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The Secularism of Music Studies

The Secularism of Music Studies

Yale Journal of &

Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 8

2020

The Secularism of Music Studies

Jim Sykes

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Recommended Citation Sykes, Jim (2020) "The Secularism of Music Studies," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1210

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Why does power need glory? If it is essentially force and capacity for action and government, why does it assume the rigid, , and “glorious” form of ceremonies, acclamations, and protocols? What is the relation between economy and Glory? —Giorgio Agamben1

Political Theology and Formations of and the writings of Paul that the classical notion of dike morphed into the broader, “cosmopolitan” ideal of In his book The Kingdom and the Glory, what we term social justice.5 Giorgio Agamben reconsiders Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis that “ significant concepts Trinitarian doctrine sought to resolve of the modern theory of the state are how God could be complete, infinite, and secularized theological concepts.”2 Schmitt, pure while existing on earth in limited 6 a committed Nazi, sought (as Carl Raschke and material form. is Hippolytus’s puts it) “to revalidate somehow the pre- description of this (as summarized by modern assumption that political absolutism Watkin): had its own kind of legitimacy, if it had The Father is , but two persons, the warrant of religious transcendence.”3 Father and Son, and then there is Agamben argues that there is in fact a second a third, the . The third mediates between Father and Son, first paradigm of sovereignty also operative in in that the Father gives orders which early Christian political theology, the “divine are performed by the revealed in economy” or oikonomia (“an immanent the Son. Then the Son, through belief, ordering—domestic and not political in is accorded to the Father as a strict sense—of both divine and human who performs the Father’s will. In other ”).4 To stick with Raschke’s summary of words economy, the Holy Spirit, is a Agamben a bit longer, he suggests that the doubly mediating articulation that does not reconcile Trinitarian and origins of paradigm lie “in ’ Gnostic theology but solves the age- proclamation of the ‘kingdom of God’”: old theological problem of how God’s On the one hand, “kingdom” will is actuated on the earth without (basileia) signifies unconditioned undermining all the elements of God’s divine sovereignty, but as the Great power, such as omniscience, atemporality, Commandment implies, and Jesus’ the will of good resulting in the existence own radically relational interpretation of evil etc.7 of what it means to be a participant in The heavenly army of bureaucrats—that is, the “kingdom,” it also connotes limitless the angels and clergy—act to dispensate, mutual obligations that we have to each other, a form of a familialism reaching manage, and produce the glorification of God, infinitely beyond the limits of blood, making humans aware of his providence, kinship, and any particular, concrete leading ultimately to their redemption “household.” under the influence of in the kingdom of . The central

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 119 observation of Agamben’s book is that Being without any further act, represent “the apparatus of the Trinitarian oikonomia through their of praise, God’s may constitute a privileged laboratory inoperativity (he no longer needs to act on for the observation of the working and earth).”13 Note the causal power of music articulation . . . of the governmental in this production of sovereignty—music machine” because it shows modern acts to provide “cover” for the sovereign’s sovereign power in its “paradigmatic form.”8 inoperativity—yet note also that Agamben What Agamben finds in each era is an does not perceive music as doing “empty throne” whose power is dispersed, to humans, society, or God here, since managed, and legitimized through glory to music-as-glory is revealed produce consensus. He likens the economy merely to represent divine inoperativity. of to the modern media’s ability (Notice the dichotomies in Agamben’s to produce and retract glory in secular phrase “not of action but of , not of democracies (“the acclamative and power but of glory.”) Paradoxically, music doxological aspect of power that seemed to in this conception lies at the center of the have disappeared in modernity”).9 oikonomia but is noneconomic, without In a stunning argument that should action and without power. give music scholars pause, Agamben “Inoperativity as the dimension most locates music at the very center of the proper to God and man” reaches its early Christian oikonomia. This is because apotheosis in the Jewish Sabbath and music is central to the production of glory Christian Sunday, when all work ceases.14 that is bestowed upon the sovereign by To my ears, the celebration of rest—which liturgy, ceremonies, and acclamations, in churches and synagogues has long the purpose of which is to “cover with featured uses of to glorify God—is its splendour the unaccountable figure the origin of Western society’s notions of of divine inoperativity.”10 Glory fills the music as transcendence, epiphenomenon, “unthinkable emptiness” left in the wake and an alternative to normative labor. of divine inoperativity (.., the empty Musicological scholarship has located throne), but in so doing, it is also what these concepts in the emergence of the “nourishes and feeds power (or, rather, Western classical canon in the eighteenth what the machine of power transforms and nineteenth centuries, but the value of into nourishment).”11 Thus, Agamben Agamben’s text is not just that he shows asks, “what is a politics that would not be how going back to early Christian political of government but of liturgy, not of action theology allows us to grasp their Christian but of hymn, not of power but of glory?”12 origins. Rather, it is that he demonstrates The empty throne of the sovereign who the signal importance of music-as-glory, is glorified through the divine economy music-as-non-normative labor, and music- that acts on his behalf to redeem humans as-noneconomy to , is fully revealed as inoperative after concepts that (I strive to show in this essay) redemption, when what will remain is “a become firmly integrated into the modern hymnological hierarchy”: the angels, “left Western ontology of music in secular form without act or praxis as God’s will has been but have been much less discussed by completed so that he is, , scholars than the historicization of

120 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) transcendence and the musical works that those who are not Christian on the outside. (I contend) derive from them.15 Consider the political theologist Shane At this juncture, I question Akerman’s statement that whether Agamben is not taking a modern the liturgy is . . . not only a view of music and projecting it onto early public act of the , but also one Christian political theology—for surely the that sets itself in opposition to the role of music in early is narrowly nationalistic public space of more complex than he makes it out to be. the state. As one moves the vertical Music’s role throughout diverse Christian axis, participating more profoundly in theologies today is emotive, redemptive, the of the angels, then one’s salvific: music transforms the interior horizontal reach is also widened. All of state of a person. For the early church creation is called inward and upward in the participation of the worship of the fathers, though, music’s value lay in large triune God.19 part in the sense of unity that monophonic choral facilitated, as a The German theologian Erik Peterson mimicking of the angelic .16 Music describes this ontology of musical was granted as a concession to human salvation in terms that would horrify any weakness, since God does not need singing— ethnomusicologist: “every type of ethnic perhaps music, then, was “nourishment” singing, , and national more for people than for divine sovereign eventually succumbs to its inevitable power.17 The value of music-as-glory lay, I decline.”20 The result is that “it is worship suggest, not so much in its legitimization of that predates governmentality and worship God’s power but in the spiritual discipline that will outlast it.”21 God is eternal it facilitated for worshippers: music in while cultural practices and governance, this conception moves to the sovereign as giving to difference and violence, are glory, but it also points from the angels to transitory and ultimately superseded: the individual who pours open their “the government is nothing but the brief within the social unit of the , offering interval running between the two eternal “one’s whole spirit as incense.”18 and glorious figures of the Kingdom.”22 I suggest music was a critical part of This veneer of music-as-inclusive-inaction the early Christian economy of salvation diverts attention from its active exclusion (and not just a representation of divine of those who otherwise.23 inoperativity) in at least one other sense. In We might ask why Agamben takes the virtue of music’s role as a smokescreen for early Christian presentation of liturgy divine inoperativity that is conceived as a as laborless and powerless at face value, representation of angels’ hymnody (labor viewing only what music does inwardly (it conceptualized as nonlabor), it actively is a smokescreen for divine inoperativity) shapes the oikonomia itself: this is because rather than outwardly (it excludes through music works toward redemption by doing its ideology of inclusion). The reason, I away with divisions between humans contend, is that our modern ontology of (ethnic, national, cultural, gendered, etc.) music carries forward these notions of in a way that presumes Christianity’s music-as-glory, music-as-non-normative universality but is hierarchical since it places labor, and music-as-representation from

