Books by Amanda Haste
Music and Identity in Twenty-First-Century Monasticism, 2023
Twenty-first-century monastic communities represent unique social environments in which music pla... more Twenty-first-century monastic communities represent unique social environments in which music plays an integral part. This book examines the role of music in Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian and neo-monastic communities in Britain and North America, engaging closely with communities of practice to provide a penetrating insight into the role of music in self-care and as a vector for identity construction on both individual and community levels. The author explores the essential role of music in community dynamics, the rationale for using instruments, the implications of both chant-based and freestyle composition, gender-related differences in musical activity, the role of dance (‘music made visible’) in community life, the commodification of monastic music, the ‘Singing Nun’ phenomenon and the role of music in established and emerging neo-monastic communities. The result is a comprehensive and compelling study of the agency of music in the construction and expression of personal and community identity.
This book analyses the power that religion wields upon the minds of individuals and communities a... more This book analyses the power that religion wields upon the minds of individuals and communities and explores the predominance of language in the actual practice of religion. Through an investigation of the diverse forms of religious language available – oral traditions, sacred texts, evangelical prose, and national rhetoric used by ‘faith-insiders’ such as missionaries, priests, or religious leaders who play the communicator’s role between the sacred and the secular – the chapters in the volume reveal the dependence of religion upon language, demonstrating how religion draws strength from a past that is embedded in narratives, infusing the ‘sacred’ language with political power.The book combines broad theoretical and normative reflections in contexts of original, detailed and closely examined empirical case studies. Drawing upon resources across disciplines, the book will be of interest to scholars of religion and religious studies, linguistics, politics, cultural studies, history, sociology, and social anthropology.
This volume represents a significant effort on the part of scholars across the globe to embrace t... more This volume represents a significant effort on the part of scholars across the globe to embrace the challenge of post-modern identity. Their goal here is to stake out the critical questions and bring to light some of the transformative innovations now under way. Coming out of an international conference in Paris on “Global Identities” hosted by the cultural research association Ars Identitatis, these essays begin from the lived experience of groups and individuals as they problematize and engage their own social connectivity and historical directionality.
The essays in this volume are organized around the four major themes that emerged from the Conference: Re-Imagining Group Identity, Embracing Hybridity, The Challenges of Assimilation, and Locating the Individual in the New Terrain. Rather than seek to impose a single conceptual frame as a Procrustean bed into which these diverse research projects were to be fitted, the objective has been to bring different perspectives to the investigation of the myriad liminal spaces now confronting us.
A brief survey of the essays will reveal the enormous richness of the topics under discussion. The scholars represented here reveal the shifting cultural landscape in many regions throughout the world. They further demonstrate the insight to be gained variously through ethnography, interviews, popular culture, literature and poetry, musicology, religion, the culinary arts, history, and social theory. They have together dramatically advanced the dialogical interchange we must undertake if we are to insert human priorities into social processes too often seemingly beyond our reach. What is most clear – and provides a pathway for further social constructivism and critical reflection – is that our basic sense of located selfhood and affiliation are being transformed beyond recognition, and that many are already taking the initiative of reassembling the joint meanings of our social worlds."
La présence anglicane à Marseille remonte au moins à 1849, année où les archives ont débuté, et p... more La présence anglicane à Marseille remonte au moins à 1849, année où les archives ont débuté, et peut-être même 1840. A l’origine liée au Diocèse de Gibraltar (de nos jours Diocèse d’Europe), l’objectif de la paroisse était de s’occuper de la population locale anglophone (souvent connue sous le nom de ‘colonie anglaise’) ainsi que des marins britanniques en escale à Marseille. Cependant, elle devint rapidement un ‘foyer’ spirituel et social non seulement pour les britanniques mais aussi pour les américains et canadiens ainsi que les pratiquants de nombreux pays francophones et autres. Tous ces gens venaient – et le font toujours – pour des raisons nombreuses et variées et comme l’histoire de “l’église anglaise” est aussi leur histoire, ce petit livre met l’accent sur la vie des gens qui y ont pratiqué leur foi et ont participé à son existence au cours des dernières 170 années.
There has been an Anglican presence in Marseille since at least 1849, the year in which records b... more There has been an Anglican presence in Marseille since at least 1849, the year in which records began, and possibly since 1840. Originally part of the Diocese of Gibraltar (now the Diocese of Europe) the chaplaincy was originally intended as a means of ministering to the local English-speaking population (often known as ‘the English Colony’) and to British seafarers putting in to the port of Marseille. However, it quickly became a spiritual and social ‘home’ not only to the British but also to Americans and Canadians as well as worshippers from many French-speaking and other countries. They came – and still do – for many and varied reasons and, as the history of the ‘English Church’ is also their history, this little book focuses on the lives of the people who have worshipped in and contributed to it over the past 170 years.
Mention of Venn Ottery has been recorded as far back as the Domesday Survey of 1086. In 1259 the ... more Mention of Venn Ottery has been recorded as far back as the Domesday Survey of 1086. In 1259 the manor was held from the Crown by the Furneaux family, and during the reign of Edward III was granted to the Abbey of St Michel in Normany a ferling of land in Fenotri, for the maintenance of a chaplain to celebrate divine service there. This brief historical survey outlines the subsequent history of Venn Ottery, including the eleventh-century church and significant buildings, and charts the coming of the railway which subsequently transformed the neighbourhood.
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters by Amanda Haste
The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World, ed. Russell Cobb, Apr 2, 2014
Everyone knows about monks and nuns: they shut themselves away in monasteries and convents, they ... more Everyone knows about monks and nuns: they shut themselves away in monasteries and convents, they wear habits and they sing plainchant. This perception can be confirmed with a quick shuffle through the hundreds of chant recordings in your local megastore, which often feature cover images of ‘proper’ monastics in medieval-style habits, and are heavily marketed as the music sung daily by ‘real’ monks and nuns. However, the author’s research has revealed that the music currently being played, sung and composed by monastics is not confined to the chant genre, but actually extends into the folk idiom and even into soft pop, and this poses the question of whether, through chant recordings, we really are being sold the genuine article, or simply our received ideas of how monastic music should sound. So whose are the criteria for authenticity? Does a perception of authenticity deepen the musical experience? And does it really matter?
Monasteries and convents in the Western world have always needed to produce saleable goods and services in order to support themselves financially and to fund their valuable social work across the globe. Their goods have traditionally included food products and alcoholic beverages, but their income streams are increasingly supplemented by commercial recordings of their music for which, through the internet, they now enjoy a global market. They have long found the promise of both tradition and authenticity to be their most effective selling point, viz. the assertion of the Abbot of Nièges that “la meilleure force de vente est ‘la tradition et l’authenticité’,” but to what extent does the drive to produce high-quality recordings impact on this promise? And how does such commodification of the musical product affect the representation – and reception – of authenticity?
This interdisciplinary article, based on ethnographic research among twenty-first-century monks and nuns in Canada, the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, opens with a narrative of the commercial means by which present-day monastic communities function in, and present themselves to, the wider world through their products, and in particular explores the marketing of their music as an important signifier of authentic monastic identity and values. A detailed examination of recording technicalities (e.g. multi-tracking and mixing) challenges the promise of the ultimate authentic monastic experience; the article also demonstrates that the marketing of monastic music through not only religious and classical outlets but also world music and ‘chill-out’ labels is evidence for the many reasons why people buy into it, and questions whether the intended effect can always be guaranteed. Given that the reasons given by monastics for selling their music do not always tally with those of the distributors, the article therefore concludes with a discussion of the producers’ responsibility for satisfying the consumer’s expectations.
