chua 2011, 137–61). For Chua, writing on music is by definition an act of ventriloquism, but theology is a particularly beleaguered dummy because musicology is governed by the methodologically hostile precepts of scientific materialism—the “anti-theological discourses of the ventriloquists” (ibid., 159). Chua paints a prophetically bleak picture of science’s historical role in the spiritual deracination of music, yet he also employs a redemptive narrative for what has become increasingly known as Music Theology—a broad term for methods interpreting music as theology and theology as a methodologically legitimate musicological dialogue partner: “After all,” he opines: [M]usic is inherently relational, both internally in the way its notes are put together and externally in the way in which it is used to communicate in everyday life. A relational discourse on music would replace the gap of alienation native to monistic thought. (ibid., 160–61) Music Theology is just such a relational discourse. The disciplinary descendent of Jon Michael Spencer’s term “theomusicology” (Spencer 1991)—itself a descendent of Jaap Kunst’s “ethno-musicology” (Kunst 1950)—Music Theology sees musical objects through theological lenses where its predecessor theomusicology considers itself “musicology as a theologically informed discipline” (Spencer 1991, xi). Unlike theomusicology, moreover, Music Theology generally considers its objects of study (and objectives for that matter) to be intrinsically theological—objects like psalms, hymns, chant, gospel music, musicals, and birdsong; singing, dancing, and listening; justice, time, transcendence, beauty, goodness, and faith; prayer, preaching, worship, and liturgy; or space, digital media, migration, reconciliation, disability, and church communities. Today, Music Theology unites relational

104  Bennett Zon discourse across many music–theological interdisciplines including “musical theology,”1 the “theology of music,”2 “music and theology” (Saliers 2007), and “music as theology” (Heaney 2012; Lynch 2018), and it can be found in university modules, professional organizations3 articles, and chapters (Zon 2011a, 2011b). Maeve Heaney provides a good definition of what is meant by Music Theology in her self-deprecation over the title to Music as Theology: What Music Has to Say about the Word (2012): “Music as theology” is, I  admit, a rather pretentious title.  .  .  [but] if theology is “faith seeking understanding,” could music not also be theological? Does it not offer us, at the very least, a form of understanding our faith, and perhaps even an aid in attaining and entering into that faith? The conviction underlying this book is that it can—that music offers a form of approach to or comprehension of faith that is different to our linguistic and conceptual understanding of the same, and for that very reason is complementary to it, in theological discourse. (Heaney 2012, 1) While as theology Music Theology may not be held hostage to “materialistic ventriloquists,” as a relational discourse it still has to navigate the potentially treacherous disciplinary waters between the rock of science (musicology) and the hard place of religion (theology). For Chua, musicology has simply inherited and blindly accepted science’s putatively antitheological prejudice: “If God relates to the world,” Chua suggests, [t]hen the divorce between the natural and the supernatural that has bedevilled modernity cannot be sustained. Indeed, if God relates to the world, then knowledge itself ought to focus on the relational rather than merely the rational in search for reconciliation. Music understood in relational terms would be very different from its modern definition. (2011, 159) But there is a piece missing from Chua’s argument that this chapter aims to fill. Chua may consider music the mouthpiece of theology, but he does not consider the possibility that theology—and, as this chapter argues, Music Theology therefore—can actually ventriloquize science. Indeed, according to the many theologians discussed in the following pages, theology is the mouthpiece of science, and this chapter uses congregational music studies to prove it. Methodologically, congregational music studies is largely ethnomusicological (and therefore socio-anthropological) in disciplinary complexion,4 but its relation to theology and Music Theology has never been systematically investigated. This chapter is a first attempt, exploring congregational music studies as a branch of Music Theology and Music Theology as a branch of science. Based on the organizational structure of scientific method, broadly imagined through five sequentially related sections, I argue

Music Theology as mouthpiece  105 that, methodologically, congregational music studies is therefore theological science, or what Alister McGrath, Thomas Torrance, and others call scientific theology. I begin with the observation (1) that theology is science, and then hypothesize (2) that if theology is science then Music Theology must be science as well. An experiment (3) follows, testing whether congregational music studies is a branch of Music Theology; if so, and if Music Theology is a science, then congregational music studies must also be a science. An analysis (4) of the experiment leads me to conclude that congregational music studies is natural theology, while various findings (5) illuminate the disciplinary implications of often-subtle methodological distinctions between Music Theology and congregational music studies.

Observation: theology as science If Music Theology is the mouthpiece of science, then the science of theology—or theology as science—can be observed as an underpinning ­methodological proposition. The science of theology appears to be a relatively recent trope in literature on the history of debates between religion and science, yet its methodological substance probes the most fundamentally observable facts about nature and history of nature. Theologian and historian of science Alister McGrath calls it the science of God or scientific theology. The science of God is observed having several characteristics, first and foremost of which is a fully integrated system of ideas; for McGrath its defining feature is an entire system capable of achievements which “transcended the capacities of any one element” (2004, 11). As science Christian theology does this by not only claiming ownership of systematic methodologies which can be utilized and self-reflexively interrogated but also by applying them to our understanding of the natural world and creation. The science of theology, in other words, is not a means to an end, nor an end in itself, but a means to a beginning “with its own sense of identity, place and purpose” (ibid., 13). Theologian and philosopher of science Michael Hanby defends the existence of scientific theology by claiming that science itself often fails to recognize the metaphysical—and even theological— underpinnings of its own methodology. He claims that science deludes itself into thinking that nature can be studied objectively when the subject (a scientist) is part of its object (nature); that science, like theology, cannot study nature without tacitly defining what nature is not (i.e., God); and that because, historically, scientists believed they can study nature objectively and can practice science without God, modern scientists often lack the kind of theological literacy necessary to make sustainable claims about the relationship of science and theology (Hanby 2013, 17–21). A  good example, frequently cited, is Richard Dawkins and his emblematic book The God Delusion (2006). The combination of these factors leads to what Hanby calls an extrinsicist, or oppositional, reading of the dynamic relationship between the

106  Bennett Zon methodologies undergirding science and religion—not unlike Steven Jay Gould’s concept of “nonoverlapping magisterial” (1997, 16–22) or what Ian Barbour might categorize as “independence” (Barbour 2000, 17); in other words, science and religion operating in entirely separate, unrelated methodological domains. Conversely, advocates of scientific theology or the theology of science (researchers in congregational music studies, I will later argue) usually find themselves adopting a theory of some kind of “overlapping magisteria” instead, debunking ideas which diminish or denigrate, such as overlap, integration, dialogue, consonance, mutuality, interdisciplinarity, assimilation, and other forms of meaningful commonality. This is more than ideological posturing because it shows that scientific theologians, or theological scientists in as many words, subscribe to complexity theory to explain the relationship between religion and science that “nonoverlapping” scientists themselves eschew as unscientific. As Simon Oliver observes, the relationship between science and theology “is very complex. No longer can we assume a straightforward antagonism, but neither is a simple rapprochement appropriate” (Oliver 2017, 131). Using complexity theory, Oliver makes an astute scientific observation about the limits of scientific observation in the process; namely, that scientific observation fails in its own terms when it is methodologically predetermined to find teleologically reinforced explanations of natural phenomenon: the heart beats, for example, in order to pump blood around the body; why it beats is referred to neuroscience. According to scientific theology, efficient causal processes are not only confused for explanations; the explanations themselves inadvertently impose peculiarly unnecessary limitations on “God’s gift of ‘freedom’ to his creation” (Polkinghorne 1994, 79). That is not to suggest that scientific method should be abrogated to arrive at theological conclusions, but that, according to scientific theology, the scientific method itself is integral to God’s gift of creation.

Hypothesis: music theology as science The gift of God’s creation is, arguably, at the very root of Music Theology because music is uniquely placed to enact theological wisdom (Begbie 2000, 5) in the same way science is: Music Theology is, in fact, science. Nevertheless, as Daniel Chua so ably illustrates, Music Theology is seriously and endemically distrusted by a modern musicology born of a late nineteenth-century scientific (comparative socio-anthropological) mindset. That mindset exhibits methodological presumptions remarkably similar to those criticized by Simon Oliver for teleologically predetermining explanations of efficient causal processes—presumptions, I believe, created by artificially imposing ideological limits on the range of disciplines deemed to be scientifically acceptable. Postwar musicology described itself in 1955 as “a field of knowledge, having as its object the investigation of the art of music as a physical,

Music Theology as mouthpiece  107 psychological, aesthetic and cultural phenomenon. The musicologist is a research scholar and he aims at knowledge about music” (Davidson et al. 1955). That definition has changed very little substantively despite an explosion in the use of methodologies understandably critical of the pseudo-authority underpinning critically outmoded approaches. By 2006, it had become cliché, for example, to observe changes in methodological paradigms invoking the language of extra-musicological disciplines, including contingency, plurality, locality, difference, heterogeneity, dissemination, iterability, and semiosis (Hooper 2006, 5), yet in musicological contexts the application of those and more recent terms today simply mirrors the range of methodological determinisms in their source discipline, whatever they might be. In 1991, Joseph Kerman, father of what is called “the New Musicology,” benignly called it “grafting” (1991, 132), but grafting creates its own methodological problems. To paraphrase translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, modern musicology, I  maintain, “domesticates” the foreignness of its disciplinary translations and creates the illusion that the musicologist (the translator of disciplines) is actually disciplinarily invisible.5 To use Chua’s terminology, the musicologist ventriloquizes other disciplines. Of course, doing this creates and reinforces the illusion of egalitarian interdisciplinarity because invisibility creates a lack of disciplinary ownership or arguably dis-ownership. Venuti raises an ethical objection to domesticating translation precisely for this reason, but, as will be shown in the following pages, musicology, conversely, seems to embrace—or even excuse—the musicologist’s invisibility as a disciplinarily favorable mode of interdisciplinarity. While understandably reducing the presence of boundaries like humanities and sciences (Klein and Parncutt 2010, 133), it also comes with an epistemic paradox, however, because musicology is interdisciplinarily selective. The recently founded Journal of Interdisciplinary Musicology is indicative, inviting articles utilizing the widest possible selection of musicological disciplines and subdisciplines yet omitting one of the most incontestably important disciplines of all: theology. According to its website, “the journal accepts original submissions associated with • all subdisciplines or paradigms of musicology, including analytical, applied, comparative, cultural, empirical, ethnological, historical, popular, scientific, systematic and theoretical, and • all musically relevant disciplines, including acoustics, aesthetics, anthropology, archeology, art history and theory, biology, cognitive sciences, composition, computing, cultural studies, economics, education, engineering, ethnology, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary studies, mathematics, medicine, music theory and analysis, neurosciences, perception, performance, philosophy, physiology, popular music, prehistory, psychoacoustics, psychology, religious studies, semiotics, sociology, sport, statistics, [theology,] and therapy.”6

108  Bennett Zon The present absence—that is, the systemic disciplinary exclusion—of theology from musicology, and the creeping disciplinary invisibility of a “pure” disciplinary musicologist goes hand in hand to create a seriously disempowering methodological obstacle for the nascent field of Music Theology. So how can the (Music–Theological) subaltern speak, as it were, if it has no voice within musicology and the voice of disciplinary musicology is itself diminishing in volume? The answer is that Music Theology can speak as science—as scientific theology. Indeed, Music Theology is the mouthpiece of science. Music Theology is scientific theology because it conforms to the same systemic presuppositions inherent within scientific method. Although widely debated, the structure of scientific method is defined by the kind of variation in the “hypothetic-deductive model” represented in this chapter’s five-part sequence. Generally speaking, that model involves a series of steps from experiential observation, hypothesis and experiment to analysis and the interpretation of data (then replicating the experiment). Examples are pervasive across textbooks, the internet, and more philosophical literature.7 Scientific theologians believe they replicate this method. For them scientific theology is a fully integrated system of ideas capable of achievements which transcend the capacities of any one element, as Alistair McGrath suggests. It openly interrogates the subjective nature of its own observations, and its hypotheses can be systematically tested and replicated. David Munchin is by no means alone, therefore, when he claims that as we uncover the meaning “which lies within all acts of human understanding, so the increased consonance of scientific method over the fields of natural and theological science is revealed” (Munchin 2011, 261). Gregory Peterson says much the same thing: “theology is scientific to the extent that it shares in the same method of intellectual inquiry as other well-established sciences” (Peterson 2003, 17). Munchin and Peterson also recognize differences. Scientific method is, for example, limited by the limits of the material universe it empirically studies: “The material Universe,” Michael Heller submits, “as contemplated by theology, is richer than the Universe as seen from the scientific perspective” (Heller 1998, 42); and the limits of scientific method itself is also hotly debated within theology.8 Thus, Thomas Torrance may describe scientific theology as “a human enterprise working with revisable formulations in a manner not unlike that of an axiomatic science operating with fluid axioms” (Torrance 2001, xiv) but as the Journal of Interdisciplinary Musicology so amply proves, the human enterprise which is Music Theology is also ostracized by scientists (musicologists) for being purely theological—and that is reason enough to ostracize it from disciplinary or even subdisciplinary categories of musicology. Musicology, like the sciences it tries to imitate, bases its own critical hypothesis about Music Theology (that it is theology, not science) on a classic methodological confusion over the theological understanding of efficient causal processes and the disciplinarily embodied action it performs. The heart may beat to pump blood, but

Music Theology as mouthpiece  109 Christians do not “musick” (to use Chris Small’s term) to prove that God exists. They “musick” to praise God in an embodied act of performance— an action—and they theologize to test the nature of that experience. Chris Small implies this when he claims that the interrelationships created by musicking “model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world” (Small 1998, 13). Music Theologians effectively musick through the scientific performance of theology. Perhaps more accurately they are “Musick Theologians”—or even Scientifick Musick Theologians—and this is where the source of some musicological disagreement truly lies. Some musicologists probably believe that theology simply cannot be performed, and, because it cannot be studied as performance, it cannot be legitimately studied musicologically (i.e., scientifically). By definition something intrinsically unable to be performed can never be musical—to be musical it must have the capacity to be performed. As Philip Stoltzfus so compellingly proves, however, both music and theology are performing arts: Music is about a performance taking place, and about each of us playing our part in the performance. And theology, too, is about a performance taking place, and about each of us finding our voice in the cooperative movement of keeping the song alive. (Stoltzfus 2006, x)

Experiment: congregational music studies as music theology If our ultimate aim is to prove that congregational music studies is a theological science “in the cooperative movement of keeping the song alive,” we must first test its relationship to Music Theology. In the previous section I  hypothesized that Music Theology is the mouthpiece of science because it subscribes to the same methodological principles as science, but because some musicologists reject the idea that theology can be scientific, they also reject the idea that theology (and therefore Music Theology) can be performed like music or conducted like a scientific experiment. But how exactly does Music Theology perform theologically, and why is it important for congregational music studies? The forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology gives us a terminological steer. It defines Music Theology as a methodologically scientific field that performs by systematically exploring a range of both theoretical and practical topics that are themselves theologically performing objects—objects performed in the same creative spirit any self-respecting performer gives a score or any scientist an experiment. Theoretical performances might include (1) theological methods like mystagogy or natural theology; philosophical methods like epistemology or semiotics; and musicological methods like analysis or ethnomusicology;

110  Bennett Zon and (2) key doctrinal concepts like revelation and the Trinity; philosophical concepts like aesthetics and time; liturgical concepts like sacrament and the heavenly body; or experiential concepts like performance, the voice, and instrument. Not unrelatedly, practical performances might comprise (1) contextual issues in lived histories like the biblical world or the Reformation; special issues like the city and digital media; and issues over movement such as diaspora and mobilities; (2) interpretative communities like Pentecostalism and megachurches; institutional communities like national or monastic churches; or issues surrounding communities in practice like choral cultures and leadership; or (3) issues revolving around human action like listening and dancing, inclusion and violence, or worship and prayer. A representative performance of Music Theology comes in Don Saliers’s Music and Theology (2007). Saliers observes first that “Each of the human senses plays a constituent role in the formation and expression of a theologically determined spirituality” (2007, 143–44, Kindle). He then hypothesizes that “Synaesthesia (the engagement of several senses, triggered by one of them) is required for spiritual maturation” (ibid., 274–76, Kindle) and finally tests his hypothesis through a systematic theological exploration of musical embodiment—an exploration he himself defines “as a set of practices—whether in writing or in speech, whether in the systematic setting forth of specific doctrines, or in hymns, sermons, prayers, or formulated creeds and confessions of faith” (ibid., 423–25, Kindle). Saliers’s Music Theology experiment is important not just because it conforms to scientific method, but because the scientific method it exemplifies is itself a type of performance that can, ostensibly, be held musicologically accountable under the universally acceptable rubrics of musicking. Congregational music studies performs not dissimilarly, even if its theologically performing objects are differently configured by ethnomusicological practice. Congregational music studies, for example, has always embraced theology openly— evidence, for example, “Embodied Sonic Theologies” in the first book of congregational music studies—but because of the methodological centrality it gives fieldwork, its performance appears to musicology to be more demonstrably embodied than that of Music Theology. Music Theology is like active listening—conceptual and intellectual, less embodied, physically noticeable or verifiable; whereas congregational music studies is like active singing—more noticeably embodied, physically obvious, and verifiable. Anna Nekola highlights the difference when she describes the synergistic nature of the subject and the object of fieldwork underpinning in ethnomusicological methodologies of congregational music studies. Congregational music studies extrapolates meaning, she suggests, through the examination of music-making practice in communities, societies, and cultures observed through active (embodied, physical, verifiable) fieldwork observing equally and easily embodied, physical and verifiable action in the field. “Part of congregational music’s meanings,” she maintains, “come from its words and the denotative message it communicates; however, music is also a media

Music Theology as mouthpiece  111 form around which we create meaning, both individually and socially, and thus music can be a means of mediation and communication” (Nekola 2015, 2–3). The methodological distinction in the way Music Theology and congregational musical studies perform is important because it enshrines an ultimately useful disciplinary dissonance: that, from the standpoint of musicology, as a branch of Music Theology, congregational music studies can be both science (anthropology) and not science (religion), whereas Music Theology can only be and is always theology. Yet, if the outcome of our experiment suggests that congregational music studies is genuinely related to Music Theology because it performs like theological science, then why is there disciplinary resistance to one and not the other? Why can’t Music Theology be science just like congregational music studies? The answer lies partly in musicology’s congenital fear of treating theology as science (as Chua suggests) and partly in its fear of treating theology as performance (as I  suggest). But there is another, possibly even greater prejudice-producing anxiety: the fear that Music Theology is actually trying to proselytize, where congregational music studies is trying to explain; that Music Theology is not about understanding but belief (Chinn and Samarapungavan 2001, 235–41) and as such should be systemically excluded from the objectivity-sacrosanct academy, however that might be defined. This is an almost understandable disciplinary response to the fear of religious movements that either passively or proactively conflate understanding and belief and problematize the performative nature of their work as Christian mission.9 Paul Neeley’s classic definition of ethnodoxology does nothing to alleviate those musicological fears: “Ethnodoxology is the theological and anthropological study, and practical application, of how every cultural group might use its unique and diverse artistic expressions appropriately to worship the God of the Bible” (International Council of Ethnodoxology n.d.). Similarly, nor does the biographical description of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, [a]n association of scholars interested in exploring the intersections of Christian faith and musical scholarship. We are an ecumenical association, reflecting the world-wide diversity of Christian traditions, and seeking to learn from scholars outside those traditions. As scholars of Christian convictions we are dedicated to excellence in all our work as musicologists, theorists, ethnomusicologists and theologians. (Society for Christian Scholarship in Music n.d.a; emphasis by the author) These tensions actually help forge an opportunity for congregational music studies as a branch of Music Theology—to provide material evidence without the need to give Christian testimony or witness (to let the evidence speak for itself); to study theology as religion and as such to be musicologically accepted as an ethnomusicological science. If, as the outcome of our

112  Bennett Zon experiment suggests, therefore, congregational music studies is a branch of Music Theology, and if Music Theology is a theological science, then congregational music studies may just provide the musicologically acceptable face of theological science.

Analysis: congregational music studies as theological science In some respects, this kind of reasoning makes Music Theology sound unscientific, and congregational music studies more evolutionarily adaptable in a materialistically skeptical (scientific) academic environment. But, in fact, disciplinary subjectivity (i.e., prejudice) does nothing to change the fact that both Music Theology and congregational music studies espouse fundamentally performative “scientifick” methodologies. Unlike Music Theology, however, when congregational music studies engages with theology it is invariably at the level of natural human embodiment first, even when embodiment is contained within the mind, as “Embodied Sonic Theologies” attests. Echoing Nekola’s definition, Allan Moore, for example, delves into the nature of embodiment by probing the impact of words which themselves contain metaphors for embodiment. Writing on the impact words have on worship, he critiques Katherine Scott’s adaptation of “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” sung at FocusFest 2008. Scott “smooths out” the melodic rhythm to create two-bar phrases with words followed by two-bar phrases without words. She then intersperses words in the gaps, which shifts emphasis and meaning from active to static concepts. “His truth at all times firmly stood” changes emphasis from “firmly” to “stood”—from “the active manner in which God’s truth works in the world”—it operates “firmly” [in the original version] to “a presentation of statis” on stood (Moore 2015, 186). The distinction is significant not simply because emphasis changes the meaning of worship but because action itself becomes an object of deep theological reflection; Moore even goes so far as to suggest that worship is an “activity,” “a dynamic state” (ibid., 187). In this respect Moore’s critique largely conforms to Torrance’s concept of scientific theology as “a human enterprise working with revisable formulations in a manner not unlike that of an axiomatic science operating with fluid axioms.” But because it interrogates the meaning of meaning (the action of action) it also openly interrogates the subjective nature of its own observations: as Moore says, “The very act of speaking enacts the action spoken of” (ibid., 195). He also questions how performing environments influence the subsumption of a worship leader’s identity into their persona, claiming that the “persona/environment relation thus operates within the sounding object” (ibid.). These are more than metaphysical or theological observations; they are scientific hypotheses that the act of experimentation (conducting or performing an experiment) proves or disproves. The heart may beat to pump blood, and the worship leader may lead to worship God, but for Moore worship is illocutionary: as through

Music Theology as mouthpiece  113 a mouthpiece, “it is the very pronouncement [of worship] that enacts the relationship” (ibid.). While this appraisal paradoxically echoes a strongly relativistic proposition in the language of social constructivism, which argues that the substantive results of science are not discovered but “invented or constructed through organized social behaviour” (Klee 1997, 5), it nevertheless maintains as its object a strictly theological locus—“the mystery of worship, which is God’s presence and our response to it” (Norris 1998, 72). And it is the strictly theological nature of its object which, according to Hanby, keeps theology saliently scientific; for Hanby, There can be no “outside” of relation to God because it is through this relation itself—real on the side of creatures, rational on the side of God—that the being of all that is mysteriously not God is constituted. (Hanby 2013, 18) Whether or not there is such a thing as an “outside” of God, there is no denying that congregational music studies enlists natural theological principles when it scientifically tests theological hypotheses through the “humanly organized sound” of normative, ethnomusicological social constructivism. Congregational music studies would seem a natural home for natural theology because, accordingly, the design of nature is intrinsically congregational; that is, the universe (congregation) is ordered; it is an interrelated organism with unity and diversity; and it is anthropic (it must take account of our individual and corporate human presence) [Weaver 2010, 83]. Moreover, theology is itself natural: according to Jeremy Begbie it seeks to attend [t]o the reality of the physical world, the world explored and examined by the natural sciences . . . to what is primordially human . . . to those constructive activities we designate as human “culture”  .  .  .  [and] to enlist a properly functioning human reason. (2013, 572). As Begbie acknowledges, many of the ways we study music revolve around the science of explaining “the active process of making” (2013, 577)—entrainment, for example, or improvisation. It may be fairer to say that natural theology is a phantom presence in congregational music studies, to the extent that it echoes Hanby’s suggestion that there is nothing “outside” God. Peter Althouse and Michael Wilkinson’s “Musical Bodies in the Charismatic Renewal” (2015) is paradigmatic. The title is itself an expression of the chapter’s highly theorized bodily object, yet at the same time Althouse and Wilkinson sedulously avoid theological underpinning. They observe Chris Shilling, for example, providing music psychology: “embodied analysis of music must include how the body is both an important source for the creative production of music and

114  Bennett Zon deeply attuned to musical processes”; Shilling, Csordas, and Becker, social constructivism: “music is not only a social construction but also rooted in the generative powers of the body”; and Judith Becker, phenomenology: “religious trancing is an ecstatic or alternate state of consciousness that is sensually rich and physically exertive, heightens emotional responses, and is enveloped in musical processes.”10 When, however, Althouse and Wilkinson arrive at their conclusions over the worshipping body and its place in renewal, their conclusions are theological in nature and natural in theology, as it were. Their theology is natural because they utilize the resources of the natural sciences; they define what is effectively human; they locate it within cultural contexts; and they themselves embody human reason through their performance of musicking. In other words, the very act of studying congregational music is intrinsically theological because both its subject and object concern the natural design of the congregational body—again, the mystery of worship “as the mystical body is renewed through an experience of interactional love” (Althouse and Wilkinson 2015, 41). This is, arguably, what Jeremy Begbie calls “felicitous culture,” the ability to develop and reconfigure God-given materials into an act of praise (Begbie 2013, 577) or what John Polkinghorne describes earlier as “God’s gift of ‘freedom’ to his creation” (Polkinghorne 1994, 79). Alister McGrath defines four seams of natural theology: (1) a movement of the human mind toward God; (2) an argument from naturalistic premises to religious beliefs; (3) a theology of nature; and (4) correspondences between natural and evangelical experience (McGrath 2011, 16). Althouse and Wilkinson, Allan Moore, Anna Nekola—their brand of congregational music studies could easily represent these same four seams. But does, for instance, this make congregational music studies—with its emphasis on the nature of human embodiment—a more theological science than Music Theology? Debates over the scientific validity of natural theology have been rife and variably corrosive. One criticism suggests that natural theologians write only for their own religious-believing community, to “encourage the faithful” and confront doubt (Clayton 2013, 508); relatedly, there is the very widely spread injunction against compatibility theories for being theological in origin, function, and purpose—itself a retelling of the materialist anti-theism story.11 In this respect scientific criticism of congregational music studies could be justifiable, especially, as we have seen, where it invokes Christian musicology or ethnodoxology. Article II.Purposes.B.3, for example, of the constitution of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music is unapologetic and claims that the society clearly aims “To strengthen Christian scholars of music in their understanding of and faithfulness to their vocations” (Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, n.d.b), yet the society name is itself more terminologically—and therefore methodologically—inexact. What exactly is Christian Scholarship in music: is it Christian scholars testifying faith through scholarship (i.e., vocational and thus religious); or is it pluralistic, humanistic, ecumenistic scholarship about Christian topics

Music Theology as mouthpiece  115 (i.e., non-vocational and thus secular/academic)? And what is a Society for something—for Christian Scholarship in Music (i.e., is it ad-vocational and mission-based)? Inevitably, these questions raise other types of questions critics of natural theology would instantly recognize: is the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music the mouthpiece of theology or musicological science, or both; in other words, is this an academic (scientific) or religious (theological) organization, because, according to scientific materialists (or new Atheists) like Richard Dawkins, they simply cannot be both. Like natural theology, congregational music studies problematizes the relationship between academic (scientific) and religious (theological) knowl­ edge, partly by performing scientifically and partly by being performed— being read and interpreted—theologically, even self-reflexively by itself. The first section of Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner’s Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience (2013) is representative not simply because it recognizes and studies the act of congregational musicking as “Performing Theology” (i.e., performing scientifically), but because it foregrounds the complex theological ontologies inherent within the culturally constructed musical object it studies (i.e., the being performed theologically): “Congregational music often operates at the nexus between official and ‘lived’ Christian theologies, acting variously and unevenly as a source of indoctrination or challenge, complicity or contest” (Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013, 4). Unlike natural theology, however, which originates in an unapologetically apologetical theological motivation (i.e., performs theology), congregational music studies tends to eschew the performative nature of its own methodology as theological science—like the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. Is congregational music studies performing theology when it studies “performing theology”? Or is it paradoxically performing science? And if it is performing science—natural science in the broadest sense—why can it not also perform theology as a form of natural theology? Why are its two disciplinary strands seemingly incompatible? The answer may lie in its relationship to Music Theology and its disciplinary orientation, as well as in a certain amount of practical academic caution. In Music Theology there is generally no theological ventriloquism, no dissembling, no disciplinary invisibility—in the same way that, as Schopenhauer suggests, music “is a direct objectification and copy of the whole will” (1968, 333). Music Theology speaks theology directly. However scientific theologically, Music Theology performs first as theology, as Maeve Heaney and more recently Danielle Lynch attest (Lynch 2018); but however theological scientifically, congregational music studies performs first as science. According to the first series preface congregational music studies “explores the role of congregational music in Christian religious experience, examining how musicians and worshippers perform, identify with and experience belief through musical praxis.”12 Heaney, however, claims that music “is a means by which we can listen to and receive the Word of God”—that it can be, and is, theological praxis (2012, Kindle loc. 3748, 7753). Heaney, for

116  Bennett Zon her part, acknowledges the role sciences play in theological discourse (ibid., Kindle loc. 4369), but in her admittedly honest, testimonial afterward (performing theology—theologicking, if you will), Lynch leaves nothing to our disciplinary imagination: The link between the words of the book and the music are that they both speak to “music as theology.” Both are expressions of what makes meaning in my life, from the depths of who I am as an embodied human being in relation to the infinite mystery I name God. (Lynch 2018, 195)

Findings This chapter has been argued in effectively two halves. First, I argued that if theology can be science, then so can Music Theology—Music Theology can be the mouthpiece of science—and, second, that if congregational music studies is a branch of Music Theology, then it, too, is science, the type of science closely resembling what today we would call natural theology. Congregational music studies responds to this definition because, unlike Music Theology, it focuses intensively on the observable nature of our embodied human experience of music. Of course, many scientists consider natural theology to be theology, and not science, in the same way many musicologists consider Music Theology to be theology, and not science, and there are some good reasons for both sets of criticisms. Congregational music studies performs scientifically, but can be, and is, performed theologically. Music Theology performs theologically even when it performs scientifically, because it studies both musick (as it is performed) and music (as it is designed). Perhaps this is where another important—even doctrinal— distinction with Music Theology lies. Like musicology, congregational music studies adamantly disavows the idea that music carries any inherent meaning “to ‘decode’ regardless of the varying contexts of its performance” (Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013, 4)—in natural theology, a meaning akin to “design.” For natural theologians, “design” is a scientific response to observation, analysis, and experimentation with non-revealed (natural, not scriptural) sources. But for scientists, “design” is a categorically theological study of efficient causal processes: the heart beats to circulate blood, but blood circulates because God designed us that way. This may be treating natural theology too simplistically, but it does express a central concern in congregational music studies to reflect a methodology equally accountable to both theology and science in a way that exemplifies more than the status of a mouthpiece. Maybe congregational music studies is apophatic theologically but cataphatic scientifically; meaning, that it uses theology to describe what God is not (i.e., his creation), whereas it uses science to describe what He is (i.e., the Creator and Designer). Maybe congregational music studies is the voice of theology and the mouthpiece of science, whereas Music

Music Theology as mouthpiece  117 Theology is always going to be the mouthpiece of musicology and voice of theology, even if it does aspire to the condition of theological science, like— as Walter Pater says—all arts aspire to the condition of music. Whatever their status, and whatever their methods, if congregational music studies is the sound of Music Theology and Music Theology the sound of science, then Chua’s concerns will have been addressed by making disciplinary ventriloquism invisible to the point of vanishing altogether. According to Chua: “The challenge for theology is whether it can articulate the difference while engaging with the modern and postmodern world” (2011, 161), but the same could be said of musicology itself. The challenge for musicology is accepting theology as a scientific discipline and Music Theology as its mouthpiece. Perhaps congregational music studies will lead the way.

Notes 1 See for example, Huyser-Honig 2005; Ferone 2017. 2 “Theology of Music,” Grace and Peace Presbyterian Church (OPC) website, n.d., accessed August 5, 2019, www.gppopc.org/music/theology-of-music/. 3 Durham University’s Music Theology module description n.d., accessed August 5, 2019, www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/module_description/?year=2019&module_ code=MUSI3711 and the International Network for Music Theology n.d. www.dur. ac.uk/musictheology/. 4 See for example, Porter 2014. 5 See Venuti 1995. 6 Journal of Interdisciplinary Musicology, n.d., accessed December  20, 2018, https://musicstudies.org/about/. Very recently Klein and Parncutt largely replicate this list and include “religious studies” (i.e., the anthropology of music) but not theology (Klein and Parncutt 2010, 138). 7 See for example, Nola and Sankey 2007; Gauch 2012; Staddon 2017, and “Steps of the Scientific Method,” Science Buddies n.d. www.sciencebuddies.org/sciencefair-projects/science-fair/steps-of-the-scientific-method. Accessed July  7, 2019. For a philosophically reflexive exploration of textbooks, see Blachowicz 2009. 8 See Reeves 2019. 9 See Stallsmith 2015. 10 Quoted in Althouse and Wilkinson 2015, 33–34. 11 See for example, Barr 2016. 12 See preface, Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2013.

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120  Bennett Zon Spencer, Jon Michael. 1991. Theological Music: Introduction to Theomusicology. New York, Westport, CN and London: Greenwood Press. Staddon, John. 2017. Scientific Method. London: Routledge. Stallsmith, Glenn. 2015. “Worship from the Nations: A Response to Scott Aniol.” Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith 3 (1): A21–A36. Accessed January 4, 2019. https://artsandchristianfaith.org/index.php/journal/article/view/25/22. Stoltzfus, Philip E. 2006. Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics and God in Modern Theology. London: T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. 2001. Reality and Scientific Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A  History of Translation. London: Routledge. Weaver, John. 2010. Christianity and Science. London: SCM. Zon, Bennett. 2011a. “Bedazzled by Breakthrough: Music Theology and the Problem of Composing Music in Words.” Review of The Reinvention of Religious Music; Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough toward the Beyond, by Sander van Maas. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 136 (2): 429–35. ———. 2011b. “ ‘Spiritual Selection’: Joseph Goddard and the Music Theology of Evolution.” In Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Martin Clarke, 215–35. Farnham: Ashgate.

Part II

Key Issues

7 Political economy and capital in congregational music studies Commodities, worshipers, and worship Andrew Mall Introduction I arrive at church ten or fifteen minutes early, with plenty of time to grab a cup of coffee from the fellowship hall downstairs and find my sister and brother-in-law, Lydia and Brad, in the sanctuary. They are part of a team that was commissioned to plant a new branch of New Life Community Church in Albany Park, the Chicago neighborhood where they live. New Life is a non-denominational evangelical church with many locations in and around Chicago; I have previously accompanied Lydia and Brad to the West Lakeview location they used to attend a few times. The new church plant is currently renting space in a Lutheran church. Lydia is the worship leader here, and she is busy prepping the rest of her team for the start of the service. Brad introduces me to their pastor and greets several other friends as we settle into a pew. Lydia encourages the congregation to stand promptly at 11:00 a.m. As at most evangelical worship services I have attended, this service starts with music. Lydia sings and leads from the keyboard; she is accompanied by a guitarist, drummer, and two or three additional singers. Although the pews contain the Lutheran church’s hymnals, we sing from lyrics projected on a screen. After three or four songs in a row, Lydia pauses to introduce the next song, “God of This City.” This song is particularly meaningful this morning, she explains, because she believes it articulates both a need for urban ministries, like the one they have just launched, and a hope that she and the rest of the team and congregation at New Life Albany Park can be a positive force for change in their neighborhood: “For greater things are yet to come / and greater things are still to be done / in this city.” After the song ends the sanctuary is still reverberating, and Lydia says a short prayer as the sound decays before she and the rest of her worship team return to their seats in the congregation. “God of This City” was written by Bluetree, a Christian band from Belfast, Northern Ireland. They recorded it for their debut album Greater Things (2007), which was rereleased as God of This City (2009). In the interim, Chris Tomlin recorded “God of This City” for his studio album

124  Andrew Mall Hello Love (2008b) and the live album Passion: God of This City (2008a), released by the Passion Conferences.1 Passion: God of This City won the 2009 Dove Award for “Special Event Album of the Year”; in 2010, Bluetree was nominated for Dove’s Best New Artist award but did not win.2 The song “God of This City” has circulated widely because of its association with Tomlin and Passion. Chris Tomlin is a well-known US-based worship artist and songwriter who has written many popular contemporary worship songs himself, including the Dove Award-winning “How Great Is Our God” and “Our God.” Passion Conferences was founded by Louie Giglio in 1997 as an outgrowth of a campus-based college student ministry. In the years since, Passion has become a major contemporary worship institution, reaching tens of thousands of participants each year through its annual worship events in Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere through the record label sixstepsrecords, the multi-branch megachurch Passion City Church, and numerous national and international tours.3 Tomlin has been affiliated with Passion from the beginning, performing at its conferences and tours, recording for sixsteps­ records, and helping launch Passion City Church’s Atlanta location. His successes and those of Passion are intertwined and inseparable; for many attendees and listeners, Tomlin is Passion and vice versa. This context flashed through my head as Lydia was introducing “God of This City” in her church, now many years ago. I am not a regular churchgoer and had not sung that song in church as often as she had, so my main familiarity with it was as a commodity that circulated globally, buoyed by Tomlin’s popularity and Passion’s reach. This familiarity is but one component of the background and cultural fluencies I  bring to ethnographic research, which necessarily affect my ability to comprehend congregants’ worship experiences. These prior experiences also impact my ability to build rapport with congregations, worship leaders, and other interlocutors while conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Harris Berger (2009) describes this set of competencies as an ethnographer’s “stance,” which he uses to examine how researchers might frame and understand distinct phenomenological experiences appropriately, and also how they come to terms with their own subjectivities (including inherent biases) so that they know what kinds of fieldwork experiences are likely to affect and impact them.4 It is incumbent on ethnographers to understand their own backgrounds, beliefs, biases, and ideals and to trust their own expertise and embodied experiences as sources of knowledge that could open doors and help them connect with interlocutors in the field. As I sang “God of This City” in church that Sunday, reflecting on what Lydia, Brad, and their friends hoped to accomplish with New Life Albany Park, the song felt significant and immediate. It spoke of their individual ambitions and, as a leadership group, their objectives and mission for their new church. It helped them articulate and celebrate a shared sense of responsibility both for their local community (at the time, Lydia and Brad

Political economy and capital  125 lived only a few blocks away) and for the future congregation they hoped the church would become. For them, “God of This City” was simultaneously a song of reflection and of resolution for their aspirations. The song’s efficacy that Sunday morning—a sense of urgency and togetherness that rippled across the sanctuary from the front to back and sustained the rest of the worship service—illustrated that congregants who are also often consumers can have profoundly intimate moments with incredibly public commodities. Indeed, the intimate moments that worshipers have with “God of This City” might be amplified by its global popularity, circulation, and public encounter. It also demonstrated to me that discourses of capital, political economy, and privilege are useful when considering ethnographic stance, access, and rapport. An ethnographer’s ability to understand, analyze, and question fieldwork experiences depends, in part, on her prior knowledge of the field itself. This knowledge, however cultivated or acquired, constitutes a form of embodied informational capital. For example, my expertise in music industry infrastructures and business practices enables me to ask probing (but not insensitive or unnecessarily intrusive) questions about the intersecting roles of music, faith, and business in my interlocutors’ personal and professional lives. But, as someone who does not self-identify as Christian, my lack of belief means that, no matter how deep my knowledge about contemporary worship music, there are aspects of worship itself that will remain forever out of reach. Under this model, faith (or the ability to perform faith) is itself a symbolic form of capital, enabling those familiar with its embodiment (and comfortable with the public intimacy of its expression) to move through particular social spaces and worlds with ease—an ethnographer’s stance thus constitutes a form of privilege that becomes easy to recognize and acknowledge when it is absent. For others, the felt lack of a common faith background becomes yet another way to mark, enact, and enforce difference. If singing “God of This City” united congregants at New Life Albany Park, it also highlighted the value that analyzing its status as a capitalist commodity can add to understanding its significance as a worship song. It is this relationship between the phenomenology of worship and the circulation of worship music in capitalist contexts with which I am concerned in this chapter. These intersections can be productive, as the lived experience of Lydia and her congregation demonstrates. They can also produce tensions when the needs and expectations of individual worshipers and congregations collide with those of for-profit corporations and capitalist infrastructures. Of course, late capitalism is not the only framework that structures worshipers’ lived experiences or the needs of their churches. The economic, political, and social realities of worship under planned economies (including socialism and communism), in traditional economies (such as barter, gift, or subsistence systems), as favored state religions (whether by official policy or de facto convention), as disfavored or persecuted religions, or in regions

126  Andrew Mall upended by violence differ, sometimes dramatically, from those experienced by late capitalist consumer-congregants for whom going to church is as fraught as going to the mall (which is to say, not very fraught at all). My observations in this chapter are directly related to the socio-economic conditions of these hyper-commercialized, capitalist cultural contexts. That said, my larger conclusions about the need for considering the influences of broad economic and political systems on the circulation and use of worship music, congregants’ lived experiences, and the phenomenology of worship remain salient and productive for studying congregational music in a variety of contexts. In this chapter, I examine and illustrate how attention to modes of production can provide valuable insight into congregational music—not only its circulation in globalized marketplace economies, but also its usage in local churches.

