omg I love you, can I ask (if you have a coherent answer – I never did when people asked me this question) how you ended up interested in your subject?

shelomit:

Ehehehehe, well, I am only a fake historian of Christianity, and depend on maaaaaaany longsuffering divinity-school friends to keep my theology straight ; P I got to religious history via my interest in hymnody. The area where I grew up (at least the rural parts) are very strongly Plain; we have the world’s biggest population of Church of God in Christ, Mennonite to which many of our neighbors belonged. My childhood best friend was a Holdeman Mennonite but lived about a three-hour drive away, so my best opportunity to get to see her was at the monthly gospel singings at the Mission Church in Dodge City. (They actually sing three times a month, but the other two are in Spanish and Plautdietsch!) The best friend’s aunt is also a prolific and pretty well respected hymnodist within that denomination. I had started to read a lot of hymnological research by the time I was ten or so. When I was twelve I happened to come across a library copy of the facsimile of James Lyons’s Urania (1762, usually considered the first “American tunebook”) and I sort of followed Lyons forward and the Mennonite repertoire backward until I ended up in the early nineteenth century. Bar a little writing about Richard Allison at the turn of the seventeenth century, I haven’t really ventured before 1800 or after 1850 since! 

Hymnology had such a draw on me because I enjoyed the music and the texts, but I’ve always been distressed by the tendency of a lot of writers on hymnody (especially those whose disciplinary background is in musicology *cough*RichardCrawford*cough*) to focus on the music and brush over the religious context. I’m coming from such a different religious background that I’ve had to labor and labor and read and read just to attain the basic understanding of the Christian ideas/symbols/idioms that pop up in hymnody and that culturally Christian musicologists can simply accept at face value and move on from. I think that has made me a little more sensitive to disjunctures between what I was reading in primary sources and the standard historiographical narratives, and a little more curious about how sacred music actually functioned within the devotional lives of people whose view of the world was so radically different than mine. Tl;dr, I like hymns, but it turns out that you have to know religious history to understand the hymn repertoire in the ways I’m most interested in understanding it. 

I like to joke that when I totally don’t get a thing, my instinctive response is to try and get it harder. I don’t experience music as a deeply emotional sensation the way many people do, and Christianity still doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. Obviously, I’m writing a dissertation about nineteenth-century Christians getting way too worked up about/by music ( ;