This exploration of the idea of buying into the authentic monastic experience proves to be a complex one, as the producers of the musical product strive to reconcile their own wish to disseminate a spiritual message through commodification of their musical life with the purchaser’s expectations of cultural authenticity.
Constructing Identity in an Age of Globalization, ed. James Block and Amanda Haste (Paris: Ex Modio, 2014): 109-121., Dec 2014
Central to monastic life is the commitment to celibacy, a choice which would appear to set monks ... more Central to monastic life is the commitment to celibacy, a choice which would appear to set monks and nuns apart from ‘normal’ men and women. Some scholars argue that this viewpoint was represented in the Middle Ages, with sexual reproduction so common an expectation that those who chose celibacy became not men and women but a third gender; however, recent ethnographic research into contemporary monasticism has shown that twenty-first-century monks and nuns have a well-developed sense of their own self as masculine or feminine and that gender-specific behaviour is indeed in evidence. This paper, which assumes no specialist musical knowledge, focuses on the expression of gender identity through musical and textual expression.
The Opus Dei of the sung liturgy and daily Office is crucial to monastic life, and many monks and nuns find creative expression through musical setting of texts, so this paper explores the difference dilemma of music as both product and promulgator of gender constructs. Celibacy in the monastic sense, defined as a lifelong commitment to abstain from all sexual activity, necessarily precludes marriage and reproduction and thus denies a conventionally-expressed generative identity, or a psychic construction of oneself as a potential progenitor; yet the textual response which drives compositional endeavour features creative and procreative metaphors through which monastics repeatedly express their generative identity. Other issues to be examined include the impact of gender on textual response, textual themes and imagery, and reception and evaluation of the musico-textual product.
It should be noted that, in this instance, ‘gender’ refers to masculinity and femininity, patterns of behaviour and identity rather than ‘sexuality’ which concerns orientation or desire. It would be simplistic to suggest that an individual’s gender construction is utterly separate from their sexuality, and the fields of feminist theory and queer theory have covered many aspects of the impact of sexuality on creativity. It would be, however, impractical and intrusive to question celibate monks and nuns about their own sexuality, so this research is confined to a masculine/feminine binary opposition, with the proviso that men also display ‘feminine’ traits and women ‘masculine’ traits to varying degrees. In fact, in the few cases where the gay/lesbian sexuality of the monastic is known, this has not diluted the biological markers and gender-stereotypical behaviour has still been observed.
This research demonstrates that, in celibate monasticism, musical creativity provides a medium for the sublimation of sexual and reproductive energy as creative energy, and that musical choices clearly demonstrate the construction and interpretation not of a ‘third gender’ but of positive male/female gender identities.
Languages of Religion: Exploring the Politics of the Sacred, Jul 2018
When the English King Henry VIII broke with Rome and created the Church of England, it was vernac... more When the English King Henry VIII broke with Rome and created the Church of England, it was vernacular English which was chosen as the new ritual language of the new Church. This meant underlining the break with Catholicism by rejecting the mystery of the Latin of the Catholic service books in favour of a tongue “clearly understanded of the people” in Cranmer’s new Book of Common Prayer. At the same time, Henry VIII also dissolved the Catholic monasteries, and English monks and nuns were forced either to abandon their religious vocation or to migrate to (Catholic) mainland Europe. After a break of three hundred years during which religious life was illegal in Britain, the late nineteenth-century revival of the Anglican Church, spearheaded by the Oxford Movement, led to the foundation of the first monastic communities in the Anglican Church, and in 2015 there are some 2000 monks, nuns and friars in the Anglican Communion worldwide.
However their journey over the past 150 years has been fraught with difficulties as they seek to reconcile their Anglicanism with their Catholic roots. This paper traces the problematic linguistic journey of the English-speaking Anglican Religious Communities (ARC), narrating their quest to construct a unified Anglican monastic identity, and the struggle of equating their Roman Catholic heritage (in Latin) with the ‘Englishness’ of their Anglicanism, through the words and music of their Office and liturgy. Starting with an exploration of the textual decisions with which the early communities were faced, through the upheaval of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, to the recent (2013) ‘going over’ to Rome of a major Anglican community, along with its celebrated ‘English Rite’, the story of Anglican monastic identity is therefore about developing a sense of a new tradition which draws on a sense of monastic – and thus Catholic – heritage, while interweaving this with a consciously historically valid English element. The result is a linguistic identity in which the twin strands of Catholicism and Anglicanism are intertwined and which continue to speak both of the past and the future of the ARC.
Language, Identity and Community, ed. Kamila Ciepiel , 2019
It is often said that music is an international language, but the ways in which we express the te... more It is often said that music is an international language, but the ways in which we express the technical and philosophical aspects of music in language serve to illustrate the ways in which musicians of different nationalities conceptualize not only music but also their own role, through language as an instrumental tool, and as an emblem of groupness (Edwards, 2013, p. 55). This research uses the author’s own experience as a British musician living abroad where her personal identity as a musician has been an ongoing issue, supported by survey data and dialogue with other musicians, to address issues such as: What does being a musician represent in the adopted society? Who has the right to identify themselves as a musician? And if a musician cannot express meaningfully their background and credentials, can they still self-identify as a musician?
The discussion centers on the “speech-background” to the musical experience which is “tied to possibilities of lingual articulation” (Wellmer, 2004, p. 100), and differences in cultural expectations or social constructs which can ultimately lead to an identity crisis in which a musician can doubt their own “deeply personal” musical identity (Georgii-Hemming, 2011, p. 208). This paper therefore explores two areas in which musicians self-identify through language: firstly in terms of the ways in which they describe and conceptualize the music itself, and secondly in terms of their own selfhood and personal musical identity, and concludes that although ‘groupness’ can be considered to transcend musical activity, communicative difficulties can serve to disrupt and destabilize musician identity.
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Amanda Haste
CHOMBEC News. Issue 21 (2016): 5-7. .
Music and Arts in Action Vol. 5, Issue 2: 39-51., Oct 2016
Despite the social climate of individualism and freedom of choice which pervades the early twenty... more Despite the social climate of individualism and freedom of choice which pervades the early twenty-first century, men and women still feel called to enter monastic life, a decision which brings with it not only vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Monastic life also involves a serious commitment to living in community and, as such community living often presents interrelational problems, the aim of this paper is to use ethnographic data to show that the ways in which music acts as a crucial element in communal health and the resolution of social conflict in modern-day monastic communities.
A monastic community brings together highly disparate individuals with the sole common aim of a personal theocentric existence: every individual will bring their own attitudes into community, and one of the hardest lessons to be learnt is that of giving up their own will and agenda to pursue this goal, while simultaneously establishing themselves within their own community. Music has always played a major role in monastic life, and chant has long proved an ideal medium for supporting a life of prayer, but recent research in twenty-first-century monasteries and convents has shown that it also has considerable agency in the psychosocial structure of monastic communities. In this paper ethnographic data are used to explore the role of communal singing, and specifically chant, as an integral part of twenty-first-century monastic life, and its impact as a source of both conflict and reparation, division and cohesion.
Following a review of the current literature on monasticism and monastic music this paper outlines my own perspective and methodology for the collection and presentation of the ethnographic data; I then present and discuss my findings on the musical implications of joining a religious community, the role played by music in community bonding, and issues of elitism and exclusion which can complicate the ongoing community dynamics, before drawing conclusions on the agency of music in modern monastic life.
This paper, based on a presentation given at the 2015 NCIS Conference at Yale University, explore... more This paper, based on a presentation given at the 2015 NCIS Conference at Yale University, explores the transmission of meaning through the experience of researchers working in an Anglophone environment, but who need to use primary and secondary source materials which are, in their original form, in a language foreign to English.
