Musicology Commons^™

“About Organs”: A Lutheran Statement About Organ Music From 1597, And Its Historical Context, Markus Rathey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The article presents a translation of an important document about organ music, published by the Theology Department at Wittenberg University in 1597. While written in response to an ongoing controversy, the document became the authoritative statement of the Lutheran church about organs and organ music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article presents the first complete English translation of the text and it analyzes the historical context of the document.

Singing About Singing: Images Of Choirs In Aquitanian 'Versaria', Eva Moreda Rodriguez

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Charles Atkinson and Gunilla Iversen, among others, have noted and discussed the increased presence of terms relating to music, singing and sound in Latin-language liturgical or paraliturgical music of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Aquitanian versus and Benedicamus trope repertoires provide a prime example, with words such as cantum, carmen, chorus and others recurring frequently. The recent development of scholarly strands (Emma Dillon, Sarah Kay) that considers how music and text combines (Dillon’s “sound of song”) to shape and put forward discourses that are precisely about the nature of sound, singing and music open up new opportunities to examine …

The Politics Of Musical Time: Expanding Songs And Shrinking Markets In Bengali Devotional Performance, Jaime Jones

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for The Politics of Musical Time: Expanding Songs and Shrinking Markets in Bengali Devotional Performance, authored by Eben Graves, by Jaime Jones.

Byzantine Theories Of Scale And Arab-Byzantine Chant Practices: A Comparative Analysis Proposing A New Resolution To The Theoretical System Of Chrysanthos Of Madytos, Rosy Azar

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In 2015, Amine Beyhom published a book on Byzantine chant, in which he summarised all the existing theories, paying particular attention to the problematic reform of the Byzantine chant theory in 1881, and guiding the reader through the steps that led to that reform. Driven by the first ever comparison between Byzantine and Arabic modes that he had found in Mīkhāʾīl Mashāqa’s epistle, Beyhom first studied Chrysanthos of Madytos’ insight. He documented this research in detail and followed it with a practical comparison to demonstrate if theory is indeed applied or it acts only as prescriptive guide. He recorded and …

Olivier Messiaen’S "Première Communion De La Vierge" And The Translation Of Religious Meaning, Robert Sholl, Jean-Rodolphe Kars

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This study creates a rich exegesis of “Première Communion de la Vierge” from Olivier Messiaen’s (1908–1992) piano cycle Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (1944) to show how Messiaen attempted to translate musical symbolism into religious meaning. The first two sections provide background and context on the work, revise previous scholarship, and show how this piece (no XI) functions as a theological hinge in the cycle. The genesis and sources of the Vingt Regards, using previously unavailable archival material, are examined to provide new insight into both the cycle and the “Première Communion.” The aesthetic scaffolding of this piece is then …

Timbre — A Transcendent Paradox?, Eugenia Siegel Conte

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Timbre, as ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales writes, is “paradoxical” precisely because it is one of the most exacting processes in which the human body may sense and comprehend the source of a sound even as that comprehended sound is impossible to describe outside of metaphor or comparison. As one of the more recognizable qualities of sound but the most difficult to describe, timbre allows us to consider physical/emotional (affective) experiences of sound as a key aspect of faith and meditation. In this article, I examine physical-affective intersections of faith and meditation that often are key to praxes of worship, and show …

Live Wires: The Angelus Temple And The Timbre Of Power, Catherine Provenzano

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article is a media history and contemporary case study of The Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. My analysis of the Angelus insists upon the centrality of a hyperaudible paradigm of worship that uses media to maximize the legibility of a Christian message, and, more than this, imagines that media itself as a living soul in need of redemption. Many contemporary megachurches employ savvy applications of sound and sound transmission as instruments of belonging as well as action, and these rely on high-budget investments in church infrastructure, software and personnel. I argue that …

Performing "Manly" Worship Music: Gender And Timbre At Mars Hill Church, Maren Haynes Marchesini

