Sacred Sound And Social Change

Teachers, students, composers, performers, and other practitioners of sacred sound will appreciate this volume because, unlike any book currently available on sacred music, it treats the history, development, current practices, composition, and critical views of the liturgical music of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Contributors trace Jewish music from its place in Hebrew Scriptures through the nineteenth-century Reform movement. Similar accounts of Christian music describe its growth up to the Protestant Reformation, as well as post-Reformation development. Other essays explore liturgical music in contemporary North America by analyzing it against the backdrop of the continuous social change that characterizes our era.

"This innovative book explores religion through music - the source of spiritual elation, social cohesion, and empowerment in cultures around the world."--BOOK JACKET.

This fully updated second edition is a selective annotated bibliography of all relevant published resources relating to church and worship music in the United States. Over the past decade, there has been a growth of literature covering everything from traditional subject matter such as the organ works of J.S. Bach to newer areas of inquiry including folk hymnology, women and African-American composers, music as a spiritual healer, to the music of Mormon, Shaker, Moravian, and other smaller sects. With multiple indices, this book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Religion and music are complementary resources for interpreting our lives. Music serves the sacred in ways that can be specified and articulated, yet the connection between them has been sorely neglected in the scholarly study of religion. In The Sacred in Music, Albert Blackwell brings the two subjects together in a celebration of the rich Western musical tradition, both classical and Christian.

"When Gilya Gerda Schmidt met him in 1986, Cantor Heiser had spent forty-six of his eighty-one years as a US citizen. He had assumed the cantorate at Congregation B'nai Israel in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1942. A master of the cantor's art, he was renowned for his style, arrangements, and deeply affecting voice. In this book, Schmidt melds decades of archival research, conservation efforts, family interviews, and trips to Jerusalem and Berlin into a critical reconstruction of the life and vision of Hazzan Mordecai Gustav Heiser in the multiple contexts that shaped him. Coming of age in Berlin in the afterglow of the Second German Empire, young Gustav had tasted European Jewish culture in a rare state of refinement and modernity. But by January 30, 1940, when he reached New York with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Cantor Heiser had lost nearly all of his living family relations to the extermination programs of the German Reich, and narrowly survived incarceration at Sachsenhausen himself. While Cantor Heiser's art was steeped in nineteenth-century tradition, Schmidt contends that Heiser's music was a powerful affirmation of Jewish life in the twentieth century. In a final chapter, Schmidt describes his influence on the American cantorate and American culture and society"--

Was the Holocaust a natural product of a long German history of Anti-Semitism? Or were the Nazi policies simply a wild mutation of history, not necessarily connected to the past? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between? This latest volume in the acclaimed Studies in Contemporary Jewry series, edited by internationally known scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, presents essays on the origins of the Holocaust. The works in this volume are diverse in scope and opinion, ranging from general philosophical discourses to detailed analyses of specific events, and often reflecting the divergent ideologies and methods of the contributors. But each adds to the whole, and the result is a fascinating panorama that is sure to be indispensable to all students and scholars of the subject.