David W. Stowe | Michigan State University (original) (raw)
Books by David W. Stowe
Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 – which begins “By the rivers of Babylon, t... more Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 – which begins “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” – has become something of a cultural touchstone for music and Christianity across the Atlantic world. It has been a top single more than once in the 20th century, from Don McLean’s haunting Anglo-American folk cover to Boney M’s West Indian disco mix. In Song of Exile, David Stowe uses a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that combines personal interviews, historical overview, and textual analysis to demonstrate the psalm’s enduring place in popular culture.
In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates ... more In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe shows how evangelicals' increasing acceptance of Christian pop music ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.
Musical expression is at the heart of the American spiritual experience. And nowhere can you gau... more Musical expression is at the heart of the American spiritual experience. And nowhere can you gauge the depth of spiritual belief and practice more than through the music that fills America’s houses of worship. Most amazing is how sacred music has been shaped by the exchanges of diverse peoples over time. How Sweet the Sound traces the evolution of sacred music from colonial times to the present, from the Puritans to Sun Ra, and shows how these cultural encounters have produced a rich harvest of song and faith.
Pursuing the intimate relationship between music and spirituality in America, Stowe focuses on the central creative moments in the unfolding life of sacred song. He fills his pages with the religious music of Indians, Shakers, Mormons, Moravians, African-Americans, Jews, Buddhists, and others. Juxtaposing music cultures across region, ethnicity, and time, he suggests the range and cross-fertilization of religious beliefs and musical practices that have formed the spiritual customs of the United States, producing a multireligious, multicultural brew.
Stowe traces the evolution of sacred music from hymns to hip-hop, finding Christian psalms deeply accented by the traditions of Judaism, and Native American and Buddhist customs influenced by Protestant Christianity. He shows how the creativity and malleability of sacred music can explain the proliferation of various forms of faith and the high rates of participation they’ve sustained. Its evolution truly parallels the evolution of American pluralism.
Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era,... more Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era, and swing was giving a new shape and sound to American culture. Swing Changes looks at New Deal America through its music and shows us how the contradictions and tensions within swing--over race, politics, its own cultural status, the role of women--mirrored those played out in the larger society. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, recordings, photographs, literature, and films, Swing Changes offers a vibrant picture of American society at a pivotal time, and a new perspective on music as a cultural force.
Papers by David W. Stowe
Church History
As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because t... more As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because they viewed religious meddling as destructive of family life.) It might be fruitful, then, to place Kselman's findings in conversation with Camille Robcis's work on "familialism" in French history. According to Robcis, political theorists after the Revolution sought to overcome republicanism's inherent individualism by privileging the family as the fundamental building block of society, the school where future citizens would learn "to reconcile social solidarity and individual liberty" (Robcis, 18). This suggestion only serves to sharpen the paradox studied by Kselman: perhaps the postrevolutionary, secular age invests the family with greater social meaning and anxiety at the precise moment that it also makes rejection of the familial faith possible. Kselman's book is also sure to be of interest to historians and theorists of secularism, although his evidence and analysis are too complex and nuanced to fit neatly into any one camp. On the one hand, those (Talal Asad, Joan Scott, and others) who have criticized secularist governments for the ways they circumscribe, surveil, and intervene in religious matters will find some confirmation. For example, the liberal July Monarchy, precisely in order to guarantee religious liberty, found itself in the business of evaluating the sincerity of deathbed conversions in state hospitals (46-47). On the other hand, in the early days of the French Revolution, it was not overly aggressive secularists but Catholics who first demanded that religious liberty be constrained by "public order"-enshrining the state's "right to monitor and control the public expression of religion" (14).
The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, 2016
American Historical Review, 1996
... Owing (Chanqes Page 4. Page 5. Wl nq wnancjes Dig-Dana Jazz in flew Ueal America DAVID W. STO... more ... Owing (Chanqes Page 4. Page 5. Wl nq wnancjes Dig-Dana Jazz in flew Ueal America DAVID W. STOWE Harvard Universilij PP»?SS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 09SX-OPQ-6D1G Page 6. ... But even in its 1920s bloom, "jazz" had no settled meaning. ...
