Exploring Christian Song - Softcover

Bloxam, M. Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1498549926 ISBN 13: 9781498549929

Publisher: LEX, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

M. Jennifer Bloxam is professor of music at Williams College.

Andrew Shenton is professor of music at Boston University. His research areas include music and transcendence, humor and religion, performance practice, and theology and the arts.

Markus Rathey is the Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History at Yale University and author of Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom.

Joshua Busman is Associate Professor of Music and Assistant Dean of the Esther G. Maynor Honors College at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: LEX
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498549926
• ISBN 13: 9781498549929
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258