In this era of YouTube and GodTube, when worship leaders compete on the televised vocal talent contest American Idol, and when websites like spotifyforlife.com can help one find the most popular playlists of Christian music for digital streaming, we can often take for granted the interconnectedness of music, media and Christianity. Music and media have been an intertwined part of the lived experience of Christianity for hundreds of years, but we often think of our current time in church music history as a media age. In part this is because today we are aware of so many new ways to make and access Christian music. In past centuries, we’ve encountered Christian music in manuscripts, books, records and on the radio, but today we can carry a library in our pocket and share our self-produced worship songs with people thousands of miles away via the Internet. New technologies offer different sets of possibilities for how we worship – how we hear, how we sing, how we feel and how we connect.
We often equate media with recent technologies of mass communication, especially electrified broadcast technologies such as radio and television, or with other communication technologies such as mobile phones and the interconnected web of networked computing. We know these technologies affect our daily lives and love to hate them (and, perhaps, hate to love them) for the way we feel they affect our personalities and relationships. We love them when we feel they enable new means of connection and productivity and we hate them when they seem to keep us apart or foster our less desirable selves. Thinking of media primarily as a form of technology allows us to see media as external to ourselves, as something artificial and thus usually in tension with the ‘authentic’, the ‘genuine’ or the ‘real’. Often our aesthetic disputes in congregational worship get caught up in this media technology-related binary of artificial and authentic: electric guitars, sound systems and flat screen displays of lyrics are new worship media technologies that, depending on one’s point of view, might be seen as artificial and engendering social/divine distance, or authentic and promoting new forms of social/divine connection.
That is, if we even notice these media at all. Mark Deuze argues that even as media become more ‘pervasive and ubiquitous’ in our daily lives, they become ‘invisible’ so that ‘we become blind to that which shapes our lives most’ (2011, 137). Music, too, can be ‘ubiquitous’ in our daily lives (Kassabian 2002) and, like media, we may not notice the many ways music shapes our worship practices and even our theologies. One of the challenges in studying music, both as culture and as media, is its innate intangibility and ephemerality as sound. Even as we understand that music is a form of communication, we struggle to pin it down as an object of study, and when we do, music often becomes reduced to and isolated as a text – already a mediated form – rather than as a lived experience or an affective process. Furthermore, what music means to us in worship may depend on how we are listening to it, whether we are deliberately paying attention to it as music, or whether it is so fully integrated into other systems of meaning in worship that we do not realize how it affects us. As Nicholas Cook says, music is ‘the discourse that passes itself off as nature’ (1998, 21), so that even in the experience of hearing it we may not fully appreciate the ways in which it not only communicates particular messages but also mediates our experiences. Thus it is our task in this volume to present ways to see musical media as multifaceted and dynamic, while also paying attention to musical media as always inseparable from larger patterns and processes of culture including religion.
We are used to thinking of music as a cultural form distinct from the media that transmit it. In other words, we might think of a hymn as piece of church history that we can read via a media tool such as a piece of sheet music. Or we think of a praise song as a cultural artefact that we hear through the mass communication technology of a radio or that we watch by means of a YouTube video. Music functions in congregational worship in many ways: as a vehicle for content, a site of sensory engagement, a means of connection to tradition, a place for personal expression and a channel for emotion. For still others of us, music in worship enables not only human ritual and social connection but also our access to the Divine.
Part of congregational music’s meaning comes from its words and the denotative message it communicates; however, music is also a media form around which we create meaning, both individually and socially, and thus music can be a means of mediation and communication. Some styles of music have become encoded as sacred, usually through systems of social rules for what are appropriate sounds or genres for church and what are not. These ideas of what church music sounds like, which many take for granted as somehow ‘natural’ for worship, are not inherently sacred but instead have become accepted as such through processes of repetition that enculturate our practices as ‘tradition’. For instance, a four-part choral hymn signifies congregational music to many Christians because it has been assigned this meaning for hundreds of years, across multiple denominations. But not all Christians find the four-part choral hymn to be meaningful or significant for their practice. The dominant signifiers of the sound of church music, then, are not natural but social, cultural, even political. Understanding media and music in congregational music requires examining these cultural politics and the social implications of these mediated musical worlds.
