Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 9
“Moments of discomfort highlight how congregations in the United States negotiate the nexus of repertoire, racialized identity, and voicing within their musical practices.
Because the voice is a primary site of music- and meaning-making for many congregations, I argue that congregational music scholars must grapple with the role of the voice in constructing and negotiating racialized identities.”
“We Just Don’t Have It”: Addressing Whiteness in Congregational Voicing”
By Marissa Glynias Moore
Abstract
While scholars of Black sacred music often attend to the implications of race on making meaning through musical practice, race is rarely discussed in white congregational musicking. In this chapter, Moore challenges the presumed race-neutrality of musical activities in predominantly white congregations, especially in communities whose repertoire represents many axes of cultural and racial difference. Rather than conceiving of these practices through the frequently used frameworks of cultural appropriation or dialogic performance, in narrowing my investigation to the act of congregational singing, Moore suggests that the congregational voice is a contested site for negotiating racial difference.
Congregational voicing is a participatory practice with a many-bodied source, whose produced sound and content vary depending on those gathered. Building on Nina Eidsheim’s work on race and timbre, Moore argues that white congregations identify differences in sonic, bodily, and idiomatic language as inherent to Black voicing, aspects that are deemed impossible to replicate with their own white voices and bodies. As she shows through a case study based in my ethnographic work, the white vocalization of Black sacred music therefore complicates the idealistic universal “body of Christ” that Christian congregational voicing is meant to promote, by revealing widely held assumptions regarding racial essentialism and musical performance. On the other hand, this attempt to voice “the other” while voicing themselves also can catalyze critical reflection about the complicity of white Christians in structural inequalities that perpetuate such assumptions. Ultimately, this chapter provides a new way to consider the intersections of race and power in congregational voicing.