Many researchers use foreign-language resources as the basis of their research, while others may use them only occasionally, but in all cases the scholar needs to ensure that, when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience, they communicate their message in its entirety. Ensuring that the full import of the source text is transmitted to the reader is particularly important when analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and implicit cultural references with which they may not be familiar. This paper therefore uses numerous examples of translation in academic work to illustrate the mechanics and best practice of translating meaning, and concludes by considering complex cultural references and multiple layers of meaning when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (Berlin, Germany): 28-32., Dec 2014
'Technology’ for composers has evolved from the use of quill and parchment, through fountain pens... more 'Technology’ for composers has evolved from the use of quill and parchment, through fountain pens and pre-printed manuscript paper, to the late twentieth-century phenomenon of notation software. The technological trajectory of monastic musicians parallels that of the secular world, with computer-based technology now playing a crucial role in the production and commercial distribution of a considerable body of compositions not only in chant genres but also in folk- and pop-based idioms. When experienced aurally, the effect of the music is independent of the means of notation, but its visual impact – through the choice of certain fonts and scripts for both words and music – has a profound effect on the evaluation and reception of this music, especially when the music is published commercially on the open market.
This interdisciplinary paper, illustrated with both written scores and recorded examples, uses ethnographic evidence to explore issues of notational encoding and ambiguity, the aesthetics and associations of the musical artefact, and the resulting subliminal messages transmitted and received through its physical representation. As Elizabeth Eva Leach has stated in Sung Birds, the notational process “informs and shapes compositional endeavour” and the use of software may itself limit the possibilities for notating the unmetered or metrically flexible compositions favoured by monastic composers. The advantages and disadvantages of general purpose programmes (e.g. Sibelius) and specialist neume-based fonts (e.g. Meinrad) are therefore briefly examined in the light of both the potential effect on the compositional process, and of the recipient’s ultimate perception of the musical product.
This paper is situated within a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework which utilises the literature in musicology (such as Treitler, Kivy and Gelbart), reception and composer-function (Everist, Foucault, Citron) and aesthetics (Cook, Johnson) to inform the argument, and to draw conclusions about the power of notation software to influence both composer and recipient.
Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, issue 4 volume 1 , Dec 2012
The Lord’s Prayer is a central text in Christian liturgy, generally recited rather than sung, oft... more The Lord’s Prayer is a central text in Christian liturgy, generally recited rather than sung, often as a communal act of worship. However the text has also provided inspiration for many musical settings, a process of ‘musicking’ [musikierung] which takes it onto an entirely different level. The internet – and specifically video-streaming sites such as YouTube – are now providing a medium for the dissemination of stage, screen, studio and audio performances of the Lord’s Prayer as song, and these are now reaching – and speaking to – new audiences up to eighty years after they were made; the fact that individuals continue to post video and audio content of the Lord’s Prayer as song reflects their desire to share something which has moved them, whether musically or spiritually, with a worldwide audience.
In liberating the text from its liturgical context and releasing it as song into classical, jazz, rock, and pop performance arenas, many questions are raised about the transformation of textual meaning and ritual significance. The aim of this study is to examine the meaningfulness of the musico-textual setting for the receiver, firstly through the question of ownership of the text as a communal prayer, and secondly in arguing that perception and reception of the performer are contributory factors in the relative positivity or negativity of the receiver’s response. The research was carried out by examining a selection of the legion twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer readily accessible through YouTube, using ethnographic data from on-line comments and from the author’s on-line survey of Christian worshippers to explore the issues raised by these musical settings. These include the perceived right of an individual to ‘perform’ a mutually-owned prayer; the loss of ritual functionality engendered by the ‘musicking’ of the text and its release into the popular domain; and the additional layers of meaning afforded to the text by gestures in performance, which can in turn lead to a transformation and renewal of ritual efficacy. The inclusion of hyperlinks to YouTube video content throughout the article encourages the reader to engage with the performances themselves, from which it is hoped that a fruitful discussion of the issues will emerge.
Culture and Religion, Vol. 14, Issue 3: 268-288. First published online 30 January 2013., Sep 1, 2013
Many of today’s monks and nuns are active composers: some have entered their communities as highl... more Many of today’s monks and nuns are active composers: some have entered their communities as highly-trained musicians, while others find themselves drawn to musical expression after profession. But how does such a creative musical response relate to the monastic atmosphere of hesychia (prayerful silence), and does this response differ in secular experiences of a prayerful silence? This paper provides an ethnographic account of the relationship between hesychia and creative response among twenty-first-century monastic musicians in the Western tradition, comparing these responses with those from secular Christian composers, and from composers in the Quaker tradition for whom silence is, as for monastics, an integral component of worship; the issues are then explored in the context of methodological constructs for discursive meditation and contemplative prayer, and of conceptual notions of silence. The paper argues that essential differences between monastic and secular experiences of silence are significant regulators of creative response to hesychia.
Global Cuisines: A Scholarly Cookbook, 2023
Music forms an essential element in monastic life, but the musical diet of modern monastic commun... more Music forms an essential element in monastic life, but the musical diet of modern monastic communities is moving away from the staple food of plainchant. In-house musical composition therefore becomes commonplace as religious communities create their own musical traditions. This essay uses the experience of an American Episcopalian community (founded in the 1980s) to explore their musical decision-making, and to illustrate the tension between new communities’ wish to align themselves to 1000 years of Western monasticism by drawing on the chant canon, and the need to create a musical repertory which reflects the relevance of their life and work in the early twenty-first century.
Lectures & Keynote Papers by Amanda Haste
Instruments are, in effect, tools which produce sound, but also carry meaning. They mean differen... more Instruments are, in effect, tools which produce sound, but also carry meaning. They mean different things to each of us, depending on our own cultural background and experience of life. So how would you feel if someone introduced drums into your worship service? Or a string quartet? Or guitars, or even saxophones? Most of us would happily go to a concert featuring any of these instruments, and would no doubt admire their particular sound qualities and ability to express the music.
So what’s the problem? Is it the look of an instrument that bothers us? Or is it the sound? Is it the instrument’s associations with the secular world? Or is there something about worship which precludes certain instruments for some reason?
People have been arguing about using instruments in Christian worship for at least two thousand years. The debate centres on two issues: firstly, whether or not instrumental music is acceptable at all, and secondly, assuming this to be the case, which instruments are suitable. So should we use instruments at all? To answer this, people have of course referred to the authorities, and particularly biblical authority. The Psalms are full of references to using instruments to praise and glorify the Lord, or to soothe the soul. Psalm 150 famously reads:
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and the harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals; Praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
So we have it on the highest authority that there’s no problem with using strings, keyboard instruments or even brass and percussion. Some early theologians were also very much in favour of using musical instruments. For the 3C scholar, Origen, instruments were very symbolic. For him, the trumpet represented “the efficacy of the Word of God,” the tympanon (drum) was “the destruction of lust,” and the cymbals were “the eager soul enamoured of Christ.” And Hildegard of Bingen, the 12C German nun famous for her writings and her compositions, expanded on this to create an entire theology of instruments. She gave each of them a rational or emotional role. For her, the flute signified the mystical union of the soul with God, and she glossed Psalm 150 like this:
“. . . praise him with the sound of a trumpet – that is, with the faculty of reason . . .
And praise him with the lyre of profound emotion, and with the harp of softness and gentleness.
And praise him with the timbrel of mortification and with the dance of exultation . . .
And praise him with the strings of repentance, and with the organ of divine guidance.
Praise him also with cymbals of true joy”.