The commodification of worship music and worshipers In his article on the commodification of music at the turn of the twentieth century, Timothy Taylor (2007, 281) defines a commodity, at its base, as “something that can be turned to commercial advantage, bought and sold,” which he later extends to emphasize the importance of technology and industrial or mechanical (re)production. That “God of This City” is a commodity in this sense is unquestioned, something taken for granted by listeners who could expect to encounter the song on the radio, Pandora, or YouTube just as (if not more) easily as they could encounter it at church. In the next section I explain some of the ways that capitalist industries, infrastructures, and institutions are implicated in the processes of production, circulation, mediation, and consumption of contemporary worship songs like this one. The commodity status of contemporary worship songs is not the only factor that contributes to the tension between the intimate experiences of worshipers and the public circulation of worship songs. Another factor is the status of worshipers and congregants as consumers. In late capitalist contexts, consumers’ social and cultural experiences are overwhelmingly influenced by and framed within systems of exchange. For example, I trade my money, time, attention, expertise, or expectation of privacy for access to goods and services, both the necessities I need to live and function (childcare, food, housing, quiet, transportation, WiFi) and those I  use to edify and entertain myself and my family (craft beer, Frozen 2, Hulu, kettlebell class, The New Yorker, Spotify). Late capitalist consumers integrate these systems of exchange into their social relationships, at times seamlessly and unquestioned: in this way, quality time with colleagues, friends, and loved ones is often reduced to after-work drinks, dinner and a show, Disneyland vacations, Netflix binges, trips to the mall or market, or watching the big game together. No wonder, then, that many churches feel compelled to distinguish themselves by investing in specific (and specifically contemporary)

Political economy and capital  127 ways of engaging their congregants and of meeting presentational expectations shaped by lifetimes spent consuming modern entertainment. In other words, the expectations and experiences of modern consumers in late capitalist contexts are inseparable from their identities as churchgoers and congregants, and many churches leaders are constantly adjusting their approach to worship in recognition of this. Elsewhere I have argued that church leaders’ investments into worship, particularly those investments intended to “establish and sustain a specific mode of worship” for particular worshipers, comprise “worship capital” (Mall 2018b, 305). Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (2005, 29) stake a more forceful position in describing the “religious economy,” in which churches and religious denominations “must compete for members and that the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace is as unforgiving of ineffective religious firms as it is of their commercial counterparts.” In free market capitalism, consumers are faced with abundant choices and, within that context, agency to decide where and on what particular commodities to spend their resources. The purveyors of these choices compete for consumers along a number of vectors: loyalty, nostalgia, price, quality, reputation, social responsibility, style, tradition, value, and so on. This logic of capitalist competition would dictate that those firms (religious or not) that are most effective at attracting and retaining consumers (or members) will be the most successful and sustainable—winning, whether we like it or not, a zero-sum game in which there is a predetermined (and not-unlimited) number of potential consumers, each of whom has a not-unlimited amount of resources to spend. Churches have long used advertising and underwriting to reach newcomers: banners on buildings and sandwich board signs on sidewalks, billboards on highways and ads in subway cars, commercials on radio and television, and sponsoring children’s sports teams or local community events (such as concerts, Easter egg hunts, farmers’ markets, festivals, holiday markets, or movie nights). Increasingly, however, churches in late capitalist cultural contexts are using contemporary concepts of “branding” to attract and retain members who integrate that church (as a brand) into their daily lives, as Thomas Wagner (2020) demonstrates in his analysis of the global megachurch Hillsong.5 In these modern marketplaces, brands are often more valuable (and thus, more important) than the specific products and services they sell. For churchgoers attuned to modern consumerism, there is a very real possibility that their churches’ brands are more significant than the religious edification and spiritual transcendence those churches’ leaders and ministers facilitate. What church you attend is diminished, then, as just another fashionable component of your identity—an identity, Taylor reminds us, that you strategically construct through your consumption choices (2016, 66–67)—and susceptible to Brett McCracken’s (2010) prediction that the performative style of faith is increasingly mistaken for the doctrinal substance of faith.6 McCracken denigrates this transition toward style over substance as “hipster Christianity,” and it is clear that its spread

128  Andrew Mall is due not only to the hipster churchgoers who buy into it but also to the hipster church leaders who sell it.7 But, in today’s increasingly competitive religious economy, can we really fault church leaders for doing whatever they can to attract new attendees and keep existing ones? Purveyors of commodities have always competed against each other for consumers. In several markets, those consumers and the knowledge that firms have about them can be monetized. This is most obvious at businesses for which advertising constitutes an important revenue stream, particularly in the mass media. Magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks, for example, often make money by selling their content to their listeners, readers, and viewers; but they make far more money selling those listeners, readers, and viewers to their advertisers.8 The more data they have about their audiences—that is, the more detailed audience profiles they can provide to (potential) advertisers—the more that access to their audiences is worth, and the more they can charge for advertising or underwriting.9 If consumers—or consumers’ data doubles—can be turned to commercial advantage, bought and sold, then they indeed are also commodities. This status has only become clearer as streaming has emerged in many regions around the world as the dominant form of media consumption. In considering the data that Spotify collects about its users’ listening habits, for example, Eric Drott (2018a, 237) has argued that these data are not only commodities themselves (“sold directly to third parties, such as ad servers, credit agencies, insurers, or general-purpose data aggregators”) but also indirectly, as factors of production that inform the service’s individualized programming and advertising algorithms, and as assets, or core components of Spotify’s value to individual investors, the stock market, and the market’s metrics.10 For services like Spotify, he argues, “consumers are themselves a valuable product, forming the basis of the audience, user, and data commodities to be sold to advertisers, data aggregators, and other third parties” (Drott 2018b, 351). Even when consumers do not encounter advertisements, their data is nonetheless commodified, both in aggregated and individuated forms (in order to, for example, tune the service’s recommendation algorithms to each listener’s taste in order to compete for that listener’s attention).11 Spotify and other digital content providers thus participate in what economists call “two-sided markets,” in which the service sells both (1) consumers access to content (books, movies, music, podcasts, social networks, television shows) and (2) advertisers and data aggregators access to consumers (Drott 2018a, 239). The resources that users spend to access services that operate in two-sided markets—their time and attention, for example, or their tastes as expressed via listening habits—are simultaneously both capital (in transactions on one side of the market) and commodity (aggregated in transactions on the market’s other side). In the twenty-first century, the sheer quantity of data generated by consumers and collected and sold by the digital services they use has made the

Political economy and capital  129 presence of these transactional relationships in many facets of daily life more transparent. But it is the scale of these relationships that is new, however, not their existence. Companies have long been collecting and selling data about their consumers. As aggregated data, consumer profiles are the basis of paid advertising and underwriting for mass media outlets and inform entrepreneurial, investment, and marketing decisions in a wide variety of markets and organizations. In short, as long as there have been capitalist consumers, they have also been commodities. The fact that consumers are used to being surveilled, monitored, and monetized under late capitalism in the twenty-first century provides a critical lens through which we might rethink consumers’ relationship to capitalism generally, and mass media specifically, in the twentieth century and earlier.

Political economy, worship songs, and congregational music Comprehending the forces at play within capitalist systems of labor and exchange is central to the foundational theories articulated by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and many others.12 Religion has often been significant within this discourse: for Marx, it anesthetized members of the working class to their subjugation by capitalists and the ruling class; for Weber, personal ethics central to Protestantism were key to the development and spread of free market capitalism, idealized as a meritocracy. In the late twentieth century, the discursive relationship between religion and political economy began to account for, among other aspects of faith in daily life, the decision-making processes on the part of churchgoers about which churches to attend. Doing so necessarily frames churches and other religious organizations as capitalist institutions, even if they do not sell commodities directly and explicitly. Laurence Iannaccone (see, e.g., 1992, 1995) and other writers developed the economics of religion as a subfield to understand social behavior within religious contexts through rational choice and other mainstream economic theories. Building upon and within this discourse, several writers (Moore 1994; Roof 1999; Finke and Stark 2005) have directly linked practices of consumption within capitalist marketplaces to changing notions of what it means to choose and attend a church. This discourse is not limited to the social sciences but has spread throughout a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to religious and congregational studies. Theologian Rob Warner (2010, 119), for example, has characterized non-denominational evangelicalism in the United States as “a detraditionalized, post-denominational religious marketplace [in which] the individual consumer is kind, reserving the right to relocate their religious practices according to present personal preference.” For Warner, trajectories of detraditionalization, globalization, neoliberalism, and secularism have combined to produce a “religion of choice” within which each individual congregation “appears increasingly to function as a peer group of consumers who have migrated to the niche-church that addresses their priority needs” (2010, 120).

130  Andrew Mall At times, participants and observers alike express an uneasiness with the nature of worship music as a commercial commodity. Several of Ari Kelman’s (2018) songwriter and worship leader interlocutors, for example, emphasize the religious and spiritual priorities of their labor over its economic realities. From this perspective, fixating on the roles of money that enable the production and circulation of worship music, it seems, might be seen to cheapen the religious encounters that worship songs themselves enable, rendering them somehow inauthentic. A different perspective might perceive (and celebrate) commercial success as evidence of God’s favor and approval. Congregational music scholars might question the nature of commercial music as genuine or sincere expression—central as it is to a system through which large amounts of money flow—or consider the degree to which listeners’ tastes are manipulated by that same system in order to empower and enrich itself, drawing on criticisms articulated by Antonio Gramsci and Frankfurt School thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others.13 Others, following Jay Howard and John Streck’s (1999, 173) analysis of Christian popular music, might agree that the commercial success of music that is intended to circulate in capitalist marketplaces is evidence of that music’s authenticity and appropriateness for its purpose. But one does not have to be fluent in the languages of economics or political economy to ask how the circulation of worship music within systems of exchange impacts that music’s accessibility and utility, or how that circulation is framed within congregations. Fundamental to these questions is an understanding that the logic of capitalism, as a competitive marketplace, benefits and rewards participants whose objective is to acquire and accumulate capital. Money is simultaneously a means and an end, and it influences all other objectives. Money, however, is not the only form of capital that may be present when researching worship and contemporary worship music. Pierre Bourdieu’s theories address symbolic forms of capital, including social capital and three types of cultural capital (embodied capital, objectified capital, and institutionalized capital).14 As I wrote earlier, cultural fluency—including familiarity with norms of religious expression and practice—can function as a form of symbolic capital, particularly for ethnographers seeking access to and rapport within fieldwork environments. Writers following the Bourdieuian tradition are concerned less with the accumulation of economic capital and more with the presence, power, and influence of symbolic capital within specific sociocultural contexts. Thus, concepts of “religious capital” (Bourdieu 1991), “sacred capital” (Urban 2003), “spiritual capital” (Verter 2003), and “worship capital” (Mall 2018b) all capture slightly different understandings of how religious institutions, leaders, and congregants manipulate and navigate power hierarchies in religious contexts through the acquisition and divestment of symbolic capital. “God of This City” and other contemporary worship songs are essentially “born capitalist” as the products of creative labor situated within economies,

Political economy and capital  131 infrastructures, and marketplaces under neoliberal capitalism. Contemporary worship songwriters’ ownership (or co-ownership) of their songs’ copyrights provides a consistent source of revenue, sometimes enabling them to live entirely off of their creative labor (hit songs can earn many hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month). Much of that revenue flows through Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), an organization that sells licenses (at a sliding scale) to churches and other religions organizations for certain uses of copyrighted works, such as printing song lyrics in a Sunday bulletin or putting them on a PowerPoint slide for a worship service.15 Other revenue flows through performing rights organizations— in the United States, these include ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC; different organizations represent rightsowners in other countries—which collect ­ royalties on behalf of songwriters and composers from the commercial sale and performance of their works. The rights, royalties, and revenue streams afforded by copyright result from national and international legislative frameworks that protect intellectual property, but other intersections between worship music and capitalist marketplaces do not rely so obviously on statist interventions. For example, worship leaders at local churches often undergo many years of training, by taking music lessons, enrolling in college or conservatory, attending seminary, or taking worship leading workshops—spending economic capital to enhance their educational, intellectual, and/or cultural capital. Many worship leaders (such as Chris Tomlin) make money as recording artists, releasing music through record labels for sale and streaming, and also by performing at worship conferences and conventions. Concert venues, convention centers, and megachurches spend a lot of money purchasing, operating, and maintaining the technical equipment that performances require: microphones and cables, sound consoles, speakers and monitors, video screens, and other equipment. But even the fifty-member church my dad pastored in southeast Wisconsin for several years had to buy a new-to-them piano and then have it tuned regularly, as well as upgrade the computer, software, and projector they used during services. Churches and religious institutions might be tax-exempt, but they are not exempt from participating in capitalist economies and marketplaces. It is all but impossible for songwriters, artists, and worship leaders to navigate this ecosystem by themselves, so they partner with accountants, agents, attorneys, labels, managers, and publishers to help them “exploit” their copyrighted music and collect the money they earn with their songs, recordings, and performances. These aspects of their work are identical to those of songwriters and artists outside of the Christian market (what professionals call the “mainstream,” “secular,” or “general” market, often interchangeably), because copyright and intellectual property regulations are agnostic: the relevant laws do not differentiate between Christian music and non-Christian music.16 For major entertainment conglomerates that own performing venues, publishing companies, radio stations, and record labels around the world,

132  Andrew Mall contemporary worship music is just one of many markets in which they have invested. Smaller, independent firms and businesses can provide more personalized attention, and many approach their work from a faith-based perspective, but they nonetheless operate in the same industries as their much larger counterparts—industries whose goal is to maximize revenue and profit. Churches and parachurch organizations, seminaries and divinity schools, and denominations and non-denominational networks are all constituent components of these networks. This is partly because they are prime sites of consumption and, as CCLI license holders, revenue generation, but it is also because their worship leaders and musicians are key to individual worshipers’ familiarity with worship songs. Worship leaders function as gatekeepers or cultural intermediaries for contemporary worship music, connecting their congregants (the consumers) to worship music (the product) by regularly reviewing, selecting, performing, and repeating songs. In other words, if a worship songwriter wants to reach worshipers, they must first reach the worship leaders. Increasingly, scholars are taking into account these industrial infrastructures and forces of capitalism when examining contemporary worship music. Kelman’s (2018) work on contemporary worship music addresses the myriad ways that systems of capitalism and exchange influence songwriting and worship leading, and he devotes an entire chapter to the commercial marketplace for worship music. Swee Hong Lim and Lester Ruth (2017) discuss the importance of Maranatha! Music and Mercy Publishing in the widespread institutionalization and commercialization of contemporary worship music following the genre’s emergence during the Jesus People Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Monique Ingalls (2018), in rethinking the relationships between “congregating” and worship both in and outside of churches, considers the impact of the globalized music industries and technological mediation on worship music’s meaning and efficacy for congregations. Thomas Wagner (2020) is explicitly concerned with Hillsong’s enthusiastic integration of branding and consumer culture into its activities and growth worldwide. The normalization of music industries is an important, if sometimes implicit, feature of April Stace’s (2017) examination of the use of secular rock and popular music during worship. In short, congregational music scholars increasingly acknowledge contemporary worship music as the product of capitalist economies, infrastructures, and marketplaces. For many, these contexts are central objects of analysis while, for others, they are but one of several components that contribute to the ways in which music and the phenomenology of worship are related for congregations and individual worshipers. The work of these and many other writers emphasizes the modes of production and circulation within marketplaces for worship music: examining (for example) the creation, discovery, selection, and performance of worship music; considering how institutionalized circulations of capital inflect the diffusion and popularity of any given song; analyzing the impact of popularity charts on

Political economy and capital  133 worship music; and addressing the business of worship music as industry. This work demonstrates that accounting for the presence and influence of capital and capitalism is foundational to the field of congregational music studies, particularly for those researchers and practitioners concerned with contemporary worship music within late capitalist contexts. Like music industry scholarship outside of Christian music (see, e.g., Bruenger 2016), this is also ongoing, unending work that attempts to comprehend forces that are constantly fluctuating in response to new technologies of production and circulation. Congregational music scholars have been following the capital, in other words, which I  have recommended (Mall 2018b, 311). But there is also much to gain by attending to the ways in which capital and capitalism impact the agency, choices, and actions of individual worshipers. In addition to ongoing scholarly production of macro-level systemic research, case studies of congregations and congregating collectives, and profiles of songwriters, artists, worship leaders, and industry executives, what might a political economic approach reveal about the experiences and impacts of worship music for distinct congregants? What might an individual’s worship encounter teach us about the infrastructures through which “born capitalist” worship music circulates? How could a deliberate and intentional awareness of capital better prepare and position researchers who study congregational music? These questions are important not for their potential to teach congregational music scholars about capitalism and capitalist systems but, rather, for their capacity to demonstrate the ways worshipers’ and worship leaders’ religious experiences and objectives reflect and reproduce the larger economic and political systems within which they are enmeshed.

Consuming worship/worship as commodity Worship capital, I have argued (Mall 2018b, 310), both buys churchgoers and functions “to situate individuals and [religious] institutions in relationship to each other.” Churchgoers become commodities in this perspective, like consumers in other economies (particularly those that comprise twosided markets). But, crucially, they are also consumers who, when choosing which worship services best suit their needs, are deciding how, when, and where to spend their resources—their time, attention, trust in a religious authority, and money (for those who tithe or otherwise donate to their church). These resources function as a form of capital held (and, ultimately, spent) by each consumer qua churchgoer. Worship is thus an act of consumption in which worshipers trade valuable resources to sustain and edify (and, for some, entertain) themselves. Worship services and their constituent components are commodities, routinely (or ritually, or liturgically) produced at least once a week (and often more frequently) to compete for worshipers who could have rather chosen to spend their time at another church or at no church at all, instead bowling, shopping, watching TV, or

134  Andrew Mall one of many other consumptive activities. Warner (2010, 122) describes this choice viscerally, picturing “streets lined with recently built churches [that] provide a religious equivalent to the many consumer options at the shopping mall.” Churchgoers’ relationships with their churches may not be explicitly transactional, nor does this equation describe the fullness of the worship experience and the God-encounter it facilitates for so many worshipers, but the nature of late capitalism is such that so many aspects of our daily lives and routines can be reduced to transactions: consumers exchanging their resources for particular goods and services. Adorno (1996 [1945]; cf. Witkin 2000) bemoaned what he perceived to be uniform taste among working- and middle-class consumers for the manufactured, uninspired, and uncomplicated music produced by the increasingly industrialized mass culture industries of the first half of the twentieth century. Decades later, scholars and observers of the popular music industry in the second half of the twentieth century criticize its homogeneity, enforced by increasingly consolidated recording and publishing sectors in which a handful of companies control a large majority of their market (Laing 2013; Marshall 2013). This worry is present within contemporary worship music also: David Bjorlin (2019), for example, has noted that 90% of CCLI’s top 100 songs (a ranked list of the worship songs reported being used most frequently by licensees, the large majority of which are churches) are administered by three companies: Bethel Music Publishing, Capitol CMG Publishing (a division of Universal Music), and Essential Music Publishing (a division of Sony Music).17 As Bjorlin points out, the resulting list of songs is startlingly homogenous, both stylistically and theologically. This homogeneity reflects the fact that CCLI and its licensors largely cater to white, charismatic-leaning evangelical traditions. But there is a danger that this homogeneity is self-perpetuating, both by directing worship leaders to new songs not dissimilar from those they have already used successfully and also by discouraging new publishers and churches with more diverse expressions of worship from participating in CCLI as licensors or licensees. The question that Bjorlin and other participants and observers critical of this homogeneity pose is one of legitimacy: To what degree can the industrialized infrastructure of contemporary worship music legitimately claim that it represents the needs of all of its participants? Furthermore, following an Adornian culture industry argument, to what degree can a worship experience legitimately meet the intimate needs of worshipers (including, among other things, facilitating the God-encounter, strengthening congregational cohesion, and reinscribing ritual and tradition) if it is rooted in the products of a handful of companies, several of which are subsidiaries of for-profit, globalized entertainment conglomerates? What impact, in other words, does the commercial nature of contemporary worship music have on the legitimacy and effectiveness of contemporary worship itself? These are good questions

Political economy and capital  135 to ask, in part because they can direct congregational music scholars and the congregating communities with whom we work to interrogate existing power hierarchies and point us toward seeking more transparent and equitable solutions to producing and circulating congregational song. And in this way, the sounds of worship might better reflect the needs of individual congregations and less those of music industry executives or their shareholders. But these are not the only questions we should be asking, nor do I believe are they the most important. The fact is that, despite the criticisms of Adorno and music industry observers, both in the past and in our present day, as consumers we make choices about the music to which we listen on a regular basis. Yes, that agency and those choices are often constrained by forces (and commercial entities) largely outside of our individual control, but nonetheless we do choose music from a seemingly endless array of options when deciding what music best suits our tastes and needs for specific situations, including worship. To argue otherwise—to claim that consumer choice within capitalist contexts is wholly irrelevant—is to divest individuals of their agency entirely. In addition to interrogating the relationships between capitalist marketplaces and worship experiences, we should also be asking “why” more often. Why did a particular worship leader choose these specific songs for that service? Why did a certain verse in a song the congregation has sung dozens of times over the last year suddenly feel so moving today? Why did we feel the Holy Spirit’s presence more readily when the worship band played louder? Asking “why” in this manner would direct our attention away from the macro-level analysis to specific experiences within particular contexts, and it can do so without abandoning the important concerns that a broader political economic approach would reveal. The phenomenology of worship is a product of individuated and distinct acts of consumption, and it varies among congregating communities and individual worshipers. Critically examining these acts and choices with attention to political economy will lead us to a greater understanding of the rich variegation of worship experiences. When worship itself is a commodity, and worshipers are simultaneously the consumers and the consumed, it is incumbent upon us as researchers to account for the ways that capital interpolates between congregational music and congregating communities. This does not mean that individuals cannot have spiritually transcendent experiences, nor that those experiences are not sincere or authentic expressions of faith. It does mean, however, that the intimacy of these moments—including those accompanied by born-capitalist songs such as “God of This City”—is the product of an accumulated set of forces put in motion to preserve and protect existing power hierarchies in capitalist contexts. The better we are able to comprehend and explain the work and effects of these forces, the clearer will be our way forward in describing and explaining the phenomenology of religious encounters.

136  Andrew Mall

Acknowledgments Jeffers Engelhardt’s feedback on this chapter was timely and illuminating. Many thanks to Lydia Zopf for reading an early draft and confirming my memory of her worship service.

Notes 1 Busman (2015) analyzes the Bluetree and Tomlin versions of “God of This City,” comparing and contrasting their harmonies and chord changes, origin stories, and theological interpretive frameworks. 2 The Dove Awards are the US Christian record industry’s version of the Grammys. The annual awards ceremony is produced by the Gospel Music Association, the main trade organization that promotes the Christian music industry in the United States. 3 Passion is a major worship convention that has taken place annually since 1997, aside from a gap in 2000–04. Some years Passion is held in multiple cities, at times simultaneously; in other years it is only held in a single location (usually Atlanta, where the organization’s headquarters are located). The annual conventions have been supplemented by tours (both within the United States and internationally) and smaller single events. Ingalls (2018, ch. 2) considers the unique aspects of congregating communities at worship conventions, including Passion. Passion’s record label, sixstepsrecords, is distributed by Capitol Christian Distribution (formerly Chordant Distribution) and has released music from David Crowder and David Crowder*Band, Sean Curran, Charlie Hall, Matt Redman, Kristiaan Stanfill, Chris Tomlin, and a long-running series of Passion-branded studio and live albums of worship music. Passion City Church opened in 2009 in Atlanta, and currently has two Atlanta locations and a branch in Washington, D.C. 4 Jeff Todd Titon addresses ethnographic research as a methodological tool for congregational music scholars in this volume. Also see Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011) on the methodological implications of ethnographic stance. 5 For more on Hillsong, see Riches and Wagner (2017). 6 McDannell (1995) has shown how important the strategic (and, at times, conspicuous) consumption and display of religious material objects has been in the construction and performance of Christian identity in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the growth of the Jesus People Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s was accompanied by an expanded range of religious commodities for new evangelical converts. One effect was the growing association of evangelical Christianity not only as a set of religious beliefs but as a lifestyle—one which could be bought at Christian bookstores and worn during your daily life outside of church. 7 Michael (2015) examines the tensions between trendiness and authenticity in discourses about “hipster” among youths. 8 This is true even for non-profit media outlets, for whom successful underwriting and grant-writing partly depends on their ability to identify and characterize their audience to funding agencies. 9 Thus, for example, commercial radio in the United States largely evolved into a system of “formats” in the 1970s in which particular genres, artists, and programming philosophies were tailored for specific idealized audience types. See, for example, Weisbard (2014) and Mall (2018a). 10 Spotify is a public corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange (as “SPOT”) since April 3, 2018.

Political economy and capital  137 11 For example, Apple Music and Netflix are only available to paying subscribers and do not have advertisements; Hulu, Spotify, and YouTube, however, provide multiple tiers of service, some of which include advertisements (in which consumers pay to access the service with their attention) and others, more costly, which do not. 12 See, for example, Smith (1991 [1776]), excerpts from Marx’s Capital in Marx and Engels (1978), and Weber (2001 [1905]). 13 See, for example, Gramsci (1988) on cultural and ideological hegemony, Adorno (1991) on mass culture and the culture industries, and Benjamin (2008) on authenticity under mass reproduction. 14 See, for example, Bourdieu (1984, 1986). 15 CCLI is one of several different licensing options for churches. Another popular licensor is OneLicense. Both CCLI and OneLicense offer similar licensing terms, but the repertoire and catalogs that each cover are different. Some churches are better suited by one or the other; many churches choose to purchase licenses from both licensors. 16 Because this revenue is tied to the ownership and administration of a musical work’s copyright, at times in the Christian music industries there has been discomfort over copyright itself. Opponents have argued that copyright inhibits the ability of Christians to use the products of intellectual and creative labor (artwork, music, poetry, etc.) to minister or evangelize—a use that should be as freely available as the God-given creative talent itself (Mall 2020). 17 Both Universal and Sony are subsidiaries of publicly traded corporations, which are legally obligated to maximize the value of their shareholders’ investments.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. “A Social Critique of Radio Music.” The Kenyon Review 18 (3/4): 229–35. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Bjorlin, David. 2019. “Consumerism and Congregational Song.” Sing! The Center for Congregational Song. September  3, 2019. https://congregationalsong.org/ consumerism-and-congregational-song/. Bluetree. 2007. Greater Things. Self-released. ———. 2009. God of This City. Lucid Artists. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A  Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood Press. ———. 1991. “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field.” Comparative Social Research 13: 1–44.

138  Andrew Mall Bruenger, David. 2016. Making Money, Making Music: History and Core Concepts. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Busman, Joshua Kalin. 2015. “ ‘Yet to Come’ or ‘Still to Be Done’? Evangelical Worship and the Power of ‘Prophetic’ Songs.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Anna E. Nekola and Tom Wagner, 199– 214. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Drott, Eric A. 2018a. “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12 (3): 233–67. ———. 2018b. “Why the Next Song Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity.” Twentieth-Century Music 15 (3): 325–57. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. 2005. The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1988. An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916– 1935. Edited by David Forgacs. 1st American ed. New York: Schocken Books. Howard, Jay R., and John M. Streck. 1999. Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1992. “Religious Markets and the Economics of Religion.” Social Compass 39 (1): 123–31. ———. 1995. “Voodoo Economics? Reviewing the Rational Choice Approach to Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34 (1): 76–88. 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. Laing, Dave. 2013. “The Recording Industry in the Twentieth Century.” In The International Recording Industries, edited by Lee Marshall, 31–52. New York: Routledge. Lim, Swee Hong, and Lester Ruth. 2017. Lovin’ on Jesus: A  Concise History of Contemporary Worship. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Mall, Andrew. 2018a. “Tuning in to Locality: Participatory Musicking at a Community Radio Station.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, 139–53. New York: Routledge. ———. 2018b. “Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music.” American Music 36 (3): 303–26. ———. 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. Marshall, Lee. 2013. “The Recording Industry in the Twenty-First Century.” In The International Recording Industries, edited by Lee Marshall, 53–74. New York: Routledge. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton. McCracken, Brett. 2010. Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

Political economy and capital  139 McDannell, Colleen. 1995. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Michael, Janna. 2015. “It’s Really Not Hip to Be a Hipster: Negotiating Trends and Authenticity in the Cultural Field.” Journal of Consumer Culture 15 (2): 163–82. Moore, R. Laurence. 1994. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Riches, Tanya, and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2017. The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Adam. 1991. Wealth of Nations. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Stace, April. 2017. Secular Music, Sacred Space: Evangelical Worship and Popular Music. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music.’ ” Ethnomusicology 51 (2): 281–305. ———. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tomlin, Chris. 2008a. “God of This City.” Track 3 on Passion: God of This City. sixstepsrecords. ———. 2008b. Hello Love. sixstepsrecords. Urban, Hugh B. 2003. “Sacred Capital: Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 15 (4): 354–89. Verter, Bradford. 2003. “Spiritual Capital: Theorizing Religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu.” Sociological Theory 21 (2): 150–74. Wagner, Tom. 2020. Music, Branding and Consumer Culture in Church: Hillsong in Focus. Oxford: Routledge. Warner, Rob. 2010. “How Congregations Are Becoming Consumers.” In Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio-Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Michael Bailey and Guy Redden, 119–30. Surrey, England: Ashgate. Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Weisbard, Eric. 2014. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Witkin, Robert W. 2000. “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” Sociological Theory 18 (1): 145–70.

8 Congregation and chorality Fluidity and distinction in the voicing of religious community Jeffers Engelhardt

Introduction II. Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can. III. Sing All. See that you join with the Congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight Degree of Weakness or Weariness hinder you. If it is a Cross to you, take it up and you will find it a Blessing. IV. Sing lustily and with a good Courage. Beware of singing as if you were half Dead, or half a Sleep; but lift up your Voice with Strength. Be no more afraid of your Voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sung the Songs of Satan. V. Sing modestly. Do not bawl, so as to be heard above or distinct from the Rest of the Congregation, that you may not destroy the Harmony; but strive to unite your Voices together, so as to make one clear melodious Sound. VI. Sing in Time. Whatever Time is Sung be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it; but attend close to the leading Voices, and move therewith as exactly as you can; and take care not to sing too slow. This drawling Way naturally steals on all who are lazy; and it is high Time to drive it out from us, and sing all our Tunes just as quick as we did at first. VII. Above all sing spiritually. Have an Eye to God in every Word you sing. Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself, or any other Creature. In order to this, attend strictly to the Sense of what you sing, and see that your Heart is not carried away with the Sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve of here, and reward when he cometh in the Clouds of Heaven. —John Wesley, “Directions for Singing”

John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” appended to his Select Hymns: With Tunes Annext (1761) and still found in the opening pages of contemporary Methodist hymnals, is an evocative outline of his Arminian theology of congregational singing as a means of experiencing God’s universally

Congregation and chorality  141 available, unconditional grace. The qualities of voice and style of practice Wesley advocates are meant to foster lay participation, no less so in Methodist meetings than when those Methodists had previously “sung the Songs of Satan.” Mass participation matters a great deal in Wesley’s directive, and many of its specific recommendations are set against “the Old Way of Singing” that emerged in “unregulated” seventeenth-century English parishes— ever-slower tempi, freer rhythms, substantial melodic elaboration, and exuberant vocal timbres (Clarke 2009; Temperley 1981). Wesley’s admonition against straying from notated melodies, voices that “bawl,” and “lazy” meandering tempi and rhythms articulates an eighteenth-century, middle-class moral sensibility filtered through the aesthetic ideals of English chorality. Unisonant melodies performed in coordinated, blended vocal “Harmony,” all in service of restrained, self-effacing worship, is Wesley’s ideal. By beginning with Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” I  want to draw attention to the way congregation and choir intersect in Christian practice, especially since congregants and choir singers (or “congregational” and “choral” repertoires) often (but not always) assume contrasting ritual and social roles through the sound and authority of their voices.1 In the singing of collective worship and its attendant field of congregational music studies, there is fluidity (often unremarkable, sometimes transformative) and distinction (in terms of ritual function and sonic ideals) between congregation and choir. Fluidity and distinction are, nevertheless, intersections. As collected bodies performing a “sacrifice of praise to God” (Hebrews 13:15), commemorating the hymn sung by Jesus and his followers at the Passover meal (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26), or singing “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3: 16), a congregation enacts the church in illocutionary song (Austin 1962); vocally, it brings a community into being rather than expressing a community that already exists (Weidman 2006, 13). And a choir, despite the architectural (the choir of a cathedral, a choral synagogue), acoustic (Thompson 2002, 180–89), and ritual distinction its name reflects, or the different ways a choir is dressed and moves, is intimately bound to a congregation in the textures of call-andresponse, its role in leading or singing in place of a congregation, and, as it performs, its ability to create a congregation of listeners (Harrison 2013). This chapter takes up the commonplace distinction between congregation and choir in hopes of bringing renewed clarity to the question of how “congregation” is defined in congregational music studies. What is a congregation, vocally, and how does it relate to a choir? Are congregational voices collective (acting in common) or collected (gathered up individually), and what about choral voices? From the perspective of voice studies, I  linger over the sonic-social figures of congregation and choir as sonic phenomena and avenues for religious voicing. This entails a shift from thinking about what the massed voices of a congregation or the specialist voices of a choir represent from an ecclesiological or aesthetic perspective to what massed voices and specialist chorality do at a sonic register in worship. Along the

142  Jeffers Engelhardt way, I draw attention to one of chorality’s provocations for congregational music studies—the fact that, as chorality turns congregants into listeners, it necessitates a listener-centered approach (alongside approaches centered on musical performance) within congregational music studies.

