Literature Review:
-Monique Ingalls & Anna Nekola, both writing from a North American perspective, provide important foundational work in the field (of Christian congregational music) from within music scholarship.
-Contemporary Worship Music (Ingalls' definition): 'the broad repertory of evangelical congregational song composed from the late 1960s to the late 2000s in mainstream Western popular music styles' (2008, p.16)
-The enduring influence of key tenets surrounding the music's origins:
"The idea that music was simply a vehicle or tool for promoting the Christian message; that musical style was not an integral part of the evangelical tradition; and that the timeless Christian message not only could, but should, be paired with contemporary cultural styles--each of these ideas and practices would become increasingly important in the ensuing decade as the contemporary song repertory gained popularity. -Ingalls (2008, p.72)
Anna Nekola wrote on the "worship wars" in late 20th C. America...disputes about the role of music; attitudes of ahistioricism within evangelicalism. p.6
-Howard and Streck's research: Contemporary Christian Music (1999)-beyond congregational to Christian music industry as a whole.: separational, integrational, and transformational (p.7)
...
-the alliance between popular music and charismatic experience-both emphasise the personal experience.
-Pete Ward: (UK), provided a detailed "summary of its history and development,
charting the music’s rise as part of evangelical youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s through movements, events and festivals, groups and publications, and its later association with the charismatic movement, noting that ‘charismatic [worship music] has become the default setting in most evangelical churches in Britain’" (Ward 2005b, p1). p.7
Methodology:
-it is not, primarily, a historical project.
"The core of this research centres around 42 individual unstructured and semi-structured interviews with members of the congregation, members of the worship team and church staff at St Aldates, through which I interrogate the ways in which individuals frame and articulate their experiences within and outside of a worship context and examine the connections and disjunctures between their experience and evaluation of these different environments." p.8
-pros, cons, situate the research, acknowledge self-bias...
The chapters:
road map of the rest of the discussions/how you organised the research into sections/chapters
"Chapter 2 is largely theoretical in nature, focusing on some of the key issues raised by my research questions and highlighted in the foregoing discussions. I suggest the problematic nature of frequent ascriptions of neutrality to music within the church, alongside associated relegations of musical attachment to the level of personal preference, while suggesting that attention to the ethical has the potential to provide a more-helpful basis for discussion. After a brief discussion of music and identity I examine models of diversity in congregational music, suggesting the applicability of frameworks taken from the ‘new cosmopolitanism’, and offering this body of social and political theory as an alternative to the shortcomings I find within existing models. I finish by introducing the framework under which I will be discussing material from the interviews.
"...the values of the St Aldates church community, offering a range of important qualities including freedom, fluidity, simplicity, flexibility, the ability to respond to the Spirit, dynamic range, easy participation, accessibility, and easy replicability at home. The musical style adopted by the church
is one that is able to fulfil its function well and to serve the purposes to which it is put within the context of the church community through its service to a range of other practical goals. The way in which these goals are embedded in the music connects with the way in which congregation members are expected to identify with the music." p.24
-Musical meaning:
"Much recent work in musicology (Small 1998; Chua 1999; Cook 2001; Kramer 2003, 2004; Cross and Tolbert 2008) and ethnomusicology (DeNora 2000, 2003; Clayton 2001; Rice 2001; Nooshin 2011) has sought to conceptualize in a variety of ways the different kinds of meaning that are present within and around music and the activity of music-making. In particular, the ways in which musical meaning can be socially constructed and ascribed have replaced earlier conceptualisations of ‘absolute music’ which push many forms of musical meaning to the margins in favour of granting music a more autonomous existence. Such an understanding is not, however, one that is immediately at home within the discourses of Contemporary Worship Music; as Monique Ingalls highlights, part of the founding ideology of the movement is that music is a profoundly neutral medium (2008, p248), an understanding that has clear and important historical roots in the worship wars surrounding the introduction of Contemporary Worship Music." p.32
-In evangelical churches, there is an ontology of neutrality that deflect attention away from music and onto more spiritual concerns. "Neutrality has become a model for music which not only denies it inherent moral significance but which, in doing so, sets up a conceptual frame which pushes out other ways in which it might be conceived of as significant." p.33 "Christians worry that talking about music and potentially ascribing power to it in a setting where direct encounter with God is expected risks ascribing power to an aspect of the experience that should not become powerful and potentially confuses the source of encounter." p.33
-Difference: Rowan Williams: "Williams maintains that such a situation is undesirable in society and that instead, in order to create a healthy liberal democracy, there is the need for public negotiation
of difference in an environment where different voices can be heard and taken seriously without the assumption that in doing so the result would be inevitable animosity, conflict or disloyalty to the larger community. Conversely, he argues that in providing a space for these differences to be taken seriously there is the potential for a more powerful level of social identification to take place." p.34 "David Hesmondhalgh (2007) examines some of the ways in which discourse around music may have the potential to establish commonality despite differences in perspective and initial dismissals of others and their values."
