The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing embraces an open-ended interpretation of socio-musical practices that can be described with the term community singing. The volume exemplifies community singing as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses diverse methodologies and objects of inquiry, and in the process brings together recent research from the fields that have historically engaged with the practice of group singing, including group dynamics, ethnomusicology, music history, music education, music therapy, community music, church music, music performance, sociology, political science, Latin American and North American studies, media studies, embodied psychology, theology, and philosophy.
Chapters are divided into eight interdisciplinary sections: "Media and the Imagination of Community", "Singing in Place-Based Communities", "The Practitioner's Perspective", "Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture", "Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation", "Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum", "Singing and Political Action", and "New Paradigms". Each is prefaced with an introduction that traces the common threads running through the methodologically and topically diverse chapters that examine culturally specific narrow instances of community singing, each confined to a given time and place, in significant detail.
The chapters explore community singing as one of two phenomena: the practice of singing
as community--the utilization of collective song by communities of place or preference, and the singing of community
into existence--the creation or identification of a new community, through singing, that did not exist before. Both practices can profoundly affect participants.
The Handbook considers why communities are motivated to sing, what their activities mean, and how practitioners can improve the experience of singing together.
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Georgia, where she also directs the orchestra and coaches the old-time string band. She studies participatory music-making traditions of the past and present, employing both historical and ethnographic methodologies. She has published on the American community singing movement, mediated sing-alongs, Sacred Harp singing, old-time string band music, and music history pedagogy, and is also active as a cellist, fiddler and fiddle teacher, and singer.
Kay Norton is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University. Her 2016 monograph,
Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (2016) incorporates threads from musicology, anthropology, philosophy, medical history, psychology of music, and neuroscience to argue the centrality of the melodious voice in human experience. Concurrently with that ongoing work, she presents and publishes on US American sacred music. She teaches research methodologies, gender in music, music in human experience, and nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, and is a lifelong community singer.