Congregation and chorality Coming together as “the ontological or phenomenological center of the Christian church” (Ingalls 2018, 20) in acoustic, networked, virtual, emerging, and public spaces, a Christian congregation (which need not be the limit of congregational music studies, in the case of niggun, kīrtan, or nashīd singing, for instance)2 voices an ecclesial body through the mass of its sound. The act of singing, “rather than the hermeneutic potential of ‘the voice,’ ” (M. Moore 2018, 31) is essential to the bootstrap poetics of congregation (a congregation sings and becomes a congregation by singing),3 and mass is what sounds a congregation “where two or three are gathered in my name” (Matthew 18:20). In the Gospel of Luke (2:13–14), it is, depending on the English translation, the “great company” or “multitude” of angelic voices praising God that matters. Crucial to the importance of mass participation in congregation, as Ruth King Goddard reminds us, is that “nowhere in Scripture are worshipers commanded to sing skillfully. Rather, the Psalmist tells worshipers to sing for joy (Ps. 5:11; 65:8; 67:4; 81:1; 89:12; 92:4; 100:2; and so on)” (2015, 92). By mass (no pun intended in the context of this chapter), I mean the sonic qualities of quantity, the perception of textural thickness and weight, the “superimposing tonics” (sounds with well-defined pitches) that Michel Chion, in his commentary on Pierre Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects, describes as giving a sound its mass (1983, 134).4 To get at mass in the context of collective/collected singing, we can think in terms of vocal multisonance to describe qualities of quantity and textures of thickness and weight apart from melody-centered concepts of polyphony, homophony, and heterophony. Vocal multisonance invites a crucial shift of perspective from sound product to social process; from massed voices as representing something (multiple musical “parts”) to massed voices as doing something (illocutionary song). At one possible extreme, then, a congregation comes together in the mass of its voices, a mass that registers worshipers’ acts of singing, but not necessarily, or primarily, according to the sonic ideals of chorality. Through the qualities of quantity, congregational singing is “the sonorous actualizing of the otherwise abstract or merely attributive idea of a collectivity” (Connor 2016, 6). At another possible extreme is chorality—the “anticipatory assimilation” (ibid., 8) of individual voices into an ideal choric voice. The acoustics of chorality are all about the sonic qualities valued by a community and regulated in choral cultures, often described in the language of “sound,” “blend,” “intonations,” “balance,” “resonance,” “style,” or “tuning,” for instance. Attuning one’s voice to what Sten Ternström calls the “choral

Congregation and chorality  143 dialect” (1993, 130) of a collective—the qualities of voice a community values that, in turn, produce the community (more bootstrap poetics)—is the essence of chorality. Steven Connor’s “anticipatory assimilation” is the ongoing adjustment of the “self-to-other ratio” (Ternström 1994, 293) of singing and listening in chorality; of voicing oneself in relation to an ideal of sound and comportment through the embodied coordinations of breath, muscle tension, and resonance that shape the timbre, tone, and paralinguistic registers of voices that are always-already social (see Bithell 2014; Olwage 2004, 2010; Ternström and Karna 2002). The touchstone piece of scholarship for theorizing group singing and choric vocalization is Steven Connor’s “Choralities” article (2016). In thinking through the intersections of joint singing (collective “swellings toward multeity” (ibid., 9)) and chorality (the “anticipatory assimilation” (ibid., 8) of individual voices into a collected sound), Connor echoes the fluidity and distinction between congregation and choir through reference to lay/specialist and embodied ideal/sonic ideal differences. On the one hand, regarding the embodied effects of group singing, Connor asserts that, in the choric vocal body, the “many-in-one” of the group becomes a kind of “one-from-many”; there arises a “collective voice-body that is not to be identified with any of the individuals who compose it” (ibid., 5). Although singers’ bodies are right there in plain sight, the choric voice is acousmatic—there is one voice, but no single body to which voice is ascribed; there is, rather, an extensive body—a collective worshiping body—felt in the sonic mass and acoustic space that orient voices and bodies. On the other hand, regarding the vocal ideals of chorality, it is the alignment of alimentary and respiratory organs of the body—teeth, tongue, sinuses, larynx, lungs, diaphragm—and the acoustics of specialist chorality—focused formants, blended vowels, timbral unity—that makes Connor’s “one-from-many.” What one encounters in an acousmatic choric body is an extensive body that synchronously produces and transduces; singing, listening, and feeling simultaneously, but in specialized ways and through specialized repertoires that bear the authority of religious institutions. The fluidity and distinction between congregation and choir mean that congregational singing is not exclusively about mass, nor is chorality exclusively about the sonic ideals of collective/collected voice. As singers and sounds move between congregation and choir in the textures of worship and discourses of Christian voice, absolute distinctions between congregation and choir yield to specific, contingent iterations of religious community— the qualities of vocal quantity and ideals of chorality do things in a ­congregation and to a congregation. Nevertheless, hierarchical, historical distinctions between congregation and choir can be traced to the emergence of what Thomas Turino calls “participatory” and “presentational” performance (2008). In participatory performance, the qualities of group singing matter for the level of congregational participation they index; this is music “not for listening apart from doing” (ibid., 52). In presentational

144  Jeffers Engelhardt performance, the qualities of singing matter for the sonic values and aesthetics they represent; a choir of specialists sings a repertoire for listeners or in place of a congregation with the “indexical nows” of chorality drawing continuous attention to the moment and sound of performance (ibid., 58). A participatory/presentational distinction between congregation and choir articulates with histories of Christian musical value and liturgical change and the media and institutional forms that accompany those histories. Since at least the fourth century CE, the role of psaltēs and cantor distinguished choir singers from the voices of the ekklēsia. These were specialist, literate ministers of song invested with the authority to perform canonical liturgical texts. Nevertheless, the singing of lay congregants, led in responsorial psalmody, for instance, played a vital role in the vocal ecclesiology of early Christianity. Christopher Page points to figures like Niceta, fourth-century bishop of Remesiana in present-day Serbia and author of the musical apologia De Psalmodiae Bono, who, in contrast to Augustine’s anxiety over musical affect in Christian worship, understood congregational singing in participatory terms. For Page, Niceta’s position was that “the surrender of the individual voice to the common chorus testified to the unity of the Church” (2010, 196). In early Christian worship, then, singing articulated a distinction between the aural/oral participation of laity and the literate presentation of clerical voices. Historically, a distinction between congregation and choir grew stronger through the silencing of lay voices within official Christian liturgy. Although church leaders’ appreciation of the musical and affective qualities of specialists’ singing undoubtedly played a role in turning the laity into listeners, Page points to the interactions of language, media, and ecclesial institutions to explain the sonic authority of choirs in early Christianity. Page (ibid., 196–208) argues that diglossia—the distinction of vernacular and liturgical forms of a language—meant that literate clergy and monks had exclusive access to the conservative media through which worship happened (service books and, later, melodic notation). The laity, unable to participate in their colloquial idiom, were, to a significant extent, transformed from congregational singers to a congregation of listeners. At the same time, the singers who presented hymns, psalms, and liturgical texts in choral liturgies needed schooling. Institutions like the Roman scola cantorum, cathedrals, and monasteries, invested in training vocal specialists, served to further strengthen the distinction between congregation and choir. Fast forward to the global spread of Christianity and we encounter similar institutions and media that articulate a participatory/presentational distinction between congregation and choir. This is especially true in the renewal and reframing of congregational singing through Christian reform movements of the fifteenth century and later and the dynamics of missionization, when congregational and choir singing were spaces of vocal and stylistic negotiations of colonial and imperial power. Institutionally, scolae cantorum, cathedral and choir schools, institutes of sacred music, churches,

Congregation and chorality  145 and all sorts of academies, schools, and industries continue to train the specialists who are authorized and able to present and sustain Christian repertoires and vocal practices in worship (Jarjour 2018; Lind 2012; Muller 1999, 128–39; Poplawska 2018). Choirs (however they are named) afford singers community, mobility, prestige, and religious agency through their binding ideals of chorality, authority in ritual, and recognition in competition. Song and worship leaders, cantors, clerks, precentors, music ministers, and “liturgical animators” (Reily 2016) work to involve congregants vocally in worship—practices like “lining out” hymns or leading a call-andresponse entail a congregation through the expectation of a sung collective return (Ingalls 2018, 107–41; Kelman 2018, 48; A. Moore 2015, 188; Titon 1988). Religious media like hymnals, bulletins and pilgrimage texts, PowerPoint slides, cassettes, films and mp3s, and broadcast and streaming content entail congregations as well (Diao 2018; Nekola 2015; Olwage 2010). In all these cases, a participatory/presentational distinction between congregation and choir is reproduced through Christian institutional and media forms. It is no surprise, then, that a participatory/presentational distinction is alive and well in many ecclesial communities. In her study of Coloured South African worship practices in the Eastern Cape Province, Marie Jorritsma documents how a congregation/choir distinction took shape stylistically, linguistically, and in relationship to different media in the 2000s: The musical repertoire consisted mainly of hymns (gesange), choruses (koortjies), and pieces performed by the church choir. Generally, congregations used a similar singing style for both koortjies and gesange. . . . Congregational singing of hymns and choruses occurred mainly with Afrikaans-language texts, while the choirs often performed in English. The sound of choral singing offered a stark contrast to the sound of koortjies and gesange sung by the congregations, as choir members read from parts written in staff or tonic-solfa notation; concentrated on simultaneous vocal entries and blending; and paid close attention to correct pronunciation, articulation, and phrasing. In other words, choral performance featured a more self-conscious performative approach than ordinary congregational song, with congregation members acknowledging this difference by applauding after choral items. (2016, 234) Here, Jorritsma describes how South African Christians distinguished the mass sound of participatory congregational singing from the presentational sound of chorality. For me, it is Jorritsma’s discussion of congregational applause following a choir’s performance that is especially revealing, since applause signals listeners’ attention to and appreciation of the “indexical nows” (Turino) of a particular “choral dialect” (Ternström). Compared to the illocutionary singing of a congregation that brings an ecclesial body into being through its qualities of quantity, a choir’s singing demonstrates

146  Jeffers Engelhardt specialists’ abilities to reproduce vocal ideals that are contingent on access to the media and institutional forms of chorality. In this scene, congregation and choir can be understood as antipodes of collective/collected voicing in Christian worship, wherein the congregation employs the illocutionary power of vocal multisonance to produce religious community, while choir harnesses the “authorizing discourses” (Asad 1993) of vocal style to produce the “aesthetic formations” (Meyer 2009) that make religion available to the senses. For some Christian communities, the authority of chorality has deleterious effects—namely, the silencing or self-conscious dampening of congregational voices. Ruth King Goddard argues that the “tonal ideal” (2015, 88) of chorality, part of a media-driven trend toward increasing vocal professionalization in mainline Christian worship in the United States and elsewhere, animates a shift away from participatory singing through an intensifying awareness of ideal vocal qualities. As Marissa Glynias Moore notes, the emerging market for worship consultants “tasked with empowering congregations to reclaim their voices” (2018, 29) is symptomatic of a shift away from congregational vocal multisonance in favor of specialist vocal ideals. For other congregations, the play of participatory and presentational modes of singing and worship leadership is less of an issue and more of an unremarkable aspect of their religious expression (Dueck 2017; Finnegan 2007, 211–21; Ingalls 2018; Rommen 2007). Across global Christianities, fluidity and distinction between congregation and choir are commonplace. How particular Christian communities value illocutionary participation and specialist presentation are historical and ethnographic frames for encountering vocal ecclesiologies and changing relationships between Christian media, institutions, and ritual.

Fluidity and distinction Descriptions of the fluidity between congregation and choir abound in music studies. In The Whole Church Sings: Congregational Singing in Luther’s Wittenberg, Robin Leaver highlights the terminological and liturgical expressions of this fluidity in Martin Luther’s “German Litany,” published in his Small Catechism, probably in 1529: The German Litany was intended for [ordinary laypeople] and was to be sung antiphonally by choir and congregation, the choir being designated “Der Erste Chor” (the first choir) and the congregation “Der Ander Chor” (the second choir). At specific points both choir and congregation sing together: “Beide Chör zusammen” (both choirs together). The fact that the congregation is termed choir illuminates Luther’s use of the terms in the Deutsche Messe, where he writes, “After the Epistle a German hymn, either Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist or any other, is sung with the whole choir.” It is clear that Luther does not mean only

Congregation and chorality  147 the exclusive members of the choir should sing the hymn, but rather “the whole choir,” that is, the totality of the gathered community at worship, choir and congregation singing together. (Leaver 2017, 149–50) For Luther, as Leaver shows, antiphony and “unisonance,” to repurpose Benedict Anderson’s term from Imagined Communities (1991, 145), rather than an absolute ritual and qualitative distinction between congregation and choir, is key; the back-and-forth and togetherness of laypeople and trained singers constitute “the totality of the gathered community at worship” (vernacularizing Christianity and flattening out ecclesial hierarchies along the way). Here, Anderson’s “unisonance” (the potential of collective singing to represent ideological unity) and the idea of vocal multisonance (the sonic textures of mass and plurality produced through collective singing) complement one another in elaborating on the social and sonic phenomenon of collective singing. In the gospel music tradition, and nearly five centuries after Luther, there is an “important and provocative resemblance between choirs and congregations” (Shelley 2019, 194). Describing a 2012 performance by Lecresia Campbell, Braxton D. Shelley articulates “the participatory orientation that is so central to gospel performance” (ibid., 187): After winding through a virtuosic medley of Andraé Crouch’s “The Blood” and the hymn “Power in the Blood,” Campbell signaled that she would end her set with one of the songs for which she is best known, Brenda Joyce Moore’s “Perfect Praise.” As the musicians played the introduction to this canonical gospel selection, the soloist observed that the song was “recorded thirty years ago, straight out of the word of God.” After quoting its opening words, the first verse of Psalm 8, “Oh, Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth,” Campbell deputized the congregation with the statement “and the best choir is in the audience.” (ibid., 186–7) In this scene, fluidity between congregation and choir becomes the sound of mass unisonance, evaluated, in Campbell’s words, as “the best.” “In effective gospel performances,” Shelley writes, “entire congregations become one large choir” (ibid., 187) in the textures of worship performance. Here, distinctions between congregation and choir give way to a sound whose qualities of mass index a quantity of voices and bodies with great ecclesiological and spiritual significance. In the fluidity between congregation and choir sounded by antiphony and unisonance, sonic and vocal values connected to Christian community and ecclesiology hold sway (see Engelhardt 2015, 85–126 for a historical exploration of these dynamics in Estonian Orthodox Christianity). Given

148  Jeffers Engelhardt such fluidity, what about the distinction between congregation and choir that may arise when sonic ideals of chorality hold sway in the singing of worship? In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea, Nicholas Harkness focuses on how “the triumphalist narrative of Korea’s Christianization”—“the shift from Confucianism, shamanism, and Buddhism to Christianity; from superstition to enlightenment; from dictatorship to democracy; from suffering to grace; from sickness to health; from poverty to wealth; and from dirtiness to cleanliness”—hinges upon “a particular kind of singing voice—a European-style classical voice” (Harkness 2014, 8). With so much riding on the qualities of voice in this context, the distinction between congregation and choir is heightened through the concrete association of a European-style classical voice with wealth, discipline, cleanliness, and religious standing: Choirs are typically formed of music students or recent graduates (who are often soloists at other churches as well), titled members of the church (e.g., elders and deacons), and members of the general congregation (some of whom may have studied voice in college). To audition successfully and sing in the choir is to send a signal to the congregation that one is of a certain caliber, not only of musicianship, but also of Christian personhood. Within the choirs themselves, the soloists—both their voices and their conduct—are held up as examples to which the rest of the choir must orient. (ibid., 87) Here, chorality is the province of specialist vocalists who mediate individual and national salvation. In the wealthy South Korean Presbyterian congregation Harkness studied, the voices of untrained laypeople in the congregation were unable to carry the fullest message of Korea’s coming into Christianity; laypeople could not voice themselves according to the sonic ideals of bel canto singing that shaped the choir. In another case of how religious significance and an exclusive form of vocality coalesce in the acoustics of chorality, Bernard Lortat-Jacob describes Sardinian coro singing for Holy Week, when four male voices are appointed to a cuncordu by the prior of their brotherhood to sing the “Miserere,” “Stabat Mater,” and “Jesu” on Holy Monday: Just as blue and yellow do not result in a variegated hue but in a distinct color (i.e., green) that carries no clues as to its composite origin, so too a choir’s character cannot be reduced to the individuals who constitute it. . . . The brethren’s singing (which is readily observable, so numerous are the occasions for it) has a definite goal—one might even call it an aesthetic project—which may be realized more or less well in each performance. They are not looking to produce a broad spectrum from their

Congregation and chorality  149 combined voices, but rather to get the most out of the different consonances available in a chord. As they sing, it is as if their attention—not to mention their intention—is focused not on a vast spectrum, but on a much narrower frequency band in which the voices suddenly double (as the singers themselves say), bringing out another voice called the quintina. The quintina is produced by the fusion of partials from different voices matching. It stems from the perfect “accord” of the singers, and their combined voices unite to make it fully audible. (2006, 88) The “ineffable” (Lortat-Jacob 1995, 94) nature of this singing comes from the production of the quintina—the clear, resonant harmonic that is acoustic evidence of the singers’ embodied and spiritual attunement to each other. Singing in a concordu is a synchronous process of listening to others and controlling one’s breath and vocal apparatus—a heightened form of chorality that manipulates acoustic phenomena in collective singing for a religious period of heightened significance. In producing a sound that acoustically exceeds the quantitative massing of four voices, the specialist singers in the Sardinian coro Lortat-Jacob describes manifest an acoustic ideal and animate a repertoire and practice far removed from participatory congregational singing. When the values of presentational quality hold sway over the qualities of vocal quantity, a strong distinction between congregation and choir may rise to the surface within specific Christian communities. In cases where this situation does not engender strong distinctions (when laypeople join in or sing along with professionals, for instance), the presentational quality/vocal quantity distinction becomes a “both/and” congregational dynamic. Congregations, in the case of a strong distinction between presentation and participatory performance, are transformed from a mass of voices into a mass of listeners, participating in ritual through their postures and practices of listening; praying through resonant, generative acts of listening (cf. Engelhardt 2018); completing the social and perceptual feedback loop between authorized, specialized voices and an ecclesial community. In its more intensely differentiated forms, chorality provokes congregational music studies to shift its frame from the congregational performance of worship to congregational listening as worship.

Methodological and theoretical takeaways for congregational music studies and voice studies The perspectives of voice studies are invaluable in pinpointing the sonicsocial dynamics of congregation and choir and centering vocal bodies in congregational music studies, which has tended to focus on music’s role in representation, mediation, and ritual. Here, I have focused on the fluidity and distinction between participatory and presentational singing; vocal

150  Jeffers Engelhardt unisonance (the appearance of ideological coherence in mass singing) and vocal multisonance (the textures of thickness and weight in mass singing); and collective singing (voicing something in common) and collected singing (voices curated according to a sonic ideal). Developing these dynamics in congregational music studies promises to push forward conversations in voice studies as well. Voice studies has tended toward an almost exclusive focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech.5 This work focuses on what it means to ascribe and define voice, approaching voices as sonic and material embodiments of subjectivity and identity, even, and especially, as voice amplifies how bodies are gendered, raced, and acousmatically conjured up. Collective/collected voices are similarly absent in the philosophical, mediacentered, and psychoanalytic literature on voice that takes on the metaphorical and metaphysical aspects of voice as agency, as alien to or uncannily separate from the body and psyche, and as it relates to language and other sensory modes. If voice studies scholars need to engage more with group singing, then historical, ethnographic, and theological work on congregational and choir singing within and beyond Christianity is poised to make important interventions in music and sound studies. The work I cite here is, of course, foundational in this regard. Thinking about the congregation (and the choir) in congregational music studies means taking up many of the same questions concerning group singing as scholars in music and sound studies. Understanding what a congregation or a choir is in terms of its participatory/presentational, unisonant/ multisonant, and collective/collected characteristics means understanding, more broadly, the sonic and social characteristics of group singing, however it is named (Ingalls 2012). As part of the work of decolonizing music studies, critical reflection on what it means to call group singing “choir,” “chorus,” or “congregation” is a minimum requirement in positioning oneself relative to the Christian genealogies of those terms (see Engelhardt 2009, 33–34; Reily and Dueck 2016, 2–5; Robbins 2018 on the Christianity of music studies). At the same time, as André de Quadros points out, it is necessary “to consider how and why the terms chorus and choir have been arrogated by, or assigned to, a single type of music-making and configuration” (2019, 15). De Quadros shows that the default definition of chorus or choir hinges on its social role in presentational performance; choruses and choirs rehearse and perform, and “an assembled community or congregation” (ibid., 16) does something different—illocutionary communal singing, for instance. The fluidity and distinction between congregation and choir that I linger over here, however, trouble hard categories of congregation and choir, especially as voice becomes central. The intersections of congregation and choir, in other words, are fertile grounds for developing the place of group singing in voice studies. In Christian communities, the dynamics of congregation and choir call up the fleeting yet firm distinctions between participatory and presentational

Congregation and chorality  151 modes of group singing. For voice studies, these dynamics reveal how participatory choric voicing is about making community and publics through collective/collected vocal embodiment. The categories of congregation and choir also draw our attention to the presentational sonic qualities of massed voices, noting how bodies are aligned and oriented around vocal ideals. And in the often-contested ways that religious communities define and value voices that are “right,” the style and composition of congregations and choirs highlight the always-already social nature of voice through its racialization, apt timbre, gendering, metalinguistic codes, authority, accent, and so on. For congregational music studies, attending to what happens through and to these social-vocal worshiping bodies amplifies the meanings of congregation and choir in specific Christian communities, not least in the fluidity and distinction that take shape across and within those categories. As Gregory Barz has shown in Tanzanian kwayas, these collectives are “a microcosm of an idealized social system” (2006, 21) brought into being not only through their style and repertoire but also through their vocal role in congregational ministry and evangelizing and their function as social indemnity groups and spaces for leisure, romance, and surrogate kinship. The mixtures of participatory and presentational voicing in these kinds of Christian communities trace the continuities of vocal, religious, and social ideals. What does it mean when a congregation or choir sings in the first person singular “I”? From the “singular-plural” (Connor 2016, 3) perspective of collective voice, this commonplace in Christian worship becomes a key methodological stance in addressing historical, ethnographic, and theological questions about how religious personhood and community are voiced, no less so in Wesley’s “Directions for Singing” than in choir schools’ curricula or the vocal qualities modeled in professionally produced audiovisual worship media. In encountering congregational musicking, one encounters how voices iterate authority and tradition in the qualities of quantity and the ideals of lay and specialist vocalities they perform. Methodologically, each of these variables points to how congregational musicking can be understood historically, ethnographically, or theologically in intimately local or broadly diachronic frames. As voices create—and are simultaneously channeled by—a congregation or choir, and as they bear the fluidity and distinction between those modes of vocal worship, they articulate new relationships between religious media and texts, ritual roles, and attuned bodies and senses. In observing the ways fluidity and distinction between congregation and choir create new forms of joint voice and religious practice, one encounters new openings for scholarly critique and curiosity.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Amy Coddington, Bradford Garvey, Monique Ingalls, and Robert Saler for their conversations and feedback on this chapter.

152  Jeffers Engelhardt

Notes 1 See Ingalls, Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Sherinian (2018) on the “Eurocentric assumption of a stark binary between choir and congregation” and the distinction of choir and congregation on the basis of musical style rather than specialist vocality (15–16). 2 Although the field of non-Christian congregational singing is too vast to cover here, it is, I believe, essential, without getting bogged down in definitions of “religion,” to incorporate non-Christian congregational practices into the field of congregational music studies (see Chen 2016; Frühauf 2015; Greene 2004; Summitt 2000 and in this volume; and Qureshi 1995). 3 In writing on sonic intensity and the “economy of embodiment” in Christian hymnody, Joshua Kalin Busman describes the bootstrap poetics of congregating as “sound becoming theology becoming body politics becoming sound” (2017, 204). 4 See Schaeffer 2017, 406–21. 5 Remarkably, there is no mention of group singing, choir, or chorality in Nina Sun Eidsheim’s and Katherine Meizel’s The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (2019), which is meant to take stock of this no-longer-emergent field.

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154  Jeffers Engelhardt Kelman, Ari Y. 2018. Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America. New York: New York University Press. Leaver, Robin A. 2017. The Whole Church Sings: Congregational Singing in Luther’s Wittenberg. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Lind, Tore Tvarnø. 2012. The Past Is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Lortat-Jacob, Bernard. 1995. Sardinian Chronicles. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. “Concord and Discord: Singing Together in a Sardinian Brotherhood.” In Chorus and Community, edited by Karen Ahlquist, trans Marc Benamou. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 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. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, Allan F. 2015. “On the Inherent Contradiction in Worship Music.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Anna Nekola and Tom Wagner. Surrey: Ashgate. Moore, Marissa Glynias. 2018. “Sounding the Congregational Voice.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 4 (1). https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1093. Muller, Carol Ann. 1999. Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nekola, Anna E. 2015. “Introduction: Worship Media as Media Form and Mediated Practice: Theorizing the Intersections of Media, Music, and Lived Religion.” In Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, edited by Anna Nekola and Tom Wagner. Surrey: Ashgate. Olwage, Grant. 2004. “The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre.” Ethnomusicology Forum 13 (2): 203–26. ———. 2010. “Singing the Victorian World: Tonic Sol-Fa and Discourses of Religion, Science, and Empire in the Cape Colony.” Muziki 7 (2): 193–215. Page, Christopher. 2010. The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Poplawska, Marzanna. 2018. “Inculturation, Institutions, and the Creation of a Localized Congregational Repertoire in Indonesia.” In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, edited by Monique M. Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe C. Sherinian. New York: Routledge. Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1995. Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reily, Suzel Ana. 2016. “Local Music Making and the Liturgical Renovation in Minas Gerais.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan M. Dueck. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reily, Suzel Ana, and Jonathan M. Dueck. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan M. Dueck. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2018. “Afterword: On the Anthropology of Christianity, the Complexity of the Local, and the Study of Christian Congregational Music in Global Perspective.” In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities

Congregation and chorality  155 Worldwide, edited by Monique M. Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Regersberg, and Zoe C. Sherinian. New York: Routledge. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schaeffer, Pierre. 2017. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines. Translated by Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shelley, Braxton D. 2019. “Analyzing Gospel.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72 (1): 181–243. Summitt, Jeffrey A. 2000. The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Temperley, Nicholas. 1981. “The Old Way of Singing: Its Origins and Development.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 (3): 511–44. Ternström, Sten. 1993. “Perceptual Evaluations of Voice Scatter in Unison Choir Sounds.” Journal of Voice 7 (2): 129–35. ———. 1994. “Hearing Myself with Others: Sound Levels in Choral Performance Measured with Separation of One’s Own Voice from the Rest of the Choir.” Journal of Voice 8 (4): 293–302. Ternström, Sten, and Duane Richard Karna. 2002. “Choir.” In The Science & Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, edited by Richard Parncutt and Gary E. McPherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weidman, Amanda J. 2006. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

9 “We just don’t have it” Addressing whiteness in congregational voicing Marissa Glynias Moore

Introduction Perched on a sharp incline characteristic of the Potrero Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, California, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church—or St. Gregory’s, as it is often called by congregants—is known for its somewhat eclectic mix of denominational and cultural influences, visible in its Byzantine iconography of saints ranging from Malcolm X to Queen Elizabeth I, its Ethiopian and Coptic Orthodox crosses, and its Japanese bell-gongs and Shinto shrine “tabernacle.” Such a juxtaposition of multicultural visual elements is mirrored in the musical repertoire: the St. Gregory’s songbook is home to Syrian Orthodox responses, Sacred Harp tunes, and South African anti-apartheid songs alike (Fabian et al. 1999). The diversity of origins for its visual, aural, and liturgical practices is often what draws congregants and visitors to St. Gregory’s, earning it the moniker “one weird church,” in the words of journalist Gordon Young (1996). In one sense, the multicultural musical selections and iconography of dancing saints are more aspirational than they are literal: the diversity of the worship at St. Gregory’s stands in stark contrast to the makeup of the congregation, a community that is made up primarily of white, middleto upper-class individuals. Nevertheless, congregants at St. Gregory’s embrace this “weird” identity: cultural borrowings are part and parcel of St. Gregory’s identity of practice and a key attraction for many to worship there. Congregants and choir members alike celebrate the cultural diversity of liturgical materials, feeling equally at home singing Russian Orthodox kyries as they do hymns written by fellow members. During my ethnographic research at St. Gregory’s, then, it was somewhat surprising for me to find that one repertoire in particular inspired an openly expressed discomfort among choir members around its performance: African American sacred music. When singing gospel songs or arrangements of Negro spirituals, choir members consistently described their anxiety in performing this repertoire, feeling that their voices were fundamentally unsuited to this music due to their whiteness. But why, I  wondered, in a place with widespread embrace of cultural diversity, did my interlocutors understand a performative vocal challenge as a racialized failing?

“We just don’t have it”  157 In this chapter, I suggest that these moments of discomfort highlight how congregations in the United States negotiate the nexus of repertoire, racialized identity, and voicing within their musical practices. My analysis relies on a tripartite construction of the voice that includes the sound emitted, the source from which it is emitted, and the musical and lyrical content that it carries. I show how the sounds of singing have cultural and historical meanings that can be simultaneously shared and contested within a particular community, drawing on Nicholas Harkness’ model of voice as a “phonosonic nexus” (2014, 12). As I shall demonstrate, a focus on voicing reveals assumptions about Black racialized sounds and bodies which, in fact, produce racialized identities of whiteness. Because the voice is a primary site of music- and meaning-making for many congregations, I argue that congregational music scholars must grapple with the role of the voice in constructing and negotiating racialized identities. In exploring the voiced uneasiness of St. Gregory’s choir members, I first outline the types of assumptions that my interlocutors make regarding Black voicing, showing their assumptions to be, at least in part, historically and aurally constructed by white singers. The voice has long been assumed to be racialized, meaning that people believe they can identify the race of a speaker or singer through listening (Eidsheim 2019). A host of characteristics accompany this racialization, many of which are entrenched in longheld discourses of racial differences: the timbre of a singer’s voice, the nature of their pronunciation, the type of vocal embellishments, and the emotive capacities of their performance. While scholars have worked to deconstruct such associations, U.S. singers and congregants—many of whom are our ethnographic interlocutors like those at St. Gregory’s—continue to uphold these assumptions of racialized vocal sound. I suggest that the white singers at St. Gregory’s struggle to negotiate racial differences through their own voices, as their adherence to these racialized vocal expectations reveals fractures in ideology that prevent singers from understanding Black voices and bodies as similar to their own. Drawing on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, I posit that my interlocutors understand white voicing in these contexts as a lack of Black voicing, thereby problematically upholding the presumed neutrality of whiteness, diametrically opposed to vocal “color.” Such ideological fissures have significant theological consequences for St. Gregory’s choir members as well, as their inclusive theology of welcome clashes uneasily with the tacit and dominant assumption of whiteness in their music-making. Yet, I am less interested in defining “white voicing” than I am in understanding what Geoff Mann calls music’s “productive ideological function,” or how communities actively produce and contend with particular forms of whiteness through singing the music of other people (Mann 2008, 83). Like any construction of racialized identity, “whiteness” is not a monolithic category: it is both celebrated and critiqued in the United States for its connections to supremacist ideology and associations with working-class

158  Marissa Glynias Moore communities (Morrison 1992; Hill 1997; Vance 2016). I suggest, however, that the white voicing of St. Gregory’s participants (“well-meaning white people”) points toward the need for a new conception of whiteness in music scholarship as a way to understand how these communities sing their whiteness through what I call the unattainable Black voice. Indeed, the performative handwringing of white singers in approaching African American sacred music highlights the complicated political dynamics inherent in any project of cross-racial musicking undertaken by white people in the United States and poses a new way of considering the role of racialized identities in congregational music making. Finally, I explore how missteps in performance can nevertheless have a positive, even productive effect for white congregational communities: by being unable to “attain” the Black voice, white singers become involved in critical discussions and reflections around race and the complicity of white people in structures of oppression in the United States, including those associated with Christian institutions and congregations. While my focus throughout this chapter is on U.S. contexts, my underlying arguments regarding racialized voicing and congregational music-making can be of use—as I suggest in my conclusion—to scholars working around the world.

The racialized voice To begin with the voice is to question how singers conceive of the sounds that they produce vis-à-vis their own subjectivity: Can the words that one sings, the music that carries those words, or the timbre of one’s voice index one’s gender, race, class, ethnicity, or spirituality? Or are those categories primarily mapped by listeners, rather than produced by singers? Nicholas Harkness’s conception of the voice as a “phonosonic nexus” allows us to understand how both of these positions may exist in one voicing (Harkness 2014). Voice as a phonosonic nexus accounts for the sound of the voice, the source from which it comes, and the content that it carries, showing how voicing is always already imbued with cultural and historical meaning within a particular context. As a result, the act of voicing always creates a feedback-loop of meaning, reaffirming how voices are understood by both producers and listeners at each sounding. Such a conception of voicing allows us to understand how racialized assumptions of Black sound are simultaneously produced by Black singers and constructed by white audiences. Indeed, vocal Blackness has long been considered to comprise a discernible and audible set of characteristics, many of which can work to empower Black communities by voicing resistance and shared social values common to the African American experience (Morrison 2017; Nero 2007; Mahon 2011; Radano 2013). Thus, my intention is not to claim that Black vocal practice is solely the construction of the white listening ear. Rather, I  contend that when considering race—especially Blackness—listeners and performers in the United

“We just don’t have it”  159 States assume a direct correlation between sound and source that essentializes Black practices for the empowerment of white people. For example, vocal qualities associated with Blackness have long been coopted by white singers, often for their own financial gain (Brooks 2010). Laurie Stras has argued that this adoption of Black vocal sound coincided with the rise of the radio industry in the early twentieth century, as white performers felt the need to “cultivate a more convincing aural black mask  .  .  . to retain white artists’ popularity in a market hungry for black cultural forms” (Stras 2007, 217). Just as minstrelsy was based on a “profound white investment in black culture,” in the words of historian Eric Lott, the practice of “sounding black” that continues to dominate the popular music of white artists treats Blackness as a resource to be mined for white gain (Lott 1993, 18). Such appropriations reveal an understanding of the Black voice as a marker of differences, rather than recognizing sonic Blackness as a quality that is, in part, aurally constructed by white listeners. As Ronald Radano writes, “the American populace [is] still convinced that the blackness and whiteness of sound is fundamentally, essentially, real,” (Radano 2003, 12). For white singers, Black vocal sound is rooted in the Black body, an idea that is “grounded in the assumption that the black body is intrinsically different from the white body,” in the words of Nina Eidsheim, meaning that regardless of musical content, “the resonance of a singer’s black body is evident,” (Eidsheim 2011, 655). But, as Eidsheim further argues, the timbral quality associated with blackness is not an essential sonic quality of Black bodies; instead, its essentialized and inflexible characteristics are constructed by the (white) listener’s ear. Indeed, Jennifer Stoever has identified the historical process of racializing sound as the drawing of a “sonic color line,” showing how the white “listening ear” has constructed a hierarchical division of sound that both names sonic blackness and simultaneously subjugates it to dominant white norms (Stoever 2016, 7). Like the world of opera that Eidsheim studies, white singers in communal singing contexts who perpetuate the “artificial belief that timbre evokes blackness” risk “maintain[ing] otherness and thus maintain[ing] whiteness, with its accompanying privileges,” (Eidsheim 2011, 664). Along with a timbre associated with specific racialized bodies, assumptions about the inherent musical abilities and deep spirituality of Black singers also work to construct the nature of Black vocalization in the minds and ears of white performers.1 These assumptions can be traced back to the era of Reconstruction, when performances by Black musicians like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were heard as a “sonic medium for grief, nostalgia, and racial release” by white audiences, many of whom wished to anchor blackness “firmly in the sounds of slavery,” (Stoever 2016, 132). Black voicing is thus not purely about timbre but also about the cultural and historical associations that have historically been heard in those sounds. St. Gregory’s choir members regularly uphold these essentialized notions of Black vocalization. Rather than constructing sonic blackness aurally,

160  Marissa Glynias Moore however, choir members instead produce their whiteness through a failure to attain vocal blackness. St. Gregory’s choir members desire performative authenticity in all of their cross-cultural music-making; and yet, when performing African American sacred music, they feel that such authenticity is impossible to access due to their whiteness. Self-described as “white honkeys” and “tight-a** white folks,” some choir members tell me that their discomfort stems from being unable to replicate the feeling of Negro spirituals and gospel music that seems inherent to Black choirs (Julia, conversation with author, 7/3/16; Peter, conversation with author, 7/3/16).2 When the choir sings arrangements of Negro spirituals, like Brian Tate’s version of “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” for example, some members feel that their performance efforts do not reach the sonic or aesthetic ideals for which the genre calls, lacking in rhythmic clarity or appropriate emotional fervor. In addressing rhythm and emotion as communal deficiencies, white singers at St. Gregory’s laud Black communities for the musical and performative prowess they hear in the vocal performances of these genres. But comments like “we try really hard, but we just can’t rock a backbeat,” and acknowledgments that St. Gregory’s singers lack the “real enthusiasm and spirit” that Black congregations “instantly” seem to have, unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes regarding the innate rhythmic abilities and deep physical spirituality of Black people that are considered part and parcel of Black voicing (Michael, conversation with author, 7/6/13; Jane, conversation with author, 7/10/16). The association of rhythm with Black music in the United States is, of course, a crucial and valuable element of understanding Black musical practice and its historical development (Ramsey 2003). The association of rhythm with racial blackness—that is, the collapsing of rhythmic ability with one’s raced body—however, is a common and over-exhausted trope that continues to pervade white consciousness. As a result, its appearance in comments regarding Black voicing is (unfortunately) not especially surprising (Agawu 2003; Tagg 1989). Similarly, as Gerardo Marti writes, African Americans are often identified as “superior, ‘soulful’ worshippers” by both Black and white Christians, who relate repertoires like gospel and Negro spirituals to the persistent suffering caused by enslavement (Marti 2012, 52–56). Again, my intention is not to dismiss the empowering nature of deeply spiritual worship within African American congregations: rather, it is to show that for choir members at St. Gregory’s, the pathos of Black voicing is inherent to African American performance, making it a natural, even essential, characteristic of their vocal practice. Yet, as scholars like Jennifer Stoever and Julia Chybowski have shown, the act of identifying vocal emotion as natural to Black singers—whether that emotion is mournful, spiritual, or simply heightened—has, since the Reconstruction era, worked both to obscure the musical training and expertise of Black singers and to perpetuate stereotypes regarding what Black voicing should (and must) entail (Stoever 2016, 141–42; Chybowski 2014, 128).

