Sacro-Soundscapes: Interpreting Contemporary Ritual Performances of Sacred Music through the Case of The Passion in the Netherlands

Abstract

Abstractis a musical practice staged in the Dutch public sphere and an example of how large, Christian musical forms in late-modern network societies moved from the church to the broader culture. Neither the classical discipline of hymnology nor the emerging discipline of Christian congregational music studies have developed theoretical concepts that serve to understand musical practices outside the ecclesial domain. The authors distinguish the emerging field of fluid ritual musical practices and reinvent the concept of sacro-soundscapes as a notion that contributes to the interpretation of these practices. They claim that, consequentially, the aforementioned disciplines are included in this field and therefore change, as well.

The Passion of Christ on Television: Intertextuality as a Mode of Storytelling

“…Typically, The Passion attracts tiered participation for a variety of motives. The different ways in which the participants perceive it make it a hybrid and altogether fluid event (Gärtner 2017b;Klomp and Barnard 2017). Five groups can be distinguished.…”

Spirituality and music

“…Focusing on contemporary presentations of religious music in non-religious spaces, Dutch theologians Mirella Klomp and Marcel Barnard recently coined the term "sacrosoundscapes." In contemporary Western societies, performances of Passions, Requiems, Masses, and Stabat Maters have moved out of the institutionalized church into secular cultural domains, even into public spaces, often concurrent with popular culture and commerce, thus turning them into real media events (Klomp and Barnard 2017). The essay becomes especially interesting when the authors -if only for a very brief moment -think beyond the mere musical realm by claiming that sacro-soundscapes consist of a whole complex of sacred sounds, their words and music, the way they are performed and accompanied, the context in which they are performed, the way they are appropriated, and the attributed meanings that people share […] beyond the church, beyond institutionalized religion, and possibly even beyond religion.…”

“…The essay becomes especially interesting when the authors -if only for a very brief moment -think beyond the mere musical realm by claiming that sacro-soundscapes consist of a whole complex of sacred sounds, their words and music, the way they are performed and accompanied, the context in which they are performed, the way they are appropriated, and the attributed meanings that people share […] beyond the church, beyond institutionalized religion, and possibly even beyond religion. (Klomp and Barnard 2017) The term "spiritual soundscape" -which I prefer over Klomp and Barnard's sacro-soundscape, as it avoids too much emphasis on religious music, with its close ties to Christendom and therefore to transcendentalism -primarily refers to a sonic way of knowing and being in the world.…”

A psalm is always a memory: Nostalgia and sacrality in contemporary ritual-musical appropriations of the psalms

“…These ritual-musical appropriations take place in a context marked by steady processes of de-churching and the decline of the institutional Christian religion (Bernts and Berghuijs, 2016; CBS, 2018; De Hart and Van Houwelingen, 2018). Simultaneously to these processes, religious language and religious ritual practices have migrated from the domain of institutional religion into the public domain, or the domain of cultural heritage (Klomp, 2020: 55; Klomp and Barnard, 2017: 243, 250; Meyer, 2019: 65, 70–71, 79–82; cf. Assmann, 2008: 100–101).…”

“…Assmann, 2008: 100–101). Mirella Klomp and Marcel Barnard (2017: 254) have described such migrating musical forms as ‘sacro-soundscapes’. A ‘sacro-soundscape’ encompasses the whole complex of performed sounds of a cultural form as well as the way in which it meanders through a cultural landscape, as individuals, groups and institutions ‘carry these various sounds along, cherish them, discuss them, reject them, leave them behind, and/or find them again’.…”