Music and Spirituality – serie

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.

Rivers of Sacred Sound traces the flow of influences from East to West, fromBC to AD and from wordless jubilations to the setting of texts. It takes thediscussion about western chant beyond a European perspective.The text of this book, preceded by an introduction, is presented in sevenchapters and covers a period of approximately five thousand years. There aremany references all over the world to praising the divine with sound. Thusthe starting point is the praise song, a fundamental impulse in mankind. TheRg-Veda requests that our loudest-sounding hymn be accepted, as food mostdelightful to the Gods. The Psalms request us to make a joyful noise unto Godand to sing forth the honour of His name. Spontaneous songs became ritualevents. In an aural culture what was the role of gesture and what is its rolenow? There are many doors to open in pursuing these and other questions.This book opens some of them.

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.

School can be an epicenter for expressing what troubles or energizes the wider community. Taking a step back from the messiness of today’s issues and clarifying what we mean by school may provide a new or refreshed lens for viewing these institutions. Schools are sacred, not in a religious sense but in terms of their potential value. At all levels of schooling, teaching and learning are its sacred tasks. And teaching and learning are sacred because the knowledge and skills they impart can potentially open the learner’s mind to meaning-making, wisdom, and self-understanding, where values are clarified and life commitments are made. Seeing the school as sacred implies that its environs are sacred space, its schedules are sacred time, and its actions are sacred rites. They are to be respected, protected, and nurtured. This has profound implications for our demeanor and actions, teaching approaches, curriculum planning, administrative priorities, policy-making, and resourcing.

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.

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.

Identifying the roots of African American spirituals and other religious folk music has intrigued academics, hymnologists and song leaders since this genre came to the public eye in 1867. The conversation on origins has waned and waxed for over eighty years, sometimes polemical, sometimes compromising. They Bear Acquaintance looks at this discussion through the output of various well-regarded researchers from the twentieth century. The effects of cultural distinctions, immigration patterns and class structure have all left their imprint on the anatomy of the music. No one living has ever heard a spiritual performed in an authentic setting, so misconceptions abound. Pre-dating the American Civil War and achieving global attention in the Civil Rights movement, the spirituals soften the edges of difficult situations, and speak gently, yet poignantly, to human struggles. The book also pinpoints new material from a wide range of sources in the twenty-first century that will preserve and affirm this music for many years to come.