Exploring Christian Song

This essay collection celebrates the richness of Christian musical tradition across its two thousand year history and across the globe. Opening with a consideration of the fourth-century lamp-lighting hymn Phos hilaron and closing with reflections on contemporary efforts of Ghanaian composers to create Christian worship music in African idioms, the ten contributors engage with a broad ecumenical array of sacred music. Topics encompass Roman Catholic sacred music in medieval and Renaissance Europe, German Lutheran song in the eighteenth century, English hymnody in colonial America, Methodist hymnody adopted by Southern Baptists in the nineteenth century, and Genevan psalmody adapted to respond to the post-war tribulations of the Hungarian Reformed Church. The scope of the volume is further diversified by the inclusion of contemporary Christian topics that address the evangelical methods of a unique Orthodox Christian composer’s language, the shared aims and methods of African-American preaching and gospel music, and the affective didactic power of American evangelical “praise and worship” music. New material on several key composers, including Jacob Obrecht, J.S. Bach, George Philipp Telemann, C.P.E. Bach, Zoltan Kodály, and Arvo Pärt, appears within the book. Taken together, these essays embrace a stimulating variety of interdisciplinary analytical and methodological approaches, drawing on cultural, literary critical, theological, ritual, ethnographical, and media studies. The collection contributes to discussions of spirituality in music and, in particular, to the unifying aspects of Christian sacred music across time, space, and faith traditions.This collection celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music.

Since ancient times, Christianity has embraced a paradoxical identity: eternal and temporal, celestial and terrestrial, universal and particular, global and local. This sampling spanning ages and continents represents song as sacrament, both a sign and means of Christian unity without uniformity. Ghanian song reflects glocalization (the opposite of globalization)—and so do Renaissance motet prints in the East-West crossroads of Venice, Enlightenment fascination with earthquakes exemplifying the terrible Sublime, and Zoltán Kodály's Genevan Psalm 50 (1948), contextualized within Hungarian folk music, Reformed psalmody, Jewish genocide, and Stalinist terror. This collection admirably demonstrates the mission of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music as it celebrates fifteen years., This engaging collection is testimony to the vitality and breadth of the emerging conversation between theology and music. Wise and insightful essays address music from various genres, historical eras and cultural settings. Taken together they illuminate the ways that musicians and communities have embodied their faith and devotion—in text and tone and rhythm; likewise, they point to the ways in which music has supported and enabled different dimensions of the life of the church., This wide-ranging anniversary collection of essays is a harvest home of the excellent scholarship that has animated the Society for Christian Music and Scholarship for the past fifteen years. It not only demonstrates the depth and richness of this vein of interdisciplinary thought, but it shows that the hermeneutic impulse is grounded in a spiritual instinct and a search for truth that acts as a refreshment of the Word. These texts once again bring us to contemplate divine action through music, the variety of revelation it brings, and its profound message of hope that is much needed by our culture today.

M. Jennifer Bloxam is professor of music at Williams College.Andrew Shenton is associate professor of music at Boston University.