Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Leopold Mozart, The Rationalist? Humanism And Good Taste In Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought, Katherine H. Walker

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The religious turn in eighteenth-century studies over the last two decades has created opportunities to revisit and refine some of our most entrenched ideas about this period in history. Revisionist histories of the Enlightenment emphasize various compromises between religion and secularism, tradition and individual freedom, faith and reason. One important nexus among these tendentious beliefs and values is the Jesuit education system. Using Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as a case study, this essay argues that “enlightened Christianity” long predated the Age of Enlightenment. The Jesuit educational system, which was founded on the humanist neoclassicism that proliferated in …

Calundu's Winds Of Divination: Music And Black Religiosity In Eighteenth And Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil, Jonathon Grasse

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Calundu was an African-derived religious practice known in colonial Brazil, most widely recognized in Minas Gerais during and following that region’s early eighteenth-century gold rush. Drumming, chant, and dance channeled healing and divinational powers brought about primarily through trance possession. Severely disrupted by Church intervention, descriptions of calundu found in Portuguese Inquisition testimony join the published observations by European travelers as windows into the social history of Minas Gerais, an important yet often overlooked cultural territory of Brazil. This region of gold, diamonds, and coffee formed one of the most intense, highly populated slave operations known in the Western Hemisphere. …

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 …

Liturgical Singing In The Lutheran Mass In Early Modern Sweden And Its Implications For Clerical Ritual Performance And Lay Literacy, Mattias O. Lundberg

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article postulates and analyses three distinct modes of performativity in Early Modern ecclesiastical music in Sweden, each linked to a specific repertoire of melodies, and each de facto (and sometimes also de jure) monopolized by the Church of Sweden. It is proposed that recognition and analysis of these three modes may provide further understanding of the interaction between singing, reading and speaking during the period under discussion. This sheds new light on what has in literacy research been termed “religious reading”, giving rise in some instances to a corresponding type of “religious singing” in a narrower sense: one …

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 …

Glimpses Into The Music And Worship Life Of A Victorian Colonial Cathedral: The Anglican Cathedral Of St Michael And St George In 1900 (Grahamstown, South Africa), Andrew-John Bethke

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article documents one year (1900) in the musical life of a colonial Anglican cathedral in Grahamstown (Cape Colony, South Africa), during the British colonial period. The source material for the music-lists is drawn mainly from the Saturday editions of two local newspapers: Grocott’s Penny Mail and the Grahamstown Journal. The author analyses the musical trends of the cathedral by exploring the content of the cathedral’s musical repertoire and relating it to the choir’s size and competency; commenting on the preference for certain composers and what this might imply about local musical taste; examining the precentor’s hymn choices and …