Music Education as Prayer

Often referred to as a “national shame,” segregated Roma settlements located on the outskirts of small towns with poor infrastructure and living standards are unique to Slovakia. Resulting from decades of forced resettlements and human rights violations, these remote places continue to suffer from the effects of the problematic transition after the fall of the communist regime in 1989 when many Roma lost economic support previously granted by the communist state. At the same time, governmental measures denied their ethnic identity and contributed to the decline of traditional Roma crafts and sources of livelihood. Roma villages continue to be difficult to access for external educators, especially when it comes to music—a luxury addition to the elementary education package, already endangered or even temporarily canceled for thousands of Roma children during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns. Music teachers working with local children struggle to access Roma settlements due to a lack of education facilities, funding, and specialized training. And for many Roma children and their families, it is too difficult to travel weekly to music classes in cities. 

This situation can be explained via the concept of “scarcity” in music education, developed by Daniel Shevock, a non-Roma scholar who studies the intersections of Whiteness and poverty in rural music education. Shevock uses the term to refer to the inability to be musically educated in rural places or outside official structures (2016, 33). These conditions leave music to be taught, experienced, and socialized exclusively in the living rooms and outdoor spaces of Roma households. Under these circumstances, learning music typically occurs during everyday household rituals, and is fostered by a musically advanced paternal figure. All the children from the specific Roma community I talked with indicated that their first music mentors were their father and uncles. Musical traditions continue to be bound by kinship to adulthood. 

The children of a local Roma community in Stará cesta[1] (a small town in the Prešov county) are members of such families. However, their musical lives and opportunities have been enriched thanks to an initiative called Gréckokatolícka rómska misia (“the Greek Orthodox Church’s Roma Mission”). As a pilot for a larger project in the region, the Mission has built a vibrant community center, the first of its kind in Slovakia, where it accommodates several music and dance classes. This center is situated in Stará cesta near the Roma “camp”—the emic term for the local Roma settlement, used by missionaries and local Roma alike. By cultivating spaces where local non-Roma and Roma children can unreservedly interact through music as a spiritual practice, the Roma mission has brought new cultural actors who operate under principles of religious organization that could be described as “liquid church”—a faith community functioning as a network of individuals and groups working within a community and broadly reaching into everyday life (Ward 2002). This entanglement of life and faith is integral to the Greek Orthodox Church’s Roma Mission evangelization principle. Workers of the Mission believe that Roma people cannot be truly socially emancipated without an investment and belief in Christianity. Conversely, one of my missionary interlocutors has also argued that non-religious community involvement comes first, and calls to join worship should only be made after months of social work. 

By cultivating spaces where local non-Roma and Roma children can unreservedly interact through music as a spiritual practice, the Roma mission has brought new cultural actors who operate under principles of religious organization that could be described as “liquid church”—a faith community functioning as a network of individuals and groups working within a community and broadly reaching into everyday life (Ward 2002).

Music education provided by the mission lies at the core of this evangelization design. It is not necessarily tied with the worship itself, yet it subtly teaches its subjects that music performance and faith are interconnected areas of experience and expression. Rather than relying solely on Roma traditional music sources from the area, the Roma mission specializes in Greek Orthodox worship music and the version of this music considered to have Roma elements, which was in fact developed in and for this community by the local Greek Orthodox priest as an outlet for children’s musical and spiritual expression. The loose term “Roma gospel” sometimes refers to catchy worship songs with integrated traditional Roma rhythms, and sometimes also to songs with no musical reference to the ethnic tradition (in the case of these songs, “Roma gospel” refers solely to the ethnic identity of the performers). Both categories of worship songs are utilized for worship service but also during a range of events like music festivals and tours. Now the local tradition of this “Roma gospel,” engineered by non-Roma missionaries working in the area for over two decades, is becoming dominated by local Roma themselves through performance, songwriting, and music video production. The reason is that Roma parents who got involved in gospel bands are including their children and other family members in their music projects. As a result, the worship genre has become more prominent in the area than the traditional Roma repertoire. 

My interlocutors have also mentioned that worship music is, for them, superior to other genres (like traditional Roma music) thanks to its unequaled spiritual significance. For instance, one child interlocutor, Matej, said that in worship music, “nothing is ever wasted [...] because we know that God listens,” whereas other genres, he claims, sneak in some “corrupted” messages and meanings (Horváth 2019). With its joyous melodies, playful rhymes, and musical syntax that involves the so-called “gradation” between verses (grády[2]), local gospel provides the children of Stará cesta a capacity for affective involvement that is radically socialized into a diverse community of local Roma families, families of the missionaries, and also larger audiences of Christian music concerts and festivals.

In my ethnographic research, I attempt to understand how the children from the Roma gospel community shape their musical lives in these new social and spiritual contexts. I recognize that the enterprise of music education in Stará cesta functions as a subtle tool for cultural domination because the subjects of music teaching are socialized into a community that, in the end, requires complete devotion and also abandonment of traditional Roma spirituality.[3] To theorize this area of religious community involvement, I would like to adopt the perspective offered by Rachel Beckles Willson, in which she describes two primary, traditional angles for reading of “the Mission”—“cultural imperialism on the one hand, and musical conflict transformation on the other” (2011, 303). Willson suggests that these binary frameworks should be overcome to create a space for nuance through fostering “sensitivity towards individuals’ personally-cherished convictions” and appreciation of the peculiar connections between individual experience and larger structures and histories (ibid.). In my research, I also aspire to position my findings outside the binaries of hegemony and resistance (see Gelbart 2010) and appreciate the complex political role of the Roma gospel in Stará cesta as both instrumental to the powerful hegemony of the Greek Orthodox Church and culturally innovative in terms of offering new hybrid forms of music and community involvement. 

