June Boyce-Tillman – författare

This book is an autobiographical account of the development of an authentic interiority. It charts the way in which the Christian faith in which the author was enculturated was refined by her lived experience of music, abuse, forgiveness, interfaith dialogue, gender and vocation (into teaching and priesthood). The author describes how music and spirituality can create a route into forgiveness by creatively transforming («mulching») childhood abuse into celebration. Her work challenges established therapeutic models and suggests a variety of alternative tools, including created ritual.The volume is set out as a series of meditations on the themes contained in the Lord’s Prayer; it can be read in separate sections, as well as in its totality. The author’s life is perceived as a crystal that can be viewed through various lenses, illustrated by different styles of writing. These include narrative accounts written in a personal style; hymns, songs and poems that condense her thinking around a theme; and more academic reflection, using other people’s writing and experiences to understand her own.

This book is intended to challenge the status quo of music learning and experience by intersecting various musical topics with discussions of spirituality and queer studies. Spanning from the theoretical to the personal, the authors utilize a variety of approaches to query how music makers might blend spirituality’s healing and wholeness with queer theory’s radical liberation.Queering Freedom: Music, Identity and Spirituality represents an eclectic mix of historical, ethnomusicological, case study, narrative, ethnodramatic, philosophical, theological, and theoretical contributions. The book reaches an international audience, with invited authors from around the world who represent the voices and perspectives of over ten countries. The authors engage with policy, practice, and performance to critically address contemporary and historical music practices. Through its broad and varied writing styles and representations, the collection aims to shift perspectives of possibility and invite readers to envision a fresh, organic, and more holistic musical experience.

The relationship between Christian theology and music has been complex since the early daysof the Church. In the twentieth century the secularization of Western culture has led to furthercomplexity. The search for the soul, following Nietzsche’s declaration of the Death of God hasled to an increasing body of literature in many fields on spirituality. This book is an attemptto open up a conversation between these related discourses, with contributions reflecting arange of perspectives within them. It is not the final word on the relationship but expresses aconviction about their relationship. Collecting together such a variety of approaches allows newunderstandings to emerge from their juxtaposition and collation. This book will contribute tothe ongoing debate between theology, spirituality, culture and the arts. It includes contexts withstructured relationships between music and the Church alongside situations where spiritualityand music are explored with sometimes distant echoes of Divinity and ancient theologiesreinterpreted for the contemporary world.

Our age owes Sir John Tavener deep gratitude. His works cross both cultural and disciplinary boundaries. He illustrated how to deal with intense suffering and felt deeply for the suffering of the world. He stands as an icon representing a view of artistic expression as a way of generating hope and transcendence.In Tavener’s thinking, spirituality was closely tied to wellbeing and healing and this book considers the spiritual encounters that brought him ‘heart’s ease’ and the communication of that experience to performers and listeners through his composition. The contributors to this book include scholars, musicians, theologians, medical practitioners, informed listeners and practitioners in religious traditions. It includes case study material, empirical studies, philosophical, theological and theoretical contributions along with accounts from lived experience of the spirituality generated by Tavener’s music. This is set in the context of a world that sees spirituality sometimes coupled and sometimes uncoupled from religion.The pattern of the book is an alternation between interludes and chapters illuminating different facets of the crystal of Tavener’s creative work and the spirituality and ‘heart’s ease’ it can offer.

There is an immense and growing literature on singing in relation to a number of areas, often associated with wellbeing of various kinds – physical, mental, emotional, communal, public and spiritual. Although spirituality is mentioned in much of the literature it is often as an addendum to other more measurable aspects of the experience/event. This volume consists of various approaches to the spirituality of the singing experience, particularly how these have changed or even been heightened during the current pandemic. This collection offers a number of very wide-ranging perspectives from across the world. The chapters are drawn from several cultures and include a number referring to the various lockdowns that have characterized the pandemic. The book includes a mixture of chapters – which incorporate academic references and discourse – and interludes that are more reflective accounts of individual experiences.

This volume focuses on the ways in which mutual musical engagement might play a role in creating healthful, life-giving experiences. Scholarly chapters and reflective interludes illustrate how people use music to forge authentic spiritual and emotional connections with others, including in times of physical isolation and political unrest. Chapters and interludes address topics such as relationship building, community, wellbeing, therapy, education, and ecology. Each describes various ways in which individuals connect authentically with themselves, others, the music they make, and the physical and spiritual world around them. Many authors address current global crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, nationalism, environmental injustice, and associated climate catastrophes. Authors articulate various qualities of authentic human connections, and discuss various ways in which music might be poised to facilitate emotional and spiritual connections in some of the most challenging and physically isolating times.

