Abstract
Following a brief historical sketch of recent trends toward the renewal of congregational singing, this chapter analyzes three seminary chapel services. The chapter seeks to provide preliminary rubrics for liberating congregational singing that are contextual, accountable, and liberating. The analysis of these three examples focuses on congregational song leading using global hymnody. The rest of the book will extend, expand, and problematize the issues raised here in an ongoing praxiological process rooted in concrete experiences of song leading and congregational singing.
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Notes
- 1.
As outlined in the introduction, praxis includes the notion of transformation, along the lines of Freire and others. See chapter 4 of Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 119–86. A “liberating” praxis of song leading therefore entails a reflection on the practice of song leading for the purpose of transformation—the transformation of liturgy and church structures which can in turn contribute to broader liberation struggles, against forces of dehumanization and toward movements that build up humanity as part of God’s wider creation.
- 2.
Global South/Majority World refers to the geographical Global South as well as communities in the Global North which are marginalized, especially along ethno-cultural or racialized lines.
- 3.
Emerging out of ethnomusicology and popular music discourses, the terms global music and world music refer to music of a non-Western origin. The terminology remains contested and fluid, striking at the heart of the tension in ethno/musicology which sets every “other” music against European art music, what Stuart Hall calls the “West and the Rest.” Similarly, in church music circles, global song and global hymnody refer to music that comes from the Global South, along with marginalized contexts in the Global North. For further discussion, see: Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Gieben, Bram (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press in association with the Open University, 1992), 185–227; Martin Stokes, “Globalization and the Politics of World Music,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction,”eds. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 107–116, (New York: Routledge, 2012); Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 4.
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 123.
- 5.
World Council of Churches 24, “Member Churches,” in World Council of Churches, accessed February 11, 2018, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/member-churches/wcc-regions
- 6.
Pope Paul VI, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium,” II: 14, accessed October 27, 2017, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html
- 7.
See chapters by Per Harling and Pablo Sosa which examine these influences on ecumenical congregational singing practices in S. T. Kimbrough, ed., Music and Mission: Toward a Theology and Practice of Global Song (New York: GBGMusik, 2007).
- 8.
“Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture,” Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, accessed April 16, 2018, https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/nairobi-statement-on-worship-and-culture-full-text
- 9.
“Global Praise,” Global Ministries, accessed July 25, 2018, https://www.umcmission.org/Find-Resources/Global-Praise
- 10.
Christopher Small’s book Musicking transformed discourses about music, particularly in the field of musicology. Insisting that music ought to be the verb to music, he writes that “to music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing (italics his).” Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9.
- 11.
The scholarship in this new sub-field is driven by emerging scholars, many of whom are themselves Christian practitioners. It is characterized by a commitment to take the theo-religious meaning-making in Christian congregational musicking seriously. See, for example, Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner, Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 2013); Mark Porter, Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017; Anna Nekola and Tom Wagner, eds. Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age (Farnham, Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2015).
- 12.
It is worth mentioning a few of the key players in the field of global congregational song leading. These include John Bell, S. T. Kimbrough, Michael Hawn, and Lim Swee Hong, among others. The work of both Kimbrough and Hawn is particularly notable for their commitment to partner with practitioners and scholars from the Global South/Majority World. Lim Swee Hong distinguishes himself not only by providing a rare foray into a scholarly analysis of Christian congregational song beyond Western European Anglo North Atlantic contexts, but also by engaging postcolonial and ideological concerns in his study. See John L. Bell, The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Song (Chicago: GIA Publications, Inc., 2000); John L. Bell, The Singing Thing Too: Enabling Congregations to Sing (Chicago: GIA Publications Inc., 2007); Kimbrough, Music and Mission; C. Michael Hawn, Gather Into One: Praying and Singing Globally. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003); C. Michael Hawn, comp. and ed., New Songs of Celebration Render: Congregational Song in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2013); Swee Hong Lim, Giving Voice to Asian Christians: An Appraisal of the Pioneering Work of I-To Loh in the Area of Congregational Song (North Charleston, SC: VDM Verlag, 2008).
- 13.
Bell, The Singing Thing Too, 138; Kimbrough, Music and Mission, 105–6; Hawn, New Songs, XLV.
- 14.
Hawn argues for an opening up from “center to spectrum” that involves “polyrhythmic worship [which] embodies both the depth and heritage of liturgical tradition and the breadth of diverse ways of praying with the world church and fresh movements of the spirit.” Hawn, Gather Into One, 273.
- 15.
Names, locations and some identifying details have been omitted to allow the focus to be on the liturgical/musical questions at stake.
- 16.
Néstor Medina, Email correspondence with the author (19 September 2013). Medina was drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 283.
- 17.
Hall, “The West and the Rest.”
- 18.
Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera note that “our colors and cultures, our sexualities and nationalities, crisscross each of our identities, forming complex mazes of power. Whatever our bloodlines or our religious backgrounds, we find ourselves within these mazes. We find these mazes within us.” Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds., Post-Colonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (Danvers, MA: Chalice Press, 2004), 3. Questions of identity will be examined in much more detail in the next chapter.