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Ten years ago, Mars Hill boasted fifteen campuses and 15,000 members. Amid mounting allegations of abuse and mismanagement leveled against founding pastor Mark Driscoll, the church famously collapsed, closing its doors at the end of 2014. Driscoll had built Mars Hill’s core brand around his opposition to the perceived feminization of the Christian mainstream, and appointing himself the “leader of a heterosexual male backlash” in the church and broader culture. While Driscoll’s muscular Christianity stands in a wide historical stream, Mars Hill long led the charge in establishing a youth-oriented, hipster brand of hypermasculine Calvinism. And while rhetoric and theology …

A Sunlit Ambience: How Reverb Pedals Influence The Contemporary Worship Music Imagination, Dylan Crosson

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

With the recent proliferation of scholarship on the musical elements of Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) in addition to ethnographies exploring the tradition’s inner machinations, readers now enjoy unprecedented levels of insight into the actions of human actors and their music. But what of CWM’s non-human actors? Could the instruments and musical equipment used by CWM practitioners, for example, impact evangelical piety? In this article, I entertain this question by arguing that the materiality of reverb pedals—devices used by guitarists to add artificial reverberation to their sound—influences how evangelicals conceptualize elements of their faith by introducing new imagery or enriching pre-existing …

From The Heaviest, Dirtiest Depths To The Washy Ambient Clouds: Guitar Timbre In/As Schismogenesis In North American Christianity, Joshua K. Busman, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This essay argues that within the socio-cultural context of North American Christianity, the timbral qualities of electric guitar, with its long lineage as a site of cultural values conflict and identity negotiation, serves a theological function in the emerging and cohering sonority of digital worship. Using as comparative case studies the timbral qualities of delay and ambience as promoted and sold by Worship Tutorials as representing normative sonic values for these Christians, on the one hand, and the dialectic and schismatic deployment of distortion by the band My Epic on the other, we suggest that these timbral qualities become important …

Sounds Like 'Saudade': Eschatological Echoes In Brazilian 'Gospel' Music, Fernando Berwig Silva

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This paper analyzes the song “Saudade” by the Brazilian gospel singer Stella Laura. In the song, I argue that Stella Laura uses Brazilian timbral markers from the Sertanejo and Gospel Brazilian music genres to articulate a unique perspective on eschatology, one that is based on the affective structure of the Lusophone word ‘saudade.’ Furthermore, I contend that the song, rooted in the Brazilian nostalgic sertanejo music tradition, leans on stylistic and timbral tools to communicate the idea of saudade from heaven. Beyond lyrics that feature theological notions of origin, identity, and nostalgia, Stella Laura’s song employs timbral, poetic, …

Thomas Pereira’S 'Lülü Zuanyao' 律呂纂要 (Ca. 1685): A Jesuit Music Theory Textbook For The Chinese Emperor, Qingfan Jiang

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Thomas Pereira (1646–1708), a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, arrived in Beijing in 1672 and was appointed by the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) as his music tutor. For the emperor's music lessons, Pereira authored Lülü Zuanyao 律呂纂要 [Elements of Music] (ca. 1685), the first known Western music theory treatise written in Chinese. My translation includes the first half of Zuanyao that focuses on Western music notation, solmization, and the hexachordal system. As a product of the global circulation of musical knowledge in the early modern period, Zuanyao is significant in three ways. First, it illustrates the direct influence of the music education Pereira …

Commemorating August Thirteenth: Music And Theology In Eighteenth-Century Moravian Communities, Ryan M. Malone

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

One of the most important memorial days in the Moravian liturgical calendar is August Thirteenth, a commemoration of the communal spiritual awakening that eighteenth-century Moravians experienced on the Saxon estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). While the Moravian church has celebrated this storied event for centuries, complete with music-rich religious services, only a few original compositions were crafted specifically for these services. In light of the importance of August Thirteenth, and given of the abundance of musical works that eighteenth-century Moravian composers wrote for other memorial days and religious holidays, this article employs musicological and theological perspectives to …