“We just don’t have it”  161 In addition, by collapsing the sound of emotive singing and rhythmic precision with the blackness of the vocal source, singers at St. Gregory’s mark their own whiteness through what they perceive as innate racial disabilities; or in one congregant’s words, “we just don’t have it . . . we’re just so white,” (Lena, conversation with author, 7/5/16). Yet in many ways, this whiteness is produced rather than inherent, a result of their own performance not living up to assumed characteristics of Black voicing. As is often the case with whiteness, its shape is defined in opposition to blackness, rather than on its own terms. Ruth Frankenberg has called whiteness an “unmarked marker,” showing how whiteness signifies a power to exclude on the basis of race and the privilege to claim that race is irrelevant in one’s actions (Frankenberg 1997, 13). Indeed, much work in critical whiteness studies has illuminated the ways in which whiteness is the assumed neutrality, defined only through its lack of blackness; as George Lipsitz writes, whiteness is the category “against which difference is constructed,” meaning that it “never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations,” (Lipsitz 1998, 1). At St. Gregory’s, whiteness is only named in reference to blackness; it is only through the performative failing of Black vocalization that choir members’ racialized white identities come into relief. In the broader scheme of congregational musicking, this seemingly small instance of discomfort shows how cross-racial voicing can magnify fissures that already exist within communities, even if they are not otherwise addressed. At St. Gregory’s, for example, these existing racialized tensions are generally obscured due to their explicit celebration of “cultural” differences, as congregants and choir members generally uphold the unattainable ideals of “race neutrality” or “color blindness.”3 Color blindness is often a well-intentioned response to the essentialist racism of earlier decades; yet, as Frankenberg has argued, color blindness in fact involves a “selective engagement with difference” that, “despite the best intentions of its adherents . . . preserves the power structure inherent in essentialist racism” (Frankenberg 1993, 139, 43, 47). Color blindness is often associated with the tenets of multiculturalism that are upheld at St. Gregory’s more broadly, an ideology that—while it affirms the universal “equal dignity of all citizens” through a “politics of difference”—has been criticized as a utopian celebration of differences that allows white people to neglect the messy history of race-­ relations specifically in the United States (Taylor 1994, 38; Roediger 2002, 7; Hage 2000; Abelmann and Lan 2008). At a place like St. Gregory’s, where singing and worshipping with the “saints of every time and place” are core to its mission, negotiating racial differences in vocal practice poses a challenge to their universalist ethos, as practitioners instead become entrenched in vocal differences. The white vocalization of Black sacred music can therefore complicate the idealistic universal “body of Christ” that Christian congregational voicing is meant to promote (Moore 2018a). St. Gregory’s is but one example of

162  Marissa Glynias Moore many mainline Protestant congregations in the United States that endeavor to sing music of the “Other,” whether drawing from a repertoire of nonWestern Christian music known as “global song” or using African American gospel music as a choral anthem (Moore 2018b). Because the vast majority of these communities are white, they often undertake the performance of this music as an ethical and theological act of inclusion, intending to “draw the circle wide,” in the words of one frequently sung congregational hymn (Thompson). Congregants thus intentionally use their voices to work toward transcending cultural and racial boundaries. Yet as I have shown, the resulting vocal performances often reproduce these boundaries, thus reifying racialized categories by forcing singers to recognize their own racialized identities as white singers. As a result, the hopeful imaginings of the universal and global body of Christ are immediately fractured by revealing widely held assumptions regarding racial essentialism and musical performance.

Voicing well-meaning whiteness For many congregants in U.S. mainline Protestant denominations, musical experiences in worship are influenced by the tension described earlier: the inclusion of “diverse” musical traditions, whether grounded in a theological imperative or multiculturalist ideology, and the fear of cultural appropriation. As an academic and popular critique, appropriation can be leveled against members of a dominant culture for exploiting the (musical) resources of a disenfranchised community, often with both cultural and financial consequences (Ziff and Rao 1997; Gray 2017). As a result, many white communities in the United States who endeavor to sing “cross-­culturally” or “cross-racially” (often meaning that their repertoire originates from a minority culture) are caught up in a mixture of “wokeness” and white guilt, desiring to engage in practices that are inclusive, but ever wary of replicating the systemic power structures that have long privileged white Christians in the United States.4 In the case of African American sacred music specifically, the fundamental realness of Black sound is thus further imbued with concerns over perpetuating historically oppressive presentations of blackness, such as those associated with minstrelsy or appropriation. As E. Patrick Johnson notes in his work with white Australian gospel choirs, “when white-identified subjects perform ‘black’ signifiers . . . the historical weight of white skin privilege necessarily engenders a tense relationship with its ‘others’ ” (Johnson 2005, 61). This fear of representing what Gage Averill calls “blackvoice,” or “the stereotyped representations of black dialect, vocal mannerisms, and musical style that was the product of the minstrel stage,” is ever-present for white singers in the United States who wish to distance themselves from a practice that long worked to sustain white supremacy through the denigration of Black voices and bodies (Averill 2003, 11).

“We just don’t have it”  163 The whiteness that is voiced through performances of African American sacred music at St. Gregory’s, then, is a particular form of whiteness: the whiteness of “well-meaning white people.” Following its use in social justice contexts, I understand well-meaning white people to be those who acknowledge that racism is embedded into institutional structures of all types.5 Well-meaning white people therefore recognize that their privilege as white people allows them to either deny their complicity in these structures or to concede it but respond through inaction. Many U.S. congregations (and universities, for that matter) are full of well-meaning white people. In using this definition, I  am inspired by work within critical race theory that recognizes how U.S. institutional, governmental, and political structures have long wielded the power of white privilege to marginalize people of color under the guise of racially neutral hierarchies. Critical race theory originated in legal studies, focusing on how the legal system has propped up white supremacy and on how anti-racist work might provide solutions.6 While critical race theory is underutilized in music scholarship, Matthew Morrison’s recent work on “blacksound,” tracing the “ephemerality and materiality of the sounds produced by black bodies within the history of popular music in the United States,” provides one excellent example of this type of methodology (Morrison 2017, 18).7 Morrison emphasizes the role of sound in constructing a conception of whiteness that has systematically subjugated blackness and Black people throughout the history of American popular music, resonating with the work of Eidsheim and Stoever discussed earlier (Eidsheim 2019; Stoever 2016). The voicing of well-meaning whiteness, I contend, takes Morrison’s claim and turns it on its head: rather than focusing on the sounds produced by Black bodies and their ramifications for the construction of white supremacy, I  instead turn my attention to the voices produced by white bodies and its ramifications for the same. These acts of voicing are imbued with a simultaneous (presumed) failure of Black vocality and fear of “blackvoice,” an awareness of the dangers of white supremacy with an almostparalyzing fear and guilt of how to move forward.8 My experiences at St. Gregory’s, however, have shown that the voicing of well-meaning whiteness not only results in paralyzing anxiety but can also catalyze critical reflection about the complicity of white Christians in structural inequalities that perpetuate the assumptions of racialized voicing. At St. Gregory’s, many singers assert the importance of being attentive to a song’s context especially when it draws on the African American experience precisely to avoid the tendency of white performers appropriating Black expression (Baraka 1960; Brackett 2000, 109–19; Cutler 2014). In some cases, this contextual attention leads to a performative adjustment. In speaking with Jean, a choir member and self-defined racial justice advocate, she recalled to me a moment where she made an intervention during rehearsal when singing “My God is a Rock.” Stopping the rehearsal after a fast run-through of the song, Jean suggested slowing down the tempo to

164  Marissa Glynias Moore embody the song’s lyrical themes of providing hope in times of crisis better. She remembered saying at the time, If we look at the words, they are really powerful. Shelter in a time of storm. I  think that we are in a time of storm, now and I  think that maybe if, we look at these words and think about the context in which they were written—I don’t know but have to presume that there have been very few moments in the last 400  years of black America that hasn’t been a time of storm. . . . Whenever it was, there was violence against black people. The song states that in the time of storm, God is a rock. This is really heavy stuff. Maybe if we take it a little slower, with some gravitas, awareness, and thinking about what has been going on this week, maybe it will feel different. (Jean, conversation with author, 7/27/16) She suggests that St. Gregory’s choir members should emphasize the differences by historically contextualizing the song’s origins and its current resonances for Black Americans in the United States—even if, in this case, such an emphasis simply means singing the song more slowly. Jean’s own work with the Black Lives Matter movement and as a convener of a book club at St. Gregory’s focused on social justice (during my time there, the book club was reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow) also shapes her perspective as a well-meaning white person, as she strives to act as an ally to marginalized communities in many of her personal endeavors. As a result, Jean’s proposed rehearsal adjustment was meant to lead her fellow singers to go beyond performance—beyond the sounds of their voices—toward a more holistic understanding of the meaning of their performance. The phonosonic nexus of their voicing, inspired by Jean’s intervention, therefore allowed for a more nuanced and grounded understanding of the historical and current systems of racism in the United States. By raising concerns over the validity and practices surrounding singing American Black music in their predominantly white space, choir members of St. Gregory’s show their resistance to being complicit in these long-standing practices of appropriation of Black musical culture. Choir members Helen and Jocelyn further bear this out in their expressed uneasiness in identifying their choir as one that specializes in the performance of African American sacred music. Helen recalls how, many years earlier, the choir wanted to begin a series of annual concerts and considered choosing the performance of Negro spirituals as their forte. Feeling uncomfortable with the idea, Helen remembers, “I said no way! These [spirituals] are not our music, we can’t pretend to make a specialty out of this music that is not . . . it’s not appropriate, no, we shouldn’t do that,” (Helen, conversation with author, 7/7/16). What Helen deems inappropriate is put in starker terms by Jocelyn as “the appropriation of other people’s pain and suffering,” attributing such an act to the “white privilege” that the vast majority of St. Gregory’s

“We just don’t have it”  165 congregants and choir members enjoy (Jocelyn, conversation with author, 7/26/16). Church leaders are equally aware of this reality: in the words of St. Gregory’s leader Sasha, “the possibility of looking away for white people is always there, particularly in a white church,” (Sasha, conversation with author, 7/26/16). For members at St. Gregory’s, the act of recognizing their own discomfort around race as based in structures of oppression and white privilege may be the first step in combating systemic racism. Echoing arguments within the field of critical whiteness studies, members at St. Gregory’s therefore question the presumed dominance of whiteness and critique the structural advantages that allow white people to avoid engaging with issues of race. The performance of Negro spirituals and gospel music challenges the very identity of St. Gregory’s: they are a church whose practices range in religious and cultural origins, yet they are still, fundamentally, a “white church.” Being a white church means that no matter how diverse and multicultural their liturgy is, no matter how wide-ranging the origins of their musical selections and iconographic subjects, domestic issues of race—particularly, blackness in the United States—complicate their practices, challenge their identity, and require self-reflexive evaluation. For singers at St. Gregory, it is the place of discomfort within their own voices that is the starting point for grappling with their complicity in structures of racist oppression. In naming their own assumptions about Black voicing—and, by extension, rethinking what could constitute white voicing—singers push themselves toward a place of productive insecurity and self-reflexivity, forcing them not only to confront their assumptions of differences but also to recognize how these assumptions are bound up in structural racism. As such, the voice is the site of identifying, producing, and challenging whiteness. Yet, even with this reflection, well-meaning white people like those at St. Gregory’s are by no means immune to acts and thoughts of anti-Black racism based in vocal sound. As Julia Robinson Moore and Shannon Sullivan write, well-intentioned Christian white people are sometimes the guiltiest of such offences, as their commitment to social and racial justice can “go hand in hand with the erasure of black suffering” (Moore and Sullivan 2018). The authors describe a meeting of Unitarian Universalist members in North Carolina during which they discussed the then-recent murder of Keith Lamont Scott by the Charlotte police. When the group watched the video footage of the event, some participants focused exclusively on Scott’s wife’s voice—her heightened emotion, her volume, her use of curse words—marking it as disrespectful, inappropriate, and out of control. Rather than hearing her vocalizations as the manifestation of pain from seeing her husband shot before her eyes, well-meaning white Christians heard only the transgression of decorum, showing how, as Jennifer Stoever argues, “willful white mishearings and auditory imaginings of blackness . . . have long been a matter of life and death in the United States,” (Stoever 2016, 1). Indeed, as Moore and Sullivan argue, U.S. Christian discourses have long been embedded within a

166  Marissa Glynias Moore racialized hermeneutic that ritualizes the dehumanization of non-white people and connects biblical texts to racist ideology (Moore and Sullivan 2018). Thus, the well-meaning white voicing of St. Gregory’s congregants is always fraught with potentialities of hope and danger, transformative change, and willful ignorance.

Whiteness, voice, and congregational music studies Through this chapter, I have highlighted the ways in which choir members at St. Gregory’s negotiate well-meaning whiteness through their own voices. By way of conclusion, I  offer three interrelated takeaways for scholars in congregational music studies regarding the intersection of race, voice, and musical practice. Racialized identity and whiteness in congregational music studies First, I assert the necessity of addressing the role of whiteness in U.S. congregational music-making. Scholars of congregational music in the United States have often addressed the concept of race by focusing on embraced racialized identities within a given community, using race as a framework for understanding a particular community’s musical practice and the heritage of its repertoire. In particular, exemplary work in the scholarship of Black sacred music has shed light on the importance of racialized identities in community formation. Scholars in Black sacred music like Deborah Smith Pollard, Mellonee Burnim, James Abbington, Alisha Lola Jones, and Birgitta Johnson have examined the ways in which African American experience shapes congregational interactions, highlighting the Black church as a space of community, support, and sometimes resistance, with shared values that manifest through musicking (Pollard 2013; Burnim 1985; Abbington 2001, 2015; Jones 2018; Johnson 2011). Considerably fewer scholars, however, have endeavored to understand how racialized identities are produced through sound, and even fewer have considered whiteness through this lens.9 Like any other community, a congregation can be a racializing agent capable of producing conceptions of whiteness through shared actions and ideologies. I  contend that music-making is one such practice, as things like repertoire choice, performance practice, and shared understandings of musical meaning can produce a specific white racialized identity for participants. Considering the ways that whiteness is constructed in different congregational spaces has implications for both interpersonal interactions at the local level and community interactions on a global scale. Such analyses can open up new possibilities for examining moments of music-making that might otherwise be challenging to address, allowing us to dig into tensions of white racial anxiety with which many scholars—both of congregational music and otherwise—are hesitant to engage. As musical communities in the United States more broadly continue

“We just don’t have it”  167 to draw on a wide range of origins for their sung repertoire regardless of their own demographic make-up (Moore 2018b), the field of congregational music studies must acknowledge and study the potential role of whiteness in these cross-cultural and cross-racial musical encounters. That is to say: comprehending whiteness can facilitate comprehending broader racialized contexts more completely. Beyond the United States, understanding whiteness is equally important for scholars working in congregational communities around the world. Needless to say, racialized identities are often entangled with power structures regardless of geographic boundaries, so an attention to the particular political and cultural weight of whiteness in a given community is valuable for all congregational contexts. In addition, considering how congregational music-making produces, rather than simply reflects, racialized identities can be a useful framework for scholars across a wide range of geographical and cultural spheres. Sounding critical race studies and well-meaning whiteness While recognizing whiteness as a produced racialized identity is essential, here I have shown the value of understanding whiteness as a multifaceted and complex identity. In what little work on whiteness exists in music scholarship, whiteness is often associated with what Geoff Mann calls an “ideal past-ness,” as white communities—especially those with lower socioeconomic status—feel disenfranchised by current policies and thus desire an economic and social success that no longer seems attainable (Mann 2008, 76). Mann connects this type of whiteness to musical sound, suggesting that country music produces a conception of whiteness that depends on a mythic past of success. Understanding whiteness along these lines has only become more prevalent in the wake of the 2016 election in the United States, after which music scholars have tuned in to the sounds of white supremacy and white nationalism.10 Scholars of congregational music could—and should— similarly examine the ways a correlation between whiteness and victimhood are sounded in sacred space, especially when studying communities that associate themselves with similar kinds of theologies and political ideologies. The addition of critical race theory to the toolkit of congregational music scholars is, in my view, equally important in understanding racialized identities in congregational music-making. While critical race theory approaches in music studies have thus far focused on the commercial sphere (like Morrison’s work cited earlier), they show an attention to acts of repurposing of sound for sustaining white supremacy that is more universally applicable. As a result, these approaches model how congregational music scholars could investigate their own research areas, given that North American denominational structures are just as vulnerable to institutionalized racism as commercial or governmental entities. Indeed, U.S. denominational structures are imbricated with—or, some might say, even the cause of—the

168  Marissa Glynias Moore institutionalized racism of these external secular systems. Understanding how white supremacy is built into denominational structures is equally important for scholars working in postcolonial or post-missionized contexts, where the residues of Euro-American ideas of race and privilege may continue to shape interactions within communities. The concept of well-meaning whiteness in particular allows scholars to conceive of a white racialized identity where interlocutors struggle with acknowledging their privilege. Inspired by critical race theory’s identification of structural white supremacy and the acknowledgment of whiteness as a racially constructed category, I argue that such methodologies allow scholars of congregational music to address whiteness not as a given, but as a fraught category through which musicking, community formation, and meaning-making are refracted. Such methodologies are not intended to excuse white people from responsibility nor to lessen the focus on minority communities; instead, these methodologies can turn the analytical lens of race into a mirror, exposing the fissures within predominantly white communities around race and how these fissures manifest in acts of musicking. Racialized voicing and cross-racial music making Addressing whiteness in congregational music studies means being ever attentive to how one’s interlocutors are navigating the complicated terrain of identity and privilege and to how these choices manifest themselves through musicking. In this chapter, I have outlined one potential avenue for inquiry, by investigating the voice as a site of a particular kind of produced whiteness that, while at first standing in opposition to Black voicing, ultimately may push singers to question their own assumptions. Analyzing the voice, as I have argued, is particularly useful when striving to understand cross-racial or even cross-cultural music making. Often, the discourse of cultural appropriation does not allow for a nuanced understanding of musical practice, as the analytic requires that cultural and musical esssentialisms are upheld and constructed by a dominant group. Not surprisingly, scholars who are seeking a more nuanced way to understand cross-cultural or cross-racial musical encounters are hesitant to engage with appropriation as a result. Some scholars have chosen to focus instead on the transformative potential of cross-cultural sacred music making, through concepts like dialogic performance or reconciliation (B. Johnson 2018, E. P. Johnson 2005; Newland 2018; Myrick 2014; Opstal 2015). Yet these approaches do not leave space for analyses of practices that are neither exploitative nor transformative. Starting at the voice, by contrast, allows us to dig into the nuances of cross-cultural or cross-racial music making without a priori judgments of value. In the case of St. Gregory’s,

“We just don’t have it”  169 understanding my interlocutors’ assumptions of racialized Black voicing shed light on how their well-meaning whiteness was produced and reaffirmed through the phonosonic nexus of voice. Similarly, bringing a conception of racialized voicing may be useful for other congregational music scholars who seek to understand cross-cultural or cross-racial musical practice beyond the exploitation/transformation binary, applicable to any international community who sings music with racialized signifiers that differ from their own identities. Regardless of one’s specific methodology, congregational music scholars should take seriously the varying roles that producing racialized identities can play in musical practice and community formation, even when such analyses border on uneasy terrain for our interlocutors. Finally, if we are white scholars ourselves, it is even more crucial not to shy away from the distress of our own complicity in the very structures of oppression that our interlocutors are considering. Grappling with one’s own complicity is uncomfortable and difficult, especially when the academy privileges the use of such critical lenses on our objects of study, rather than on ourselves. Engaging with the tenets of critical race theory in both academic and subjective ways, however, can have transformative potential for ourselves and for the communities within which we work. For my part, I try my best to reflect upon the activist potential of my research to effect change among well-meaning white worshippers and congregations. Doubtless I have a long way to go, and such a process will not be without its challenges. But the trouble will itself be of value: after all, productive change often comes from discomfort.

Notes 1 Similar assumptions can be based on performance practice associated with Black sacred music genres. In the case of gospel, for example, there are sung characteristics that are closely associated with Black performance practice in church settings, so much so that the authenticity of performances may be judged on the execution of these characteristics, see Alicia Lola Jones, “ ‘Playin’ Church’: Remembering Mama and Questioning Authenticity in Black Gospel Performance,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, Volume 2, ed. James Abbington (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2014). 2 For purposes of publication, all names of ethnographic interlocutors are pseudonyms. 3 Abelmann and Lan, “Christian Universalism and U.S. Multiculturalism,” 66. They talk about this process specifically in reference to an Asian American congregation who is attempting to shift their identity from a single-ethnic congregation to a multicultural one. 4 The term “woke” has its origins in African American Vernacular English and has traditionally referred to a state of awareness regarding racial inequality and its real dangers for communities of color, gaining activist implications through its use within the Black Lives Matter Movement. While “staying woke” was originally used to refer to African American experiences, the phrase is sometimes

170  Marissa Glynias Moore coopted by white “allies” to claim an awareness of structural racism, with varying degrees of success. See “Stay Woke: The new sense of ‘woke’ is gaining popularity,” Meriam Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/ woke-meaning-origin 5 Here I take from Barbara Trepagnier’s usage of the term, see Trepagnier (2017). This term has also circulated in popular press as a way to call out the pitfalls of white wokeness as expressed above. 6 Prominent legal scholars in critical race theory include Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams, among many others. 7 Morrison’s work is reflective of a renewed interest in critical race theory by musicologists, evidenced by the invitation of law scholar Cheryl I. Harris to give a keynote address at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society. 8 For more on white guilt, see DiAngelo, Robin, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 9 There has recently been some work on whiteness in liturgical studies; for example, see Andrew Wymer and Chris Baker, “Drowning in Dirty Water: A Baptismal Theology of Whiteness,” Worship 90 (2016); Cláudio Carvalhaes, Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia W. Mount Shoop, A Body Broken, a Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015). 10 Both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology have hosted panels and papers on music and white supremacy at their 2017 and 2018 conferences.

References Abbington, James. 2001. Let Mt. Zion Rejoice!: Music in the African-American Church. King of Prussia: Judson Press. ———, ed. 2015. Readings in African American Church Music and Worship. Vol. 2. Chicago: GIA Publications. Abelmann, Nancy, and Shanshan Lan. 2008. “Christian Universalism and U.S. Multiculturalism: An ‘Asian-American’ Campus Church.” Amerasia Journal 34 (1): 65–84. Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge. Averill, Gage. 2003. Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baraka, Amiri. 1960. “Jazz and the White Critic.” Black Music. Brackett, David. 2000. Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brooks, Daphne A. 2010. “ ‘This Voice Which Is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)Face Culture.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20 (1): 37–60. Burnim, Mellonee. 1985. “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist’s Research on Gospel Music.” Ethnomusicology 29 (3): 432–47. Chybowski, Julia J. 2014. “Becoming the ‘Black Swan’ in Mid-Nineteenth Century America: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s Early Life and Debut Concert Tour.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (1): 125–65.

“We just don’t have it”  171 Cutler, Cecilia. 2014. White Hip Hoppers, Language and Identity in Post-Modern America. New York: Routledge. Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2011. “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera.” American Quarterly 63 (3): 641–71. ———. 2019. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Durham: Duke University Press. Fabian, Richard, Donald Schell, Sanford Dole, Scott R. King, and Diana Landau, eds. 1999. Music for Liturgy: Music for All God’s Friends. San Francisco: St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1997. “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, 1–34. Durham: Duke University Press. Gray, Briahna Joy. 2017. “The Question of Cultural Appropriation.” Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics & Culture, September 6, 2017. Hage, Ghassan. 2000. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge. Harkness, Nicholas. 2014. Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hill, Mike, ed. 1997. Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Birgitta J. 2011. “Back to the Heart of Worship: Praise and Worship Music in a Los Angeles African-American Megachurch.” Black Music Research Journal 31 (1): 105–29. Johnson, Birgitta J. 2018. “Singing Down the Walls of Race, Ethnicity, and Tradition in an African American Megachurch.” Liturgy 33 (3): 37–45. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2005. “Performing Blackness Down Under: Gospel Music in Australia.” In Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry Justin Elam and Kennell A. Jackson, 59–82. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jones, Alisha Lola. 2018. “ ‘You Are My Dwelling Place’: Experiencing Black Male Vocalists’ Worship as Aural Eroticism and Autoeroticism in Gospel Performance.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 22: 3–21. Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Mahon, Maureen. 2011. “Listening for Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thorton’s Voice: The Sound of Race and Gender Transgressions in Rock and Roll.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 15: 1–17. Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (1): 73–100. Marti, Gerardo. 2012. Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, Julia Robinson, and Shannon Sullivan. 2018. “Rituals of White Privilege: Keith Lamont Scott and the Erasure of Black Suffering.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 39 (1): 34–52.

172  Marissa Glynias Moore Moore, Marissa Glynias. 2018a. “Sounding the Congregational Voice.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 4 (1): 28–42. ———. 2018b. “Voicing the World: Global Song in American Christian Worship.” PhD, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Morrison, Matthew D. 2017. “The Sound(s) of Subjection: Constructing American Popular Music and Racial Identity through Blacksound.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 27 (1): 13–24. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Myrick, Nathan. 2014. “An Honest Question to Difficult Answers: Explorations in Music, Culturalism, and Reconciliation.” Liturgy 29 (3): 37–46. Nero, Charles I. 2007. “Langston Hughes and the Black Female Gospel Voice in the American Musical.” In Black Women and Music: More than the Blues, edited by Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams, 72–89. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Newland, Marti. 2018. “Mediating Racial and Spiritual Difference in Harlem: Cocolo Japanese Gospel Choir and Convent Avenue Baptist Church.” In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, edited by Monique Ingalls, Murial Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe C. Sherinian, 232–45. London: Routledge. Pollard, Deborah Smith. 2013. “ ‘Praise Is What We Do’: The Rise of Praise and Worship Music in the Black Church in the US.”  In Christian  Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience, edited by Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner, 33–48. Farnham: Ashgate. Radano, Ronald. 2003. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. “The Sound of Racial Feeling.” Daedalus 142 (4): 126–34. Ramsey, Guthrie. 2003. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roediger, David. 2002. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. The Sonic Color Line: Race & the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press. Stras, Laurie. 2007. “White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters.” Journal of the Society for American Music 1 (2): 207–55. Tagg, Philip. 1989. “Open Letter: ‘Black Music’, ‘Afro-American Music’ and ‘European Music’.” Popular Music 8 (3): 285–98. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thompson, Jacqueline Kay. “History of Hymns: Draw the Circle Wide.” www. umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-draw-the-circle-wide. Trepagnier, Barbara. 2017. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. London: Taylor & Francis. Vance, J. D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper and Row.

“We just don’t have it”  173 van Opstal, Sandra Maria. 2015. The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Young, Gordon. 1996. “One Weird Church.” SF Weekly, August 14. https://archives. sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/one-weird-church/Content?oid=2133325. Ziff, Bruce H., and Pratima V. Rao. 1997. “Introduction to Cultural Appropriation: A Framework for Analysis.” In Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, edited by Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao, 1–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

10 Researching Black congregational music from a migratory point of view Methods, challenges, and strategies Melvin L. Butler Introduction During a recent trip home, I asked my mother to tell me some stories about her childhood. I was keen to hear her reminisce about my grandfather, William F. Sullivan, who had enlisted in the U.S. army at the start of World War II, and I hoped our conversation would inspire entertaining accounts of my mother’s experiences as a “military brat” traveling around the United States with him in the 1950s and 1960s. I retrieved a few dusty photo albums from the basement, and as we sat perusing the sepia-toned images, the stories that unfolded were delightful, funny, and poignant. Some of the most fascinating had to do with the differences between the churches she attended in various places. “I remember going to some beautiful churches in the state of Washington,” she remarked. I think I  went to a Catholic church. I  didn’t understand all of it, but I thought it was such a beautiful service. I thought, “Oh, this is so nice.” It was a quiet worship. I  didn’t get saved there. [Laughs] But I  said, I  have to go there because of the pretty stained glass and the pretty colors, and the lights. I do like church, you know. Her fondest memories are of the church she and her sister frequented in Massachusetts. I remember especially in Springfield, Massachusetts—we went to a Holy Roller church, Pentecostal, I  guess you might say—a little storefront church. That was one thing we had to do: If we wanted to go to the movies on Sunday afternoon, we had to go to church on Sunday morning. That’s back when I got saved every Sunday. The preacher would say, “Is there one? Is there just one? You don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring. Come to Jesus now.” So every Sunday, I went to Jesus. [Laughs] And I  got saved! And the music was so good. That’s when I fell in love with music, gospel music. And I loved the piano and the

Researching Black congregational music  175 singing and the rhythm. And there was a heavy-set lady in front of us, and she would be moving and shaking. You know—she’d be doing her church dance! And me and Robbie [her sister] would be giggling. [Laughs] I loved the church, and I loved being saved. I felt like when I was saved, I’m okay now! My mother’s descriptions of church services and the different kinds of worship experiences she recalls provide for me an entree into broader issues of Black congregational music and migration. Her narratives are a testament to the power of “travel stories” to evoke memories of migration and reveal music’s uneven relation to the “spaces” and “places” we inhabit. The congregational spaces of Pentecostal worship are enlivened by religious practitioners who use song and speech to exercise their faith. These spaces are formed through a ritualization process (Bell 1992) that marks congregational activities as distinct from “everyday life” and situates believers within a Christian imaginary that transcends the boundaries of geographical “place.”1 I submit that the religious events people find most memorable are often connected to spaces, the contours of which take shape only as people pass through them and imbue them with a sense of universal value and spiritual significance. This chapter aims to demonstrate the usefulness of migration as a conceptual tool and methodological strategy for enhancing our understanding of congregational music-making among African American and African Caribbean Christians. Approaching congregational music from what I call a “migratory point of view” brings music-centered research in line with anthropological approaches that challenge conventional notions of a bounded “field.” As an anthropologist of music, I  study in churches inhabited by congregations of people who come and go and whose musical choices and challenges change over time.2 This perspective foregrounds congregations not as monolithic people or places but rather, as dynamic hubs of social activity through which believers, fieldworkers, and any number of “visitors” travel. By exploring the connections between congregational music and migration, I also seek to locate and redress some of the “methodological deficits” described by analysts of contemporary migration studies.3 My work here and elsewhere (e.g., Butler 2019) highlights intra-congregational negotiations of identity and musical style, and adopts a “multi-sited” approach to field research—one that takes up George Marcus’s ongoing challenge (1995) “to follow and stay with the movements of a particular group of initial subjects” (106). As perhaps “the most influential methodological move in present-day anthropology” (Neveling 2017, 81), the multi-sited approach entails collecting data by “directly observing mobile bodies either through overt methods such as ‘shadowing’ others, or covert methods that are effect a kind of sociological ‘stalking’ ” (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 8). Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in African American and

176  Melvin L. Butler African Caribbean Pentecostal congregations, along with what I  describe as “observant participation,” I  have learned much about the migratory aspects of Pentecostal music-making. This chapter thus delves into some of the methodological concerns and challenges pertaining to research on migration and congregational music in Black Pentecostal settings. I develop my discussion by surveying recent literature on migration and religion and using case studies from my field research among congregations in the United States and the Caribbean. The insights I share are, I believe, applicable to a much larger set of field sites in which researchers engage with peoples and musical practices that are dynamic and fluid. Over the past twenty years, I  have come face-to-face with the issue of migration in at least three interdependent ways. First, I have observed, even in relatively brief fieldwork stints, the migration of congregants to and from their countries of origin. Second, I note an array of “musical migrations,” that is, the fluid exchange of musical styles and repertories among congregations. Third, I consider my research—namely, my activities as an anthropologist of musical practice engaged in multi-sited fieldwork—as a form of migration. Conceptualizing migration in this multilayered way is a strategic move—one I hope will help to magnify some of the dilemmas and possible solutions that emerge when both a unit of study and the persons conducting that study are in flux, mobile, and operating in complex arenas of musical worship. Taking into account recent ethnographic and theoretical currents, the following questions recur: How does migration, as both historical and modern-day experience, inform music-making within communities of faith? What methodological challenges do scholars and practitioners of “migratory” congregational music face as we move about in twenty-first-century intellectual, theological, and political arenas? And finally, what is at stake in adopting an expansive concept of migration to rethink both the global and local impact of congregational church music and the ways we investigate them? I  begin by examining different types of migration as they relate to the historical and modern-day study and practice of Black congregational music-making. Next, I  explore various meanings of “congregation” and “migration” and the applicability of these terms to fieldwork and other “mobile” situations. This leads me into a discussion of “observant participation” and the politics of positionality as it pertains to “insider” research on migration and music. I conclude with two ethnographic vignettes that exemplify how migration shapes fieldwork encounters and brings to light productive tensions that deepen our understanding of congregational musicmaking in the United States and elsewhere.

Types and challenges Exploring congregational music from a migratory point of view creates an opportunity for us to reimagine congregational spaces as dynamic fields

Researching Black congregational music  177 of cultural production worthy of deeper study. My research, along with the work of this volume’s contributors, stands to benefit from transformational reassessments of humanistic studies of religious music and a greater appreciation of music’s value to migration studies. Moreover, a championing of congregational music-migration research works in favor of progressive theologies of inclusion, particularly those pushing for the Body of Christ to “make room at the table” for historically marginalized groups who feel socially unwelcome or spiritually unsafe within the Euro-American “Church.” I believe perceptions of Christian ambivalence, apathy, and even disdain for migrants in the United States hinders the ability of churches to flourish and makes the relevance of scholarship on congregational music and migration a tougher sell within academia. Migration is a deceptively complex term, one that is modified and defined in multiple ways. History has shown that human beings move from place to place under a variety of circumstances, many of which influence, and are influenced by, music and religious practice. Yet to invoke “history” is also to concede the impossibility of determining precisely “what happened” in a troubled past to which we no longer belong.4 As we consider the methods scholars use to study congregational music from a migratory point of view, the challenges and limitations of following the historical movements of people and their music come into sober relief. Most historical and anthropological studies of the religion–migration relationship make only passing mention of music, if they discuss music at all.5 By the 1960s, ethnomusicologists, unlike the “comparative musicologists” who preceded them, were at least beginning to embrace issues of migration, thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Herskovits, the research of Herskovits’s protégé Alan Merriam (1964), and the “urban ethnomusicology” of Adelaida Reyes Schramm in the 1970s and 1980s.6 Much of this work focuses on migration as the crossing of national or regional boundaries by men and women who transform, and are transformed by, their host societies. The transnational migration of African American gospel music, along with its appropriation within countries as wide-ranging as Australia, Brazil, and Jamaica, has attracted scholarly attention as well (Johnson 2003; Burdick 2019; Butler 2019).7 Considerations of transnational flows have also included the Atlantic slave trade, a horrific form of “forced” migration entailing the transportation of millions of enslaved African men, women, and children to the American colonies. Most scholars now agree that “Africa has had much to with the ways that New World Blacks have chosen to address the realities before them from the moment they emerged from the ships” (Okpewho 1999, xv). Theories concerning “African retentions” expressed in Melville Herskovits’s classic The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), along with modifications of those ideas by Mintz and Price (1992), have influenced generations of scholars.8 Domestic (or internal) migration has been another point of departure for the study of Black expressive cultures. It is well established that the

178  Melvin L. Butler so-called Great Migration of approximately six million Blacks from the US South to northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit had a profound effect on the development of congregational worship and gospel music. Despite initial resistance from middle-class denominational churches, newer forms of “urban gospel music” grew popular among those craving lively congregational worship (Sernett 1997, 208). In the early1930s, Thomas Andrew Dorsey’s music became all the rage in Chicago’s storefront congregations, such that “the Sanctified groups and the shouting Baptists, were swaying and jumping as never before. Mighty rhythms rocked the churches” (Bontemps 1944, 31–32). Dorsey had himself migrated from Georgia to Chicago in 1919 (Harris 1992, 49). Drawing from oral histories with dozens of African Americans who moved northward in the mid-twentieth century, Lisa Boehm (2009) observes, “The deep connection with religion bridged the migration; the teachings, taking up no physical space whatsoever, were easy to pack up and bring along on the move.” The act of migration was limited neither to the physical movement of bodies nor to the metaphorical transportation of internalized teachings, attitudes, and feelings. In many cases, “the actual congregation moved as well. It was not unheard of for whole churches to make the move north about the same time” (59). These congregations were sanctuaries for members of what Wallace Best (2005, 65) terms a “religious diaspora,” African American migrants desperately in need of emotional and spiritual protection from the horrors of racial violence. As Isabel Wilkerson (2016) explains, Blacks “were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war and pestilence.” In addition to varieties of transnational and domestic migration, I  am also intrigued by metaphorical uses of “migration” to connote forms of movement, boundary-crossing, transcendence, and travel pertaining to nonmaterial aspects of human life. Spiritual migration, as I conceive it, could entail the mystical voyages of a shamanic healer or the intervention of a supernatural power into the lives of those who serve it. Karen Richman (2005) explores migration in the traditional sense of the term—in this case Haitians migrating to and from the United States. But migration also serves to capture the moves of various spirits who “travel” between spiritual and earthly realms to influence human actions in everyday life. Glenn Hinson (2000) studies Pentecostal Christians who speak of the “move of the Holy Spirit,” inviting a comparison between divinely sanctioned transcendence of the self and the crossing of national boundaries by human beings seeking access to mundane sources of “deliverance.” My inclination is to expand this faith-informed discussion of transcendence to encompass other kinds of “boundary crossings,” including those that involve the transcendence of national boundaries. Close attention to biblical texts—which is itself a methodological ­strategy—reveals that the metaphorical expansion of “transcendence” to which I allude is intrinsic to Pentecostalism as described in the Acts of the

Researching Black congregational music  179 Apostles, wherein Jesus’s disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit. This experience of spiritual transcendence occurs in what is clearly a transnational, multicultural, and “migratory” setting. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” (Acts 2:5–11, New International Version) In some ways, Pentecostalism is distinct from branches of Christianity that use ethnicity or nationality as a core of their identity.9 As Althouse and Waddell (2017) explain, “Pentecostalism was a migrating faith from its inception in that Pentecostals traveled the world either as missionaries bringing their message to new lands or as migrating people who carried their newfound experience with them” (1). Moreover, Pentecostal Christians continue to draw on a “multicultural tapestry” of musical traditions, resulting in the evolution and transformation of both congregational worship and worldwide Pentecostalism itself. Offering an “insider’s” contribution to “the ongoing quest for robust methodological approaches to the study of black religion” in the United States, Cheryl Sanders (1996) uses the paradigm of exile—with its connotations of displacement, expulsion, emigration from one’s home country—to analyze the experiences of believers who position themselves, through rhetoric and lifestyle, as “in the world, but not of the world” (125). Here, too, these present-day religious experiences resonate with biblical narratives that serve to corroborate Pentecostals’ assertions that they worship a God who is “on their side” even and especially in the midst of social misery and marginalization.10

