How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans

Rating:
Summary: An excellent work - An expanding provocative area of study
Review: First a note of disclosure: As I write this, I am one of David's graduate students at Michigan State University. And thankfully, because of this, David has allowed me to suggest pre-publication comments and and in some small way perhaps add to the fine scholarship of this project.

In "How Sweet the Sound," David Stowe points out that music plays a "variety of roles in religious life." Socially, its a means of transmitting behavioral and belief codes. Phenomenologically, it serves as a channel for means of ecstatic communication through the infusion of power, or as a means for liturgical address and response. Additionally, sacred music accumulates additional meanings over time, layered and even disjunctive in content. These accumulations often occur for invountary as well as voluntary reasons, as music bears the markers of community exclusion, exile, and conquest. In sociological terms, music is part and parcel of creation and maintenance of a religious "habitus." But this always occurs in a broader web of contexts--economic, political, and othewise.

Stowe's approach is to draw broad, yet circumscribed historical contours by examining prominent case studies. His approach is deliberately and commandingly pluralistic, a pluralism extending both within and beyond Christianity. Yet his larger point is that even at its most radically pluralistic and sectarian, stories and narratives from the Hebrew Bible have become and maintained their predominant place in American religious music, and by extension, American religious life. The story of Exodus, in many ways, is the story of Mormons, Shakers, African-Americans, 19th century Esotericists, and Sun Ra's "Afro-Futurism."

Along the way, we see clear trends delineated--such as a tradition of strongly bodily affective religious music in the United States. This should be no surprise, given the primacy of the Hebrew Bible as a source for allegory, metaphor and narrative in Christian religious music. The Biblical Song of Solomon is especially strong in its use of eroticism as religious devotion. Likewise, Moravian hymms have been characterized as "impassioned, full of vivid imagery of Christ's atoning blood and a nearly erotic emphasis on communion with Christ." Methodist hymns, especially those influenced by John Wesley, were in many ways a reaction against this tendency. In a more general sense, neither of the Wesleys could stop the development of American Shaker hymns. Though not erotic in nature, Shaker hymns were certainly affective. Producing visions of ecstasy and celestial kingdoms, and "divine communication," they danced in the set of affective relationships that has been part of the Christian tradition, especially its mystical subtraditions, since its earliest days. Even in the political and religious mainstream of music in the 18th and 19th century United States, William Billings' patriotic hymms produced "inchanting" and "ecstatic" erotic songs.

Together with both Methodist austerity and impassioned eroticism, Stowe adds the secular and sacred histories of songs such as "Amazing Grace," from its use in American civil religion to its expression in Star Trek's funeral for Mr. Spock, and Judy Collins's theurgically protective use of it in the midst of the turbulence of the 1960's. The World Parliament of Religions and the Immigration Act of 1965 are highlighted as catalytic moments in American religious pluralism, helping to give birth to events as diverse as Paul Carus's Buddhist hymnals, the Beastie Boys "Bodhisattva Vow" and Duke Ellington's pluralistically affirming sacred concerts.

And yet we return to the Hebrew Bible again and again, especially in Stowe' examination of Rabbinic cantoring, Kol Nidre, and the controversy surrounding movie "The Jazz Singer." Moody, Sankey, and the Fisk Jubillee Singers are not to be outdone, as the Civil War's role in generating Manichean, patriotic, even Prodigal calls to battle are brought carefully and vividly to life.

This is a highly recommended book. While engaging contemporary concerns such as race, class, gender, and imperialism, this volume goes deeper, and refuses to be bound by specific time periods or specific religious traditions. Where necessary, Stowe crosses all sorts of boundaries to follow the trajectories of songs composed, read, re-read, and re-appropriated in vastly different contexts, from sociology to existentialism. In its dogged devotion to follow different crossing threads of music over time and tradition, as well as the tropes and relationships inscribed within them and by them in adherents. By all means suitable for students of Religious Studies, Stowe's book also stands as well within the perhaps more eclectic but no less rigorous interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies.

Rating:
Summary: Mel Gibson should make a movie about this book
Review: Stowe writes with 'Passion' about his subject. Look for Mel Gibson to make a movie about it.