Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 8
“This chapter takes up the commonplace distinction between congregation and choir in hopes of bringing renewed clarity to the question of how ‘congregation’ is defined in congregational music studies.
What is a congregation, vocally, and how does it relate to a choir? Are congregational voices collective (acting in common) or collected (gathered up individually), and what about choral voices?”
Congregation and Chorality: Fluidity and Distinction in the Voicing of Religious Community
By Jeffers Engelhardt
Abstract
This chapter examines an important intersection in voice studies and congregational music studies—namely, the complicated relationship of chorality and congregation. As technique, aesthetic, and a form of social and symbolic voicing, chorality, as Stephen Connor puts it, is “the sonorous actualizing of the otherwise abstract or merely attributive idea of a collectivity”; the “anticipatory assimilation” of individual voices into a univocal body. Chorality converges with ideals and theologies of congregational musicking in plainly powerful ways through the voicing of Christian collectivity in worship, public life, and spiritual communion. Stronger yet, chorality—the “sound” of a tradition, the “timbral labor” (Nina Sun Eidsheim) of a community, the “choreosonics” (Ashon Crawley) of worshipers—is the sonic ground where orthodoxy and orthopraxy converge; where the Christian choric voice is “right” or anointed. However, in the ways a congregation is not a chorus (sonically, ritually, historically, and socially), chorality voices divergent forms of Christian collectivity oriented toward amplifying religio-sonic norms and values that may not be voiced congregationally. Those norms and values articulate through choral sound (including repertoire, style, tuning, timbre, language, performance, and others) and extend to social and religious identities (such as the distinction and subsumption of the choral subject and the agency of musical and worship leaders) and theologies of the voice and body. To this end, Engelhardt attends closely to the sound of collective singing, the dynamics of congregation, and the work of chorality in two pairs of case studies that illustrate converging and diverging voicings of Christian collectivity. For congregational singing, Engelhardt returns to the Sunday-morning hymnody of my New England Methodist childhood and my historical research on the emergence of congregational singing in Estonian Orthodox Christianity. For chorality, he turns to a spectrogram analysis of Sardinian coro singing and the story of Jan Chamberlin, who resigned from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ahead of the Choir’s participation at the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. Together, these examples bring critical nuance to the ways we think about voicing Christian collectivity and the ways voice studies is beginning to think about congregational singing.