Multifaced Functions of Music in Faith:

An Annotated Bibliography

Lily Cresswell (King’s College London), Luca Gambirasio (University College Cork), Subash Giri (University of Alberta), Anna Wright (Brown University), and Eva (Yi) Yang (University of Rochester)

SEM Student News Research Team

Faith is often defined within the context of religion. In many cases and cultural contexts, music has been a powerful tool for forging a deep connection between a religious understanding of faith and the individual. Observable in different cultures around the world, certain sounds or types of musical instruments have been incorporated, adapted, and employed to maintain and cultivate religious traditions. Nevertheless, in some religious settings certain types of music and musical practice have been excluded and considered “forbidden” or inappropriate. Due to the diversity of musical experiences and requirements in these contexts, faith, when considered within the relationship between music and religion, must also be valued for the diversity of its expression.

In recent decades, the scope of faith has broadened to encompass a wide range of discourses related to topics such as gender, identity, ecology, and the human body. Consequently, the relationships between faith and music have also been redefined because music research has expanded to address various issues related to faith, including resistance and social justice (Sherinian 2014), and the betterment of humankind and societies (Sykes 2018). Based on musical interactions with faith—in contexts both within and outside of religion—this annotated bibliography aims to explore the multifaceted role of music in faith practices. 

Most of the sources included in this bibliography were published within the past ten years, and they notably discuss a diversity of faith-based engagements with music. These sources approach topics and practices around expanded understandings of music and faith extending to questions around community, body, and alternative forms of practice. We hope that this list reflects a growing trend of inclusivity and openness in considerations of faith, one that we see expressed in various ways by the authors’ contributions to this issue. The referenced texts work on both macro and micro levels within the broad topic, with some approaching vast themes such as music in a post-secular world, while others offer a narrower scope focusing on music and faith in certain cultures. 

Annotated Bibliography

Arnold, Jonathan. 2019. Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press.

Arnold’s Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age deals with the broader subject of music and Christianity in a comprehensive way, while making a conscious effort to center on the “non-professional listener,” or layman. Including research that involves both historical and ethnographic methods, it is split into three larger sections: “Medievalism to Post-Secularism”; “The Human Mind and Society”; and “Belief and Unbelief.” Notably, Arnold’s inclusion of ethnography in his approach, interviewing a wide array of people involved in religion and music—writers, artists, scientists, historians, atheists, and clergy—and drawing on his own experience as a professional choral singer, lends a conversational feel to this volume, which reads as a detailed and thorough exploration of the role of sacred music in the lives of a complex and diverse listening community.

Butler, Melvin L. 2019. Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

In this ethnographic study, Melvin L. Butler explores Jamaican Pentecostal musicking and identity while simultaneously drawing on several dimensions of his own professional identity within this faith community. As an acclaimed saxophonist, choir director, ethnomusicologist, and Pentecostal believer himself, the author engages this music with flexibility, taking into consideration different viewpoints, and approaching the study of music-making from multiple angles. Butler examines the multiplicity of ways with which Pentecostal worshippers on the island of Jamaica and New York City position and express themselves through religious music. This work is focused on both the music and the people that are making it in all their complexities, taking into account local and personal beliefs, modifications, and the tendency to incorporate different genres in order to adapt to global flows such as living in the diaspora and performing African American gospel music. According to the author, the aim of this book, besides offering a comprehensive ethnography of this sociomusical phenomenon, is to show that the boundaries of Jamaican Pentecostal identity are neither solid nor stable, as the practitioners refashion themselves in as many forms according to particular musical, theological, and cultural contexts.  

Harris, Rachel. 2020. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

This book is the culmination of the author’s decades-long ethnographic fieldwork regarding the Uygur population in Xinjiang and former Soviet countries in Central Asia. In considering their soundscape as a means of faith embodiment and emplacement, the author offers an overview of the constant struggle of this Islamic community within the People’s Republic of China. The Uyghurs are portrayed here as a minority within their homeland, and Harris endeavors to appropriately understand and describe their emotions, experiences, and habitus, through her attention to their daily relationship with music. In the second part of the book, Harris moves from analyzing music forms and genres to the pressing issues of the current Uyghur situation, describing how their soundscape has been marked as “noise” and equated with terrorism due to its Islamic content. The author highlights how local people have been forced to participate in patriotic songs remembering the Cultural Revolution by a government that wants to erase their soundscape, via a form of “weaponization of music” against their culture and faith.