-"Monique Ingalls draws attention to the way in which assumptions about the neutrality of style and the emphasis, instead, on the heart and the motives of the individual within the activity of worship can serve to deflect critical reflection away from musical practices (2008, p247). A lack of music-talk provides a means of maintaining authority," p.35
-Ethical significance:
"These priorities seem to affect people’s relationship with the church community, its worship and its spirituality in wide-ranging and significant ways which, due to the value-laden nature of such relationships, seem to best be thought of in ethical terms." p.35
-Can affect: "how questions of music have the potential to draw in matters of spirituality, justice, authority, cultural and contextual engagement, theology and gender, amongst others and how these are negotiated within the life of the church community. " p.35
-Ethics does not point us to one particular set of concerns, but rather allows a particular mode of attentiveness to the concerns and issues of particular situations, people and things – in the case of this book, those that arise within the St Aldates community. For the purposes of this book, to say that something has ethical significance is to say:
1 that it is not neutral and, instead, is closely bound up with particular goods or evils whether in and of itself or through those things with which it forms some kind of connection.
2 that something matters and it matters for and in relation to particular people or communities.
-"In the case of music, and within the concerns of this project, this means to say that not only is music a vehicle for a range of meanings but that many of these meanings are in some manner associated with particular values and that, within the context of a community of diverse and different individuals, these will inevitably be subject to negotiation as to their appropriate functioning within that community’s ongoing life. This ongoing negotiation can be seen to constitute the practice of ethics. The ethical dimension of music is an inevitable function of its nature as significantly meaningful in the context of shared musicking in community." p.36
-"Timothy Rommen, ... has sought to draw up a framework within which to think about some of the ethical issues surrounding church music on the island. He proposes an ‘ethics of style’ which:
[f]ocuses attention on the discursive spaces between individual and community (self and other) in order to come to a more nuanced understanding of music in its sociocultural contexts … investigates the process by which musical style informs identity formation for both artists and audience; illustrates how style thus becomes the vehicle for a multifaceted communal discourse about value and meaning; and interrogates the process of personal identification or disidentification with musical style as a
moment of ethical significance." Rommen (2007b, p2), p.38
-"Habermas and Rommen draw our attention to the fact that the way in which congregation members encounter discourse surrounding music and worship can be highly significant." p. 40
-"Nanette Nielsen and Marcel Cobussen suggest a number of key locations through which music can become ethically charged: Fundamental to our understanding is music’s association with activity (‘Interaction’), including contact with music through the act of listening (‘Listening’ and ‘Voice’), music as an immanent critical process that possesses profound cultural and historical significance (‘Discourse’), and as an art form that can be world-disclosive, formative of subjectivity, and contributive to intersubjective relations (‘Interaction’, ‘Affect’, and ‘Voice’)." Cobussen and Nielsen (2012, p4), p.41
-"Shusterman (who articulates similar claims) argues that a routine isolation of the aesthetic can even lead to ethically undesirable situations ‘provid[ing] an excuse for the powers and institutions that structure our everyday life to be brutally indifferent to natural human needs for the pleasure of beauty and imaginative freedom." p.42
