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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Other types of music > Sacred & religious music
The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a
foundational role in many aspects of India's arts and social norms.
For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching,
listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the
Ramayana's first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient
times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through
the centuries in many of India's regional languages, such as Hindi,
Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for
enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions,
dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces
non-specialists to the Ramayana's major themes and complexities, as
well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to
represent theater and performance. Two introductions orient readers
to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban,
Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and
aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide
context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance
traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are
clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and
gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary
re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of
Ramayana discourse in daily life.
Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical
sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of
techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most
important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names
including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through
its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns
song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical
traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation
for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main
event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition?
What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do?
And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of
black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp's essential
place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical
cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. A defining
feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual
performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African
American musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a
venerable lineage of black sacred expression. As it generates
emotive and physical intensity, the vamp helps believers access an
embodied experience of the invisible, moving between this world and
another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a
musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a
system of belief, performance, and reception that author Braxton D.
Shelley calls the Gospel Imagination. In the Gospel Imagination,
the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power
into a physical reality-a divine presence in human bodies.
Articles on masterpieces of European religious music, from the
middle ages to Stravinsky and Tavener. The late Wilfrid Mellers,
who occupies a special place among music critics, described himself
as a non-believer; but his preference for music that "displays a
sense of the numinous" (in his words) will strike a chord with many
wholisten to religious music nowadays, and who share his view that
music that confronts first and last things is likely to offer more
than music that evades them. The essays form five groups, which
together offer a survey of religious music from around the first
millennium to the beginning of the second, in the context of the
difficult issues of what religious music is, and, for good measure,
what is religion? The parts are: The Ages of Christian Faith; The
Re-birth of a Re-birth: From Renaissance to High Baroque; From
Enlightenment to Doubt; From "the Death of God" to "the Unanswered
Question"; and The Ancient Law and the Modern Mind. Musical
discussion, with copious examples, is conducted throughout the book
in a context that is also religious - and indeed philosophical,
social, and political, with the open-endedness that such an
approach demands in the presentation of ideas aboutmusic's most
fundamental nature and purposes. COMPOSERS: Hildegard of Bingen;
Perotin; Machaut; Dunstable, Dufay; William Corniyshes father and
son; Tallis; Byrd; Monteverdi; Schutz; J.S. Bach; Couperin; Handel;
Haydn;Mozart; Beethoven; Schubert; Bruckner; Berlioz, Faure; Verdi,
Brahms; Elgar, Delius; Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells; Britten;
Janacek; Messiaen, Poulenc; Rachmaninov; Stravinsky; Part, Tavener,
Gorecki, Macmillan, Finnissy; Copland.
The history of American church music is a particularly fascinating
and challenging subject, if for no other reason than because of the
variety of diverse religious groups that have immigrated and
movements that have sprung up in American. Indeed, for the first
time in modern history-possibly the only time since the rule of
medieval Iberia under the Moors-different faiths have co-existed
here with a measure of peace- sometimes ill-humored, occasionally
hostile, but more often amicable or at least tolerant-influencing
and even weaving their traditions into the fabric of one another's
worship practices even as they competed for converts in the free
market of American religion. This overview traces the musical
practices of several of those groups from their arrival on these
shores up to the present, and the way in which those practices and
traditions influenced each other, leading to the diverse and
multi-hued pattern that is American church music at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. The tone is non-technical; there are
no musical examples, and the musical descriptions are clear and
concise. In short, it is a book for interested laymen as well as
professional church musicians, for pastors and seminarians as well
as students of American religious culture and its history.
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