Music Research as a Source for Thinking About Practices

I’ve been interested in music for a long time. As a musician for more than thirty years, there are certain musical worlds in which I feel right at home. Although my academic life has been going (post-grad school) for only half as long as my musical life, I’ve been in practical theology long enough to notice, constantly, resonances back and forth between the way that practices are thought to matter in theology and in music.
Musicological research and performance studies in music are always evocative in this regard. I’ve been thinking about how, in musical performance, significance for an audience is generated not only by what one hears, but by what one sees as one is hearing. Richard Leppert’s theory of practice in The Sight of Sound is helpful in this regard. I think it potentially speaks to the difficult question of “where” one looks in music to find potential theological material, as well as to practices more broadly. Sound, the “essence” of musical practice, is strangely supplemented and even substantiated in its significance, by sight.
Here is Leppert:
“When people hear a musical performance, they see it as an embodied activity. While they hear, they also witness: how the performers look and gesture, how they are costumed, how they interact with their instruments and with one another, how they regard the audience, how other listeners heed the performers […] Visual representation in effect encapsulates more or less all of the embodied activity, not as a ‘disinterested’ record of events, but as a coherent and discursive, commonly dialectical, vision of the varied relations within whose context sound occurs and sound means.”
–Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Univ of CA Press, 1993), p. xxii
Practical theology keeps me continuously curious about how practices, experiences, actions and performances are ingredient to theological form and content. Other fields such as musicology and cultural studies of music assist in keeping this curiosity both sustained and open.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York