Digital Commons Network^™

Healing For The Soul: Richard Smallwood, The Vamp, And The Gospel Imagination, Horace J. Maxile Jr.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Braxton D. Shelley's Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

The Malay Nobat: A History Of Power, Acculturation, And Sovereignty, Abdul Haque Chang

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Raja Iskandar Bin Raja Halid's The Malay Nobat: A History of Power, Acculturation, and Sovereignty, The Lexington Series in Historical Ethnomusicology: Deep Soundings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022).

(Special Section Introduction) Hymns Beyond The Congregation: Constructions Of Identity And Legacies Of Meaning, Erin G. Johnson-Williams, Philip Burnett

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

We offer here the first of two special sections on the theme of "Hymns Beyond the Congregation." Divided into the two sub-themes of “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Constructions of Identity,” and “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Legacies of Meaning,” our authors (based in institutions both in the USA and the UK) comprise both early career and senior scholars and come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in American history, South African colonial history, political history, the history of mission education, and historical musicology. Together, these two special issues will pave the way for facilitating new dialogues between historians, musicologists and congregational …

Church Music Leaders In The Usa: Prioritizing Technical Competence And Inclusion, Heather Maclachlan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Church music leaders in the United States pursue two priorities: technical accuracy and fluency in the music-making of their church ensembles, and, including as many volunteers as possible in those same ensembles. At times, the prioritization of technical competence and inclusion conflict, because volunteers whose playing or singing is less than competent seek to be included in church music groups. Facing this ethical dilemma, church music leaders operate ethically; that is, they employ strategies and develop policies based on their understanding of their responsibilities to other people (Warren 2014). During interviews, they verbally espouse an ethic of deontology, but in …

Tracking The Harmonium From Christian Missionary Hymns To Sikh Kirtan, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The harmonium is prominent in Sikh practices of devotional music known as kirtan and yet its significance has barely been addressed in Euro-American scholarship. Following on the heels of a recent ban against using the instrument at the holiest temple of the Sikhs, Harmandir Sahib (popularly known as the Golden Temple), this article explores how the ban seeks to discard this colonial instrument and return to playing traditional string instruments (tanti saz) associated with the courts (darbar) of the Sikh Gurus. This study is the first to examine primary missionary sources from the nineteenth and early …

Chanting The Medicine Buddha Sutra: A Musical Transcription And English Translation Of The Medicine Buddha Service Of The Liberation Rite Of Water And Land At Fo Guang Shan Monastery, Jeffrey W. Cupchik

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Reed Criddle, ed., Chanting the Medicine Buddha Sutra: A Musical Transcription and English Translation of the Medicine Buddha Service of the Liberation Rite of Water and Land at Fo Guang Shan Monastery. Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music 13. Philip V. Bohlman, general editor. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2020. 77 pages.

Shifting Paradigms, Pandemic Realities: The Reception Of Ishay Ribo’S Music In The American Hasidic Community, Tzipora Weinberg, Gordon Dale

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The COVID-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the landscape of social, communal, and religious life. Within the Jewish community, reactions to the virus have taken many forms. One of the most visible and criticized populations, the Hasidic community of Brooklyn, has been the focus of attention from the media and press, and has responded in unprecedented ways, both in political and social arenas. Our close study of the evolution of a particular instance of atypical musical permissiveness in the period preceding COVID-19, and its subsequent development during the pandemic period itself, follows this metamorphosis, limning the shift in communal norms as …

From The Islands To The Motherland: Motivic Traveling In Contemporary Gospel Music, Lauren Eldridge Stewart

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Contemporary gospel musicians frequently use ad libs that describe diasporic desires, imagined identities, and the music itself. “To the islands” and “to the motherland” are directives that call audiences to join musicians in a motivic journey that spans the Black Atlantic, and flows between North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Though deployed throughout the genre’s history, I focus here on the motivic traveling featured in gospel music released within the past two decades. I posit that musicians engage in this symbolism for three possible reasons: to enliven gospel music, to appeal to increasingly diverse congregations both within the U.S. and …

Congregational Music As Phatic Communication: Affect, Atmosphere, And Relational Ways Of Listening And Being, Anna E. Nekola

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Much of the scholarship of congregational music focuses on participatory music in organized corporate worship. This article draws on theories of communication and affect to examine the secondary, background music that happens alongside other events in a worship service or in places other than the space of the sanctuary. Instead of understanding affects as an individual emotion, this article argues that music is made meaningful through a socio-cultural and relational affective process. This in turn enables one to understand how musics, particularly secondary non-participatory musics, work beyond language and representation in phatic ways that can engender powerful feelings of human …

Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills, Nadia Chana

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Bodies Of Silence, Floods Of Nectar: Ritual Music In Contemporary Brahmanical Tantric Temples Of Kerala, Paolo Pacciolla

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The Tantric concept of sound (nāda) as universal life-force has seen worldwide diffusion over the last few decades but such a fame does not reflect academic interest in the impact of Tantra on music. Indeed, while a number of essays have been written to demonstrate the contribution of Tantrism to the evolution of Indian religions and culture, its contribution to music has been left largely unexplored.