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 121 early Christian political theology. This Christian ontology of music, personhood, makes it difficult for thinkers who have and devotion in secular form to analyze grown up in that tradition to analyze those concepts’ development in Western music outside of its concepts (this is why history (as well as that developed many keen musical listeners and thinkers outside Christian influence). I call this can read the phrase “not of action but of tendency “secular resonance” and contend hymn” without batting an eye). It becomes it has shaped music studies—indeed, much difficult to see what music is doing to Others of music history around the globe—in its through a framework that assumes music (in His?) image. The notion that music’s doesn’t do anything to Others. Or, to put primary function, given its presumed this another way, the ontology positions “inaction,” is to form community and music as having a community-forming bestow glory upon it or individuals, capacity through the idea that music, which especially through festivity (as a presumed does not really do anything but bestow break from normative labor) and through glory and serve as an antidote to normative music’s ability to serve as a representation labor, can be a way for a community to of a community’s beliefs, has a Christian understand itself.24 Music’s ability to divide (perhaps more specifically, a Protestant) one community from another, its ability to heritage.26 To be clear, my aim here is not connect to Others outside a community, to call out scholars who inadvertently use its ability to be a form of mundane and this Christian-derived ontology when it is everyday labor, its way of relating directly inappropriate to do so, but rather to gain to nonhuman animals and God(s), its a basic understanding of how it came to efficacious powers to plea with and cajole shape (and continues to shape) formations the divine—these and similar concepts of music globally and in music scholarship (widespread outside Abrahamic ) (including ) through the are expressly avoided in the Christian process I call secular resonance. (2) I argue paradigm that (as Agamben demonstrates, that secular resonance, in taking music’s albeit accidentally) undergirds many representational capacities at face value—in modern assumptions about what music is presuming the legitimacy of music-as-non- and how to think about it. normative labor that builds community through its capacity for a shared experience Secular Resonance of salvation—has long obscured music’s In this essay, I provide a framework for function as an economy in the structuring, registering the enduring presence, if not hierarchical, familial, and political sense dominance, of concepts from early Christian (oikonomia), including between humans political theology—music-as-glory, music- and nonhumans, and between humans as-noneconomy, music-as-non-normative belonging to different communities.27 (3) labor, music-as-representation, and music- I contend that in secular modernity, music- as-salvation—in the secular methodologies as-glory became redirected away from of music studies.25 I propose (1) that God, but the early Christian theological Agamben’s analysis demonstrates the conceptualization of music—expanded widespread tendency for Western scholars via Protestant-influenced secularism to to recursively use concepts from the early include a community’s supposed emerging

122 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) in “private reason”28 via a “scene” defined studies, “the question as to what constitutes by symbols that represent and mediate knowledge is going to be intimately bound ’ and listeners’ actions—remains up with the question as to what constitutes marshaled (such as through the culture relations.”35 This is not just because we concept) as an inclusive methodology that investigate the relations between people and excludes through its transformation of their music, nor because we must consider difference.29 ourselves as researchers in relation to the In celestial mechanics, “secular resonance” people and musics we study. If we frame our describes a type of orbital resonance methods only in these ways, we are already in which the rotation (or “precession”) performing secular resonance since we will of a celestial body gradually becomes out relations between () people synchronized with a larger body, typically a and their neighbors, God(s), nonhuman planet, over a duration of a million years or animals, plants, objects, and the — more.30 This use of “secular,” pertaining to all of whom/which have been shown to “characteristics that change slowly over ,” be relevant (if not generative) for musical derives from an old definition of secular as “a actions the world over—while assuming long duration” that was once widespread in that music functions as a representation scientific fields from economics to geology. and expression of the interior state of the It is from the late Latin saecularis (“worldly, peoples who made it. What needs to be a pertaining to a generation or age”),31 which, focal point of scholarship is how those who as Charles Taylor and many others have think otherwise have engaged this Western shown, developed into “secularism” through conception of music-as-nonrelation (music the medieval European notion of secular as defines who is on the inside of a boundary, not “worldly” activities not considered sacred.32 how those within a boundary relate to those I use the term “secular resonance” here outside), music-as-noneconomy (music is in the first sense above: it is a process an expression of an interior state, not an of slowly bringing the sounds of Others action that produces personhood through into the orbit of the Christian ontology of exterior relations with Others), and music- music, even when the latter has been firmly as-nonlabor (music is a way to blow off secularized, through an influence that is steam, as entertainment and/or devotion). barely if at all noticeable. Music-as-glory This can be achieved only by avoiding our and music-as-salvation, I suggest, double own imposition of the Christianized secular themselves in terminology like “music and ontology of music in our documentation nationalism” and “music and ethnicity,” of the otherwise. By “secular resonance,” slowly transforming musical difference then, I mean the process through which our into Christianity’s likeness.33 Marilyn musicological vocabulary doubles itself to Strathern calls this “the duplicate”: when eliminate the types of relations from music we demarcate the concept “knowledge,” for history that contradict Christian political example, it produces knowledge; through theology’s ontology of music and its myriad such doubling, concepts come to occupy doublings (through the ages) that have come “both an object position and subject position to shape music studies. The legacy of secular in relation to itself ” and thus “subject and resonance, I suggest, has been: (1) a decline object cocreate one another.”34 In music of music’s social power (“not of action but of

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 123 hymn, not of power but of glory”); (2) the often been “cleaned up,” celebrated for sedimentation of a notion of musical labor their mathematics, morals, and cosmology as non-normative that affects musicians’ (in a secular manner), removing them from livelihoods (sometimes positively, though their well-documented (by classicists) more often, I suggest, negatively); and attachment to sacrifices, processions, and (3) an enormous transformation in global religious cults. Alternatively, ancient Greek conceptions of “musicianhood” that mimic and Roman musics are studied on their early Christianity’s eradication of pagan own terms, mainly by classicists, typically ontologies of music.36 To be clear, at a distance from early making the endlessly repeated suggestion or the longue durée history of Western that scholars better place music in music.38 Surprisingly underresearched are its social context. Rather, I am making the the efforts of the to ban claim that do so, we tend to utilize pagan musics and instruments from the conceptions of music and personhood church.39 This foundational exclusionism derived from an early Christian political of Western music history, indeed the absolutism that ignores the potential for whole era of transition from ancient musics the second paradigm of Christian theology to Christian dominance, is routinely to reach outside itself and wind down our skipped over or barely mentioned in secularized, Christian-derived exclusionism, music textbooks, and it is virtually absent the result of which would accord more as a scholarly specialization in Anglo- closely with what Raschke calls (above) American music departments.40 It is as “social justice.” though those of us who work in Anglo- American music studies believe that very Ancient Christian Musics: little of interest happened for or “Drastic or Gnostic?” five centuries (or more) after the birth I turn now to addressing the yawning gap of (I must admit, I long assumed between those who study European musics so myself ).41 In my experience, a reason from the medieval era to the present and often given for this temporal gap is a “lack those who study musics of the ancient of sources,” so it bears emphasizing that world (mainly classicists). For what lies there are thousands of texts in Latin and between is the historical transition to Greek (and myriad other languages, like Christian hegemony articulated by the Aramaic) that survive from the period. church fathers. Nowhere has the Christian Such sources are detailed enough about theological paradigm of music been daily life, for example, that they have led more pronounced in silencing musical classicists to study the sounds and smells difference—nowhere has our secular of ancient cities.42 The musicological resonance been more prolonged and gap here strikes me as akin to scholars of powerful—than in the near-total erasure (say) thirteenth-century Europe or Asia of “pagan” (ancient Greek and Roman) skipping over the Mongols because they musics from Anglo-American music can’t sympathize with their worldview; studies. In writings by musicologists the problem, I suggest, is that we have coming from the “American school,”37 trouble taking the pagans’ side in the ancient Greek and Roman musics have story of the emergence of Christian

124 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) musics. Musicologists who come to this on music in Greek and Roman sacrificial early material often do so because they are and cults—here are the opening lines Christian and intend to study the growth of his chapter 1: of that musical tradition (a Strathernian The legends and myths of nearly all doubling). The blame can be spread pagan peoples have sought to explain the around to include ethnomusicologists’ elaborate use of music in their worship commitment to ethnography and their by indicating that the art of music was a general lack of interest in this subject gift of the gods to men. . . . According to matter, as well as the methodological the view which was most widely held, it was to the gods themselves that music tendency for music scholars studying was pleasing. This is how Tibullus, for history to research Christian example, interprets the connection musics qua Christian musics rather than between music and worship. In keeping their communal encounters with Others. with this is the explanation Horace gives The point I want to here is for sacred music when he calls it a means that when the fundamental violence of the of appeasement which, like the fragrance of break with pagan ontologies of music is incense and the blood of animals, disposes 45 not acknowledged, the Christian musical the gods to act favorably toward men. ontology as something that Even according to the Christian theologian early simply assented to—I Quasten, then, the foundations of Western will describe this below as a Protestant music history lie not in the theorization of ontology of music projected back in scales, or Platonic or Aristotelian notions time—rather than a world-historical of music and morality, or the harmony of transformation in what music is that was the , or or , but in brought about through the disciplining music’s use as a gift to the gods: music in efforts of the church fathers and early the earliest moments of Western history is Christian music itself. fundamentally relational, conceived not as not have space to consider the an expression of an interior self or identity, church fathers’ disciplining of music here in but as a means to cajole, plead with, and much depth. I point readers to two sources: appease divine sovereign power. If a retort Johannes Quasten’s Music and Worship in to this claim is that such an ontology is Pagan and Christian Antiquity and James a “prehistory” to Western music, that it McKinnon’s The , the Church Fathers disappeared in the wake of Christianity, and Early Western Chant.43 Both are obscure bears little resemblance to Western music and, in my experience, not discussed history today, and thus does not constitute much (if ever) in Anglo-American music what defines Western music history, we departments. Both are old: Quasten’s book must note that you are then defining is based on his 1927 dissertation submitted Western music history as founded upon and to the Theology faculty at the equivalent to the growth of Christianity. University of Münster, with the English But this line of thought makes two rather translation (now out of print) appearing extreme assumptions: first, that the shift to just in 1983; McKinnon’s book, published Christianity was assented to by the in 1998, is based on his 1965 dissertation.44 bulk of the population, and thus was a choice Quasten’s book begins with several chapters that is reflective of a broader civilizational

