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This is an exciting book showing how a spiritual tradition has been formed from a mix of traditions and it also shows clearly how history is constructed. The author shows how a dominant culture tried to make stories simple; she disentangles the strands and shows how complex the stories are. It shows how the spirituality of the US is built out of a merger of European and African traditions. The music is the way the spirituality is merged and identity created through music king. It shows clearly how emotion, theology, and culture interact within the concept of spirituality especially when it is expressed in musicking. It explores a particular tradition in a painstaking way and restoring the place in the story of the sacred and secular traditions from Europe alongside the spiritual traditions coming from Africa via the slave trade within the history of spirituality in the US.

This book is the product of a long journey by a company of academics and practitioners sharing a common interest, titled the Spirituality and Music Education Group (SAME). It started at the International Society for Music Education Conference in Bologna in 2008, with its first gathering in Birmingham in 2010. This book is a product of the various meetings of this group. Since the group formed, the notion of spirituality has been struggling to find a way through the dominant ideology of secularisation in the West to a place in a post-secularising world. This book concentrates on examining this issue from the position of music educators on three continents. This process can be defined as both separate from as well as part of the dominant Christian and humanist traditions, whatever is appropriate in a particular culture. The book represents a fascinating array of lenses through which to examine the many and complex strands within the concept of spirituality.

This volume 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 chapter authors utilize a variety of approaches to query how music makers might blend spirituality’s healing and wholeness with queer theory’s radical liberation.  It represents an eclectic mix of historical, ethnomusicological, case study, narrative, ethnodramatic, philosophical, theological, and theoretical contributions.  The volume 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.  

This book is an autobiographical account of the development of an authentic interiority, based thematically around the Lord’s Prayer. It charts the way in which the Christian faith in which I was enculturated, was refined by my lived experience of music, abuse, forgiveness, interfaith dialogue, gender and vocation (into teaching and priesthood). It sees music and spirituality as a route into forgiveness by transforming (‘mulching’) childhood abuse creatively into celebration. It challenges established therapeutic models and suggests a variety of tools including created ritual. It sees my life as a journey into understanding and experiencing the multi-facetted nature of the Divine. It is set out as a series of meditations on the themes contained in this prayer; it can be read in separate sections, as well as in its totality. My life is seen as a crystal that can be seen through various lenses, shown in different styles of writing – narrative accounts in a personal style, hymns, songs and poems that condense my thinking around a theme and more academic reflection using other people’s writing and experiences to understand my own. Each chapter ends with questions which I hope will enable readers to reflect on their own lived experience.

The intention of this book is to highlight perception and understanding of chant practice, Eastern and Western, from BC to AD, by tracing some ancient roots. Why are there so many references all over the world to praising the divine with sound? Why is the tradition of chant a sacred one? Could it be that praise songs and ritual are at the heart of life and have been, since the beginning of human existence? The text of this book covers a time span of approximately 5000 years. The chapters represent a progression from aspects of the development of Eastern music, to the origins of Western music derived from chant. It opens with a very brief description of ancient river-valley civilisations before selecting the Indus river-valley civilisation as a particular focus. This book takes the discussion about Gregorian chant beyond a European perspective. It aims to open a door onto some aspects of more ancient chant forms, their words and their melodies. The door, once opened, reveals a vista of possibilities.

This sets out an environmental account of song and music that embeds it squarely in its physical environments based on human sensitivity to the sounds around them. It raises many questions and hopefully will stimulate worthwhile research into human roots in our sound environment. Other areas of research, such as economics are now including environmental contributions, why not music? It identifies three sound environments called habitats: outdoors, built, and electronic. These three habitats are viewed as a tool with which to deepen the understanding of the infinite genres of human song and the environments in which they have been born. Each habitat is viewed as an archetype which embraces a predominant mode of sound generation. Early on humans created songs outdoors that are a fit with the natural environment; then music composed indoors became independent of outdoor sound; and then electronic songs were transmitted by electricity, and composed largely from electronic material. Whether the ambient sounds are outdoor, indoor or electronic the impact on human song is audible. Our premise is that human song is made up of sounds derived from our surrounding environment. We think we have made ourselves independent of the physical sound environment, that our songs are learned from other people, from print and from electronic copies. Our focus remains on consciously creating music with little recognition of the planet’s pervasive sound. There is differentiation and diversity, but no disconnect. Humans and their sonic products are part of their environments.

The connection of music to Christian spirituality has been there from the very beginning of the Christian tradition and has developed in different ways in a variety of cultures associated with various denominations as well as theological differences within denominations. Alongside this, the notion of spirituality within music has been generating increasing interest in the context of professional and academic discourses in Western music hand related fields. This has arisen in an increasingly secularized cultural context in which music is often considered as an important carrier for spiritual experiences. It is, however, an area besieged with problems such as the place of religion in the public square, including political, cultural, social, legal, educational, aesthetic, ethical, and religious tensions. This anthology is designed to look at these issues through various lenses and from different perspectives.  It has contributions which are theoretical but also case studies from various church contexts and education in various continents.  Most of the chapters are based on papers given at conferences at the Tavener Centre at the University of Winchester and the Nordoff Robbins Research Centre in London in 2016 and 2017.  It includes case study material, empirical studies, philosophical, theological and theoretical contributions that engage with policy and practice.

The music of John Tavener (1944 – 2013) has brought alive spirituality for many people. His own distinctive spirituality is the essence of his understanding of the nature and role of music. His spirituality is rooted firmly in the Christian tradition but during his lifetime he drew on a variety of spiritual traditions. His fundamental view of music was that it is concerned with heart’s ease. He challenged an increasingly secularized cultural context including its view of the place and role of music. This anthology is designed to look at the issue of Sir John’s spirituality through various lenses and from different perspectives with papers drawn primarily from the study days of the Tavener Centre at the University of Winchester. Contributions are from scholars, musicians, theologians, medical practitioners, informed listeners and practitioners in religious traditions. These include case study material, empirical studies, philosophical, theological and theoretical contributions and accounts from lived experience of spirituality generated by Sir John’s music.

This book represents a significant contribution to debates about identity, the arts and spirituality. Written in an autoethnographic style, the author charts his own journey into understanding the interface between himself, culture and digital technology. He charts a course through West African orate and literate traditions and their relationship to the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans, describing how they became a source of so many dance traditions in Europe and the Americas, such as capoeira, Afro Brazilian and Cuban movement, Hip Hop and Samba. He enters into a detailed analysis of Western linear time and the African curved time; the flux of the Return Beat. He sets out a description of the Yoruba religion of the Orishas; centred around the figure of Olodumare and the concept of Ashe, the animating force of the natural world.

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.

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 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.