The Yale Journal of Music & Religion (YJMR) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal publishing scholarship on sacred music in all its ritual, artistic, and cultural contexts across a range of methodologies.
ARTICLES
Congregational Music as Phatic Communication:
Affect, Atmosphere, and Relational Ways of Listening and Being
Anna E. Nekola
Much of the scholarship of congregational music focuses on participatory music in organized corporate worship. This article draws on theories of communication and affect to examine the secondary, background music that happens alongside other events in a worship service or in places other than the space of the sanctuary. Instead of understanding affects as an individual emotion, this article argues that music is made meaningful through a socio-cultural and relational affective process. This in turn enables one to understand how musics, particularly secondary non-participatory musics, work beyond language and representation in phatic ways that can engender powerful feelings of human community and sacred connection.
From the Islands to the Motherland: Motivic Traveling in Contemporary Gospel Music
Lauren Eldridge Stewart
Contemporary gospel musicians frequently use ad libs that describe diasporic desires, imagined identities, and the music itself. “To the islands” and “to the motherland” are directives that call audiences to join musicians in a motivic journey that spans the Black Atlantic, and flows between North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Though deployed throughout the genre’s history, I focus here on the motivic traveling featured in gospel music released within the past two decades. I posit that musicians engage in this symbolism for three possible reasons: to enliven gospel music, to appeal to increasingly diverse congregations both within the U.S. and abroad, and to participate in an ongoing musical conversation among members of the African Diaspora.
Shifting Paradigms, Pandemic Realities:
The Reception of Ishay Ribo’s Music in the American Hasidic Community
Tzipora Weinberg and Gordan Dale
The COVID-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the landscape of social, communal, and religious life. Within the Jewish community, reactions to the virus have taken many forms. One of the most visible and criticized populations, the Hasidic community of Brooklyn, has been the focus of attention from the media and press, and has responded in unprecedented ways, both in political and social arenas. Our close study of the evolution of a particular instance of atypical musical permissiveness in the period preceding COVID-19, and its subsequent development during the pandemic period itself, follows this metamorphosis, limning the shift in communal norms as expressed through the Hasidic embrace of the music of Ishay Ribo. Ribo, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli singer-songwriter, has produced a musical oeuvre that creatively draws upon Biblical and liturgical language to create original lyrics in modern Hebrew, in a soft-rock musical style. This unique fusion has garnered surprising popularity in the secular Israeli world, but has also made inroads into the American Hasidic community which had previously distanced itself from modern Israeli music, specifically music with modern Hebrew lyrics and in that stylistically differs from the community’s sonic norms. Ribo was introduced to the Hasidic music scene before the pandemic, but the marked uptick in the popularity of his music became most evident during the height of this period, as public gatherings and political engagement in the Brooklyn Hasidic community increased. In this study, we argue that these coeval phenomena are interrelated rather than coincidental, and bespeak a larger trend toward openness and interaction with the other that was bolstered by the circumstances of COVID-19.
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