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Full-Text Articles in Musicology
Higher Ground: Rev. Dr. William Barber Ii And The Political Content Of Prophetic Form, Braxton D. Shelley
Higher Ground: Rev. Dr. William Barber Ii And The Political Content Of Prophetic Form, Braxton D. Shelley
Yale Journal of Music & Religion
This essay argues that Rev. Dr. William J. Barber’s message on “Higher Ground,” a speech delivered at a massive 2014 protest rally, reveals his intentional problematization of distinctions between the sacred and the secular. As Barber’s articulation of what Ashon Crawley calls “Blackpentecostal breath” spill over the boundaries posited by conventional categories—they are too ecstatic to be ordinary speeches, and too political to be traditional sermons—these plural expressions identify themselves as sounds that come from another world. If both content and form are understood as thought, it becomes apparent that these prophetic utterances critique the oppression wrought by contemporary social …
The Acoustics Of Justice: Music And Myth In Afro-Brazilian Congado, Genevieve E. Dempsey
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 …