You are warmly invited to the fourth research colloquium of the 2021–22 series at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge.
On Wednesday 27 October 17:00 (UK time), Dr. Melvin L. Butler, associate professor in the Department of Musicology and the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, will share a paper entitled “Lines in the Sand: Music, Flow, and Boundary-Crossing in Jamaican Pentecostal Worship”, followed by Q&A.
Colloquia take place in the Recital Room of the West Road Concert Hall at Cambridge University and are available to attend online. Please email [log in to unmask] for the Zoom link.
Best wishes,
2021–22 Colloquium Committee
Alexandra Leonzini, Tadhg Sauvey, Nicky Swett
Abstract
Lines in the Sand: Music, Flow, and Boundary-Crossing in Jamaican Pentecostal Worship
In Jamaica and throughout its diaspora, Pentecostal Christians use music to affirm their cultural and religious identities, celebrate deliverance from sin, and unlock pathways to the Holy Spirit. They use homegrown rhythms and repertories to nurture feelings of collective distinctiveness which are reinforced by transcendent worship, ritualized nostalgia, and conceptual oppositions between the Church and the wider "world." However, Pentecostals also destabilize this dichotomy by appropriating styles and repertories that travel across conventional lines of sacred and secular demarcation. This talk thus highlights the strategies of flow through which believers navigate the crossroads of local and global practice.
The concept of “flow” connotes the transmission of people, ideas, and media within Jamaica and from abroad. Spiritual flow centres on the ways that Pentecostals discuss the movement of divine presence and power. Cultural flow implicates a variety of shifting practices and ideas—the “habits” that reside within individuals and groups at any given time. Migratory flow concerns the back-and-forth travels of Jamaicans, a significant portion of whom reside more or less permanently in the United States or England.
Music is a creative yet controversial resource for Jamaican Pentecostals who seek to safeguard both the sanctity and fluidity of their tradition, Reverence and nostalgia for the “old-time way” infuse processes of remembering the past and making sense of the present. Church leaders sometimes consider newer gospel sounds a threat to the established sound ideal of Pentecostal worship. This heightens generational tensions that have become acute as younger and more progressive leadership has assumed control of one of Jamaica’s prominent Pentecostal organizations. I submit that music complicates affirmations of faith and belonging and lays bare the shifting foundations of Jamaican Pentecostal identity.
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