Jones, Alisha Lola. 2020. Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

In this book, Jones embarks on an explorative journey into the religious and gendered identity performances of African American male gospel singers. Looking at church music, with specific focus on the Black Pentecostal Christian movement, this text works within the theme of desire and faith to understand the intense and complex negotiations black male gospel singers undertake to navigate their sexuality and identity in a traditionally heteronormative space. Based on ethnographic research, including case studies of countertenor Patrick Dailey and queer preacher-musician Tonéx, Jones rigorously examines representations of queerness in this strand of music and faith and demonstrates how religious individuals challenge a binary understanding of gender within the Pentecostal faith. This text offers a vibrant account of a current movement, giving a spotlight to its key players while touching upon important issues such as sexual assault, identity anxiety, and queer representation. 

Jurik, Andy. 2019. “‘It's Not about Genre, It's about Emotion’: Composer William Brittelle on Faith, Music, and Identity.” PopMatters. Last modified May 31, 2019. https://www.popmatters.com/william-brittelle-2019-interview-2638257167.html.

Working again from a specifically religious definition of “faith,” this interview with composer William Brittelle allows for an exploration of music and faith from a first-hand perspective. As readers, we are taken on a journey through Brittelle’s relationship with Buddhism and Christianity and his own understanding of faith and its manifestation in his own music. Brittelle establishes a more liberal view of religion and music, both as separate entities and as one in his own music, again paving the way for a more expansive understanding of music and faith. This interview provides a valuable firsthand account that is valuable as an insider perspective.

Luthy, Tamara. 2019. “Bhajan on the Banks of the Ganga: Increasing Environmental Awareness via Devotional Practice.” Journal of Dharma Studies 1: 229–240.

In this article, Tamara Luthy starts with an ethnography of the Ganga aarti as undertaken by the Parmarth Niketan ashram, a spiritual hermitage located in Rishikesh, India. The Aarti is a religious ceremony honoring the river Ganga, common in North India, which includes music, dances, and the offering of light to the river. Her attention is focused on how the performers and some of the devotees, via this sacred performance, attempt to raise awareness of toxic pollution in the river. She describes how the ashram has developed a “mobile” version of the ceremony that includes lectures and a puppet show along with the religious offer in a sort of faith-centered environmental activism. 

Marini, Stephen A. 2016. “Music, Media, and Message: Transitions in Contemporary American Evangelical Music.” In Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, edited by Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip V. Bohlman, 163–190.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

This chapter examines the broad transitions in genre, style, and presentation that have occurred in contemporary American Evangelical sacred music. Because music and lyrics have the capacity to encompass Evangelical spiritual experience, sacred music has become an indispensable ritual medium for religious movements. This chapter focuses on the four interrelated pathways along which the transitions in contemporary sacred music take place: literal, historical, figurative, and ontological. While the author asserts that contemporary Evangelical songs represent a revival of sacred music, they also raise two questions: 1) Whether contemporary Evangelical songs have crossed a line that jeopardizes or invalidates their claim to sacredness; 2) Whether their lyrics have abandoned the doctrinal foundations that define Evangelicalism as a religious movement.

McClure, John S. 2011. “The Grain of the Voice: Inventing the Soundscape of Religious Desire.” In Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention, 109–22. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

McClure's approach to theological invention focuses on some of the processes involved in the production of popular music. He introduces the methods and medium of mashup to develop a religious role for the grain of the voice based on Barthes' own theorization: "this body [of music] in this place at this time, in all of its materiality, gave (and now regives) voice, speaks, or works beneath and at the language of music.” McClure's framing here attempts to fill the ineffable space of faith and desire between the voicing of the communicator and the receiving audience. The “grain” creates the tone or tone of voice that a theological text establishes, inventing the shape of desire in music. After developing a framework for considering the role of technology within the relationship between mashup and religion—such as the use of microphones, sound systems, and equalization—he concludes with an emphasis on how to “voice religious desire” in popular music. 

Pallota-Chairolli, Maria, ed. 2018. Living and Loving in Diversity: An Anthology of Australian Multicultural Queer Adventures. Adelaide: Wakefield Press. 

