Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
Congregational Worship ◽  
Congregational Music

The introduction sets out the book’s scope, argument, and goals; places the exploration in historical and cultural context; and frames the study in relationship to recent scholarship in ethnomusicology, evangelical studies, and congregational music studies. It first defines contemporary worship music from both North American and global perspectives and discusses that music’s relationship to closely related Christian popular-music genres. The chapter then situates the rise of contemporary worship music in relationship to several important social developments, including the widespread conflicts over music and worship in evangelical churches (the “worship wars”), the development of the Christian-music recording industry, the adoption of new technologies within congregational worship, and the influence of pentecostal-charismatic practices. Finally, in describing the book’s research methods, the introduction identifies several challenges the author faced in navigating distance and proximity in the field as a result of her own religious upbringing as an evangelical and her complex relationship to communities in her study.

Transnational Connections, Musical Meaning, and the 1990s “British Invasion” of North American Evangelical Worship Music

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Music Industry ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Worship Services ◽  
Congregational Worship ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
The U.S

Monique Ingalls’ essay, on the “British invasion” of U.K. contemporary evangelical congregational worship songs into the U.S. market, points to how a transnational musical network provides ways for powerful individuals within the music industry to locate “authentic” religious faith. The U.K. worship music industry imagined different uses and, consequently, formats for its music than that of the American-based Christian music industry: the American-based industry modeled its songs on pop, focusing on radio-friendly short song formats; but U.K. industry modeled its music and performances on charismatic worship services that had a long and powerful emotional trajectory. As a set of U.S. Christian music industry elites traveled to the U.K. and experienced U.K. performances, they began to locate “authentic” worship in the developing U.K. style—largely through their own embodied experiences of worship. These mobile individuals laid the groundwork for the “British invasion” of the U.S. Christian music market, which led to a new genre term: “modern worship.” While Ingalls sees these industry executives as real agents, she also interprets their experiences and choices as part of an emergent discourse in which, as she aptly puts it, “religious rationales [exist] side by side, and in many ways justify, the capitalist logic within the evangelical media industry.”

Finding the Church’s Voice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Local Church ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Church Leader ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Congregation Members ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
And Performance

Chapter 3 provides a detailed ethnographic portrait of music in a local church congregation in which contemporary worship music serves an important—and often strategic—means of positioning. Examining the choices of congregational music repertory, style, and performance practice at St. Bartholomew’s Church, an “evangelical Episcopal” church in Nashville, Tennessee, reveals how church leaders and congregation members use music to navigate the church’s relationship with other area churches, denominational traditions, and church networks. The church’s choice of worship songs and styles constitutes what one church leader referred to as the church’s unique “voice,” in other words, its identity and position relative to other congregations and within networks. Though the church’s voice is constructed in part from broadly circulating discourses and practices within contemporary worship music, the case study of St. Bartholomew’s shows that this song repertory is also subject to imaginative reinterpretation within local church contexts.

Making Jesus Famous

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Recording Industry ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Church Congregations ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Participatory Engagement

Chapter 1 examines the worship concert, a mass gathering marked by participatory engagement that differentiates it from a “mere” concert, as a lens to investigate the interplay between pop-rock performance conventions and evangelical congregational singing. It identifies the range of performative strategies whereby a contemporary worship-music concert crowd becomes authenticated as a concert congregation united in worship. Through musical style, song lyrics, and discourse about music-making, many of the activities associated with rock concerts are reframed as acts of worship. This reframing has musical and political consequences: understanding the concert gathering as worship shapes evangelical expectations of the “worship experience,” which in turn influences what evangelicals expect from worship music in their local church congregations. The desire to realize these ideals fuels the sale of worship-related music commodities produced by the Christian recording industry.

Singing the Congregation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Congregational Studies ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Congregational Music

Singing the Congregation examines how contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship and argues that participatory worship-music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations (“modes of congregating”). Through ethnographic investigation of five of these modes—concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations—this book seeks to reinvigorate the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music.” Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology, congregational studies, and ecclesiology, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice—in this case, the musically structured participatory activity known as “worship.” By extension, “congregational music-making” is recast as a participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a potent way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that this global religious community comprises. The unique congregations examined in each chapter include but extend far beyond local churches, revealing widespread conflicts over religious authority and far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

Worship Music on National and Global Stages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls ◽  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
The World ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
The Way ◽  
A Performance

The book’s conclusion draws together the book’s themes by returning to a performance of the contemporary worship song discussed in the introduction. It highlights a source of continued conflict within evangelicalism: the tension between the worship music “mainstream” and its alternatives. It shows the mainstream to be an influential matrix that combines a specific understanding of music, worship, and congregating and sets itself forward as a model for the way these three activities should relate across geographical and cultural space. Understanding how evangelical congregations are sung into being matters for understanding how other religious social formations throughout the world constitute and understand themselves. Thus, remodeling and reinvigorating the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music” may enhance their usefulness for scholars working on religious musical practices among religious groups facing similar social changes and pressures.

Singing Heaven Down to Earth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Congregational Music

Chapter 2 examines how two large, interdenominational multi-day conferences for evangelical college students use contemporary worship music. Interpreting these events through the lenses of pilgrimage and eschatology, it demonstrates that conferences like these serve as sacred centers for powerful spiritual experiences mediated by music. When participants sing contemporary worship songs together, they imagine the conference gathering as an embodiment of the heavenly community and their singing as the “sound of heaven.” As conference attendees collectively perform the heavenly community into being, they also imagine their relationships to others both within and outside the conference. Comparing lyrics, musical performance, and social organization of congregational music-making at the two conferences reveals that the two events encourage participants to conceive the heavenly community very differently, resulting in diverging understandings of their relationship to Christians of other gendered, racial and ethnic, and national backgrounds.

