Oxford Handbook of Community Singing

The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing embraces an open-ended interpretation of socio-musical practices that can be described with the term community singing. The volume exemplifies community singing as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses diverse methodologies and objects of inquiry, and in the process brings together recent research from the fields that have historically engaged with the practice of group singing, including group dynamics, ethnomusicology, music history, music education, music therapy, community music, church music, music performance, sociology, political science, Latin American and North American studies, media studies, embodied psychology, theology, and philosophy.

List of contents

• List of Contributors


• Introduction: Singing as Community, Singing into Community, and Growing the Singing Community


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis and Kay Norton


• Part I. Media and the Imagination of Community


• Introduction to Part I. Media and the Imagination of Community


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis


• 1. Mediated Community Singing


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis


• 2. Selling with Singalongs: Community Singing as Advertising in Cinema, Radio and Television


• Malcolm Cook


• 3. Singing into a Smartphone: The Persuasive Affordances of Karaoke and Lip-Syncing Apps


• Byrd McDaniel


• 4. What the Pandemic Couldn't Take Away: Group Singing Benefits That Survived Going Online


• Kay Norton


• 5. Virtual choirs and issues of community choral practice


• Cole Bendall


• 6. Community Singing in the Age of Coronavirus: The Case of Collegiate A Cappella


• Joshua S. Duchan


• Part II. Singing in Place-Based Communities


• Introduction to Part II. Singing in Place-Based Communities


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis


• 7. "Some Old Remembered Song": Music at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, 1825-1840


• Glen W. Hicks


• 8. New Music for Old Prayers: Identity Construction and Community Building in Zimbabwean Black Jewish Synagogues


• Lior Shragg


• 9. Vernacular Christmas Carol Singing in the Southern Pennines of England


• Ian Russell


• 10. "Take Me Out" to "Sweet Caroline": Collective Singing in the Ballpark


• Matthew W. Mihalka


• 11. "Singing Their Heads Off": Sing-along Behavior in the Nightlife of Northern England


• Alisun Pawley


• 12. Brigadoon in the Heights: Fostering Intimacy, Community, and Activism through Secular Leftist Hymnody


• Eve McPherson


• Part III. The Practitioner's Perspective


• Introduction to Part III. The Practitioner's Perspective


• Kay Norton


• 13. Benefits of Community Singing for Cancer Patients, Survivors and Caregivers


• Amy Clements-Cortés and Joyce Yip


• 14. "It's about the Relationships": Epiphanies in Songleading


• Roger Mantie and Glenn Marais


• 15. "Everyone Can Sing": Class Choirs in 0th through 3rd Grades and the Significance of Community Singing for Pupils' Social Wellbeing and School Engagement


• Lars Ole Bonde and Stefan Ingerslev


• 16. Singing for Singing's Sake? Community Singing in Norwegian Schools


• Anne Haugland Balsnes


• 17. "Scare Away the Dark": The Promotion of Singing to Create Post-Secondary Academic Communities


• Trudi Wright


• 18. Songs of Diversity: Three Case Studies of Community Singing, Identity, and Well-being


• Catherine Birch, Ruth Currie, Wayne Dawson, and Stephen Clift


• Part IV. Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture


• Introduction to Part IV. Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture


• Kay Norton


• 19. Community Choirs: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusivity


• Kayla Drudge and Anna E. Nekola


• 20. Blend and Balance in Trans* Choral Musicking


• Holly Patch


• 21. Peace and Harmony Prevailing: Masonic Singing in the US


• Andrew Schaeffer


• 22. Singing Jewishness: The Musical Nostalgia of Jewish Congregational Melodies


• Rachel Adelstein


• 23. Sacred Sounds and Social Justice: Singing the Spirituals in an Interracial and Multigenerational Community Choir


• Aleysia K. Whitmore and Marquisha L. Scott


• 24. Women Singing in a Rural North Indian Community: A Case Study


• Kamlesh Singh, Suman Sigroha, and Bharti Shokeen


• Part V. Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation


• Introduction to Part V. Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis


• 25. A "Badge of Americanism": Group Singing as Political Expression in the Early United States


• Laura Lohman


• 26. Singing at Ellis Island


• Dorothy Glick Maglione


• 27. Community Singing in Flint and Baltimore, 1917-1920


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis and Alan L. Spurgeon


• 28. The Disney Chorus: Singing Along to the Studio's Forging of American Musical Identity


• Gregory Camp


• 29. Spectacle and Empire: Imagined Community and the Crystal Palace Handel Festivals


• Charles Edward McGuire


• 30. Estonian singing traditions as an impetus for community building and expressing Estonian cultural heritage in Australia


• Naomi Cooper


• Part VI. Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum


• Introduction to Part VI. Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum


