Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age by Nekola Anna E.; Wagner Tom; Ingalls Dr Monique

Author:Nekola, Anna E.; Wagner, Tom; Ingalls, Dr Monique
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘Far in Distant Lands to Dwell’: Sacred Harp as Transnational and Sacred Harp in National Consciousness

Sacred Harp interculture uses an imagined diasporic consciousness to transcend and unify a globally dispersed community; however, changes to organizing structures at the national level along with variations and additions to the style, aesthetic and local codes, reveal shifts from a broad diasporic interculture to a transnational network. Although this abstract collective consciousness could be described in earnest as diasporic, physical and virtual interactions can be more accurately understood through a transnational social field, described above (Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994, 5). Specifically, some singers choose not to travel and instead participate only in the events of their own local group, while others travel throughout the wide Sacred Harp singing network and bring back first-hand musical knowledge to their local communities, feeding a sense of enthusiasm for those waiting at home (Basch, Schiller and Blanc 1994). Also, within a social field the inevitable cultural differences – existing simultaneously alongside a cultivated diasporic consciousness – can be comfortably displayed in face-to-face interactions and represented in cyber-media. One significant cultural difference lies in the presence of national consciousness among singers from different countries.

National identity intersects with Sacred Harp identity as singers use The Sacred Harp (that is, its texts and subcultural codes), as well as interactions between local and international participants, to explicitly and implicitly express and perform national consciousness. This intersection describes the complexities of identity multiplicity: participants display loyalty to an imagined borderless diasporic community of spiritually connected Sacred Harp singers; yet through nuanced coded behaviour, participants simultaneously display loyalty to their identity as a citizen of a nation, which, as Benedict Anderson has argued, is also an ‘imagined community’ perceived as a ‘horizontal comradeship’ (1983, 7). Ethnomusicologist Phillip Bohlman suggests that nationalism and musical meaning may be to some extent inseparable, claiming that ‘nationalism contributes fundamentally to the ontology of European music, that is, to music’s “ways of being” in Europe’ (Bohlman 2004, xxi). In line with Bohlman’s assertions, local communities and individual singers within a particular national border engage with ways of being – defined as ‘the actual social relations and practices that individuals engage in’ (Levitt and Schiller 2004, 1010) – and ways of belonging – ‘practices that signal or enact an identity which demonstrates conscious connections to a particular group’ (Levitt and Schiller 2004, 1010) – to a nation while simultaneously engaging in the Sacred Harp interculture. This idea is most vividly expressed through explicit national representation, such as the Scottish singer who wears a kilt to Sacred Harp conventions, or the Cork community’s creation of a shape-note logo that resembles a Celtic cross.

For a more nuanced example, Irish identity has been performed and expressed to the Sacred Harp transnational field through social media. The Cork singers have an active Facebook page, and just weeks after the Second All-Ireland Sacred Harp Convention in 2012, a London singer posted an originally composed limerick about Sacred Harp. The limerick – a poetic form

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.