Willson suggests that these binary frameworks should be overcome to create a space for nuance through fostering “sensitivity towards individuals’ personally-cherished convictions” and appreciation of the peculiar connections between individual experience and larger structures and histories.

While I recognize the problematic power dynamics present in the mission project—however challenged by the spiritual agency of Roma members of the community who have worked out their own religious narrative and practice—I also feel the obligation to appreciate that any power relationships distributed among Roma and non-Roma children, parents, and missionaries are ultimately subject to an affective organization that teaches and values a tuning process which leads to a spiritual experience during concerts and private gatherings. This affective spirituality is conceived as a shared state within these participant communities. My child interlocutor Štefan has described a potential for a spiritual dialogue based on affective possibilities of music: “It is possible to speak with God through music. I talk to him through music better than I normally can [through prayer]” (Kurák 2019). This and other remarks from my interlocutors about enhancements of spiritual experiences through gospel music have indicated the potency of affect as an epistemic force. Affect can traverse or subvert dominant power relations and ethnic and class boundaries while producing its own identitarian configurations. For these reasons, an affect-oriented perspective offers a framework for my research that does not erase the nuances and ambiguities between music education, power and faith. As Ana Hofman writes, the affective turn in ethnomusicology represents “a new emphasis on embodiment, material substance and the senses” (2015, 36). I feel the need to explore these aspects of spiritually-centered music education in Stará cesta as well. 

At the same time, there is more to say about the hegemonic significance of this affective spirituality. I will try to explain this political dimension of the Roma gospel movement through the seemingly neutral language of “acceptance” and “love.” Both Roma and non-Roma local children describe the emotions and experiences of “love” as a non-judgemental predicament that is shared among the participants of the local gospel tradition. For instance, one young interlocutor, Štefan, said, “When I came [to the community center] for the first time, I assumed that they don't accept me, but they in fact did accept me, and after a year, I have realized that I was the one who was not open to acceptance. And now, since I know that, I accept everyone, and I feel love towards everyone” (Kurák 2019). Štefan is using the word “love” (láska) as a code for acceptance across ethnic and generational boundaries, since the previous assumptions about “them” being unaccepting concerned mostly white adults. This acceptance could be theorized as “multicultural love,” according to Sara Ahmed, who uses this term to describe a love that “is extended to others who are recognized as ‘being different’” (2003, 133). Ahmed recognizes the limits of the unconditional acceptance under the concept of multicultural love, in that there is a conditional call for those outside the bounds of generally-accepted norms to conform in order to be granted acceptance. In the case of the Roma mission, the children must adhere to the given spiritual organization to fully participate in the creation of the multicultural love object. Their affective spirituality is therefore tied to distinct religious ideas and values, and the ultimate objective of this spirituality is membership by faith alone. Due to the utilitarian nature of gospel performance, education in music, and the music itself, is implemented not as a goal but rather as a method for evangelization. 

Their affective spirituality is therefore tied to distinct religious ideas and values, and the ultimate objective of this spirituality is membership by faith alone.

I also argue that any new forms of performance and affective organization in the community are aesthetically subordinate to spiritual goals (as in the above-mentioned statement from my youth interlocutor Matej, who says that worship music is always good simply because “God listens”). Thus, music education in Stará cesta represents an engine for the production of multicultural love as a collective entity which, while creating intimate space for self-exploration, community bonding, and unique affective states, at the same time fortifies the hegemonic influence of the Greek Orthodox Church. In my future research, I aspire to reflect this tension between intimacy and power in a more elaborate form. 

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2003. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Buzalka, Ján. 2020. “Tridsať či tristo rokov? O hodnote práce” [Thirty or Three Hundred Years? On the Value of Labor]. In Rómovia 30 rokov po revolúcii. Úvahy a reflexie na ceste za slobodou  [Roma 30 Years after the Revolution. Accounts and Reflections on the Path to Freedom], edited by Rafael Vlado, 86–90. Bratislava: eduRoma.

Gelbart, Petra Margita. 2010. Learning Race, Music and Nation in the Czech Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Horváth, Matej (pseudonym). 2019. Interview with the author, December 21, 2019. 

Hofman, Ana. 2015. “The Affective Turn in Ethnomusicology.” Muzikologija 18: 35–55. 

Kurák, Štefan (pseudonym). 2019. Interview with the author, December 21, 2019. 

Shevock, Daniel. 2016. “Music Educated and Uprooted: My Story of Rurality, Whiteness, Musicing, and Teaching.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (4): 30–55.

Wade, Matthew, and Maria Hynes. 2013. “Worshipping Bodies: Affective Labour in the Hillsong Church.” Geographical Research 51 (2): 173–179.

Ward, Pete. 2002. Liquid Church. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Willson, Rachel Beckles. 2011. “Music Teachers as Missionaries: Understanding Europe's Recent Dispatches to Ramallah.” Ethnomusicology Forum 20 (3): 301–325.