Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career.
Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation.
Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order todemonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt offers an illuminating study of Narsinha Mehta, one of the most renowned saint-poets of medieval India and the most celebrated bhakti (devotion) poet from Gujarat, whose songs and sacred biography formed a vital source of moral inspiration for Gandhi. Exploring manuscripts, medieval texts, Gandhi's more obscure writings, and performances in multiple religious and non-religious contexts, including modern popular media, Shukla-Bhatt shows that the songs and sacred narratives associated with the saint-poet have been sculpted by performers and audiences into a popular source of moral inspiration.
Drawing on the Indian concept of bhakti-rasa (devotion as nectar), Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat reveals that the sustained popularity of the songs and narratives over five centuries, often across religious boundaries and now beyond devotional contexts in modern media, is the result of their combination of inclusive religious messages and aesthetic appeal in performance. Taking as an example Gandhi's perception of the songs and stories as vital cultural resources for social reconstruction, the book suggests that when religion acquires the form of popular culture, it becomes a widely accessible platform for communication among diverse groups. Shukla-Bhatt expands upon the scholarship on the embodied and public dimension of bhakti through detailed analysis of multiple public venues of performance and commentary, including YouTube videos.
This study provides a vivid picture of the Narasinha tradition, and will be a crucial resource for anyone seeking to understand the power of religious performative traditions in popular media.

In the last decades of the 17th century, the feast of Christmas in Lutheran Germany underwent a major transformation when theologians and local governments waged an early modern "war on Christmas," discouraging riotous pageants and carnivalesque rituals in favor of more personal and internalized expressions of piety. Christmas rituals, such as the "Heilig Christ" plays and the rocking of the child (Kindelwiegen) were abolished, and Christian devotion focused increasingly on the metaphor of a birth of Christ in the human heart. John Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio, composed in 1734, both reflects this new piety and conveys the composer's experience living through this tumult during his own childhood and early career. Markus Rathey's book is the first thorough study of this popular masterpiece in English. While giving a comprehensive overview of the Christmas Oratorio as a whole, the book focuses on two themes in particular: the cultural and theological understanding of Christmas in Bach's time and the compositional process that led Bach from the earliest concepts to the completed piece. The cultural and religious context of the oratorio provides the backdrop for Rathey's detailed analysis of the composition, in which he explores Bach's compositional practices, for example, his reuse and parodies of movements that had originally been composed for secular cantatas. The book analyzes Bach's original score and sheds new light on the way Bach wrote the piece, how he shaped musical themes, and how he revised his initial ideas into the final composition.

Ranging from the medieval period to the present day, this is a brief history of church music as it has developed through the English tradition. Described as "a quick journey", it provides a broad historical survey rather than an in-depth study of the subject, and also predicts likely future trends.

Music in the California missions was a pluralistic combination of voices and instruments, of liturgy and spectacle, of styles and functions-and even of cultures-in a new blend that was non-existent before the Franciscan friars made their way to California beginning in 1769. This book explores the exquisite sacred music that flourished on the West Coast of America when it was under Spanish and Mexican rule; it delves into the historical, cultural, biographical, and stylistic aspects of California mission music during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book explores how mellifluous plainchant, reverent hymns, spunky folkloric ditties, "classical" music in the style of Haydn, and even Native American drumming were interwoven into a tapestry of resonant beauty. Aspects of music terminology, performance practice, notation, theory, sacred song, hymns, the sequence, the mass, and pageantry are addressed. Russell draws upon hundreds of primary documents in California, Mexico, Madrid, Barcelona, London, and Mallorca, and it is through the melding together of this information from geographically separated places that he brings the mystery of California's mission music into sharper focus. In addition to extensive musical analysis, the book also examines such things as cultural context, style, scribal attribution, instructions to musicians, government questionnaires, invoices, the liturgy, architectural space where performances took place, spectacle, musical instruments, instrument construction, shipping records, travelers' accounts, letters, diaries, passenger lists, baptismal and burial records, and other primary source material. Within this book one finds considerablebiographical information about Junipero Serra, Juan Bautista Sancho, Narciso Duran, Florencio Ibanez, Pedro Cabot, Martin de Cruzelaegui, Ignacio de Jerusalem, and Francisco Javier Garcia Fajer. Furthermore, it contains five far-reaching appendices: a Catalogue of Mission Sources; Photos of Missions and Mission Manuscripts (with over 150 color facsimiles); Translations of Primary Texts; Music Editions (that are performance-ready); and an extensive Bibliography.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.