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 125 identity; and second, that dissenting voices stating that music leads to licentiousness). and ontologies did not persist and do not According to McKinnon, early Christians also define Western music history over the blamed poor behavior on instruments and longue durée. their condemnation should not be taken to Now consider how Clement of mean they were not performed in the early Alexandria (d. ca. 215 c.e.), in his Paidagogos, church. By the third and fourth centuries, felt “called to take up the struggle against however, due to mass conversions to the ‘music of ’”: Christianity, instruments became more When a man occupies his time with directly associated with pagan rites and flutes, stringed instruments, choirs, strictly forbidden on those grounds: dancing, Egyptian krotala and other “Where aulos-players are, there Christ is such improper frivolities, he will find not,” John Chrysostom (d. 407) states.48 that indecency and rudeness are the The was advertised as a consequences. Such a man creates a din “sacrifice ‘worthy of God,’ in sharp contrast with cymbals and tambourines; he rages to pagan sacrifice.”49 McKinnon notes that about with instruments of an insane cult. “the attitude of opposition to instruments . . . Leave the syrinx to shepherds and the flute to superstitious devotees who was virtually monolithic even though it was to serve their idols. We completely shared by men of diverse temperaments forbid the use of these instruments at our and different regional backgrounds, and temperate banquet.46 even though it extended over a span of at least two centuries of changing fortunes for Arnobius (d. 330), in his Adversus nationes, the Church.”50 “advises the pagans” thus: Despite such strict proclamations by You are convinced that the gods are the church fathers, Quasten claims, early pleased and influenced by the sound of Christian worshippers resisted giving up brass and the blowing of flutes, by horse aspects of pagan musical worship: races and games in the theaters and that, as a result, the wrath which they The more Christianity expanded among have conceived at one time or another the pagans, the more difficult it became to is quelled by such satisfaction. To us hold to “adoration in spirit,” as Christ [Christians] this seems out of place. In had asked for. No longer did it suffice fact it is incredible that those who far merely to offer the people a substitute transcend every kind of virtue should for pagan sacrifice and cultic music . . . find pleasure and delight in things that in the singing of and . a reasonable man laughs at and which Now apologists had to work against the no one appears to enjoy except little people’s attraction for customs that they or those who have been poorly had grown to .51 and superficially brought up.47 The struggle was made more difficult The polemic goes on and on like this for because “even the , God’s chosen a couple hundred years—the ancient people, had made great use of this art [i.e., sources read not much differently from instrumental music] in their liturgy.”52 today’s Muslim reformists’ banning of Ephraem of Nisbis (d. 373) expressed instruments (with whom there are indeed anxiety that worshippers might relapse shared in ancient Greek philosophies into pagan musics:

126 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) Today, to all appearances, they sing two academic books I found on the social psalms as God has ordained, and in this era were published tomorrow they will eagerly as long ago and are now out of print. In sum, taught by Satan. . . . Let it be far from I am not saying no one currently researches you that today you listen attentively to this (I do, after all, spend a lot of time with the reading of the divine Scripture as one ethnomusicologists), but in my experience, loving Christ, and that tomorrow you few music scholars specialize in this era, and listen to lyreplaying as a criminal and a hater of Christ.53 it seems that few of us feel we need to care about it.56 Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390) “had to My aim here is not to vilify Christianity impress continually upon his flock the fact nor any particular scholar, but rather to point that the playing of the tambourine had been this out as an example of secular resonance— replaced in Christian liturgy by hymnody, in this case how nominally objective, secular while the psalms took the place of other scholarship may carry with it a Christian songs.”54 In the fourth century there was bias in how it defines Western music history, a move against allowing women to sing who the protagonists of that history are, and in , which Quasten what its operative terminology and ontology suggests was due to their prominence in consist of. I should also stress it is not my Gnostic rituals.55 aim to argue that music needs to be revived Why present the outlines of this violence as an accompaniment to the sacrificing of against pagan musics here? I am struck by bulls. Rather, I am suggesting that by failing how, through the many years I have spent to recognize the depth of these struggles in music departments in the United States over the ontology of music within Western (and two in the United Kingdom), not music history—which would amount once have I heard anyone ask about the to admitting that many in the Western mass ontological transformation in music past resisted what is now the “orthodox” forced by early Christianity, nor question ontology of music in the West—“Western the impact this had on we music history” becomes about how use to study music today. Meanwhile, the Christianity worked inclusively in the West, language that emerged through Christian in opposition to perceived external Others theology (much of it stemming from (e.g., Muslims as the boundary with the Judaism)—representation, expression, West), rather than an acknowledgment salvation, noneconomy, and so on—is often that Christianity worked hard to exclude taken as the default assumption about what internally (i.e., non-Christians in Europe; music is, while Western music history— and those deeply Othered by the Christian analyzed through those very concepts—is ontology of music, such as drummers).57 defined precisely as a story about how As a drummer from the West, those concepts won out. Regardless of that the “Otherness” the church one’s valuation of this history, it still seems placed on percussion continues to define that a scholarly discussion on this drummers in the West today (consider the history of suppression should be had, from early drummer joke from : outside of the musicological terms that “If I speak with the tongues of mortals and were born by Christianity itself. Yet the only of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 127 gong or a clanging cymbal”; Corinthians ontology and subjectivity as normative for 13:1). The hegemony of over the foundation of Western music. The point drumming surely extends to music was registered by Rousseau long ago in his scholarship—I consider this a key secular On the Origin of Language (1781), which resonance—as though the voice is more Jacques Derrida (in his Of Grammatology) fundamental to what it means , sums up thus: “The history of music is a Judeo-Christian–derived tendency parallel to the history of language, its reinforced by the fact that music scholars evil is in essence graphic.”59 Rousseau’s these days often grow up in an complaint was that sheet music facilitated that privileges the voice over drumming greater distance from the tetrachord (another secular resonance). The of system of ancient Greek music, which he drumming’s evident relationality outside romanticized as closer to speech; leaving the bounds of community has always this romanticization aside, I can rephrase appeared to threaten disorder (such as in this to say that early sheet music and its the colonies, whether in the United States, doubling in scholarship was where drumming was banned for slaves on a key mode through which pagan musical plantations, or in South Asia, where the ontologies became marked by absence and British regulated processional drumming taken to constitute a non-normative aspect through permits) and of course has long of the “identity” of Western music history. been racialized, with characterizations Carolyn Abbate’s famous article “Music— of Africans as talented at rhythm and Drastic or Gnostic?” urges musicologists to drumming in opposition to European turn to performance (for which, following music defined as melodic and vocal.58 the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, she The hegemony of sheet music as the uses “drastic” as a shorthand) as opposed premier source for historical to a focus on gleaning the meaning of a in that field’s opening decades, particularly musical work through hermeneutic analysis with regard to the study of early Western (which, following Jankélévitch, she music, was another key secular resonance calls “Gnostic”).60 On the one hand, I am that is necessary to mention here. The echoing Abbate here by suggesting music problem was not just with the formalistic scholars need to better recognize how early approach it allowed but that the use of Christian music played this disciplining, sheet music (a form of representation) transformative role (for surely that was to generate scholarly representations of “drastic”), thus lessening our reliance on music history is a form of “doubling” (in treating sheet music as a “neutral” source the Strathernian sense above) that uses that provides a window onto early Christian a particular object (sheet music) and the musical meaning (“Gnostic”). On the other discourse about music it generated to study hand, I named this section after Abbate’s the growth of music itself as a historical article to point out that any online search . I am not suggesting that for the term “Gnostics and music” brings formalism has a genealogical relationship to up her article rather than any study of what Christian ontology, but rather that it lent a the actual Gnostics—those stigmatized veneer of secular objectivity to a method that insiders/outsiders to Christianity—did was bound to position Christian musical with music. Perhaps it is time for music

