Abstract for Session 8
Session #8: Music and Crisis in Popular Culture: A Thematic Approach to Christian Musical Scholarship
Timothy H. Steele, Calvin College, chair
Kevin Holm-Hudson, University of Kentucky
Tammy L. Kernodle, Miami University of Ohio
Stanley C. Pelkey, Western Michigan University
Emmett G. Price III, Northeastern University
Among the many conversations that occupy the musicological community today, few have made greater advances than the study of music in popular culture. Much of the impetus for this work is a concern to understand the ways in which popular music is embedded in social contexts, including the ways in which music both conveys and creates meaning among different groups distinguished by race, class and gender, and how music is subjected to commodification and distribution through globalized networks of markets and consumers. Popular music is increasingly the focus of analytical and theoretical studies as well, and new ways of thinking about music as performance rather than as text—a shift of emphasis that parallels ethnomusicological insight into music as social practice—are contributing to the recasting of musicological discourse in general. Inevitably, given the sociological orientation of much popular culture scholarship, questions of the construction of identity and the experience of religious faith arise. But as is the case in much of postmodern musical scholarship, the perspective of faith itself has been left to scholars mostly outside of the discipline of musicology. The question we want to ask is: What insights can Christian musicologists bring to the conversation about music and popular culture that are shaped by perspectives formed in and through Christian commitment? How can Christian musicologists and theorists, as professionals who are also nurtured and shaped by faith communities and traditions, contribute to the discourse of popular culture?
The Christian Voices in Musicology Study Group was formed in 2008 to undertake a joint research project that focuses on developing a thematic approach to Christian musical scholarship, and that aims to address the questions we put before the FMCS in this panel. Our project seeks to better understand the relationship of music to crisis, justice and peace—themes that Christians have thought about for thousands of years, and that are central to the Christian way of being and acting in the world.
We are pursuing work on a number of case studies in which music figures prominently, and even decisively, as crises unfold, justice is upheld or denied, and peace enables human flourishing or its absence leads to suffering and abuse. Four panelists will offer brief presentations in which they examine how these themes provide foci that enable scholars to engage in Christian musicological reflection on various musical contexts. Kevin Holm-Hudson looks at the crisis of inner experience reflected in progressive rock of the late 1960s and 1970s. He considers the role played by R. D. Laing’s theories of sanity and madness in his 1967 bestseller, The Politics of Experience, in shaping the musical markers of schizophrenic experience in music by King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator and Renaissance. Tammy Kernodle shows how Mary Lou Williams and Alice Coltrane, responding to personal and social crises of the 1950s and ‘60s, drew upon the language of religious conversion and life-changing spiritual encounter in their writings and music. Stanley Pelkey argues that the hit television series “Dexter” uses music both to underscore and problematize the issues of violence and justice that structure key episodes in the drama. Emmett Price invites us to hear the transcendental message in gangsta rap, which for him designates a kind of urban hymnody, giving musical voice to the underbelly of American society. Opportunity for extended interaction among the panelists and the audience will be provided.