Performing theology, forming identity and shaping experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This short piece introduces the book _Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience_. Collected from presentations during the first biennial Christian Congregational Music conference (congregationalmusic.org), this book explores the role of congregational music in Christian religious experience, examining how musicians and worshippers perform, identify with and experience belief through musical praxis. Contributors from a broad range of fields, including music studies, theology, literature, and cultural anthropology, present interdisciplinary perspectives on a variety of congregational musical styles - from African American gospel music, to evangelical praise and worship music, to Mennonite hymnody - within contemporary Europe and North America. In addressing the interconnected themes of performance, identity and experience, the volume explores several topics of interest to a broader humanities and social sciences readership, including the influence of globalization and mass mediation on congregational music style and performance; the use of congregational music to shape multifaceted identities; the role of mass mediated congregational music in shaping transnational communities; and the function of music in embodying and imparting religious belief and knowledge.
Religions, 2023
“Performing” and “performance” are potentially contentious words within the context of contemporary Christian worship. However, performative elements are explicit in the lyrics of contemporary congregational songs (CCS), and in video recordings of CCS, through the actions of those on stage and in the congregation, as well as in the broader context of staging, lighting, projection, production, and video editing. However, to date, there is only a handful of scholarly works that explore performing in contemporary worship or contemporary worship as performance and most of them are ethnomusicological. This paper seeks to address notions of performing and performance through a broader lens of the most-sung CCS globally, examined through the disciplinary fields of performance studies, musicology, media studies and theology. It involves a two-fold complementary textual analysis of the most-sung CCS lyrics and the most-watched ‘live worship’ videos of those songs on YouTube. In so doing, this study identifies how the Christian music industry at large officially portrays and languages performance in worship songs and also identifies how performative elements are enacted in the live worship videos released. These analyses are finally synthesized to identify how performing and performance are understood and actively portrayed to and by the contemporary church.
Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, 2018
This is the introduction to the book _Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide_ (Routledge, 2018). In it, we propose the term ‘musical localization’ as a useful umbrella category to describe the processes by which Christian communities worldwide adapt, adopt, perform, and share congregational music. We first describe the related terms inculturation and indigenization, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. We then describe aspects of a methodological and theoretical approach common to each of the volume’s musical ethnographies and outline how the book’s chapters work together to flesh out four discrete but interrelated aspects of musical localization. Finally, through a self-reflexive discussion of how the co-editors selected our introductory musical example, we put forward several questions suggested by our work on musical localization that can benefit scholarly reflection on Christian congregational music.
Music and theology have in recent decades come into dialogue with one another, primarily under two guises: firstly, in the form of a theological hermeneutic within the framework of raditional musicology (and equally in the form of music analogy for the purposes of theological explication), the best examples of which can be found in the works of Jeremy Begbie; secondly, a growing interest in church music from an ethnomusicological perspective, a recent landmark of which is Christian Congregational Music: performance identity and experience (2013). In proposing to write about the music of Ely Cathedral for my MPhil thesis, it seems that not much attention has been directed at exactly how these disciplines interact with one another. This paper opens up some of the paradigmatic problems latent in the dialogues between theology, musicology and ethnography and discuss some possible directions towards a more comprehensive framework for studying musical worship in contemporary settings. A key issue, drawing on models outlined in Georgina Born’s “For a Relational Musicology” (2010), is that theology and music’s dialogue often adopts a “subordination-service mode”. Another issue is that theology and ethnography operate within completely different frameworks (see Paul Fiddes, “Ethnography and Ecclesiology: 2 disciplines, 2 worlds?” in Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, 2012). Rather than to solve, my aim is to probe these problems in such a way that will point towards a more self-conscious methodology that allows for proper theological considerations in the ethnographic study of church music.
Ethnography in the Study of Congregational Music (2021)
Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods and Theoretical Perspectives, 2021
An introduction to ethnography as a research method, both in general and specifically for studying people making religious and ceremonial music. It also surveys changes in theory and practice of ethnographic research since the early 1900s, and discusses modern and contemporary developments. Written in 2017, it is an invited chapter for a book entitled "Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives" edited by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls (Routledge, 2021). This is a copy of the original typescript of the article before copyediting. My apologies for the typos. These are corrected in the book.
