Studying Congregational Music

Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives

Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, Monique M. Ingalls, Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, Monique M. Ingalls

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429959653
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Teologia e religione
• Thema: Chiesa cristiana

Studying the role of music within religious congregations has become an increasingly complex exercise. The significant variations in musical style and content between different congregations require an interdisciplinary methodology that enables an accurate analysis, while also allowing for nuance in interpretation. This book is the first to help scholars think through the complexities of interdisciplinary research on congregational music-making by critically examining the theories and methods used by leading scholars in the field.

An international and interdisciplinary panel of contributors introduces readers to a variety of research methodologies within the emerging field of congregational music studies. Utilizing insights from fields such as communications studies, ethnomusicology, history, liturgical studies, popular music studies, religious studies, and theology, it examines and models methodologies and theoretical perspectives that are grounded in each of these disciplines. In addition, this volume presents several "key issues" to ground these interpretive frameworks in the context of congregational music studies. These include topics like diaspora, ethics, gender, and migration.

This book is a new milestone in the study of music amongst congregations, detailing the very latest in best academic practice. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, music, and theology, as well as anyone engaging in ethnomusicological studies more generally.

Part I
Methodological Perspectives

1 In case you don’t have a case

Reflections on methods for studying congregational song in liturgical history

Lester Ruth

Introduction

As a liturgical historian, I think it is best to say that my fellow liturgical historians and I have an eye for music, but not necessarily an ear for music. By disposition, training, normally employed methods, and the primary materials usually available to us, liturgical historians tend to access music by what we can see—most normally the lyrics—rather than by what we can hear. Of course, this approach has significant limitations in studying congregational worship song, as any scholar from a variety of musicological disciplines would tell you. I readily admit that music is meant to be heard and performed, not just read or looked at.

Nevertheless, at the risk of using my own work on American evangelicals as a positive example (Ruth 2000, 2013; Park, Ruth, and Rethmeier 2017), I want to suggest that liturgical historians and other scholars who employ their methods make a useful contribution when they investigate the lyrics of congregational songs. Specifically, what lyrical analysis contributes is a sense of what people value and love about the God they are worshiping. After reviewing the reasons why liturgical historians usually do not consider the auditory aspects of congregational song and examining a few examples of the work of liturgical historians in analyzing lyrics (mine included), I will focus on the poetic quality of song lyrics—how lyrics express theology as poetry rather than prose—as the rationale for this method. Appreciating congregational song lyrics as poetry enables us to use them as windows into a worshiping people’s piety regarding what they love and adore about God. This quality is especially useful for studying Christians who otherwise reject written texts—other than the Bible—in worship.

Worship is musical?

Before looking at the explanations for why it is reasonable to investigate lyrics, we should first note a critical factor as to why most liturgical historians can make only a limited contribution to the study of Christian congregational music: the only term among those three (Christian, congregational, and music) these historians regularly engage is the term “Christian.” Liturgical historians tend not to study congregations—with some notable exceptions such as the Church at Worship Series—and they necessarily do not have to deal with music as a topic, especially when it comes to the sound of the music.

Congregations tend not to be the focus because these historians are not confident about their ability to gather enough primary sources for any one time, place, and people to describe in detail the worship of historic congregations. To state it bluntly, liturgical historians tend not to do case studies of specific worshiping assemblies, particularly from early church history, which is the period that so enamors this guild. Instead, liturgists like to describe changes over time. If you give cameras to liturgical historians, they are more likely to produce movies that have a sense of chronological development rather than photo albums with a limited time frame.