"Kol Mekadesh Shevi'i": A Liturgical Melody Sung At Home, Naomi Cohn Zentner

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article draws upon the unusual characteristics, origins and prevalence of the melody to the poem "Kol mekadesh shevii" [He who sanctifies the Seventh day] and discusses how it came to be recognized in the past seventy years as a signifier of Ashkenazi pre-Holocaust musical and religious culture and in particular as a sonic marker of liturgical sound, although it was sung at home. The Kol mekadesh melody came over time to represent two vastly different symbolic positions. As a melody adopted from non-Jewish sources bringing new, sometimes controversial sounds into the synagogue, and as a typical synagogal …

Who Is Allowed To Compose Catholic Church Music? Ferdinand Hiller's Insightful Report On The Sacred-Music Competition In Louvain (1866), Jürgen Thym, Ralph P. Locke

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In 1866, a competition was held in Louvain (Belgium) for a new setting of the Latin Mass text; the aim was that the winning piece be accessible in style and require only choir and organ. The jury included, among others, the composers Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Ferdinand Hiller; the lexicographer Fétis; and Joseph d’Ortigue, music critic for the Journal des débats, editor of Le Ménestrel, and a prominent advocate for the regeneration of Catholic church music.

In 1880, Hiller—longtime director of the Cologne Conservatory—published an essay describing the competition in detail. His essay, never before translated or discussed, forms …

Secular Formations Of Sacred Music: Schleiermacher, Romanticism, And Devotional Media In Germany, Desmond Sheehan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Theologians and musicologists alike have often disregarded the material and technical facets of devotional scenes such as the one meticulously described in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Celebration: A Dialogue (1806). More recent musicologists have highlighted more concealed technologies that helped to facilitate Romantic aesthetic experiences – a form of methodological unmasking that at once denies and reclaims a Schillerian notion of disenchantment. This essay argues that both types of studies perpetuate secularization narratives that displace a Christian religiosity into public artforms and social practices in Romanticism, and secular modernity by extension. As a proposed alternative, a media history of sacred music …

The Vagina Dentata: A Case For Unlocking Mouths, Loosing Hips, And Spreading The Gospel Of Healing Women's Sexual Performance Anxiety, Alisha Lola Jones

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article explores how vagina dentata folklore—stories and imagery about a mythical "toothed vagina"—connects to the ways Black religious communities often cultivate silence around women’s sexual lives, particularly within the “Worth the Wait” and Word of Faith movements. Ignited by womanist religious ethnographer Monique Moultrie’s scholarship on sexual silence in these movement, I take seriously the musicological chasm by exploring how these ministries influence Black women’s sexual agency and moral decision-making through inequitable theological procedures and discourses. The vagina dentata metaphor emerges as a symbol of constrained appetites—respiratory (larynx), digestive (intestine, anus), and reproductive (uterus, vagina)—reflecting broader sociocultural and religious …

(Special Section, Hymns Beyond The Congregation Ii): Whither Christian Soldiers? Metaphor And Momentum In The Midtwentieth-Century Reception Of A Victorian Hymn, Jonathan Hicks

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

There are few more explicit documents of the interconnection of hymnody, mobility, and coloniality than the 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone. Directed by the American duo of Henry King and Otto Brower, much of the picture was filmed “on location” in the British-controlled territories of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania). The film tells the real-life story of a New York journalist (Stanley) searching for a Scottish missionary (Livingstone) and eventually finding him in a town on the north-eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. One scene in particular—where Stanley finds Livingstone leading his hosts in a rendition of …

Polluted Soundscapes And Contrepoison In Sixteenth-Century France: The Sonic Warfare Leading To The First War Of Religion, John Romey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In the decades leading up to and during the first years of the Wars of Religion, Huguenots and Catholics waged audible battles over sonic territories using songs as spiritual weapons. Huguenots memorized and communally sang metrical psalms in the vernacular as sonic markers of the Reformed faith. Catholics interpreted these same sounds as pollution in need of eradication. Artus Desiré, for example, responded by producing polemical contrepoison, musical antidotes created by composing new countertexts to Marot’s Psalm tunes to “cleanse” them of their perceived heresy. While scholars have long recognized both the destructive nature of iconoclastic attacks on religious …