Other writers haven’t been so eclectic in their acceptance: in the early Church, according to Gelineau, the lyre was considered respectable (King David is often associated with the lyre, so playing it meant emulating King David, and no-one could argue with that). On the other hand, the flute and the oboe were considered erotic (mainly because they were played by prostitutes). The trumpet was considered bellicose, and the organ theatrical (think Hammond organ). In fact, a cynic could well take the view that anyone in favour of instrumental music can justify it using biblical precedent or theological symbolism. On the other hand, anyone who feels negatively about it could justify their view by associating instruments with undesirable – and thus un-Christian – behaviour.
But we have a problem, and that’s one of inconsistency. Many instruments have been condemned as often as they are praised. For instance, wind instruments have been variously viewed as bad, because they prevent the player from speech and are thus a bar to rational expression...or they’re good because they have a ‘holy’ means of production, In other words, breath - the sacred symbol of living breath, of life itself. In this talk, illustrated with musical recordings, I’m going to be looking at all of these issues.
This paper covers two important facets of academic translation: translating your own work in its ... more This paper covers two important facets of academic translation: translating your own work in its entirety, and how to handle translation of source material so as to ensure a nuanced reading.
The global academic marketplace is largely anglophone, and if English is not your native language you may need help in getting your work into anglophone journals, so that your scholarship is available to the widest possible audience. Journal papers and book chapters will be rejected if the target language grammar and lexique is not acceptable, and even a technically competent paper may require substantial revision on linguistic grounds before it is accepted for publication. The same applies to scholarly work translated out of English (there are many specialist journals in French or German), and this paper explains the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation (e.g. Google translate) and human translation, and demonstrates the most cost-effective way of disseminating your work in another language without losing accuracy or subtlety of meaning.
The second strand is the handling of source material such as quotations or ethnographic data: deciding when to provide a translation, and when to add a gloss explaining the subtleties of meaning to non-native speakers. This is particularly important when your analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and hidden cultural references with which the reader may not be familiar.
The appropriateness – or not – of instruments in worship has long been a controversial topic. In ... more The appropriateness – or not – of instruments in worship has long been a controversial topic. In this illustrated lecture, musicologist Dr Amanda Haste explores the conflicting viewpoints, ranging from Hildegard of Bingen’s all-inclusive ‘theology of instruments’ through Erik Routley’s vitriolic rants about electronic instruments, to the twenty-first-century polemic around praise bands. Her analysis raises questions of performativity, ritual expectations and the need for 'specialness' if instruments are to be widely accepted in worship.
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Books by Amanda Haste
The essays in this volume are organized around the four major themes that emerged from the Conference: Re-Imagining Group Identity, Embracing Hybridity, The Challenges of Assimilation, and Locating the Individual in the New Terrain. Rather than seek to impose a single conceptual frame as a Procrustean bed into which these diverse research projects were to be fitted, the objective has been to bring different perspectives to the investigation of the myriad liminal spaces now confronting us.
A brief survey of the essays will reveal the enormous richness of the topics under discussion. The scholars represented here reveal the shifting cultural landscape in many regions throughout the world. They further demonstrate the insight to be gained variously through ethnography, interviews, popular culture, literature and poetry, musicology, religion, the culinary arts, history, and social theory. They have together dramatically advanced the dialogical interchange we must undertake if we are to insert human priorities into social processes too often seemingly beyond our reach. What is most clear – and provides a pathway for further social constructivism and critical reflection – is that our basic sense of located selfhood and affiliation are being transformed beyond recognition, and that many are already taking the initiative of reassembling the joint meanings of our social worlds."
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters by Amanda Haste
Monasteries and convents in the Western world have always needed to produce saleable goods and services in order to support themselves financially and to fund their valuable social work across the globe. Their goods have traditionally included food products and alcoholic beverages, but their income streams are increasingly supplemented by commercial recordings of their music for which, through the internet, they now enjoy a global market. They have long found the promise of both tradition and authenticity to be their most effective selling point, viz. the assertion of the Abbot of Nièges that “la meilleure force de vente est ‘la tradition et l’authenticité’,” but to what extent does the drive to produce high-quality recordings impact on this promise? And how does such commodification of the musical product affect the representation – and reception – of authenticity?
This interdisciplinary article, based on ethnographic research among twenty-first-century monks and nuns in Canada, the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, opens with a narrative of the commercial means by which present-day monastic communities function in, and present themselves to, the wider world through their products, and in particular explores the marketing of their music as an important signifier of authentic monastic identity and values. A detailed examination of recording technicalities (e.g. multi-tracking and mixing) challenges the promise of the ultimate authentic monastic experience; the article also demonstrates that the marketing of monastic music through not only religious and classical outlets but also world music and ‘chill-out’ labels is evidence for the many reasons why people buy into it, and questions whether the intended effect can always be guaranteed. Given that the reasons given by monastics for selling their music do not always tally with those of the distributors, the article therefore concludes with a discussion of the producers’ responsibility for satisfying the consumer’s expectations.
This exploration of the idea of buying into the authentic monastic experience proves to be a complex one, as the producers of the musical product strive to reconcile their own wish to disseminate a spiritual message through commodification of their musical life with the purchaser’s expectations of cultural authenticity.
The Opus Dei of the sung liturgy and daily Office is crucial to monastic life, and many monks and nuns find creative expression through musical setting of texts, so this paper explores the difference dilemma of music as both product and promulgator of gender constructs. Celibacy in the monastic sense, defined as a lifelong commitment to abstain from all sexual activity, necessarily precludes marriage and reproduction and thus denies a conventionally-expressed generative identity, or a psychic construction of oneself as a potential progenitor; yet the textual response which drives compositional endeavour features creative and procreative metaphors through which monastics repeatedly express their generative identity. Other issues to be examined include the impact of gender on textual response, textual themes and imagery, and reception and evaluation of the musico-textual product.
It should be noted that, in this instance, ‘gender’ refers to masculinity and femininity, patterns of behaviour and identity rather than ‘sexuality’ which concerns orientation or desire. It would be simplistic to suggest that an individual’s gender construction is utterly separate from their sexuality, and the fields of feminist theory and queer theory have covered many aspects of the impact of sexuality on creativity. It would be, however, impractical and intrusive to question celibate monks and nuns about their own sexuality, so this research is confined to a masculine/feminine binary opposition, with the proviso that men also display ‘feminine’ traits and women ‘masculine’ traits to varying degrees. In fact, in the few cases where the gay/lesbian sexuality of the monastic is known, this has not diluted the biological markers and gender-stereotypical behaviour has still been observed.
This research demonstrates that, in celibate monasticism, musical creativity provides a medium for the sublimation of sexual and reproductive energy as creative energy, and that musical choices clearly demonstrate the construction and interpretation not of a ‘third gender’ but of positive male/female gender identities.
However their journey over the past 150 years has been fraught with difficulties as they seek to reconcile their Anglicanism with their Catholic roots. This paper traces the problematic linguistic journey of the English-speaking Anglican Religious Communities (ARC), narrating their quest to construct a unified Anglican monastic identity, and the struggle of equating their Roman Catholic heritage (in Latin) with the ‘Englishness’ of their Anglicanism, through the words and music of their Office and liturgy. Starting with an exploration of the textual decisions with which the early communities were faced, through the upheaval of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, to the recent (2013) ‘going over’ to Rome of a major Anglican community, along with its celebrated ‘English Rite’, the story of Anglican monastic identity is therefore about developing a sense of a new tradition which draws on a sense of monastic – and thus Catholic – heritage, while interweaving this with a consciously historically valid English element. The result is a linguistic identity in which the twin strands of Catholicism and Anglicanism are intertwined and which continue to speak both of the past and the future of the ARC.