Congregations, fieldwork, and migratory situations According to Baily and Collyer (2006): [V]arious forms of cultural production have been used to provide greater depth to our understanding of the way migrants view their own migration, their host society and the place they have left, as well as how they are viewed by the host society. (167)

180  Melvin L. Butler The types of migrants the authors have in mind are physically mobile; they travel in geographical space, moving from community to community and nation to nation. There are many other types of “migratory situations” worth exploring as well. Many people regard congregations as communal gatherings of individuals who meet in a designated place of worship. But we might also understand congregations as mobile units. Like migrants of the aforementioned types, individual congregants, particularly those who have firsthand experiences with migration in the traditional sense, view their mobility in ways that are informed by “various forms of cultural production.” In the United States and the Caribbean, Black Pentecostal music informs, and is informed by, believers’ perceptions of their church “homes.” Their sanctuaries are hubs, points of connections through which people flow, and the soundscapes of these spaces evolve with the flow of time. Pentecostal youth who grow up in the church can resemble second- or third-generation migrants whose musical choices differ, sometimes dramatically, from those of their forebears. In Jamaica, recent transnational flows of sound and expressive culture help to mold the stylistic preferences of church youth, as do digital technologies that provide immediate access to contemporary African American gospel music (Butler 2019). Members of a congregation carry with them a plethora of experiences, preferences, and assumptions, all of which influence the musical choices and lend worship services their distinct character. And while congregations have a cohort of regular members, on any given Sunday there may also be a host of “visitors” akin to temporary migrants exploring a new town or country. Congregational visitors often blend in with the members, who were themselves visitors until, at some point, they “joined the church” and obtained what one might consider “permanent resident” status. In large congregations, the regular members seldom realize that my family and I are visitors until we are singled out or asked to identify ourselves on cue: “At this time,” it is announced, “we ask all of our guests and first-time visitors to please stand and be recognized.” I shoot a glance at my wife, and she nudges me to stand. Half-heartedly, I oblige. There is no more hiding. The members clap, and a few shake our hands and share welcoming smiles that help us feel safe. Churches may serve as safe havens for visitors—“sanctuaries,” if you will, on more than one level. The increasing visibility of “sanctuary cities” in the United States, Canada, and Europe invites consideration of urban centers as types of “congregations.”11 Thinking of congregations as hubs through which people travel has interesting implications for how we envision ethnomusicological “fieldwork.” The global interconnectedness of peoples and cultural practices has given rise to a situation in which, as Sunil Bhatia explains, “the distinction between home and field [is] blurred for transnational immigrants and researchers. Fieldwork and homework entails back-and-forth relationships between the home and the field, border crossings, multi-sited research, and plural sites of belonging” (2007, 60). Despite a willingness to “toss out older assumptions

Researching Black congregational music  181 about fieldwork” with its stale exoticisms and embrace “the new fieldwork” (Cooley and Barz 2008, 13–14), university curricula still incentivize reinscribing “the field” as a bounded locale, such that it remains what Amit calls “a strangely persistent bubble of isolation” (2000, 16). The process of conducting fieldwork outside of one’s home country can be complicated. Governmental bureaucracies and institutions often oversee how, when, and under what circumstances we can come and go. Some fieldworkers must gain approval from an institutional review board. Many of us apply for grants to fund our work and lend it legitimacy in the eyes of our colleagues. Like temporary migrants—for example, those who move to a new country for a specified period of time to work or study—­fieldworkers relocate for a designated purpose with an ­expectation that they will, at some point in time, return “home.” Undocumented migrants—for example, those who visit a foreign country and sometimes remain without procuring a visa or Permanent Residence Card—bear some similarity to fieldworkers who conduct research informally or adopt a researcher’s analytical stance vis-à-vis the everyday practices they witness wherever they live. My own fieldwork has entailed crossing cultural boundaries, getting authorization in the form of a research visa, and sometimes simply being an observing participant of music right at home in my own church congregation. For nearly a century, anthropologists and other scholars have envisioned participant observation as a type of “mini-immigration.” As Clifford (1997) states, the typical field researcher “is ‘adopted,’ [and] ‘learns’ the culture and the language.” Clifford compares fieldworkers to “travelers who like to stay and dig in (for a time), who like to make a second home/workplace. Unlike other travelers who prefer to pass through a series of locations, most anthropologists are homebodies abroad” (22). Even when conducting fieldwork “at home” we are still crossing boundaries—constructing a field for the purposes of our research, often as an “undocumented” fieldworker. Whereas previous generations of scholars have maintained a discourse of the fieldworker as mobile and the informant as stuck “in the field,” we stand to benefit by flipping this script and viewing congregants as “travelers” passing by our (at least temporarily) stationary “posts.” Clifford adds: In tipping the balance toward traveling . . . the “chronotope” of culture (a setting or scene organizing time and space in representable whole form) . . . is less like a tent in a village or a controlled laboratory or a site of initiation and inhabitation, and more like a hotel lobby, urban café, ship, or bus. (25) His description of the field site as a “site of travel encounters” applies well to church sanctuaries—“chronotopes” that have more in common with hotel lobbies and cafés than meets the eye.12

182  Melvin L. Butler In this historical moment, it seems especially problematic to draw comparisons between undocumented migrants to a foreign country, visitors to a church, and fieldworkers. Indeed, the costs of standing up to be “recognized” can vary dramatically in these situations. For undocumented migrants in the United States, recognition could mean expulsion and separation from family members. Visitors to a church typically face only the possibility of mild embarrassment, although some congregants may feel pressure to join the church or “get saved.”13 During my church visits in the United States and the Caribbean, it rarely takes longer than a few minutes for me to feel at home. Participation observation feels starkly different from immigration (pace Clifford), even of the “mini” variety, in today’s political climate. Notwithstanding these caveats, I think fieldwork constitutes a type of voluntary and temporary migration worth exploring as such.14 Migration, in all of its forms, is a fertile “field” unto itself.

Politics and positionality If historians of migration who strive to untangle the threads of a contested past face a daunting epistemological challenge, those hoping to understand the experiences of contemporary travelers grapple with a set of concerns that are no less complex. Musical considerations aside, transnational migration became a particularly contentious topic of cable news talking points in the United States after the launch of Donald J. Trump’s candidacy for president in 2015 and his subsequent “America First” policy agenda. As Trump took residence at the White House, migration remained front and center in reports that he pursued a travel ban on citizens from several ­Muslim-majority countries, the construction of a wall along the southern border of the United States, the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the withdrawal from international treaties, a significant curtailing of legal immigration, and a doubling down on a zerotolerance policy resulting in the detention and separation of undocumented migrant family members (Kulish et al. 2017; Pierce, Bolter, and Selee 2018; Semple 2018; McGraw 2019). Migration-talk in the United States has had a decidedly nationalist bent, and a traveler’s “country of origin” is often the definitive classificatory designation. Aside from the occasional apocalyptic rumors of “jihadists” and “Muslim extremists” infiltrating U.S.-bound migrant caravans from Central America, the religious identities of asylum seekers and refugees have been relegated to the margins of mainstream discourse. Men and women fearing political or economic violence make reluctant and involuntary “decisions” to leave their homes, and the circumstances under which they make those decisions leave them with little agency to dictate the terms of their existence in a host country. Undocumented immigrants have historically taken shelter in sanctuaries of worship or migrantfriendly communities, particularly those in which they believe there is less

Researching Black congregational music  183 likelihood of being scapegoated or reported as “illegal aliens” (FiddianQasmiyeh et  al. 2016; Gurney 2017; Dias 2019). In her eerily prescient book on “sanctuary cities,” Jennifer Bagelman (2016) describes “how sanctuary is mobilized in particular sites—often religious—across Canada in order to protect failed asylum seekers from deportation” (xii). Sanctuary is conceived “not simply as a physical location (such as a church) to provide safe refuge, but a host of welcoming practices within urban environments” (2). The “negative” consequences of human migration are perhaps an inconvenient topic for congregational music researchers, but exploring them in light of Bagelman’s fluid concept of “sanctuary” cracks opens a window of opportunity to pose some pressing and provocative questions, the answers to which could advance what I consider to be a musical scholarship of hope.15 What kinds of insight could music-centered research lend into the plight of migrants enduring hardship in the present day? What role, we might ask, does music-making play in the experiences of those “seeking sanctuary” from death and despair? How might the notion of “congregational music” apply to clusters of men, women, and children who migrate under extreme duress? These are questions to which there are no easy answers. Those of us who take seriously the mission of “applied,” “engaged,” or “public sector” ethnomusicology—to produce research that speaks to everyday concerns, to make our work relevant to wider publics, and to use our expertise as a force for good in the world—could draw inspiration from a legacy of activist scholarship by those who have prioritized an ethics of community service over academic parochialism (Habermas 1991; Averill 2003). For scholars of music and migration, attention to research methods is of paramount importance. Pondering the methodological upside of exploring music in relation to forced migration and human tragedy, Adelaida Reyes writes, “That such tragic dislocations . . . nonetheless revive and nurture cultural traditions . . . should provide an effective conceptual tool . . . for loosening the hold  .  .  . of the debilitating premise that cultural and geographic boundaries coincide” (1999, 15). Lejla Voloder’s commentary on the ethics of migration research is also worth citing here. She explains that while the growth of “migration studies” has facilitated a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it has also resulted in some unfortunate by-products. These include both the “dominance of quantitative modes of inquiry within studies of migration” (in which qualitative approaches are cast as inferior) and a “relatively limited discussion around researcher positioning among migration scholars.” It is imperative, she argues, “to explore the role of positioning in the research endeavor,” to and consider how “insider-outsider dynamics” shape the questions and conclusions scholars present in their work (2016, 1). I  am hopeful that we can think more critically and ethically about how our work as qualitative researchers of music positions us to promote a better understanding of migration in all of its guises.

184  Melvin L. Butler

Faith, knowledge, and observant participation Since the end of World War I, scholars have ascribed intellectual value to “traveling to distant places in order to study and reconstitute a humane order” (Tedlock 1991, 69). But whether we travel or stay at “home,” musicologists who use “participant observation” have long viewed it as the quintessential method of field research. The participant observer “seeks to become explicitly aware of things usually blocked out,” perhaps in contrast to the “ordinary” participant, who typically experiences social interactions in an “immediate, subjective manner” (Spradley 1980, 55–56). Barbara Tedlock characterizes fieldwork as “observant participation,” welcoming a movement—in full swing by the 1970s—away from dispassionate surveillance and toward the “subjective experiences” of fieldwork as sources of insight. She connects this movement to a range of prior anthropological approaches adopted by individuals for whom “the lived-reality of the field experience was the center of their intellectual and emotional missions as human beings” (71). Among Tedlock’s “candidate[s] for the ‘gone native’ award” include scholars such as Curt Unkel (1914) and Verrier Elwin (1964), both of whom published respected ethnographies while also becoming permanent residents of the societies they set out to investigate. Elwin explained, “For me anthropology did not mean ‘field-work’: it meant my whole life” (Elwin 1964, 142; cited in Tedlock 1991, 71). One of the surprising and still-refreshing aspects of Tedlock’s thirty-yearold article is that it frames these cases studies not as cringeworthy cautionary tales but, rather, as counterevidence that “a subject’s way of knowing is incompatible with the scientist’s way of knowing and that the domain of objectivity is the sole property of the outsider” (71). To a lesser degree, the “subjective experiences” to which Tedlock refers have sparked spiritual or epistemological transformation in the lives of some music scholars. Katherine Hagedorn’s travels to Cuba to study sacred drumming (2001) led to her initiation as a Santeria priestess. In her study of Haitian music and dance, Lois Wilcken shares that “after 18 years in the field, I joined the ranks of Vodou initiates” (2005, 193–94). Michelle Kisliuk was ritually inducted into the Elamba dance while living among the BaAka of central Africa (1998, 71). Richard Jankowsky’s study of the ritual healing music known as stambeli in Tunisia led him to “question some very fundamental assumptions [he] held about music and the spirit world” (2007, 186–87). Deborah Kapchan acknowledges that trance experiences “became not just an object of study for me, but also a vehicle of knowledge, an ontology of difference that at times possessed me viscerally, in the very habits of my body and spirit” (2007, 5). Absent from this list of “observing participants” are ethnomusicologists who report having experienced conversions to Christianity during field research. Notwithstanding the emergence of an “ethnomusicology of Christianity” (Engelhardt 2009, 33), a music scholar’s written revelation of, say, speaking in tongues or being filled with the Holy Spirit, particularly

Researching Black congregational music  185 while conducting fieldwork in a church, would most certainly turn heads. It seems as though personal transformation through the intensive study of Santeria, Vodou, Elamba, stambeli, and Gnawa trance more easily enhances one’s intellectual credentials in the North Atlantic academy. This situation is, of course, understandable, particularly given Christianity’s historical ties to missionization and cultural imperialism (Reily and Dueck 2016, 2). Ethnomusicology’s aversion to Christianity may also be due to the influence of its “parent” field of anthropology, along with a never-ending attempt on the part of anthropology’s leading exponents to bolster their discipline’s status among the humanities and social sciences. It is, however, a myth that Christian faith and “anthropological” knowledge are mutually exclusive (Larsen 2014; Smith 2015). As an “observant participant,” I draw from a deep understanding of Pentecostal music-making as embodied “participatory performance” (Turino 2008, 59). Through this participatory stance, I  allow myself to be fully engaged with other congregants in worship, making music and giving God praise to facilitate spiritual transformation. This is also perhaps what Kay Shelemay means by “truly participatory participant-observation” (2008, 143). My fieldwork necessitated a heightened awareness of my “self,” not only as a scholar and performer of music but as a devout (and no less intellectually curious) “observer” of Pentecostal Christianity. In the realm of religious practice, the notion of “observant participation” thus accrues yet another important layer of significance for scholars of faith, particularly when we make room for our faith at the table as we research, write, and establish our careers.

Conclusion November 2017, Miami Gardens, Florida. I had heard of Pentecostal Tabernacle and its pastor, Bishop Robert Stewart for years. Finally, we had the chance to go. The service started with typical African American gospel. The welcome song was a pleasant surprise, especially when it morphed into a medley of “Jamaican songs.” These songs (or “choruses” as they are also called) constitute a repertory unfamiliar to most Black Pentecostals born and raised in the United States but well-known to those who grew up in the Anglophone Caribbean. The level of enthusiasm increases noticeably throughout the congregation. Men and women dance and shout, celebrating the presence and power of the Holy Spirit and the ability to worship God in a style of music that evokes feelings of home. I become a singing spectator, watching myself watching them. It seems we are no longer in the United States. We have migrated, through the act of music making, to Jamaica.

This ethnographic vignette retells a fieldwork moment I will never forget. What makes this experience so memorable is that it exemplifies for me the tensions that can arise when music and ritual migrate. As an observing

186  Melvin L. Butler participant in these types of situations, I  sometimes ask myself questions such as: Where am I right now? What is the “right” way to proceed here, in this space, in this ritual moment? To what extent should I  modify my personal style of worship to match those around me? How does musical worship in this context represent the interplay of religious and cultural identities? In this majority Jamaican–American Pentecostal service, I maintain in my mind a running dialogue—a meta-narrative of sorts—as the musical events unfold. These kinds of situations awaken my curiosity and call my attention to methodological challenges and strategies of conducting fieldwork on congregational church music from a migratory point of view. Ethnomusicologists have long recognized the dynamic processes through which music crosses boundaries and becomes refashioned in global cultural contexts. Building on this ongoing intellectual conversation, I  have employed “migration” as a multilayered process that is applicable both to people and to musical practice. I  submit, furthermore, that migration, broadly conceived, offers fresh insights for our understanding of the evolution of congregational music as well as for the multiple ways in which Black congregants, in particular, use music to reposition themselves within spiritual, cultural, and transnational landscapes. For some scholars of Christian faith, moving from the spaces of home and church to those of academia present particular challenges. I believe a migratory perspective offers insight into some of the tensions and epistemological contradictions of music research among marginalized and minoritized congregations, particularly as more researchers who happen to be religious practitioners join intellectual “congregations” in which uncomfortable logics of knowing are sometimes produced and circulated. I agree with Bilger and van Liempt (2009) that “the increased attention given to research involving vulnerable persons has not yet been adequately translated into corresponding publications on methodological and ethical challenges in the study of migration” (1). This chapter is an attempt to remedy this scholarly deficiency while stimulating additional reflexive considerations of congregational music research. I submit that scholars and worshippers engage with congregational music in ways that are informed by diverse academic and religious “faiths.” In our efforts to understand the strategies through which musical participants position themselves within their church and academic homes, migration is a handy conceptual tool. We have only begun to realize its potential.

Notes 1 For Catherine Bell, the term “ritualization” refers to “various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors” (Bell 1992, 74).

Researching Black congregational music  187 2 Likewise, Clifford Geertz declares, “Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods); they study in villages” (1973, 22). 3 For example, Anna Amelina and Thomas Faist (2012) lament that “researchers consider neither the constructionist quality of ‘group formation’ nor the processes by which ethnic and national categories are socially developed, distributed and applied” (1710). 4 Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) argues that the “unevenness of historical power” (56) always allows for the privileging of some “facts” over others. 5 See, for example, Bagelman (2016), Bava (2011), Becker-Cantarino (2012), and Hirschman (2006). 6 Reyes Schramm’s 1979 article is particularly noteworthy for its early attention to the music of immigrant populations in major cities, as well as the author’s analytical synopsis of the work of her student, Linda Fujie (1976), who explores negotiations of ethnic and religious identity within a “Japanese Buddhist” congregation in New York City. See Baily and Collyer (2006, 168–70) for an extended discussion of ethnomusicological contributions to the study of music and migration. 7 I began thinking about music and transnational migration in the late 1990s while studying at New York University, where I took a graduate seminar on music and migration taught by Adelaida Reyes. Her constructive commentary facilitated my first publication on church music and cultural identity in Brooklyn (Butler 2000). Additional research on inter- and intra-congregational cultural and musical differences has since emerged, such as Janel Bakker’s book on “sister church” relationships whereby “North American congregations  .  .  . have forged longterm relationships with partnering congregations in the global South” (2014, 40). 8 Mintz and Price (1992, 62–65) summarize the well-publicized “debate” between Herskovits (1941) and E. Franklin Frazier (1964), which centered on the extent to which African-derived cultures influenced Blacks in the “New World.” See also the work of Crumbley (2012), Dargan (2006), Floyd (1995), Gilroy (1993), Kubik (1999), Maultsby (1985), Murphy (1994), Pitts (1993), Roberts (1998), and Small (1987) for additional discussion of African retentions as they relate to musical and religious practices. Manuel (2006) and Béhague (1994) have urged scholars to take more seriously the role of Caribbean and South American influences on Black music-making. 9 While German Lutheran and Russian Orthodox branches of Christianity have roots in specific ethnic communities, modern-day practitioners often embody diasporic identities shaped less by ethnicity than by theological orientations and migratory flows. For example, as Peter Berger (2016) maintains, “ethnicity is no longer a real factor in American Lutheranism.” 10 One particularly relevant passage of scripture is Psalm 137, especially verse 4 (New International Version), which asks, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” See Stowe (2016) for a discussion of how this biblical chapter has been deployed in diverse cultural contexts. 11 Focusing on the rise of sanctuary cities in the United States, Paik (2017) describes the sanctuary city movement as “a coalition of religious congregations, local jurisdictions, educational institutions, and even restaurants, that commit to supporting immigrants, regardless of status” (5). 12 See Stringer (2013) for an intriguing comparative discussion of congregations and hotel lobbies. 13 See, for example, Ward (1997, 375). 14 During my fieldwork in Jamaica, expectations of me shifted whenever my “informants” realized that I hailed from the United States. Allowing Jamaicans

188  Melvin L. Butler to believe that I too was from the island felt like indulging in a guilty pleasure, as it afforded me access to honest opinions seldom shared in mixed cultural company. Likewise, “passing” as Haitian while in Haiti sometimes proved advantageous, particularly when street vendors assumed I knew the tricks of buying and selling. There are, I  am told, at least five prices charged by Haitian merchants who are adept at categorizing customers as tourists (touris), foreigners (blan), Black foreigners (blan nwa), Haitians living abroad (ayisyen dyaspora), and native-born Haitians (ayisyen natif natal). Tourists are charged the highest prices; only native-born Haitians get the local rate. 15 Aslam Fataar (2011) also uses a “scholarship of hope,” albeit in a different disciplinary context, to explore the potential of academic work to speak to broader social concerns.

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190  Melvin L. Butler Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gurney, Kyra. 2017. “Miami Schools Vote to Protect Undocumented Immigrants, Refugees.” Miami Herald, March  15, 2017. www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ education/article138758253.html. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 6th Printing ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hagedorn, Katherine J. 2001. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Harris, Michael W. 1992. The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Herskovits, Melville J. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper. Hinson, Glenn. 2000. Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hirschman, Charles. 2006. “The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups in the United States1.” International Migration Review 38 (3): 1206–33. Jankowsky, Richard C. 2007. “Music, Spirit Possession and the In-Between: Ethnomusicological Inquiry and the Challenge of Trance.” Ethnomusicology Forum 16 (2): 185–208. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press. Kapchan, Deborah. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Kisliuk, Michelle. 1998. Seize the Dance: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Kubik, Gerhard. 1999. Africa and the Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kulish, Nicholas, Vivian Yee, Caitlin Dickerson, Liz Robbins, Fernanda Santos, and Jennifer Medina. 2017. “Trump’s Immigration Policies Explained.” The New York Times, February 21. www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/us/trump-immigrationpolicies-deportation.html. Larsen, Timothy. 2014. The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. New York: Oxford University Press. Manuel, Peter. 2006. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. Rev. and Expanded ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Maultsby, Portia K. 1985. “West African Influences and Retentions in U.S. Black Music: A Sociocultural Study.” In More than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians, edited by Irene V. Jackson, 25–57. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McGraw, Meredith. 2019. “Trump Unveils New Immigration Plan in Speech.” ABC News, May  16. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-trump-unveilimmigration-plan-speech-thursday/story?id=63056289. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. 1992. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press.

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11 Studying Byzantine Ukrainian congregational music in Canada Considering community and diaspora Marcia Ostashewski Introduction This chapter on Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical singing in Canada contributes to the study of congregational music and ethnomusicologies of diaspora, in at least two ways. First, there is a dearth of publications on the topic. More specifically, this chapter is a relatively rare example of scholarship published in English about Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical music, and rarer still in that it focuses on this music in diaspora; it is also a rare example of scholarship published about Ukrainian cultural practice in Cape Breton, a region that is overwhelmingly described in public memory and discourse according to its Scottish antecedents (McKay and Bates 2010). Second, the collaborative, community-engaged, practice-based study out of which this chapter has arisen inspires an understanding of a diaspora community as a community of practice (Wenger 1998). Rather than ascribing the parish community an identity according to a particular understanding about the ancestry of some of its members, the collective process of liturgical practice has been identified by community members as their primary value. That is, the parish members regularly gather for activities, including congregational singing and, through it, they create community. Critical creative practice, known in Canadian scholarship as researchcreation,1 integrates creative process, scholarly research, and experimentation. This understanding of arts-based research holds that new knowledge is created through the process of creative, critical inquiry (e.g., singing and other aspects of music-making), not merely in the outcomes of research (e.g., digital media, publications). The artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation that make up my research are inextricably intertwined; creative processes are part of conventional ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative methods, knowledge creation and knowledge-exchange. Collaborative, community-engaged, practice-based research builds on and expands upon critical, creative research. “Community arts processes are research processes in themselves—processes of collaborative knowledge

194  Marcia Ostashewski production” (Conrad and Sinner 2015, 91). Community-engaged artsbased research also engages research participants and provides access to kinds of knowledge that are often not otherwise included in research. As Barndt writes, “the social experience of art-making can open up aspects of peoples’ beings, their stories, their memories and aspirations, in ways that other methods might miss” (2008, 353–54). This “opening up” of avenues pertains to understanding and knowledge-creation through the processes of research-creation; it also pertains to matters such as building relationships and trust that is core to ethnographic research.

“Vytaj mizh namy . . . welcome among us!” Father Roman walks out from the vestibule where he has draped himself in golden vestments. Those of us in the pews settle in our seats and become quiet. We watch as he walks through the Sanctuary toward the two Great Doors at the center of the wooden ikonastas, or icon wall. The ikonastas stretches across the length of the inside of the church between the Sanctuary, within which is the altar, and the Nave, the wide-open space inside the church where the congregation sits in pews. Father Roman ceremoniously opens the Great Doors one by one, each a wooden frame upon which is hung a richly colored hand-painted Byzantine sacred image. He walks through toward us, taking a few steps to the edge of the red carpet-covered dais. Greeting us, he speaks first in Ukrainian, “Slava Isusu Khrystu! Welcome to this morning’s liturgy.” Father Roman makes a few brief announcements related to the community calendar, perhaps current affairs and special prayers that will be offered in light of a natural disaster or global conflict, as well as the page numbers of the propers and the paraliturgical hymns to be sung throughout the service. He invites us to join in the opening hymn, and then he turns around and walks toward the altar to quietly recite prayers. This is our signal to begin. I breathe in, muster my focus and energy as I look down to my hymnal to remind myself quickly of the first intervals and bits of text, and begin to sing. I feel gravelly bits in my early morning voice as my throat begins to warm with song. My good friends and other parishioners around me clear their voices and join in with the melody or sing in harmony. “Vytaj mizh namy, Khryste, vitaj!”—or, as we know on some other level, “Welcome among us, Christ, welcome!” This hymn is frequently sung to open liturgy in this parish; it is a well-known tune and text. As I  feel my own throat clearing through the first phrases of the hymn, I hear the voices of most of the congregants singing around me. The Sunday morning Ukrainian language liturgy attendees are a smaller group than the Saturday afternoon English language service. We are twenty or twenty-five people or so, mostly regulars, few, if any children, only the little ones of the new immigrant family who sit just ahead of our pew full of woman singers in the middle of the church. Even without turning to the sides or behind me to look, I can

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  195 visualize almost every person who is sitting in each of the pews and whose voices I hear. Father Roman takes the censer from Tony, the Starshij Brat, a parish elder (literally, Older Brother) who helps the priest with his liturgical work behind the altar. Father Roman is light on the incense. Tony appreciates when it isn’t too strongly scented so that it doesn’t bother his allergies. Poor fellow, I think—he farms hay (the only local parishioner who still lives on a working family farm), so it must be difficult with the allergies. I know that Father Roman really enjoys incense, as do I. A Ukrainian Byzantine liturgy is a service for the senses, he has said many times in conversation and in homilies. Along with the singing, the incense wafts through the church with the smoky scent of paraffin candles, lit by parishioners as they entered this morning and offered special prayers as they did so. The ornate and gilded iconography on the walls, stained glass windows, Cyrillic fonts describing the icon images and printed into books, plush red carpets under our feet as we walk in the aisle, glossy wooden pews, bell-ringing bright tones during the prayers, Holy Water blessings, and other aspects of the church environment and activities all make for a sensory-rich ritual experience. “Smells, bells and yells!” Father Roman likes to say with a cheeky grin, as we chat about our practice of the Byzantine Ukrainian liturgy. In this church, I sing as the cantor, the djak, as I am sometimes called— a masculine noun, telling of the traditionally male role. I sing with a congregation almost entirely older than I am by at least twenty years, and usually I  sing with a small group of lead singers seated next to me and throughout the congregation. We are what Father Roman describes as the krylos, a group that leads in singing liturgical responses and hymns from among the congregation. Our krylos is different from the parish’s choir that sings responses from the choir loft above the pews on some special occasions, though very infrequently nowadays. The choir was active in the parish until a few years ago when regular rehearsals became too much of a challenge for the elderly members, and the director took a job off-island. I  moved to Sydney in 2013 to take up a permanent job at the local university, but I was known and active in the parish through repeated field research visits from as early as 2008. During previous collaborations with parishioners, they learned that I had a strong voice, that I love to sing, and that I knew the liturgical music well enough to lead. They knew that I had grown up in a churchgoing Ukrainian Canadian farm family in an area where many Ukrainian immigrants had settled on the prairies. Very soon after I moved into Sydney, Father Roman and several parishioners asked if we might all work together to rekindle a regular congregational singing practice. Many parishioners love to sing and know the practice fairly well. They certainly remember singing it when they were younger, but they are shy to lead. We agreed to try, beginning one section of the liturgy at a time during the Sunday morning Ukrainian services, giving ourselves and the congregation time to learn and adjust. I made mistakes, not infrequently

196  Marcia Ostashewski at the beginning of this process, which we stretched over a year to allow us to gradually become comfortable. I still make mistakes as anyone might do, losing my place in the text if I  am tired (I often struggle with sleep) or my mind wanders, or because I am yet unfamiliar with special holiday prayers that are infrequently sung, for example. When this happens, I can hear the faces of singers around me turn abruptly toward me by the directness and sometimes slight break or questioning in their voices, which I hear in their hesitancy, or a suddenly higher pitch as if asking a question. They wonder what I am doing, suddenly a bit unsure of what they are supposed to do (and which of us has wandered off track). When they see me realize that I  might have been daydreaming, they might chuckle, pat me on my hand as they give me a sideways smile. They are reassured as I refocus and find my place again, and they keep singing. I quietly say “sorry” after the next cadence and carry on. My continued singing even as I sometimes make errors seem to have emboldened everyone in their singing, Father Roman has observed, and our group has acknowledged. It’s as if they see that I, too, need support. Also, as Father Roman explains when he invites everyone to sing at the liturgies: “It’s okay to make mistakes, just keep singing and we’ll figure it out together.” And, as he has said so many times in conversation with many of us, what’s most important is to facilitate the participation of the congregation in liturgical singing—“it’s not a concert.” In our parish, those of us who sing like to sing with others as is the tradition, which Father Roman also values. As I have written elsewhere (Ostashewski 2019), the parishioners who come and sing Sunday morning liturgies value the practice especially for the opportunity that it offers us to create community through singing together—as well as continue a Ukrainian tradition. From time to time during his homilies, Father Roman tells the story about the djak in an Ontario parish who relished the lead singing role so much that in addition to changing up his practice during the liturgy without notice or preparation for the congregation, he insisted on having his liturgical primers and texts buried with him in the coffin. This is what is referred to as taking your secrets with you to the grave, Father Roman says tongue-in-cheek. Father Roman is clear with everyone—me, other singers, all congregants, and in public when he speaks about the practice—that our liturgical singing is intended to be supportive of the whole congregation’s participation. For this reason, rather than singing the entire liturgy as is the tradition, it is customary in our parish that some of the changeable parts are read and spoken by parishioners who are more comfortable with English and less comfortable with singing. Of course, parishioners also have the option of attending the Saturday afternoon liturgies that are English and at which the congregation responds by speaking through the entire liturgy. The spoken and English language use in Byzantine Ukrainian liturgies are two of the innovations in practice since its earliest days of being celebrated in North America. On most days when I am singing at liturgy, at some point I wonder how many of the congregation are yet thinking how odd it is that a

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  197 woman is leading. This is another innovation in liturgical practice, one that I have only heard of occurring in Canada and increasingly since the early 2000s due to a decline in the numbers of learned men (Ostashewski 2019). I  have spoken with the handful of members of the krylos (most of them women), an informal group, so I know that they hardly give it a thought. But what of the elders, both women and men, even those who affably offer me helpful instruction with the changeable parts and special prayers? Most of them are aware of two important women singers in the parish’s history, though it is still understood as unusual for a woman to sing as djak. Even that term—djak—is a masculine noun and indicates the intended gender of the singer. A local lay historian noted that, before a man who had learned to lead liturgical singing had immigrated to Sydney in 1915, “The first Sydney cantor was a woman by the name of Mrs. Pashkarenka” (Huk 2011, 39). Many of the parish’s members also remember Mrs. Hawrylak leading the singing in church during the 1980s, because she had a strong and beautiful voice and she loved to sing. Still, Father Roman’s use of the term krylos to describe us from time to time is a way of allowing a greater valence of understanding of our role and signifying our other-than-normative practice. It is not a term that typically circulates about Ukrainian liturgical practice in Canada. And what does the new immigrant family think of our djak and krylos, most of whom are women? I haven’t yet had an opportunity to speak with them at length, but I have never read or heard of a woman cantor anywhere in Eastern Europe, and already they have occasionally offered corrective instruction to some of our spoken Ukrainian vernacular, regarding spravzhnij (real) Ukrainian lexicon. Then, I realize that I’m thinking too much about other things, and this means I’m likely to stumble in my singing. When that happens, my face turns red and hot with embarrassment, and I recall that feeling almost as if to remind myself to focus on the singing now. I quickly look down to the liturgical prayer book and put my finger on the page at the text that Father Roman is intoning. I quietly hum ahead through to the end of his text and find in my head the note for the beginning of my next opening melodic phrase. As Father Roman sings into the end of his prayer, I begin singing our response, slightly overlapping my voice with the tail end of his cadence. This layers the sounds that surround us through the service, all part of the interwoven, elaborate, and ornamented elements that create the lush texture that is characteristic of our liturgical experience. I listen to myself and to the others to check that I am not singing too fast ahead of them or rushing them, to ensure that the congregation is supported in singing with—and to see that I am not singing too slowly, such that I would draw grumbles from the beloved elders on their way out the church at the end of liturgy, unhappy that it dragged on. I am careful that my vowels are round and full so that they carry a clear tune, that the sound is resonating warmly and lightly up inside my face, that I roll my “rrr”s but not too many times, and that the consonants are strong and percussive but that they don’t stop the

198  Marcia Ostashewski sound, that the “sss”s don’t persist and bring down the pitch. I am mindful that others, many hard of hearing, are listening for what I am singing. They listen more for comfort and assurance, I think. Many of them know the music and the words far better than I do, they have been singing it for several decades longer than I  have been alive. Almost every single one of these parishioners have been living in community and singing together, have known each other’s voices, all of their lives. I am the newcomer.

