Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 7
“The relationship between the phenomenology of worship and the circulation of worship music in capitalist contexts intersections can be productive.
But they can also produce tensions when the needs and expectations of individual worshipers and congregations collide with those of for-profit corporations and capitalist infrastructures.”
Political Economy and Capital in Congregational Music Studies: Commodities, Worshipers, and Worship
By Andrew Mall
Abstract
Popular music scholars are, by necessity, interested in the economic and marketplace conditions that shape the production, distribution, mediation, and consumption of music. Whether we are concerned with a Marxian, Weberian, or Bourdieuian construct (among others), capital controls access to goods, services, people, institutions, and experiences. That the political economy of music industries informs research projects in popular music, both implicitly and explicitly, is almost taken for granted: one cannot analyze or interpret commercial music, after all, without accounting for commerce itself. The same has not been true, however, in congregational music scholarship, even though commercial music industries have invested heavily in the production, distribution, and mediation of praise and worship music. Studying worship music repertoires introduces additional complexities for participants and observers alike: How does the commodity status of worship music inflect the phenomenological dimensions of congregational singing? What roles do commercial industries and infrastructures play in the spiritual lives of musicians and congregants? And how might ethnographers of congregational music productively engage with theories of political economy in their work?
Drawing from popular music scholarship, Mall illustrates how attention to modes of production can provide valuable insight into congregational music—not only its circulation in globalized marketplace economies but also its usage in local churches and from the stages of Christian festivals. In this chapter, Mall uses theories of capital in the context of congregational music studies to problematize one’s ability to participate in a variety of worship contexts. Based on extensive fieldwork at evangelical churches and festivals in the United States as a religious outsider, Mall frames access and rapport in ethnographic research methodologies as negotiations of capital both literal and metaphorical.