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Wyatt Boelens
Professor Zaretti
LCS 280-AE
2 December 2019
Ethnomusicology Report

This course is centered around the idea that music is much more than something we listen

to. It is something that we share with friends and family, it is something that we can experience

with our community or thousands of strangers simultaneously. It is a way of expressing emotions

and history often without using words. It transcends all barriers, whether it is linguistic or

cultural, music is able to connect and unite us as a species and it capable of touching the hearts of

millions. By better understanding how music is shaped by the culture, we can begin to determine

how music is the projection of a culture at any given time. Indigenous music like Agbekor and

Capoeira are musical styles that help cultures to remember their roots, tell stories, and reflect the

culture’s history. Popular music today is a projection of all the attitudes and beliefs of our

cultures today, just like these indigenous styles were when they were created. Music can act as a

lens through which we can gain an understanding of cultures past and present through

observation, participation, as well as engagement; by utilizing these three aspects of

ethnomusicology, we are able to open the doors to a whole world of understanding that may have

otherwise been closed to us. One particular genre of music that fits the idea of transcendence is

worship music. Each culture has its own way of worshiping whether it be through music, dance,

meditation, etc. This idea that worship music is able to embody music and sounds from every

culture imaginable. What is also unique about worship music as it relates to religion is that it has

a high level of individual emotional affect, along with the ability to promote engagement and

participation of the religion. By attending the Awakening Church’s 11am service on November
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18th, I was able to gain some insights as to exactly how the engagement and participation of

worship music related to the affect of the individual.

Services at the Awakening Church are held on Sunday’s at 9am and 11am, I chose to go

to the 11 as my sleep is precious to me. Entering the church, I was initially struck by how

modern the interior is. It has a quadruple wide set of glass doors revealing a spacious yet

comfortable hospitality room where there were dozens of other couples and families conversing.

This felt very familiar to me, as my experiences with many churches before this had the same

communal feel to them upon entering.

I proceeded to move through the hospitality room into the sanctuary. The room was

dimly lit aside from the stage which had LED lights in a neat and attractively organized way,

with an LED embroidered cross hovering 15 feet above the stage. The sanctuary was arranged

like an amphitheater with descending floors gravitating towards the stage, naturally encouraging

people to congregate near the stage. I sat near the back-right corner of the sanctuary to give

myself a holistic view of the room and to keep myself segregated from the masses as to not

invoke the Hawthorne effect on the audience as well, as is my ethical responsibility as an

ethnomusicologist. I noticed that most people who were in attendance were there as a family or

with a spouse, only a small percentage of the audience were there by themselves. Also, I noticed

that there were no elderly people present, hardly anybody there was older than 40 for that matter.

This church is a “new life” church, and it is organized to appeal to a more youthful audience, as

it was much more modern in affect and in style.

The music began with a deep drum beat that felt like the heart of the church. People

began clapping along with the worship leaders on stage. There were approximately 15-20 people
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on stage, and all appeared to be in their early to mid-twenties. The band comprised of two

guitarists, a drummer, a bassist, a keyboard player, three lead singers, and a group of about 10

backup singers arranged in traditional chorus stands. The band is a very energetic group on stage

as to increase excitement and participation with the audience. The band proceeded to begin their

worship setlist with a very lively pop-sounding song. A very heavy drumbeat, very vocalic with

a large range of pitch and volume directed at generating excitement. There was a strong baseline

of participation as the majority of people were singing along from the start. I did notice that those

who were sitting towards the back of the sanctuary were not singing, while those at the front

were much more inclined to sing along.

The remainder of the songs were centered around the drum beat and the guitar which is

typical of worship/gospel music. As the music shifted from pop rock sounds to a more acoustic

sound the lights would shift shades from bright to dark to mirror the emotional content of the

song. The message of the songs had similar themes of redemption, community, selflessness and

love and coincidentally the music followed the core “7 values” of the Awakening Church. The

values are; “Jesus: is our everything, People: are our heart, Church: is our home, Serving: is our

honor, Generosity: is our lifestyle, Expectation: is our approach, and Unstoppable: is our nature.”

(awakeningchurch.org/). This exemplifies how aligned this church is with its message and its

values, and it heavily increases the emotional effect of the music on the audience. Through my

observations it became clear as day that this church has something special about it. I was feeling

strange sitting down taking notes while others were engaging with the music and sinking into the

reciprocal exchange of energy between the performers and the audience. It is something I wanted

to be a part of, the level of engagement was captivating. The music moved the whole room. This
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church just like thousands of others across the country, utilize music to draw people closer to

God. I was curious to find out more as to how and why this happens.

Understanding our connection to music goes back thousands of years to the first

civilizations. Ancient civilizations like the Ewe people in west Africa created the musical style

Agbekor as a way relive stories, battles, speak philosophy, and as a way to bring the community

together. Listening to Agbekor it is easy to tell that drums are one of the primary instruments

used. This is still the case today in all genres of music whether it be pop, gospel, funk, R&B,

Hip-Hop, the drum beat is the heart that keeps the organism of music alive. “The only way you

can ban drumming is to destroy the drummer, because drumming does not exist in an instrument.