128 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) studies to be both drastic and Gnostic, by understandings of religion—as based on which I mean we need to consider the “inner states rather than outward practice,”65 dissenting ontologies of music in the defined as “a matter of symbolic meanings West during the period of ascendence for linked to ideas of general order,”66 and as a orthodox Christianity (and beyond). set of beliefs one assents to—are universally applicable to all religions. Such a perspective, Colonialism, Culture, and Asad argues, has a Protestant Christian Political Liberalism history and ignores the role of institutional Talal Asad’s writings on secularism have power and discipline, which needs always been vastly influential in the academy be situated in its unique social and temporal but underrecognized in music studies. context. of Asad’s critique, Thus it bears mentioning that his famous like to return to my earlier point about the demarcation is between “the secular persistence of a Christian ontology of music as an ontological-epistemic formation, and ask whether formations of the secular secularism as a political doctrine about the in music studies utilize Protestant Christian separation between religion and politics, understandings of music (even when [and] secularization as simultaneously a studying the distant Christian musical past), historical process and a sociological thesis.”61 and if so, how these might differ from the As Sabah Mahmood puts it, the secular early Christian theology of music described “is not simply the organizing structure via Agamben. But before turning to this, I for what are regularly taken to be a priori want to consider secularism as a political elements of social organization—public, phenomenon, because I believe doing so is private, political, religious—but a discursive necessary to grasp the ways the Christian operation of power that generates these very theology of music in its Protestant guise spheres, establishes their boundaries, and spread globally, including its shaping of suffuses them with content, such that they ethnomusicology. come to acquire a natural quality for those Sociologist José Casanova argues that living within its terms.”62 Thus far, I have capitalism and racial exclusions laid the been proposing a framework for thinking foundations for secularism: alongside 1517 about “the secular” in music studies as “a (’s reforms), he believes an domain of historically constituted and important date was 1492, both as a signifier variably related behaviors, sensibilities” of the general period in which Jews and related to (and reproducing) early Christian Muslims were expelled from Spain “to notions of music, experience, personhood, create a religiously homogenous realm” community, and discipline through and “the beginning of European global nominally secular methodologies like the colonial expansion initiated by the Iberian study of early sheet music.63 monarchies.”67 It was in the wake of all this, Asad’s Genealogies of Religion explains Casanova writes, that the management of that the idea that religion has an autonomous new confessions in Europe allowed states essence allows us to view it as a transhistorical to increasingly centralize their power. As and transcultural phenomenon.64 In Kenneth Dean and Peter Van der Veer note, modernity, he claims, this resulted in the for Casanova, the and Counter- assumption that Protestant Christian Reformation are best described

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 129 as creating the conditions for national- music, now metonymic for community ism through state-controlled religious and mobilized as a “transhistorical and confessionalization processes involving transcultural phenomenon,” serves as ethnic or religious communal “cleans- “proof ” of communal differences and a ing.” Where adherence to a national (or a territorially divided and nationally community’s willingness to conform to supervised) church was a prerequisite liberal demands for equality. This Protestant to full belonging.68 secularism in “traditional music” resembles a Lacanian process of identifying “lack” in Through this process, they write, the Other—those having to rationalize “religious imaginings of majoritarian their religious musics to conform see a lack belonging [became] crucial to the of concern for the “real” (i.e., efficacious, formation of the multiple forms of trance-inducing) traditions from the state, secularity and secularism.”69 Religious while those on the side of the state see a lack innovations usually happen in cities; after of modernity in the former—and each side all, “pagan” meant “country looks to the law (including state-driven bumpkin,” since the earliest Christians discourses on cultural authenticity rooted were in cities.70 Urbanization does not in state funding and nationalist displays necessarily lead to a drop in religion when of culture) to safeguard its rights in virtue those from rural areas move to the city and of having authentic practices. This drives become cosmopolitan.71 In many cases the an “archive ” to find and prove the result is rather the development of overt authenticity and ancientness of practices.73 ethnonationalisms in which urbanized This intimate attachment between elites use religion in the public sphere music and identity—the transference of to rewrite a nation’s music history. We music-as-glory and salvation to non- can see this, for example, in India today, Christian settings around the globe— where the trend to “Hinduize” Hindustani should be understood as emerging from music elides the influences of Others the imposition in the colonies of the (particularly Muslims and the lower trifecta of political liberalism, secularism, castes). Even in a comparatively tolerant and the culture concept. As numerous country like Singapore, the notion of scholars of South Asia have shown, in equality between races (liberalism: each British colonies like India, public space must act equally in accordance with the became masculinized and assigned as the law) has pressured communities into rightful place of the market, while private “rationalized” expressions of religion space became feminized and considered due to the need to maintain orderliness the domain for formations of culture and space, resulting in pressure to religion.74 This echoes Charles Taylor’s eradicate practices like trance.72 claim that the Protestant revolution, in In this way, the relationship between conjunction with the growth of science music and secularism becomes a mode of and capitalism, appears to have promoted communal identity formation that produces a detachment of religion from public life notions of essential difference between that made religion appear more about ethnic and religious groups. Traditional community and communal values.75 In

130 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) turn, music could easily be taken as gave way to those invested in efficacious representative of a community’s culture ritual practices and religious revivals that rather than being efficacious, public, and have merged with ethnonationalists’ uses relational; religious processions, in this of music-as-identity to drive contemporary view, are not gifts to gods that plead with politics. Certain secularized musics partake and cajole them into action but the public in the “magical elements of state sovereignty,” emergence of a community and its already- helping produce the “sacrilized nation” in formed culture expressing its identity in secular form.77 What has resulted, however, public. Mahmood puts it this way: is a collapsing of cultural practices into a . . . the inescapable quality of secularism relationship with ethnicity that obscures in part emanates from the structure their histories of connection between of the modern liberal state, which Others. This, I contend, is the global legacy promises to demolish premodern of the Christian ontology of music-as- forms of hierarchy in order to create a glory, music-as-representation, and music- polity where all citizens are supposed as-salvation.78 to be formally equal in the eyes of the law. This , we might recall, In looking at “music and secularism,” was linked to a foundational critique of then, I suggest we need to avoid collapsing ascriptive inequality and a recalibration it into a study of how sacred music of particularistic forms of belonging. traditions become or hidden The modern political subject had to spaces; rather, we should at subordinate fealty to his religion, locale, how the work of secularism, in public spaces, and clan to loyalty to the nation-state. institutes “Protestant secular” beliefs A key dimension of this transformation was the legal and political elaboration about the human, God, causality, space of the public-private divide, which was through the law, capitalist development, an important source for elaborating and “tradition”—the result being that other modern distinctions such as cultural practices become “ethnicized” and secular/religious, political/civil, and conceptually lacking in “relations” with 76 universal/parochial. Others. It is precisely this formation of In promising to “demolish premodern the secular that we “double,” I suggest, forms of hierarchy” to produce equality when we write about “music and ethnicity,” under the law, liberalism emerges as “music and nationalism,” and the like. My secularism’s version of Agamben’s second point is not that we should refrain from paradigm of early Christian political studying such topics; rather, I suggest that theology, since the mandate to accept when we presume the naturalness of music- equality requires leaving one’s differences as-salvation and music-as-noneconomy behind to be included in a social context and mobilize it to conceive of what music that claims neutrality but is, in fact, is in relation to identity formation, we transformative and exclusionary. are producing a secular resonance that The result has not been the total investigates a formation of the secular from rationalization and disenchantment of within the vocabulary the secular has made music. In many former colonies, the available to music studies—a language that anticolonial elites of an earlier generation is heavily Christianized in secular form.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 131 Capitalism and “Protestant Secular” neoliberalism). In the neoliberal era, each Music Studies is her own oikonomia, dispensing Rather than celebrating divine sovereignty, and managing her own glory, with the music today glorifies the individual (as necessity of a vigorous work ethic marketed , musician, , listener, or by institutions (e.g., websites charging you community in isolation), while sovereignty for distribution) as a musician’s personal is equated with a lack of institutional or choice to be independent from institutions divine control (small government) and (e.g., record labels). Music as freedom from work ethic (as Weber famously showed). normative work undergirds our notion Akin to Asad’s critique of Protestant of music as the celebration of human secularism (above), music is now a matter achievement and culture, severing music’s of lifestyle, rife with symbols that relationship to our natural environment what the person or community “assents” except as aesthetic inspiration (where to, which mediate actions (e.g., long hair, music serves to represent nature or present rock, free love). Also “Protestant” is that a composer’s feelings toward nature) the privileging of music as a personal and eliminating the notion that we labor choice turns listeners into consumers and through music for others rather than just obscures the disciplining role of music on as an expression of ourselves. the body by institutions (record labels, high Meanwhile, in music studies, this schools, venues) and inscriptions (e.g., Protestant secular musical ontology allows films). Music still glorifies inoperativity for the seeming translatability and mutual since it is viewed as a temporary release comprehension of differing conceptions from labor (time off work, when one of sound, personhood, community, and “blows off steam”); even when economic territory, “binding” and “tying” bodies success is achieved through music, it and sounds together so that they appear remains conceptualized as an alternative in sync like planets in orbit, consumable to real labor (not a “normal job”). Thus, in the classroom today amid a musical as with early Christianity, music-as-glory marketplace dominated by phenomena continues to serve as a smokescreen for like “the playlist” (secular resonance).79 its own labor. But now this operates via As with Asad’s discussion of “religion,” commodity fetishism, since the social labor the positing of “music” as a universal that influenced the compositional process category likewise positions it as having an (yielding the musical “product”) is obscured autonomous essence—allowing us to view in favor of the genius-star-sovereign whose music as a transhistorical and transcultural glory is bestowed by fans and managed by phenomenon—when we look for it in bureaucratic figures (the new oikonomia)— particular contexts. Conceived as a neutral first the conductor, sheet , framework, a search for “music” tends to booker, and musicologist; then the utilize the Protestant secular understanding record company, , music of it as lifestyle when discussing an video director, and so on; and in our times, individual or musical product in the the solitary electronic musician at her capitalist marketplace, while the communal, laptop who is at once a musician, composer, ethnicized framework (described in the manager, and (the apotheosis of prior section) is used for “traditional” and