"These are not to be sought in real life, but in art, whose and escape from the real gives us human sufferers temporary solace and relief’ (1992, p20). More recent trends towards a virtue ethics which focuses on the good and the good life (Higgins 2011, pxviii) and a view of music which draws both subjects and social meanings into its very core mean that the conceptual gap has begun to fade to the background. Music can carry with it a range of different goods by virtue of the different ways in which it becomes meaningful, and these can thus become part of the process of ethical negotiation as they make themselves felt in different situations and experiences. As we have seen, attention to ethics serves to focus this research on musical value and meaning, encounters with discourse, patterns of authority and community, the relationship between music, subjectivity and the wider world and the negotiation of all of these. Examining these in the course of this book helps to reconnect music with a plane of significance that has both been frequently side-lined, not least within Contemporary Worship Music, and which is deeply meaningful within the life of the church." p.43
-"Differences of taste and the specifics of individual attachment are thereby positioned outside the
realm of meaningful negotiation and contestation. Psychological studies of music often serve to reinforce this subjectivization of musical judgment, investigating the different traits that lead one person to prefer music with certain characteristics over other kinds of music (Chamorro-Premuzic et al 2010; Schäfer and Sedlmeier 2010; Rentfrow et al 2011) and thereby setting to one side questions
of agency, individuality and deeper significance." p.43
-Hennion: "By conceptualizing taste as a matter of varying modes of attachment and engagement...opens up the discourse around taste in a way that can make it meaningful and productive, able to involve diverse aspects of listener and music and the establishment of different forms of relationship between the two." p.44
"Likewise, if music and taste both have engagement and interaction at their core, then music is able to
become a significant participant in the process of tasting, not merely as a separate object, but as something which can be discussed using a common language. Hennion helps us to move beyond common models which locate taste largely in the internal make-up of the subject, thus subjectivizing it, and instead allows taste to become part of an interaction in which both subject and object (music) have crucial roles to play and in which the relationship between the two stands as the key determining element. This, in turn, opens taste up much more readily to negotiation – the process of tasting and the activity of the relationship is one that can provide room for manoeuvre that is harder to come by in a space where there is a strict dichotomy between a subject’s tastes and the properties of a musical object. Such a view is remarkably at home in the situation of congregational worship music, in which worshipers actively engage in the process of singing. Views about preferences in such a situation are
hard to frame without addressing individuals’ experiences of being present and their modes of engagement within the process of congregational singing." p.44
Music & identity:
-"some of the diverse ways in which music and identity can be conceptualized:
1 Do we want to argue that music contributes to the psychology of an individual’s identity or to some form of collective social identity or to both?
2 If we want to argue that music contributes to the psychology of identity, then are we talking about a sense of ‘who am I?’ – that is, ‘what is my essential nature?’ – or are we talking about a person’s desire to ‘suture’ himself or herself to a social group?
3 How many identities does an individual have? Do all individuals have the same possibilities for multiple identities or are the possibilities constrained by social, economic, and political inequalities? Does music contribute in the same way to all of them?
