Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nationalist Transformations: Music, Ritual, And The Work Of Memory In Cambodia And Thailand, Jeffrey M. Dyer

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cambodia and its diaspora since 2004, this article explores tensions that arise when individuals and institutions impose nation-state ideologies on music and ritual that predate the nation-state concept and transcend official state boundaries. In numerous contexts, musicians and dancers in Cambodia and Thailand perform offerings and blessings that honor their teachers and initiate artistic lineages. Due to broad influence from India and centuries of conflict and borrowing, these rituals—though not necessarily their musical content—have proliferated in these two countries. I describe these nearly identical rituals—called thvāy grū in Khmer and wai khruu in Thai—and their …

The Acoustics Of Justice: Music And Myth In Afro-Brazilian Congado, Genevieve E. Dempsey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

For the Afro-Brazilian musicians of popular Catholicism, or Congadeiros, who live precariously on the urban and rural margins of Brazil, ritual undergirds their struggles for subsistence, spiritual fulfillment, and racial equality. When Congadeiros create ritual, they enter into a tradition begun in the seventeenth century in Brazil by their enslaved African and Afro-descendant ancestors who intoned songs of redemption. In keeping with their ancestors’ evocations of dignity during slavery, worshipers in the present day embed multiple kinds of vested interests within ritual festivity to achieve racial equality. This article explores Congado, the ceremonies of these disenfranchised musicians, to …

Relational Power, Music, And Identity: The Emotional Efficacy Of Congregational Song, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song

The power of congregational song to unify (or divide) people along various lines is well documented. Yet, how this process of uniting or dividing is accomplished has proven necessarily difficult to document. This paper examines the complex and polyvalent factors that contribute to the meaningfulness of congregational music making, seeking to offer a synthetic, conceptual framework with which to engage this often murky milieu.

Employing interdisciplinary research techniques drawn from sociology, ritual studies, and ethnomusicology, I construct a conceptual framework with which to understand the profoundly formative power of …

Ultramontane Piety And Catholic Sociability: The Prescription And Practice Of Identity In Acadian Patriotic Songs, Jeanette Gallant

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The emergence of ultramontane thought during the Catholic Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France had wide-reaching effects in Catholic communities beyond Europe. One such community was a francophone colonial minority population in Atlantic Canada called the Acadians who, as Canada became a nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century, came under the control of ultramontane nationalists working to protect Acadian cultural rights from the English-speaking Protestant majority. This paper looks at the role that music played in the transmission of ultramontane thought with these new socio-political circumstances. The Acadians, exiled for seven years during Canadian colonization, were resettled in disparate …