The discussion centers on the “speech-background” to the musical experience which is “tied to possibilities of lingual articulation” (Wellmer, 2004, p. 100), and differences in cultural expectations or social constructs which can ultimately lead to an identity crisis in which a musician can doubt their own “deeply personal” musical identity (Georgii-Hemming, 2011, p. 208). This paper therefore explores two areas in which musicians self-identify through language: firstly in terms of the ways in which they describe and conceptualize the music itself, and secondly in terms of their own selfhood and personal musical identity, and concludes that although ‘groupness’ can be considered to transcend musical activity, communicative difficulties can serve to disrupt and destabilize musician identity.
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Amanda Haste
A monastic community brings together highly disparate individuals with the sole common aim of a personal theocentric existence: every individual will bring their own attitudes into community, and one of the hardest lessons to be learnt is that of giving up their own will and agenda to pursue this goal, while simultaneously establishing themselves within their own community. Music has always played a major role in monastic life, and chant has long proved an ideal medium for supporting a life of prayer, but recent research in twenty-first-century monasteries and convents has shown that it also has considerable agency in the psychosocial structure of monastic communities. In this paper ethnographic data are used to explore the role of communal singing, and specifically chant, as an integral part of twenty-first-century monastic life, and its impact as a source of both conflict and reparation, division and cohesion.
Following a review of the current literature on monasticism and monastic music this paper outlines my own perspective and methodology for the collection and presentation of the ethnographic data; I then present and discuss my findings on the musical implications of joining a religious community, the role played by music in community bonding, and issues of elitism and exclusion which can complicate the ongoing community dynamics, before drawing conclusions on the agency of music in modern monastic life.
Many researchers use foreign-language resources as the basis of their research, while others may use them only occasionally, but in all cases the scholar needs to ensure that, when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience, they communicate their message in its entirety. Ensuring that the full import of the source text is transmitted to the reader is particularly important when analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and implicit cultural references with which they may not be familiar. This paper therefore uses numerous examples of translation in academic work to illustrate the mechanics and best practice of translating meaning, and concludes by considering complex cultural references and multiple layers of meaning when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience
This interdisciplinary paper, illustrated with both written scores and recorded examples, uses ethnographic evidence to explore issues of notational encoding and ambiguity, the aesthetics and associations of the musical artefact, and the resulting subliminal messages transmitted and received through its physical representation. As Elizabeth Eva Leach has stated in Sung Birds, the notational process “informs and shapes compositional endeavour” and the use of software may itself limit the possibilities for notating the unmetered or metrically flexible compositions favoured by monastic composers. The advantages and disadvantages of general purpose programmes (e.g. Sibelius) and specialist neume-based fonts (e.g. Meinrad) are therefore briefly examined in the light of both the potential effect on the compositional process, and of the recipient’s ultimate perception of the musical product.
This paper is situated within a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework which utilises the literature in musicology (such as Treitler, Kivy and Gelbart), reception and composer-function (Everist, Foucault, Citron) and aesthetics (Cook, Johnson) to inform the argument, and to draw conclusions about the power of notation software to influence both composer and recipient.
In liberating the text from its liturgical context and releasing it as song into classical, jazz, rock, and pop performance arenas, many questions are raised about the transformation of textual meaning and ritual significance. The aim of this study is to examine the meaningfulness of the musico-textual setting for the receiver, firstly through the question of ownership of the text as a communal prayer, and secondly in arguing that perception and reception of the performer are contributory factors in the relative positivity or negativity of the receiver’s response. The research was carried out by examining a selection of the legion twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer readily accessible through YouTube, using ethnographic data from on-line comments and from the author’s on-line survey of Christian worshippers to explore the issues raised by these musical settings. These include the perceived right of an individual to ‘perform’ a mutually-owned prayer; the loss of ritual functionality engendered by the ‘musicking’ of the text and its release into the popular domain; and the additional layers of meaning afforded to the text by gestures in performance, which can in turn lead to a transformation and renewal of ritual efficacy. The inclusion of hyperlinks to YouTube video content throughout the article encourages the reader to engage with the performances themselves, from which it is hoped that a fruitful discussion of the issues will emerge.
Lectures & Keynote Papers by Amanda Haste
So what’s the problem? Is it the look of an instrument that bothers us? Or is it the sound? Is it the instrument’s associations with the secular world? Or is there something about worship which precludes certain instruments for some reason?
People have been arguing about using instruments in Christian worship for at least two thousand years. The debate centres on two issues: firstly, whether or not instrumental music is acceptable at all, and secondly, assuming this to be the case, which instruments are suitable. So should we use instruments at all? To answer this, people have of course referred to the authorities, and particularly biblical authority. The Psalms are full of references to using instruments to praise and glorify the Lord, or to soothe the soul. Psalm 150 famously reads:
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and the harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals; Praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
So we have it on the highest authority that there’s no problem with using strings, keyboard instruments or even brass and percussion. Some early theologians were also very much in favour of using musical instruments. For the 3C scholar, Origen, instruments were very symbolic. For him, the trumpet represented “the efficacy of the Word of God,” the tympanon (drum) was “the destruction of lust,” and the cymbals were “the eager soul enamoured of Christ.” And Hildegard of Bingen, the 12C German nun famous for her writings and her compositions, expanded on this to create an entire theology of instruments. She gave each of them a rational or emotional role. For her, the flute signified the mystical union of the soul with God, and she glossed Psalm 150 like this:
“. . . praise him with the sound of a trumpet – that is, with the faculty of reason . . .
And praise him with the lyre of profound emotion, and with the harp of softness and gentleness.
And praise him with the timbrel of mortification and with the dance of exultation . . .
And praise him with the strings of repentance, and with the organ of divine guidance.
Praise him also with cymbals of true joy”.
Other writers haven’t been so eclectic in their acceptance: in the early Church, according to Gelineau, the lyre was considered respectable (King David is often associated with the lyre, so playing it meant emulating King David, and no-one could argue with that). On the other hand, the flute and the oboe were considered erotic (mainly because they were played by prostitutes). The trumpet was considered bellicose, and the organ theatrical (think Hammond organ). In fact, a cynic could well take the view that anyone in favour of instrumental music can justify it using biblical precedent or theological symbolism. On the other hand, anyone who feels negatively about it could justify their view by associating instruments with undesirable – and thus un-Christian – behaviour.
But we have a problem, and that’s one of inconsistency. Many instruments have been condemned as often as they are praised. For instance, wind instruments have been variously viewed as bad, because they prevent the player from speech and are thus a bar to rational expression...or they’re good because they have a ‘holy’ means of production, In other words, breath - the sacred symbol of living breath, of life itself. In this talk, illustrated with musical recordings, I’m going to be looking at all of these issues.
The global academic marketplace is largely anglophone, and if English is not your native language you may need help in getting your work into anglophone journals, so that your scholarship is available to the widest possible audience. Journal papers and book chapters will be rejected if the target language grammar and lexique is not acceptable, and even a technically competent paper may require substantial revision on linguistic grounds before it is accepted for publication. The same applies to scholarly work translated out of English (there are many specialist journals in French or German), and this paper explains the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation (e.g. Google translate) and human translation, and demonstrates the most cost-effective way of disseminating your work in another language without losing accuracy or subtlety of meaning.
The second strand is the handling of source material such as quotations or ethnographic data: deciding when to provide a translation, and when to add a gloss explaining the subtleties of meaning to non-native speakers. This is particularly important when your analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and hidden cultural references with which the reader may not be familiar.