132 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) “classical” musics but It is a sign of we have come that excludes the Western classical canon. Abigail Fine (in this special issue of the Between these poles of the individual Yale Journal of Music and Religion) locates and community, curiously, lies the Western of Dahlhaus’s (and the canon’s) classical canon as formulated by some secular enchantment rather than simply long-canonized musicologists, of whom using it as her mode of analysis: I’ll name Carl Dahlhaus as a preeminent The politics of canon formation mirror example. The idea of relation emerged for secularity because canons emerged at such scholars as internally valid through the intersection of sacred and secular, highlighting ( fetishizing) through a constellation of practices the listener-music-transcendence relation known as Kunstreligion, or art-religion. —a Christian extrapolation if there ever was In the nineteenth century, cultural one (as some of them admit). Once again, like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart became surrogate for the liberal music-as-glory presents itself as welcoming elite, for whom Bildung was grounded and inclusive but excludes any perspective in an amalgam of religious practices: that might claim external relations. This Catholic sainthood, Lutheran Pietism, ideological opposition to the social— and Jewish educational ambition, all the idea that recognizing the social is a latent behind the smokescreen of secular bastardization of the music which, though self-improvement. nominally secular, is treated as an object No longer a smokescreen for divine that must not be profaned—was perhaps inoperativity, music became “the smoke- most infamously expressed by Charles screen of secular self-improvement,” taking Rosen in the hostility he showed toward on many of religion’s material components. Tia DeNora sociological study of The term Kunstreligion (art-religion), 80 Beethoven’s genius. Viewed as potentially Fine says, debased by the market and linked to ethnic identity only by reference to the Volk who refers to a set of concepts at the could be referenced within the abstracted intersection of German Romantic philosophical idealism, Catholic revival, work, the pretense to secularism (in and a growing interest in Eastern scholarship on the canon and the canon religions in the early nineteenth century. itself ) greatly loosened as scholars (of that Its roots in musical thought have been era) became enthralled with how Western traced to early Romantic writers like produces Christianity from Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and within the supposedly secular space of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sacralized its performance—what has been termed the listening experience as a form of “secular enchantment.” Consider Dahlhaus’s devotion and likened religious feelings to a “holy music” (heilige Musik) that statement that “even Beethoven’s should accompany secular life. symphonies [became] ‘religious’ music, since they represent an evolutionary stage Fine shows that some Jewish intellectuals at which the ‘ever-drifting World Spirit’ has hid their roots and conformed, while transmuted clearly the defined Christian others rebelled against the “Christian beliefs into previsions of the ‘marvels of a secularism” of the canon by adopting distant realm.’”81 Marxism—“a satisfying surrogate for

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 133 national ” since it appreciated people gathered, Barber problematized “the collectivity of human achievement by the boundaries between the sacred and Jews and non-Jews alike.” The struggles of secular through his use of “Blackpentecostal Jewish and critics to assimilate to breath”83—“jeremiads” that are situated the secular canon’s Christian underpinnings, “at the intersection of political speech and Fine argues, demonstrates that Bildung failed ecstatic .” In Barber’s performances, to offer the secular space it promised. The sounds that are highly characteristic of black same process of exclusion through inclusion sacred rhetoric are recruited to “critique above in the erasure of the pagans the oppression wrought by contemporary and Gnostics from music history, and social orders.” interested in here through the imposition of secularism and is how Barber’s refusal of secularism is a liberalism in the colonies (and of course also refusal of the secular resonance between the missionization), thus happened similarly in ethics of neoliberal capitalism and white, Europe at the heart of the classical music conservative, that positions canon through the assimilation or exclusion itself as embattled but actually dominates it mandated of Jews. The message of the the “neutral” public sphere: Western ontology of music seems always to be: , but only if you listen By claiming that various features of a governing program are immoral, Barber (and think) as we do. seeks to deny the system the legitimacy on which it depends, suggesting that this The Special Issue interruption is the most effective affront The six essays in this special issue mark a to the extant structure. As he names protest in these moral terms, Barber turning point in music studies’ engagement aims to invalidate the injustices that are with secularism because they refuse the naturalized by market capitalism, the types of facile secular resonance described persistent inequity that is explained away above. More important, they demonstrate as evidence of personal irresponsibility, how musicians are combating the exclusions asserting that there is also a public of Christianized secularism as it dominates responsibility. If neoliberalism is a various public spheres, particularly in political theology, then it is differently vulnerable to theological critique. tandem with neoliberal capitalism. 82 Braxton Shelley’s essay considers Rev. Dr. Reverend Barber produces an inclusive William Barber’s role in the “fusion politics” universalism akin to the second paradigm of of the North Carolina-based Moral Mondays early Christian political theology outlined at movement, through which he aimed to the start of this essay—a radical relationality produce “higher ground” following the necessary for social justice. enactment of Tea Party–influenced policies In Andrew ’s essay, liberal, white by the state’s Republican legislature, which Christians to combat the gained control of both branches of state toxic mix of neoliberal and conservative government in 2010 and the governorship evangelical hegemony. The Beer & Hymns in 2012. Speaking at largescale protests, movement—which fosters community including the 2014 Historic Thousands through the singing of Christian hymns on Jones Street March, when 85,000 in bars and festival settings—allows for

134 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) those who left the church to engage in example in this special issue of how secular their nostalgia for hymnody and childhood, public space is dominated by a hostile while on others who simply enjoy and conservative evangelical Christianity, hymns to gain a sense of togetherness in leading to particular compromises and the wake of neoliberal isolation. The event refusals by those who think otherwise. brings Christian singing into public space, In Oksana Nesterenko’s essay, these but it also somewhat divests Christianity dynamics are reversed: in the former Soviet from hymnody by situating it in a secular Union, the government and public sphere setting. Here the theology of music-as- were defined by atheism and so Catholicism salvation remains but has been transferred came to a radical otherness that to “Protestant secular” notions of the signified the possibility for freedom, self and community. Though less overtly relationality, and community. In the 1970s, political than Barber’s jeremiads, the Beer composers like Alfred Schnittke, Sofia & Hymns movement also challenges the Gubaidulina, and Arvo Pärt turned toward secular resonance between neoliberalism Christianity, a move that happened, as one and evangelicalism by aiming to be “as pianist of the era quipped, because “the welcoming as possible, and in doing so to forced everyone to .” recognize that faith identities are multivalent Nesterenko highlights the emergence of and problematic, and that your a theme that has productively dominated religious beliefs, baggage, or lack thereof, discussions of secularism in music studies, singing hymns can be fun.” Here Christian “secular enchantment,” and, through the music becomes a welcoming “secular” public music of Vyacheslav Artyomov, an attempt expression of the longing for relationality to revive religion in public spaces in the that, ironically, refuses the Christian wake of state atheism.84 absolutism dominating the “secular” public What appears at stake in these essays sphere in the United States. is oppression rather than religion per se: Shobana Shankar’s essay explores how whatever exclusions come to dominate Hindus in Ghana have responded sonically the public sphere call forth sonic protests to Christianity’s dominance in Ghana’s for inclusion and respect for difference. public sphere. Though Ghana is a secular Religious musics become vessels, or state and safeguards the right for people perhaps I should say efficacious offerings, to join different religions, Pentecostal that have the potential to produce social Christians have had a large influence on justice through relationality outside the defining religiosity in the public sphere, and bounds of community. according to Shankar they tend to look down on Ghanaian Hindus as idol worshippers. Conclusion: From “The Other” to Hinduism is positioned by its Ghanaian “The Otherwise” practitioners as a return to “tradition” that While I have been critical of secular liberates some senses Christianity has kept resonance throughout this article, adopting down, though Ghanaian Hindus have the normative, Christianized, secular reshaped certain mantras in the wake of musicological language is not always Christian influence, adopting some musical misplaced, and in fact is often impossible practices not found in India. This is the third to move beyond for good reason. This

