Without Limits: Singing the Congregation’s Song

Sponsored by David English

Fernando Berwig Silva
“Appropriation or Solidarity?” Investigation Transnational Latine/x Church Music Practices

In January 2024, Latin American church musicians gathered in Barranquilla, Colombia, for the first Latinx Leadership Connection Program. The meeting was sponsored by the Center for Congregational Song of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, and it aimed “to connect worship leaders of Latin American descent living and working in the United States with worship leaders from across Latin America for a time of shared learning, relationship-building, and inspiration” (“Latinx Leadership Connection Program,” 2024).

This paper investigates ways the Latinx Leadership Connection Program participants narrate ideas of religious appropriation, borrowing, and solidarity. By leaning on Bucar’s concept of “religious appropriation”—a class of religious borrowings where “individuals adopt religious practices without committing to religious doctrines, ethical values, systems of authority, or institutions, in ways that exacerbate existing systems of structural injustice” (Bucar 2022, 2)—through the lens of Latin American church musicians, I nuance the racialized North American category of appropriation, particularly in its cultural and religious instances. Through an analysis of the musical performances during the event and interviews with the musicians present at the program, I showcase the necessity of new conceptual frameworks that attend to the epistemological, cosmological, and theological multi-layered realities of Latin American and Latinx church musicians.

This paper, an ethnographic reflection, joins decolonial church music scholars in exposing how Latin American “embodied, oral, communal singing [practices] challenge prevailing Eurocentric norms that emphasize written texts, individual ownership, and rationalist intellectualism, represented in Euro-North-Atlantic epistemologies of the Enlightenment” (Whitla 2018, 289). Moreover, my paper clues how Christian Congregational Music studies can ethically inform theological, cultural, and ethnoracial denominational debates, stirring conversations toward more diverse, inclusive, transnational, and interdisciplinary Christian liturgical practices.


Nick Klemetson
“How” Does a Hymn Mean?

Originally published in 1959, author John Ciardi's book How Does a Poem Mean? offers insights into poetic procedures and describes how a reader can understand and interpret poetry. With this resource, Ciardi demonstrates that poems communicate content and convey the how in various ways. The question can then be asked, "how does a hymn mean?" Hymns are not impactful in universal ways. What touches the heart of one may be perceived as spurious by another. Hymns can "mean" in the same ways poems can; text structure, alliteration, anaphora, rhyme scheme, and other factors can all be utilized to deepen the meaning of a text. When added to a poem, a hymn tune adds a layer of depth and meaning to a text, and the success of a hymn in various church settings can rely on the tune as much as it does on the words. Limitations of our human words can struggle to express our spiritual journeys, especially with generations of worshipers participating under one roof. This paper explores how to define what and "how" a hymn is in relation to its tune. Specific hymns that have gained success using multiple tunes, such as Fred Pratt Green’s “When In Our Music God Is Glorified,” will be explored, including questions relating to the enlivening of Christian worship and examinations of ecclesial context. Examining these questions will provide insight into how and why hymns impact organizations, denominations, individuals, and even entire generations.


Deanna Witkowski
Jazz in the Pews: “Experiments in Sunday Worship” in the 1960s

“Jazz in the Pews” explores the relationships between two Black Catholic composers, Mary Lou Williams and Eddie Bonnemère, and two parishes for which they composed liturgical jazz: St. Thomas the Apostle Church, a Black Catholic parish in Harlem, and Saint Peter’s Church (Lutheran), a predominantly white Protestant congregation, in midtown Manhattan. By exploring a larger ecosystem that encompasses Vatican II liturgical reform, ecumenism in New York, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the beginnings of the Black Catholic Movement, “Jazz in the Pews” argues that the liturgical jazz works composed by Williams and Bonnemère could not have been created in a different moment in time or in another locale outside of New York.

The project also explores how Williams and Bonnemère situated themselves as Black Catholics within the larger ecumenical moment of the late 1960s. Beginning with his thirty-year tenure at Saint Peter’s in 1967, Bonnemère navigated mainline, white Protestantism (including interactions with clergy, congregations, and publishers) while simultaneously contributing to early Black Catholic sacred music initiatives including the first African American hymnal, Lead Me, Guide Me, in 1987. By contrast, placing Williams’s Masses in the context of early Black Catholic organizations throws into stark relief how her sacred music was rarely given a national Catholic platform. “Jazz in the Pews” asks how the size of Williams’s liturgical music might look differently if she had received more robust support from Black Catholic and white Protestant organizations. The project also asks how each composer’s agency and views of their audiences for their sacred music contributed to the dissemination of their work and suggests ways to forward their legacies in the present day.