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2006
A significant addition to studies in English dedicated to early-to midtwentieth century Brazilian... more A significant addition to studies in English dedicated to early-to midtwentieth century Brazilian popular music, McCann's welcome work struggles at times in balancing a well-focused narrative of mass culture institutions with passages on select artists, related social developments, critical impact of recording and broadcast technologies and aesthetics, and familiar political issues, such as the Vargas regime's widely discussed and well-documented relationship to cultural manipulation during much of the time between 1930 and 1954 (mapping closely to the time frame of the book). The author reminds us that popular music, specifically samba and Northeastern genres such as baião, offer multifaceted identities in their complex relationships to cultural citizenship, and to sociopolitical "realities" as processes and popular culture products to be packaged and sold. It is in the approach to this latter arena, and in weaving tales of naked commerce into wider areas of interest, that the book succeeds. Indeed, bureaucrats, corporate types, and Rádio Nacional engage, along with performers and their fans, crucial roles in these pages and this seems to be McCann's forte: the selling of mid-century modernity, those theories and techniques, its transnational extent, and the industry of packaging ideas as images and sounds, becomes a cornerstone of culture itself. The author, in deconstructing carnivalesque songwriter Lamartine Babo's rhetorical lyric, "Who invented Brazil?" pushes the discursive envelope by essentially asking, "Who packaged Brazilian modernism in a popular culture wrapper?" Readers are taken on both refreshing and sobering tours of culture industry business practice, racial polemics of "critical" samba discourse, and of nationalism and popular music's role in defining Brazilian modernist ideals in the face of international influences. The seemingly simplified, comparative binarisms of paired personalities such as, for instance, Ari Barroso and Heitor Villa-Lobos regarding nationalism, Dorival Cayymi and Luis Gonzaga with respect to Northeastern regionalism, and the Noel Rosa-Wilson Batista malandro polemic (in short, state-brokered morality versus
The American Historical Review, 2009
The Journal of Religion, 2013
Academia Letters, 2021
Having surveyed the geographic and demographic landscape of sixth-century Palestine and Mesopotam... more Having surveyed the geographic and demographic landscape of sixth-century Palestine and Mesopotamia in my book, Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, I'd like to offer a different perspective. Let's pull back from what is by any reckoning a tiny plot of real estate (with an outsized impact on world events over succeeding millennia) to a more global view of the social trauma of 587 BCE. The Babylonian Exile event falls squarely into an epoch that big-picture thinkers of a certain persuasion refer to as the Axial Age. This was a loosely defined time period in which figures as diverse as the Buddha, Confucius, Mencius, Plato, Aristotle, and the compilers of the core Hindu scriptures were generating ideas that came to define the now-existing world religions. These same seeds of thought, gradually fertilized and mutated by experiences that arose out of the messy collisions of human history, eventually produced "modern" thought. The concept was used most influentially by the Karl Jaspers, who included the Hebrew prophets in his pantheon of Axial Age thinkers. Though the concept of the Axial Age is attributed to Jaspers, a German philosopher writing in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, its core idea was first formulated by a French scholar in the late 18th century. The paradigm was elaborated and extended by various thinkers of the 19th and 20th century, including Jakob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Alfred Weber. Though subject to extensive critiques and modifications, the notion of a decisive shift in the way humans understand themselves and the cosmos, sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE, continues to intrigue scholars from multiple disciplines. Whatever other characteristics of human consciousness were developed during the Axial Age, the central one was critical self-reflection. By that we mean the ability to step back from one's individual or collective circumstances, as the member of a family or community, and to assess these circumstances with a certain objective distance.
