Theological Music

Theological Music PDF Author: Jon M. Spencer
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 9780313279539
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Theomusicology is musicology as a theologically informed discipline. Borrowing thought and method from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, it has as its subject the myriad cultural worlds of ethical, religious, and mythological belief. Theomusicological research into cultural/intercultural reflections on the ethical, the religious, and the mythological involves the study of music in the domain or communities of the sacred, the secular, and the profane. By examining the depths of sacrality, secularity, and profanity in the music of civilization's many cultures, the theomusicologist can increasingly discern how particular peoples perceive the universal mysteries that circumscribe their mortal existence, and how the ethics, theologies, and mythologies to which they subscribe shape their worlds. To accomplish his goal, Spencer divides his book into two parts. Part One, The Domain of Theomusicology, functions as a methodological exposition to Part Two. It defines the meaning of and suggested method for theomusicology and delineates the theomusicologist's best and broadest possible perspective on the world. Part Two, The Discourses of Theomusicology, illustrates how theomusicology can, and at its best does, involve dialogue with different disciplines as well as a gamut of historical epochs and movements. Each chapter is divided into sections based on the particular text theomusicology has read and interacted with. Spencer's work establishes theomusicology as a scholarly discipline and a valid research approach to studying world religious, mythological, and ethical beliefs via music. It is essential reading for historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars of sacred music.

Theological Music

Theological Music PDF Author: Jon M. Spencer
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 9780313279539
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theomusicology is musicology as a theologically informed discipline. Borrowing thought and method from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, it has as its subject the myriad cultural worlds of ethical, religious, and mythological belief. Theomusicological research into cultural/intercultural reflections on the ethical, the religious, and the mythological involves the study of music in the domain or communities of the sacred, the secular, and the profane. By examining the depths of sacrality, secularity, and profanity in the music of civilization's many cultures, the theomusicologist can increasingly discern how particular peoples perceive the universal mysteries that circumscribe their mortal existence, and how the ethics, theologies, and mythologies to which they subscribe shape their worlds. To accomplish his goal, Spencer divides his book into two parts. Part One, The Domain of Theomusicology, functions as a methodological exposition to Part Two. It defines the meaning of and suggested method for theomusicology and delineates the theomusicologist's best and broadest possible perspective on the world. Part Two, The Discourses of Theomusicology, illustrates how theomusicology can, and at its best does, involve dialogue with different disciplines as well as a gamut of historical epochs and movements. Each chapter is divided into sections based on the particular text theomusicology has read and interacted with. Spencer's work establishes theomusicology as a scholarly discipline and a valid research approach to studying world religious, mythological, and ethical beliefs via music. It is essential reading for historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars of sacred music.

The Black Church

The Black Church PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984880330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

Lift Every Voice and Swing

Lift Every Voice and Swing PDF Author: Vaughn A. Booker
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479890804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century Beginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.

Protest & Praise

Protest & Praise PDF Author: Jon Michael Spencer
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451411645
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Here is a skillful tracing of two tracks in the evolution of musical genres that have evolved from black religion. Songs of protest developed from the spiritual through social-gospel hymnody to culminate in songs of the civil-rights movement and the blues. Born in rebellion, they envision the Kingdom of God.Songs of praise, by contrast, express adoration. Beginning with the "ring-shout," Spencer follows the history of intoned declamation through the tongue song, Holiness-Pentecostal music, and the chanted sermon of the black preacher. Spencer's approach, termed theomusicology, unlocks the wealth of African-American sacred music with a theological key. The result is a fascinating account of a people's struggle with God in history.

Readings in African American Church Music and Worship

Readings in African American Church Music and Worship PDF Author: James Abbington
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781579997670
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Readings in African American Church Music and Worship features important articles and essays on music and worship written by some of the most influential voices of the past century, including W. E. B. DuBois, Wendell P. Whalum, V. Michael McKay, Wyatt Tee Walker, J. Wendell Mapson Jr., and others.

Segregating Sound

Segregating Sound PDF Author: Karl Hagstrom Miller
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392704
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. In a cultural history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and the market.

Black Diamond Queens

Black Diamond Queens PDF Author: Maureen Mahon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012773
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

Singing in My Soul

Singing in My Soul PDF Author: Jerma A. Jackson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863610
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Black gospel music grew from obscure nineteenth-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after World War II. Jerma A. Jackson traces the music's unique history, profiling the careers of several singers--particularly Sister Rosetta Tharpe--and demonstrating the important role women played in popularizing gospel. Female gospel singers initially developed their musical abilities in churches where gospel prevailed as a mode of worship. Few, however, stayed exclusively in the religious realm. As recordings and sheet music pushed gospel into the commercial arena, gospel began to develop a life beyond the church, spreading first among a broad spectrum of African Americans and then to white middle-class audiences. Retail outlets, recording companies, and booking agencies turned gospel into big business, and local church singers emerged as national and international celebrities. Amid these changes, the music acquired increasing significance as a source of black identity. These successes, however, generated fierce controversy. As gospel gained public visibility and broad commercial appeal, debates broke out over the meaning of the music and its message, raising questions about the virtues of commercialism and material values, the contours of racial identity, and the nature of the sacred. Jackson engages these debates to explore how race, faith, and identity became central questions in twentieth-century African American life.

Music in the Life of the African Church

Music in the Life of the African Church PDF Author: Roberta Rose King
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1602580227
Category : Church music
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Furthermore, they extract useful lessons for fostering faith communities around the globe.

African American Music

African American Music PDF Author: Mellonee V. Burnim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317934423
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.