Without Limits: Singing the Congregation’s Song

Sponsored by Hilary Seraph Donaldson, Andrew Donaldson, FHS, and Wendy Donaldson

A recent study of the contents of the Voices Together hymnal found that among songs originating outside Europe and North America (or written in connection to those styles), about 57% of tunes were unattributed while named composers were about 37% male and 6% female (Graber and Loepp Thiessen 2023). This reliance on songs from contexts where songs are considered communal creative products or from a “collection” process in which the name of the composer was not preserved reflects decades-long biases in how Western congregational song curators have engaged with sources outside the Euro-American axis. These types of songs tend to be older and more recognizably different from Western hymnody. A cursory glance at other sources suggests Voices Together’s statistics are similar to many other congregational song collections in North America. We ask: what does this say about North American Christians’ conception of global Christian music? Are we putting conceptual limits on songs of “the other,” and how can we better sing without these limits?

This sectional will introduce a forthcoming hymnal companion-type resource from GIA that focuses on global hymnody. Scholars working on the project will present information about the roughly 200 songs discussed in the volume, along with accompanying essays on histories of Christian song in various geographical areas and issues such as appropriation, copyright, decolonization, and hybridity. We will sing examples of global song of many varieties (old and new, as well as “traditional” and styles that cross boundaries) and discuss their contexts and their relationship to issues named above.