Excerpt from a chapter in The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life... more Excerpt from a chapter in The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life (2014)
Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 – which begins “By the rivers of Babylon, t... more Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 – which begins “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” – has become something of a cultural touchstone for music and Christianity across the Atlantic world. It has been a top single more than once in the 20th century, from Don McLean’s haunting Anglo-American folk cover to Boney M’s West Indian disco mix. In Song of Exile, David Stowe uses a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that combines personal interviews, historical overview, and textual analysis to demonstrate the psalm’s enduring place in popular culture.
In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates ... more In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe shows how evangelicals' increasing acceptance of Christian pop music ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.
Musical expression is at the heart of the American spiritual experience. And nowhere can you gau... more Musical expression is at the heart of the American spiritual experience. And nowhere can you gauge the depth of spiritual belief and practice more than through the music that fills America’s houses of worship. Most amazing is how sacred music has been shaped by the exchanges of diverse peoples over time. How Sweet the Sound traces the evolution of sacred music from colonial times to the present, from the Puritans to Sun Ra, and shows how these cultural encounters have produced a rich harvest of song and faith.
Pursuing the intimate relationship between music and spirituality in America, Stowe focuses on the central creative moments in the unfolding life of sacred song. He fills his pages with the religious music of Indians, Shakers, Mormons, Moravians, African-Americans, Jews, Buddhists, and others. Juxtaposing music cultures across region, ethnicity, and time, he suggests the range and cross-fertilization of religious beliefs and musical practices that have formed the spiritual customs of the United States, producing a multireligious, multicultural brew.
Stowe traces the evolution of sacred music from hymns to hip-hop, finding Christian psalms deeply accented by the traditions of Judaism, and Native American and Buddhist customs influenced by Protestant Christianity. He shows how the creativity and malleability of sacred music can explain the proliferation of various forms of faith and the high rates of participation they’ve sustained. Its evolution truly parallels the evolution of American pluralism.
Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era,... more Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era, and swing was giving a new shape and sound to American culture. Swing Changes looks at New Deal America through its music and shows us how the contradictions and tensions within swing--over race, politics, its own cultural status, the role of women--mirrored those played out in the larger society. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, recordings, photographs, literature, and films, Swing Changes offers a vibrant picture of American society at a pivotal time, and a new perspective on music as a cultural force.
Church History
As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because t... more As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because they viewed religious meddling as destructive of family life.) It might be fruitful, then, to place Kselman's findings in conversation with Camille Robcis's work on "familialism" in French history. According to Robcis, political theorists after the Revolution sought to overcome republicanism's inherent individualism by privileging the family as the fundamental building block of society, the school where future citizens would learn "to reconcile social solidarity and individual liberty" (Robcis, 18). This suggestion only serves to sharpen the paradox studied by Kselman: perhaps the postrevolutionary, secular age invests the family with greater social meaning and anxiety at the precise moment that it also makes rejection of the familial faith possible. Kselman's book is also sure to be of interest to historians and theorists of secularism, although his evidence and analysis are too complex and nuanced to fit neatly into any one camp. On the one hand, those (Talal Asad, Joan Scott, and others) who have criticized secularist governments for the ways they circumscribe, surveil, and intervene in religious matters will find some confirmation. For example, the liberal July Monarchy, precisely in order to guarantee religious liberty, found itself in the business of evaluating the sincerity of deathbed conversions in state hospitals (46-47). On the other hand, in the early days of the French Revolution, it was not overly aggressive secularists but Catholics who first demanded that religious liberty be constrained by "public order"-enshrining the state's "right to monitor and control the public expression of religion" (14).
The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, 2016
American Historical Review, 1996
... Owing (Chanqes Page 4. Page 5. Wl nq wnancjes Dig-Dana Jazz in flew Ueal America DAVID W. STO... more ... Owing (Chanqes Page 4. Page 5. Wl nq wnancjes Dig-Dana Jazz in flew Ueal America DAVID W. STOWE Harvard Universilij PP»?SS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 09SX-OPQ-6D1G Page 6. ... But even in its 1920s bloom, "jazz" had no settled meaning. ...