- 19.
Gloria Kehilwe Plaatjie calls such a process “reading with and reading from” in her own South African context in which she aims to establish a Post-Apartheid Black Feminist reading of the bible by lifting up the agency of non-academic black women, affirming their identities, and seeking to transform systems of oppression. Gloria Kehilwe Plaatjie, “Toward a Post-Apartheid Black Feminist Reading of the Bible: A Case of Luke 2.36–38,” in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 467.
- 20.
The question of who owns a song is complex and culturally conditioned, a point which will be developed especially in Chap. 5 in the analysis of “El Espíritu de Dios.” Whether authorship is claimed or not, songs do originate from specific contexts and often become meaningful for other peoples and other cultures far from their source, “belonging” to their new contexts. There are also legal copyright implications which are explored briefly in this chapter (see footnote 24) and in Chap. 5.
- 21.
Hawn, Gather Into One, 60–61.
- 22.
Ibid., 19.
- 23.
I use the phrase here expansively. In Canada “right relations” refers to an ongoing commitment to restore broken relationships between settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples in Canada understand all newcomers as settlers even while acknowledging the complexity of settler identities depending on the ethnocultural backgrounds of people and their stories of immigration to Canada.
- 24.
James Poling suggested some helpful questions to guide practices of accountability in a reflection on his work as a white academic man working with marginalized peoples. His questions about his teaching work include the following: To whom, to what and how is a teacher or scholar accountable? Whose work and traditions has one appropriated? Who has the power to challenge a teacher or scholar and to hold them accountable? Who has benefited from one’s work and how? And was the benefit emotional, intellectual, or material? These questions are applicable to song leaders who “borrow” from cultural traditions that are not their own. James Poling, “Postcolonial Theologies,” Roundtable Response, International Academy of Practical Theology (Victoria University, University of Toronto, 13 April 2013). I also note that Pete Seeger along with Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton copyrighted the well-known civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” in a deliberate move to control the potential income from the song as it became more popular. They then established a fund called the “We Shall Overcome Fund” which is chaired by African-American activist and singer Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon. According to Seeger, “all royalties from any recording of the song go to this non-profit fund, which distributes the funds ‘for black music in the South.’” Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A Singalong Memoir (Pennsylvania: Sing Out Corporation, 2009), 33.
- 25.
Otto Maduro, “An(Other) Invitation to Epistemological Humility: Notes Towards a Self-Critical Approach to Counter-Knowledges,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 87, 88. Throughout the book, I use the term LatinaXo, following Neomi DeAnda who writes that “the inclusive ‘a’ and ‘o’ expresses the feminist critique of the male dominant in the Spanish language” and also, “the ‘X’ between the ‘a’ and the ‘o’ points to the need to omit an often created gender binary and allows for more fluidity.” DeAnda, Neomi, “Jesus the Christ” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology, edited by Orlando O. Espín, 155–171. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2015, 169, footnote 1.
- 26.
Ibid., 103.
- 27.
Ibid., 102–3.
- 28.
Néstor Medina, “Jürgen Moltmann and Pentecostalism(s): Toward a Cultural Theology of the Spirit,” in Love and Freedom: Systematic and Liberation Theology in the Canadian Context, ed. David John C. Zub and Robert C. Fennell (Toronto: Toronto School of Theology, 2008), 109. See also Néstor Medina, Christianity, Empire and the Spirit: (Re)Configuring Faith and the Cultural (Leiden: Brill, 2018), especially chapter seven: “Understanding the Cultural Pneumatologically,” 311–360.
- 29.
Medina, “Cultural Theology of the Spirit,” 109.
- 30.
These include autobiographical narratives, unsuturing, unbleaching, engaging intermixture, and unforgetting.
- 31.
Such a moment would be rare, but could involve a public prayer lamenting the absence of a singer from the culture of the song and praying for the community from which the song came, with silence following. Praying for the community of any given song is an appropriate way to contextualize it.
- 32.
“El Espíritu de Dios” will also be considered in greater detail in Chap. 5.
- 33.
Even the category “Asian” was subverted by the inclusion of hymns that challenged stereotypical notions of “Asian” geography. By including a Palestinian song, “The Olive Tree,” and a US-Singaporean collaboration, “Make Us One” by Ruth Duck and Lim Swee Hong, the essentialized identity of the oriental “other” was thus unfixed.
- 34.
The notion of accompaniment will be developed in more detail in the last chapter. See Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (New York: Orbis Books, 1995).
- 35.
Michael Hawn, Gather Into One, 250.
- 36.
Ibid.
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Whitla, B. (2020). (Trans)forming Praxis: Initial Rubrics for Liberating Song Leading. In: Liberation, (De)Coloniality, and Liturgical Practices. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52636-8_2
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