Faith is applied both literally and broadly in this collection. Written by Australian personalities of media, art, humanities, health and education, in the LGBTQ+ community and representing multicultural and multifaith backgrounds, the chapters speak from lived experience. Some chapters explicitly focus on religion, while others discuss faith as a more flexible idea. Similarly, direct references to music are not abundant—with the exception of “The Experience,” a song which advocates for human rights within the frame of Indian faith, laid out in verse as its own chapter—and yet this text's value is boundless. Themes of identity, community, sexuality, nationality, and belonging are explored in a poetic manner, leaving the reader with deep understandings of a range of topics on both a micro and macro level. 

Rees, Helen. 2000. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

This book examines the development of Lijiang's Dongjing, a minority-performed genre that initially included both sacred and secular roles. While Dongjing music became a completely secular phenomenon in 1949, the amateur and commercial use began in 1988. This monograph draws on Rees’s fieldwork research in Lijiang County, Yunnan Province, southwestern China. As a ritual genre that originated among the majority Han Chinese, Dongjing was adopted by the Naxi ethnic minority. Although this minority-performed music has been heavily reworked and reinterpreted in the public sphere, Lijiang Dongjing, as well as other minority art forms, are encouraged by the state for the value of both political and economic persuasion. In Lijiang county's booming tourism economy, Rees suggests that Dongjing music, with "potential contradiction of ethnic affiliation," has "exchanged the traditionally religious character for a highly visible and audible role," bolstering the Naxi identity through economic success in music. 

Sherinian, Zoe C. 2014. Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  

The book examines the Dalit (formerly called “untouchables;” the poorest by caste hierarchy from birth) Christian community of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India and presents an ethnographic study of Tamil Christian folk music for the liberation of Tamil Dalits. Sherinian portrays James Theophilus Appavoo (pen name Parattai Annan) as the central actor in this book and as the liberator of his own Dalit people, and delineates the process of liberating of poor, Dalits, and women of Tamil Nadu through the creation, recreation, and transmission of Christian folk music. The major argument of the book is that music can be used as an activist tool by socially, politically, culturally, and religiously marginalized outcasts, in that music can help to ease or eradicate caste oppression and hierarchical violence in this specific society. Sherinian discusses how the musical practice, cultural forms and values of Dalits (e.g., using the parai frame drum in the church, an instrument primarily used by untouchables at funerals and considered socially-polluted) of the Madurai village helped facilitate the process of liberation.

Skyes, Jim. 2018. The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

This book presents a sonic study of post-war Sri Lanka by focusing on musical giving, also referred to as “sonic generosity,” of the Sinhala Buddhist ritual group Beravā and the Sri Lankan ethnic group Tamil. It examines the use of ritual music, dance, and drama of Sinhala and Tamil as well as other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka for the purposes of medicine, protection from (war) violence, interaction between communities, and understanding of shared cultural history through sonic exchanges. Sykes discusses the notion of identity episteme—personhood, territory, population, sovereignty, and nationality often discussed in music studies, particularly in ethnomusicology as an instrument that forces people into ethnicized regions and neighbourhoods. According to Skyes the notion of sonic generosity in this book is “…the idea that sound/music is a technology of care, offered as a gesture of respect (to gods and to humans) that protects and heals people, and that such offerings not only help Others but are ways of caring for oneself” (8). The major argument of the book is that the identity paradigm—which emerged in the 1980s and became fully hegemonic in the 1990s—has had negative effects on musicians/people by creating communal difference and conflict (2). The book proposes new ways of studying the relationship between music, sound, people, and community by using the musical giving found in Sri Lanka as a model.

Wyss, Georgia, dir. 2017.  Mantra: Sounds into Silence (film). Tengotwo Films.

This documentary is about the international practice of chanting mantras, the sacred utterances considered to possess spiritual and divine efficacy typical of Buddhism and Hinduism. The film presents an interesting analysis of the emotional and psychological power of chanting and the relationship between voice studies and the development of the individual. It includes the accounts of many musicians about their process of self-discovery via this peculiar singing practice, regardless of the original religion. Chanting mantras is described as a way in which a faith-related action can be a tool for constructing a social space and shaping personal identity. There are many artists featured, and each discusses how they individually encountered and embodied this musical practice.