But, considering the critical and nearly pervasive role music has played in Christian worship across traditions, how is it possible for liturgical historians to ignore or downplay music? The reasons are multiple: a tendency to focus on rites as the central objects of investigation, especially the Eucharist, a fascination with liturgical texts, the sheer difficulty in replicating sound from past centuries, and a dearth of primary sources that document this dimension for some histories. (See my discussion of early Methodism in the following pages.) Among the other possible reasons liturgical historians overlook music, the simplest may be that many liturgical historians have little or no formal musical training. The result can be a wariness to study an area assumed “to require special knowledge and skills” as Mark Porter has recently stated (2014, 155). Beyond this lack of training, a more compelling, comprehensive reason for ignoring music comes from the larger background movement that stands behind the development of this field, namely the Liturgical Movement. Driven by historical studies and aimed toward the renewal of congregational worship, this movement contributed much to the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, to the recent, official reforms of worship in mainline Protestant denominations, and to the development of many of the graduate programs in liturgical studies.¹ Its tenets tend to dominate the perspectives of many members of academic liturgical guilds. What the Liturgical Movement has emphasized will be what most liturgical historians likewise emphasize: sacraments, ordo (or order of worship), liturgical texts, rhythms of time, participation, the meaning and understandability of acts/texts/symbols, and the connection between worship and justice.

And the historical period that the Liturgical Movement prioritized—the early church—helped reinforce an ability to overlook music. As others have noted, documenting the music of the early church can be especially problematic because the sources are not abundant and what they tell us is limited, especially with respect to musical practices (McKinnon 1987, 108). Consequently, it is quite possible to be a leader in the field of liturgical history and disregard the musical dimensions of worship. Consider the treatment of antiphonal psalmody in the Byzantine rite by Robert Taft, a renowned scholar of that rite (2001, 187–202, esp. 196). In an essay on his research method, Taft attempts to re-create the original shape and sequence of antiphonal psalmody as it originally existed in the Byzantine rite. One can read his description of how to reach this goal and hear little about musicality; how the psalmody sounded as music is irrelevant to his concerns. Paul Bradshaw, another leader in the field of worship in the first centuries of church history, follows a similar path in his examination of psalmody and hymnody in daily prayer services in the early church (Bradshaw 1982).²

An eye for music: the importance of song texts for liturgical historians

Not all liturgical historians, however, have ignored music. Perhaps the most striking thing about many who linger with the musical aspect is the emphasis upon the musical text, that is, the song lyrics. These lyrics captivate our eyes. This approach has limits, but I suggest, too, that it has something to offer as part of a complex of methods for understanding the dynamics of historical and contemporary congregational music. There is a straightforward reason why liturgical historians often go this route of focusing on the lyrics: it is often the nature of the available primary material. Sometimes the song text is all the historian has to work with.

Liturgical historian Karen Westerfield Tucker of Boston University is one example of a scholar who regularly employs close attention to various collections of worship song texts as part of her larger body of work. Although the particular bodies of songs differ as do the specific questions she raises, there are common elements in her method. As she develops bodies of songs that have internal cohesion, she pays special attention not only to the words of individual songs but also to the manner of their presentation and labeling. She applies these emphases when considering a single theological topic across a range of hymn texts in comparable collections of songs, for example, a study of Christology in recent Protestant hymnals (Tucker 1996, 2008, 327–41).³ Westerfield Tucker has also pursued theological analysis of a single collection from one composer. An example of the latter is her study of Charles Wesley’s hymns on the earthquakes that struck London in 1750 (Tucker 2004).

My own work is both similar and dissimilar to that of Westerfield Tucker. Like her, I have focused on determining reasonable bodies of song texts and brought explicit theological questions and categories to them, which is commonplace among liturgical historians since this guild regularly assumes the Church’s worship to be a kind of primary theology—actual divine–human encounter—and not just a secondary, distanced reflection upon God and the things of God.⁴ Unlike Westerfield Tucker, however, I have tended to think they help me understand the piety (what people love and enjoy about God) rather than the theology (what people might think about God) of a people.⁵

I stumbled into the practice of studying song lyrics as I began to gather primary sources for my dissertation to document the worship of early American Methodists in its first half century, that is, the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century. My goal was to push the understanding of this worship beyond the caricatures then rampant in the secondary literature, a failure based on the use of limited primary materials. Specifically, I was looking to provide a fuller, more accurate portrayal by focusing on a single, critical setting for worship: the Quarterly Meeting. I hoped to expand in detail the grid developed by groundbreaking liturgical historian, James White, as the best way to document Protestant worship, namely to focus on piety, time, place, prayer, preaching, and music as well as on sacraments (White 1989). (Because of the guild’s Roman Catholic roots, the tendency of liturgical historians has been to focus on the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.) To that end I collected every shred of primary material (mostly unpublished) from the first fifty years of American Methodism that spoke of its worship, especially at Quarterly Meetings.