If this collection were only discussing the complicated relationships of music and media (both as form and as process), our project would already be challenging. To confront music and media in the cultural context of religion and belief adds further richness and complication. In contrast to what we see as an always-changing media landscape that seems to be driven by a desire for the new and the better, we often assume religion to be somehow timeless or at least more steadfast, less subject to changing tastes, technologies and fashion. Religion appeals to our desires for truth while, in this era of competing niche-market news providers, the ephemerality of media sometimes feels suspect: transient, full of spin, out to capture our attention at any cost in order to manipulate our emotions and our beliefs. We often assume media to be tied to a profit motive, while religion seems like a haven from the marketplace. Furthermore, we love to complain about how forms of media technology, particularly the mobile phone, appear to isolate us, keeping our heads down, our eyes on our screens and our communications somehow ‘virtual’ in contrast to ‘IRL’ – so-called ‘in real life’. Religion, then, may appeal to us as an antidote to this disconnected, media-saturated world, giving us something set apart, sacred and inherently social, unifying instead of atomizing. But, as many of the chapters in this book reveal, we encounter and use religious musical media in complicated ways.
This book explores how these three areas – media, music and religion – intersect in different places and communities around the globe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond seeing media as a tool or technology, instead showing how mediation (while it may involve particular technologies and means of communication) is a process of doing and being that creates and shapes musical practices, religious beliefs, and understandings of our individual identities, as well as our communities. The chapters here, while coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, demonstrate that media and culture are co-constitutive: our mediated musical experiences produce our understandings, even as we are also actively producing ourselves when we sing along with a worship video or connect with our faith community via the Internet. Simon Frith explains what this perspective means for us as scholars of religious musical media: ‘The question we should be asking is not what does … music reveal about “the people” but how does it construct them’ (1987, 137, emphasis original). Christian congregational music, then, is a fruitful site for investigating the reciprocal meaning-making systems around the tools and technologies of musical media. The authors in this collection examine media not only as forms of technology or means of communication but as part of the active participatory processes of culture-making. This allows them to explore how Christians create and maintain their beliefs, how they feel and experience this belief, and how it shapes their sense of self as well as their relationships with others.
Media, the plural name for a medium of communication, can be seen as material or technological forms through which we send, receive and experience ideas. A desire to understand the significance of new forms of electronic mass communication technology has driven academic media scholarship, particularly within the formal discipline of Communication Studies established in the 1950s. Within the broader field of Communication, the subfield of Media Studies has investigated ‘mediation’ or the circulation of ideas between people via different technologies, paying particular attention to questions of how these ideas are represented.1 Media Studies at its core is concerned with examining processes of meaning-making, chiefly around different technologies, forms and modes of communication, investigating how and why particular representations are made accessible or perceivable in specific ways and at certain times.
Particular forms of media technology affect how we encounter and understand the ideas being communicated – reading a score is different from hearing our favourite performer sing it in a live concert with an audience of five thousand people, and both of these experiences of music are also different than how we feel when we are alone in a car, blasting the song on the stereo and singing along until we are hoarse. Here the song is not only a transmitter of meaning, nor is the stereo only a medium through which the music flows to us. The meanings of any given message (and there might be more than one) are inextricable from the context and receiver of that communication as well as the technologies with which it is being communicated. Indeed, here we might not even be able to clearly distinguish between the ‘medium’ and the ‘music’, since the song, our favourite performer, the FM compression of the original track, the stereo speakers, the acoustics of the car, ambient noise and even our singing voice are all mediating a meaningful experience.
When we think of media in the context of congregational music-making, many of us may automatically equate media with particular forms of electronic technology. Thus contemporary debates about media in worship might seem to be mostly along the lines of considering whether we should amplify our singers with microphones, replace paper hymnals with projected slides or change our accompaniment technology from the organ to electric guitars and drum pads. Certainly new technologies can be helpful tools, but we must also pay attention to how debates over media technology are bound up with other issues such as aesthetic taste, perspective on Scripture, church or denominational identity, as well as a community’s economic privilege and access to things such as electrical power or a high-speed Internet connection. In this way, a microphone is not merely an amplifying device but part of a larger negotiation around the meaning and practice of worship.