Ukrainian histories, politics and practices in Canada2: “living music” To write of Ukrainian music and religious practices in Canada is to consider histories and experiences of migration, diaspora, and multiculturalism. Ukrainian immigration to Canada is generally described in academic and public discourse as largely having occurred in three “waves”: the first pre-World War I, the second in between the two World Wars, and the third after World War II and largely characterized by “Displaced Persons.” More recent immigration happened at a less intensive rate and is sometimes called the “trickle,” most of it having occurred since the end of the 1980s in a postglasnost era and then increasingly since the dissolution of the USSR. Large numbers of people of Ukrainian origins who began to migrate to Canada in the early 1890s through the beginning of World War I when cross-Atlantic transportation all but came to a halt, approximately 170 thousand in that period. They were part of a broader influx of immigrants from various European regions, enticed by the government of Canada, which made a concerted effort to bring settlers in to the country to develop the prairies in the west for agriculture. Some were also attracted to mining regions for the jobs, in regions such as northern Quebec and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Early immigrants often experienced overt ethnic discrimination, prejudice, and racism. This reached a zenith at times like World War I, when the passports of Ukrainians identified them as citizens of the Austrian enemy nationstate, and thousands were interned to labor in camps across the whole of Canada, including the Canadian Atlantic provinces and Cape Breton specifically (Lehr 1983; Luciuk and Hryniuk 1991; Martynowych 1991; Melnycky 1983; Swyripa 1994, 2012). In the wake of the discrimination faced by so many people identified as Ukrainian, scholars of Ukrainian culture and history in Canada usually describe their experiences and culture as straining under the pressure of and trying to resist “assimilation.” A  related need for the “preservation” of Ukrainian culture in Canada has often been expressed as an antidote to the pressures of assimilation (Swyripa 2012). Other scholars have documented concerns, expressed by Ukrainians throughout Canada, about the existential threat to the “purity” and continuity of the Ukrainian language (Pavliuc 1985, 9) including the “problem” of the Anglicization (GerusTarnewecka 1983), lineage (through “intermarriage” with non-Ukrainians),

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  199 as well as the decline in religious practices, and other customs and traditions (Kuplowska 1980, 153). A desire to continue distinctive cultural practices in new environments—in diaspora—is certainly not unique to Ukrainian immigrants in Canada, and its importance for many Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry cannot be overstated. Upon review of a draft of this chapter, for instance, Father Roman Dusanowskyj, a community-based coresearcher, reminded me of his mother’s clearly stated purpose with regard to Ukrainian traditions in Canada. His mother immigrated to Canada as a young adult after the end of World War II. She felt that it was her family’s responsibility to maintain and preserve all Ukrainian traditions, including religious practices, in order to one day return them to Ukraine once that country was liberated (from Soviet influence). I have heard and read countless times about the importance of preservation and maintenance of Ukrainian cultural traditions in Canada, in interviews, public talks, and the popular and academic writings of parents, politicians, and scholars of culture in and about communities across the country. The prevalence of this discourse in diaspora communities resonates with contemporary scholarship in ethnomusicology regarding other Eastern European liturgical music in North America. For instance, in her chapter on Russian church music in New York, Natalie Zelensky raises issues that are common concerns of music and diaspora studies. They include constructions of “Russianness” through music; “signs and discourses of similarity and unity” (after Turino 2004, 5): or “fracture” (Zelensky 2016, 362) that group members exhibit, regarding symbols and representations of the homeland. Zelensky’s writing provides a contribution to ethnomusicology for its attention to diaspora in the context of a Christian music in North America and more specifically about a Byzantine music in English-language literature. Given her focus on a Byzantine liturgical music of Eastern European origins, her work may be the closest comparator to my own. It will be interesting to observe, as both of our studies continue to develop in the coming years, the significances of different socio-political (USA and Canada) and religious (Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic) contexts. As with Zelensky’s interlocutors, Ukrainians in Canada have at times been concerned with the “real” culture and have endeavored to “preserve” it as I have written elsewhere about secular music and dance practices. Tensions regarding what variants of costume, language, or music are more authentically Ukrainian have been heightened at different times and locations across Canada, as well as in other diaspora situations where I have worked and visited and otherwise engaged (e.g., Croatia, Poland, Australia). In Canada, differences of opinion and experience are often evident between different immigrant groups. For instance, differences often are evident between Ukrainian Canadians such as those of my family who came as farmers prior to and just after World War I and the Ukrainians who came as political émigrés to Canada after the end of World War II as “Displaced Persons” from highly educated,

200  Marcia Ostashewski politically engaged, and urban backgrounds. More times in my life than I can remember, people of this latter immigration wave have spoken about a desperate need to protect Ukrainian culture from “Russification” that began under Soviet governance—perhaps unsurprisingly, since their families were exiled due to those political pressures. As with Zelensky’s study, the dynamics between different groups of Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants can point to important aspects of diaspora experience. To illustrate, I  have sometimes heard post-World War II Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants speak dismissively about earlier immigrants of rural backgrounds, their (low, or macaronic) language, or their strong interest in practicing folkloric dance and music (rather than urban and classical genres). Likewise, comments have been made about the language of the most recent Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, those who came after the dissolution of the Soviet Union but grew up in that political contexts. “I can’t understand them. They don’t learn Ukrainian in school there, they learn Russian. They don’t speak Ukrainian—it’s Russian.” And when the current version of the Ukrainian Catholic liturgy was introduced in the 1980s in the churches that I attended, as a child I overheard the adults talking in the vestibule and at community gatherings about the language sounding Russified and that “it doesn’t fit the music—you can’t sing to it!” It’s true that the text no longer aligned with the music as we sang it, in many places of the liturgy, but there are larger issues at play, bound up in this instance with the practice of congregational liturgical music. Thus, telltale tensions do exist between practices of different groups and in different parts of Canada, for reasons including immigrant period, background, and other factors of experience. I would suggest, however, that to simply frame the congregants of the current study as Ukrainian would be to succumb to the biggest problem that scholars of critical multiculturalism warn against: it would be to reduce this group of people and all of their diverse backgrounds and experiences and ways of practicing their faith to, and ascribe them “difference” according to a cultural category (Bannerji 2000, 131). Ethnomusicologist of diaspora, Tina Ramnarine, echoes sociologist Bannerji’s concerns on multiculturalism when she writes that: [d]iaspora often articulates with historical sensibilities and postcolonial politics, offering perspectives on the legacies of empires, historiographies and modes of cultural representation (2007, 2) . . . . the essentialisms of diaspora and multiculturalism raise problematic issues of “ethnicity,” of difference. (2007, 12) In this chapter, I am being less interested in how Ukrainians in Canada construct Ukrainian identities or debate authenticities because it has not been the main issues of concern for the congregation. I am more interested

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  201 in how, through Byzantine Ukrainian congregational singing, practitioners create and continually re-create community and their participation, since this is what they have indicated is their primary concern. I am less interested in reifying previous notions of bounded ethnocultural identity. I am more interested in what Byzantine Ukranians are doing with music as part of congregational practice, what the practice of music affects and/or impacts as part of liturgical practice, and how it is made effective. At the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Church in Sydney, we have ongoing discussions regarding our congregational practices. We have discussed among the congregation, with men and women of different ages, the general feeling about the fact that a woman cantor and women usually lead the singing. Their responses indicate very little concern with that matter—they say they are most concerned to have someone lead the practice so that they are able to participate in singing, and that we find ways of fostering the meaningful involvement of as many people as possible in liturgical practice. This means that some segments of the liturgy are spoken in English by different congregants, such as the Tropar and Kontakion and other changeable parts of the liturgy including the Epistle reading—and, always, the Apostles’ Creed. Excepting the Creed, all of the other components would traditionally be chanted, led by the cantor in dialogue with the priest, in Ukrainian. As the person often identified as the cantor, I can and have done this, but as a congregation we decided that we prefer to have these parts spoken in English to facilitate greater congregational involvement and comprehension. At holidays such as Christmas, when extended families attend with parents and grandparents who are regular congregants, we often choose to sing the “Our Father” in English. Further, as a lead singer, I am mindful to enunciate clearly especially for the benefit of our elder congregants, many of whom have difficulty hearing—and where some cantors may move very quickly through liturgical responses, I am careful to keep a steady and medium tempo to ensure that others can easily sing along. The parish also regularly celebrates an English-language liturgy, with responses spoken by the congregation, on Saturdays at 4 p.m. This practice was established in the 1970s with the hope of encouraging young families to participate on the heels of shift toward the use of vernacular language in liturgical practice and with the hope of facilitating the involvement of younger families. Currently, the Saturday afternoon liturgy is helpful to folks who might not wish to drive at night or be up too early in the morning, or who prefer to participate in English language prayer, or who are unaccustomed to congregational chant-based singing. About Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical practice across the whole of Canada, parishioners, clergy, and laymen and women have noted in conversation with me and other researchers that the number of parishioners and level of activity in parishes across the country has been in steady decline since at least the 1990s. Reasons for this are many. Some of them are specific to each given location, though a general decline has been observed as fewer

202  Marcia Ostashewski and fewer young people and families attend church regularly. Nonetheless, Byzantine religious practices in the onion-domes churches that extend across the country from one end to the other, and on islands of both ends, and congregational liturgical singing specifically, continues to be a vital and sometimes seemingly self-evident aspect of activity and experience in many communities. To illustrate, when I told my father that I was writing about Ukrainian liturgical music, he excitedly offered that he had heard of a new choral liturgy composed by a local clergy. When I  explained to him that I was writing about the chant-based material that the entire congregation sings without “reading” any music, the singing we all learn simply from participating in services, he was genuinely confused. “I don’t know why anyone would find that music important—it’s a living music.” Indeed, and precisely. Rather than valorizing Ukrainian sacred music as an object of study, we— I and the people with whom I  conduct research, collaboratively, in a ­community in which we all participate and sing together—are also i­ nterested in the singing that is core to living liturgical practice, the music that does the work of building and affirming community through its practice.

Opening up new possibilities for diaspora research and congregational music studies: communities of practice and collaborative, community-engaged, practice-based research methodology I was asked to lead the singing at the Sunday morning Ukrainian language liturgies by the priest on behalf of parishioners primarily because (in this order): (1) it results in a different experience of the liturgy, one that is in line with the traditions and values of a rich, sensory Byzantine liturgical practice; (2) it creates a sense of community through the doing, the singing of the music; (3) parishioners wish to continue their culture and tradition, both singing and language practices, and asked that someone support them in this. This Ukrainian sacred singing practice is a shared experience that brings the congregation together each Sunday morning. It creates community while it “creates sonic space” (Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner 2016, 1) that allows for differences in interpretation of religious belief, as well as for ancestry whether one claims some variant of Ukrainian or not at all. The congregants are members of a community that practices a variety of Ukrainian traditions, and they cherish them, as they are tied to both lovely and difficult, powerful and tender embodied histories and memories of families and communities as well as their individual experiences. Honoring the traditions and practice is a value evident in my Sydneybased experience, although it is not the primary value. Authenticity is far less a concern than the individual and collective practice and enjoyment of singing, as well as the vitality and the vibrancy of each parish community. Like many Christian faith traditions, churchgoers and clergy acknowledge that fewer and fewer people are coming to church regularly and fewer still

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  203 know the language or music practices. This singing is the (musical) strategy through which these communities are created. If this chapter is about answering the question, “What can studies of diaspora contribute to the study of congregational music?”—then my broad answer, as a communityengaged practice-based scholar of the liturgical music in question, is that it may be more helpful to recognize that the activities of people living in a situation that we might call a diaspora are not as much about the particular ethnic or cultural box as the collective experience,3 in this case the practice of singing together. In this study, the agents and their musical strategies are understood as social process; the activities and practices through which people create affiliations and alliances are privileged. I propose that this congregation can be understood as a “community of practice” (Wenger 1998)—a theory about which I write at greater length in other publications (Ostashewski 2019). Rather than being ascribed an ethnocultural or religious identity first, “[c]ommunities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder 2002, 4). Indeed, some congregants have no Ukrainian ancestral background; many have told me of their joint ancestry, for example, Ukrainian and Barbadian, Polish, Scottish, or “Newfoundlander.”4 A  community of practice theoretical framework posits that identities and practice are developed through deep socialization and collaborative participation (Morley 2016), in this case singing as part of liturgical practice and critical engagement throughout these activities. Community members participate together in a domain of shared interest, in this case Byzantine Ukrainian liturgical religious practice and singing. They are members of the parish, its activities including liturgical practice and singing, though they may not identify as Ukrainian or Catholic. Practitioners regularly interact with one another through this activity to create the community. They engage in the practice, a “shared repertoire,” such that they are practitioners who develop a set of resources, activities, or practices related to the interest, according to which they, and the community, are identified (or self-identified) (Morley 2016). In the case of the Holy Ghost Ukrainian parish, they are familiar with and sing the liturgy in a particular way; they attend liturgies and participate in other parish activities (Easter breakfast, Christmas Eve liturgy, funerals, as well as the bingo, perogy-making5 and paska-baking,6 dance), including singing at the liturgies. In the research in which I am involved, the social experience of creative practice, including music-making, has facilitated a dialogic and reflexive process, one that supports critical engagement on substantive theoretical issues and concrete challenges that exists for the communities with whom I work. For example, a recent project with Membertou First Nation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia fostered relationships and learning about “migration” and “encounter” in the lives of indigenous youth through a series of workshops that led to the creation of new knowledge regarding the community’s

204  Marcia Ostashewski history. The project facilitated critical engagement with that history by the youth and broader community, together with the process of creating and performing a new theatrical production based on the new knowledge that was collaboratively created (Ostashewski, Fitzsimmons Frey, and Johnson 2018; Ostashewski et al. 2020). The current project with the congregation in Cape Breton’s Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church has led to broadened and refined musical practice in the parish, expanded knowledge of liturgical practice, and critical engagement with community histories and related issues (e.g., race, gender, cultural diversity). It has also resulted in an understanding that this sacred music practice is valued especially for the work that it does in creating community, as well as its signification as an aspect of a Ukrainian heritage. These collaborative community-engaged arts-based research projects provide examples of some of the ways in which community-based arts research “brings to the fore the generative possibilities that emerge through richly textured, sometimes contentious, and always dynamic connections initiated within communities around common understandings of equality, accessibility, and accountability within research about social issues” (Conrad and Sinner 2015, 91). In my experience of now nearly thirty years of focused critical engagement and ethnomusicological research, conventional research practice is simply unable to elicit the data and effect impact that collaborative, community-engaged practice-based research can. This is true in terms of relationships and power dynamics, critical engagement for both academics and non-academics, and also in terms of music and creative practice. Moreover, building upon a foundation of community engagement, the research in which I am involved inherently includes the means of sharing the knowledge created with those who would be most impacted by it, as is consistent with a participatory research approach (Chevalier and Buckles 2013; Hacker 2013). Community-engaged arts research involves outreach and collaboration with individuals and organizations from diverse backgrounds and across sectors as the means, modes, and methods of research. Together with these diverse interlocutors we identify challenges and problems; design research projects to generate new knowledge related to the issues and questions; plan methods and processes, which when carried out gather data (e.g., ethnographic interviews, archival research, material culture collections); analyze and interpret data, through dialogue and critical reflection in discussions that also reference other [religious music] practices; and disseminate it widely to broad audiences, locally and internationally, including academics. Throughout a collaborative process, we engage in ongoing dialogue and critical review; reflect upon and continue to refine our thinking; and ultimately augment and change existing bodies of knowledge, interpretations, and practices (e.g., music teaching practices, representation of migrant cultures in public libraries and museums, changing religious music practices to be more inclusive, cultural policy and funding decisions related to marginalized cultures and community development, research ethics practices).

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  205 The value of this research both to the music studies and the communities with which we work has been acknowledged by preeminent ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger, as in a letter in support of my tenure file in which he addressed his recent visit to Cape Breton. [T]he fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology are undergoing a major shift in emphasis from research “on” individuals and communities to collaborative research and engagement “with” those individuals and communities. This reflects a profound post-colonial shift and a recognition that research is not a prerogative of scholars and that it can have profound relevance to the peoples collaborating with academic researchers. . . . Such collaborations take time to develop and require a major investment of time to keep active. . . . [Ostashewski] is at the forefront of the development of this kind of collaboration and also of writing about it. . . . Her collaborative approach and community work is based on similar activities in ethnomusicology and folklore. But she is developing the methods and reflection in them in an important way that will have an impact on her field over the long term. (letter, August 18, 2017) As Seeger notes, collaborative research is part of an ongoing shift in academia, and my work, in this regard, is not unique. Its value has been expounded upon by such esteemed scholars as Luke Lassiter (1998). But it was nearly twenty years after Lassiter published his groundbreaking volume on collaborative research that he delivered a keynote address at a special conference dedicated to “Transforming Ethnomusicological Praxis through Activism and Community Engagement” (2015).7 Evidently, the practice is still considered novel enough that we are still having to argue for its utility in transforming scholarly praxis. While collaborative research seems resonant with the values of ethnomusicology generally, and aspects of congregational music studies specifically, I have both experienced and observed that collaborative, community-engaged, practice-based research is still not as readily rewarded within some segments of the academy and related accountability infrastructures. In a recent publication on music in Canada, Hoefnagels, Klassen, and Johnson have observed of localized music studies, “Microhistories, especially those based in ethnography, are powerful tools in subverting cultural analyses that take imagined homogeneous cultural groups . . . as their point of reference (2019, 6). I hope the current chapter, focusing on a Byzantine Ukrainian congregation in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, helps to further illuminate and educate readers regarding the value of collaborative, community-engaged ethnomusicology, in particular—and what it offers us in terms of possibilities for studying and further understanding congregational musics in diaspora.

206  Marcia Ostashewski

Notes 1 The online glossary of Canada’s federal research council and granting body, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) offers a succinct definition of research-creation, including the following statement. “Research-creation:  An approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms)” (SSHRC 2016). Scholarship in the United States often describes this as critical, creative practice—and in Europe, it is typically called artistic research. 2 Until the 1920s, after the brief period of existence of the autonomous nationstate of Ukraine, Ukrainians were known by various regional identities (e.g., Ruthenians, Rusyns, Galicians, Bukovynians, and sometimes even “Little Russians”); and/or by the allegiances dictated by their passports, according to the empire that governed their home region (e.g., Austria, Russia). It is common practice, in contemporary political climate and scholarship on the history and culture of these groups of people, to refer to them collectively as Ukrainians (Lehr 1991; Subtelny 1988, 177). The Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church in Cape Breton was originally called the Holy Ghost Ruthenian Catholic Church. 3 See https://kenanmalik.com/2014/10/16/whats-the-problem-with-multiculturalism/. 4 Much of what is today Canada was brought into Confederation in 1897, but Newfoundland joined in 1949. It is, like Cape Breton, an island off the coast of Eastern Canada and further out into the Atlantic. 5 Ukrainian terminology for these dumplings is either “pyrohy” or “varenyky,” but the English-language variant is common in Cape Breton and many other parts of Canada as well. 6 Paska is traditional Easter bread. 7 This Forum was jointly sponsored by the International Council for Traditional Music and the Society for Ethnomusicology. See www.ictmusic.org/ joint-sem-ictm-forum-2015.

References Bannerji, H. 2000. Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Barndt, D. 2008. “Touching Minds and Hearts: Community Arts as Collaborative Research.” In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, edited by J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole, 351–63. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Chevalier, J. M., and D. Buckles. 2013. Participatory Action Research: Theory and Methods for Engaged Inquiry. New York: Routledge. Conrad, D., and A. Sinner, eds. 2015. Creating Together: Participatory, CommunityBased, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship Across Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Gerus-Tarnawecka, Iraida. 1983. “The Canadianization of the Ukrainian language.” In Rozumnyj, New Soil, Old Roots, 155–72. Hacker, K. 2013. Community-Based Participatory Research. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Hoefnagels, Anna, Judith Klassen, and Sherry Johnson, eds. 2019. Contemporary Musical Expressions and Resonances in Canada: Ethnomusicological Perspectives. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Studying Byzantine Ukrainian music  207 Huk, John. 2011. Strangers in the Land: The Ukrainian Presence in Cape Breton. Sydney, NS: CBU Press. Ingalls, Monique M., Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner, eds. 2013. Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience. Surrey: Ashgate. Kuplowska, Olga M. 1980. “Language Retention Patterns among Ukrainian Canadians.” In Changing Realities: Social Trends among Ukrainian Canadians, edited by W. Roman Petryshyn, 134–60. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Lassiter, Luke Eric. 1998. The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 2015. “Collaborative Ethnography: Recent Developments and Opportunities.” Paper Presented at the Conference Transforming Ethnomusicological Praxis Through Activism and Community, University of Limerick, September 13–16. Lehr, John C. 1983. “Propaganda and Belief: Ukrainian Emigrant Views of the Canadian West.” In Rozumnyj, New Soil, Old Roots, 1–17. ———. 1991. “Peopling the Prairies with Ukrainians.” In Canada’s Ukrainians— Negotiating an Identity, edited by L. Luciuk and Stella Hryniuk, 30–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Ukrainian Canadian Centennial Committee. Luciuk, Lubomyr Y., and Stella M. Hryniuk, eds. 1991. Canada’s Ukrainians: Negotiating an identity. Toronto: Published in Association with the Ukrainian Canadian Centennial Committee by University of Toronto Press. Martynowych, Orest T. 1991. Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Period, 1891– 1924. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. McKay, Ian, and Robin Bates. 2010. In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Melnycky, Peter. 1983. “Political Reaction to Ukrainian Immigrants: The 1899 Election in Manitoba.” In New Soil, Old Roots: The Ukrainian Experience in Canada, edited by Jaroslav Rozumnyj, 18–32. Winnipeg: Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada. Morley, Dawn. 2016. “Applying Wenger’s Communities of Practice Theory to Placement Learning.” Nurse Education Today 39: 161–2. Ostashewski, Marcia. 2019. “Ukrainian Catholic Congregational Singing in Canada: Sounds in Service and Celebration.” In Contemporary Musical Expressions and Resonances in Canada: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, edited by Anna Hoefnagels, Sherry Johnson and Judith Klassen 453–476. TBD. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ———, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, and Shaylene Johnson. 2018. “Youth-Engaged Art-Based Research in Cape Breton: Transcending Nations, Boundaries, and Identities.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 10 (2): 100–25. ———, Shaylene Johnson, Graham Marshall, & Clifford Paul. 2020. Fostering Reconciliation through Collaborative Research in Unama’ki: Engaging Communities through Indigenous Methodologies and Research-Creation. Yearbook for Traditional Music 52: 23–40. Pavliuc, Mykola. 1985. “Literary Ukrainian and Its Dialects.” In Osvita: Ukrainian bilingual education, edited by Manoly R. Lupul, 1–10. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. Ramnarine, Tina K. 2007. “Introduction.” In Musical Performance in the Diaspora, edited by Tina K. Ramnarine, 1–17. New York: Routledge.

208  Marcia Ostashewski SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). 2016. “Definition of Terms: Research-Creation.” Accessed November 25, 2017. www.sshrc-crsh. gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/definitions-eng.aspx#a22. Subtelny, Orest. 1988. Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Swyripa, Frances. 1994. Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2012. “Ukrainian Canadians.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed March 15, 2016. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ukrainian-canadians/. Turino, Thomas. 2004.  Identity and the Arts in Diaspora Communities. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder. 2002. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A  Guide to Managing Knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Zelensky, Natalie. 2016.  “Russian Church Music, Conundrums of Style, and the Politics of Preservation in the Emigre Diaspora of New York.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Jonathan M. Dueck, 361–83. New York: Oxford University Press.

12 Congregational singing and practices of gender in Christian worship Exploring intersections Teresa Berger Introduction Drawing on insights from contemporary gender theory, this chapter explores key intersections between musical practices, practices of gender, and liturgical life in the Christian tradition. Beyond the specifics of the intersections I  will explore in what follows, my foundational argument— namely, that gender is an elemental marker of all practices of worship, singing included—easily travels across disciplinary boundaries and can be applied to different ­ecclesial traditions, times, places, and styles of congregational singing. Yet even with the limited, select intersections between musical practices, practices of gender, and liturgical life that I will explore in this chapter, the overall subject-matter is multifaceted indeed, since it concerns three sets of practices—worship, music, and gender—that each are complex and many-sided. Given that my primary scholarly home is the field of liturgical studies, the intersections I  highlight are focused on the realm of Christian worship. My chapter is rooted in two overarching convictions regarding these intersections. The first is that congregational singing in the context of Christian worship has always been and continues to be today, inflected by practices of gender. The second is that the particular shape of each of these inflections mirrors broader cultural understandings of gender in particular historical and cultural contexts. In line with these convictions, my chapter proceeds in three steps. First, I  will argue that gender differences are an elemental ingredient of Christian worship, congregational singing included, because liturgy entails bodily presence. Second, I  illustrate this claim—namely, that worship ­practices always involve human bodies and therefore processes of gendering— by probing two specific historical moments in time. The first comes from the early Christian centuries and involves gender-specific practices of disciplining bodies and voices in liturgical space. The second example comes from the gendered soundscapes of medieval monastic communities, both in their (dominantly male and androcentric) theorizing and in their contemporaneous women-identified practices that offered space, at least for religious women, to exercise liturgical and musical leadership. In a third step, I offer

210  Teresa Berger some reflections on our own moment in time, highlighting contemporary ways in which Christian worship, congregational singing, and practices of gender continue to intersect. I conclude with brief thoughts on possible developments in the future.

Gendering Christian worship and congregational singing In order to explore how gender differences shape worship, one has to first recognize and acknowledge gender as an elemental ingredient in all liturgical practices, singing included. Gender is so elemental an ingredient because the basic materiality of worship is the bodily presence of worshippers. There is, in other words, no Christian worship and no congregational singing without the presence of human bodies; thus, there is no Christian worship without some form of gendering. Which forms of gendering are present and how they shape worship depends in large part on the gendering processes of the broader cultural context in which the worshippers exist. For musicologists, this argument might evoke Lawrence Kramer’s claim about the irreducibly “worldly” nature of music, meaning that music is not autonomous of the world around it but instead participates in and is shaped by the broader historical and cultural contexts in which it exists (Kramer 2001). For my own purposes here, the focus is on gendering processes that shape (and are shaped by) a broader cultural context and the Christian worship practices in it. To put my point differently, if human bodies are indeed the basic materiality of Christian worship, then liturgical presence is always co-constituted by the bodily particulars of worshippers, for example, the clothes worshippers wear to church and the frequently gendered cultural codes these clothes carry, or the ways in which voices have been gendered for centuries. Gendering processes, in other words, are always present where two or three are gathered in worship. There is no human body as such at worship, only specific human bodies (plural), and these are gendered in ways shaped by broader cultural gender codes. That said, processes of gendering are rarely unidirectional, and acknowledging the influence of broader cultural gender codes on worship practices does not mean that liturgical practices themselves, with their particular gender scripts do not also seep into and shape society. This is especially true for time periods when Christian worship marked the basic rhythms and patterns of individual, communal, and social life. What additional insights can gender studies in music studies contribute to this basic claim about worship, in order to sharpen its relevance for the study of congregational singing? I begin with a note about gender studies in music studies more broadly, before highlighting some of its insights for the present chapter. Depending on whom one asks, gender studies in music studies is either a very new field or has been developing for many decades. What seems quite obvious—at least to scholars employing gender theory in the field of liturgical studies—is that gender studies in music studies have developed along similar lines and with similar arguments to other scholarly

Congregational singing and gender  211 fields. Gender studies, briefly put, emerged out of both the deepening insights and the increasing difficulties produced by the growth of women’s studies and feminist scholarship which burst on the scene as scholarly fields in the early 1970s. Women’s studies and feminist scholarship generated fundamental, critical insights into the workings of traditional disciplines, resulting in a wealth of groundbreaking studies, inter alia on women of the past and a much greater visibility and recognition for women-identified contours and sites (e.g., female convents). Gender studies both grew out of these women-identified insights and also moved beyond them, mainly by focusing on an analysis of sexual difference—that is, gender codes, systems, and hierarchies (for an overview, see Stimson and Herdt 2014). Basically, this focus recognized that relational others are fundamental to the construction of gender categories in the first place. To put this concretely, one cannot invoke “women” without acknowledging that the meaning of the term (and the social category to which it refers) is constituted by what women are not, namely men. In pursuit of this insight, detailed analyses of gender differences—whether between women and men, or between men and women of differing sexualities, or of persons embodying genders beyond the traditional binary—became a dominant concern. As the seemingly natural category “women,” which had anchored much of women’s studies, crumbled under the weight of evidence that the underlying binary division was neither universal nor stable, further fields of inquiry emerged. Among these fields, the most prominent were the study of masculinities, sexuality studies, and queer theory. If one were to name one crucial moment in the emergence of gender theory thus understood, it would be the publication in 1990 of Judith Butler’s seminal work aptly titled Gender Trouble (Butler 1990). Gender studies in music studies mostly maps onto this broader trajectory of gender-theoretical scholarship over the last three decades. There is by now a rich body of work in the field (for an int. overview, McMullen 2013; for an overview of pertinent lit., Maus 2011), and also a research center, at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover, Germany, dedicated to “Musik und Gender.”1 More particularly, there are important insights and challenges that scholars of music and gender can contribute to the study of congregational singing. Four such insights and challenges easily come to mind. A first insight is embodied in the attention to how both music theory and music practices have been shaped by gendered terminology and gender stereotyping (Treitler 1993).2 I  will return to this point in greater detail in the following pages. A  second insight is embodied in the move away from the traditional musicological notion of a great canon of masterpieces (whose formation itself evidences gendered privilege and power) and instead to the study of musical practices, including those of women and of non-hegemonic males or “men who were only men.” Thelma Fenster, a medievalist, coined the latter expression to describe the vast majority of men, that is, the men who were “only men” rather than also being powerful bishops, well-known theologians, or famous rulers (Fenster 1994, X).

212  Teresa Berger A  third challenge moves beyond this second point and calls attention to congregational singing beyond the basic binary of male and female voices. There were, after all, other forms of embodiment that shaped the musical soundscape of Christian worship, for example, eunuch/castrati singers, male sopranos, and human beings with intersex conditions, to name just a few. The history of congregational singing in Christian worship therefore must be studied in all its gendered complexity. The fourth challenge probes the seemingly self-evident nature of the gender of a voice. Granted that voice differences have some connections to sex differences (the drop of the voice pitch in puberty tends to be greater in boys than girls), human beings also place their speaking voices within a socially given range. The particulars of this range are shaped by cultural conventions that include gender codes (cf. Ehrick 2015). A recent Australian study, for example, of the voices of two groups of women has shown that women nowadays speak with a deeper pitch than their mothers and grandmothers did. In fact, the frequency dropped by 23 Hz. over five decades, a quite significant difference that is audible.3 The Australian researchers theorize that the change is due to the rising status of women, marked by a deeper voice that projects authority and increased social rank. The long-reigning cultural consensus that equates high voices with femininity and low voices with masculinity offers an example of voice differences that are highly constructed by cultural contexts. As such, they are also variable. Contemporary critical theorizing of the human voice therefore acknowledges the astounding range of voices across gendered particularities (e.g., Linke 2012, 215–50). An example of this range is the vocalist Robert Crowe, who sings within the soprano range and self-identifies as a “male soprano.”4 To illustrate what these four insights from gender studies in music studies yield when applied to the history of congregational singing in Christian worship, I turn to two historical moments in time, namely the earliest centuries of Christian worship and medieval monastic communities, to probe in more detail the intersections between practices of gender, congregational singing, and liturgical life.

Congregational singing shaped by gender: two historical examples Gender, space, and voice—glimpses from early Christian worship A first example comes from the earliest centuries of Christian worship. While the evidence for liturgical practices in those centuries remains scant and fragmentary, one can discern at least some details about both congregational singing and the power of gender as an ordering principle.5 Regarding the latter, most importantly, entry into the Christian community was not gender-selective. From the earliest times, Christians welcomed and baptized not only men and women but whole households, which often will have

Congregational singing and gender  213 included children as well as eunuchs, both those castrated by force and those who were considered eunuchs since birth, that is, in today’s parlance: a number of persons with intersex conditions. This foundational genderinclusion did not, however, mean that gender played no role in Christian worship. Gender differences mattered deeply, not least for the genderspecific disciplining of certain voices, and the resulting soundscape of early Christian communities. Gender as an ordering principle of bodies in liturgical space worship is clearly visible by the third century. For the Didascalia Apostolorum, an early third-century Syrian church order, the separation of men and women in worship was of basic importance. The Didascalia envisioned the liturgical assembly oriented eastward, toward the altar and the bishop’s seat. Lay men were first in the nave; behind these men, toward the west and away from the altar and the bishop’s seat, women had their place. The women were grouped according to marital status. Young girls gathered in a group, as did married women with children, elderly women, and widows. There was no equivalent separation among the lay men (i.e., into groups of young, married, and elderly or widowed men). Given that men and women were so clearly separated in worship, and given that placing of singers matters for sound, gender separation must have marked congregational singing and thereby the soundscape of early Christian worship, at least in this community and others who divided the congregation in similar ways. In the following centuries, gender differences became a primary factor in the spatial practice of worship. We know of three different configurations. First, in some communities, women stood behind the men, as was the case in the Didascalia Apostolorum. Second, in some communities, women were placed on the left side in the sanctuary and men to the right. This gender separation became the dominant spatial ordering in the Western church. Third, and primarily in Byzantine churches, women were placed on galleries above the main sanctuary space, while men took their place in the sanctuary itself. In every case of this gender-specific spatial separation, women were placed at a greater distance from or disadvantage to the ritual center. And in each case, the specific gender separation must have marked the soundscape of early Christian worship. Male voices resounded closer to—and of course in!—the center of ritual power, while women’s voices sounded either on the periphery or the “lesser” side of a sanctuary (the left side was thought to be inferior; it is no coincidence that the Latin term for left, “sinistra,” carries negative connotations). The distancing of women from ritual centers was mirrored in the growing suspicion around women’s voices in worship, both in prayer and in song. Broader cultural suspicions of the female voice in public utterance, namely as unseemly, wicked, and dangerous (e.g., Beard 2017), played a part here. In Christian communities, these suspicions (already present in the New Testament, cf. 1 Cor 14:34: “mulier taceat in ecclesia”) became clearly visible in the fourth century. Given cultural suspicions surrounding women’s

214  Teresa Berger voices, the Christian church’s swift entrance into the public sphere in the fourth century meant something else for female worshippers than it did for their male counterparts. A growing number of attempts to discipline or constrain women’s bodies and particularly their sounds in worship is witness to this. Ambrose of Milan (died 397 C.E.), for example, in his treatise on consecrated virginity written in 377 C.E. warns the women against sighing, clearing their throats, coughing, and laughing while at worship (Ambrose, De Virginitate III.3, 13). Female virginity, he claims, is evidenced by a silent voice and a closed mouth (Ambrose, De Virginitate III.3, 13). Ambrose addresses a similar request to women believers more generally, signaling them out specifically from their male counterparts at prayer (Ambrose, De Sacramentis VI.3, 15 and VI.3, 17). Cyril of Jerusalem, bishop of the city from c. 350–387 C.E., admonishes female catechumens to sing or read an edifying book quietly during the pre-baptismal rituals of exorcism, that is, to move their lips without any sound being heard (Cyril, Procatechesis 14). Male catechumens faced no such constraints on their voices. Women’s congregational singing was also marked as a problem. By the fourth century, such singing was contested, although much depended on what was sung (psalms continued to be acceptable) and what kind of women were raising their voices in worship (the voices of consecrated virgins were privileged in comparison with other women’s voices). Ambrose of Milan, for example, argues for allowing women to participate in the singing of the psalms in worship (Ambrose, Ennaratio in Ps. 1). Gregory of Nyssa, at his sister Macrina’s funeral, himself orders the psalm singing of the gathered community by dividing singers into two groups, male and female (monastic communities were at the heart of this funeral) (Gregory, Life of Macrina 35,3). The Syriac theologian Ephraem (died 373 C.E.) founded separate choirs of ascetic men and consecrated virgins in Edessa which sang his own hymnic compositions in public worship (Harvey 2005, 125–49). Indeed, singing by female monastics continued to be acceptable in the liturgy in the Western church also, while the congregational singing of other women came to be frowned upon, as was congregational singing of the laity as a whole.6 The musical soundscape of early Christian worship is insufficiently mapped, however, if one merely inquires about the voices of women and of men respectively. The forms of embodiment described under the umbrella term “eunuchs” in the ancient world also deserve attention here, not least because the number of eunuchs in early Christian assemblies was far more significant than standard histories reveal. In order to attend to the lives and voices of eunuchs in Christian congregations, one has to note, first of all, that the descriptor “eunuch” covered a number of dissimilar and unrelated embodiments in the ancient world. A eunuch “from birth” or “by nature,” that is, someone with gender-indefinite genitalia, was different from an adult man who had chosen castration for health reasons (such an operation was an accepted remedy for a range of common ailments at the time). Different again was the status of a eunuch by involuntary, forced castration, either for

Congregational singing and gender  215 the purposes of creating a eunuch slave or as a form of punishment. Moreover, with regard to congregational praying and singing, the kinds of voices eunuchs brought to worship depended very much on whether a eunuch was made by castration before the onset of puberty or not. The actual presence and participation in early Christian communities of these various worshippers, all described as “eunuchs,” is hard to ascertain beyond some very basic glimpses. The biblical account of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–40) demonstrates, at a very basic level, that eunuchs were received into the community of faith. Furthermore, there is no evidence in early Christian texts that “eunuchs from birth” and adult men castrated for medical reasons were excluded from the worshipping assembly. By the time the Roman aristocracy and the imperial court turned to the Christian faith in the fourth century, eunuch servants entered churches in growing numbers, not least as chaperons of high-status women. And questions regarding the ordination of eunuchs were prominent enough to be discussed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. (for more, see Berger 2011). One thing is clear: the musical soundscape of early Christian communities must have been marked both by a diversity of voices and by various genderspecific ways of ordering and disciplining bodies at worship. The resulting musical soundscape of worship would have been different from anything we hear today: women’s voices would have been disciplined or silenced altogether, and a much larger number of “eunuchs” was present since castration was not an infrequent occurrence. To summarize my argument: the practices of early Christian communities give evidence for the power of gendering processes in worship related to congregational singing. They do so for the spatial practice of liturgy and thereby the soundscape of worship, as well as for the question of whose voices are heard and privileged and whose are discounted and silenced. In both cases, Christian communities mirrored broader cultural formations of the Graeco-Roman world in which women, children, and most eunuchs occupied places at a distance from the center of power and in which suspicion of the female voice ran deep, especially in the public sphere. As the classicist Mary Beard noted succinctly with regard to the latter: “public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices that defined masculinity as a gender. . . . Public speech was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness” (Beard 2017, 17). Gendered soundscapes—glimpses from medieval monastic communities A second historical example comes from medieval monastic communities, which were largely gender-separate sites of communal, liturgical singing. Women’s monastic communities had by the early middle ages become primary spaces for women’s singing, as well as for the arranging and composing of music by women. These communities are of interest for my subject

216  Teresa Berger because they highlight an intriguing disconnect—namely, between the dominant medieval discourse about gender and music, on the one hand and the vibrant musical practices actually found in women’s communities, on the other hand. The dominant discourse about music was not only deeply gendered in its theorizing but also gendered to the disadvantage of women’s voices. The constitutive elements of this medieval discourse were rooted in a basic, binary dichotomy between female and male voices, a dichotomy inherited from Greek and Roman antiquity. This dichotomy strongly marked Boethius’ De institutione musica, an early sixth-century text that became the pedagogical text regarding music in the Middle Ages. Boethius, following Plato, described excellent music as “temperate, simple, and masculine,” in contradistinction to music that was “effeminate, violent, or fickle” (Boethius 1989, 4). This gendered dichotomy—which undergirds the theory of musical characteristics of durus (hard) as masculine and mollis (soft) as feminine (Boethius 1989, 3 fn. 7)—shaped medieval musical discourse (for more see, Leach 2009, 21–39). Additional musical pairings accompanied this basic dichotomy (e.g., unadorned/adorned, homophonic/polyphonic), and a host of other binary opposites complemented and reinforced the dichotomy in the broader cultural discourse (e.g., culture/nature, mind/body, reason/ emotion, virtue/sin, active thrust/passive reception) (see Biddle and Gibson 2009, 15). Undergirded by these musical and cultural dichotomies, male monastic houses emphasized the rational, virile nature of music in both music pedagogy and practice for young choristers, novices, and monks (see Leach 2009, 24–34). In tandem with this emphasis, certain ways of singing came to be labeled disparagingly as “feminine.” The learned English churchman and philosopher John of Salisbury (+ 1180 C.E.), for example, accused a group of monks of sounding like “sirens” rather than men, a commonplace critique marking certain kinds of music-making as dangerously alluring and effeminate (for more see, Holford-Strevens 2006). John was worried that when the liturgy was chanted in that way, negative consequences would follow for those monks whom he considered to be “feminine types who revel in great melody” (quoted in Leach 2009, 30). Especially with the beginning of the Notre Dame style of polyphonic chanting in the late twelfth century, anxieties rose about perceived threats to masculinity in this musical repertory and its performance. In the Cistercian reforms, which included attempts to simplify musical performance in worship (e.g., by limiting the melodic range of chants) there was particular antipathy to seemingly feminine ways of singing: “It benefits men to sing with a manly voice, and not in a womanish manner” (quoted in Holsinger 2001, 113). The Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (+ 1153 C.E.) instructed his monks not to wheeze through the nose “with an effeminate stammering” but to pronounce the words “with becoming manliness” (quoted in Holsinger 2001, 113). His fellow Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (+ 1167 C.E.) was explicit about the emasculating

