Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 12
“Congregational singing in the context of Christian worship has always been and continues to be today, inflected by practices of gender.
The particular shape of each of these inflections mirrors broader cultural understandings of gender in particular historical and cultural contexts.”
Congregational singing and practices of gender in Christian worship: exploring intersections
By Teresa Berger
Abstract
This chapter explores key intersections between musical practices, gender differences, and liturgical life in the Christian tradition. Drawing on insights from contemporary gender theory, Berger looks at two different historical moments in this tradition, to highlight how Christian worship intertwined music, gender, and liturgy in multiple and changing ways. The first example comes from the early Christian centuries and the glimpses offered in the sources show how gender differences mattered in the disciplining of bodies and voices in liturgical space. The second example comes from the gendered soundscapes of medieval monastic communities, both in its (dominantly male) theorizing and in its practices, which offered space for women in particular to exercise liturgical and musical leadership.
How exactly gender differences shaped—and continue to shape—practices of worship and congregational singing has to be mapped along a number of liturgical givens, prominently among them varieties of gendered embodiment and the arrangement of musical bodies in ecclesial space. Thus, for example, the fact that binary gender functioned as a basic pattern of liturgical ordering in much of Christian history shaped the soundscape of worship for centuries. At the same time, the history of singing in Christian worship cannot be mapped solely through the gender binary of masculine–feminine, since there were also monastic same-gender communities, eunuch/castrati singers, boy sopranos, and intersex human beings at worship, all of which complicates simplistic narratives. This chapter shows that practices of Christian worship and congregational singing have always been inflected by gender, and that how they have been inflected by gender was—and continues to be—shaped by broader cultural understandings and performances of gender.