Call for Essays: Christian Music Traditions in the Americas
written by Chad Fothergill
Following the success of its first volume of collected essays, Exploring Christian Song, the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music invites submission of abstracts for essays to be included in an edited scholarly volume on Christian music traditions in the Americas.
Editors Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko welcome submissions on diverse topics using a variety of methodologies and approaches that include, among others, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory, theology, liturgical studies, as well as cross-disciplinary perspectives.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- African-American musics
- American composers and musical borrowing from sacred traditions
- American denominations and liturgies
- American sacred music in global contexts
- Early hymnals
- Historical and contemporary practices of church music
- Immigrant communities and their traditions
- Music in/of a particular denomination or church
- Native American church music
- Sacred Harp and other shape-note traditions
- Sacred music and social justice/protest
- The intersection of oral and written traditions in sacred music
Abstracts of up to 350 words may be submitted to scsm.collection2020@gmail.com by 1 October 2019. Contributors will be notified by 1 November 2019. Essays of approximately 7,000 words will be due 1 February 2020, with an expected publication date of fall 2020.
Joanna Smolko, editor, is a musicologist whose work has clustered around American hymnody, popular music, film music, and classical music. She is an Online Teaching Fellow at the University of Georgia, as well as a private music teacher and an academic editor and coach. Recently she has co-written a volume with her husband, Tim Smolko, entitled Atomic Tunes: The Cold War in American and British Popular Music, which is currently under review with Indiana University Press.
Andrew Shenton, editor, is a scholar, prize-winning author, performer, and educator. Moving freely between musicology and ethnomusicology Shenton’s work is best subsumed under the heading “music and transcendence,” and includes several major publications on Messiaen, Pärt, and others. His most recent monograph, Arvo Pärt’s Resonant Texts was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Dr. Shenton is Associate Professor of Music at Boston University, and Artistic Director of Boston Choral Ensemble and Vox Futura.
We invite you to forward this call for essays to anyone you think may be interested in contributing to this volume!