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 135 is because secular resonance in many decades to make available the perspective places has become something like what on secular resonance that I present here Mauss called a “total social fact” and thus (which is not to say they would agree with created the conditions many of us study. all my assumptions and formulations). For example, if we are able to trace a line Some noteworthy examples, to name a few from certain anticolonial and postcolonial stretched out over the past few decades, constructions of music as national culture include Philip Bohlman’s historicization of in newly independent states to colonized Herder’s identity paradigm; Georgina Born’s intellectuals whose notions of culture mobilization of Alfred Gell’s anthropology have a clear genealogical relationship to of art in a music studies framework, which the Herderian paradigm of folk music treats art objects as having agency on the as communal and national expression viewer; Tamara Levitz’s convening of the (Herder was a Lutheran ), it follows “Musicology Beyond Borders?” colloquy that scholarship on those postcolonial in a special issue of JAMS that she edited; traditions may need to utilize concepts that and Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s work on emerged from and reproduce the inherited ontological difference in colonial Colombia. Christian musical ontology in secular Each of these works helps us move beyond form that they are being used to analyze. secular resonance, even if they do not use But this does have the effect of making that term.86 our Christianized, secular musicological I should also be careful to avoid my own concepts—which today have an astounding secular resonance by unwittingly attributing global ubiquity—appear to be what music to the Christian secular ontology a global is in nature, a tendency that is of course dominance that it does not have. Many another secular resonance. countries in the world are not secular, and Secular resonance becomes more in many societies where secularism is state noticeable and important to flag as a tendency policy, many sounds and musics remain to avoid when one is doing research with largely untouched by secularization. There communities that have not been shaped by are also places where Christianity is not it. Thus it is not so easy to ask, has music dominant in state-driven secularism (for studies moved beyond secular resonance or example, the imposition of the Islamic does secular music studies remain a “fugitive conceptualization of God on Balinese way for [Christian] religion to survive”?85 Hindus by the constitutionally secular What is more appropriate, to my mind, is to Indonesian state).87 Lauren Osborne shows ask, have we learned how to move beyond in her essay in this issue that Christianized secular resonance for those contexts when secularism is not a force that positions our inherited Christian musical ontology qur’anic recitation in Oman. Her study is inappropriate? I believe we have indeed highlights the bureaucratic, governmental, made significant improvements, though and economic (i.e., cultural differences a discussion is outside the bounds of this in how sound plays a role in any given article. Suffice it to say here that despite ordering, “domestic and not political in a the rather polemical tone of this article, strict sense—of both divine and human I acknowledge that music scholars of life”).88 Rather than the transformation all stripes have been chipping away for of religion, Osborne shows that, on the

136 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) one hand, technologies like the internet creating its differential qualities and are tools through which the Omani state , and, in the process, pulling in promotes traditional ways of reciting and and altering that which surrounds it.”92 memorizing the Qur’an. , Following Povinelli, I suggest we might the modern state is “secular” (the official strive to move beyond “the Other” per place of Islam in Oman notwithstanding). se in music studies—beyond thinking Religion here again adopts the mantle of that what is needed for equity in music “culture” and is presumed to be an important studies is simply a greater representation component of Omani identity, history, and of difference according to the terms of our heritage. Religion and secularism are thus Christianized secular ontology—and move not naturally opposed. Rather, the secular toward a better respect for what Povinelli state and new technologies in Oman become calls “the Otherwise.” This would amount means through which religion is at once to being more careful about inadvertently newly situated and traditionally reinforced forcing the Otherwise through the sieve through governmentality. of the audio-visual litany, but it will also These are important points for scholars require avoiding what Povinelli calls “the of music to keep as we increasingly cunning of recognition”—the tendency turn to sound studies: for, as Jonathan for liberal multiculturalism to require Sterne famously showed, the West’s “audio- minority groups (such as in courts of visual litany” is of Christian heritage.89 This law) to act traditionally.93 In other words, ordering of the senses “idealizes hearing moving beyond secular resonance is not (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a process of naming authentic traditions a kind of pure interiority. It alternately that are seemingly beyond the grasp of denigrates and elevates vision: as a fallen modernity, for doing so has long been the sense, vision takes us out of the world. But task of ethnonationalist movements that, it also bathes us light of reason.”90 paradoxically, appropriate such traditions This is a “metaphysics of presence” that, through the colonial-derived framework James notes, “we get from Plato described above (and thus their own and Christianity: sound and speech offer secular resonance). the fullness and immediacy that vision and In sum, just as words deny.”91 But when scholars turn to reinforces a boundary between nature sound but retain the idea that it produces and culture when writers demarcate a immediacy and is necessarily opposed to seemingly enclosed concept of “nature” vision, she notes, they actually double there for study (as Ana Maria Ochoa down on what the discourse on sound is Gautier has argued),94 positing religion intended to supplant: the hegemony of in music studies as “a distinctive space of Christian framings of the senses—which is human practice and belief which cannot be to say, they produce secular resonance. As reduced to any other” is a formation of the Elizabeth Povinelli puts it, in terms that secular.95 In saying this I mean no ill will echo my description of secular resonance, toward this journal; rather, my aim is to “What is initially dispersed noise comes to issue a warning for scholars of music who enclose itself through self-reference (and think the topic of secularism is irrelevant thus an initial this-that differentiation), for their research if they do not study

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 137 religious musics. To sequester the study of A more interesting question than secularism and music in journals of “music Agamben’s that leads off this essay—why and religion” would be another secular does power need glory?—is to my mind its resonance. Furthermore, when we position opposite: why does glory need power? The Christian musics (vis-à-vis the public and secularization of music and music studies private spheres) as the ground level for removes music from the formal/societal our investigation of music and secularism— institutions that gave it power in order to as I suggest we tend to do—we position position music-as-representation as the what is actually a globally specific case for will of a sovereign individual (musician, thinking about music and secularism as , listener) removed from social norm. Christianity is unique for the study obligations. In some cases, such as when of “music and secularism” because the music-as-culture works to eliminate caste religion’s notions of salvation, glory, and discrimination in India, this can be a good representation already define the normative thing.96 But too often around the world, I secular ontology of music, so what emerges suggest, musical labor loses its value as part from such studies is an emphasis on the of an ordering economy or oikonomia and public/private placement of religion rather becomes valued merely as the production than the misrepresentation and elimination of a self seemingly removed from relations of ontological difference that occur when to Others. Power comes from relationships; the normative secular ontology is applied the British is nothing without her to non-Christians. This hiding of the subjects. Once conceptually removed transformative power of Christian-derived from the production of political and concepts of music studies that occurs social power—viewed as being situated through their doubling—even when “music in relation to politics and in an economy and secularism” is the topic of study—is of rather than always already being a political course another secular resonance, a binding economy—music is reshaped into what it and tying effect that, over a long period is not in nature: merely representative and (saeculum), transforms difference. not causal.

NOTES

1 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: 7 Ibid., 209. Philo of Alexandria remarks that For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government God made the Word “to stand and (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), xii. separate the creature from the Creator” (cited in ibid.). 2 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters As “the divine principle that mediates between the on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of ultimate God and the created world,” the Word (logos) Chicago Press, 2006 [1922]). achieves its creative and forceful capacity through 3 Carl Raschke, “Forget Schmitt! Political vocalization—it is a performative utterance in the Theology Must Follow Agamben’s ‘Double Paradigm’ classic Austinian sense. As religion scholar David of Sovereignty,” Political Theology 19/1 (2018): 2. Brakke puts it, “it is God’s voice that brings the world 4 Agamben, The Kingdom, 1. into existence,” for “according to Genesis, God created 5 Raschke, “Forget Schmitt!,” 3 (his emphases). the universe by speaking: ‘Then God said, “Let there 6 William Watkin, “The Kingdom and the Glory: be light”; and there was light’(Genesis 1:3). David The Articulated Inoperativity of Power,” Res publica: Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity Revista de filosofía política 28 (2012): 248–49. in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 60.