Many scholars have considered the impact of new technologies on culture. For instance, Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ sought to explain what he saw as the aesthetic and social repercussions of new technologies that enabled quick and cheap recreations of works of visual and sonic art that sought to fulfil the desires of the masses to get literally and metaphorically closer to a thing. For Benjamin, the technologies that allowed original art works to be copied and circulated widely beyond the place and time of their initial creation may have been useful, but this technology importantly changed the experience of encountering the work of art, stripping it of a kind of authenticity and power, or ‘aura’ (Benjamin 2003, 45). Benjamin saw this change as potentially liberating not only because reproduction allow for increased access to a work, but it stripped it of its ‘parasitical dependence on ritual’ (2003, 46) and raised questions about long-standing cultural assumptions about art’s nature, use and value. While Benjamin saw technology as modernizing society by freeing it from a strict hierarchical system around tradition and religion, another reading of this is that new media technologies such as the photograph and the phonograph acted to ‘secularise’ art (Benjamin 2003, 51), changing the social processes of meaning-making around art.
It is not surprising then that some Christians associate new media technologies in congregational musical practices with loss or corruption – of tradition, connection and perceived sacred value. New genres of worship music and the different cultural practices they engender are seen as too ‘worldly’ in their rhythms, harmonies, instrumentation, singing styles and easy availability as commodities. These critiques reveal how some Christians understand the sacred and secular to be a clear and hierarchical binary where the stakes of any boundary-crossing could range from separation from an earthly community to separation from the Divine, now and for all eternity. In 1912, Emile Durkheim claimed that this dichotomy of the transcendent and mundane structures all religions and can be observed through ritual practices that set certain things and actions apart from the everyday. Colleen McDannell, however, argued that much of Christian doctrine actually serves to weaken this dichotomy in interesting ways: ‘For those Christians who emphasize the bodily nature of Christ and his intimate understanding of human longings, the material world no longer could be radically profane and unattached to the sacred’ (2012, 136). Indeed, she posits, it is through interacting with religious material culture and experiencing a physical dimension of religion that people actively create, explore, learn and ultimately practice their faith; acknowledging and troubling the binary of sacred and secular becomes integral to Christianity on a theological and material level (McDannell 1995, 1–2).
The study of how different material forms of media influence how people communicate with each other, how they relate to one another, and the economic and political systems they create, has been named ‘media ecology’. For media ecologists, media is a key transformative force in a society, and its forms, rather than the specific content these forms might carry, require particular attention even though we might not be consciously aware of the way they shape our ideas and interactions (Mittell 2009, 405). For instance, in the days before telegraph cables crossed the Atlantic we assumed that it would take messages weeks and months to travel long distances. Yet today we most likely take for granted the ability to follow breaking news on another continent, sometimes watching these events unfold in real time. Media ecology, then, is a way of looking at the world that calls our attention to how different media forms and technologies participate in changing how we think and what we do. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan encapsulated the core principle of media ecology in the short phrase ‘the medium is the message’ (1994, 7). By this he meant that one cannot separate the content or message from the forms or affordances of the medium itself. For instance, argued McLuhan, electric light can be understood as a medium: even though it arguably has no content to communicate, it mediates by shaping social processes (1994, 8–9). McLuhan’s theory prompts us to investigate not only what a medium communicates, but also how it communicates.
For instance, writing’s ability to preserve ideas and communicate them across distance and time has enabled different modes of thinking, particularly compared to oral cultures. Printed texts not only transmit a message from the author but the very act of reading text on a page tends to structure our thinking in a linear manner, ultimately affecting not only the practices of reading but even our metaphysical understandings of ourselves and our world. Walter Ong has argued that writing enables ‘study’ or ‘extended sequential analysis’, thus facilitating the development of science, history, philosophy and many other modes of intellectual inquiry (1982, 9 and 15). The ability to read and reread an idea, claimed Ong, allowed for more abstract thinking, while the process of writing and rewriting allowed an author to feel even greater control over his ideas (1982, 14). In congregational music history, the rise of print technology via the mechanized printing press and the relatively cheap medium of paper, combined with the spread of literacy beyond the clergy, allowed for more people to participate in the performance of music in worship as well as the creation of new musics for worship. In this case, the impact of print technology enabled new forms of participation and access in worship – the medium is as powerful as the message.
Yet as we look at the social impact of new technologies, we need to be cautious not to see the technology as the actor or driver of change, for to do so is to forget that it is human actors who create and use technology. Benjamin noted that it was the very desire for greater connection and experience with works of art – a desire to bring the cathedral to the art studio or choral music from the auditorium to the living room – that propelled changes in technology (2003, 43–4). Likewise our desire for more portable computing devices has helped create a market for increasingly smaller and lighter tablets and phones. In worship, then, people’s desire for enriching their relationships with other people and with the Divine may be seen less as the effect or outcome of new media forms, and more as the driving force behind the development of new media technologies.
