Christian Sacred Music in the Americas

Christian Sacred Music in the Americas
Author: Andrew Shenton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-02-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1538148749

Christian Sacred Music in the Americas explores the richness of Christian musical traditions and reflects the distinctive critical perspectives of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. This volume, edited by Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko, is a follow-up to SCSM’s Exploring Christian Song and offers a cross-section of the most current and outstanding scholarship from an international array of writers. The essays survey a broad geographical area and demonstrate the enormous diversity of music-making and scholarship within that area. Contributors utilize interdisciplinary methodologies including media studies, cultural studies, theological studies, and different analytical and ethnographical approaches to music. While there are some studies that focus on a single country, musical figure, or region, this is the first collection to represent the vast range of sacred music in the Americas and the different approaches to studying them in context.

Sacred Song in America

Sacred Song in America
Author: Stephen A. Marini
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252028007

In Sacred Song in America, Stephen A. Marini explores the full range of American sacred music and demonstrates how an understanding of the meanings and functions of this musical expression can contribute to a greater understanding of religious culture.Marini examines the role of sacred song across the United States, from the musical traditions of Native Americans and the Hispanic peoples of the Southwest, to the Sacred Harp singers of the rural South and the Jewish music revival to the music of the Mormon, Catholic, and Black churches. Including chapters on New Age and Neo-Pagan music, gospel music, and hymnals as well as interviews with iconic composers of religious music, Sacred Song in America pursues a historical, musicological, and theoretical inquiry into the complex roles of ritual music in the public religious culture of contemporary America.

Music in American Religious Experience

Music in American Religious Experience
Author: Philip V. Bohlman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2006
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780195173048

For students and scholars in American music and religious studies, as well as for church musicians, this book is the first to study the ways in which music shapes the distinctive presence of religion in the United States. The sixteen essayists' contributions to this book address the fullness of music's presence in American religion and religious history.

Exploring Christian Song

Exploring Christian Song
Author: M. Jennifer Bloxam
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2017-06-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498549918

This essay collection celebrates the richness of Christian musical tradition across its two thousand year history and across the globe. Opening with a consideration of the fourth-century lamp-lighting hymn Phos hilaron and closing with reflections on contemporary efforts of Ghanaian composers to create Christian worship music in African idioms, the ten contributors engage with a broad ecumenical array of sacred music. Topics encompass Roman Catholic sacred music in medieval and Renaissance Europe, German Lutheran song in the eighteenth century, English hymnody in colonial America, Methodist hymnody adopted by Southern Baptists in the nineteenth century, and Genevan psalmody adapted to respond to the post-war tribulations of the Hungarian Reformed Church. The scope of the volume is further diversified by the inclusion of contemporary Christian topics that address the evangelical methods of a unique Orthodox Christian composer’s language, the shared aims and methods of African-American preaching and gospel music, and the affective didactic power of American evangelical “praise and worship” music. New material on several key composers, including Jacob Obrecht, J.S. Bach, George Philipp Telemann, C.P.E. Bach, Zoltan Kodály, and Arvo Pärt, appears within the book. Taken together, these essays embrace a stimulating variety of interdisciplinary analytical and methodological approaches, drawing on cultural, literary critical, theological, ritual, ethnographical, and media studies. The collection contributes to discussions of spirituality in music and, in particular, to the unifying aspects of Christian sacred music across time, space, and faith traditions. This collection celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music.

Public Worship, Private Faith

Public Worship, Private Faith
Author: John Bealle
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1997
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780820319216

The Sacred Harp, a tunebook that first appeared in 1844, has stood as a model of early American musical culture for most of this century. Tunebooks such as this, printed in shape notes for public singing and singing schools, followed the New England tradition of singing hymns and Psalms from printed music. Nineteeth-century Americans were inundated by such books, but only the popularity of The Sacred Harp has endured throughout the twentieth century. With this tunebook as his focus, John Bealle surveys definitive moments in American musical history, from the lively singing schools of the New England Puritans to the dramatic theological crises that split New England Congregationalism, from the rise of the genteel urban mainstream in frontier Cincinnati to the bold "New South" movement that sought to transform the southern economy, from the nostalgic culture-writing era of the Great Depression to the post-World War II folksong revival. Although Bealle finds that much has changed in the last century, the custodians of the tradition of Sacred Harp singing have kept it alive and accessible in an increasingly diverse cultural marketplace. Public Worship, Private Faith is a thorough and readable analysis of the historical, social, musical, theological, and textual factors that have contributed to the endurance of Sacred Harp singing.

Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music

Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music
Author: Joseph P. Swain
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1442264632

Sacred music is a universal phenomenon of humanity. Where there is faith, there is music to express it. Every major religious tradition and most minor ones have music and have it in abundance and variety. There is music to accompany ritual and music purely for devotion, music for large congregations and music for trained soloists, music that sets holy words and music without words at all. In some traditions—Islamic and many Native American, to name just two--the relation between music and religious ritual is so intimate that it is inaccurate to speak of the music accompanying the ritual. Rather, to perform the ritual is to sing, and to sing the ritual is to perform it. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 800 cross-referenced entries on major types of music, composers, key religious figures, specialized positions, genres of composition, technical terms, instruments, fundamental documents and sources, significant places, and important musical compositions. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about sacred music.

Shout to the Lord

Shout to the Lord
Author: Ari Y. Kelman
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 147986367X

How music makes worship and how worship makes music in Evangelical churches Music is a nearly universal feature of congregational worship in American churches. Congregational singing is so ingrained in the experience of being at church that it is often misunderstood to be synonymous with worship. For those who assume responsibility for making music for congregational use, the relationship between music and worship is both promising and perilous – promise in the power of musical style and collective singing to facilitate worship, peril in the possibility that the experience of the music might eclipse the worship it was written to facilitate. As a result, those committed to making music for worship are constantly reminded of the paradox that they are writing songs for people who wish to express themselves, as directly as possible, to God. This book shines a new light on how people who make music for worship also make worship from music. Based on interviews with more than 75 songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry executives, Shout to the Lord maps the social dimensions of sacred practice, illuminating how the producers of worship music understand the role of songs as both vehicles for, and practices of, faith and identity. This book accounts for the human qualities of religious experience and the practice of worship, and it makes a compelling case for how – sometimes – faith comes by hearing.

How Sweet the Sound

How Sweet the Sound
Author: David Ware Stowe
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2004
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780674012905

Stowe 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.

Traveling Home

Traveling Home
Author: Kiri Miller
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008
Genre: Pluralism
ISBN: 0252032144

A compelling account of the vibrant musical tradition of Sacred Harp singing, Traveling Home describes how song brings together Americans of widely divergent religious and political beliefs. Named after the most popular of the nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks - which employed an innovative notation system to teach singers to read music - Sacred Harp singing has been part of rural Southern life for over 150 years. In the wake of the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, this participatory musical tradition attracted new singers from all over America. All-day "singings" from The Sacred Harp now take place across the country, creating a diverse and far-flung musical community. Blending historical scholarship with wide-ranging fieldwork, Kiri Miller presents an engagingly written study of this important music movement.