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.
Readings
This is a monograph-based seminar: we read entire books, cover to cover, and then dedicate an entire class session to Q&A with each author. Here are the books I’ve assigned for this course, listed in alphabetical order by author:
Sarah Eyerly, Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania (Indiana University Press, 2020; taught Spring 2021) [also see the book’s companion site]
Cesar Favila, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain (Oxford University Press, 2023; taught Spring 2024)
Michael Figueroa, City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022; taught Spring 2024)
Richard Jankowsky, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (The University of Chicago Press, 2021; taught Spring 2024)
Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (Oxford University Press, 2020; taught Spring 2021)
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York University Press, 2016; taught Spring 2024)
Leah Payne, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024; taught Spring 2024)
Jeffrey Summit, Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2016; taught Spring 2021)
Jim Sykes, The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka (Oxford University Press, 2018; taught Spring 2021)