Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Public Expressions of Religion in America)

Rating:
Summary: Recommended for scholars of religion and/or music
Review: Stephen Marini's "Sacred Song in America," is one of two main 2003 books (besides Stowe's) to deal with religious music in a pluralistic way. Musics, and the traditions involved are presented as largely insular discourse, with little overlap. While Marini, as a historian, uses both historical and anthropological (Geertzian) models, his analysis gives the impression that these religious musics have developed as separate discourses and historical fields. This tends to minimize the historical overlap and thematic unities and discontinuities in religious music history. Each chapter, whether on Contemporary Christian music, African-American Gospel, Mormon music, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism, Chicano or Amerindian musics, proceeds with a history, and a specific musical case analysis, and an interview or two. Its an interesting model, with both strengths and weaknesses.

For music to be religious music, for Marini, it must contain some form of mythic content, and participate as part of a conscious, intentional effort at ritual action--action that seeks to move everyday participants out of everyday awareness into a space of shared mythic consciousness and creative community. Marini does not utilize, nor is it clear that for him, he would accept a terminology of "imagined communities." But, writing in a pluralistic context, allows for the occurrence of musics outside a specific ritual space or performance, so he expands and suggests also that religious intentionality combined with ritual performance in some way marks a given music (noun) as religious. Thus, he allows for phenonema such as Amerindian Pow-Wow and other occurences beyond specific spaces. This allows him to suggest that sacred song functions at its most basic level by allowing its participants and audiences to personally "engage with a mythic past."

But there is a serious difficulty for Marini. His use of postmodern/secularization theory for Protestants and Jews and indigenous ritual and language modalities for Amerindians and Chicanos, and African-Americans beg the question of what exactly a "traditional" or "authentic" performance context means for ANY sacred music. Geertz's famous conceptual framework for religion serves as an ur-model for the topic, while most specific religious musics are dealt with by separate theorists, ranging from Adorno and Weber (Contemporary Christian) to Victor Turner (Amerindian) and Durkheim and Bellah (LDS), and of course Gates's "Signification" for African-American religious music. Two other notable chapters are either extended interviews with two Sacred art music composers, and a history of two battles over hymnal constructions in the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Church of Christ.

At the end Marini includes a section of scores from hymnals and written sources, including Kay Gardner's "Lunamuse" and a chart of correspondences from a famous book of hers.

These last two examples and conflation of New Age and Neopagan music speak of a chapter that is an admirable effort, but is the least effective and convincing chapter in the book. It is rendered misguided by its lack of accurate history of New Age and Contemporary Paganism, and a simple conflation of the two. Marini counts the latter to be largely a subset of the former, when recent studies suggest a much different, and more complex relationship. There exists at least two well-known publishers of sacred Pagan music, Serpentine and Ladyslipper Music, and many artists who have roots in folk, ecstatic drumming, and other genres beside Gardner's orchestral material, yet these are either invisible at all or relegated to a single paragraph. Inexplicable is the absence of any discussion of Sabina Magliocco and Holly Tannen's 'Ethnologies' article on Neo-Pagan musical aesthetics, especially since it is one of the few academic treatments of the subject and was published prior to other sources he cited. In fact, Marini cites no specific academic studies of contemporary Paganism at all, only a more popular (but still very useful) older study by Margot Adler.

Marini's efforts at New Age music proper are somewhat better, but highly abbreviated, especially compared to the attentions given other musics in the book. The history of New Age is largely confined to Catherine Albanese's book, yet its history is much more complex than either "nature religion" or Pythagorean sound theory, two subjects that form the basis of Marini's analysis of New Age music. As with contemporary Paganism, several studies (like Wouter Hanegraaff's) that would have added weight and history to Marini's arguments were available, but inexplicably not used.

Overall, many chapters are excellent, and as one might expect from Marini's training and position, these are the ones that he is closest to: Sacred Harp, Contemporary Gospel, Charismatic Catholicism, and Jewish music. Other chapters tend to be more or less successful depending on Marini's distance from the subject matter.

This is not to blame Marini in any way; trying to write a book with such a wide treatment of religions and musics must be more or less successful in parts. Its an ambitious work, and even in its weaknesses, serves well as a seed crystal for vastly underregarded and often ignored traditions of sacred musics, such as those associated with contemporary Paganism. For that he is to be thanked wholeheartedly.