Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 5
“Studying Christian musical practices and the broader soundscapes that encompass them is important to understanding concepts of social and religious identity.
For researchers interested in historic sound-ways, sound reconstructions can usefully simulate an informed and academically rigorous sense of past acoustic environments.”
Re-sounding the History of Christian Congregational Music
By Sarah Eyerly
Abstract
This chapter discusses the Moravian Soundscapes digital project, and the process of reconstructing the intangible cultural heritage of Moravian mission communities in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The Moravian practice of Christianity was centered on the belief that sound, whether human or non-human, spanned the divide between humans and the natural environment, structured and clarified human-to-human relationships, and inhabited the spiritual space between human and divine. The singing of hymns and broader perceptions of sound were central not only to the Moravians’ missionary philosophies, but also to daily Christian practice and life-ways in mission communities. To capture these sounded aspects of Moravian Christianity, the Moravian Soundscapes project encompasses a wide variety of methodologies (sound studies and audible history, composition, historical performance, and mapping and spatial humanities), as well as musical and technological approaches (soundscape compositions, field recordings, and historically-informed recordings of spoken texts and hymns in Delaware, Mohican, English, and German). These elements are brought together through interactive sound maps containing the GPS coordinates for locations important to the history of the Moravian missions in Pennsylvania. For scholars interested in creatively re-sounding historic traditions of Christian congregational music, this chapter presents a demonstration of sound mapping and provides a potential toolkit for those who wish to engage in sound reconstruction and geo-humanities research.