To be quite frank, I did not know the songs I found and used in my research even existed prior to doing my archival searching. By the end of my searching, however, I had accumulated multiple handwritten compilations of hymns⁶ as well as numerous hymns sprinkled throughout various unpublished journals and diaries.⁷ In addition, I gathered several printed compilations, all organized and edited by American Methodists in the movement’s first fifty years.⁸ The sources rarely gave authorship nor was there frequent indication of the tune. I had the text of their music, but not the sound. My eye was engaged, but not my ear. But I had enough texts to get a sense of what American Methodists thought was important enough concerning God that they wanted to sing about it. Consequently, ample use of hymn texts became a central feature in my two books on early American Methodism (Ruth 2000, 2005). In both books I used the texts at judicious places and provided collections on critical topics, gathered through my archival research, in order to break a strict narration-based description and give readers a chance to hear the early Methodists’ own voices.

The song texts also provided the closest approximation to providing the words for the early Methodists’ worship practices, which were largely extemporaneous. Without the song texts, it would have been much more difficult to have known the likely content of their worship. Consider the example of the exhorters who spoke after the sermon. (Being an exhorter was a licensed office for a kind of liturgical speaking in early Methodism.) A sermon was often followed by an exhortation that gave to the congregation a rigorous, pointed application of the sermon and its inherent appeal (Ruth 2000, 57–67; Wigger 1998, 29–31). Exhortations were extemporaneous and not written. Descriptions of exhorting, however, noted that they often started with a hymn. And so in my narrative I used a hymn that matched how many exhorters described what they emphasized while exhorting: “Stop, poor sinner, stop and think/Before you farther go/Will you sport upon the brink/Of everlasting woe?”⁹ This hymn provided a reasonable example of likely worship content as well as enabling the reader to feel the impact of that content.

Since that first foray into Methodism, I have continued to assess bodies of worship songs as part of a way to write the history of Christian worship. Some of that work continues the general approach first used with the Methodists. One example of a general continuation is the inclusion of the hymnody from Charles Price Jones, the founding pastor and dynamic music composer of Christ Temple in Jackson, Mississippi, the mother church of a Black Holiness denomination, the Church of Christ (Holiness) USA, at the beginning of the twentieth century (Ruth 2013). Jones’s lyrics open the window to what he valued about God and how he sought to negotiate the difficulties of living faithfully in an era of Jim Crow racism. Thus, my use of the hymnody written by Jones is generally comparable to the use I followed for the Methodists in showing Jones’s piety and, seemingly, that of his congregation. Similarly, song texts give a sense of the piety of Baptists in northwest Argentina (Ruth and Mathis 2017).

My other work with worship song has tended either to take the focus on individual congregations to the next level by assessing active core repertoires as part of writing history or in a completely different direction by focusing on songs as a distinct corpus without any reference to specific congregations at all.

With respect to individual congregations and core musical repertoires, my first work along that line was part of the Living Worship DVD, an open-ended teaching resource in which students were enabled to envision themselves as a worship-related staff person in a specific congregation (Johnson, Caccamo, and Ruth 2010). To that end the research team found a congregation willing to be documented on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. Part of that historical documentation noted the evolving core repertoire of songs for this church. More recently I have been part of a team writing the history of worship in John Wimber’s Anaheim Vineyard congregation in its first few...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: interdisciplinarity and epistemic diversity in congregational music studies
• Part I Methodological Perspectives
• Part II Key Issues
• Index