Marissa A G Moore | Yale University (original) (raw)
My work broadly examine examines how contemporary religious Americans encounter and engage “the other” through vocal performance, focusing on how the globalization of Christianity has influenced worship in the United States. My dissertation looks at the construction and use of "global song," a repertoire of non-Western Christian music that is performed within mainline Protestant and Catholic communities in the US, and how practitioners de-center themselves from a Euro-American Christian worldview through the singing of this music. Beyond my dissertation, I am interested in using congregational singing to theorize communal voicing as a broader practice.
I enjoy teaching courses across the music subdisciplines, integrating multi-modal active learning activities to the study of Beethoven and Bieber alike. As a current Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale, I work within my department to share pedagogical techniques grounded in research with my colleagues, and work with graduate students across the university to cultivate inclusive learning spaces in their classrooms.
I see my work as an ethnomusicologist to be intimately tied to the public sphere, a priority I approach through my scholarship and work outside of the academy. I look forward to pursuing further projects within applied ethnomusicology, and continue to work with non-profit groups like the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in NYC.
I am currently a Lecturer in the Yale Department of Music, and received my PhD in Ethnomusicology in May 2018.
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Peer Reviewed Publications by Marissa A G Moore
Congregational singing is a participatory vocal practice undertaken by Christians across a wide r... more Congregational singing is a participatory vocal practice undertaken by Christians across a wide range of denominations, yet the specific qualities and active capacities of the congregational voice have yet to be investigated. Drawing on recent musicological and philosophical perspectives on voice, I theorize the congregational voice as an active practice, illuminating its abilities to do something in worship through sound.
Taking Brian Kane’s model of the voice as a circulation of content (logos), sound (echos), and source (topos), I explore how these categories are redefined through an active-based theorization of congregational singing. I argue that topos must be expanded to include the multiplicity of congregant voices and bodies, even when the sound of each voice is obscured or even intentionally hidden: as a result, congregational singing fundamentally transforms the commonly perceived correlation between echos and topos. In addition, I broaden the definition of logos to include musical content, shedding new light on discussions of musical genre in Christian worship by grounding them in the voice. As a result, I assert that music’s place within the voice is at the boundaries of sound and content, without being reducible to either. By examining the reformulations of logos, echos and topos that result through congregational singing practice, I present a new methodological framework for analyzing communal voicing, both within the congregation and beyond.
Popular Press by Marissa A G Moore
Publications by Marissa A G Moore
Congregational singing is a participatory vocal practice undertaken by Christians across a wide r... more Congregational singing is a participatory vocal practice undertaken by Christians across a wide range of denominations, yet the specific qualities and active capacities of the congregational voice have yet to be investigated. Drawing on recent musicological and philosophical perspectives on voice, I theorize the congregational voice as an active practice, illuminating its abilities to do something in worship through sound.
Taking Brian Kane’s model of the voice as a circulation of content (logos), sound (echos), and source (topos), I explore how these categories are redefined through an active-based theorization of congregational singing. I argue that topos must be expanded to include the multiplicity of congregant voices and bodies, even when the sound of each voice is obscured or even intentionally hidden: as a result, congregational singing fundamentally transforms the commonly perceived correlation between echos and topos. In addition, I broaden the definition of logos to include musical content, shedding new light on discussions of musical genre in Christian worship by grounding them in the voice. As a result, I assert that music’s place within the voice is at the boundaries of sound and content, without being reducible to either. By examining the reformulations of logos, echos and topos that result through congregational singing practice, I present a new methodological framework for analyzing communal voicing, both within the congregation and beyond.