Music in American Religious Experience presents a carefully constructed juxtaposition of articles problematizing—and ultimately illuminating—religious experience in the United States. Initially, this ground-breaking collection of essays seems to assume an impossible task: covering the role of music in the diverse religious and historical landscape of American experience. Editors Bohlman, Blumhofer, and Chow use Martin E. Marty’s forward to promptly allay any fears of excessively ambitious scope. It would take an entire library to even begin to properly cover music, religion, or America, the renowned religion scholar and historian writes. In contrast, good books, he continues, are about only one thing, and this book is about experience: “What the editors and authors here aspire to do is to hear religious music in the United States and locate it in the experience of citizens who sing and pray, worship and march” (vi). Marty’s brief forward sets the tone for the entire volume, encouraging readers to explore the overt and underlying relationships between the seemingly contrasting chapters. Excellent editorial arrangement thematically links the book’s essays into a coherent whole that transfers individual instances of scholarship into collective metacommentary on human experience.
One of the major strengths of Music in the American Religious Experience is the depth and breadth of its pool of contributors. The fifteen authors come from a variety of related academic disciplines: ethnomusicology, history, folklore, Scandinavian studies, religion, ethics, music, anthropology, and theology. In addition to their academic involvements, many are practicing religious musicians or clergy, including a rabbi, Northern Sacred Harp revivalist, and a Christian cantor. While there is some degree of qualitative variation between the articles, this is due, in the main, to the differing levels of prior subject-area knowledge that the authors presume in their readers. Although these assumptions are occasionally frustrating, the un-standardized approaches highlight the contrasting perspectives of the scholars’ disciplines. The diverse, yet deep, backgrounds of the authors allow the volume editors to juxtapose variously flavored articles for heightened experiential effect. The brief biographical section on the volume’s contributors is extremely helpful in contextualizing each author’s work and perspective. The placement of this section before the body of the book also encourages readers to view it as a type of preface, a contained microstudy of American religious experience vis-à-vis the contributors.
Framed by Marty’s forward and editor Phillip Bohlmann’s introduction, Music in the American Religious Experience is organized into four thematic sections: “Experience and Identity,” “Liturgy, Hymnody, and Song,” “Individuals and the Agency of Faith,” and “Congregation and Community.” While the essays in each section cover contrasting cultural areas, they are internally united through their focus on a single aspect of experience. In Part One, for example, the editors combine four similar, yet contrasting essays to comment upon “Experience and Identity.” Regula Qureshi’s “When Women Recite: ‘Music’ and Islamic Immigrant Experience” describes the impact of shifts between public and private spheres of worship on immigrant South Asian Muslim’s religious gender roles. Next, Jon Michael Spencer’s article, “African American Religious Music from a Theomusical Perspective,” advances an epistemological, theological contextualization of Black religious music and concludes that most African Americans experience more religious resonance with the blues than with conventional religious music. In “Medeolinuwok, Music, and Missionaries in Maine,” Ann Morrison Spinney writes an insightful essay on Native Americans’ adoption and adaptation of Catholicism for political, social, economic, and spiritual ends. Finally, Margarita Mazo rounds out the section with an essay detailing the importance of communal singing in “Singing as Experience among Russian American Molokans.”
While addressing specific religious groups, the essays in this section are combined to form a metacommentary on identity via communal religious responses of adaptation, rejection, reinterpretation, and reaffirmation. Although the differences between the religious communities’ approaches are clear, the combination of these chapters into a single section of the book highlights the motivational similarities between these communities, as people adapt to fulfill their basic spiritual needs and form identities in America. For example, in Chapter Three, the idiosyncratic details of Medeolinuwok Catholicism are refracted beyond their original contexts into markers of human reaction as manifestations of a universal need to interact with religious systems.
Similarly, Part Two, “Liturgy, Hymnody, and Song,” is far from a dry survey of canonized religious music. Rather, the editors’ combination of articles highlights the issue of corporate musical liturgical change, with special attention to the locus of affective power in individuals and communities. Otto Holzapfel’s essay casts a particularly illuminating light on the process of German immigrants’ implementation of English-language worship. Writing as both a German and a scholar, Holzapfel approaches the discourse from a European perspective which, through its contrast to typical Americanist angles, coaxes out delightfully refreshing experiential nuances and details. This type of unexpected insight, supported by a general feeling of academic collegiality and support for a common project of inquiry, pervades the entire volume.
Another particularly positive aspect of the book as a collection is the presence of musical transcriptions and examples in nearly every article, including one spectrogram in Jeff Todd Titon’s chapter on Old Regular Baptists. Additionally, there are many statistical charts, mostly detailing frequency of hymn/song/text usage, which adroitly support the authors’ conclusions. The inclusion of the charts in the book also allows readers to examine some of the data for themselves, yet another instance in which the editors highly encourage the reader to experience the text on multiple levels.
Music in the American Religious Experience presents a diverse collection of articles through such brilliant editorial lenses that the resulting volume is one of the rare cases in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. While the individual articles are quite excellent overall, it is their thought-provoking juxtaposition that raises this book beyond the status of “just another collection of articles.” The power of Music in the American Religious Experience lies not in the assertion of difference, but in the illumination of similarity. While the musical and religious experiences described in the collection do have many cultural and theological points of contrast, the authors and editors attempt to shed light on the means and motivations of religious groups in their reactions to overarching societal conditions. Music in the American Religious Experience takes an important new step in religious and musical scholarship, highlighting commonalities of diverse experience to substantially enrich understanding of humanity.
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[Review length: 1052 words • Review posted on November 7, 2006]