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WELLESLEY, Mass. -- Sacred Song in America: Religion,
Music and Public Culture (University of Illinois, 2003)
is an exploration of the role of ritual music in American
society. Author Stephen A. Marini, the Elisabeth Luce
Moore Professor of Christian Studies at Wellesley College,
looks at sacred songs throughout American history, from
Native Americans and Chicanos of the Southwest to the
modern developments of New Age and Neo-Pagan music. Sacred
Song encompasses an amazing mix of musical diversity,
from the Black Church and the Sacred Harp singing in
the rural South to Jewish klezmer music, sacred art music
and gospel music.
Marini doesn't just research American music; he also
sings it. He's the founder of a 25-year-old group, Norumbega
Harmony, which produces concerts and CDs featuring Early
American sacred music. It's natural, he says, that singing
and religion became so closely bound together in the
human experience.
"Singing develops out of deeply held emotional
responses--fear or exaltation--and you make
great leaps of sound," he said. "Talking, communicating
and remembering things also invite a musical rhythm and
a sustained tone."
Marini says the first sacred texts also were the first
hymns. The Vedas, Hindu sacred scriptures, were the earliest
sacred text, written 3,000 years ago. "They were
clearly sung and chanted," he said. "Something
about chanted language, sung language, endows the language
with additional potency, which from the beginning and
all throughout human culture, has been associated with
the divine, the sacred. The power defies description,
defies analysis."
It turns out that the United States is among the most
religious countries in the world. Marini reports polling
data that virtually all Americans believe in a Supreme
Being, more than half are members of a religious community,
40 percent attend religious services regularly and more
than a third claim to have a personal experience of the
sacred.
"These levels of religious commitment are exponentially
higher than in any other developed nation," Marini
said.
Americans also are very religiously diverse, with at
least 500 denominational varieties of Protestantism,
another 500 Native American tribal religions as well
as "most forms of Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy,
significant enclaves of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists,
one of the world's largest and most heterogeneous Catholic
communities and an ever-growing number of New World faiths
from Mormons to Scientology to Santeria to New Age goddesses," Marini
writes.
Each religion has its own unique tradition of sacred
song; each tradition is further subdivided by racial,
ethnic, class and regional differences. Marini tackled
a gargantuan task in writing about sacred song in America,
and his next book promises to be a similar challenge.
It is tentatively titled The Government of God: Religion
in Revolutionary America, and will explore the complex
ways in which religion helped to shape the founding of
our country. This new project will develop themes introduced
in an earlier book, Radical Sects of Revolutionary
New England.
Marini's Sacred Song in America has been well-received.
"This unusually fine and important book has no
parallel," said Harvey Cox, professor of divinity
at Harvard and author of The Secular City and Fire
from Heaven. "I know of no other book on American religious
music with as wide a sweep. As a historian of American
religion, and as a student and practitioner of sacred
music, Marini is simply and utterly unique."
Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life:
A History, calls the book "enlightening, well-informed
and sophisticated. I know of nothing like it."
Unique as it is, Marini's book was inspired by an age-old
human need: the musical expression of praise and ritual.
"Sacred song is an extraordinary vehicle for conducting
believers into the ritual dimension," he said, whether
that means honoring God or helping us through life-changing
events such as weddings and funerals. "Anybody who
participates in a religious tradition has experienced
this at some point or another. I hope they can see their
experience in this book and perhaps learn something about
this whole huge world out there of sacred song."
Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing
an excellent liberal-arts education for women who will
make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near
Boston is home to 2,300 undergraduate students from all
50 states and 68 countries.
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