Christian Sacred Music in the Americas Edited by Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

The Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, “an association of scholars dedicated to exploring the intersections of Christian faith and musical scholarship,” celebrates their upcoming twentieth anniversary with Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko's edited collection: Christian Sacred Music in the Americas. In the same way that the Society for American Music dedicates itself broadly to the “study, teaching, creation, and dissemination of all musics in the Americas,” this volume, too, reaches beyond the United States in its scope of musical subjects and source materials.¹ Chronologically, the collection ranges from studies of sacred art music sung in seventeenth-century Guatemala to present-day musical expressions throughout the Americas. In addition to Guatemala, much of the volume is focused on the United States, with some representation of multiple Brazilian musical traditions. Even so, the studies in this collection paint a picture of diverse Christian musical expressions of belief across the Americas. In addition to the many musical genres and phenomena considered here, the authors of the individual chapters represent a variety of backgrounds and methodologies.

The collection is organized topically into six main sections: Liturgical Music, Hymnology, Contemporary Music, Paraliturgical Music, Diasporic Music, and Indigenous and African American Music. The first section on Liturgical Music provides two different perspectives from South and Central America. Cathy Elias’ chapter explores three masses composed after the Second Vatican Council. As a result of the changing regulations around language used in the Catholic Church following Vatican II, more composers began to write masses in their vernacular, and it is this phenomenon and the Church's varied responses that are examined in the essay. Elias further juxtaposes aspects of Brazilian culture in the analysis of these pieces, working with the contrasting ideologies of racial democracy and liberation theology to contextualize them. In Chapter 2, Martha E. Thomae hopes to increase access to six Guatemalan choirbooks, describing the efforts of local musicologists to transcribe and digitize music held in the Archdiocesan Historical Archive of Guatemala. Thomae provides descriptions of each choirbook and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century polyphonic music they hold. Following these descriptions, this chapter focuses extensively on providing insight into advanced techniques for digitizing music. Both authors featured in Part I are scrupulous in their attention to detail, and provide fresh perspectives about the study of sacred Catholic music in the Americas.

All music in the second section, Hymnology, is based in the United States. There are two chapters about southern U.S. shape-note singing traditions here, as well as a chapter about the Northeastern hymns of composer Thomas Hastings. S. Andrew Granade's chapter first focuses on shape-note singing in Arkansas through a case study of the singing group at Sweet Home Primitive Baptist Church in Alpine. Granade provides a brief history of shape-note singing specific to the region and then contextualizes the singing traditions of Sweet Home Group within the larger concept of musical and spiritual “revival” (67). Joanna Smolko's chapter outlines the history of shape-note singing in Athens, Georgia. Smolko works with archival documents collected there and identifies the most prominent songbooks advertised and utilized for shape-note singing in the area. In addition to exploring events in twentieth-century Athens, Smolko also describes more recent republications of shape-note hymnals, as well as contemporary events that characterize this culture. Observations from Granade and Smolko provide context for a more holistic treatment of the continued traditions of shape-note singing in the southern U.S.

David W. Music analyzes a different aspect of American hymnody in his chapter on Thomas Hastings. Providing a brief history Hastings's life—a composer who wrote “nearly nine hundred original compositions”—Music then demonstrates the significance of Hastings’ contributions through analysis of the varying texts, tunes, keys, meters, melodies, harmonies, and forms in his hymns (110). Altogether, the chapters in Part II demonstrate new approaches for better understanding familiar American musical subjects.

In Part III, two chapters provide different perspectives about contemporary worship music. Marcell Silva Steuernagel writes about the Brazilian gospel genre.² Steuernagel describes the emergence of scholarship on Brazilian contemporary worship music, noting the absence of research into alternative musical styles on the fringes of this industry. Using oral history and ethnography to engage with these musical genres, Steuernagel provides an introductory history. Jeff R. Warren's chapter then considers the contemporary worship music industry in the United States and its potential for being interpreted politically. Warren notes that many practitioners in the United States describe their music as “beyond politics,” yet are themselves politically engaged and hold a wide influence among their followers (155). This fact is confirmed by the results of the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump and the association of this result with white evangelical expressions of Christianity. Through analysis of the intersecting networks of contemporary worship music in the United States, Warren demonstrates the prevalence of political ideas, including Christian nationalism. Steuernagel and Warren's chapters challenge the easy categorization of contemporary worship music genres and demand that any reader familiar with contemporary Christian music in the United States reconsiders their preconceptions.