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2006
A significant addition to studies in English dedicated to early-to midtwentieth century Brazilian... more A significant addition to studies in English dedicated to early-to midtwentieth century Brazilian popular music, McCann's welcome work struggles at times in balancing a well-focused narrative of mass culture institutions with passages on select artists, related social developments, critical impact of recording and broadcast technologies and aesthetics, and familiar political issues, such as the Vargas regime's widely discussed and well-documented relationship to cultural manipulation during much of the time between 1930 and 1954 (mapping closely to the time frame of the book). The author reminds us that popular music, specifically samba and Northeastern genres such as baião, offer multifaceted identities in their complex relationships to cultural citizenship, and to sociopolitical "realities" as processes and popular culture products to be packaged and sold. It is in the approach to this latter arena, and in weaving tales of naked commerce into wider areas of interest, that the book succeeds. Indeed, bureaucrats, corporate types, and Rádio Nacional engage, along with performers and their fans, crucial roles in these pages and this seems to be McCann's forte: the selling of mid-century modernity, those theories and techniques, its transnational extent, and the industry of packaging ideas as images and sounds, becomes a cornerstone of culture itself. The author, in deconstructing carnivalesque songwriter Lamartine Babo's rhetorical lyric, "Who invented Brazil?" pushes the discursive envelope by essentially asking, "Who packaged Brazilian modernism in a popular culture wrapper?" Readers are taken on both refreshing and sobering tours of culture industry business practice, racial polemics of "critical" samba discourse, and of nationalism and popular music's role in defining Brazilian modernist ideals in the face of international influences. The seemingly simplified, comparative binarisms of paired personalities such as, for instance, Ari Barroso and Heitor Villa-Lobos regarding nationalism, Dorival Cayymi and Luis Gonzaga with respect to Northeastern regionalism, and the Noel Rosa-Wilson Batista malandro polemic (in short, state-brokered morality versus
The American Historical Review, 2009
The Journal of Religion, 2013
Academia Letters, 2021
Having surveyed the geographic and demographic landscape of sixth-century Palestine and Mesopotam... more Having surveyed the geographic and demographic landscape of sixth-century Palestine and Mesopotamia in my book, Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, I'd like to offer a different perspective. Let's pull back from what is by any reckoning a tiny plot of real estate (with an outsized impact on world events over succeeding millennia) to a more global view of the social trauma of 587 BCE. The Babylonian Exile event falls squarely into an epoch that big-picture thinkers of a certain persuasion refer to as the Axial Age. This was a loosely defined time period in which figures as diverse as the Buddha, Confucius, Mencius, Plato, Aristotle, and the compilers of the core Hindu scriptures were generating ideas that came to define the now-existing world religions. These same seeds of thought, gradually fertilized and mutated by experiences that arose out of the messy collisions of human history, eventually produced "modern" thought. The concept was used most influentially by the Karl Jaspers, who included the Hebrew prophets in his pantheon of Axial Age thinkers. Though the concept of the Axial Age is attributed to Jaspers, a German philosopher writing in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, its core idea was first formulated by a French scholar in the late 18th century. The paradigm was elaborated and extended by various thinkers of the 19th and 20th century, including Jakob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Alfred Weber. Though subject to extensive critiques and modifications, the notion of a decisive shift in the way humans understand themselves and the cosmos, sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE, continues to intrigue scholars from multiple disciplines. Whatever other characteristics of human consciousness were developed during the Axial Age, the central one was critical self-reflection. By that we mean the ability to step back from one's individual or collective circumstances, as the member of a family or community, and to assess these circumstances with a certain objective distance.