4 If we are arguing that music contributes to the social identity of a group, then how does it do that? Through performativity? Symbolization? Boundary formation?" Rice (2010, p322), p.45
-Subcultural studies gradually waned in favour as the fluid, fragmented and individual aspect of identity became more prominent (Gelder 2005, p12). Alternative notions such as the neo-tribe (Bennett 2000) and the scene (Straw 2001)..." p.46
-"Tia DeNora, rather than focusing on group identity, takes the individual as a starting point, focusing on the way in which music is present within the regular patterns of daily life (2000, 2003). Music, for DeNora, gains meaning through its ability to ‘afford’ different meanings depending on context. She uses case studies to show how music can afford different meanings for particular individuals, allowing them to exploit these affordances for identity-formation and meaning." p.46
-"For Turino ‘identity is the representation of selected habits foregrounded in given contexts to define self to oneself and to others by oneself and by others … Social identities are based on recognized similarities within groups, and differences from others, which in turn serve as the basis of collective feeling and action. Group identities are the foundation of all social and political life’ (2004, p8). Turino notes that these identities will tend to play out differently between different groups depending on whether it is helpful to highlight difference or unity." p.46
-How, then, can we account for movement across and between identities? Here it becomes critically important to distinguish between individual self-identity and collective identity in relation to music... Without such a distinction between individual and collective forms of musical identity …we cannot address the potential disjunctures and conflicts between individual and collective musical identities, the way that cultural expectations and norms, or dominant musical discourses, may be in tension with individual identities and may exert powerful pressures of musical subjectification."
Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000a, pp32–33) p.47
-"Nancy Ammerman proposes a similar position from the sociology of religion: I am unwilling to discard the possibility that persons seek some sense of congruence within the complexity of their lives. Nor do I believe that structured categories exist untouched by the actions and resistance of the actors who inhabit them … What we need is a way to talk about who we are and how we behave without reducing ourselves either to a single determining structural essence or to complete chaotic indeterminacy …"Ammerman (2003, pp211–212)
-The inadequacy of assimilation and multiculturalism p.48
-Cosmopolitanism:
-"A turn towards intercultural processes is often complemented by a move towards cosmopolitan models of community, and it is these which, I suggest, in seeking to provide frameworks for understanding the interactive negotiation of cultural movement, inter-relation and difference, form a helpful basis for understanding the various negotiations of congregational diversity." p.50
-A number of ethnomusicologists have, in recent years, been drawn to cosmopolitan frameworks in order to understand a variety of musical negotiations and practices (Turino 2000; Stokes 2007; Tsiouslakis 2011; Perman 2012; Bosse 2013; Harnish 2013; Webster-Kogan 2014).
-While cosmopolitanism often refers primarily to national identities and international flows and exchanges this is not the only level on which it can be a useful concept. Gerard Delanty suggests that:
It is useful to distinguish three main dimensions of cosmopolitanism: the historical level of modernity, the macro or societal level of the interaction of societies or societal systems, and the micro level of identities, movements and communities within the social world … cosmopolitanism is not to be equated with transnationalization … it makes more sense to see it expressed in more reflexive kinds of self-understanding … it resides in social mechanisms and dynamics that can exist in any society at any time in history where world openness has a resonance." Delanty (2006, pp41–42), p.50
-Vertovec and Cohen make a similar point, suggesting that ‘present-day processes … such as diasporic identification and the rise of identity politics, have multiplied people’s interests and affiliations. Now gender, sexuality, age, disability, ‘homeland’, locality, race, ethnicity, religion - even cultural hybridity itself - are among the key identifications around which the same person might at one time or another politically mobilize’ (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002, p12). p.50
-Thus, the cosmopolitan conceptual framework can be applied to "the micro-scale of everyday movements within individuals’ lives." p.51
-"Onyx et al suggest that ‘everyday cosmopolitanism reflects the ordinary interactions that occur between individuals of different cultures routinely negotiating across difference in order to coexist
within a shared social space’ (Onyx et al 2011, p61) and Anthony Appiah suggests that 'cosmopolitanism imagines a world in which people and novels and music and films and philosophies travel between places where they are understood differently, because people are different and welcome to their difference’ (2005, p258)." p.51
-"Beck suggests that ‘The central defining characteristic of a cosmopolitan perspective is the “dialogic imagination” … The dialogic imagination corresponds to the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual experience, which makes it a matter of fate to compare, reflect, criticize, understand, combine contradictory certainties’ (2002, p18), while Vertovec and Cohen quote Waldron, who suggests that ‘[cosmopolitanism] means the ability to stand outside of having one’s life written and scripted by any one community, whether that is a faith or tradition or religion or culture - whatever it might be - and to draw selectively on a variety of discursive meanings’ (Vertovec and Cohen 2002, p4)." p.51
paying attention to the way in which they navigate the movement between ecclesiastical and extra-ecclesiastical musical environments and relating this to a variety of concerns in theory and in discourse.
