Congregational Music Studies Series
About the Book Series
Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. Music can both unite and divide: at times, it brings together individuals and communities across geographical and cultural boundaries while, at others, it divides communities by embodying conflicting meanings and symbolizing oppositional identities. Many factors influence congregational music in its contemporary global context, posing theoretical and methodological challenges for the academic study of congregational music-making. Increasingly, coming to a robust understanding of congregational music's meaning, influence, and significance requires a mixture of complementary approaches. Including perspectives from musicology, religious and theological studies, anthropology and sociology of religion, media studies, political economy, and popular music studies, this series presents a cluster of landmark titles exploring music-making within contemporary Christianity which will further Congregational Music Studies as an important new academic field of study.
Amazing Grace at 250: Global Heritage and Contested Legacies
1st Edition
Edited
By Martin V. Clarke, Gareth Atkins
August 01, 2025
This book focuses on arguably the best-known Christian hymn worldwide. From the slave trade to the civil rights movement and from obscurity in its country of origin to global recognition, the origins, history, influence, and legacy of “Amazing Grace” are uniquely complex. The volume brings together...
Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality
1st Edition
Edited
By Erin Johnson-Williams, Philip Burnett
August 01, 2025
Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality examines how the hymn, historically and today, has reinforced, negotiated, and resisted constructions of race. It brings together diverse perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, anthropology, performance studies, ...
Black British Gospel Music: From the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter
1st Edition
Edited
By Dulcie A. Dixon McKenzie, Pauline E. Muir, Monique M. Ingalls
June 04, 2024
Black British Gospel Music is a dynamic and multifaceted musical practice, a diasporic river rooted in the experiences of Black British Christian communities. This book examines gospel music in Britain in both historical and contemporary perspectives, demonstrating the importance of this this vital...
Church Music Through the Lens of Performance
1st Edition
By Marcell Silva Steuernagel
September 26, 2022
This book is an investigation into church music through the lens of performance theory, both as a discipline and as a theoretical framework. Scholars who address religious music making in general, and Christian church music in particular, use "performance" in a variety of ways, creating confusion ...
Ethics and Christian Musicking
1st Edition
Edited
By Nathan Myrick, Mark Porter
September 26, 2022
The relationship between musical activity and ethical significance occupies long traditions of thought and reflection both within Christianity and beyond. From concerns regarding music and the passions in early Christian writings through to moral panics regarding rock music in the 20th century, ...
Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives
1st Edition
Edited
By Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, Monique M. Ingalls
August 29, 2022
Studying the role of music within religious congregations has become an increasingly complex exercise. The significant variations in musical style and content between different congregations require an interdisciplinary methodology that enables an accurate analysis, while also allowing for nuance ...
Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives
1st Edition
By Mark Porter
June 28, 2018
Whilst Contemporary Worship Music arose out of a desire to relate the music of the church to the music of everyday life, this function can quickly be called into question by the diversity of musical lives present in contemporary society. Mark Porter examines the relationship between individuals’ ...
Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age
1st Edition
Edited
By Anna E. Nekola, Tom Wagner
October 12, 2017
Congregational music can be an act of praise, a vehicle for theology, an action of embodied community, as well as a means to a divine encounter. This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, ...
Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience
1st Edition
Edited
By Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, Tom Wagner
September 06, 2016
Christian Congregational Music explores the role of congregational music in Christian religious experience, examining how musicians and worshippers perform, identify with and experience belief through musical praxis. Contributors from a broad range of fields, including music studies, theology, ...