Bringing Worship to the Streets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Spiritual Warfare ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
The Public ◽  
Regional Community ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
The City

Chapter 4 examines what happens when congregational music “goes public” through the lens of the praise march, a public procession in which evangelical Christians sing contemporary worship songs in the streets of their cities. It examines two consecutive praise marches in Toronto—the March for Jesus and the Jesus in the City Parade—as public congregations whose participants use contemporary worship music to engage in spiritual warfare, to imagine and embody the global evangelical community while creating new intimacies, and to unify area Christians across ethnic, national, and denominational difference. In examination of the sonic practices and values at these praise marches, two models of the public congregation emerge, characterized by differing performance and ethical ideals. Evangelicals use contemporary worship music in public spaces not only to define their public image, but also to delineate the boundaries of their regional community and manage diversity within those boundaries.

The Awakening of a New Form of Christianity? Catholicism in the Cariri Region (Brazil)

Exchange ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-397
Author(s):  
Jan Joris Rietveld
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
Rural Zone ◽  
New Form ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractThe Cariri region is the most isolated and poor part of the rural zone of the diocese of Campina Grande in the Paraiba state of Brazil. The Catholic Church has been present here for a relatively short time: 335 years. Moreover the region has an isolated context and this favors conservatism so that only fundamental changes have an impact. These facts make the Cariri an interesting region for a case study about how Catholicism develops. I distinguish five periods, which are described with religious key words and situated in the socio-cultural context. This classification is a schematization: different types of Catholicism often exist together. It is obvious that the dominant features of Catholicism change with time, but in the mainstream of the fifth period we see a small revolution. Now there are not only influences in the socio cultural context and factors in the Church itself that cause changes, but there are also influences of powerful newcomers, the evangelical churches. Their main impact is that many people have left the Catholic Church and are going to live their old faith in a new form. The Catholic Church is searching for adequate ways to respond to this phenomenon.

scholarly journals Issue of Integrity of Art Education in the Context of Changes in Art and Visual Culture

Pedagogika ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
Edita Musneckienė
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Arts Education ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Wide Range

This article examines a paradigmatic change of contemporary art education in the context of visual culture and focus to the integrity of arts in formal and informal art education. The article is based on an international research “Contemporary art and visual culture in education” which reveals the problematic aspects of contemporary arts and visual culture in education in general. The research method was the discourse analysis of the participants and researchers, who presented the insights in reflective groups and during the interview with teachers and educators.This paper explores how contemporary cultural context and the spread of visual culture provide preconditions for changes in art education. The aim of the article is to analyze theproblems and perspectives of integral arts education in formal and non-formal education: what the educational challenges and opportunities appear in the context of contemporary art and visual culture? How the integral arts could be realized in art education practice in different arts disciplines and areas of education?Contemporary art and visual culture is increasingly multidimensional, the wide range of visual art forms integral with per formative arts, new technologies and media merge the limits between the arts disciplines. That becomes relevant pedagogical problem with the fact that arts education is traditionally allocated to the separate arts subjects such as music, art, theatre, dance, which also can also be divided into separate areas. This subject segregation of the school curriculum and strong subject orientation limits multimodal contemporary arts education. Secondary Education programs provide opportunities for several options of arts education disciplines (photography, cinema art, graphic design, contemporary music technologies), but it needs special resources for the schools and professional teachers. Many schools follow on traditional model of teaching art and still focusing on simple interpretation of modern artworks, different media and technical skills.Contemporary model of teaching integrated arts and visual culture in education is challenging, because it is based on visual literacy and critical thinking skills, it emphasizes inquiry-based education, a critical understanding of contemporary art practices, problem solving and creating new valuable ideas. Knowledge and experiences came from various sources: formal, non-formal, accidental, individual.Great potential for contemporary art education has non-formal art education programs and projects. Successful project-based initiatives in art education have been excellent examples of arts integration.Artists and other creative people involved into a process of education, their collaboration with schools and communities could initiate some interdisciplinary and collaborative practices. Non-formal arts education environment creates more space for creativity, freedom and diversity. Additional arts education programs, museum and gallery education, artistic competitions and international projects allows for the wider development of arts education. Art education in the new age requires changing attitudes towards learning and teaching, changing roles of the educator and new learning environments.

scholarly journals On the return of the (media) author: Michel Houellebecq, écrivain médiatique

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
Ashley Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Michel Houellebecq ◽  
Cultural Domination ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Authorship

This article argues that Michel Houellebecq is an écrivain médiatique, and it examines how and why he engages in an authorial strategy that relies on more than the text and presents the author as a visible, multimedia, and culturally relevant figure. From an epistemological need to reassess authorship in the digital age, this article defines media authorship before analysing Houellebecq through a critical framework including Meizoz’s concept of posturing (2007), Saint-Gelais’s transmediality (2011) and Angenot’s social discourse (1989). It addresses how Houellebecq attempts to situate and justify his media-focused and author-centric strategy, showing how this reflects the challenges of the cultural domination of mass media and new technologies of the digital age, and indicates that the autonomy of the literary field is diminishing. This article shows how a superficially transgressive engagement with the media and multimedia in fact reflects consent to the dynamics of the contemporary socio-cultural context.

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