This article uses Jeff Astley's concept of ordinary theology (Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)) to examine and interpret listening experiences from nineteenth-century Methodist sources. It argues that the participatory experiences of singing together with fellow believers were crucial to the development and sustenance of personal faith, and that believers shared accounts of such experiences in ways that they knew would be understood by their readers as indicative of the depth and sincerity of their spirituality. It further contends that the widely recognized importance of hymnody in Methodism demands attention to its practice as well its content, and that while the lyrics of hymns set out Methodist theology and doctrine, the participative experience of communal singing was itself invested with meaning and value by many lay Methodists. Ordinary theology provides a framework through which common features of these accounts are identified and discussed, emphasizing the importance of various forms of life writing in understanding the ways in which religious practice shaped the lives and interactions of individual believers. The article also explores differences between different types of published and unpublished life writing. While examples are drawn from different branches of nineteenth-century Methodism, it is argued that hymnody's potential for creating spiritually intense experiences was commonly recognized and affirmed across them. This article contributes to the wider discussion of the significance of listening experiences by emphasizing music's vital role in the construction and communication of meaning between individuals on matters of deeply personal value.
This chapter discusses the contribution of hymnology to nineteenth-century intellectual culture. It demonstrates how clergy and musicians engaged in scholarly writing and debate concerning the history, context, practice, and spirituality of congregational song. Using a diverse range of sources, including journal articles, lectures, sermons, and hymnals, it argues that hymnology was recognized as an important area of scholarship that drew on a range of musical and religious perspectives. Interest in it extended across denominational and national boundaries, and was characterized by professional and amateur participation. The key to understanding hymnology’s centrality in intellectual culture lies in the pervasiveness of church music in nineteenth-century cultural practice and experience.
Digital Hymnology: Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Hymn Tune Index,
Hymnary.orgWhether hymnology is thought to sit at the intersection of a range of academic disciplines, among them literature, musicology, theology and history, or if it is regarded as peripheral to each of these, will depend on one's perspective and interests. The nature and purpose of hymn texts and tunes has often seen them marginalized in academic terms, but works such as J.R.
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This article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.
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