Resonance, Bach, and Noisy Congregations

This chapter takes, as its starting provocation, Tanya Kevorkian’s suggestion that performances of Bach’s cantata compositions would originally have taken place within a somewhat noisy social environment. Drawing from the wider field of literature on listening and noise in other historical and contemporary contexts, it examines the potential for sonic interactions between different actors to set up patterns of social resonance. It draws out the consequences of taking these sonic and social interactions seriously in understandings of musical performance and experience. Many analyses consider noise primarily as a distraction to attentive listening. This chapter, however, highlights its role in processes of meaning making and in establishing different sets of relationships between performers, congregation, and the divine.

Prayer Room Live-Streaming and Transnational Resonant Assemblages

Dynamic resonant interplay is not limited to the space of the gathered congregation. Religious practices have always occurred beyond the boundaries of congregational spaces. There is an increasing desire to move away from an understanding of congregations as discreet, bounded entities and toward an inclusion of a range of practices and interactions, both individual and communal, private and public, in the surrounding world. This chapter utilizes on-site and online ethnography in order to observe the transnational resonant assemblages set up through Internet live-streaming of prayer room music and worship. It examines the way in which sound and video carried through the cameras of the prayer room, the fibers of the Internet, and the computers and mobile devices of those tuning in set up a dynamic interplay between prayer room environments and other devotional spaces around the globe.

Evangelicals, Authenticity, and Sacrament

This chapter examines evangelical worship music as an environment in which ideals of congregational singing focus particularly strongly on dimensions of affective interaction. Recent evangelical discourse has had a lot to say about ideas of authenticity and sacrament as they are present in musical worship. This chapter examines the potential for these terms to be understood as different varieties of resonant interaction as sound is either expressed outward from the worshiper into their surrounding environment or received inward as something that carries with it something from God. It highlights the limits of understanding these phenomena through a simple inward/outward dichotomy. Rather, it suggests that each relies on a range of different back-and-forth sonic and more-than-sonic interactions.

Singing, Resonance, and Ascetic Struggle

This chapter suggests that an exploration of ascetic singing within its broader ecology serves to illuminate practices of recitation within the literature of the early Desert Fathers. Solitary recitation provides a relatively stripped-down mode of devotion, with few opportunities for interpersonal interaction. However, within this context, the idea of resonance highlights the way in which ascetic singing relates the individual to body, architecture, landscape, and the surrounding spiritual world. It focuses attention on the dynamic interplay of these different spaces and actors in the activity of singing. This chapter moves toward an ecological understanding of music as integrally caught up in broader projects.

Introduction

The Introduction to this volume explores the importance of individual–world interactions through the medium of sound in distinguishing between different traditions of Christian worship. I introduce ideas of musicking and resonance and suggest their potential usefulness in exploring the different patterns of interaction present in musical acts of devotion. I draw attention to resonance’s ability to point toward the simultaneous or subsequent sounding of energy in and between multiple actors, entities, and spaces, and to its particular conceptual advantages and strengths in approaching congregational singing. I highlight its ability to foreground the materiality of music while simultaneously giving conceptual space for the overtones latent within and surrounding such materiality. Alongside this, it is able to offer a relatively loose sense of priority that evokes very strongly complex dynamics of interplay back and forth between numerous agents, spaces, things, and materials as energy and vibration are passed between them.

Conclusion

The Conclusion draws together the insights gained through the exploration of different environments in the foregoing chapters. These insights suggest how these different situations of congregational musicking can be understood alongside one another. In concluding the book, this chapter returns explicitly to the nine questions asked in Chapter 1. Here the answers that have been given through the different explorations are considered, while reflecting on the outcomes of the volume as a whole. The Conclusion considers themes of contingency and normative experience that can be traced across the chapters of the book, and it suggests what the impact of this investigation might be going forward.

Space, Multiplicity, and De/Reconstructing Resonance

Congregational singing has become problematized within the emerging-church movement. This movement is a self-consciously postmodern expression of Christianity that brings into question not only ideas of group singing but also of the congregation itself, intentionally deconstructing the boundaries, patterns, and norms that have typically served to define the congregational group. Nevertheless, music and sound remain important, if contested, components of emerging-church practices. Through fieldwork undertaken in a number of emerging-church groups, this chapter investigates the ways in which sonic material is deployed in nontraditional settings, and the different patterns of interaction that are set up between agents, spaces, and objects in these environments. In particular, this chapter draws attention to a move away from totalizing patterns of high-intensity resonant union, toward models that, in a variety of different ways, offer space for individuals to experience their own micro-resonant interactions as they engage in a range of different devotional activities.

Sounding Back and Forth

This chapter explores some of the ways in which resonance has been theorized in recent literature. Through this exploration it proposes ways in which attentiveness to dynamics of resonance can be useful in the study of congregational musicking. Drawing upon the work of Hartmut Rosa, the author draws attention to the potential for individuals to aspire to resonant relationships with the world around them. This is supplemented with perspectives from Jean-Luc Nancy in order to emphasize the way in which sound continually draws different entities into dynamic and meaningful relationships, and from the work of Veit Erlmann in order to highlight the ways in which these relationships spill over between sonic and more-than-sonic dimensions. Bringing these authors into conversation, the author suggests the need to hold together a number of different understandings of resonance in order to exploit the term’s ability to point toward the multidirectional and multidimensional complexes of relationships that surround devotional musicking.