It exists within a need… within a human spirit” (Grauer 1993). This quote from the Religious

Music chapter in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music really exemplifies how we have an

inherent need for rhythm. This was evident in the church service I attended, and from personal

experience, I can confirm this phenomenon. As the band began its call to worship, they didn’t

just start playing a song. The drummer began a heart like beat that I could almost feel in my

chest. This immediately woke me up and I began to feel like something was happening. Not just

the music but with the drumbeat came a feeling of excitement and anticipation, I felt like I had to

move my body. In a study conducted by the Department of Psychology at Uppsala University in

Sweden, to determine how cues by musicians can impact the emotional effect of their music.

This study focused on the performance cues of live music, rather than the overarching moods of

songs in their entirety. This study isolated the cues that musicians would place within their

performance to elicit specific emotional responses. They would attempt to invoke feelings of

happiness, anger, sadness, and fear in the listeners. The study found that by utilizing expressive

cues in the musical performance like; note selection, tempo adjustments, volume and pitch
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change, that there was a high correlation between the intentional cues in the performance and the

emotional effect of the listener (Juslin 2000). This study demonstrates the energy that can be felt

in the church’s service. With a basic drumbeat the band was able to get hundreds of people off

their feet and start clapping in unison with the beat.

The Awakening Church, like many more around the world have an interesting

generational issue. Typically, children grow up in the church and they will attend services

regularly with their family throughout childhood. Once kids grow up and become late teenagers,

they begin to embark on their different life paths, many of which choose college. During these

four years, they will typically attend church only on holidays when they are home with their

families. This creates a four-year generational gap in the church’s congregation. (Yoon pp. 316).

One way that churches have found is effective at drawing back their youthful audiences. It is the

formation of contemporary Christian music that has re-ignited the spiritual spark in younger

generations, as the worship music sounds very similar to popular music today. Digitized

instruments, guitars, drums, loud beats, all these things help to generate excitement in the

congregation, and that is what youthful generations desire in a musical performance. In a book

written by Monique M. Ingalls called “Singing in the Congregation” she defines what a

congregation is as, “… a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into

being through a set of communal practices… known as ‘worship’” (Ingalls pp. 5). She is

essentially saying that the whole of the congregation is greater than the sum of the individuals

that comprise it.

By creating and participating in worship, the congregation breathes life into a unique and

new shared reality between all the members of the congregation. It is in this shared reality that

people feel free to release their inhibitions and worship the God they love openly and freely. This
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creates a truly unique and special environment that lasts only for a fleeting moment in the day,

but the energy we feel sticks with us for the rest of the week.

In a study conducted by Mandi Miller and Kenneth Strongman titled “The Emotional

Effects of Music on Religious Experience” regarding the emotional effects of music on religious

experience, they found hard evidence supporting the ideas that; familiarity increases emotional

affect, and that there are strong correlations between experiences and mood shifts. In this study,

they found participants who were members of a church of approximately 1,000 people and were

asked to respond to questionnaires and interviews regarding their experiences in church.

Participants were found to have high correlations in the increases of their moods both before and

after the worship service (Miller, Strongman pp. 12). This demonstrates that by coming together

as a church community, and engaging in worship, there is a measurable positive effect on the

congregants. The Encyclopedia of World Music states that emotional expression is found

wherever evangelism is strong (Miller pp. 120). Evangelism is the passionate and free expression

of the gospel with the intention of spreading the messages and teachings of Jesus Christ. In the

case of the Awakening Church, from the second you walk through the front doors you can feel

the love of the community rooted in Jesus’ teachings. This can also be felt in the excitement of

the pastor when he hopped on stage and began shouting praises from the community,

prophesying the impact of the church on the community, and calling the congregation to love and

care for one another. It is the energy in the pastor’s words along with the earnest way he

communicates them that enables people to open up and feel free to express themselves.

In conclusion, we are feeling machines that think; we make interpretations and draw

conclusions based on information that we gather through our experiences, and this constitutes

our reality. Everyone will have different experiences in life which will lead them to have
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differing perceptions of the world around them. However, it is able to transcend our

individualism and our isolated senses of reality, in worship music. It creates an environment

where people release their inhibitions and are able to contribute to a shared reality that is as

fleeting as the church service itself.

It is during this time of worship where people escape their physical realities and are able

to join a much more idealized one that is much greater than the sum of the individuals that

constitute it. By closing our eyes and sinking into the music we are able to feel different things

that we wouldn’t be able to without the music. By engaging on a very deep and personal level we

are able to connect with the omniscient entity that we call God and feel the love that is being

communicated through song. The Encyclopedia of World Music also states that “…one

encounters music that brings the worshipper to a state of ecstasy or even trance through

repetition and extreme volume combined with emotional words encouraging surrender to the

Lord” (Miller pp. 120). This demonstrates the fact that, at the end of the day, worship music and

the effects that it has on people is in fact in-tangible. It doesn’t exist in our reality or on the

elemental chart, and yet we can feel it in our bones when we are a part of these worship services.

This is the thing that is truly special about worship music is that everybody has their own

experiences and their own way of worshiping but when we are together as a community, we all

feel the same thing.