Music and Religion

Abstract Music and Religion is a critical examination of how scholars understand the relationships of human and other-than-human beings through sound. The author traces the changing relationships between scholars and gods, spirits, demons, and other supernatural beings in the religious worlds they study. This book challenges the secular assumptions that have defined the field of ethnomusicology. For much of its history, there was no real room in ethnomusicology for other-than-human agency or theologically grounded methods. However, in recent years, ethnomusicologists have recognized the limits of secular models that favor sonic data over divine knowledge. The field is currently shifting to incorporate both secular, cultural approaches and resurgent, nonsecular approaches to the study of music and religion. This moment is marked by the return of sacred musicologies that predate ethnomusicology as a field and ethnomusicologists’ commitments to decolonizing their discipline. Music and Religion surveys key texts from the eighteenth century to the present day and provides ethnographic case studies to consider a central set of questions: What happens when music and religion are disentangled and kept apart? What happens when we acknowledge their entanglement in the worlds of practitioners and scholars? In attending to religion’s audibility or inaudibility, what can ethnomusicologists offer to all students of religion? This book provides readers with quick access to the interdisciplinary debates on music and religion that have occupied scholars for generations and invites them to follow the field into new ways of thinking and listening.