Even more specifically, historian David Nye cautions us against subscribing to two dominant, if opposing, views of technology as overly ‘deterministic’; it is problematic to claim that technology always and inevitably improves our lives by providing us greater choice and possibility, and it is equally unproductive to argue that technology homogenizes culture (Nye 2007, 44). Our mistake, says Nye, is in believing that technology is a ‘hegemonic force’ that inevitably and unavoidably shapes the world, and forgetting that technology operates in a complex social system, since, he argues, ‘technologies, which include all of material culture, are social constructions with political and social implications’ (2007, 60 and 43). Musicologist Mark Katz argues similarly that not only are media technologies operating within intricate systems with other technologies – technologies are never autonomous – but a technology’s impact is determined by its relationship to human users within complex contexts (2010, 3–4). David Suisman, too, says that we must recognize ‘that sound has power and is woven into a host of other social, political, and economic power relations’ (2010, 3). In other words, media technologies may affect us, but rather than seeing media technology as acting upon us and shaping us, we must instead examine the complex interactive world where people create technologies for certain ends and use technologies in ways that always have important social and political implications.
Central to studies of media from the perspective of the discipline of Communication is the study of culture and human relationships. Experiences of communication can transcend the boundaries of both time and space but they always happen in the context of relationships, between individuals but also within collections of people, from small social organizations through substantial institutions, to even more diverse and dispersed cultural assemblages.
One early media theory, the ‘transmission model’, focused on communication as a direct process of information encoded by a source and sent to a receiver to be decoded. In this model, the sender is the authoritative source of a message’s meaning, and the content itself is the locus of meaning. Consider a university lecture scenario as one example of this kind of cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response model of communication, where information is transmitted from the professor and received, hopefully intact, by the attentive student. Also called the ‘process’ or ‘sender-message-receiver’ model of communication, this linear model considers communication as a kind of transportation of an idea or message from one place to the next (Grossberg et al. 2006, 17). A successful act of communication in this model occurs when the sender and the receiver both come away from the communication action understanding the same message, and any misunderstandings or discrepancies between the sender and receiver would be degrees of communicative failure – an inability to properly decode the message (Fiske 1990, 2). We often assume that forms of media technology function according to this model whereby a book is the medium that carries the message of the story, and radio and television are the media that carry the message of a news broadcast or musical performance. However, although this transmission model of communication does pay attention to the reception of an idea, it assumes that, if the process is ‘successful’, individuals and groups will have shared or at least compatible interpretations of a communication, or that the communication of an idea will produce the desired direct effects (I say: ‘hand me that pencil,’ and you hand me the pencil = communication successfully completed). Yet we know not all messages will mean the same thing to all people in all places and times.
Thus another approach to theorizing communication is viewing it as the interactive creation and exchange of meanings within a culture. The work of linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss gave us tools for discussing meaning via ‘semiotics’, and for understanding meaning as a relational and cultural system. Essentially, Communication scholars in the semiotic tradition argue that the process of meaning-making happens in the acts of reception as well as at the site of creation (or encoding). This ‘cultural model’ of communication is similar to theories of media ecology; however, it looks beyond the form or the medium into the ‘processes of language and meaning production, of sense making and interpretation’ that occur in and around the action of communication (Grossberg et al. 2006, 21). The ideas of British literary critic and cultural historian Raymond Williams are central to this cultural model. His 1958 Culture and Society examined the relationship between different communication media and the rise of industrial capitalism, arguing that not only is communication an active process, but it is through this communicative process that culture is constantly made and remade. Specifically, Williams saw communication as an everyday, interpretive process whereby people constantly seek to make sense of their individual experiences against the meanings agreed upon by a larger group or society. No longer is there a single ‘right’ way to interpret a message but a single message might produce multiple understandings which each depend on the reader’s view of the world; even a ‘successful’ transmission of content does not guarantee shared meaning.
Media scholar John Fiske, a student of Williams’, argues that the cultural model puts the emphasis on the audience or receiver who has the power to ‘read’ or make sense of a message through a process of negotiation, whereby a reader’s understanding is shaped both by shared cultural meanings and individual experience (1990, 3). One way to think about this complexity is via language as a symbolic system where words may sometimes denote a shared understanding of a concept but at other times connote or evoke other individual associations. For instance, while two people both might understand ‘house’ to mean a form of shelter we live and sleep in, one person’s idea of a house might be a small cottage, while another’s might be a large mansion. Other ideas might further be activated by readings of the concept of ‘house’: associations of stability, family, success, political ideologies of autonomy, and economic ideologies of free-market capitalism.