This book interrogates the notion of belonging through musicing rituals in the South African context. The authors raise questions such as «What can we learn from musicing rituals?», «What does it mean to belong through musicing?» and «In what ways could musicing address marginalization and transform a broken society?»To answer these questions, the editors employ a range of perspectives from micro-sociological theory to personal accounts of marginalization and belonging through musicing. The contributors employ both established and novel qualitative strategies of inquiry including case studies, narrative inquiry, performative autoethnography, practice as research, and interpretive phenomenological analysis, amongst others.Although this book focuses on musicing in the South African context, international readers will also benefit from the rich theoretical and methodological contributions in this volume. It investigates the potentiality of cultivating a sense of belonging through musicing rituals to heal a mutilated world. The contributions will inform and enhance readers’ repertoire of musicing strategies in both community and educational contexts.This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Numbers: 118579). The Grantholder, Prof Liesl van der Merwe,　acknowledges that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in　Ritualised　Belonging,　generated by the NRF supported research (Grant Numbers: 118579), is that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

This book reflects on a journey as a shamanic healer and a psychotherapist, and how the integration of psychotherapy and traditional healing methods emerged. It explores an initial training in cognitive behavioural psychotherapy, to gestalt therapy, to body therapy, to energy healing and shamanism, to develop a unified theory. It explores the process by means of a dialogue between a psychotherapist, a shamanic healer, an academic and an integrative therapist. This is placed in a dialogue within the therapist herself. Later chapters give examples of the unified theory in practice, including both individual and in group settings. Opening and closing chapters contextualise the work in the context of developments on the internet in the areas of wellbeing and therapeutic practices drawing on different cultures.

This volume explores how negotiating power between different cultures, as well as within educational contexts, can shape personal growth, empowerment, and well-being in musicking practices. It examines the interface between individuals engaged in musicking and the institutions and societies that exercise power over them. The chapters investigate strategies of resistance and survival used by musicians who challenge or reject institutionalised ways of knowing. In doing so, they often draw on traditionally marginalised domains of musical experience—such as expression, affect, and values. In some contributions, these domains form the central argument, while in others they are integrated with more conventional concerns of musical materials and construction. Together, these perspectives raise important questions about the role of spirituality in the lives of musicians, offering fresh insights into how musicking can contribute to spiritual flourishing and emotional well-being even under conditions of constraint.

This volume explores how music-making, listening, composing and caring within musicking contexts foster spiritual and emotional well-being in diverse settings.By engaging with both deeply personal and collective experiences across musical contexts, the chapters showcase innovative forms of autoethnography—individual, duo, trio, and collaborative—that illuminate how music shapes meaning, belonging, transformation, and healing. Rich with narrative, theory, and creative expression, this collection brings forward multiple dimensions of spirituality—metaphysical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergaian, and extrapersonal—while offering fresh insights into vulnerability, compassion, and the search for wholeness.Spanning contexts as diverse as professional performance, education, care centres, grief journeys, and everyday listening, the contributions reveal music’s enduring role in connecting body, spirit, community, and environment.

Early Christianity saw women in positions of authority and a fluid theology that included feminine figures in the notion of the Divine. However, for centuries a male trinity has dominated theology with the characteristics of triumphalism, clarity, order, eternality and unity.Unconventional Wisdom examines the attempt within the last half of the twentieth century to unearth the hidden theological tradition of feminine Wisdom. The book presents the work of influential theorists, notably Foucault, Belenky and Dorothy Smith. The recovery of the feminine in the divine is linked with the rediscovery of subjugated value systems and what this might mean for ecclesiology.

Early Christianity saw women in positions of authority and a fluid theology that included feminine figures in the notion of the Divine. However, for centuries a male trinity has dominated theology with the characteristics of triumphalism, clarity, order, eternality and unity. 'Unconventional Wisdom' examines the attempt within the last half of the twentieth century to unearth the hidden theological tradition of feminine Wisdom. The book presents the work of influential theorists, notably Foucault, Belenky and Dorothy Smith. The recovery of the feminine in the divine is linked with the rediscovery of subjugated value systems and what this might mean for ecclesiology.

