In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

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.

Composers like Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich created works that indelibly commemorated American places. Denise Von Glahn analyzes the soundscapes of fourteen figures whose "place pieces" tell us much about the nation's search for its own voice and about its ever-changing sense of self. She connects each composer's feelings about the United States and their reasons for creating a piece to the music, while analyzing their compositional techniques, tunes, and styles. Approaching the compositions in chronological order, Von Glahn reveals how works that celebrated the wilderness gave way to music engaged with humanity's influence--benign and otherwise--on the landscape, before environmentalism inspired a return to nature themes in the late twentieth century. Wide-ranging and astute, The Sounds of Place explores high art music's role in the making of national myth and memory.

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music.

A silent clapboard church on a barren Arctic landscape is more than just a place of worship: it is a symbol that can evoke fraught reactions to the history of Christian colonization. In the Inuit homeland of Northern Labrador, however, that church is more likely to resonate with the voices of a well-rehearsed choir accompanied by an accomplished string orchestra or spirited brass bands. The Inuit making this music are stewards of a tradition of complex sacred music introduced by Moravian missionaries in the late 1700s – a tradition that, over time, these musicians transformed into a cultural expression genuinely their own. Called Upstairs is the story of this Labrador Inuit music practice. It is not principally a story of forced adoption but of adaptation, mediation, and agency, exploring the transformation of a colonial artifact into an expression of Inuit aesthetic preference, spirituality, and community identity. Often overlaying the Moravian traditions with defining characteristics drawn from pre-contact expressive culture, Inuit musicians imbued this once-alien music with their own voices. Told through archival documents, oral histories of Inuit musicians, and the music itself, Called Upstairs tracks the emergence of this Labrador Moravian music tradition across two and a half centuries. Tom Gordon presents a chronicle of Inuit leadership and agency in the face of colonialism through a unique lens. In this time of reconciliation, this story offers a window into Inuit resilience and the power of a culture’s creative expressions.

"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence offers both a macro and micro approach to its content. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl. 1651-1674). Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic"--

Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today.