The essays in this volume are organized around the four major themes that emerged from the Conference: Re-Imagining Group Identity, Embracing Hybridity, The Challenges of Assimilation, and Locating the Individual in the New Terrain. Rather than seek to impose a single conceptual frame as a Procrustean bed into which these diverse research projects were to be fitted, the objective has been to bring different perspectives to the investigation of the myriad liminal spaces now confronting us.
A brief survey of the essays will reveal the enormous richness of the topics under discussion. The scholars represented here reveal the shifting cultural landscape in many regions throughout the world. They further demonstrate the insight to be gained variously through ethnography, interviews, popular culture, literature and poetry, musicology, religion, the culinary arts, history, and social theory. They have together dramatically advanced the dialogical interchange we must undertake if we are to insert human priorities into social processes too often seemingly beyond our reach. What is most clear – and provides a pathway for further social constructivism and critical reflection – is that our basic sense of located selfhood and affiliation are being transformed beyond recognition, and that many are already taking the initiative of reassembling the joint meanings of our social worlds."
Monasteries and convents in the Western world have always needed to produce saleable goods and services in order to support themselves financially and to fund their valuable social work across the globe. Their goods have traditionally included food products and alcoholic beverages, but their income streams are increasingly supplemented by commercial recordings of their music for which, through the internet, they now enjoy a global market. They have long found the promise of both tradition and authenticity to be their most effective selling point, viz. the assertion of the Abbot of Nièges that “la meilleure force de vente est ‘la tradition et l’authenticité’,” but to what extent does the drive to produce high-quality recordings impact on this promise? And how does such commodification of the musical product affect the representation – and reception – of authenticity?
This interdisciplinary article, based on ethnographic research among twenty-first-century monks and nuns in Canada, the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, opens with a narrative of the commercial means by which present-day monastic communities function in, and present themselves to, the wider world through their products, and in particular explores the marketing of their music as an important signifier of authentic monastic identity and values. A detailed examination of recording technicalities (e.g. multi-tracking and mixing) challenges the promise of the ultimate authentic monastic experience; the article also demonstrates that the marketing of monastic music through not only religious and classical outlets but also world music and ‘chill-out’ labels is evidence for the many reasons why people buy into it, and questions whether the intended effect can always be guaranteed. Given that the reasons given by monastics for selling their music do not always tally with those of the distributors, the article therefore concludes with a discussion of the producers’ responsibility for satisfying the consumer’s expectations.
This exploration of the idea of buying into the authentic monastic experience proves to be a complex one, as the producers of the musical product strive to reconcile their own wish to disseminate a spiritual message through commodification of their musical life with the purchaser’s expectations of cultural authenticity.
The Opus Dei of the sung liturgy and daily Office is crucial to monastic life, and many monks and nuns find creative expression through musical setting of texts, so this paper explores the difference dilemma of music as both product and promulgator of gender constructs. Celibacy in the monastic sense, defined as a lifelong commitment to abstain from all sexual activity, necessarily precludes marriage and reproduction and thus denies a conventionally-expressed generative identity, or a psychic construction of oneself as a potential progenitor; yet the textual response which drives compositional endeavour features creative and procreative metaphors through which monastics repeatedly express their generative identity. Other issues to be examined include the impact of gender on textual response, textual themes and imagery, and reception and evaluation of the musico-textual product.
It should be noted that, in this instance, ‘gender’ refers to masculinity and femininity, patterns of behaviour and identity rather than ‘sexuality’ which concerns orientation or desire. It would be simplistic to suggest that an individual’s gender construction is utterly separate from their sexuality, and the fields of feminist theory and queer theory have covered many aspects of the impact of sexuality on creativity. It would be, however, impractical and intrusive to question celibate monks and nuns about their own sexuality, so this research is confined to a masculine/feminine binary opposition, with the proviso that men also display ‘feminine’ traits and women ‘masculine’ traits to varying degrees. In fact, in the few cases where the gay/lesbian sexuality of the monastic is known, this has not diluted the biological markers and gender-stereotypical behaviour has still been observed.
This research demonstrates that, in celibate monasticism, musical creativity provides a medium for the sublimation of sexual and reproductive energy as creative energy, and that musical choices clearly demonstrate the construction and interpretation not of a ‘third gender’ but of positive male/female gender identities.
However their journey over the past 150 years has been fraught with difficulties as they seek to reconcile their Anglicanism with their Catholic roots. This paper traces the problematic linguistic journey of the English-speaking Anglican Religious Communities (ARC), narrating their quest to construct a unified Anglican monastic identity, and the struggle of equating their Roman Catholic heritage (in Latin) with the ‘Englishness’ of their Anglicanism, through the words and music of their Office and liturgy. Starting with an exploration of the textual decisions with which the early communities were faced, through the upheaval of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, to the recent (2013) ‘going over’ to Rome of a major Anglican community, along with its celebrated ‘English Rite’, the story of Anglican monastic identity is therefore about developing a sense of a new tradition which draws on a sense of monastic – and thus Catholic – heritage, while interweaving this with a consciously historically valid English element. The result is a linguistic identity in which the twin strands of Catholicism and Anglicanism are intertwined and which continue to speak both of the past and the future of the ARC.
The discussion centers on the “speech-background” to the musical experience which is “tied to possibilities of lingual articulation” (Wellmer, 2004, p. 100), and differences in cultural expectations or social constructs which can ultimately lead to an identity crisis in which a musician can doubt their own “deeply personal” musical identity (Georgii-Hemming, 2011, p. 208). This paper therefore explores two areas in which musicians self-identify through language: firstly in terms of the ways in which they describe and conceptualize the music itself, and secondly in terms of their own selfhood and personal musical identity, and concludes that although ‘groupness’ can be considered to transcend musical activity, communicative difficulties can serve to disrupt and destabilize musician identity.
A monastic community brings together highly disparate individuals with the sole common aim of a personal theocentric existence: every individual will bring their own attitudes into community, and one of the hardest lessons to be learnt is that of giving up their own will and agenda to pursue this goal, while simultaneously establishing themselves within their own community. Music has always played a major role in monastic life, and chant has long proved an ideal medium for supporting a life of prayer, but recent research in twenty-first-century monasteries and convents has shown that it also has considerable agency in the psychosocial structure of monastic communities. In this paper ethnographic data are used to explore the role of communal singing, and specifically chant, as an integral part of twenty-first-century monastic life, and its impact as a source of both conflict and reparation, division and cohesion.
Following a review of the current literature on monasticism and monastic music this paper outlines my own perspective and methodology for the collection and presentation of the ethnographic data; I then present and discuss my findings on the musical implications of joining a religious community, the role played by music in community bonding, and issues of elitism and exclusion which can complicate the ongoing community dynamics, before drawing conclusions on the agency of music in modern monastic life.
Many researchers use foreign-language resources as the basis of their research, while others may use them only occasionally, but in all cases the scholar needs to ensure that, when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience, they communicate their message in its entirety. Ensuring that the full import of the source text is transmitted to the reader is particularly important when analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and implicit cultural references with which they may not be familiar. This paper therefore uses numerous examples of translation in academic work to illustrate the mechanics and best practice of translating meaning, and concludes by considering complex cultural references and multiple layers of meaning when writing for a cross-cultural academic audience
This interdisciplinary paper, illustrated with both written scores and recorded examples, uses ethnographic evidence to explore issues of notational encoding and ambiguity, the aesthetics and associations of the musical artefact, and the resulting subliminal messages transmitted and received through its physical representation. As Elizabeth Eva Leach has stated in Sung Birds, the notational process “informs and shapes compositional endeavour” and the use of software may itself limit the possibilities for notating the unmetered or metrically flexible compositions favoured by monastic composers. The advantages and disadvantages of general purpose programmes (e.g. Sibelius) and specialist neume-based fonts (e.g. Meinrad) are therefore briefly examined in the light of both the potential effect on the compositional process, and of the recipient’s ultimate perception of the musical product.