• Kay Norton


• 31. The Voices of Hope: A Traveling Miracle


• Susan Bishop


• 32. Community Singing as Counterculture in a Women's Prison


• Amanda Weber


• 33. Border Transgressions: Song, Story, and Communal


• Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros


• 34. Singing, Suffering, and Liberation in the Concentration Camps of the South African War


• Erin Johnson-Williams


• 35. Music, Emotion, and Asylum: Wellbeing Mapped Through Choral Singing


• Jane W. Davidson, Benjamin P. Leske, and Amanda E. Krause


• 36. Selectively Staging the "Beloved Community": Sacred Harp Singing and Racial Politics in the Folk Revival


• Jesse P. Karlsberg


• Part VII. Singing and Political Action


• Introduction to Part VII. Singing and Political Action


• Esther M. Morgan-Ellis


• 37. New Firebombs in Old Bottles: Social Mobilization and Cultural Resonance of Protest Songs


• Marek Payerhin


• 38. From "Preguntitas sobre Dios" to "Solo le pido a Dios": Protest and Piety in Latin American Community Singing


• Marcell Silva Steuernagel


• 39. March for the Beloved: A Brief History of a South Korean Protest Song


• Jarryn Ha


• 40. "Cielito Lindo" or "Son de la Negra"?: Mariachi, Latinidad, and the Trump Administration


• Cameo Flores


• 41. Youth, Group Singing, and Peacebuilding in Urban Zimbabwe


• Simbarashe Gukurume


• 42. The Role of Hate Songs among Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Fans: The Entrapping Loop of Hatred


• Moshe Bensimon and Shiran Hen


• Part VIII. New Paradigms


• Introduction to Part VIII. New Paradigms


• Kay Norton


• 43. Music and Human Flourishing in Christian Communities


• Nathan Myrick, Benjamin Gessner, and Johnathan Alvarado


• 44. By the Rivers of Babylon: Re-membering Community through the Affordance of Congregational Singing in Greek Orthodox Churches in the United States


• Alexander K. Khalil


• 45. Community Singing, the Church of England, and Spirituality: The Singer, the Song, and the Singing


• June Boyce-Tillman


• 46. Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes of Entrainment in Communal Singing


• Guy Hayward


• 47. From Art Music to Heart Music: The Place of the Composer in Community Singing


• Fiona Evison


• Index

About the author

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Georgia, where she also directs the orchestra and coaches the old-time string band. She studies participatory music-making traditions of the past and present, employing both historical and ethnographic methodologies. She has published on the American community singing movement, mediated sing-alongs, Sacred Harp singing, old-time string band music, and music history pedagogy, and is also active as a cellist, fiddler and fiddle teacher, and singer.

Kay Norton is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University. Her 2016 monograph, Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (2016) incorporates threads from musicology, anthropology, philosophy, medical history, psychology of music, and neuroscience to argue the centrality of the melodious voice in human experience. Concurrently with that ongoing work, she presents and publishes on US American sacred music. She teaches research

methodologies, gender in music, music in human experience, and nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, and is a lifelong community singer.

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing embraces an open-ended interpretation of socio-musical practices that can be described with the term community singing. The volume exemplifies community singing as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses diverse methodologies and objects of inquiry, and in the process brings together recent research from the fields that have historically engaged with the practice of group singing, including group dynamics, ethnomusicology, music history, music education, music therapy, community music, church music, music performance, sociology, political science, Latin American and North American studies, media studies, embodied psychology, theology, and philosophy.

Chapters are divided into eight interdisciplinary sections: "Media and the Imagination of Community", "Singing in Place-Based Communities", "The Practitioner's Perspective", "Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture", "Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation", "Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum", "Singing and Political Action", and "New Paradigms". Each is prefaced with an introduction that traces the common threads running through the methodologically and topically diverse chapters that examine culturally specific narrow instances of community singing, each confined to a given time and place, in significant detail.

The chapters explore community singing as one of two phenomena: the practice of singing as community--the utilization of collective song by communities of place or preference, and the singing of community into existence--the creation or identification of a new community, through singing, that did not exist before. Both practices can profoundly affect participants. The Handbook considers why communities are motivated to sing, what their activities mean, and how practitioners can improve the experience of singing together.

Product details

• Authors: Esther M. (Associate Professor of Mu Morgan-Ellis
• Assisted by: Esther M. Morgan-Ellis (Editor), Esther M. (Associate Professor of Music History Morgan-Ellis (Editor), Kay Norton (Editor), Kay (Professor of Musicology Norton (Editor), Norton Kay (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.05.2024
• EAN: 9780197612460
• ISBN: 978-0-19-761246-0
• No. of pages: 1032
• Series: Oxford Handbooks
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > General, dictionaries; PERFORMING ARTS / General, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Choral, Other performing arts, Choral Music