The fourth section on Paraliturgical Music contains two chapters on music that is performed beyond the church setting. In Chapter 8, Zen Kuriyama writes about Virgil Thomson's collection of hymn tune arrangements, Hymns from the Old South, specifically focusing on the anthem “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (177–195). Kuriyama demonstrates that Thomson was able to bring together his twentieth-century art music sensibilities with his ability to effectively write U.S. sacred music for contemporary listeners. In Chapter 9, Delvyn Case introduces a new reason to reconsider the dichotomy between sacred and secular music: The inclusion of Jesus as a subject. Through an analysis of nearly 450 songs that identify Jesus in musical genres typically described as secular, Case creates theological categorizations for the ways he is most popularly represented outside of the sacred genres represented in the other aspects of this collection. Both of these chapters reveal how composers and songwriters have grappled with Christianity in unexpected ways.

The fifth section, on diasporic music, takes novel approaches to the idea of diaspora. Jesse P. Karlsberg's chapter focuses on how Sacred Harp singing has become a global phenomenon beyond the Americas. Karlsberg utilizes ethnomusicological scholarship to demonstrate the specific reaches and cultural influences of the southern U.S. on a variety of singing traditions in other countries, while also examining regional ideas of nationalism and folklore. In Chapter 11, Matthew Hoch demonstrates the changing musical traditions of the Anglican and Episcopal churches in the United States. Hoch notes that U.S. genres like jazz and gospel have gained more prominence within Anglican hymnals over the years, as have U.S.-written hymns from sources like The Southern Harmony.³ In addition to these U.S. genres, Anglican hymnody has included other traditions from Taizé, Iona, and Celtic communities. Together, Karlsberg and Hoch's chapters highlight the ways music associated with the Americas has operated in a variety of global contexts.

The last part of the collection focuses on Indigenous and African American music. The chapters each focus on different racial and ethnic aspects of musicking, reminding readers of the variety of perspectives about Christian music in the Americas. Andrew Janzen and Meiry Yakawa's moving chapter tells Yakawa's story as an Indigenous Brazilian musician, who has decided to share her music with others. This chapter grapples with the struggle of identity that many Indigenous Christians face when asked to justify their ethnic background with their religious association. Together, the two authors reflect on the metaphors and symbols found in Yakawa's song that emphasize the unique theological perspectives that only she can provide through her musical participation. Stephen Michael Newby and Chelle Stearns write about the Black national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in Chapter 14. The authors make a point to identify themselves as “a white musical theologian and a black theological musician/composer,” reinforcing their commitment to the embodied aspect of music as theologically significant (290). Relating to Elias's use of liberation theology earlier in this collection, Newby and Stearns approach this song from the perspective of James Cone's scholarship on Black liberation theology.⁴ Using this framework, they demonstrate how the anthem has created an embodied theology of Black liberation not only through its lyrics and music, but also in its social and cultural context. Emma Wimberg, a member of the Choctaw tribe, then chronicles the history of Christian hymnody within the traditions of the Choctaw peoples. Wimberg describes some of the ceremonies in which they use music, and also writes about different source materials used for hymns composed by both Anglo-American missionaries and the Choctaw people themselves. In a section tied so closely with racial and ethnic aspects of identity, it is gratifying to read about these authors’ relationships to their own identities.

Michael O'Connor's epilogue to the collection, “Singing Worlds in the Americas,” made quite an impression on this reader. I found the musical and cultural ideas presented in this volume to be endlessly stimulating, but it also caused me to pause and ask how we should define what “America” is. O'Connor tackles this question directly, discussing the “early modern Florentine merchant,” Amerigo Vespucci, who he says, “haunts this collection” (330). Making a point to discuss the brutality of colonization on the lives of Indigenous peoples across what we today call the Americas, O'Connor opens up further conversation with each of the collection's chapters. He further recontextualizes the idea of Christianity and its origins, reminding the reader that the religion itself “arose in Asia, between Galilee and Jerusalem,” long before it was viewed as “European” in any way (331). Finally, O'Connor concludes by calling the reader to look to what is now called Palestine for further context. O'Connor reminds us that Jesus himself once lived in that region and would be described today as “a person of color,” and a Jew “who sang the psalms at Passover” and “chanted the scripture in the synagogue” (335). Thus, when we speak of Christianity, we must not lose sight of the origins of its very namesake, as O'Connor confirms the “vast majority of Christians in the Americas (and worldwide) do not share Jesus's Jewishness” (335).

I enjoyed reading this book throughout 2021, and I think it will intrigue readers from a variety of contexts. These chapters would be useful in a variety of classroom environments, whether for undergraduate or graduate students studying sacred or American musical expressions. Scholars of American sacred music will also find this book stimulating in the variety of methodological approaches it considers. In addition to the scholarly and educational contexts in which this book would be useful, I imagine it would also prove meaningful for curious readers beyond an academic context.