The word Tantra refers to a pan-Asian religious phenomenon spread over numerous centuries and including a wide number of sects having different and even opposite philosophical and theological approaches which may be …

Liturgy And Musical Inculturation In A Post-Apartheid South African Catholicism, Austin Chinagorom Okigbo

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

There is a developing trend within mainstream South African Churches to incorporate styles of traditional African music and cultural elements in liturgical functions. This is happening in places where such ideas were hitherto unwelcome because mission churches witnessed the denigration of indigenous African cultures by Europeans during the eras of both colonialism and apartheid. Inculturation Theology underscores the current drive for liturgical transformation. It comprises a part of Black Theology in South Africa, which developed as an intellectual framework for liberation during the time of the anti-apartheid struggles. Using the ethnographic study of the cultural mass at Emmanuel Cathedral in …

Ambient Sufism, Tomal Hossain

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for RIchard Jankowsky, Ambient Sufism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

‘Jesus Is Not A Foreign God’: Baptist Music Making In Burma/Myanmar, Heather Maclachlan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Christians in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, also known as Myanmar, make up approximately five percent of the national population. The Christian community of Burma includes both Catholics and Protestants, and Baptists predominate among the Protestants. In this article I argue that twenty-first century Protestant Burmese Christians fulfill both aspects of a “twofold legacy” bequeathed to them by Adoniram Judson, the first Baptist missionary to Burma, and that their fulfillment of this legacy is manifest in their musical practices. I further argue that it has been, and continues to be, to Burmese Christians’ advantage to emphasize both aspects of …

Vatican Ii, Liberation Theology, And Vernacular Masses For The Family Of God In Central America, Bernard J. Gordillo

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) instituted reforms in the Catholic Church that included changes in language and music employed in the liturgy, inspiring a proliferation of sung vernacular masses throughout Latin America. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research undertaken in Nicaragua and the United States, this article examines three Central American vernacular masses—Misa típica panameña de San Miguelito (1967), Misa popular nicaragüense (1969), and Misa campesina nicaragüense (1975). Each mass emanated from communities founded as part of the transnational Familia de Dios (Family of God) movement, which established programs of religious education, leadership training, and community building among impoverished …

Sankyoku Magazine And The Invention Of The Shakuhachi As Religious Instrument In Early 20th-Century Japan, Matt Gillan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The early 20^th century was a period in which understandings of music, religion, and the nation-state underwent rapid change in Japan. In this article I examine Japanese cultural discourse from the first decades of the 20^th century in which the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, was frequently portrayed as a religious instrument. In some cases, this discourse referenced pre-20^th century historical affiliations of the shakuhachi with the Fuke-sect, an organization that was loosely affiliated to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. But the article also explores how religio-musical discourse surrounding the shakuhachi intersected with developments in modern Japanese religious life, …

Review: Rachel Harris, Soundscapes Of Uyghur Islam, Chris Hann

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Rachel Harris, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.

The Secularism Of Music Studies, Jim Sykes

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A response is presented to the articles collected in this special issue.

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 …

“Beer & Hymns” And Community: Religious Identity And Participatory Sing-Alongs, Andrew Mall

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

As a series of loosely-organized events, “Beer & Hymns” started at the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2006 and migrated to the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina in 2012. Local Beer & Hymns gatherings meet at bars, breweries, clubs, and pubs across the U.K., the U.S., and around the world. Most are not affiliated with a church or Christian denomination, instead relying on the energy of independent local organizers. Some attendees are regular churchgoers, other are not, but all find community in these sing-alongs—congregational singing, that is, outside of traditional congregational contexts. Beer & Hymns is exactly what it …

Sound And Secularity: Introduction, Margarethe Adams, August Sheehy

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Guest editors Margarethe Adams and August Sheehy introduce their special issue on Sound and Secularity.

Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, And Sonic Atmospheres In An Indian Ocean World, Jim Sykes

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Patrick Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 174 pp. ISBN: 9780520298712

Warfare And Welcome: Practicality And Qur’Ānic Hierarchy In Ibāḍī Muslims’ Jurisprudential Rulings On Music, Bradford J. Garvey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

While much ink has been spilled by musicologists on the legal standing of music in Islamic jurisprudential scholarship, few scholars have offered as comprehensive a view as Lois Ibsen Al-Faruqi. Thirty-five years after her major works on this issue, this article seeks to reassess her model of musical legitimacy within Muslim scholarship. Al-Faruqi places Qur’ānic recitation at the apex of a unidirectional continuum of sound art, with genres less similar to the recitation of the Qur’ān located progressively further away from it. Based on fieldwork in the Sultanate of Oman in 2015-17 and engaging with recent reinvigorations on the anthropological …

Metta, Mudita, And Metal: Dhamma Instruments In Burmese Buddhism, Gavin D. Douglas

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Bells, gongs, and other dhamma instruments offer valuable insights into the role of sound in Buddhist practice. Participation in musical events in the Theravada Buddhist world is deemed inappropriate for devote laity and for those who have taken monastic vows. The seventh Buddhist precept implores monks “to abstain from dancing, singing, and music,” yet Buddhist monasteries and pagodas are sonically vibrant places that contain a wide variety of layered bells, gongs, chants, and prayers sculpting the sonic environment. This study examines the soundscape of Burmese Buddhist social space and argues that these sounds are essential to understanding the lived practice …

Singing Yoruba Christianity: Music, Media, And Morality, Olabode Festus Omojola

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Vicki L. Brennan, Singing Yoruba Christianity: Music, Media, and Morality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 210 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-03209-6.

The Mulberry Tree, The Birds And The Divine In The Music Of The Dotār In Khorāssān (Iran), Farrokh Vahabzadeh

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The relationship between music and environment plays an important role both in musical compositions and in research on music. The paper is about an anthropological study on the relationship between music of the long-necked lute dotār and the environment, in the region of Khorāssān in Iran. By examining the close relationship between the mulberry tree, birds, metaphor and music of dotār, we will try to show how the environmental factors, data or aspects can be directly or indirectly related to the music, particularly through the symbolism of Sufi beliefs in the region. These relationships to the nature are strongly linked …

Ecojustice, Religious Folklife And A Sound Ecology, Jeff Todd Titon

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Folk, traditional, and indigenous ecological knowledges have a significant role to play in ecojustice. A case study in the traditional ecological knowledge among one of the religious communities with whom I have spent several decades illustrates how they embody the main principle and three fields of an ecological rationality: the community of inter-related beings; the ways the beings participate in that community or place; and the relations of nature and the nonhuman world to humans and human nature. Ecological rationality stands in contrast to economic rationality, a branch of instrumental reason exemplified by what economists call rational choice theory. An …

“A Gentle, Angry People”: Music In A Quaker Nonviolent Direct-Action Campaign To Power Local Green Jobs, Benjamin A. Safran

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

While the use of spiritual music in non-violent resistance is noted by such scholars as Thomas Turino (2008), one not might expect music to play a large role in a Quaker-led non-violent direct action campaign. Even though Quakerism is known for its historical animosity toward music, I argue that Quakerism's historic values have in fact fostered a robust musical culture within Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) and shaped its ability to function effectively as a "rebel" non-violent direct action group. Music is used to summon courage and unity within scary actions. The “gentle” Quaker aesthetic may meanwhile partially mask or …

"No Human Ever Made A Cathedral Such As This": Scoping The Ecology Of The Carols By Candlelight Effect In Australia's Open-Air Environments, Robin Ryan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

During Australia’s dry December, traditional and popular forms of caroling shape the sight and sound of the key Christian festival of Christmas. Creative connections between belief, place, and music are characteristically manifest in focused open-air environments of beach, bushland or park. Reasoning from gospel belief that the very first “Christmas carol” emanated from a heavenly host of angels singing to an audience of shepherds in a field, caroling alfresco is an appropriate activity. How, then, do Australian caroling venues become conducive to environmental spheres of sound and influence? While the annual mass Carols by Candlelight concerts televised from Melbourne and …

Conch Calls Into The Anthropocene: Pututus As Instruments Of Human-Environmental Relations At Monumental ChavíN, Miriam A. Kolar

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Pututus, conch shell musical horns, are known in the Andes as annunciatory devices enabling their players to call across long distances. Beyond their iconic call, the sonic and gestural versatility possible in pututu performance constitutes dynamical evidence for prehistorical uses and site-specific cultural valuations of these multifaceted ritual instruments. Pututus appear in drawings created during the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Andes, and intact shell horns have been excavated from monumental architecture in Perú preceding the Inca by more than two millennia. At the late Andean Formative center at Chavín de Huántar, Perú, a well-preserved ceremonial complex active …