Music and Religion

Why do we disentangle music and religion? How are music and religion entangled in the worlds of practitioners and scholars? What can ethnomusicologists offer to all students of religion by attending to religion's audibility or inaudibility? In this book, author Jeffers Engelhardt engages generations-old interdisciplinary debates to highlight scholars' changing relationships with other-than-human beings in the religious worlds they study. In the history of ethnomusicology, there is a degree of discomfort with other-than-human agency and theologically grounded methods. However, in recent years, ethnomusicologists have recognized the limits of secular models that favor sonic data over divine knowledge. This moment is marked by a resurgence of sacred musicologies that predate ethnomusicology as a field and by ethnomusicologists' commitments to decolonizing the discipline. The resulting scholarship incorporates both secular, cultural approaches and non-secular, entangled approaches to the study of music and religion. Music and Religion critically examines how scholars navigate these approaches to sound and other-than-human agency. Engelhardt provides ethnographic case studies and surveys key texts from the eighteenth century to the present day to address questions that have occupied scholars for generations. In doing so, he invites readers to embrace new ways of thinking about and listening to the world around them.

Jeffers Engelhardt is the Karen and Brian Conway '80, P'18 Presidential Teaching Professor of Music at Amherst College, where he is affiliated with Film and Media Studies, European Studies, and the Five College Certificate in Ethnomusicology. He is the author of Singing the Right Way (2015), and the co-editor of Baltic Musics Beyond the Post-Soviet (2024), Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred (2021), Studying Congregational Music (2021), and Resounding Transcendence (2016). Since 2016, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.