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Full-Text Articles in Religion

Lost In Translation: A Critical Analysis Of The Libretto In Handel's Messiah, Jordan Lehto, Aaron Escamilla, Eden H. Nimietz Dec 2020

Lost In Translation: A Critical Analysis Of The Libretto In Handel's Messiah, Jordan Lehto, Aaron Escamilla, Eden H. Nimietz

2020 Festschrift: Georg Frideric Handel's "Messiah"

Handel’s Messiah is renowned for its lush sound and richly developed message regarding the rejoicing of Christians and the celebration of religion through their faith in a divine savior. Not only is the full oratorio performed by countless ensembles every year, but many scholars have spent months, and even years, poring over its libretto. The conclusions they have come up with regarding the intentions of the librettist, Charles Jennens, have sparked much controversy over the years. Because of Jennens’ personal, religious beliefs, many scholars are concerned that much of his libretto is designed to discredit all other religions and proclaim …


Warfare And Welcome: Practicality And Qur’Ānic Hierarchy In Ibāḍī Muslims’ Jurisprudential Rulings On Music, Bradford J. Garvey Nov 2020

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 Nov 2020

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 …


The Performance And Patronage Of Baloch Culture Through Music (And Related Arts) In The Eastern Arabian Peninsula, George Murer Sep 2020

The Performance And Patronage Of Baloch Culture Through Music (And Related Arts) In The Eastern Arabian Peninsula, George Murer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of …


Talk This Way: A Look At The Historical Conversation Between Hip-Hop And Christianity, Joshua Swanson Aug 2020

Talk This Way: A Look At The Historical Conversation Between Hip-Hop And Christianity, Joshua Swanson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christianity and Hip-Hop culture are often said to be at odds with one another. One is said to promote a lifestyle of righteousness and love, while the other is said to promote drugs, violence, and pride. As a result, the public has portrayed these two institutions as conflicting with no willingness to resolve their perceived differences. This paper will argue that there has always been a healthy conversation between Hip-Hop and Christianity since Hip-Hop’s inception. Using sources like Hip-Hop lyrics, theologians, historians, autobiographies, sermons, and articles that range from Ma$e to Tipper Gore, this paper will look at the conversation …


Ecojustice, Religious Folklife And A Sound Ecology, Jeff Todd Titon Feb 2020

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 Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Emotion, And Islamic Knowledge In Kachchh, Gujarat, Brian E. Bond Feb 2020

A Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Emotion, And Islamic Knowledge In Kachchh, Gujarat, Brian E. Bond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the use and contestation of Sindhi-language Sufi poetry performance as a means of Islamic knowledge transmission and ethical self-formation in rural Muslim communities in Kachchh, a border district in the western Indian state of Gujarat adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research with Muslim performers and enthusiasts of Sindhi poetry between 2014-2018, I first examine an ecology of performative and interpretive practices revolving around the musico-poetic repertoire of the poet-saint Shāh ʿAbdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689-1752 CE). I argue that the pedagogical efficacy of Sufi poetry performance is undergirded by its …


Mimicry As Movement Analysis, Rosa Abrahams Jan 2020

Mimicry As Movement Analysis, Rosa Abrahams

Faculty Publications

The analysis of movement to music often stems from examinations of video-recorded events. This allows the analyst an opportunity to re-watch, pause, and slow down the movements of their participants, and to produce descriptive notation that appears alongside a score (e.g., Roeder and Tenzer 2012). Unlike prescriptive forms of dance notation (e.g., Laban 1928), such transcriptions of movement often illuminate metrical connections between music and movement. However, when video-recording is not permissible, other methods of movement analysis must be developed. This paper pilots a new technique for rigorous analysis of the interaction between movement and music, which may be used …


“Because We Are Catholic”: Music As A Bridge Between Identities Within The Catholic Community Of South India, Johnathan Theodore Travis Rhodes Jan 2020

“Because We Are Catholic”: Music As A Bridge Between Identities Within The Catholic Community Of South India, Johnathan Theodore Travis Rhodes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that the music of the Catholic Church of South India, which draws from Indian and Western music genres, functions as a cultural bridge allowing the worshiper to express a distinctively Catholic identity without distancing themselves from their Hindu roots. This cultural connection reinterprets Karnatak musical styles, practices, and traditions as distinctively Catholic rather than Indian or Hindu. Thus, Indian cultures are recontextualized within a Catholic paradigm, as these practices are regarded as Catholic regardless of their historical, cultural, or religious origin. These identities, Indian and Catholic, are not in tension with one another, but instead, …