Excerpt from a chapter in The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life... more Excerpt from a chapter in The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life (2014)
Black Music Research Journal
Lingua Franca, Jan 1, 1996
Description: This course will draw students inside the lived experience of the major world religi... more Description: This course will draw students inside the lived experience of the major world religions through the practices of chant, music and dance. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have distinctive and contrasting ideas about the spiritual power of music and its proper relationship to religious life. We will explore these ideas through a wide variety of sound recordings, film clips and written texts that will enrich students' appreciation both of world music and of the religious imagination. Here are some major questions we will consider this semester: What is music? How do we distinguish music from other kinds of humanly-produced sound? What is religion? How is it related to the category of the sacred? The secular? How can insights into music help us understand the role of religion in people's lives? How does awareness of religious practice help us understand national and transnational identities? Sharpen our understanding of diasporas and diasporic identity? How might tracing flows of musical and religious practice help us theorize and historicize our understanding of transnationalism and globalization? How have cultural forms like music been shaped and changed by the flows of people, products and belief systems within a large landmass like Eurasia? Expected learning outcomes: Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world focused by engagement with big questions, both contemporary and enduring: Thinking critically about religion and music as interlinked and integral parts of human culture and artistic heritage Developing reflective empathy for diverse religious practices and beliefs Interpreting religious experience from insider and outsider perspectives Intellectual and practical skills practiced in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects and standards for performance: Analyzing religion and music from multiple disciplinary perspectives Recognizing and describing elements of musical form Developing critical reading skills Honing written and oral communication Practicing teamwork, manifested in small group discussions and projects
Description: This course uses film as a lens to explore a range of religious experiences and trad... more Description: This course uses film as a lens to explore a range of religious experiences and traditions. In the first part of the course we explore what makes film distinct as a form of creative expression, what makes religion a distinctive form of human experience, and what these two areas might have in common. The first half of the course introduces through film a number of key concepts in religion: nature, myth, redemption, gnosis, and the cosmos. The second half of the course uses films to explore several of the world religions: East Asian religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
MUS 669/REL 912 Thursday 3:30-5:20
Integrative Studies at MSU seeks to assist students to become more familiar with ways of knowing ... more Integrative Studies at MSU seeks to assist students to become more familiar with ways of knowing in the arts and humanities and to be more knowledgeable and capable in a range of intellectual and expressive abilities. IAH courses encourage students to engage critically with their own society, history, and culture(s) or to learn more about the history and culture of other societies. They focus on key ideas and issues in human experience; encourage appreciation of the roles of knowledge and of values in shaping and understanding human behavior; emphasize the responsibilities and opportunities of democratic citizenship, highlight the importance of language, and the value of the creative arts, and alert us to important issues that occur and reoccur among peoples in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world.
Integrative Studies at MSU seeks to assist students to become more familiar with ways of knowing ... more Integrative Studies at MSU seeks to assist students to become more familiar with ways of knowing in the arts and humanities and to be more knowledgeable and capable in a range of intellectual and expressive abilities. IAH courses encourage students to engage critically with their own society, history, and culture(s) or to learn more about the history and culture of other societies. They focus on key ideas and issues in human experience; encourage appreciation of the roles of knowledge and of values in shaping and understanding human behavior; emphasize the responsibilities and opportunities of democratic citizenship, highlight the importance of language, and the value of the creative arts, and alert us to important issues that occur and reoccur among peoples in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world.
The American Historical Review, 2000
... Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Post a Comment. ... more ... Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: ... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): x, 338 p. SUBJECT(S): United States; Race relations; European Americans; Whites; Immigrants; Racism; Race identity; History. ...
Isis, 2002
The early twentieth century was a particularly labile period for ideologies of race in the United... more The early twentieth century was a particularly labile period for ideologies of race in the United States. The century began with Ital-ians, Greeks, Jews, Slavs, and Irish streaming in from Europe, many hoping to win a place at the American table. White supremacists thundered ...
New Books Network, 2016
On today's program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: T... more On today's program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Song of Exile weaves together the 2,500-year history of one of the most famous psalms in the Hebrew Bible; it examines the entire psalm, including the more obscure last stanza; and it draws on historical and interview research with musicians who have used Psalm 137 in their music.