Sound and the Sacred
Northeastern University
Semesters taught: Spring 2024, Spring 2021
Course description
Music and sounds play important roles in religious contexts: among other things, they connect worshippers to spiritual realms, center practitioners within continuous traditions, distinguish between sacred and secular spaces (and places), enable communal cohesion, facilitate transcendent experiences, imbue everyday activities with religious intent, orient believers to ritual practices, and contribute to religious identities, both at the individual and the collective (or congregational) levels. Several faith traditions incorporate musical sounds liturgically, as functional (and ritualized) components of religious practice. Some religions enforce dogmatic rules that prescribe the appropriate (and proscribe the inappropriate) use, performance, and consumption of music. Within other faiths, the role of music is flexible and responsive, at times helping situate religious identities vis-à-vis broader socio-cultural contexts. In many religions, music and sounds are so closely intertwined with the practice of faith that they are essentially indivisible: religion relies on musical sounds for its efficacy; belief itself is musical or sonic.
In what ways are religious beliefs, ethics, meaning, and practices embodied within music and musicking, sound and sounding? What do music and sounds contribute to faith identities, including those embedded within secular spaces? How might music and sounds be implicated within religion’s capacity to include as well as its capacity to exclude and divide? What happens to religious musics when they are divorced from sacred contexts? In this course, our study of music, sounds, and religion benefits from intense attentional investment. Instead of surveying as many religions as possible, long-form studies provide intricately detailed perspectives. Although we sacrifice any attempt at comprehensiveness, by focusing on select cases over multiple weeks we benefit from extended time spent with individual works and the opportunity to interrogate them (and their authors), finding deeper layers of meaning through cumulative engagement and iterative processes of discussion. As a result, throughout the semester we learn and practice skills of comprehending and interpreting lengthy works of scholarship.