Studying Congregational Music: Introduction
“Interdisciplinary fields like congregational music studies enact amplification through epistemic diversity: we promote work from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives because congregations and their musics, however defined, are too complex not to do so.
Instead of being confounded by these confrontations, we celebrate them.”
Interdisciplinarity and Epistemic Diversity in Congregational Music Studies
By Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls
Abstract
Congregational music-making has long been one of the most potent and portable Christian religious practices, holding immense significance for Christian communities worldwide. Congregational music ranges across boundaries of region, nation, and ecclesial tradition, creating sonorous ways for its participants to create, maintain, and challenge individual and communal identities. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the advent of new media technologies, the mass migration of Christian populations domestically as well as internationally, and the avenues of distribution widened by global capitalism have rendered many Christian musical traditions eminently mobile. Now, the sounds and images of musicking bodies—whether transmitted via sound recordings, radio waves, or binary code—are taken up as embodied worship practices in new places. Congregational music-making is a rich and multifaceted social practice, and as such, scholars seeking to understand how participatory musicking forms Christian community and subjectivity must address an often bewildering array of questions: inquiries into historical transmission and traditioning, processes of mediation, multilayered social dynamics, and liturgical contexts, and analyses of lyrics, music, and movement each contribute insights to congregational music’s social and spiritual efficacy.
Against this interdisciplinary backdrop, Studying Congregational Music examines key theoretical perspectives and research methodologies within the emerging field of congregational music studies. We present congregational music studies as a coherent—if complex—area of study and seek to make its variety of available perspectives, methods, and limits more comprehensible to scholars and practitioners alike. Studying Congregational Music is not a prescriptive methodological handbook; rather, it is a guide to help readers think through the challenges of interdisciplinary research on congregational music-making by critically examining the theoretical lenses and methodological toolkits that leading scholars are using to interpret the phenomenon and its communities.