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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction “Contemplating Christian Song in Context” Building Bridges with Christian Song I 1. “Song as a Sign and Means of Christian Unity” Reading Books of Catholic Song c. 1500 2. “The Late Medieval Composer as Cleric: Browsing Chant Manuscripts with Obrecht” 3. “Reading Ottaviano Petrucci’s Early Motet Prints as Devotional Books” Theology and Lutheran Song in the 18th Century 4. “Theology and Musical Conventions in the Arias of J. S. Bach” 5. “Apocalyptic Visions and Moral Education in the Age of Enlightenment: Earthquakes and the Sublime in Oratorios by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann” Christian Song in 20th-Century Eastern Europe 6. “Kodály’s Genevan Psalm 50: The Composer as Prophet in an Age of Crisis” 7. “Magnificat: Arvo Pärt the Quiet Evangelist” Preaching through Christian Song in Contemporary America 8. “Sounding Belief: ‘Tuning Up’ and ‘the Gospel Imagination’” 9. “ʻSongs are like sermons that people actually remember’: Homo Liturgicus and Hymnody in the 268 Generation” Building Bridges with Christian Song II 10.“Bridging the Old and the New in Contemporary Contexts: The Creative Task of the Christian Scholar” Contributor Biographies