Congregational singing and gender  217 power of polyphonic singing and of the use of the male high voice. Aelred complained that a chanting monk’s singing voice sometimes “is expelled like the neighing of horses, sometimes, manly strength set aside, it is constricted into the shrillness of a woman’s voice” (quoted in Holsinger 2001, 161). He likened such singing practices to sexual transgressions, describing them as “whorish variation” (quoted in Holsinger 2001, 161). Whether, as Bruce Holsinger has argued, a fear of homoerotic desire might underlie these criticisms (see esp. Holsinger 2001, 137–81) does not need to be adjudicated here. What does seem clear—and underappreciated in s­ cholarly writing on the subject—is that a particular tradition of monastic exegesis undergirded the earlier-quoted medieval convictions and anxieties. This exegesis, in my reading, contradicts what some of the recent literature on medieval music and masculinity has suggested, namely that monks did not legitimately express their masculinity in sexual terms (cf. Leach 2009, 24). The contrary is true, I  think: monastic exegesis, from the early Middle Ages onward, understood male priestly bodies not as asexual, but rather as assertively male. The reason for this understanding is that priestly bodies were thought to be highly generative, not least because they were liturgically active and productive. Such an understanding of priestly, monastic masculinity as spiritually fecund and inseminating was in place as early as the ninth century (Coon 2004). In this exegesis, the spiritually reproductive powers of priestly men were linked to liturgical sound-acts, especially preaching and the words of eucharistic consecration. Intoning the latter in particular was interpreted as a deeply generative discharge, in this case of the mouth, analogous to the discharge of semen (cf. Coon 2004, 296). Thus, a “ritually reproducing priest” (Coon 2004, 299) had to be male, and a chaste male no less, so that his reproductive powers were not wasted on anything less than the Divine. Priestly, monastic masculinity here is understood as potent precisely because it does not engage in mere human sexual, procreative acts. Hildegard of Bingen, for one, picks up on this exegesis in her Scivias, insisting that women cannot be ordained because they are but passive recipients of life-giving discharge. She argues that “a woman must not be a priest and do the work of consecrating . . . though she can sing the praise of her Creator” (Hildegard of Bingen 1990, Scivias, 2.6.76, 278).7 Singing, as a liturgical activity open to women (at least women monastics), shines a somewhat different light on medieval musical practices from those of the dominant discourse of music theory at the time. This ray of light broadens when one looks closer at the actual practices of liturgical singing in medieval women’s communities. Before turning to a couple of examples, some preliminary remarks are in order, to underline the vital place of musicmaking in religious women’s lives. To begin with, it is important to realize that monastic life and its music-making possibilities meant something different for women than for men, since men had other, broader possibilities of education and musical expression open to them, for example, in the rising universities and the courts. At the same time, the clear demarcation

218  Teresa Berger between female and male monastic communities was not as clear as commonly thought. Not only were there a number of double monasteries, that is, monastic houses with both male and female communities (with at least one, Fontevraud, explicitly put under the rule of an abbess rather than an abbot!), but every female monastic community also had at least one male priest in its midst, for the sacramental life of the community. And there was even the occasional monk who, disguised as a woman, joined a community of nuns, only to be discovered as male after his death (Murray 2005).8 It is clear, then, that the demarcation between male and female monastic communities was not impermeable. Granted that boundaries in monasteries were somewhat porous, what would musical life in women’s communities have looked and sounded like? First and foremost, these communities were the primary medieval context in which women exercised liturgical leadership and shaped their own communal singing, not least through the arrangement and composition of liturgical music. Women like Hildegard of Bingen or the scribes and singers behind the Las Huelgas Codex of the Royal Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos, Spain, come to mind (see esp. Catalunya 2017).9 And singing in worship was not the only music heard in religious women’s communities. Singing could also happen as part of broader devotional practices, as well as during recreation, work, travel, festive events, and finally, on a sister’s deathbed (e.g., Nosow 1998). Among women religious influenced by the late medieval renewal movement known as the Devotio Moderna, there was also a noticeable use of vernacular religious songs and that in much larger degree than among men influenced by the same movement (see Joldersma 2008). A closer look at the musical life of English women’s communities in the late Middle Ages offers an example of just how important singing was in the lives of religious women (description based on Yardley 2006). The most important musical position in a community was that of the cantrix. She essentially shaped the soundscape of the monastery. The cantrix oversaw the liturgical life of the community, ensuring especially that the monastic calendar was faithfully followed. She was also responsible for the production and care of liturgical books, for the choice or the composition of chants for specific feast days, and for the settings of tempos and pitches. As an example of the latter, the Additions to the Rule of the Bridgettine Abbey of Syon instruct the cantrix to balance the two sides of her choir so that they were evenly matched, to set the tempo at a moderate pace, and to pitch the chants in a moderate range for the gathered women. Given that these nuns spent hours every day chanting, the care of the cantrix for the performance of the liturgy was essential to the well-being of the community. The cantrix was also responsible for musical pedagogy, for example, with vocal exercises and warm-ups. Most importantly for the liturgical soundscape, the cantrix served as a soloist in worship, beginning chants, singing verses, and leading the other singers through her own performance. The leadership, sound, and style of the cantrix’s singing, in other words, were

Congregational singing and gender  219 decisive for the sound of a specific liturgy. The cantrix was assisted in her work by the Abbess and, in a weekly rotation, by a nun designated as the “ebdomadaria.” Serving for a period of seven days, this ebdomadaria began the Divine Office, led the choir, began certain chants, and read or chanted prayers and lessons. The cantrix and ebdomadaria were assisted by a sacristan whose primary responsibility was the materiality of worship, both in terms of the sanctuary space and also the care of liturgical vessels, vestments, and books. In addition, the sacristan was tasked with the ringing of the bells, a critical part of the soundscape of a monastic house, since different bells signaled virtually all activities—calling to worship, accompanying processions, heralding meals, and announcing a sister’s dying. And all these musical tasks relate only to liturgical practices themselves. There were other kinds of singing—everyday practices beyond the liturgical realm—in these women’s communities as well. This brief overview reveals the intricate care for liturgical singing in women’s monastic communities. Here is a space whose soundscape was almost entirely shaped by women’s voices—and that at a point when, in male monastic communities, “singing like a woman” was an insult. With this, I return to the dominant medieval discourse of music and gender and the disconnect noted earlier between this dominant discourse on the one hand and practices of liturgical singing in women’s communities on the other hand. The disconnect is sharpened further by a brief look at the materiality behind the music-making in women’s communities. Here, I simply wish to draw attention to the exquisite skills some sisters exhibited in the production of materials needed for the practice of liturgical singing, especially choir-books. One of these women was a fourteenth-century Poor Clare, Sister Loppa de Speculo. Loppa belonged to a convent of Poor Clares in Cologne that had been endowed by a local aristocratic woman at the beginning of the fourteenth century. By mid-century, the convent had about sixty professed nuns as well as an excellent schola (on Loppa and her work see Kreutziger-Herr and Unseld 2010, 41f). Loppa created a number of Latin chant books in this community, noting in one colophon in an Antiphonal: “Soror Loppa de Speculo perfecit [iste librum], scribendo, liniando, notando, illuminando” (quoted in Kreutziger-Herr and Unseld 2010, 41). That is: she herself wrote, lined, notated, and illuminated this book (for more see Oliver 2007, 1–5).10 There are other signs of her artistic, musical, and theological expertise.11 Several of her historiating initials, for example, include to the left a praying nun, usually identified by name as a sister from Loppa’s convent. The nuns depicted to the side of the initials usually render the historical event depicted in the illumination contemporaneous for the nuns who chant using this choir-book (Loppa, n.d.). The chanting nuns, in other words, find themselves present in and to the historical moment depicted in the initial. In one case, a devotional Marian prayer in the vernacular appears alongside a nun, probably that nun’s favorite prayer or possibly her favorite devotional song (Joldersma 2008, 374).12 Occasionally, the

220  Teresa Berger praying nun in the margins directly requests prayers from her chanting sisters. Loppa’s choir-books thus embody layers of prayers, so to say, spanning across centuries of salvation history as well as across the sisters in her own community. And Loppa clearly had the chanting of her sisters in mind when creating these choir-books. At one point, she inserted a small note (custos) in the right-hand margin to indicate a coming change of clef for the singers.13 Last but not least, Loppa sought to ensure that her sisters found visual pleasure while at worship, chanting. In the margins of her choir-books, she depicted a delightful array of little animals and whimsical magical creatures, some with delicately drawn human faces. Clearly, liturgical singing in this convent was a multimedia event, rooted in prayerful reflections and enabled by exquisite artistic skills. If one looks from Loppa de Speculo back to the dominant medieval discourse on music and gender, which rendered women’s voices inferior to men’s, the disconnect between this discourse and the practices of liturgical and devotional singing in women’s communities seems pronounced. It is hard to envision a woman like Loppa de Speculo getting up every morning and entering her convent’s chapel or scriptorium with a deep sense of her own female weakness and inferiority. A different narrative might be closer to the truth: what we encounter in these centuries is a history of liturgical singing than is clearly gendered and yet much more diversely and complexly so that facile narratives of women’s weakness, invisibility, and oppression are able to display. With this look at two examples from the history of Christian worship and congregational singing, I have illustrated specific ways in which gender, liturgy, and music intersected in the past. For congregational music studies, especially when it reflects on past practices (as it must, if only to map the genealogy of contemporary practices), these examples suggest the following. First, the soundscape of Christian worship—when focused on human voices at least—must have been gendered for much of liturgical history, since women and men were either spatially separated at worship or gathered into gender-specific religious communities. Second, communal singing in Christian worship—as a practice inflected by gender—was multifaceted and “intersectional,” to invoke a key term from gender-theoretical work. Singing was intersectional in that it was shaped by other markers of difference beyond gender alone, especially by social status, age, and ethnicity, to name just a few. An example of the importance of social status within processes of gendering are medieval female monastic communities whose abbesses wielded quasi-episcopal powers, for example, the early abbesses of Kildare, Ireland and the aristocratic abbesses of the Cistercian Royal Abbey of Las Huelgas in Spain. Another example of the impact of status is the separate nuns’ and lay sisters’ choirs in convent churches, which clearly divided a community of religious women by social standing (the same division existed in male monastic communities). Finally, throughout history, cultural gender codes were not stable but ever-shifting. What constitutes

Congregational singing and gender  221 masculine prowess, for example, differs depending on whether such prowess is celebrated in a late antique bedroom, on a medieval battlefield, in an early modern university, or on a nineteenth-century opera stage. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that the contemporary situation with regard to Christian worship, congregational singing, and practices of gender continues to be complex and multifaceted. A look at some aspects of the contemporary situation illustrates this point.

Contemporary intersections Crucial to contemporary intersections between worship, music, and gender is the fact that traditional gender codes have undergone rapid transformations in the last hundred years, certainly in Europe and North America (the contexts within which I write). In the North Atlantic world, traditional gender codes are crumbling, while new and diverse ways of doing gender have emerged. For many, gender has become an open project rather than a fixed identity; and gender-bending and gender-ambiguity are culturally on the rise. To cite just one example from the world of music and its visibility in media: the winner of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, Conchita Wurst, was a female performer noted for her glamorous gown and her beard; when not performing, Conchita is Thomas Neuwirth and uses male pronouns. Developments toward increasing gender diversity and fluidity have affected most social practices in the North Atlantic world, Christian worship included. Mainline Protestant churches, for example, have moved to ordaining women to all ecclesial ministries. With this, the soundscape of worship has changed, since the ritual centers—pulpit and altar—are no longer dominated by male voices. More recently, and along other lines of gendered differences, some churches have created official liturgies for the blessing or marriages of same-sex couples, thereby broadening the genders of couples who now say “yes” to each other in the midst of a worship service. This too changes the traditional soundscape of congregational life. The same is true for another example, namely the ordination of transgender ministers. The Old Catholic Church in the United States, for example, ordained its first openly transgender priest in 2013, a person who had transitioned from female-to-male. The United Methodist Church in 2017 commissioned as a deacon its first openly non-binary trans person, Rev. M Barclay (who uses singular they/them pronouns).14 Gender transitions usually involve forms of transvocality, which frequently entail the loss of a singing voice. No doubt these ecclesial developments are rooted in broader cultural shifts, especially the growing acceptance of gay rights and LGBTQIA+ concerns. The 2012 National Congregations Study found a notable increase in the acceptance of openly gay people in religious congregations in the United States.15 In just six years, congregations who stated that openly gay people were welcome as members increased to almost 50% (up from 37%). This growing acceptance plays out in worship in the emergence of new songs and rituals that observe

222  Teresa Berger coming-out, the blessing of same-sex unions, transgender name changes, or the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20). The website Trans Rituals, for example, provides rituals for trans people who seek to mark milestones in their lives. These rituals include those shaped by various faith traditions as well as non-religious ceremonies.16 And to cite just one musical example, a choir aptly named “queerubim” was formed in Germany well over a decade ago whose members celebrate gender diversity (although heterosexual and cisgender persons are not excluded). The repertoire of the choir is that of sacred music largely within the Christian tradition, according to queerubim’s website.17 All the examples highlighted here might suggest an image of linear progress toward ever-increasing gender diversity and inclusion both in broader society and in the church. The reality, however, is much more complex and much less linear. In many Christian congregations as well as most other social groups, conflicting trends are in evidence. A  narrative that foregrounds congregational developments consonant with the trend toward LGBTQIA+ inclusion easily occludes the fact that contemporary culture (as all “culture”) is a site of contestation and by no means homogenous. In terms of gender diversity, various countertrends accompany the increase in acceptance of LGBTQIA+ concerns, both in the social and the ecclesial realm. The National Congregations Study cited earlier also noted, for example, that leaders of Roman Catholic parishes have reported a significant drop in openly welcoming congregations in recent years (from 74% to 53%) and argued that this was a negative reaction to the broader shift toward gender fluidity and diversity.18 Other Christian communities have responded to cultural shifts in gender codes by emphasizing the need for more “muscular Christianity” in order to counteract a (perceived) increas­ ingly impotent, because feminized, church. The organization Church for Men is a case in point. It claims that Christianity is “the only major world religion with a man shortage,” and notes that a typical Sunday congregation in the United States consists of “an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male” (quote from Church for Men).19 Hence, Church for Men seeks to strengthen local churches in their outreach to men and boys. The aim is “not male dominance, but male resurgence.”20 A specific problem for such a male resurgence is the prevalence of worship songs in Christian congregations that are stereotypically feminine. Concretely, men are asked to sing love songs to Jesus that basically say “Lord, You’re Beautiful,” or “Jesus, I am so in love with You.”21 In response, the organization offers strategies to enable a community to “man up,” and congregational music receives detailed attention. Advice regarding tempo, for example, suggests that men prefer “upbeat songs, as opposed to dreamy romantic sounding songs.” For length, congregations are advised that “songs that repeat over and over and over and over” drive men crazy. Regarding key, the advice is to drop the key, since many Christian songs are seen as too high for men to sing. Much attention is given to song lyrics. Among hymns “that men can relate to,”

Congregational singing and gender  223 the website lists A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Rise up O Men of God, and “that politically incorrect favorite, Onward Christian Soldiers.” Praise and worship songs, many of which, according to the organization, “sound like Top-40 love songs,” are a particular problem. The trouble is that “men don’t express their love to each other using words like ‘hold me close’ . . . It sounds strange to sing these words to a male[!] deity.” The Church for Men lists only one song from the praise and worship repertoire whose lyrics it considers masculine; the latter is spelled out as making the singer feel “as if you are stepping onto a battlefield” rather than “stepping into a bedroom.” The song is “In Christ Alone My Hope is Found” by Stuart Townend in collaboration with Keith Getty (Church for Men, 10–11).22 So much for suggestions for congregational singing from the Church for Men. Yet even when going beyond Christian communities that seek to “man up” their congregational singing (and think of God as a male Deity), there are many hi-tech evangelical congregations that are buoyed by a phenomenon aptly described as “boys and their worship toys” (see Fenimore 2012). The Church for Men would identify this as a strength of course. The examples highlighted here diversify (so to speak) and complicate an image of linear progress regarding gender diversity and inclusion. Another factor to take into account is the stark differences around the world—despite the globalizing influence of North American cultural trends—in struggles around issues of gender. Yet as diverse and conflicting as gender issues are around the globe, they all coalesce around gender as lived and negotiated by individuals within specific communities, Christian congregations included. Clearly, then, questions of gender continue to shape Christian worship and congregational singing, even (or especially?) as traditional gender codes crumble in some contexts. As the brief look back into historical developments has revealed, intersections between liturgical practices and gender practices are nothing new in the history of the church. What might be new is the fact that gender appears hyper-marked, discursively, in contemporary culture. Ways of doing gender—both in their traditional formations and in newly emerging patterns—are contested and emotive topics. This reality impacts Christian communities and their worship practices, congregational singing included. The following three examples illustrate this point. The first example involves the texts of hymns sung in worship and how these texts have changed in tandem with shifting gender codes. There has been an upsurge of hymns since the 1970s that explicitly highlight women together with men as protagonists of salvation history. The image projected in these hymns is one of a gender complementarity that mostly follows the traditional gender binary. A couple of texts by John Bell offer striking examples, such as his “Women and Men as God Intended” or his “Sisters and Brothers, with one Voice.” These hymns obviously grew out of and lent a voice to the struggle for women’s rights both outside and inside the church. As women gained greater ecclesial influence, androcentric language came under increasing pressure, not least in worship. Many liturgical texts,

224  Teresa Berger including hymn texts, were amended to reflect the importance of women’s voices in the life of the church. By now, however, some of these womenspecific gains in liturgical language have been overtaken by newer genderspecific concerns. The gender complementarity championed in some hymn texts and the addition of “sisters” to the traditional “brothers” have been supplanted, at least in some communities, by the search for a liturgical language that does not reproduce the traditional gender binary. The main reason is that this traditional binary—invoked in the “women and men” and “sisters and brothers” hymns—excludes and alienates all those who live with non-binary genders.23 A second example of contemporary intersections between worship, music, and gender comes from the search, in some conservative Protestant and evangelical communities, for a more muscular, masculine Christianity. As mentioned earlier, this search is believed necessary because of the contemporary state of the church, which appears feminized. One specific marker of this search of a church for men is a critique of “girly,” that is, sweetly romantic songs with a “Jesus is my Boyfriend” message. The commitment instead is to identifying and singing “worship songs for men.”24 Writers of these songs consciously stay away from romantic imagery, and instead invoke a robust—and thereby supposedly masculine—relationship between the believer and God. God is imagined and addressed not as lover or friend, but as, for example, “Strong Deliverer,” “Hero,” “Tower,” and “Fortress.” A list by Jeffrey Painter of “good worship songs for men” includes about forty of such contemporary songs, almost half of them by Chris Tomlin.25 Different again is the third example of contemporary intersections between worship, music, and gender, namely the many struggles for more visibility (and audibility) for LGBTQIA+ persons in Christian worship. These struggles range broadly, from congregational singing by genderqueer youth (see Taylor et al. 2014) to acknowledging the presence of “Church sissies” (i.e., Southern Black gay men in worship) (see Johnson 2008), to persons with intersex conditions seeking to live in Christian communities, open about their conditions. Examples of the latter are a Dominican priest in South Africa who came out as intersex and had their priestly ordination annulled (for more see Cornwall 2010, 2015),26 and a person with an intersex condition who sought admission to a Carmelite convent and took ­hormones to live—and worship—as a woman.27 Some contemporary hymn texts have begun to envision lives beyond the traditional gender binary. Ruth Duck’s “Sacred the Body” is an excellent example. The author calls for respect for “persons,” “bodies,” and “difference,” without ever locking such respect into a binary model of sexual difference. The text lacks any specific naming of “male and female” bodies. There are other hymn texts whose meanings have been expanded simply in their specific use. I am thinking of Roman Catholic parishes that sing Marty Haugen’s “All Are Welcome” and have a rainbow flag in mind.

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Concluding reflections Although there is no way of knowing how exactly gender differences will inflect Christian worship in the future, the following points can safely be made. First, an irreducible diversity exists and will continue to exist in how different churches and their worship practices are shaped by issues of gender. This diversity needs to be acknowledged, encountered, and honored. Second, at least in the North Atlantic world and its globalizing sphere of influence, gender-bending and gender-blurring will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. For liturgical life, including congregational singing, this means that trans, queer, and gender-non-conforming worshippers are bound to gain visibility and voice in Christian communities. Third (and not completely unrelated to the previously named development), it may just be that in the future gender will not remain as hypermarked, discursively, as it is today. The latter could actually be welcomed news for Christian communities at worship, because it might allow us to rediscover that worship of God can be an invitation to resist the absolutizing of sexed identities, whatever these may be. And if the use of the voice in praise of God is one of the continuities between this life and life beyond the grave,28 then the bodily activity of singing might indeed be thinkable beyond the strong link to gender for which I have argued in this chapter.

Notes 1 The Center (more information at www.fmg.hmtm-hannover.de/de/das-fmg/) publishes a book series and has produced the excellent Lexikon Musik und Gender, edited by Annette Kreutziger-Herr and Melanie Unseld (2010); see also Grotjahn and Vogt (2010) and Heesch and Losleben (2012). 2 Regarding medieval liturgical chant, Leo Treitler pointed this out in the early 1990s with his essay “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History” (Treitler 1993). 3 David Robson reported on this study for the BBC under the headline “Voice & Power” in June of 2018; his report was picked up in a New York Times Gender Letter by Jessica Bennett titled “What Should Women Sound Like?” at www. nytimes.com/2018/06/29/us/gender-letter-women-voices-high-pitched.html. For the broader subject, see Kreiman and Sidtis (2011). 4 For more, see his website, www.robertcrowe.com/. 5 On music in early Christian communities, see, most recently, McGowan (2014, ch. 4). For an overview of the soundscape of Christian liturgy, see Gerhards (2016). 6 Christopher Page (2010, 195–208) suggests that this “Silencing of the Layman’s [sic] Voice” is a liturgical consequence of the developing separation between common Latin speech and a learned, bookish syllabification of liturgical Latin, delivered in worship in educated pronunciation. One only wishes that Page had noted more explicitly the disadvantage this linguistic separation—which according to him left schooled Latin increasingly “to monks and clergy” (206)—meant specifically for women. One also has to wonder where this argument leaves women in monastic communities.

226  Teresa Berger 7 Hildegard pushes this argument further in the end and does accord women a priestly ministry—if they are consecrated virgins. These women are betrothed to Christ, the High Priest, and through him have “the priesthood and all the ministry of My altar” (278). 8 The Cistercian writer Caesarius of Heisterbach (died ca. 1240) tells the story of such a monk/nun; for more, see Murray (2005). 9 For the Las Huelgas Codex, see Catalunya (2017). Obviously, more is known about elite women and convents that have left sustained records of their musicmaking than about lower-status female communities. Hildegard of Bingen and the aristocratic women of Las Huelgas are cases in point. 10 Loppa’s artistic authorship has not been unchallenged, however, not least because of the angst as to whether nuns were capable of the notably accomplished art displayed in these manuscripts. For more on this, see Oliver (2007). 11 Johanna Christine Gummlich (2000) argues that the small rosettes or tiny red wheels found on several leaves of Loppa’s manuscripts are her signature mark, which she inserted into her illuminations, thus “signing” her work. 12 A similar image, namely of a sister praying and citing the first line of a vernacular song, appears in a miniature in a songbook of the Devotio Moderna titled The Spiritual Melody (c. 1470), see Joldersma (2008, 374). 13 I thank M. Jennifer Bloxam, Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Music at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, for pointing this out to me. 14 Reconciling Ministries Network, “United Methodist Church commissions first nonbinary trans person as a Deacon,” June 5, 2017, www.rmnetwork.org/newrmn/ united-methodist-church-commissions-first-non-binary-trans-person-deacon/. 15 The report is published on the National Congregations Study website at www. soc.duke.edu/natcong/. 16 See www.transrituals.com/. 17 See www.queerubim.de/. 18 See www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/Docs/NCSIII_report_final.pdf. 19 The quote is from the website of the organization Church for Men, at http:// churchformen.com/men-and-church/where-are-the-men/. 20 See http:// http://churchformen.com/men-and-church/. 21 See http://churchformen.com/men-and-church/, under “Why Men Hate Going to Church.” 22 The quotes that follow are all direct quotes from the Church for Men’s Action Plan for a “Go for the Guys Sunday,” published on its website, http://churchfor men.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/GoForTheGuysSunday.pdf, pp. 10–11. 23 Minimally, persons with intersex conditions qualify as such. Credible estimates report the number of such persons to be about one in 1,500 to 2,000 births, see the website of the Intersex Society of North America, at www.isna.org/faq/ frequency. More people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations. Anne Fausto-Sterling’s groundbreaking Sexing the Body (2000) analyzed the medical data on human sex differentiation. 24 A suggested list of “Good Worship Songs for Men” can be found under Resources of the website of the Church for Men organization. 25 See http://churchformen.com/resources/, “Good Worship Songs for Men.” 26 The person in question was Sally Gross (1953–2014), the founder of Intersex South Africa. 27 More information at https://newwaysministryblog.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/ transgender-woman-prepares-to-enter-carmelite-convent/. 28 Tertullian, for example, argues, in De Resurrectione Carnis, 59–62, that the mouth of the resurrected body will continue to sing the praise of God while other bodily functions (e.g., eating and sexual relations) will cease because they have become unnecessary.

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References Ambrose of Milan. De Virginitate, III.3, 13. ———. De Sacramentis, VI.3, 15 and VI.3, 17. ———. Ennaratio in Ps., 1. Beard, Mary. 2017. “The Public Voice of Women.” In Women & Power: A Manifesto, 3–21. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Berger, Teresa. 2011. Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past. Liturgy, Worship and Society Series. Farnham, England: Ashgate. Biddle, Ian, and Kirsten Gibson, eds. 2009. “Introduction.” In Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, 15–19. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Boethius, De institutione musica, I.1.1989 [Fundamentals of Music] translated by Calvin M. Bower, edited by Claude V. Palisca. Music Theory Translation Series. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Catalunya, David. 2017. “The Customary of the Royal Convent of Las Huelgas of Burgos: Female Liturgy, Female Scribes.” Medievalia 20 (1): 91–160. Church for Men. 2010–2019. www.churchformen.com. Coon, Lynda. 2004. “ ‘What Is the Word If Not Semen?’ Priestly Bodies in Carolingian Exegesis.” In Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith, 278–300. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cornwall, Susannah. 2010. Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology, Gender, Theology and Spirituality. London: Equinox. ———, ed. 2015. Intersex, Theology, and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cyril of Jerusalem. Procatechesis, 14. Ehrick, Christine. 2015. “Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies.” Sounding Out! February 2, 2015. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/02/02/vocal-gender-and-the-genderedsoundscape-at-the-intersection-of-gender-studies-and-sound-studies/. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fenimore, James. 2012. “Boys and Their Worship Toys: Christian Worship Technology and Gender Politics.” Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 1 (1): 1–24. Fenster, Thelma. 1994. “Why Men?” In Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures 7, edited by Clare A. Lees et al., IX–XIII. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gerhards, Albert. 2016. Klang—Ein Weg durch Räume und Zeiten der Liturgie. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner. Gregory of Nyssa. Life of Macrina, 35, 3. Grotjahn, Rebecca, and Sabine Vogt, eds. 2010. Musik und Gender. Grundlagen— Methoden—Perspektiven. Kompendien Musik 5. Regensburg: Laaber-Verlag. Gummlich, Johanna Christine. 2000. “Neue Zuschreibungen an das Kölner Klarissenskriptorium.” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 61: 23–40.

228  Teresa Berger Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. 2005. “Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity.” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 8 (2): 125–49. Heesch, Florian, and Katrin Losleben, eds. 2012. Musik und Gender: Ein Reader. Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias. 1990. English translation by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press. Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. 2006. “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 16–51. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Holsinger, Bruce W. 2001. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture:  Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Figurae. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Johnson, Patrick E. 2008. “Church Sissies: Gayness and the Black Church.” In Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men in the South, 182–255. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Joldersma, Hermina. 2008. “ ‘Alternative Spiritual Exercises for Weaker Minds’? Vernacular Religious Song in the Lives of Women of the Devotio Moderna.” Church History and Religious Culture 88: 371–93. Kramer, Lawrence. 2001. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kreiman, Jody, and Diana Sidtis, eds. 2011. Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Kreutziger-Herr, Annette, and Melanie Unseld, eds. 2010. Lexikon Musik und Gender. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2009. “Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages.” In Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, edited by Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson, 21–39. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Linke, Ulrich. 2012. “Vokaler Gender Trouble: Wie queer sind sehr hohe Männerstimmen?” In Der Countertenor. Die männliche Falsettstimme vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart, edited by Corinna Herr et al., 215–50. Mainz: Schott. Loppa de Speculo. n.d. MS 8997 1. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Maus, Fred E. 2011. “Music, Gender, and Sexuality.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A  Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton et  al., 317–29. New York: Routledge. McGowan, Andrew B. 2014. Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McMullen, Tracy. 2013. “Gender.” In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, Jacqueline. 2005. “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity.” In Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, edited by P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, 24–42. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nosow, Robert. 1998. “Song and the Art of Dying.” The Musical Quarterly 82 (3/4): 537–50. Oliver, Judith H. 2007. Singing with the Angels: Liturgy, Music, and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock, 1–5. Turnhout: Brepols.

Congregational singing and gender  229 Page, Christopher. 2010. The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stimson, Catherine R., and Gilbert Herdt, eds. 2014. Critical Terms for the Study of Gender. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Yvette et  al. 2014. “Sounding Religious, Sounding Queer: Finding Spaces of Reconciliation through Congregational Music.” Ecclesial Practices: Journal of Ecclesiology and Ethnography 1 (2): 229–49. Treitler, Leo. 1993. “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History.” In Music Studies and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie, 23–45. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yardley, Anne Bagnall. 2006. Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

13 Searching for a metaphor What is the role of the Shaliach/Shalichat Tzibur (leader of prayer)? Jeffrey A. Summit Introduction When I was growing up, I never gave much thought to the structure and dynamics of Jewish prayer. Yet, when I was explaining Jewish worship to friends from other faith traditions, I would say that when Jews pray, no one stands between us and God. We need no one to pray for us: each of us has a direct line to the Holy One. Jews from Abraham to Tevya have a history of talking quite comfortably, one on one, with God. Over time, I realized that this formulation leaves an important issue unaddressed: —If we don’t need anyone else to talk to God on our behalf, then what exactly is the leader—the cantor, the rabbi, the song leader—doing as she or he stands before the congregation leading daily, Shabbat (Sabbath) or holiday synagogue worship? Just what is the purpose of the shaliach (mas.) or shalichat (fem.) tzibur, the leader of prayer?1 In this chapter, I share a number of metaphors that can be used when we study and describe the role and function of the prayer leader.2 While I write from the perspective of Jewish worship, I hope that these images can stimulate a deeper consideration of how scholars conceive of the role of the leader in congregational worship across faith traditions. Before suggesting these metaphors, I describe the personal stance from which I consider this topic. I then discuss my theoretical approach as I examine the phenomenology of interaction between the leader and congregation in the ritual performance of congregational worship.3 I come to my understanding of the dynamics of worship leadership from two vantage points—as a rabbi on campus and as an ethnomusicologist— and this chapter is informed by both of these approaches to the phenomenology of worship. In my rabbinic work, I draw from years of interaction with Jewish college students and the broader university community. Over the past forty years, I have developed a practitioner’s feeling for how and why Jews do (or do not) engage with formal worship in the liberal traditions. While our university does not have an Orthodox population, we host active Reform and Conservative worship services. Recently, a “third space” has been in formation called “the Kavanah4 Collective,” focusing

Searching for a metaphor  231 on intentional spirituality. In this service, the liturgical text is shortened to make more time for reflection, communal singing, and chant accompanied by guitars and hand drums. I regularly participate in all of these services, working with student leaders to plan worship, giving sermons, and occasionally serving as shaliach/shalichat tzibur. Over the years, I have observed changes in how and why members of our community participate in congregational worship. Even in the liberal movements, twenty years ago students felt a sense of obligation to be engaged in worship. Based on their experiences in home congregations, Jewish day schools, and summer camps, communal worship was seen as a normative way to associate with the Jewish community. But in an experience-driven culture, students are motivated more by a desire for personal engagement than by religious obligation. And as such, the value that the leader brings to the experience of worship becomes increasingly essential to participants’ involvement. As one participant in the Conservative service said: There was a time when the congregation and the rabbi and the cantor were all “performers” and the “audience” was God. Then it changed and the rabbi, the cantor and the song leader became the performers and the congregation became the “audience.” At that point, the role of the service leaders became more central to engaging and involving Jews in meaningful worship. With a diminishing sense of obligatory participation, liberal worshippers “vote with their feet” as they search for congregational worship experiences that feel value-added to their lives on many levels—personal, social, spiritual, communal, and musical. In their article “The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-Modern America,” Steven M. Cohen and Arnold Eisen stress the centrality of the individual as the driving force in contemporary Jewish involvement. In their research, Cohen and Eisen found that personal meaning is “the arbiter of their Jewish involvement” and “voluntarist in the extreme” (2001, 20). These women and men do not assume a given trajectory for their religious lives; Jewish meaning is “constructed one experience at a time” (ibid.). As Cohen and Eisen observe, while more Jews are drawn to spirituality, they exhibit a “severely diminished interest in the organizational life of the Jewish community” (2001, 21). With less of a sense of religious obligation, Shabbat worship competes with a range of experiences one can access on a Friday night in a campus community. These students are consumers of experience and for many, their decision to participate is made at the last minute amidst a flurry of texts from friends or posts on Facebook. What is on the menu for Shabbat dinner? Do I like the song leader this week in the Reform service? What other activities are happening on campus? Religious experience is increasingly commodified in an age where men and women actively pursue heightened experiences in many aspects of their lives. Martin Jay discusses how sociologists negatively

232  Jeffrey A. Summit characterize our society as an Erlebnisgesellschaft (experience society) where “the commodification of experience [is] one of the most prevalent tendencies of our age, ranging from extreme sports to packaged tourism (2005, 407; also see Schultze 2004 on this terminology). While a Shabbat service is neither a play nor a musical performance, it has aspects of both. As such, the role of the leader is increasingly important as these women and men evaluate the potential value of the worship experience in their personal search for meaning. The stakes are high when a leader chooses music for congregational worship. I found, again and again, when women and men spoke about the value of music in Jewish worship, within minutes they were talking about their deepest spiritual questions. What tunes and chant represented the essence of who they were and what they believed as Jews? What music constituted authentic practice? What was their relationship to their ethnic and religious history? Where, and when, did they feel truly comfortable and fully at home in a community? We spoke about music but the real conversation was about the locus of core meaning in their lives. This search for religious and cultural meaning is broader than involvement in communal worship. As Jewish Chaplain and Executive Director of Tufts Hillel, I  have been involved in national projects that have developed, implemented, and evaluated a range of methodologies to understand how and why Jews become involved with—or disengage from—Jewish practice.5 The mission of the university-based Jewish organization Hillel is pluralistic, working with a broad range of Jewish students and promoting multiple entrance points to Jewish life, culture, and spiritual expression. International Hillel currently focuses on the importance of creating “meaningful Jewish experiences” for students. As a rabbi who is also an academic, I have played a role in underscoring the complexity of each of these heavily freighted words (meaningful, Jewish, experience) with my colleagues. As a Jewish professional, when I use the words “meaning” and “experience” I think functionally about actions that can be measured and have an impact on community attachment, affiliation, and personal religious expression. That is, in an organizational setting we define meaningful experiences by their outcomes. Hillel defines these terms broadly and understands “meaningful Jewish experiences” as occasions and interactions that lead students to develop ownership of their own Jewish lives—making active choices to advance their Jewish journey and ultimately, to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life. As we consider student engagement with Hillel, meaningful Jewish experiences are understood to fall into four categories. These are interactions that create positive Jewish memories, build Jewish selfconfidence, increase Jewish knowledge, and develop connections to the Jewish people and Jewish community (Zwilling 2010, 6). This concept of ownership of experience is particularly American, where a focus on the individual’s self-fulfillment increasingly takes precedence over a more traditional sense of obligation to community. This is not to say that liberal denominational communities do not have standards of

Searching for a metaphor  233 practice, defined theological approaches, and varying understandings of religious obligation. But increasingly, the individual is the locus of decisionmaking and religious authority. As such, our work on campus has centered on each student’s Jewish journey as we provide opportunities for them to become knowledgeable, active participants in Jewish celebration, learning, arts, culture, and spiritual expression. This has influenced our approach as we have planned and organized Jewish worship services on campus. As a rabbi, I love to stand up in front of a group and lead services but rather than assume that position myself, we have decided to train students to be worship leaders. They are then empowered to step into worship leadership roles where they in turn are able to teach and engage other students. This experience of ownership provides them with linguistic, ritual, and musical methodologies of belonging that facilitate their continuing participation in worship congregations long after they graduate from university. As an ethnomusicologist, I am interested in how women and men express core values by the musical choices they make in their lives. My examination of the meaning and experience of congregational worship is influenced by Harris Berger’s work on stance, a phenomenological approach to assessing meaning in culture. Berger understands stance to be “the affective, stylistic, or valual quality with which a person engages with an element of her experience” (2010, xiv) and writes that “meaning arises, not from the text alone, but from the culturally specific ways in which people grapple with texts and cog them into structures of lived experience” (xiv). Jewish worship is the performance of sacred text and the stance of a congregant in relation to the worship experience is shaped by many factors, including—but not limited to—one’s formative experiences with Jewish community, one’s ability to read Hebrew phonetically, and familiarity with the particular tunes a community uses for worship. Certain factors determine the leader’s stance as well: the extent to which the leader understands the meaning of the Hebrew text of the liturgy, one’s personal conception of the obligations of leading prayer, musical ability, gender, and the personal and communal negotiations that shape one’s Jewish observance and affiliation. The leader’s stance is also relational and is formed by one’s connection to the members of the congregation and by one’s relationship to the occasion of the service, for example, if the occasion is a regular Shabbat service or the bar or bat mitzvah of a relative or friend. A worshipper’s stance is also informed by one’s feelings about, and perceptions of, the service leaders—the rabbi, cantor, or lay leader—as well as one’s perception of certain norms of behavior in the service, such as whether or not it is permissible to talk to your neighbor during the service. In examining both the stance of the leader and the stance of the congregant, I draw from interviews, my participation in Jewish worship, and my own experience as a knowledgeable insider in the American Jewish community. I also find the sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of frame analysis valuable as I consider multiple sites of experience and examine the perspectives

234  Jeffrey A. Summit of the shaliach/shalichat tzibur, worshipers, and other players who take on specific roles in synagogue worship. Goffman’s work builds from William James’s question in his 1869 essay “The Perception of Reality” where he asks, “Under what circumstances do we think things are real?” Goffman’s approach to meaning is “situational,” that is, focused on “what one individual can be alive to at a particular moment” (1974, 8). He states that when individuals attend to any situation, they ask “What is it that’s going on here?” Goffman draws from Bateson’s use of the term “frame” (Bateson 1972, 177–93), defining it as the basic elements of a situation built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern social events and our subjective involvement in them. Frame analysis is then “the examination in these terms of the organization of experience” (Goffman 1974, 11). Goffman examines how the meaning and perspective of an event or a social interaction shift depending upon the “key” from which we view the frame. He understands key to be “the set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else” (ibid., 44). One could take the same acts, or to use the musical analogy, the same notes, and when viewed from the perception of a different participant, the acts stay the same but the “key” shifts. With the change of key, the range of color and shadings, the inherent meaning, essential relationships and end goals, all shift dramatically. This approach can be applied to the leader’s role in prayer in ways large and small, to both consider assumptive and motivational factors that shape the performance and to understand how the meaning of the ritual differs substantially when viewed through the eyes and ears of various participants. When viewed in the key of religious obligation, the worship service is about the correct and accurate fulfillment of a required act. From this perspective, leading the prayer is an exacting performance of the text with important theological and ritual implications in regard to practice and daily life. However, when viewed in the key of the individual’s personal agency and desire to express one’s identity and connection to peoplehood, leading the prayer becomes about self-actualization as a Jew, the desire for intensified experience, ownership of the tradition, and an intimate connection to congregation and community. When viewed in the key of a family celebration, such as a bar or bat mitzvah, the service becomes an occasion filled with familial and communal pride as a young woman or man steps into the role of leader. It can also be viewed as an occasion of heightened anxiety for both the parents and the bar or bat mitzvah celebrant as a young person stands before the congregation for the first time to perform newly acquired liturgical skills. Frame analysis also works well when examining the different players who take part in a worship service. For example, when considered in the key of the service leader, the frame of the service can be very much about leading the prayers without making mistakes in the pronunciation of the Hebrew

Searching for a metaphor  235 or the musical realization of the nusach, traditional prayer chant. If one is leading liturgy that he or she knows extremely well, the key can be informed by the satisfaction of a performance well done or the joy of facilitating enthusiastic, participatory singing. However, when the role of the service leader is viewed in the key of a person learning how to lead a service for the first time, the entire ritual frame can be shaped by performance anxiety. If the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is nervous about standing up in front of the congregation, he or she might not concentrate on the meaning of the liturgy at all, but rather focus on remembering the melodies and the complex details of the liturgical performance. When experienced in the key of social interaction, worship can also be an opportunity for congregants to harmonize during communal singing or sit in the back of the synagogue and visit with one’s neighbor. There is a synergy between leader and congregation, a dance in which leadership is authorized by the congregation just as the congregation is constituted through leadership. This dynamic creates a symbiosis that supports the leader’s self-expression and experience while ensuring that the congregation maintains the structured rituals required for communal worship. I have experienced Jewish worship performed in all of these keys and believe that Goffman provides a valuable way to understand and analyze “the organization of experience” in regard to the dynamics between the prayer leader and congregants in communal worship (ibid., 11). As such, the role of the leader in Jewish prayer is “played in many keys” and informed by a range of social, professional, musical, and personal factors. From this vantage point, I consider a series of metaphors for how we can understand the role and function of the leader in prayer.

