Author Meets Critics: Andrew Mall’s God rock, Inc.
AAR (2023) “author meets critics” panel on God Rock, Inc. Panelists will consider how Christian music as a niche business shapes religious communities in the United States (and beyond), as well as how its many genres and subgenres - pop, rock, metal, rap, hip hop, praise and worship, etc. - reflect and shape evangelical Christian politics, practice, and theology.
Ethnographic Research and the Study of Christian Music
SCSM conference roundtable panelist (2022). The recent turn to ethnography in various disciplines has prompted renewed reflection on the basis of knowledge for scholars of religious music. Join us for a rousing conversation on the role of ethnomusicology and both its contributions and limitations in the study of religious musicking.
Recent Books on Christian Music
Popular Music Books in Process roundtable presentation (2021). Nathan Myrick, Marcell Silva Steuernagel, and myself discussed our recent books in conversation with each other as part of the PMBiP series of author talks, co-sponsored by IASPM-US, JPMS, and the Popcon.
“Beer & Hymns” and Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs
Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2021). As a series of loosely-organized events, “Beer & Hymns” started at the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2006 and migrated to the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina in 2012. Local Beer & Hymns gatherings meet at bars, breweries, clubs, and pubs across the U.K., the U.S., and around the world. In this article, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer & Hymns as a participatory space that promotes community, contextualized against white U.S. evangelicalism’s contested relationship with the secular.
Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 7
Studying Congregational Music, Routledge (2021). Chapter 7, “Political Economy and Capital in Congregational Music Studies: Commodities, Worshipers, and Worship,” by Andrew Mall.
Studying Congregational Music: Introduction
Studying Congregational Music, Routledge (2021). Introduction, “Interdisciplinarity and Epistemic Diversity in Congregational Music Studies,” by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls.
“Beer & Hymns” and Congregational Song: Participatory Sing-alongs as Community
Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2019). Beer and Hymns is exactly what it sounds like: we raise our red Solo cups and lift our voices together to sing hymns, spirituals, praise songs, and folk songs together. Song choices include both secular and sacred selections, and the nightly gatherings attract participants from a variety of theological backgrounds, many of whom have an ambivalent or troubled relationship with Protestant Christianity (including mainline and non-denominational evangelicalism). Our voices entwine, and often our arms do, too. And by the end of the night, as our singing reverberates in the night, we emerge unified by our singing, even if only for one night.
“Beer & Hymns” and Redemption: Reimagining and Reclaiming Religious Identity through Participatory Sing-alongs
Sound & Secularity symposium presentation (2019). Given the ambivalent (and sometimes antagonistic) relationship between houses of worship and houses of drink in the United States, the mere act of singing hymns in bars can be interpreted as resisting prescriptive religious norms. But in recontextualizing these songs in Wild Goose’s pub tent, beers in hand, participants—including current and former churchgoers—reimagine their theologies and reclaim their religious identities. In this paper, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer and Hymns as a participatory space that enables resilience and redemption.
Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music
American Music (2018). Scholars and scholar-practitioners from a wide variety of disciplinary and faith backgrounds have enriched our understandings of the ways in which music functions in worship contexts around the world. Yet, the political economy of worship music remains underexamined and undertheorized. In this article, I develop the theory of ‘worship capital’ as a corrective.
Sound as Religion
AAR conference roundtable panelist (2017). While interdisciplinary interest in the phenomenon of sound has been growing apace, understanding the diverse ways in which sound is implicated in religious practice and spiritual experience remains under-researched in the field of religious studies. This lacuna can be attributed in part to the dominance of textual, visual, and liturgical paradigms in the field, but also the challenges of conducting research on sound (including music), noise, and silence. At this juncture, we feel the need to team up and share resources in order to promote more research and theoretical reflection on the auditory and acoustic dimensions of religion.
“This is a chance to come together”: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival
Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age, Ashgate (2015). Based on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012, including two summers volunteering as festival staff, this chapter examines the ways in which Cornerstone’s imagined community was constructed, manifested, perpetuated, and mourned. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian congregational music practices and contributes to scholarship in ethnomusicology and popular music studies that address explicitly peripheral musical activities.
Worship Capital, Evangelicalism, and the Political Economy of Congregational Music
SCSM conference presentation (2016). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu, analyses of music industries, and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, this paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music and considers barriers to integrating this framework into our scholarship and practice. This research emerges from several years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Anchor Fellowship, a non-denominational evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee, and advances the concept of “worship capital” to capture the various ways in which individuals and institutions invest in worship.
Studying Worship Capital: Cultural Insiderness, Religious Outsiderness, and Political Economy in Evangelical Worship
Yale ISM Fellows’ Lunch presentation (2015). The presence of capital in Christian worship is unmistakable, enabling individuals and institutions to participate in the production, distribution, mediation, and consumption of worship music. Performing artists, songwriters, and ministers operate in markets that shape the aesthetics of songs that congregations sing every Sunday morning. This worship economy, however, remains undertheorized in congregational music studies.
“We Can Be Renewed”: Resistance, Renewal, and Worship at the Anchor Fellowship
The Spirit of Praise, Penn State University Press (2015). Live music is integral to worship services, where aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock concerts often overlap. This chapter examines the ways in which the Anchor Fellowship’s theology, worship practices, and congregational music are co-constitutive. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian worship music practices and contributes to scholarship that addresses peripheral musical activities.
Capital, Class, and Congregational Matters: The Political Economy of Worship Music
Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2015). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1993), Jacques Attali (1985), and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, how might we consider the ways in which other forms of capital (cultural, intellectual, religious, social, etc.) are implicated in these markets? How do markets mediate between distinct congregations and globalized worship industries? This paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music, considering the roles of capital(s) in its production, distribution, mediation, and consumption.
Subculture as Liturgy: Resistance and Worship among Subcultural Christians
Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2013). Based on several years’ of ethnographic research, this paper examines the musical practices of two subcultural Christian communities in the U.S.: Nashville’s Anchor Fellowship and western Illinois’s Cornerstone Festival. Music and congregational song are very important to these liminal spaces, challenging old boundaries and defining new ones. Subculture itself becomes liturgical, and the political potential of corporate worship and popular music is often made explicit. In illustrating these communities, their sounds, and their ideologies, this paper both demonstrates the utility of subcultural theory to the study of congregational song and challenges Hebdige’s dialectic of incorporation.
“We Are Called Here to Worship Together”: Ethnographic Outsiderness and Insiderness in Religious and Popular Culture
SEM conference presentation (2012). In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research at the Anchor Fellowship, I address the challenges of fieldwork as a religious outsider and cultural insider. In constructing a rich description of an Anchor worship service based on my observations, those of church-goers, and formal interviews of Anchor pastors, this paper confronts the multivalence of experience and the interpretation thereof, demonstrating the importance of phenomenology to ethnography of religious and popular cultures.
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