25 World Church songs, with an emphasis on Central and South America. Includes: Cantai ao SenhorEl cielo cantaRe ya mathemathaIf you believe

Twenty-five beautiful songs from the World Church with an emphasis on Africa. Includes: GloriaSanto, santo santoSenhor tempiedade de nosHe came downStand firmHalle, halle, halleMay God draw nearThe Lord is my lightKyrie eleisonJesus Christ our living LordJesus saranamLet the world in concert singSara shristeImelaWa wa wa emimimoBlessed be GodAmen, Alleluia!Amen siakudumisaNdingen' endumisweniMayenziweMany and greatAgios o TheosKyrie eleisonYour kingdom comeJesu tawa pano

Tracing the steps of Jesus and his followers through the season of Lent to Easter Day and then beyond, these songs are suitable for music groups or choirs as well as being accessible to congregations.

Now available on CD, fifteen powerful a cappella songs from the South African church, including the acclaimed 'We Are Marching in the Light of God' (Siyahamba). Recorded in 1984. Songs collected and edited by Anders Nyberg. Freedom is comingAsikhatali (It Doesn't Matter)Gabi (Praise the Father)IpharadisiSingabahambayo (On Earth an Army is Marching)Siph'amandla (O God, Give Us Power)Akanamandla (He Has No Power)Bamthatha (He's Locked Up)Vula, Botha (Open, Botha)Shumayela (Come, Let Us Preach)Nkosi, Nkosi (Lord, Have Mercy)Siyahamba (We Are Marching)Haleluya! Pelo Tsa Rona (Haleluya! We Sing Your Praises)Thuma Mina (Send Me Jesus)We shall not give up the fight

The recording includes the title song, one of the Group's best known.

Singing God's Words is the first in-depth study of the experience and meaning of chanting or "reading" Torah among contemporary American Jews. This experience has been transformed dramatically in recent years by the impact of digital technology, feminism, the empowerment of lay people and a search for self-fulfillment through involvement with community. At a time when worshippers seek deeper spiritual experience, many Jews have found new meaning in the experience of reading Torah, an act that is broadly accessible to Jewish adults even as it requires intensive immersion with the text of the Bible in Hebrew. This book examines why and how growing numbers of American Jews in all denominations see the public chanting of Biblical texts during the synagogue service as one of the most authentic and personal expressions of their religious identity. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with men and women, both professionals and congregants, Jeffrey A. Summit describes how the reading of Torah embodies their understanding of historical religious practice, even as it is shaped by contemporary views of spiritual experience. Through this act, holiness becomes manifest at the intersection of Biblical chant, sacred text, the individual, and the community.

This follow-up to the bestselling songbook Come All You People offers 40 previously unpublished songs of similar variety which have been sung in prisons, on pilgrimages, at open air festivals, by cathedral choirs, and teenage and in-house music groups. They are short songs, some from present day Scotland, some from the World Church. They help people to participate and move in worship in a way that conventional hymns cannot and can be used as a tool to help create innovative styles of worship. The book includes hints on using the material and an appendix of readings and prayers for use with the songs. Agnus Dei (Aidan)Alleluia (Duncan)Amen alleluiaAmeniBe still and know (i)Be still and know (ii)Bless the LordBring your best to their worstDeo gratias (PSC)First born of MaryGive thanks, worship and praise the LordGod's eye be within meGoodness is stronger than evilHalle, halle, halle (Caribbean)Hallelujah (Korea)In love you summon, in love I followJesus Christ, Jesus ChristKyrie eleison (Bridget)Kyrie eleison (Chad)Lo, I am with you (to the end of the world)Lord Jesus Christ, lover of allLord of life, we come to youLord, draw nearLord, in your mercy (hear our prayer)Lord, you can turn all mourning into dancingMagnificat (G min)MayenziweMy eyes are dim with weepingNight has fallenNothing in height or in depthO brother Jesus (where have we left you)O Lamb of God (Constantine)O Lamb of God (Moss)On God alone, I wait silentlySanctus (Aidan)Stand firmThe peace of the earth (be with you)There is one among usThis is the body of ChristWe will take what you offer