Report on the SCSM Annual Meeting
by David Calvert
The 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music convened on Thursday, February 8 in Wake Forest, North Carolina, on the historic and picturesque campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS). The seminary has operated on the site since Wake Forest College moved to Winston-Salem in 1956. A portion of the conference also took place in the 183-year-old Wake Forest Baptist Church and featured the facility’s newly-refurbished pipe organ. Participants from five different countries and eighteen U.S. states gathered to discuss ideas and research related to music and Christianity: the program committee cultivated a broad spectrum of papers and presenters, provoking much thought and conversation between sessions.
The first concurrent sessions focused on “Theology through Music” and “Music, Beauty, and, the Christian Faith,” respectively, highlighting the diversity of methodologies utilized by SCSM members. For example, as Enya Doyle (Durham University) presented her ethnographic study of women in English cathedral music, Michael Harland (University of Texas at Austin) theorized the link between expression and belief in his philosophical approach to music as worldview.
Dr. Steven R. Guthrie, Professor in Theology, Religion, and the Arts at Belmont University, delivered the keynote address. Guthrie illustrated the concept of our current “aural crisis” with the help of Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy, illustrating ways in which loneliness emerges from the current cultural cacophony of competing voices. Even in the midst of the dissonant and aggressive voices, however, God through the Spirit can inspire and create powerful themes that call for response. Indeed, our failure to hear one another — which leads to the experienced loneliness — will only be overcome as we are given “ears to hear” both what God speaks and what others are speaking in response.
Friday’s full day of papers included a concurrent session on religious music in early nineteenth-century Europe and modern or contemporary worship music. The graduate student panel wrestled with statements of teaching philosophy, while the next concurrent session included papers in the German Lutheran tradition and reflections on specific intersections of music and liturgy. The pre-concert panel prepared the participants for engagement with the evening performance of the Duke Evensong Singers, demonstrating the intention and care in curating selections for the concert.
Saturday morning began with concurrent sessions on music in theological writings and congregational song in global contexts. Of particular note was graduate student Andrew Janzen’s prizewinning paper entitled “‘The Good Road’: Indigenous Christian Songs, Senses of Place, and Identity”: through robust ethnographic work with Native American Christian song and hymns, Janzen (University of Toronto) posited that the negotiation of indigenous Christian song can be a complex relationship with both the indigenous culture and the evangelizing culture making “concessions” in song that need not be through forced adoption or coercion.
The annual meeting concluded with a stirring concert-recital by Chad Fothergill (Temple University), who performed and provided insightful comments on Brahms’s Op. 122 chorale preludes. For those who were able to linger, Bennett Zon and Steven Guthrie led a group discussion on the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Theology. This session was a microcosm of SCSM — theologians, musicologists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and philosophers all in dialogue.
Special thanks are due to local arrangements chair Joshua Waggener and the faculty and staff of SEBTS for their hospitality. Thanks as well to the Center for Faith and Culture at SEBTS for partnering in the keynote address, and to the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts for partnering to bring the Duke Evensong Singers for their Friday evening performance at Wake Forest Baptist Church.
I look forward to the work being produced by the many scholars of SCSM, and deeply appreciate the fellowship and encouragement offered at each annual meeting. Next year’s meeting in Toronto will continue to celebrate the broad spectrum of scholarship represented by SCSM.
Click here to view an album of photos from this year’s gathering courtesy of SCSM webmaster Adam Perez.
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David Calvert has been a worship leader in a rural church for twelve years, observing and navigating the intersection of theology and music. In April 2018, he will defend his dissertation, “Liturgical Speech Acts: How to Do Things with Words in Worship,” completed at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary under the mentorship of Joshua Waggener.