June Boyce-Tillman's new book identifies and discusses the very issues that could render the education that we offer through music more engaging and relevent to those whom we teach. The book presents a wide-ranging and rich mix of psychological, ethnomusicological, philosophical, educational, mythological and theological material. Into this rich tapestry is woven a concern to consider seriously New Age phenomena and to empathize with people's experiences and life stories. Very occasionally, a book is published that has the potential of seriously challenging current orthodoxy and practice. This is such a book.'- British Journal of Music Education.'June Boyce-Tillman has published this beautifully researched essay at what I think may prove to be a vital re-balancing point in our history, when there is a developing realisation that post-Enlightenment culture with its emphasis on scientific reason and logic needs to incorporate again the "subjugated ways of knowing" as June Boyce-Tillman terms Gooch's value "system B" which favours being, subjectivity, personal feeling, emotion, magic, involvement, associative ways of knowing, belief and non-causal knowledge... The bibliography and referencing are excellent, massively extending the hub of resource which this book itself presents for further study, investigation and good practice by people from many walks of life. Many thanks to June Boyce-Tillman for her work.'- The Christian Parapsychologist'In Constructing Musical Healing, June Boyce-Tillman attempts to blend ancient and modern ideas and practices with her own perspective as a New Age practitioner. In an interdisciplinary effort, Boyce-Tillman describer particular philosophical aspects concerning Western music, practices of shamans and healers, and explorations of the new consciousness reflected in the New Age movement and music therapy. Her goal is to establish a new model of healing as balance including physical, psychological, and spiritual elements in a process approach, which she parallels with music therapy practice...Boyce-Tillman has some promising ideas. And certainly she adds her words, her thoughts, and beliefs to the continuing questions about the compatibility between "healing" and "therapy"...The strength of the book is that it has the potential to encourage our own discourse by giving us an opportunity to compare and contrast our own ideas about music therapy with at least one New Age practitioner.'- The Arts in PsychotherapyDrawing on literature from philosophy, anthropology, psychology and musicology, Boyce-Tillman looks at musical traditions and notions of healing in different societies. Her work includes a number of case studies in various cultures - spirit possession cults in Africa and shamans in various traditions. It explores contemporary musical practice in the New Age including neo-shamanism and notions of musical healing in Western musical aesthetics. The use of music in Western medicine is also studied, as Boyce-Tillman draws together a theory of what actually occurs when music is associated with therapeutic intention and examines the role of music within healthcare, education and the community.

The figure of Hildegard of Bingen towers both over her own and our present age. Her ideas about healing, the arts, the relationship between science and theology, the interdependence of male and female and the interconnectedness of all living beings with each other and their Creator have extraordinary relevance to our contemporary understanding of these issues. Yet for all Hildegard's astonishing creativity and originality, her spirituality is firmly rooted in the Rule of St Benedict and its emphasis on daily prayer and meditative reading of the Scriptures. This introduction to her life and thought includes many practical spiritual exercises that will enable us to bring Hildegard's wisdom and vision of wholeness to our busy, fragmented lives today.

This book explores the alliance of theology and music in the Christian liturgical tradition, interrogating the challenges posed by the gendered nature of church leadership in many areas of its life. It examines the relationship between theology, spirituality and music, concentrating on women’s perceptions of these. The title draws on the Report of the Archbishop’s Commission on Church Music from 1992 which was entitled In Tune with Heaven. It questions the absence of women’s voices and experiences from the literature and attempts to redress this. It sets out the values that underpin Christian musical liturgical traditions primarily in Europe and the USA with a view to understanding where women are situated within or outside these traditions. It draws on material from many interviews with contemporary practitioners from a variety of contexts. It does not set out to be a definitive history of women in these traditions but simply to give some small vignettes that illustrate a variety of positions that they have occupied in various denominations – and thus make their often hidden contributions more visible.

This book concerns an examination of the totality of the musical experience with a view to restoring the soul within it. It starts with an analysis of the strands in the landscape of contemporary spirituality. It examines the descriptors spiritual but not religious, and spiritual and religious, looking in particular at the place of faith narratives in various spiritualities. These strands are linked with the domains of the musicking experience: Materials, Expression, Construction and Values. The book sets out a model of the spiritual experience as a negotiated relationship between the musicker and the music. It looks in detail at various models of musicking drawn from music therapy, ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural studies. It examines the relationship between Christianity and music as well as examining some practical projects showing the effect of various Value systems in musicking, particularly in intercultural dialogue. It finally proposes an ecclesiology of musical events that includes both orate and literate traditions and so is supportive of inclusive community.