Chapter 3: (worth re-reading: pp. 59-63)
The malleability of music:
-"Laudan Nooshin’s work (2011) draws attention to the way in which the meanings associated with different musics can be altered in the movement between un-related contexts in such a way that their significance becomes almost entirely different. She draws particular attention to the way in which mediated technology makes it possible for musical style to migrate without a necessity for it to do so alongside particular peoples or cultures which might serve to maintain its ‘original’ meanings." p.60
-concepts of ‘oppositional’ and ‘negotiated’ readings. p.61
-Timothy Rice (2001): the multiple levels on which music can be assigned meaning p.61
"metaphors as ‘music as object’, ‘music as art’, ‘music as emotional expression’, ‘music as text’, ‘music as social behaviour’, ‘music as political symbol’ and ‘music as sign’ serve to make truth claims about the ontological status of music and should be taken seriously as ‘fundamental claims to truth, guides to practical action and sources for understanding music’s profound importance in human
life’ (2001, p22)." p.62 'music as a space of worship', 'music as a neutral canvas for worship'=>different musical metaphors leave space for each person who chooses a different metaphor to interpret the significance of music in the worship context.
-"If intertextuality refers to the possibility (or inevitability) of the formation of significant or meaningful relationships, through a variety of methods and agencies, between texts, then we might refer to the possible relationship between different musical worlds as a form of intercontextuality, highlighting the likelihood that meaning (as we will see later in the chapter) will spill over between multiple contexts. ... the idea of intercontextuality avoids the necessity of focussing on pre-given meaning, allowing a fluid relationship between constructed, experienced and given meanings." p.63
-"a music’s context is not merely a passive and semi-neutral background but is capable of becoming meaningful as much as the texts embedded within it. Discussion of the relationship between contexts can often fall to the background as they are often treated as self-contained worlds within which to
understand the content they contain" p.63
-Different metaphors the interviewees adopted: expression of the heart, power to move and connect, contemplation, ...
Chapter 4: Boundaries--Communal and private, spiritual and secular
-"the establishment of significant boundaries is an important key to their experience of worship music, their ability to maintain attachments to multiple disparate musical environments and their ability to evaluate and experience multiple musics in a positive manner." p.82
-Catherine Bell: the close similarities between ritual and other performances, & the dynamics which often underlie this kind of ritual separation: 'Another feature of performance lies in the dynamics of framing. As noted with regard to sacral symbols, distinctions between sacred and profane, the special and the routine, transcendent ideals and concrete realities can all be evoked by how some activities, places, or people are set off from others. Intrinsic to performance is the communication of a type of frame that says, ‘This is different, deliberate, and significant – pay attention!’ By virtue of this framing, performance is understood to be something other than routine reality. Bell (2009, p160); contemporary worship music reverses this separation and tries to be similar to everyday music, erasing the boundaries between the everyday and the special
-The interplay of similarity and differentiation: anthropologist Anthony Cohen: "the greater the pressure on communities to modify their structural forms to comply more with those elsewhere, the more are they inclined to reassert their boundaries symbolically by imbuing these modified forms with meaning and significance which belies their appearance. In other words, as the structural bases of boundary become blurred, so the symbolic bases are strengthened." (1988, p.45)
Chapter 5: At the Edges--Value transfer, judgments, discontent
-"a broad range of experiences in which musical value judgements formed largely outside of the church either become problematic for worshippers or need to be consciously suppressed in order to maintain a positive experience of Sunday worship. This is, perhaps, the most pastorally sensitive of the three categories of experience as it can sometimes lead to frustration and alienation on the part
of musicians and congregation members." p.105
-an associated renewal of social space. As Hesmondhalgh suggests: The great advantage of [Habermas’s notion of] the public sphere, when used appropriately and with attention to other Habermasian concepts such as discourse ethics, is that it can encourage us to think properly about the institutional conditions that make it possible for people to question simplifications and projections … The idea of an aesthetic public sphere relates … to the degree to which a social space provides those
participating in … debates with the resources to undertake discussion in a thoughtful and informed way." Hesmondhalgh (2007, p524) p.124
-the public sphere as ‘a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed’ (Thomas McCarthy 1989, pxi).