(Special Section, Hymns Beyond The Congregation Ii): Spiritual Concert-Fundraisers, Singing Conventions, And Cherokee Language Learning Academies: Vernacular Southern Hymnbooks In Noncongregational Settings, Jesse P. Karlsberg, Kaylina M. Crawley, Sara S. Hopkins

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Noncongregational settings were integral to hymnody in the postbellum settler colonial context of the southern United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The incorporation of hymn singing into a wide range of noncongregational settings served Black, white, and Native populations in navigating unsettled racial dynamics during this period across the US South and its diasporas. This essay features three case studies examining hymn collections intended or repurposed for a range of noncongregational uses: spiritual collections connected with the performing ensembles of black institutions, a shape-note songbook that attempted to bridge singing convention and congregational contexts, and a …

Annunciation And The Cross: The Marian Theology Of Incarnation In James Macmillan’S Music And Public Discourse, Joel Clarkson

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Many of Scottish composer James MacMillan’s most essential works are influenced by his Catholic faith, and thematically focused on a theological expression of Incarnation and suffering worked out through a dissonant musical style. MacMillan has developed a robust public discourse that includes statements about his faith and the way it informs his music, and his forthright demeanor has often provoked tension with various figures and groups. This article suggests that these two forms of conflict—discordance in his composition, and elements of conflict in his public dialogue—are both driven by a Marian theology of Incarnation that provides the impetus both for …

(Special Section) The Hymn As Protest Song In England And Its Empire, 1819–1919, Oskar Cox Jensen

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hymns played a role in envoicing the politics of protest in England long before their integration in the established Church – and do so to this day. Yet it was nineteenth-century radical movements that embraced the hymn as in many ways the ideal musical form. From the bloody field of Peterloo to the secularising South Place Society, from the mass meetings of Chartists to the top-down productions of the Fabian socialists, the century resounded with this increasingly familiar music.

Many writers laid claim to the rhetoric of the hymn to advance causes from abolitionism to solidarity with Poles exiled to …

(Special Section) Translating Race: Mission Hymns And The Challenge Of Christian Identity, Philip Burnett

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

“Ye seed of Israel’s chosen race,” “The race that long in darkness pined,” “To heal and save a race undone,” and “Sanctify a ransomed race” are a few examples of many references to “race” that exist in English-language hymnody. Throughout the nineteenth-century, hymns containing lines such as these, were exported from Britain into mission fields where translators had to find new ways to conceptualize notions of race and, in effect, created new group identities. This requires asking critical questions about the implications of what happened when ideas of race, in the Christian sense, interacted with non-religious notions of race in …

(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 …

Observant Dominican Nuns’ Processionals In Fifteenth-Century Germany: Evidence From Manuscripts Of The Beinecke Library, Eleanor J. Giraud

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article examines three Dominican processionals held in the Beinecke Library: Ms. 205, Music Deposit 60 and Music Deposit 61, all of which can be linked to the Observant Dominican convent of St Catherine in Nuremberg. Ms. 205 was undoubtedly used in Nuremberg, while Music Deposit 60 and 61 were likely copied from a Nuremberg Processional but made for use elsewhere, probably Regensburg. This small collection presents the opportunity to consider the Observant experience of procession, the dissemination of Observant liturgical books, and the relationship between the practices of Dominican nuns and friars. To a vast extent, these manuscripts reveal …

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 …

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 …

Hearing Faith: Music As Theology In The Spanish Empire, Carolina Sacristán Ramírez

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Andrew Cashner, Hearing Faith: Music as Theology in the Spanish Empire. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 194. (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

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, …