The cultural approach attempts to comprehend how people make sense of the world in a way that accommodates difference, seeing discrepancies in interpretation and understanding not only as unsurprising but as an important sign of complexity in meaning-making. It assumes that media do not produce a series of predictable ‘effects’ in the receiver, but that receivers actively interpret, reject and negotiate meaning in particular contexts (Hall 2009). And within this framework we must remember that readers come from cultural positions that are, in the words of film scholar Robert Stam, ‘multiform, fissured, schizophrenic, unevenly developed, culturally, discursively and politically discontinuous, forming part of a shifting realm of ramifying differences and contradictions’ (2000, 233). Thus communication is rarely a straightforward process or a singular act of decoding a message but rather a continuing reciprocal or co-constitutive process of meaning creation. Yet, it is our ongoing participation in this process that often works to hide it from us. Says Deuze, ‘The potential power of people to shape their lives and identities can be found in the assumption that people produce themselves (and therefore each other) in media. This perhaps may additionally explain why people do not recognize their media habits because they are a constitutive part of them’ (2011, 138).
It is to this cultural model of communication that scholars of religion and media have increasingly turned as they seek to understand the complicated roles of media in our religious lives. In one of the formative collections of essays for the study of media and religious culture, Stewart Hoover and Knut Lundby’s 1997 Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture, Robert A. White explains how Media Studies and Religious Studies share a key attention to the social processes of meaning-making, arguing that media studies brings ‘increasing ability to detect the social processes of creating discourses and texts’ (45). Hoover (2006) has continued to study media and religion from a cultural communication perspective, arguing that we need to move from just examining the medium to examining the creation of meaning or ‘mediation’. Although mediation could be understood at a basic level as a transfer of messages between sources, the cultural approach sees mediation as a ‘space of experience, interpretation, and meaning’ where we create our notion of reality, a process of making something known that relies upon a set of understandings held in common (Grossberg et al. 2006, 16). Communication theorist James Carey (1988) even uses the religiously tinged term ‘ritual’ to link communication to ‘sharing, participation, association [and] fellowship’ (18). He argues this ritual view is rooted in models of lived religious life:
[The cultural approach] derives from a view of religion that downplays the role of the sermon, the instruction and admonition, in order to highlight the role of the prayer, the chant, and the ceremony. It sees the original or highest manifestation of communication not in the transmission of intelligent information but in the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action. (Carey 1988, 18–19)
Rather than being the expression of a message or the imparting of information, communication for Carey is ultimately shared social process: the continuous creation of our shared worlds.
Investigating media from a cultural perspective means looking for struggles and negotiations, for shifting relationships and places of contradiction, as well as being aware of times and places where we may problematically assume things to be too static or uncomplicated. New forms of media technology and new processes of mediation have the potential to alter existing power structures, relationships and current religious and economic institutions.2 Our current digital media culture has the potential to offer more agency to audiences and consumers, allowing them different roles in media production and distribution, and more possibilities for re-imagining communities and re-creating their ideological and theological belief systems. For instance, social media sites allow users to post their own content, created in ordinary church halls or homes rather than in a recording studio. They enable people across the globe to encounter others’ musics and offer a venue to upload their own. These sites become places where people create, re-create, converse, connect, evangelize, confess, pray, praise and worship, enabling new social and musical interactions but also provoking new questions about power. Pauline Hope Cheong and Charles Ess (2012) claim that less hierarchical Christian denominations celebrate and utilize the interactive options presented by digital media, while more hierarchical religious communities may actively resist or otherwise dissuade followers from embracing particular interactive and ‘democratizing’ media forms in an attempt to ‘preserve’ and otherwise maintain traditional structures of religious and institutional power.
