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The purpose is to have a collective space for us to have quoting, reflecting the fact of our reading and writing as a daily practice. If you can commit to at least one submission of ONE STATEMENT a day, feel free to join us. We'd love to have you. This sentence can be either something that you read that you are working to complete that is representative of the piece OR it can be a sentence that emerges from your own writing.

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Posts tagged "religion"

‎”Traditionally, black musicians, especially in the church, do not ‘play by notes.’ That is, they tend to learn to play by ear rather than by reading music. This has certain consequences for performance that can be observed, or rather heard, in musicians trained within the traditional black church (and their secular musical heirs, soul singers and rhythm and blues musicians), which include the propensity for improvisation, highly idiosyncratic rhythmic inflection, and the ability to transpose or modulate from one key to another with relative ease. In traditional black churches it is the singer, not the accompanist, who sets the key. Because musicians who learn to play by ear not only have to reproduce sounds in order to learn new material, but have to be able to hear (understand) relationships between various sounds in order to render an accompaniment that is syntactically sound, the performer develops abilities that in traditional western music are usually only required of composers, or perhaps conductors.”

— Salim Washington
”Of Black Bards, Known and Unknown: Music as Racial Metaphor in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”

The [six] hymns about ‘mother,’ in short, exemplify the manner in which the House of God Church affirmed womanhood and the religious freedom of women. No other hymnal of any Protestant denomination, nor of any patriarchal Holiness or Pentecostal denomination, has ever affirmed womanhood in this way.

Jon Michael Spencer
Black hymnody : a hymnological history of the African-American church

it’s like they offered a critique of Moynihan’s “report” before he ever wrote it, and sung that critique from the position of the religiously marginalized. that’s hot.

The reason such sects as the House of God Church became permanent entities in Christianity, rather than remaining passing inspirations, is due…to the interacting roles which suffering and music played in the lives of church members. Less than half a century removed from slavery, those who gravitated to Holiness churches were indeed ‘the least of them,’ people who suffered most severely from social and economic repression, even at the hands of some of the move privileged blacks of the Methodist and Baptist churches.

Jon Michael Spencer
Black hymnody : a hymnological history of the African-American church

In the early days of the Africans’ transformation into African Americans, the spiritual was the most widespread, or at least the most widely known, of all African-American musical genres. It was created by American slaves as they participated in the process that Christianized them and as they performed their rituals, striving to retain their African cultural memory.

Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States

from my dissertation chapter 2 [in progress]

“Blacksong of the enslaved and one of its twentieth century articulations heard in Pentecostalsong are luddisms, they are the breaking of mechanistic stasis, machinic dominance. These sounds, these songs, are the critique of capitalism given through melismatic rupture and yodeling, through elongation and eclipse of voice.”

The first three figures (stockinger, cropper, weaver) are the three crafts corresponding to the three regions of Luddism and to three machines that were undermining them. To [E.P.] Thompson three of these five examples were machine-breakers, suggesting an identification between them and the class of all working people. The prefigurative power of a chronologically specific tactic found expression as myth, and since myth may transcend the time and place of its birth, Ned Ludd continues to wield his hammer centuries later.

Peter Linebaugh
Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12

this particular passage allows me to think about the “Three Jennys” that i’m working through presently — an enslaved woman Jenny, Jenny Marx and Jenny Seymour — and i want to consider them as likewise mythical figurations in order to suggest an animaterial “identification between them and the class of all working people,” where working people in my theorizing will be those who produced Work Songs under the lash, under duress.

haha…i’m sure these videos of dude playing an organ mean little to others … but this ish is SO exciting to me …….. !

more Hammond B-3 greatness … this guy knows how to make an organ scream …

The song ‘Yes Lord’ is a critique of the exploitation that is foundational to capitalism; it is the refusal of abstraction and alienation by the proclamation of a ‘yes’ found in another world. The world, oft, is religious and cultural and this world is generative of the resources necessary for the constant pursuit against marginalization. The ‘Yes’ functions as a ‘no’ to present conditions, accretional towards a new directionality, a different positionality, a queer way to be. ‘Yes,’ is holy.

Chapter 2 (of the diss)

this is my video. i’m writing about the Hammond B-3 … and this is perfect.