Chapter 6 Alternative musical spaces in the church: I examine two marginal/third spaces musical spaces within the life of the church: ‘Sing O barren woman’ – a week long prayer event, and ‘Word on the street’ – an evangelistic busking group that go out each Saturday onto Oxford’s main pedestrianized shopping street. I suggest that these two spaces embody different relationships between individuals’ diverse musical backgrounds and the church, offering differently nuanced musical ontologies from that found in the main Sunday worship services. I suggest that these spaces serve both to challenge and to reinforce the musical patterns of the main church services." p.10-11
-marginal/third spaces: "in-between realms, standing at the intersection of the music of the church and individuals’ broader musical lives. As such, I want to suggest that they can helpfully be understood through the idea of ‘third space’, as locations in which discourses and knowledges from two usually-distinct spaces encounter one-another and interact. p.127
-"Moje et al (2004) outline three principal ways in which such third spaces can be understood:
1. "as a means of building bridges between conventional institutional discourses and discourses marginalised in such settings.
2. they put forward the understanding of third space ‘as a navigational space, a way of crossing and succeeding in different discourse communities’.
3. ‘third space can be viewed as a space of cultural, social, and epistemological change in which the competing knowledges and discourses of different spaces are brought into “conversation”’ (Moje et al 2004, p44).
According to these understandings third spaces are largely productive in nature, a means of reconciling disparate identities and belongings." p.124
-While Moje et al’s understandings position third space as a relatively stable
structural phenomenon, other authors highlight its potential to destablise. ~Routledge, following the lead of Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 1994), suggests that it is ‘a place of invention and transformational encounters, a dynamic in-between space that is imbued with the traces, relays, ambivalences, ambiguities and contradictions, with the feelings and practices of both sites, to fashion something
different, unexpected’.
~Hoover and Echchaibi likewise highlight Bhabha’s understanding that ‘third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom. [it] gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation’ (2012, p.13), suggesting that playful and negotiative practices in which signs and symbols are subverted and re-read stand at the centre of such spaces (2012, pp12, 20)." p.124
-Physical distance creates freedom for a different musical space--Word on the street: "As a project at some distance from both the authority structures and the physical space of the church," p.144
Conclusion:
-theoretical lens of cosmopolitanism, drawing on a typology of usages set out by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen "in order to examine the multiple ways in which cosmopolitan thought can be brought to bear on the experiences presented in this book." p.11
-"The various chapters of this book suggest a multi-faceted conception of musical identity that is far from straightforward. It is the result of an interplay of boundaries and connections, individuals and institutions, freedom and constraint such that these elements and a host of others are in a constant process of negotiation and contestation." p. 153
P: Basically, the author interviewed church members at St. Aldates, a church in Oxford that focuses on using soft rock type of church music and asked them how this style of church music relates to the music that they listen to in their daily lives. A lot of them don't really listen to the worship music style in their lives but saw the worship music as good to be used in church as it is the lowest common denominator and a music that buzzes, unites worshippers to sing together to worship God, and that the lyrics/worship attitude is more important than if they enjoyed this type of music anyway; music is just a tool while spiritual experience is more important. However, the author suggests that there is a relation between how they feel about the music and how that changes their formation by the church music and when they were given freedom and an alternative space (in-between) in the 24/7 prayer room and Word in the street, they could express their theology and faith using music styles that more represent them (e.g. jazz, hip hop) and experience a different area of their spiritual lives.
Feb-31 Mar, 2017
Abingdon: Routledge, 2017