This paper is situated within a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework which utilises the literature in musicology (such as Treitler, Kivy and Gelbart), reception and composer-function (Everist, Foucault, Citron) and aesthetics (Cook, Johnson) to inform the argument, and to draw conclusions about the power of notation software to influence both composer and recipient.
In liberating the text from its liturgical context and releasing it as song into classical, jazz, rock, and pop performance arenas, many questions are raised about the transformation of textual meaning and ritual significance. The aim of this study is to examine the meaningfulness of the musico-textual setting for the receiver, firstly through the question of ownership of the text as a communal prayer, and secondly in arguing that perception and reception of the performer are contributory factors in the relative positivity or negativity of the receiver’s response. The research was carried out by examining a selection of the legion twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer readily accessible through YouTube, using ethnographic data from on-line comments and from the author’s on-line survey of Christian worshippers to explore the issues raised by these musical settings. These include the perceived right of an individual to ‘perform’ a mutually-owned prayer; the loss of ritual functionality engendered by the ‘musicking’ of the text and its release into the popular domain; and the additional layers of meaning afforded to the text by gestures in performance, which can in turn lead to a transformation and renewal of ritual efficacy. The inclusion of hyperlinks to YouTube video content throughout the article encourages the reader to engage with the performances themselves, from which it is hoped that a fruitful discussion of the issues will emerge.
So what’s the problem? Is it the look of an instrument that bothers us? Or is it the sound? Is it the instrument’s associations with the secular world? Or is there something about worship which precludes certain instruments for some reason?
People have been arguing about using instruments in Christian worship for at least two thousand years. The debate centres on two issues: firstly, whether or not instrumental music is acceptable at all, and secondly, assuming this to be the case, which instruments are suitable. So should we use instruments at all? To answer this, people have of course referred to the authorities, and particularly biblical authority. The Psalms are full of references to using instruments to praise and glorify the Lord, or to soothe the soul. Psalm 150 famously reads:
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and the harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals; Praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
So we have it on the highest authority that there’s no problem with using strings, keyboard instruments or even brass and percussion. Some early theologians were also very much in favour of using musical instruments. For the 3C scholar, Origen, instruments were very symbolic. For him, the trumpet represented “the efficacy of the Word of God,” the tympanon (drum) was “the destruction of lust,” and the cymbals were “the eager soul enamoured of Christ.” And Hildegard of Bingen, the 12C German nun famous for her writings and her compositions, expanded on this to create an entire theology of instruments. She gave each of them a rational or emotional role. For her, the flute signified the mystical union of the soul with God, and she glossed Psalm 150 like this:
“. . . praise him with the sound of a trumpet – that is, with the faculty of reason . . .
And praise him with the lyre of profound emotion, and with the harp of softness and gentleness.
And praise him with the timbrel of mortification and with the dance of exultation . . .
And praise him with the strings of repentance, and with the organ of divine guidance.
Praise him also with cymbals of true joy”.
Other writers haven’t been so eclectic in their acceptance: in the early Church, according to Gelineau, the lyre was considered respectable (King David is often associated with the lyre, so playing it meant emulating King David, and no-one could argue with that). On the other hand, the flute and the oboe were considered erotic (mainly because they were played by prostitutes). The trumpet was considered bellicose, and the organ theatrical (think Hammond organ). In fact, a cynic could well take the view that anyone in favour of instrumental music can justify it using biblical precedent or theological symbolism. On the other hand, anyone who feels negatively about it could justify their view by associating instruments with undesirable – and thus un-Christian – behaviour.
But we have a problem, and that’s one of inconsistency. Many instruments have been condemned as often as they are praised. For instance, wind instruments have been variously viewed as bad, because they prevent the player from speech and are thus a bar to rational expression...or they’re good because they have a ‘holy’ means of production, In other words, breath - the sacred symbol of living breath, of life itself. In this talk, illustrated with musical recordings, I’m going to be looking at all of these issues.
The global academic marketplace is largely anglophone, and if English is not your native language you may need help in getting your work into anglophone journals, so that your scholarship is available to the widest possible audience. Journal papers and book chapters will be rejected if the target language grammar and lexique is not acceptable, and even a technically competent paper may require substantial revision on linguistic grounds before it is accepted for publication. The same applies to scholarly work translated out of English (there are many specialist journals in French or German), and this paper explains the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation (e.g. Google translate) and human translation, and demonstrates the most cost-effective way of disseminating your work in another language without losing accuracy or subtlety of meaning.
The second strand is the handling of source material such as quotations or ethnographic data: deciding when to provide a translation, and when to add a gloss explaining the subtleties of meaning to non-native speakers. This is particularly important when your analysis hinges on double meanings, word-play, and hidden cultural references with which the reader may not be familiar.
So what is the role of the nun-composer and how is her work evaluated? And if her music is composed for the community, to whom is it attributed and who retains the intellectual property rights? This paper uses ethnographic data gathered in twenty-first-century convents, illustrated with examples of recent convent-composed music, to explore aspects of communal ownership, intellectual property, and evaluation and reception of the musical product, from both within and beyond the convent walls.
The chaplaincy became known as ‘The English Church’ and provided a valuable cultural reference point, a ‘home from home’ in a shifting and ultimately foreign world, drawing hundreds of worshippers to its regular services of the ‘Established Episcopal Church of England’ in a rented room.
This paper using information gleaned from church registers, consular correspondence, and local municipal archives, and draws on the emerging literature on migrant studies and identity studies to examine the role of the English Church in the lives of the British Colony and explore issues such as social mobility within this microcosm of British society; the symbiosis between church and congregation as both supported and supporters; the reinforcing of group national identity while integrating, and even marrying, into French society.
Although the students are all musicians, not aspiring linguists, other language teachers in the music department are not musicians (my predecessor did not even read music). I humbly consider that my own dual experiences as professional musician and professional translator allow me to serve as an “intercultural mediator” [Valero-Garcés, n.p.] between French and British musical culture as well as these two languages, so in this paper I demonstrate my own use of translation in a musical context, repudiating criticism of translation as “boring,” “pointless” and “irrelevant” [Maley 1989: 3] and claims that this use of L1 in an otherwise monolingual learning environment reduces valuable L2 exposure time [Hall & Cook, 2012). I argue for the validity of using translation as a learning tool at these two very different levels within a non-linguistic discipline: firstly to promote fluency in interlingual and intercultural communication, and subsequently extending this into “traditional principles of fidelity and adequacy” [Valero-Garcés, n.p.] for the purposes of research. [300 words]
References
Council of Europe. The Common European Framework of References for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Hall, Graham, & Guy Cook. “Own-Language Use in Language Teaching and Learning.” Language Teaching 45.3 (2012): 271-308.
Maley, Alan. “Foreword,” in Alan Duff Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Valero-Garcés, Carmen. “Mediation as translation or translation as mediation? Widening the translator's role in a new multicultural society.” On-line article on Translation Directory website. Accessed 22 April 2017
http://www.translationdirectory.com/article324.htm. n.p.
- What pedagogical methods are used nowadays, and how do they compare to historic monastic musical education?
- Which ‘experts’ are called on to aid the learning process: professional musicians (secular choir directors or early music scholars) or self-taught amateurs with an understanding of monastic life (e.g. experienced monastics, albeit from other denominations)?
- And, importantly, what happens to a community’s music when the transmission line of these skills is severed and the crucial knowledge needed to decode the music is lost?
