In the practice of liturgical music, formal and informal musical canons are essential to the formation and perpetuation of religious identity. With case studies from congregations, concert halls, and popular recording artists, this session examines the regulative role that musical canons often play in religious communities with particular attention to the ways that liturgical authority is often co-constitutive of racial and colonial authority.
This paper describes the ways one digital humanities project provides critical intervention into the perpetuation of the musical canon of “global song.” Many white North American and European Christians sing global song to identify with Christians from different countries and cultures. Marissa Moore (2018) and Lim Swee Hong (2019) note, however, that a small number of self-appointed global song curators and publishers exert a disproportionate influence in determining what is included in the repertoire. “Global song” thus often reinforces essentialist stereotypes, creating a “Christian Other” that upholds, rather than challenges, the power imbalances of “well-meaning whiteness” (Moore 2021). This paper addresses this issue by chronicling the creation of Nigerian Christian Songs, an interactive, multimedia DH website created by music doctoral students at Baptist universities in Nigeria and the USA. This project provides a model for international research collaboration and highlights the transformative potential of DH to aid in decolonization efforts.
Davóne Tines is the most innovative musicians in the area of classical music. Yet it is his innovative and subversive curation of Mass, first performed at Ravinia in August 2021, that has caught the attention of journalists, writers, musicians, and theologians. This paper addresses the polyvalent subversions that Tines's Mass offers, such as the dislocation of Mass from its traditional ecclesial setting to the concert hall; the curation of songs that emphasize Black and women composers and the implications for "decolonizing" the canon; the theological relation between aesthetic-political performance and spirituality; and the creation of a "third space" that both resists power/violence and inspires artistic and theological creativity. The paper aims to demonstrate the pedagogical significance of music in relation to constructive theology.
Black musical influences have long been acknowledged as formative in the creation of white-dominated musical genres such as country and rock n’ roll. Recent scholarship places African American music as a foundational influence with an enduring presence, uncovering the banjo as an African American instrument and foregrounding the influence of figures such as Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, who taught Hank Williams how to play guitar. Yet the notion that country music is “the white man’s blues” is stubbornly persistent. This paper reviews recent developments in scholarship and music in light of the notion of “the blues” in the work of religious scholars like Cornel West and Eddie Glaude. American country music is ethically bound to relinquish its nostalgia for an imagined white bucolic past—including poets like Williams, the “Hillbilly Shakespeare”—and acknowledge itself as a quintessentially creole art form.