What is the role of the Shaliah/Shalichat Tzibur? The literal translation of the Hebrew term “shaliach tzibur” as “messenger of the congregation” immediately raises a host of questions.6 The ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague writes that musical meaning cannot be derived from any single source. We must consider “many different perceptions of the performance situation” to understand how ritual is experienced and received (1984, 8). So if there are as many experiences in a ritual event as there are participants, how does one person deliver a singular “message” that by its very nature is heterogeneous? This is complicated by the understanding that in Jewish prayer, worshipers are supposed to bring their own personal kavanah—intention, interpretation, focus—to the performance of the liturgy. How can a messenger possibly read the hearts of each member of the praying congregation? Just what “message” is the messenger conveying? The less literal but more accurate translation, “one who is appointed by the public for the function of leading prayer” raises a variety of other problems. While the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is in many respects the congregation’s appointed representative, that term has lost a good deal of its force today. There were times in Jewish history when that expression was taken

236  Jeffrey A. Summit very seriously and all the members of a congregation had to collectively agree on a candidate, often by public vote, before he was allowed to be the community’s representative (Orenstein 1994, 14). Even if a cantor is hired by a search committee, or a ritual committee decides which lay congregants will lead the prayer, these days there is never full congregational agreement when a leader is chosen for this role. This notion of the shaliach/shalichat tzibur as a true representative of the congregation points to deeper issues. Too often the relationship between the prayer leader and the congregation is not based on a full understanding of exactly what the worshipers desire in a prayer experience or how the leader understands her or his role before the congregation. Indeed, if the leader is really a representative, then communication, discussion, and understanding between the leader and the members of the congregation should be an essential prerequisite for meaningful prayer. In the ethnographic research for my book on identity and melody choice in Jewish worship (2000), I  found that congregants were more willing to allow the cantor latitude in music choices if the congregation respected, trusted, and valued the leader as a person. In many synagogues, if a cantor was seen as too performative or used operatic style in the presentation of the prayers, worshipers were quick to make harsh judgments about the person’s character and spiritual integrity. Such a cantor was often described as a diva or understood to be egotistical. But when a trusting relationship had developed between the leader and the congregation, when the cantor had stood at their side during life cycle events, happy and tragic, then worshipers did not judge cantors harshly if they wanted to show off their musical talent a bit during services. As such, for a leader to truly be representative, the relational nature of the leader’s stance in regard to congregants was deeply important. If the members of a community spoke to one another, and to the leader, about the factors that contributed to meaningful public worship, impactful music, and the qualities that they valued in a shaliach/shalichat tzibur, they were well on the way to a deeper spiritual experience before they even opened their prayer books.

The leader as high priest Traditionally, the shaliach/shalichat tzibur also served as a “prayer emissary” for those members of the congregation who were less literate and unable to recite the standard Hebrew prayers. By responding “Amen” to the leader’s prayer, those congregants discharged their own obligation to pray. The shaliach/shalichat tzibur was seen as the expert: at least one person in the congregation knew the “right way” to do it. This suggests the image of the prayer leader as Kohen Gadol, the high priest in the Temple in Jerusalem. It was the High Priest’s responsibility to know the old, true traditions—the right words to say, as well as when and how they should be said. So too, today the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is expected to know the

Searching for a metaphor  237 appropriate nusah (traditional chant), the Hebrew, and the matbeah shel tefilah, the structure of the service. Clearly, many modern Jews think of the function of prayer leader as similar to the Kohen Gadol, or we would not find congregants who insist that the service always be conducted exactly the same way and come to the synagogue vigilantly every week to watch that nothing be changed. Historically, people believed that the Kohen Gadol wielded substantial power through his correct performance of ritual. His chanting of the atonement prayers on the day of Yom Kippur was a key component in expiating the sins of the Jewish people as they repented on that holy day. What power do contemporary worshipers attribute to the shaliach/shalichat tzibur? Do congregants believe that, like the Kohen Gadol, he or she is able to expiate the congregation’s sins by the correct and timely performance of ritual? In my interviews with Yemenite Jews in Israel, they reported that as recently as the last century, members of their community imbued the prayer leader’s role with so much power that they ascribed their high infant mortally rate to mistakes he might have made in his recitation of the liturgy. And so, their children were punished for the leader’s lack of facility and kept healthy if he did the job well. This, of course, is an extreme view. Yet, this underscores how various worshipers consider the responsibility of the prayer leader to conduct the service in the “right” way. Is the prayer leader the guardian or the architect of the community’s musical and liturgical traditions? The architect designs and builds new structures. The architect pushes musical and liturgical boundaries, conceptualizing new spaces for innovative spiritual expression. The guardian maintains a connection with powerful, authentic communal celebration. The guardian, like the Kohen Gadol, protects and preserves old traditions.

The leader as Levite There is another way to understand the role of shaliach/shalichat tzibur that is reminiscent of worship in the temple in Jerusalem. We can consider the prayer leader as Levite. The Levite’s job in the ancient Temple was to produce an impressive religious/musical performance. Rabbinic literature records that the Temple choir was composed of at least twelve Levites and their number “could be increased without end” (Schleifer 1997, 20). The Levites provided multi-instrumental musical accompaniment for daily sacrifices, processions, and holiday celebrations. Where liturgical music was concerned, the Levites were the experts. So too, during the golden age of hazzanut (cantorial performance) at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, Jews so came to rely on the cantor as the musical expert that, in the large synagogues of Europe and the United States, they all but handed over their own religious responsibilities for prayer to the cantor. Many Jews have been intimidated about taking them back ever since.

238  Jeffrey A. Summit At the beginning of the twentieth century, a certain style of cantor was firmly placed on a pedestal. Jews loved opera, and famous cantorial artists such as Josef “Yossele” Rosenblatt  (1882–1933), Mordecai Hershman  (1888–1940), Moshe Koussevitzky  (1899–1966), Moishe Oysher (1906–1958), Leib Glantz (1898–1964), and others popularized a davening (praying) style heavily influenced by opera and characterized by the use of coloratura and bel canto singing. During this period, the shaliach tzibur’s role moved into the realm of performance. Even now, many an otherwise competent shaliach/shalichat tzibur feels dwarfed by those incredible voices. Such deference is inappropriate. In one of the earliest rabbinic sources describing the essential qualities of a shaliach tzibur (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 16a), only minimal attention is paid to musical talent. In that list, the rather modest requirement of a “pleasant voice” is placed tenth in a catalog of desired qualities. The Talmud is much more concerned with a leader’s maturity, piety, and liturgical and halachic (Jewish legal) knowledge than the musical realization of the prayers. As stated earlier, to the extent that worship involves performance, both the congregation and the prayer leader can be thought of as participating and performing together. There are many ways that aesthetic expertise can stimulate spiritual experience, but when the prayer leader draws an undo amount of attention to him or herself, the worshiper’s line of vision becomes obstructed. At the same time, there are problems when a leader tries to encourage too much participation in services. When the shaliach/shalichat tzibur leads Mitch Miller-style davening, worship can become a camp sing-along. An accomplished prayer leader appreciates the importance of silence and leaves space and time for the individual worshiper to think, reflect, and consider the prayers. A leader does not help the members of the congregation by filling up every available space with catchy melodies. In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, it is important that the shaliach tzibur never take away from the congregants the wonderful responsibility of praying for themselves (1953). It is difficult to determine how much participation is too much, and a prayer leader must decide whether to be concerned primarily with the product or process. Certain influential liturgical composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt that the music in services should be aesthetically beautiful even if that meant limiting congregational participation. In the late eighteenth century, the German cantor and composer Ahron Beer (1739–1821) composed many different melodies for each Shabbat and holiday service. As a cantor, he would alternate among them so that his congregants did not have the opportunity to learn the tunes. In this way, he would maintain control over the musical quality of the worship experience (Idelsohn 1971, 47). The Austrian cantor and composer Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890) was credited with saying that it was better to have one person singing beautifully than the entire congregation howling like wolves. There have been periods in our musical history when a leader’s job was to control rather than encourage musical participation.

Searching for a metaphor  239 I have found that when members of a congregation are involved in real prayer, it is often a messy, volatile, and relatively uncontrolled experience. Some people may begin to cry  .  .  . or to laugh. Worshipers may become agitated, leave their seats, and walk around the room. All of this is potentially disruptive to the leader. Carl Jung is credited with saying that one of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. But as I  interviewed hundreds of contemporary Jews about their experiences chanting sacred text, increasingly they spoke about their desire to encounter something authentic and holy. I  interviewed a rabbi in a Jewish Renewal congregation who described a service in which he started to sing a niggun, a wordless Hasidic tune, for Shabbat. It is common for Jewish congregations across the denominational spectrum to include participatory niggunim (pl) in Sabbath worship. But in this occurrence, the leader reported that the singing was so powerful, and the congregation was so engaged with the music, that he made the spontaneous decision to just keep going. He made that niggun, supplemented with a few stories, the full service. That was a risk! I discussed this story with an accomplished shaliach tzibur who responded “sure, that was a risk” and then quoted the jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins “If you’re not hitting some wrong notes, then you’re not playing hard enough.” A shaliach/shalichat tzibur who wants to facilitate a deeper spiritual experience in worship must be open to a certain amount of risk, missteps, and creative disorder in services. The prayer leader as music director must be flexible enough to direct the service without controlling it in order to best serve the spiritual needs of the congregants.

The leader as teacher Another way to understand the role of the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is as a teacher, teaching and re-teaching sacred text. I consider the performance of text in light of Robert Bellah’s observations about the role of text in religious community. He states, “texts, sacred or profane, do not live except in the context of practice: they must be read, and reading is a social practice embedded in a whole range of other social practices” (2000, 491). Jewish worship is a text-bound experience, the performance of sacred text. The liturgy is realized publicly through music, and ideally that music should help to clarify and elucidate the meaning of the prayers. The same holds true for the cantillation of the scriptures. Yet while the Massorites canonized scriptural chant some thousand years ago, the shaliach tzibur was left with a good deal of latitude in the interpretation of the prayers. Ideally, the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is a teacher who uses all the tools of music—dynamics, rhythm, repetition—to make the words of the liturgy come alive for the individual worshipers. As such, certain words in the liturgy become musical directions: “kol d’mama” (“a soft voice”) or “ra’ash gadol” (“great noise”) can indicate dynamics. Other phrases, such as “hadesh yameinu k’kedem” (“renew our days as of old”), call for emotional intensity. This raises the question: Can someone

240  Jeffrey A. Summit fully lead prayer—and serve as a teacher and interpreter—without understanding the meaning of the Hebrew text? While ordained cantors have studied Hebrew formally, not all lay service leaders have a proficiency in the language. They might be able to read and pronounce Hebrew phonetically but can’t fully translate the text of the prayers. Having a shaliach/shalichat tzibur who does not understand Hebrew would be like having a mathematician who can’t count or a professor of Spanish who speaks only English.

The leader as train conductor Though it is hardly a classical model, I would also suggest that we consider the shaliach/shalichat tzibur as a conductor on a train. In fact, a train is a good metaphor for a Jewish worship service. Everyone on a train is headed down the track in the same direction. Yet while they are on the train, the passengers don’t all do the same thing at the same moment. Some stand, some sit, some walk around, some talk in the club car. Individual passengers may get off or on the train, but the train itself keeps moving. Traditional Jewish worship allows each worshiper to proceed at an individual pace. The leader is responsible for directing the collective flow of the service but cannot be overly concerned with an individual’s progress or personal experience. The conductor is there to call out “All Aboard!” and announce the various stations along the way. He or she lets the worshiper know where the service is but not necessarily where the worshiper is in the service.

The leader as facilitator of musical and spiritual experience Or, consider the shaliach/shalichat tzibur as a music director, not a performer but a facilitator of musical experience. One of the powers that comes with his or her role is the option to choose the melodies to which certain prayers are sung. This is a weighty responsibility, and when doing this, a leader ventures into dangerous territory. Many congregants, especially during the High Holidays, do not feel as though they have been to services unless they hear their favorite melodies for certain prayers. The melody serves as a portal to the past, a connection with our ancestors, real and imagined. A melody with historical resonance grounds one in history and, as such, is an assurance of authenticity. For many Jews who don’t understand Hebrew, melody is the prayer. The prayer leader who does not understand this will forever be at odds with the congregation. The shaliach/shalichat tzibur is also a facilitator of spiritual experience. Singing together is one of the few ways that a community can actually experience unity and is one of the most accessible routes to transcendent experience. When singing together, congregants form an embodied connection. One breathes out as the next person breathes in. As a prayer in the Shabbat morning liturgy states, “Nishmat kol chai tivareach et shimcha,” “The breath of every living beings blesses Your name.” Congregants can hear and

Searching for a metaphor  241 feel what it means to blend voice and breath, to create, even temporarily, a transcendent community of palpable beauty and harmony. In this way, singing becomes an occasion for transformation as well as an opportunity to experience, and then model, a vision of community: clear separate voices blending together to create a whole. As such, the prayer leader should be aware of the possibility for prayer to be an opportunity for transformative connection as well as a path to experience community on a deeper level. Some prayer leaders might be intimidated by the image of the shaliach/shalichat tzibur as a facilitator of spiritual experience, but my recent research on the meaning of chanting sacred text in the Jewish community has led me to think more broadly about how Jews now experience spirituality (Summit 2016). By “spirituality,” I  mean the ways that contemporary Jews encounter forces and currents larger than the self. William James’s classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, understands religious experience to comprise a transformational intensity that would be foreign to most contemporary Jews. While there were exceptions in my interviews, most of the narratives about Jews chanting Torah did not fit classic typologies of religious or mystical experience where one’s soul temporary leaves the body, where one sees visions, undergoes a conversion, or experiences God.7 As I  interviewed Jews cross-denominationally about the meaning and experience of chanting sacred text, they were eager to speak about what I would define as core, or “spiritual” questions: Where do I feel at home? Where do I belong? Am I a part of something larger in the world? How do I deal with the passage of time, with the fact that my children, my parents, and I are growing older? Am I alone in the world or do I belong to a people, a community? Are there larger connections that are uniquely accessible to me through my history and birthright? Worshippers understood communal worship as a way to engage with these issues. These Jews described how they found meaning in congregational prayer— performing sacred text and listening to text performed. For some, this meant stepping into the flow of Jewish history, a vertical connection back through time that linked them to something ancient and true. Others spoke about how their involvement in communal worship allowed them to experience peoplehood, a horizontal connection to Jews around the world, bridging the separateness that many experienced in their lives. Some worshipers reflected on a powerful sense of chosen-ness, not feeling superior to others but feeling ownership and connection to a ritual that has been performed for thousands of years, a visceral affirmation of their membership in the Jewish people. For many, the nature of the experience was intellectual and they spoke about understanding their Judaism in a deeper way after embodying the text in performance. Many studies of spirituality in American religion examine how the individual’s search for deeper experience and self-fulfillment have distanced them from institutional religion, traditional liturgy, and mainstream

242  Jeffrey A. Summit congregational affiliation.8 But unlike spiritual seekers in America who go far afield of conventional religious communities, these Jews seek meaning in a ritual performance that is completely within the regular framework of Jewish worship. They are not going off to join an ashram, looking for a guru on a mountain, or into the desert to re-experience the Exodus from Egypt. Their search for meaning has unfolded within traditional structures. As I examine what draws these women and men to congregational worship, I find it helpful to use the language employed by the scholar of religious studies Ann Taves, who focuses on “experiences deemed religious (and by extension, other things considered special) rather than “religious experience.”9 While few of the people I interviewed were willing to come right out and speak about these encounters as religious or spiritual experiences, they spoke of powerful connections with community, history, family, and tradition that were intensified in congregational prayer.

The leader as role model One of the more important functions of the shaliach/shalichat tzibur is also to serve as a role model. In many of my ethnographic interviews, Jews spoke about how they did not really know how to pray. Worship situations make them feel awkward. Many congregants seem openly distrustful of anyone who can stand in front of a group of people and—in broad daylight—talk to God. Cantors, rabbis, and lay prayer leaders, especially in the liberal movements, have more facility, experience, and ease with prayer. While leading services, the leader is teaching an approach to prayer. An effective shaliach/shalichat tzibur does not lead “prayer.” She or he leads worshipers through the experience of prayer. As such, a knowledge of the individuals in the congregation is essential for the leader to model how one negotiates the journey through a prayer service. I  interviewed a cantor who spoke about how he first tries to connect with the members of his congregation and win their confidence on a personal level. They are then more willing to trust and follow him as he leads them through the worship. The Hasidic leader, Dov Baer of Mezrich (1704–1772), taught that Moses was such a powerful leader because he knew the personal melody (niggun) of each one of the six hundred thousand souls of Israel. Rather than putting all of one’s energy on knowing the prayers, it is ultimately more important to know the pray-ers. The quality of relationship between the leader and the congregation is an essential component of impactful leadership. Then, when the leader stands in front of the congregation, she or he can convey that the material at hand is serious, real, and potentially transformative.

The leader as tour guide Finally, consider the shaliach/shalichat tzibur as a tour guide, in Hebrew, a moreh/morat-derech, who is taking the congregation on a path that ultimately

Searching for a metaphor  243 might bring them closer to holiness. Jewish worship does many things to make that journey easier, more accessible, and somewhat safer. The congregation follows a set order in the service. Worshipers return to familiar melodies. They even travel in a group. Yet the experienced leader knows that for all the preparation, the journey is an uncertain endeavor. People are on the trip for many different reasons, and some will travel much farther than others. Some congregants might be more knowledgeable about the journey than the leader. Others may feel compelled to be there against their will and might be openly hostile to the entire process. A good guide is mindful of the final destination and the people who have signed on for the journey. She or he uses all the resources at hand—and all the roles available—to motivate the assembled group to reach its final destination. The Hasidim understood that journey to be a process of hitkarvut, a drawing closer. In the synagogue, holiness becomes real through community, through prayer, and through sacred text. Through the power of music, the shaliach/shalichat tzibur binds these elements together and provides an approach to the divine.

Notes 1 Historically, the term shaliach tzibur is used in the Talmud (see BT Ta’anit 16a) and Jewish legal codes where it is only found in its masculine form. In the mid-late twentieth century, the feminine term shalichat tzibur was introduced as women assumed liturgical leadership roles in the liberal Jewish movements. 2 This chapter is a fuller development of a much shorter essay published in the journal Kerem, where I first suggested that the role of the prayer leader could be explored by a series of metaphors (Summit 1992–93). 3 In my book on the meaning and experience of chanting the Torah, I applied the concepts of stance and frame analysis to the performance of biblical chant in the contemporary Jewish community (2016). In this chapter, I draw from that work to consider the relevance of those theoretical approaches to the dynamics of congregational worship. 4 The Hebrew term “kavanah” means spiritual direction, intention, or feeling. While the rabbinic tradition understood the challenges of constantly imbuing one’s prayer with spiritual focus, it was traditionally understood that a worshipper should pray “with kavanah” in order to fulfill the obligation for prayer (B.T. Berachot 30b). 5 Two national projects are of special note. The first is the Campus Jewish Service Corps, developed in 1994. The second project, The Senior Jewish Educator/Campus Entrepreneurial Initiative (SJE/CEI), was developed by Hillel in partnership with the Jim Joseph Foundation and applied the methodologies of social entrepreneurship and relationship-based engagement to campus Jewish life. 6 One can position the musical/liturgical leadership in the synagogue on a continuum of professionalism. On one side we find the shaliach/shalichat tzibur, a skilled but non-paid congregational member who will accept the honor of leading the congregation in prayer. On the other end of the spectrum is the full-time, professional cantor, also called Hazzan (Hebrew), who has completed a course of graduate study and has been ordained or vested as a cantor. Every cantor functions as a shaliach/shalichat tzibur but not every shaliach/shalichat tzibur possesses the skills and liturgical/musical knowledge of a cantor.

244  Jeffrey A. Summit 7 William James wrote, “personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness” of which he described four features: ineffability, an experience that “defies expression . . . in words;” a noetic quality providing “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect;” transiency, cannot be sustained for long;” and “passivity, [as if one’s] own will were in abeyance . . . as if grasped and held by a superior power” (1902/1958, 292–94). 8 See Mercadante 2014, 1–19; Roof 1993, 63–88. 9 Ann Taves explains, “This shift in terminology signals my interest in exploring the processes whereby experiences come to be understood as religious at multiple levels, from the intrapersonal to intergroup” (2009, xiii).

References Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason Aronson Inc. Béhague, Gerard, ed. 1984. Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bellah, Robert. 2006 [2000]. “Texts, Sacred and Profane.” In The Robert Bellah Reader, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton, 490–503. Durham: Duke University Press. Berger, Harris M. 2010. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cohen, Steven M., and Arnold Eisen. 2001. The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-Modern America. Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), May 1. www.bjpa.org/search-results/publication/2193. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1953. “The Spirit of Jewish Prayer.” Proceedings of the Rabbinic Assembly of America. Fifty-third Annual Convention. Volume XVII. Atlantic City, NJ, 151–77. Idelsohn, Abraham Zevi. 1971. “Songs and Singers of the Synagogue in the 18th Century.” The Cantors Assembly Journal of Synagogue Music III (2) (February): 47, 48. James, William. 1958 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: The New American Library. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mercadante, Linda A. 2014. Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but Not Religious. New York: Oxford University Press. Orenstein, Walter. 1994. The Cantor’s Manuel of Jewish Law. Northvale, NJ and London. Jason Aronson, Inc. Roof, Wade Clark. 1993. A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. San Francisco: Harper. Schleifer, Eliyahu. 1997. “Jewish Liturgical Music from the Bible to Hasidism.” In Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience, edited by Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet R. Walton, 13–58. Notre Dame, IN. University of Notre Dame Press.

Searching for a metaphor  245 Schultze, Quentin J. 2004. High-Tech Worship: Using Presentational Technologies Wisely. Ada, MI: Baker Books. Summit, Jeffrey A. 1992–93. “The Role of the Shaliach Tsibur.” Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism (Winter): 42–44. ———. 2000. The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press. Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Zwilling, Jennifer. 2010. Engaging Emerging Adults: The Hillel Model for Jewish Engagement. Washington, DC: Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

14 Ecclesioscapes Interpreting gatherings around Christian music in and outside the church through the Dutch case of the “Sing Along Matthäuspassion” Mirella Klomp Introduction Movement 75. The baritone on stage steps forward to sing his aria. The amateur orchestra begins, he enters with: “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, Ich will Jesum selbst begraben.” After the final note, he turns around to walk back to his seat. But the conductor gestures to him to stay at the front. The baritone takes position again, the conductor invites all participants in this Sing Along Matthäuspassion to sing this aria. She cues, and the orchestra starts the introduction of movement 75 for the second time. Although this repeat comes out of the blue, the choir enters and in full voice sings “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein.” The audience (approximately a third of the size of the choir) partially sings along too. Apparently, most of the choir members are only familiar with the very first part of the melody, and rush to find the rest of the notes in their sheet music. Following the trail of the baritone, they stumble through the aria. The performance then continues with movement 76.

To a considerable extent, large Christian musical forms (masses, requiems, passions, Stabat Maters), liturgical–musical repertoire (e.g., choral evensongs) and other sacred sounds in liquid societies have been moved from the domain of the church to the wider domain of the culture.1 In late-modern network cultures—characterized, among other things, by processes of individualization and interconnectedness, reconstruction of self and identity, and challenges to tradition in the global era (e.g., Giddens 1990; Bauman 2000; Heaphy 2007)—many practices of Christian music are no longer confined to worship, but occur in the context of concerts and cultural projects. In the Netherlands, they are most often organized by, for example, music ensembles and foundations; churches or congregations are seldom involved. This “transfer” of Christian music practices to the “extra-ecclesial” domain is part of a broader development: in liquid societies, where change and flexibility have taken the place of continuity and stability (Baumann 2000), religion as a whole has become more flexible and fluid. Hence, the performance

Ecclesioscapes  247 of J. S. Bach’s Matthäuspassion could take the shape of a Sing Along Matthäuspassion, during the performance of which an aria for baritone solo was spontaneously repeated by all. Scholars of religion have suggested the notions of “religioscapes” (McAlister 2005, 251) and “sacroscapes” (Tweed 2006, 61) to describe the religious dimension of global cultural flows.2 These terms draw attention to religious flows across time and space that occasionally come to a temporary standstill here or there. Tweed considers religions as complex, dynamic processes instead of reified substances (2006, 59). His notion thus “only helps if we have aquatic and not terrestrial analogies in mind. Sacroscapes, as I  understand these religious confluences, are not static” (2006, 61). The “extra-ecclesial” performance of a passion at the beginning of this chapter is an example of how sonic aspects of contemporary Christian repertoire move about. In line with Tweed’s sacroscapes, together with my colleague Marcel Barnard, I proffered the notion “sacro-soundscapes” in an effort to contribute to an adequate understanding of contemporary ritual-musical practices outside the church. With that, we intended to update the discipline of hymnology (Klomp and Barnard 2017), that subsequently comes to cover the entire scenery of sacred sounds that move through times and spaces and find temporary dwellings in hymnals, concert programs, and music festivals and events. The notion “sacro-soundscapes” broadens the field of study, as it enables us to investigate and better understand ritual practices of Christian music not only inside, but also outside the church. However, we noticed upon its introduction, the notion immediately raises questions about the meaning of “congregational music” and the difficulties of distinguishing the “ecclesial” from the “extra-ecclesial” domain in liquid societies. What practices and what people do these terms include or exclude? Obviously, the notion “sacro-soundscapes” turns certain (and apparently dominant) kinds of ecclesiology on their head: the broadened field of study requires ecclesiological notions that commensurate with flexible, fluid gatherings around music.3 The scenery of sacred sounds that move through times and spaces and find temporary dwellings thus leads me to think out the communal aspects of “congregational music” in this chapter. Using an ecclesiological approach to rethink “congregation” has a big impact on congregational music studies. One of the biggest challenges for the study of twenty-first century practices of Christian music is to account for the “liquid church” (Ward 2002) and other fluid forms of gathering around Christian music.4 If the still-emerging field of Christian congregational music does not reflect on its understanding of “congregation,” it willingly runs the risk of neglecting a large part of communal musical practices in liquid societies, namely those involving fluid processes of sacred/religious meaning-making.5 Aiming to develop a concept that serves studies at the intersection of ecclesiology and ethnography in the context of congregational music studies, I  ask this question: what theoretical concept can be

248  Mirella Klomp employed to better understand gatherings around Christian music in and outside church in late-modern culture? Taking the Sing Along Matthäuspassion as an example, this chapter argues that our understanding of “congregation” in liquid times requires an update. Here, I will first briefly sketch the context of the changing ecclesial landscape in Western Europe and particularly the Netherlands and portray the Sing Along Matthäuspassion as an example of fluid practices of Christian music. As a cultural phenomenon, this participatory musical practice offers a nice case to illustrate the need to think about fluid ritual-musical practices from an ecclesiological perspective. After discussing the case, I will give a brief overview of how in some recent ecclesiological publications the conception of church as people gathering in one place at one time has been challenged in favor of an update of the notion of church in liquid times. I will then introduce and elaborate the notion of “ecclesioscapes” as a concept suitable to the interpretation of both ephemeral and more solid communal practices of Christian music in late-modern culture. I pose that liturgical ecclesiology opens a space to theoretically understand concrete communal practices of Christian music as dwellings in an ecclesioscape, thus pushing the boundaries of practical ecclesiology. I conclude this chapter by suggesting how the notion of ecclesioscapes could advance research on practices in other, related fields.

The changing Dutch ecclesial landscape and the Sing Along Matthäuspassion The changing Dutch ecclesial landscape Scholars have observed that religion and/or the sacred have relocated and changed considerably in Dutch culture over the last decades. As in other Western European countries (cf. Brown 2001; Davie 2015),6 decreasing church attendance and continuous church closure show that institutionalized Christianity is in ongoing decline (Van Rooden 2004; Frijhoff and Spies 2004). Societal processes have caused large alterations that also influence religion, religious practices, and religious affiliation: individualization has led to depillarization, crumbling orthodoxy, plurality of ideas, self-­development, and individual freedom, as well as a quest for tailor-made (religious) convictions (De Hart 2016, 7). “Informalization” has come with a breaking-down of hierarchical relations, an increase in temporary relations, deriving norms and values from direct personal contacts, as well as the use of new media. An increasing emphasis on experience dimensions and the value of emotions and perceptions evoked new shapes of spirituality and (Christian) religion, (semi-)detached from religious institutions. Indeed, Christian religion in the Netherlands has not disappeared, but has undergone deep transformations (De Hart 2011, 2014; Post 2010; Borgman 2006; Van de Donk et al. 2006; Sengers 2005; Frijhoff 1998). When focusing on practices of Christian music, we no longer see people en masse attending worship and singing

Ecclesioscapes  249 hymns on Sunday mornings. Rather, we observe many people participating in a variety of other practices of Christian music during events such as contemporary passions performed in concert halls, Sing Along Stabat Maters, choral evensong concerts, and Christian music festivals. Christianity in strong connection with (the beliefs and practices of) the church has collapsed, but a “basal sacred” (Juchtmans 2008, 306–16, 379–86) behavior remains and the phenomenon of unaffiliated “floating believers” (De Hart 2015) has arisen: people freely shape rituals with Christian roots. Christian language and ritual practices have thus moved from the “ecclesial” domain to other domains: the private, public, and cultural domains, and those of nature, healing, and sports (Post 2010). Many aspects of Christian religion have been transferred and transformed. As for Christian music, many people who would never want their names in the church administration today are enthusiastically engaging in practices of music with Christian roots. In this changing landscape, people make sense of transferred and transformed rituals in their own manner, often individually and based on their own (personal) frameworks. Naturally, not all meaning-making is sacred meaning-making. When practices and objects—religious or not—are of ultimate significance to people, we consider these “sacred” (cf. Lynch 2012).7 Sacred is thus related to the human act of “sacralizing”: it follows from an activity of interpretation. The Sing Along Matthäuspassion The Dutch phenomenon called Sing Along Matthäuspassion—a remarkable cultural event that is rather popular in the Netherlands—serves as an example of the aforementioned development. Although written for liturgical practice, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (Matthäuspassion) over the last 120 years in the Netherlands has come to be mostly performed as a concert in church buildings and concert halls, by professional as well as amateur choirs and orchestras. In 1998, the first Sing Along Matthäuspassion popped up,8 a phenomenon that in the last two decades became rather popular: every year during Lent, amateur singers have numerous opportunities to join one. Choral sing-alongs of non-religious classical masterpieces—such as the operas Idomeneo (Mozart), Dido and Aeneas (Purcell), and musicals like Grease and Hair, and repertoire from The Sound of Music—also occur. Yet, the Dutch are particularly crazy about Bach’s Matthäuspassion, hence registration for this performance is always booked-up well ahead of time. People register online to participate in a performance of Bach’s masterpiece, pay a fee, perhaps practice at home (or come to a separate rehearsal if one is organized), and for one day form an ad hoc choir to sing, mostly, the chorales and choir parts. Professional singers perform the arias and recitatives. At the end of that very day, the piece is performed during a concert, often (but not necessarily) in front of an audience. In 2012, I  performed ethnographic fieldwork at two Sing Along Matthäuspassions in Amsterdam and Utrecht, organized by a small independent

250  Mirella Klomp (non-religious) foundation that once was particularly set up to offer singalong projects.9 Throughout the year, this foundation organizes sing-along concerts of several other masterpieces (mainly religious works, e.g., Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and Hohe Messe, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Fauré’s Requiem). I  registered online and paid 49 euros for each performance. This all-inclusive price allowed me to join the Sing Along Matthäuspassion (a day of rehearsing, leading up to a performance), as well as an extra SATB rehearsal day taking place two weeks in advance and a two-day crash course for sopranos/altos or tenors/basses a few weeks earlier (on a voluntary basis). Rehearsals took place on Sundays in March, in a conference center on a green estate in the middle of the country. Once in the conference center, the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed; a mix of a distance of individualism and a benevolence of expectations. Participants ranged in age from somewhere in their twenties to into their eighties. Some of them came on their own, while others came together with a relative or (small group of) friend(s). We studied the chorus parts and the chorales, worked extra hard when things did not go so well, and were proud when successful. On the days of the Sing Along Matthäuspassions performances we rehearsed together with the amateur orchestra, and later, together with the soloists, ran through the entire passion (Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1  Rehearsal prior to performance on April 6, 2012, at Geertekerk, Utrecht Source: Photo by the author

Ecclesioscapes  251 Immediately before the performances, we had a ninety-minute break. Before the performances started, someone gave an associative talk on the meaning of the passion by way of introduction. Afterwards, we performed the entire piece, in two parts with a thirty-minute break in between. The audience was outnumbered by the performers and mostly consisted of friends and relatives who had bought so-called listener’s-tickets for 20 euros. Here, I briefly present two qualities of the Sing Along Matthäuspassions that are striking in view of the topic of this chapter.10 Participation in a communal practice Several participants declared that they would never want to be part of the audience of a Sing Along Matthäuspassion; rather, they would prefer buying tickets for a professional performance. Yet, they loved to sing it; participation in this project to them was a special experience, no matter the number of times they had done it before. This appeared to be also related to the length of the piece: the concert itself was three hours long, and the entire project took a whole day. Even without crash courses and separate rehearsal days, it was primarily an event that required a considerable investment of time and energy to engage in. Its value was contained in participation and engagement, which explains why the number of singers in both projects exceeded the number of listeners. Crucial in this engagement was the accessibility of the event: there were no auditions; everyone could take part, no matter their vocal skills or their ability to read sheet music. The aim of the Sing Along Matthäuspassion, according to the conductor, is to offer an opportunity to sing the Matthäuspassion to anyone who has ever heard the piece and thought: “How I would love to sing this myself!” The focus is on “singing together” and “engagement” with each other and the music. She claimed that “taking part” creates a more intensive “engagement” and singing gives greater joy than listening. “It is important that people have fun, sing with joy and without the stress of worrying about the right notes, and through that have a more conscious experience of the entire passion.”11 On the other hand, musical quality is not unimportant: below a certain level, she said, there is no joy; that is why choruses and chorales are sung by the choir and other parts are sung by professional singers. In short, the Sing Along Matthäuspassion aspires to a balance between joy and accessibility on the one hand and seriousness, involvement, and ambition on the other hand. In the view of participants, failing is indeed part of the game. Various interviewees underlined their engagement in the piece by saying that the conductor invited them to sing “with heart and soul,” to sing “passionately,” and to support each other; and claimed that participation in this communal practice stirred deeper, spiritual levels in them. An atmosphere of acceptance and togetherness came about through their “musicking” (Small 1998).

252  Mirella Klomp The value of participation in this communal practice in several interviews appeared to not just relate to the sing-along project but also to the Matthäuspassion as such. This may be nicely demonstrated by something that occurred on the day of the performance in Utrecht. When I  entered the church building in the morning, a reed basket was sitting on the reception table. It was filled with cherry liqueur chocolates, each wrapped in cellophane, and closed with a hand-made ribbon with white hearts and a text printed in red letters, reading: “ ‘Ich will dir mein