A Cosmopolitan Dichotomy: Mainline Protestantism and Contemporary versus Traditional Worship Music Faced with a twenty-first century crisis of cosmopolitan identity, North American mainline Protestants have turned to dichotomized musical diversity. For the better part of United States’ history, White-Anglo-Saxon Protestants had seen their identity and worship practices established as hegemonic norms. However, since the 1950s, these mainline denominations have been shaken by steady losses. Taking stock and noting that their historical evangelical Others using more “contemporary” music were thriving, mainline churches soon had their own miked singers, guitarists, and drummers leading praise and worship choruses in addition to hymns, pipe organs, and chancel choirs. Despite increasing relativism, globalized mainline cultural positions, and liberal theology, the musical expansion was quickly channeled into a Contemporary versus Traditional worship music binary that continues to dominate discourse and practice. During the Worship Wars of the 1990s, the two styles came to be seen as largely incompatible and churches now often have separate Contemporary and Traditional services. The first section of this chapter analyzes why, given the many styles, genres, and traditions actually played in these churches, mainline Protestants have essentialized the musical, cultural, and theological omnivorism of their ecumenical cosmopolitanism into an oppositional either-or choice. What prompts a local congregation choose to channel their music through this pervasive dichotomy? In the second section, I draw upon Sznaider, Beck, Rommen and fieldwork among Presbyterians in Tennessee, to demonstrate how one mainline Protestant congregations has engaged with the Contemporary-Traditional dichotomy to position themselves within broader flows of Christian media and meaning. Analyzing repertoire choices, performance choices, and congregant reception, I demonstrate how this congregation embraces the broad label of Contemporary, but brings the details in line with their local vision of self-identity. This chapter provides an analytically contextualized case study of how, by adopting and adapting the symbolic categories of Contemporary and Traditional, mainline Protestant churches are using music to assert themselves as part of a dynamic Christian network engaged in a discourse of cultural vitality.
Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music. Religions 9(6) (2018) art. 192.
Drawing on the work of Webb Keane and Joel Robbins in the anthropology of Christianity, furnished with the influential work of Charles Hirschkind in the anthropology of Islam, and the ethnographic studies of Tom Wagner and Mark Jennings on Pentecostal worship music, this article critically examines ideas of sincerity in the musical practices of Pentecostal megachurches. Making use of ethnographic data from research on congregational music in South Africa, including interviews with a variety of Pentecostal musicians, this article argues that the question of Protestant sincerity, understood following Keane as emphasizing individual moral autonomy and suspicion of external material religious forms for expressing one's inner state, is particularly acute in the case of the Hillsong megachurch. Employing the full array of spectacular possibilities made available by the contemporary culture industry, Hillsong churches centralize cultural production and standardize musical performance whilst simultaneously emphasizing individual religious experience. It is argued that Pentecostal megachurches seek to realize a form of sincere mimicry grounded in learned and embodied practices.
The developing field of Christian congregational music studies
Whilst Christian congregational music has long been an object of reflection and study it has often been pushed towards the margins of the various disciplines that it inhabits. In this article I survey some of the challenges such study has faced before suggesting that recent disciplinary developments have served to prepare the ground for increased study of Christian congregational music. I suggest that ethnomusicology, in particular, has played an important role in motivating recent enquiry across a range of disciplines although not without facing a number of further challenges itself. I suggest that a field of Christian congregational music studies is beginning to emerge and finish by outlin- ing recent contributions to scholarship from a range of perspectives.
Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, 2018
Introduction to the volume: Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide (2018) Ingalls, Monique, Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel and Sherinian, Zoe (eds.) Routledge This introduction examines the categories of musical inculturation, contextualization, and indigenization. We argue that these three terms, though useful up to a point, are inadequate to account for the interplay between structure, agency, change, and continuity within the diverse music-making practices of Christian communities around the world. We propose ‘musical localization’ as a more useful umbrella category to describe the processes by which Christian communities worldwide adapt, adopt, create, perform, and share congregational music. We define musical localization as the process whereby Christian communities take a variety of musical practices – some considered ‘indigenous,’ some ‘foreign,’ some shared across spatial and cultural divides; some linked to past practice, some innovative – and make them locally meaningful and useful in the construction of Christian beliefs, theology, practice, and identity.
Examining Contemporary Congregationsl Song - beyond sung theology
2013
What Christians sing as they worship is a focus of considerable attention in the contemporary church and yet it has been a contentious issue at almost every period of Christian history. Since the mid-twentieth century, significant social, cultural, and technological changes, all against a backdrop of increasing global consciousness, have affected the way music functions and the ways opinions about repertoire and performance practices are formed. The primary focus of this project is the analysis of eight songs composed between 1983 and 2001. The essential question is how musical analysis contributes to a greater understanding of the nature of contemporary congregational song and various performance practices. This project will focus on analysis of harmonic structures as the major element. This will provide a framework from which comparisons of other musical elements can lead to a greater awareness of the issues of music and worship, and of music and theology. Developing a greater und...