138 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 8 Agamben, The Kingdom, xi. 17 Quasten, Music and Worship. 64. 9 Ibid., xii. 18 Ibid., 54. It is outside the bounds of this 10 Ibid., 163. essay to fully consider why, in Agamben’s mapping 11 Ibid., 244. of the Trinitarian oikonomia onto the modern world, 12 Ibid., 166. music disappears in favor of media, to which he 13 This is Watkin’s summary of Agamben. grants the power of glorifying the sovereign in Watkin, “The Kingdom,” 252. modern democracies. But by the end of this essay, 14 Agamben, The Kingdom, 239. “Sabbatism is the reason should be obvious: the Christian-derived, the name of eschatological glory that is, in essence, secular ontology of music I describe at length in inoperativity” (ibid., 240). Agamben points us to this article was fundamentally altered in modernity. a passage from John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Music now glorifies individual musicians (or ethnic, Epistle to the Hebrews, which he translates as “What religious, national, and other groups to whom music other inoperativity then is there, except the kingdom is attributed) as sovereign, rather than God. This of Heaven, of which the Sabbath was an image and means music is now seen as needing to be situated type?” (ibid.). within politics or commenting upon politics rather than 15 My work here builds upon a sea change in as being foundational to sovereign power (see, in musicological scholarship that is swiftly moving past particular, my section on below). This this earlier emphasis of the in varied is of course not “actually” the case in many Christian ways. See, e.g., Olivia Bloechl, Opera and the Political contexts (let alone globally), even if it is commonly Imaginary in Old Regime France (Chicago: University of discursively positioned this way. For example, though Chicago Press, 2017). It will be useful at this juncture it is a Muslim-majority context, consider the case of to provide a comparative example of a sacred music praise-singing traditions in West Africa, which, as tradition where the relationship between personhood, Nomi Dave has shown, continue to play an important musical labor, and the causality of sound is of a wholly role in Guinea in legitimizing politicians. Nomi Dave, different cloth. Consider South Indian Tamil culture, The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in where the periya mēḷam ensemble performs daily service Guinea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). inside Hindu , and where Dalit drummers 19 Shane Akerman, “Classical Trinitarian traditionally perform the stigmatized parai as a Theology and the Idolatry of Nationalism: The service to the upper castes at funerals. (See William Doctrine of the as a Critique of Political Talotte, “Improvisation as Devotion: Nāgasvaram Theology” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate Music and Ritual Communication in Hindu Temple University, 2020), 54. Festival Processions,” Ethnomusicology Forum 27/1 20 Cited in ibid., 263. [2018]: 88–108; and Zoe Sherinian, Tamil Folk 21 Ibid., 54. Music as Dalit Liberation Theology [Bloomington: 22 Agamben, The Kingdom, 162. Indiana University Press, 2014].) It would be wrong 23 Christianity differs from non-Abrahamic to view these musics as acts of devotion that honor religions in that it covers up music’s active, ordering gods through music meant mainly for human ears: role in favor of its representational capacities portrayed the periya mēḷam is a form of communication “in as celebratory and inactive except with regard to the which musicians perform first and foremost for divine opening up or transformation of the self. The role of beings” (Talotte, “Improvisation,” 89), while the music in Western tradition is different, I suggest, not parai drives away evil at funerals. Traditionally, because of “transcendence”—a generic component of both genres are hereditary occupations and thus many musical traditions the world over—but because literally constitute work, even when performed in of the Christian-derived refusal to recognize music as a festival context. The musics do not “unite” people a legitimate form of normative labor that performs together in worship per se, as the musics embody and necessary functions for the operation of society in an reinforce caste distinctions. I suggest that the ontology everyday, ordering capacity. of music in early Christian political theology has never 24 Below argue that this is the origin for been the historic norm around the globe, yet often the link between music and identity that characterizes has been marshaled by scholars to understand non- so much ethnomusicological scholarship. For a Christian traditions. complementary discussion of music and community, 16 Agamben, The Kingdom, 235. See also though from a very different angle, see Naomi Johannes Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Waltham-Smith, Music and Belonging Between Christian Antiquity (Washington, DC: National Revolution and Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983), 67. Press, 2017).

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 139 25 Bear in mind that this is a position paper and Warner, “Secularism,” in Bruce Burgett and commentarial essay on the articles that make up this Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords for American Cultural special issue of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Studies (New York: New York University Press, rather than a research article; I have room here just 2014), 220. The term was “introduced by utilitarian to sketch out the proposed framework. Nevertheless, I free-thinker George Jacob Holyoake c. 1851.” Sindre I can spur readers on to pursue threads from the Bangstad, “Contesting secularism/s: Secularism discussion at greater length. and Islam in the work of Talal Asad,” Anthropological 26 I query the Protestant connection farther Theory 9/2 (2009): 190. See also Charles Taylor, A below. Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). 27 I mean, too, to point out that music’s 33 It is worth noting at the outset that this transformative powers on the individual are not often process does not have to be fully transformative: local read as economic—doing so can situate the emotions conceptions of the good, personhood, space, sound, in larger sociological networks. Recognizing music as and so on can be brought into or even appropriate and part of the oikonomia is not simply about recognizing transform the Christian secular ontology of music. exterior relationality and ignoring interior states (and But such local entanglements need to be documented thus includes a sociological perspective on musical without subsuming them to the Christianized secular transcendence). resonance of our normative musicological language. 28 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: 34 Marilyn Strathern, “Opening Up Relations,” Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford in Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds., A University Press, 2003), 8. Asad writes that “if World of Many Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University secularism as a doctrine requires the distinction Press, 2018), 23–24. between private reason and public principle, it also 35 Ibid., 29. demands the placing of the ‘religious’ in the former 36 If one’s retort to the perspective by ‘the secular’” (ibid.). He notes that “private reason I build here is not relevant for the musics you study, I is not the same as private space; it is the entitlement gently suggest that the musics you study have likely to difference, the immunity from the force of public been shaped by this Christian ontology that obscures reason” (ibid.; his italics). I return to this idea of how it functions across its constitutive boundaries as Asad’s (as it pertains to music) below. economy. 29 Though I am antagonistic in what 37 Eleonora Rocconi, “Review: Apollo’s Lyre: follows to certain core aspects of musicology and Greek Music and in Antiquity and the ethnomusicology, my aim here is just to highlight , by Thomas J. Mathiesen,” Journal of the the hegemony of a vocabulary in these fields that I American Musicological Society 54/3 (2001): 645. see creating exclusions and to posit its Christian 38 In her review of Thomas Mathiesen’s 800- origins; I intend no ill will toward Christianity nor page opus Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory toward my colleagues (indeed, I have inherited this in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, classicist Eleonora vocabulary as well). Rocconi remarks: “The field of ancient Greek music, 30 See, e.g., Rory Barnes, “Secular Resonance,” in perhaps more than any other sector of classical studies, Muriel Gargaud et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Astrobiology has long been investigated by scholars of different (Berlin: Springer, 2011). disciplines separated by their methodological 31 American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed. (2020), controversies and goals. On one side are the https://ahdictionary.com/word/search. classicists, who at least in the past have favored only html?q=secular. In ancient Rome, saeculum referred certain aspects of scientific inquiry, principally the roughly to the span of a lifetime, about ninety years; it metric-rhythmic structures of the ancient lyric and was used to demarcate the point from a specific event, drama, neglecting or minimizing everything else; on such as the founding of a city, to when all who were the other side are the musicologists, whose approach alive in that period would be dead. The Ludi saeculares to this historical period has had as its principal (“secular games”) organized by Cesar Augustus in 17 goal that of identifying the roots of medieval and b.c.e. celebrated the “fifth saeculum of Rome.” See, theory, without any real, concrete e.g., Jussi Rantala, The Ludi Saeculares of Septimus interest in understanding musical phenomena in Severus: The Ideologies of a New Roman Empire (New their ancient context” (ibid.). Her review, critical York: Routledge, 2017). of Mathiesen’s approach (and the “American school” 32 “Secularism” emerged in English in the 1850s she takes him to represent), nevertheless saw a “when it was adopted by reformers who regarded the rapprochement beginning between these camps at church and capital as the joint enemies of the worker.” the start of the twenty-first century. Now consider

140 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) classicist Alexandre Vincent’s recent statement about Christian Psalmody,” in Harold Attridge and Margot studies of ancient Roman musics: “Largely ignored Elsbeth Fassler, eds., Psalms in Community: Jewish by musicologists (for whom ‘ancient music’ is pre- and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions Renaissance, but still no earlier than the fourteenth- (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003): century invention of Ars Nova) and treated as a minor 147–87. subject by ancient historians, Roman music has 40 To take one of countless examples, The only recently to garner scholarly attention” Norton Anthology of Western Music, vol. 1 contains a (Alexandre Vincent, “The Music of Power and the section on “Music in Antiquity” that runs from pages Power of Music: Studying Popular Auditory Culture 1 through 6. The discussion of music in Christianity in Ancient Rome,” in Lucy Grig, ed., Popular Culture in begins with “Roman Liturgy and Chant” (Gregorian the Ancient World [Cambridge: Cambridge University chant) on page 7 and runs through page 50, ending Press, 2017]: 149). Though Vincent writes about with Hildegard of Bingen, then moving to “Song and ancient Rome rather than Greece, his statement Dance Music to 1300,” a section that begins with the demonstrates that the gap between classicists and Musica enchiriadis—the ninth-century treatise that Anglo-American musicologists identified by Rocconi systemized rules for polyphony. In this well-known has not yet been bridged. Consider, for instance, that story, Western music appears merely in in the recent (2020) Companion to Ancient Greek and form in antiquity through the emergence of music Roman Music (Blackwell), of thirty-five contributors, theory, is born fully with , and finds its only four are musicologists and all work in Italy. adolescent footing with the theorization of polyphony (For a recent bibliography of writings on ancient of the first millennium. Greek and Roman musics, see Tosca A. C. Lynch 41 Happily, two forthcoming volumes appear set and Eleonora Rocconi, A Companion to Ancient Greek to better cross this gap, one of which has a coeditor and Roman Music [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020].) who is a musicologist (Leach): A Cultural History Several exciting developments in the study of ancient of Music in Antiquity (C. 800 BCE–500 CE), ed. Greek and Roman musics have occurred recently Sean Gurd and Pauline LeVen (Bloomsbury); and outside the purview of Anglo-American ethno/ A Cultural History of Music in the Middle Ages (500– musicology: a new (as of 2013) journal called Greek 1400), ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach and Roman Musical Studies; a series of conferences (Bloomsbury). on “Soundscapes of the Ancient Greek World” 42 The last volume of the book series The Senses (held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece); in Antiquity is on sound (Shane Butler and Sarah and studies of Roman soundscapes and musics by Nooter, Sound and the Ancient Senses [New York: French scholars (see, e.g., Alexandre Vincent, “Une Routledge, 2018]). histoire de silences,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 43 Quasten, Music and Worship; James 2017/3: 633–58; Christophe Vendries, Instruments McKinnon, The Temple, the Church Fathers and Early à cordes et musiciens dans l’empire romain [: Western Chant (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1998). Éditions L’Harmattan, 1999]; and Sibylle Emerit, 44 The easiest way for readers to access the Sylvain Perrot, and Alexandre Vincent, Le paysage breadth and depth of the church fathers’ intentional sonore de l’Antiquité: Méthodologie, historiographie et violence against the use of instruments in the early perspectives: Actes de la journée d’études tenue à l’École church is to access a 1965 article by McKinnon française de Rome le 7 janvier 2013 [Cairo, Egypt: reproduced online: https://www.catholicculture.org/ Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2015]). culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9134. 39 There are Anglo-American musicologists who 45 Quasten, Music and Worship, 1. delve into early Christianity, but they tend to focus 46 Ibid., 61. on Christian musics qua the , 47 Ibid. rather than on their relationship to pagan musics 48 McKinnon, https://www.catholicculture. or the disciplining efforts of the church fathers on org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9134. pagan musics. Of particular note is the work of Peter 49 Quasten, Music and Worship, 60. , e.g., “The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory 50 McKinnon, https://www.catholicculture. Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9134. Chant,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 Quasten, Music and Worship, 60. 47/1 (1994): 1–38; Peter Jeffery, Re-envisioning 52 Ibid. On Judaism and early Christian Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study psalmody, see Jeffery, “Philo’s Impact.” Instrumental of Gregorian Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago music was prevalent in ancient Judaism but banned Press, 1995); and Peter Jeffery, “Philo’s Impact on after the destruction of the Second Temple. (The

