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Resounding Transcendence is a pathbreaking volume exploring how sacred music effects religious and social transitions. It covers Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist practices in Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe. Rich in ethnographic and historical detail and theoretically ambitious, Resounding Transcendence is essential to the study of music and religion.
Resounding Transcendence is a pathbreaking set of ethnographic and historical essays by leading scholars exploring the ways sacred music effects cultural, political, and religious transitions in the contemporary world. With chapters covering Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist practices in East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe, the volume establishes the theoretical and methodological foundations for music scholarship to engage in current debates about modern religion and secular epistemologies. It also transforms those debates through sophisticated, nuanced treatments of sound and music - ubiquitous elements of ritual and religion often glossed over in other disciplines. Resounding Transcendence confronts the relationship of sound, divinity, and religious practice in diverse post-secular contexts. By examining the immanence of transcendence in specific social and historical contexts and rethinking the reified nature of "religion" and "world religions," these authors examine the dynamics of difference and transition within and between sacred musical practices. The work in this volume transitions between traditional spaces of sacred musical practice and emerging public spaces for popular religious performance; between the transformative experience of ritual and the sacred musical affordances of media technologies; between the charisma of individual performers and the power of the marketplace; and between the making of authenticity and hybridity in religious repertoires and practices. Broad in scope, rich in ethnographic and historical detail, and theoretically ambitious, Resounding Transcendence is an essential contribution to the study of music and religion.
Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Built in 1971 for "people of all faiths or none," the chapel houses 14 monumental paintings by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, who had committed suicide only one year earlier. Upon its opening, visitors' responses to the chapel ranged from spiritual succor to abject tragedy--the latter being closest to Rothko's intentions. However the chapel's founders--art collectors and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil--opened the space to provide an ecumenically and spiritually affirming environment that spoke to their avant-garde approach to Catholicism. A year after the chapel opened, Morton Feldman's musical work Rothko Chapel proved essential to correcting the unintentionally grave atmosphere of the de Menil's chapel, translating Rothko's existential dread into sacred ecumenism for visitors. Author Ryan Dohoney reconstructs the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the premier of Feldman's music for the space, and documents the ways collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of art and its potential translation into religious feeling. Rather than frame the debate as a conflict of art versus religion, Dohoney argues that the popular claim of modernism's autonomy from religion has been overstated and that the two have been continually intertwined in an agonistic tension that animates many 20th-century artistic collaborations.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.
Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue—a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine sounds the statue might make—The Sculpted Ear rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on aurality emerging within the field of sound studies. Ryan McCormack argues that the sounding statue is best thought of not as an aesthetic object but as an event heard by people and subsequently conceptualized into being through acts of writing and performance. Constructing a history in which hearing plays an integral role in ideas about anthropocentric statuary, McCormack begins with the ancient sculpture of Laocoön before moving to a discussion of the early modern automaton known as Tipu’s Tiger and the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Finally, he examines statues of people from the present and the past, including the singer Josephine Baker, the violinist Aleksandar Nikolov, and the actor Bob Newhart—with each case touching on some of the issues that have historically plagued the aesthetic viability of the sounding statue. McCormack convincingly demonstrates how sounding statues have served as important precursors and continuing contributors to modern ideas about the ontology of sound, technologies of sound reproduction, and performance practices blurring traditional divides between music, sculpture, and the other arts. A compelling narrative that illuminates the stories of individual sculptural objects and the audiences that hear them, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the connections between aurality and statues in the Western world, in particular scholars and students of sound studies and sensory history.
Local multipart music practices are based on the intentionally distinct and coordinated participation of music makers in the performing act. Following the rules of interaction while promoting at the same time their personal goals, the protagonists share their own treasure trove of experiences and cultural affiliations and shape sounds and values. Such complex and dynamic processes are central to the investigations of instrumentation and instrumentalization of sound.
What does it mean for music to be considered local in contemporary Christian communities, and who shapes this meaning? Through what musical processes have religious beliefs and practices once ‘foreign’ become ‘indigenous’? How does using indigenous musical practices aid in the growth of local Christian religious practices and beliefs? How are musical constructions of the local intertwined with regional, national or transnational religious influences and cosmopolitanisms? Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide explores the ways that congregational music-making is integral to how communities around the world understand what it means to be ‘local’ and ‘Christian’. Showing how locality is produced, negotiated, and performed through music-making, this book draws on case studies from every continent that integrate insights from anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural geography, mission studies, and practical theology. Four sections explore a central aspect of the production of locality through congregational music-making, addressing the role of historical trends, cultural and political power, diverging values, and translocal influences in defining what it means to be ‘local’ and ‘Christian’. This book contends that examining musical processes of localization can lead scholars to new understandings of the meaning and power of Christian belief and practice.
Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland is a music history of Solidarity, the social movement opposing state socialism in 1980s Poland. The story unfolds along crucial sites of political action under state socialism: underground radio networks, the sanctuaries of the Polish Roman Catholic Church, labor strikes and student demonstrations, and commemorative performances. Through innovative close listenings of archival recordings, author Andrea F. Bohlman uncovers creative sonic practices in bootleg cassettes, televised state propaganda, and the unofficial, uncensored print culture of the opposition. She argues that sound both unified and splintered the Polish opposition, keeping the contingent formations of political dissent in dynamic tension. By revealing the diverse repertories-singer-songwriter verses, religious hymns, large-scale symphonies, experimental music, and popular song-that played a role across the decade, she challenges paradigmatic visions of a late twentieth-century global protest culture that place song and communitas at the helm of social and political change. Musical Solidarities brings together perspectives from historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and sound studies to demonstrate the value of sound for thinking politics. Unfurling the rich soundscapes of political action at demonstrations, church services, meetings, and in detention, it offers a nuanced portrait of this pivotal decade of European and global history.
Philip V. Bohlman's impact on the scope and meaning of ethnomusicology is difficult to overstate. His influence is manifest not only in his numerous publications, his service to the discipline, and his presence at institutions and gatherings across the globe, but also in the work of his students. This volume, featuring essays written by his students and peers, honors his enormous contributions to the discipline by focusing on three analytic lenses through which Bohlman's work has excavated the complexities of encounter - ethics, memory, and performance. The essays engaging ethics treat topics including scholarship as activism, the power/politics of knowledge, and the ethics of musical practice and performance. Memory is explored through essays exploring issues related to modernity, commemoration, the nation, and historiography. The essays concerned with performance interrogate historical, symbolic, and experiential aspects of musical performance and wrestle with the enduring questions of belonging that often accompany such performances. Throughout, it is clear that each contribution draws inspiration and methodological strength from the authors' formative encounters with Bohlman's body of work. Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jaime Jones is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University College Dublin. Timothy Rommen is Professor of Music and Africana Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Philip V. Bohlman's impact on the scope and meaning of ethnomusicology is profound. This volume, featuring essays written by his students and peers, honors his enormous contributions to the discipline by focusing on the complexities of encounter. Part I: Ethics addresses scholarship as activism, the power/politics of knowledge, and the ethics of musical practice and performance. Part II: Memory examines commemoration, the nation, and historiography. Part III: Performance interrogates historical, symbolic, and experiential aspects of musical performance, wrestling with enduring questions of belonging. Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jaime Jones is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University College Dublin. Timothy Rommen is Professor of Music and Africana Studies at University of Pennsylvania.
When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of "other" worlds that may intersect with the so-called "material" or "physical" worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the "unknown"--be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an "other"--shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.