These questions are answered using primary ethnographic sources [the author’s 2006 survey of modern communities, and personal interviews and correspondence with individual Anglican and Catholic monastics]; secondary sources [e.g. Boynton (2000), Yardley (2006), Monson (1995) and Montford, 2007] are also used to enable comparison with medieval and Renaissance musical education The significance of this paper to the conference theme lies in its exploration of pedagogical methods, situated within their historical context, to produce a fresh contemporary perspective on the practical issues of monastic musical education.
While technical terms can be learnt – the scales/les gammes/die Tonleiter clearly carry exactly the same meaning for all musicians – concepts and abstractions can be trickier, given that the “speech-background” to the musical experience is “tied to possibilities of lingual articulation” (Wellmer, 100). Importantly, differences in cultural expectations or social constructs (musical training, employment statutes) can also lead to incomprehension of the individual musician and, ultimately, to an identity crisis in which they doubt their own “deeply personal” musical identity (Georgii-Hemming, 208). This paper therefore explores two areas in which musicians self-identify through language: firstly in terms of the ways in which they describe and conceptualize the music itself, and secondly in terms of their own selfhood and personal musical identity.
References
Edwards, John. Language and Identity. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 2009.
Georgii-Hemming, Eva. « Shaping a music teacher identity in Sweden. » Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity : Voices Across Cultures. Ed. Lucy Green. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2011. 197-209.
Wellmer, Albrecht. « On music and language. » Identity and Difference : Essays on Music, Language and Time. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2004. 71-131.
Unlike neighbouring Nice and Cannes, where enclaves of rich British ‘swallows’ flew in for a leisured winter, Marseille was very much a working city, in which British residents interacted with French life, sometimes becoming fully integrated. However, the English Church (now All Saints’ Marseille) provided a valuable cultural reference point for these ex-pats, a ‘home from home’ in a foreign world. This paper first positions Marseille within the network of trade routes which crisscrossed the British Empire, and then uses information gleaned from church registers, consular correspondence and local municipal archives to depict some of the people who worshipped and were baptised, married and buried there. This paper thus demonstrates the role of the English Church in providing not only spiritual and social welfare, but also a sense of continuity for these builders of Empire.
The only model available to the early communities was that of pre-Reformation – and thus Catholic – monasticism. The Church did not recognize the ARC until 1935, so they had complete autonomy to develop an Anglican monastic tradition; however, they soon became divided between ‘Prayer Book Catholics’ whose strong sense of Anglican identity focused on the Book of Common Prayer as their touchstone, and the ‘Anglo-Papalists’ whose aim was reunion with Roman Catholicism. This paper examines their development of a sung repertory, from the early communities’ translation of pre-Reformation musical resources through to the vernacular translations which followed Vatican II, and concludes by touching on some recent developments which bring into contemporary perspective their continuing journey along the via media monastica.
La liturgie et les heures canoniales chantées – dites ensemble ‘l’Opus Dei’ – se trouvent au coeur de la quotidienne monastique, et il y a beaucoup de religieux qui s’expriment de manière créative en mettant des textes en musique, donc cet exposé explore le « dilemme de la différence » par lequel la musique fonctionne à la fois comme produit et comme diffuseur des concepts de sexe.
La chasteté au sens monastique, définie comme l’engagement à s’abstenir de toutes activités sexuelles tout au long de la vie, en excluant le mariage et la reproduction, prive d’une identité générative, c'est-à-dire de l’image de soi comme géniteur potentiel ; pourtant, les réponses textuelles des religieux font figurer des métaphores de créativité et de procréation par lesquelles leur identité générative s’exprime. Les questions de l’impact du sexe sur la réponse textuelle et sur la réception du produit musico-textuel seront ainsi examinées.
Il est à noter qu’ici ‘le sexe’ concerne les types de comportement et d’identité de la masculinité et de la féminité plutôt que de ‘la sexualité’ qui concerne l’orientation et le désir. Suggérer que la construction sexuelle peut se séparer de la sexualité serait simpliste, et l’impact de la sexualité sur la créativité a déjà bien été étudiée ; cet exposé s’en tient à une opposition binaire masculine/féminine, sous réserve que des hommes montrent des traits ‘féminins’ et des femmes des traits ‘masculins’ dans une certaine mesure. En fait, dans les cas où l’orientation sexuelle est connue, les balises biologiques ne sont pas diluées et ces types de comportement sont toujours notés.
Ces recherches démontrent que, dans le monachisme célibat, l’énergie sexuelle et reproductrice peut être sublimée comme de l’énergie créative au moyen de la musique, et que les choix musicaux démontrent la construction et l’interprétation non pas d’un « troisième sexe » mais des identités masculines/féminines positives.""
My own ethnomusicological research among present-day religious has raised the issue of dance as a means of self-expression in monastic communities, particularly by women religious. This paper examines the means by which present-day religious produce an embodied response to their interior spirituality, and the arguments for and against bodily expression through dance in a monastic context.
While the pro-dance movement cites many historical and biblical examples of its use, those who condemn the idea of dance in worship consider it to be a perilously subversive activity carrying a serious danger of arousing sexual feelings. However, the monastic commitment to celibacy, while valuing control and self-discipline, rarely subscribes to such paranoia: a report on a 2006 symposium entitled ‘The Body and Its Language: The Place of Meeting’ considered that close contact with non-Western cultures has brought a recognition that Western culture can leave the individual ‘deficient in gestures and images’ which make it difficult for monastics to find ways of embodying their ‘experience and quest’.
This paper will use ethnographic data and video content to explore the questions of how and why the religious use dance, the impact of the performative aspect of dance on the community, and the efficacy of such a manifestation of an individual’s ‘felt’ interiority, given the ambiguity of dance as a communicative medium and the problems of its reception.
A nun’s need to express this individuality is often manifested through the expressive medium of music, which plays a crucial role in convent life. While the communal sense of ‘otherness’ from the secular world is reinforced through the continued use of chant, it is through creative music-making and text-setting that individual sisters define their personal and sexual identity and construct a sense of self as ‘other’. This paper therefore draws on the binary perception of identity work as ‘projection’ (the presentation of self to others) and ‘introjection’ (a presentation of self to self), using recent ethnographic data from British, American and Canadian convents as the basis for a socio-musicological examination of the agency of music in the self-reconstruction of difference.
The discussion focuses on individual sisters’ gender-specific use of music to position themselves as women – albeit celibate ones – with a mature sense of sexual and reproductive identity, and at the same time to underline their difference from the secular world they have left behind. As Weil says, ‘our deepest instinct [is] that we possess an inner core of individuality different from others’ and this paper shows that, despite the anonymity of the habit, nuns are as keen to be different as the rest of us.
This paper, which assumes no specialist musical knowledge, uses recent recordings to explore the significance of music in the construction and expression of Anglican monastic identity, contextualized within an increasingly secular, materialistic and pluralistic contemporary culture. In fact, the search for an Anglican monastic identity is shown to operate on many levels: for instance, the high levels of musical composition within community, coupled with very low levels of borrowing from other communities, are illustrative of the need for a distinct community identity. Specific musical choices such as genre and instrumentation also act as indicators of the need for Anglican Religious to define themselves on three separate levels: as members of the Anglican communion; as members of their own community; and as individuals within that community. The sense of individual selfhood includes self as monastic; self as creative being, self as feminine; and a continuing sense of one’s own origins within, and relevance to, modern society.
This research demonstrates that the music currently being sung and played by women religious is crucial to the construction and expression of all these multiple identities as the Anglican religious communities seek to reconcile their long monastic tradition with their place in twenty-first-century culture.