The practices of meaning-making in a given cultural context are inseparable from our ideologies, our systems of aesthetic and economic value, our determinations of cultural and social significance and, particularly in the case of religion, our understandings of divine truth. Hoover (2012) argues that new religious digital cultures challenge structures of religious authority, as well as ideas of tradition and authenticity. In particular Hoover says that challenge comes not just in the form of ‘competition from new sources’ of ideas and new media technologies; instead ‘the whole mode of practice that defines cultural participation today operates on logics that put authority in a different place than in the past’ (2012, xii). Today’s religious media culture offers more possibilities for distributed networks of power and easier opportunities for consumers to take on more interactive roles, yet it also raises issues of the relationship of public to private culture, as well as technology and socio-economic privilege. Furthermore, we must be careful to see these cultural shifts around media not as radical alterations but as amplifications of the ‘already intense and complex relationship’ of culture and religion (Cohen, 2009, xvi).
Cultural theories of communication hold special potential for the study of musical sound, which, though often created, stored and accessed with the help of media technologies, is fundamentally experienced as a temporal and immaterial process. In other words, while some other kinds of culture produce visually and physically tangible forms that can be preserved and contemplated in their original form across time, music, like dance, is an embodied cultural form that is realized in a kinetic process – we ‘play’ music, even when we activate our recordings. Unlike a painting or a statue that may be fixed in its medium even as human culture changes around the artistic object, musical sound is different in so far as it is always fundamentally a kind of active and transitory process – we actively remake our music in performance, or we hear sound through ever-changing and new forms of technology. Not only is our meaning-making around music a dynamic cultural action, so too is our actual creation of music itself. In a sense, all music can be seen a kind of cultural (re)presentation.
For a long time, however, Western music has been studied as a closed system where meaning comes almost exclusively from internal rules; to study music was to do a close reading of the text itself, examining internal relationships among structural elements such as form and harmony. The potential drawback of this kind of close textual or ‘musical semiotic’ analysis is that it usually presumes a Western cultural context for the music or, even more problematically, sees the musical text as transcendent and unchanging, fundamentally isolable from any cultural context at all. As Richard Middleton explains, this approach to musical meaning takes the idea of ‘culture’ for granted, treating it as ‘transparent and universal’ (2003, 3). Certainly it is interesting to examine a piece of art or music to see how its component parts fit together and work. The problem arises when we take for granted that these parts ‘work’ according to certain privileged social conventions and culturally-determined systems.
Some music scholars have conceived of musical meaning in ways notably similar to Raymond Williams’s ideas of culture and communication, even if they haven’t necessarily cited Williams directly. For instance, even as early as 1969, John Blacking described music as ‘an outward sign of human communication’, stating that patterns of sounds ‘do not have absolute meaning in themselves’ (1995, 31 and 41). Instead, music’s meaning comes from ‘patterns of human relations’, particularly of the experience of individuals in society, and musical communication happens through shared and negotiated understandings of sound in its socio-cultural context (Blacking 1995, 31–2). Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of ‘musicking’ highlights active and interactive processes. Nicholas Cook also prompts us to think about musical meaning as ‘predicated on communication, on human agency’, arguing that we make sense of our musical experiences in a ‘mediation’ and ‘negotiation’ of sound in a social context (1998, 3 and 23). Thomas Turino uses semiotics to explain musical meaning in a way that emphasizes how musical signs ‘tie us to actual experiences, people, and aspects of the environment’ (2008, 16). Simon Frith also explains that musical meaning in a way clearly indebted to Williams’ theory of cultural communication. Music, Frith says, ‘describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social’, and we come to know ourselves, as individuals and as members of groups, through our interactions with a cultural form such as music (1996, 109–11). Music may be a universal human function but it is not a universal language; our responses to music, which we take for granted as singularly meaningful and true, repeatedly reveal themselves to be ‘mediated through learning’ (Egermann et al. 2015).
While explaining Why Music Matters, music and media scholar David Hesmondhalgh (2013) argues that music’s particular capacity to express emotion, to enable affective experience, to facilitate intimate and communal relationships, and to engender connections across the private and public realms – in other words, its ability to mediate – makes it an especially significant and valuable form of communication. We not only create music through the performance of musical texts, in the sense that we bring to life a sonic world when we sing and play our instruments; we create musical experiences that in turn create us and our understandings of ourselves in the world.