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 141 classic source is A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and 62 Sabah Mahmood, Religious Difference in Its Development [New York: Dover, 2012 (1932)], a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: 93–97.) Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. 53 Quasten, Music and Worship, 140. 63 Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: 54 Ibid., 62. Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt 55 For example, the Didascalia of the Three (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7. Hundred Eighteen Fathers (375 c.e.) states that women 64 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline should be forbidden to speak in church, nor should and Reasons of Power in (Baltimore, they sing or take part in the responses; they should MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). silent and pray. Isidore of Pelusiam (d. 440) 65 Bangstad, “Constructing Secularism/s,” 189. notes that women were once allowed to sing but this 66 Asad, Genealogies, 42. permission was withdrawn because it was learned 67 José Casanova, “Asian Catholicism, that they do not “gain any salutary fruits of Interreligious Colonial Encounters and Dynamics of from divine song, but used the sweetness of melody Secularism in Asia,” in Kenneth Dean and Peter Van for disturbances of every kind, since they looked on der Veer, eds., The Secular in South, East, and Southeast it exactly the same way as theatre music.” These and Asia (Berlin: Springer, 2019), 14. more examples can be found in Quasten, Music and 68 Dean and Van der Veer, “Introduction,” The Worship, 81–82. Secular, 5. 56 Interestingly, the battle between Christianity 69 Ibid., 2. and paganism remains an enduring theme of 70 José Casanova, “Religious Associations, bestselling books about antiquity. See, for example, Religious Innovations and Denominational Identities Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian in Contemporary Global Cities,” in Irene Becci et al., Destruction of the Classical World (Boston: Mariner eds., Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces Books, 2019); and Charles Freeman, The Closing (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 114. of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of 71 Ibid. Reason (New York: Knopf, 2003). 72 Patricia Hardwick, “Celestial Horses in the 57 Most discussions of musicology’s borders Lion City: Malay Identity and the Sustainability of have focused on the West and its external Others Kuda Kepang in Singapore,” in The ICTM Study Group rather than Others within the West; for some avenues on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia, Proceedings of the into the latter, see, e.g., Gary Tomlinson, Music in 4th Symposium (School of the Arts, Penang, Malaysia: Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2017). (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Philip 73 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian V. Bohlman, and Modernity (New York: Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University Oxford University Press, 2008); and Tamara Levitz of Chicago Press, 1998); Andrew Willford, of (convenor), “Musicology Beyond Borders?,” Journal Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia of the American Musicological Society 65/3 (2012): ( Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 821–61. 74 Ritu Birla, Capital: Law, Culture and Market 58 Kofi Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke Rhythm,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society University Press, 2009); Andrew Sartori, Bengal in 48/3 (1995): 380–95. For British colonial regulation Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Capital of processional drumming, see my “Sound as Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). and Threat: Drumming, Collective Violence, and 75 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Colonial Law in British Ceylon,” in Ian Biddle and MA: Belknap Press, 2007). Kirsten Gibson, eds., Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound 76 Mahmood, Religious Difference,3. and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918 (New York: 77 Dean and Van der Veer, The Secular, 6. Routledge, 2017), 141–65. 78 Certainly, different societies and religious 59 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. traditions have their own manners of registering Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns and producing difference; a consideration of how Hopkins University Press, 1997), 199. the Western ontology of music-as-identity interacts 60 Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,” with Sinhala Buddhist understandings of music in Sri Critical Inquiry 30/3 (2004): 505–36. Lanka (which has its own exclusionary tendencies) 61 This is Khaled Furani’s summary of Asad in is a topic of my book (Jim Sykes, The Musical Gift: “Said and the Religious Other,” Comparative Studies in Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka [New York: Society and History 52/3 (2012): 605. Oxford University Press, 2018]). What is unique

142 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) to Christianity (or, perhaps, Judeo-Christianity), I 88 Agamben, The Kingdom, 2. am suggesting, is the way it conceives of music as 89 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural the outward expression of an inward state taken Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke as inclusive and representative of community. For University Press, 2003), 14. Sterne describes a Buddhists, for instance, the soul does not exist in number of ways that hearing and vision are placed any stable, transcendent capacity, and thus it is not in a binary in Western culture, such as: “hearing is an indigenous concept that music is attached to or spherical, vision is directional; hearing immerses its expressive of the soul. subject, vision offers a perspective; sounds come to us, 79 Which is to say, the reproduction of consumer but vision travels to its object; hearing is concerned desire fostered by music curation and recommendation with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces . . . hides its function not only as a space for institutional hearing is about affect; vision is about intellect; hearing surveillance and control, but also as a mode of secular is a primarily temporal sense, vision is a primarily resonance. See, e.g., Eric Drott, “Why the Next Song spatial sense; hearing is a sense that immerses us in Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity,” the world, while vision removes us from it.” Jonathan Twentieth-Century Music 3 (2018): 325–57. Sterne, “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” 80 Charles Rosen, “Did Beethoven Have All the Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011): 12. Luck?,” New York Review of Books, Nov. 14, 1996. 90 Sterne, “The Theology of Sound,” 15. 81 Carl Dalhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. 91 Robin James, “ and Listen: J. Bradford Robinson (Chicago: University of Chicago The Audiovisual Litany in Philosophy,” Sounding Press, 1990), 183–84. On secular enchantment in Out! (March 2018), https://soundstudiesblog. music, see Jeffers Engelhardt, Singing the Right Way: com/2018/03/05/look-away-and-listen-the- Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia audiovisual-litany-in-philosophy/. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 92 Elizabeth Povinelli, “Geontologies of the 82 Since I discuss Fine’s essay in the previous Otherwise,” Theorizing the Contemporary (2014), section and Osborne’s in the conclusion, I consider https://culanth.org/fieldsights/geontologies-of-the- just four of the six essays in this section. otherwise. 83 Ashton Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The 93 Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Press, 2016). Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke 84 Engelhardt, Singing the Right Way; University Press, 2002). Janaki Bakhle, “Music as the Sound of the 94 Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, “Acoustic Secular,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature 50/1 (2008): 256–84. of Music in Ethnomusicology,” Boundary 2 43/1 85 Judith Butler in Judith Butler, Jürgen (2016): 107–41. Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The 95 Asad, Formations, 27. Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: 96 E.g., Sherinian, Tamil Folk Music. Columbia University Press, 2012), 72. 86 See Philip V. Bohlman, Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Georgina Born, “For a Relational Musicology,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/2 (2010): 205–43; Levitz, “Musicology Beyond Borders?” Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Needless to say, this list is intended just to point toward a long and diverse history of querying canonic formations of music studies—though it is significant that secularism has scarcely been a part of such conversations. 87 June McDaniel, “Agama Hindu Dharma Indonesia as a New Religious Movement: Hinduism Recreated in the Image of Islam,” Nova Religio 14/1 (2010): 93–111.

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