Studying congregational music-making practices as processes of meaning-making and ‘mediation’ enables us to become more aware of sites and occasions where we negotiate faith and identity, form community and meet God. Harkening back to McDannell and the importance of the material, Gordon Lynch explains that mediation is a space of encounter with the sacred: ‘The interaction of symbol, thought, feeling and action that characterizes sacred forms is only possible through media which give sacred forms material expression. Media enable communication about, and interaction with, those forms’ (2012, 87). Similarly, Matthew Engelke explains forms of religious material culture as ‘middle grounds or places of mediation and encounter … where the human can apprehend the divine’ (2012, 229). And Robert Orsi reminds us that ‘the holy’ is not just a concept of sacredness but an experience ‘of something out of the ordinary’, a phenomenon that is real but which can also ‘exceed reality’ (2012, 86 and 100). Thus it is possible to understand the musical mediation of religion as an experience of liminality – a place of process that is alight with divine potential. For something so immaterial and transient, so fleetingly but so powerfully felt, music has unique capacities to affect us deeply as individuals and connect us in our shared humanity.
With the twenty-first century global expansion of pentecostal and charismatic faith practices based on emotion, embodiment and encounter, many Christians of different belief communities around the world have embraced different forms of media in their acts of worship. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the chapters in this book focus on music in faith communities that value individual emotional experience, as well as physical expressions of faith, praise and emotion. Recent research (Meyer 2009, 2012; Promey 2014) explores embodied religious practices as ‘sensational’ forms that mediate our access to and experience of the Divine. Birgit Meyer argues that sensational forms could be collective rituals that create feelings of transcendence or connection, but they also could include religious material culture or particular technologies ‘through which religious practitioners are made to experience the presence and power of the transcendental’ (2012, 160, emphasis original). Meyer argues that mass media forms such as print, photography, television and film are some of the ways that we encounter and know the Divine, but she also describes the sonic experience of pentecostal worship as a sensational form that mediates a fundamentally real, ‘immediate’ and authentic connection with God (2012, 161).
Theories of ‘lived religion’, like theories of cultural communication, emphasize that we must study practices and processes – the active ‘doing’ of congregational music. Deuze proposes that media studies in the twenty-first century can benefit from an ‘ontological turn’, arguing that the ubiquity of media technology and mediated experiences in our lives shows how media cannot be seen as separate from us: we ‘live in media, rather than with media’ (Deuze 2011, 143, emphasis original). Similarly, theories of ‘lived religion’ argue that religion is similarly intertwined with everyday experience and not just an occasional engagement with institutional ritual – life is lived in religion rather than with religion (Hall 1997; Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008). A media life is ‘mediated self-creation’ within a global context of connectivity and connection, and the process of our lived reality is one where we have an active part in constituting that experience (Deuze 2011, 145). Thus, says Orsi, ‘What is called for is an approach to religion and culture that embeds the religious person and community in history, that sees history and culture not as something that religious persons are “in” but as the media through which they fundamentally are’ (Orsi 1997, 16). We must then resist seeing ourselves as separate from our religious practices but instead examine how these practices mediate and constitute us and our sense of reality and truth, as it is through our lived religious experiences that we come into being in both affective and transcendent ways.
Music has long facilitated participation in different types of Christian congregation and community, even as this music has also always existed in complex webs of media and commercial cultures. If we return now to the example of the microphone, we can now see it not only as a technology or form of media but as a meaningful part of a more comprehensive and complex cultural system. On a practical level, microphones have been brought into musical worship practice to help solve particular problems of volume and balance. If we look culturally, we can see that the need for a microphone – a seemingly neutral device – may already presuppose a hierarchical and aesthetic singer-audience relationship in the musical worship experience, as well as particular ideas about the appropriate size of a worshiping community. Using a microphone can be understood to put a singer into a position of musical and institutional authority, empowering and legitimating particular voices over others. Putting microphones in the hands of worship leaders may signal to some that a worship service is a professional performance rather than a participatory event. Microphones may signal that a church is up-to-date, financially prosperous and musically savvy, while for others it could signal a challenge to tradition, denominational identity and church community.3
We may take for granted the power of sound, its ubiquity in our lives and in our worship, particularly its ability to make social connections. Recent technologies have enabled increased interaction across time and space, so that concepts of community and meaningful connection – and the ways that those concepts can be experienced and embodied – have greatly expanded. In addition, music’s ability to alter our experience of time or to mediate our affective experience indicates its power to cause us to feel on a subjective or individual level; this heightened emotional and physical state, enabled by music, is a place of communication beyond language, sometimes in ways that countless cultures have experienced as set-apart, holy and transcendent.
This volume presents congregational music as a site where music mediates our understandings of ourselves, the details of our belief, our experiences of salvation, our fellowship with others and our divine encounters. We offer here a range of perspectives on how media technology has been used to re-imagine corporate worship, to create new forms of community and to provide additional options for church leaders, congregants, worshipers and fans. Examining congregational musical cultures using theories of cultural communication complicates any easy divide between music and media, media and culture, and technology and meaning. Furthermore, seeing media and culture as co-constitutive reminds us that we cannot separate our ideas about musical cultures from considerations of power and ideology. The chapters in this collection examine congregational musical practices in relation to social, cultural, political and economic conditions, raising questions about the significance of these many different instances of worshiping in a media age.
The chapters in this part focus on the ways that media technology participates in changes to our worship practices, our relationship to worship spaces, and our sense of religious identity. In his study of the marketing practices of Hillsong London, Tom Wagner explains how forms of mediated communication affect processes of religious experience. Florian Carl examines the role of social media in Ghanaian pentecostal worship, particularly how this communication technology mediates secular styles of dance and expression in a religious context, thus transforming practices of collective worship. Carl also looks at how these social media allow congregants to bring these collective practices into personal worship in the private spaces of the home. Tanya Riches uses her own experiences as a worship pastor as a starting point for confronting big questions around social media and church leadership, considering the ways that media affect community expectations around their role as the visible node of collective worshiping, as well as around worship leaders’ identity as ‘pastors’ or caretakers of their congregants’ well-being. Ruth King Goddard delves deep into the complex cultural reasons behind an overall decline in congregational singing, looking at how representations of singing voices in secular and sacred media participate in creating a hegemonic discourse that says only certain voices should be heard in public music-making. Goddard then reflects on Biblical imperatives to worship with our voices, raising key questions about the participatory nature of worship in Christian churches around the globe.
The chapters in this next part investigate the ways that new media technologies enable musical and spiritual community beyond the context of the local church, allowing performers and worshipers to create new communities and collective identities through music. Andrew Mall illustrates the role of the Cornerstone Music Festival in mediating a subcultural Christian community that defines its identity against the mainstream. Ellen Lueck examines the international spread of Sacred Harp singing and the role of Internet media in the creation of new networks of enthusiasts. Kinga Povedák’s chapter, as well as Daniel Thornton and Mark Evans’s investigate the influence of YouTube in the process of community-making around worship music. While Thornton and Evans examine the significance of social media interactions around several internationally beloved worship songs, Povedák sheds light on how Romani Pentecostal Christians are performing multiple forms of local and translocal community through their adoption and transformation of global Praise and Worship songs and musical styles.
The chapters in this final part address the relationships between theology and music from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, focusing on the question: how can music participate in the understandings and experiences of belief? Both Allan Moore and Joshua Kalin Busman investigate how subtle musical and sonic details of a song’s rendition can signal significant theological and epistemological distinctions in its message. Clive Marsh explores whether listeners’ experiences of music might not only be seeking personal emotional happiness but yearning for a deeper feeling of well being, what a religious person could describe as salvation. Also exploring notions of affect, Marcus Moberg examines how the Dance + Pray worship services in a Finnish Lutheran context use popular music to create ‘sensational’ and embodied experiences of worship.
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1 It is useful here to think of representation here as a ‘re-presentation’ of an idea where the portrayal of an idea is as important as the idea itself.
2 Raymond Williams’ theories about cultural communication were explicitly rooted in the ideological project of expanding participatory democracy. Henry Jenkins, too, is concerned with examining questions of agency, particularly in response to what he sees as hegemonic corporate power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He proposes the term ‘convergence’ to describe not only the complicated flows of information in our multiply mediated social landscape but also media’s everyday interactive and participatory nature and potential for engendering new models of social power: ‘None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions within convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006, 3–4).
3 Others have examined the significance of changes in media technology for Christian belief and practice, as well as changing socio-cultural dynamics. For instance, Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘print capitalism’ sheds light on how, even in its early days, printing was driven by publishers’ profit motive (2006, 38). Importantly, Anderson links this profit-driven print capitalism to the spread of Protestantism in Europe in the sixteenth century, as publishers could quickly produce and sell many cheap copies of religious texts in vernacular languages (2006, 40). Not only does this example illustrate that technology and economics are a constitutive part of larger shifts of religious belief and practice, but Anderson takes his analysis a step further to argue that print capitalism helped engender new forms of ‘imagined community’ by connecting people across geographical, social, economic and political boundaries (2006, 46).