Christina Baade
“I Love this Land”: Imperialism, Greater Britain, and the Falklands War
“Where’s the Vera Lynn for our war?” asked the conservative pundit Mark Steyn in 2005, concerned about the lack of patriotic music for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Indeed, few patriotic songs have been written for Britain’s many postcolonial military involvements since World War II. A striking exception was the Falklands War, for which Dame Vera, the WWII Forces Sweetheart, released the last single of her career: “I Love this Land,” a patriotic hymn with choral and soft rock backing, by André Previn, Leslie Bricusse, and producer Wayne Bickerton.

The ten-week Falklands War yielded a British victory, restored British territorial status for the Falklands, and inspired a wave of patriotism that helped push Thatcher’s Conservatives to a landslide election victory. It also inspired contentious debate among historians: was the Falklands War an imperial conflict? Among those arguing against the “imperialesque” error, Richard Weight (2003) claimed, “the national past which the Falklands conjured up was that of the Second World War”—an assertion that resonates with Lynn’s musical presence, if not with WWII’s own imperial dimensions.

In this paper, I examine “I Love this Land” in order to refract Falklands War discourses of imperialism and nostalgia. My analysis is informed by Ezequiel Mercau’s (2019) reframing of the imperialism debate in terms of “Greater Britain” and how racialized notions of Britishness cast the Falklands as a “purer,” atavistic version of Britain. Although Lynn was not alone in saluting the Falklands Task Force, the conflict had an outsized impact on her place in the British imaginary.

Devon J Borowski
“When the fairy sang, the whole world listened”: Voice & Imperial Decline in English Fantasy Literature
The sounding voice has long been constitutive of humanity in the Western imaginary. Creating and comprehending song, in particular, could impart varying degrees of personhood to settlers or colonial subjects abroad through the British Empire.

With decolonization after the Second World War came a stream of imperial nostalgia. One form this took was the midcentury blossoming of English mythopoetry exemplified by Narnia and the Tolkien legendarium. C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (1955) and Tolkien’s posthumous Silmarillion (1977) offer their readers novel creation myths, but mirror the Judeo-Christian story in which logos is essential to the formation of the world and of life; the genesis of these imperio-nostalgic worlds, however, are accomplished through song. Characters with the ability to shape their world—elves or talking animals—are further distinguished by the use of voice. Alternatively, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) presents an alternate history of England in the wake of the abolition of the British slave trade. Clarke’s tale grapples directly with England’s colonial history by imagining the voice in/as excess through the screams of an enslaved African woman and the otherworldly song of fairy heard by a Black servant.

In each instance, the efficacy of magic and political power are premised on the right to a voice and the knowledge of its proper use. As English fantasy came to terms with the declining empire, voice—and especially song—presented itself as a potent tool, a reminder of its actual legacy in shaping bodies, nations, and empires.

Alissa Clapp-Itnyre
“From India’s Coral Strand:” Spreading the Gospel through Children’s Missionary Hymns
Though dissemination of Christianity began during the Roman era, mission work in its modern sense stemmed primarily from late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century English Evangelicals.  English children were very much a part of these efforts.  Missionary support and leadership came mainly from the middle- and upper-middle classes, so their children were naturally drawn into this missionary zeal and also its obligatory fund-raising.  The image of Mrs. Pardiggle’s large brood of boys (from Dickens’s Bleak House) “voluntarily” donating money and gifts to missions abroad is perhaps the most famous satiric reference of the frequent coercion of children for missionary purposes.  Children participated more actively and willingly, though, in the area of hymn-singing: missionary hymns sung at church, at fund-raising concerts and missionary meetings.  Hymn ideology was, of course, problematic to modern views: hymns taught young singers the value of and need for mission work to “save” the unbelieving of other cultures and nations.  Children were taught their own British superiority, that race was hierarchical, and that cultural and religious difference could and should be eliminated.  However, through inspirational tunes and texts which affirmed the value of young children, hymns also energized and empowered children.  If mission hymns did not empower other nationalities, then, they did empower the British child, revealing a growing appreciation for the child as agent of global change. This paper will pursue these themes through the close reading of the tunes and texts--and musical and visual examples--of hymn-writers from Isaac Watts and Ann and Jane Taylor through James Edmeston and Reginald Heber, his “From Greenland’s icy mountains” (quoted in the title), extremely popular in children’s nineteenth-century hymn books.

John Dilworth
Between Sydenham and Nablus: George Grove in an Imperial Context
While scholarship on musical lexicographer, analyst and administrator George Grove has long recognized the role of nationalism in his output, the extra-European dynamics of imperialism in his work have largely remained underexamined. This is despite the fact that, outside of musicology, Grove’s work through the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), has been a focus of much postcolonial scholarship in recent years. This organization, co-founded by Grove in 1865 and run by him for the next five years, was established to produce cartographic, archaeological, and ethnographic surveys in partnership with the UK War Office, so that useful information could be provided to the Bible-reading British public and to the British and Ottoman governments.

In this paper, I focus on Grove’s relationship with the Samaritan community in Nablus, a religious and ethnic group that was a source of ethnographic curiosity for Biblical scholars. Through materials including an account of their rituals he published in 1862, a photographic record of a gift sent to him by the Samaritan leader Jacob Esh-Shellaby in 1867, and his libretto and explanatory analysis for Arthur Sullivan’s oratorio The Light of the World (1873), I explore how music, religion and racial difference intertwined in Grove’s work.

Taking a broader view, this research provides material for considering how the dynamics of archival plunder and mastery of information in Grove’s musical projects might be related to an imperial context. Understanding this story is part of a wider process of confronting the historical roots of musicology in racist and Euro-centrist ideologies and practices.

Natalie Farrell
“Come Out Ye Black and Tans” and Black Lives Matter: Pro-IRA TikTok in Irish America, Summer 2020 
Shortly after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor renewed calls for radical opposition to police brutality in the public imagination, Irish American teenagers took to the popular lip-syncing app TikTok to express support for Black Lives Matter and frustrations with their ancestors’ complicity in Black oppression. In a recent trend, teenagers set The Wolfe Tone’s 1972 rebel song “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” to clips of themselves in balaclavas, posing with fake guns, or pretending to throw a backpack bomb under a car. These videos immediately garnered significant media attention as controversial acts of misguided solidarity. The trend provides an opportunity for white teenagers to claim an ethnic heritage of resistance and express nostalgia for an idealized version of Irish Republicanism amidst a time of political turmoil unlike anything they have seen in their lifetimes. 

In this paper, I investigate the complicated racialization at play in white American pro-IRA TikToks supporting BLM. The IRA is being rediscovered by a generation of young Irish Americans for whom imperialism, whiteness, and racism are synonymous, and their rebel song redux are a complex entanglement of racial ideologies that speak to the contemporary anti-imperialist struggle. Drawing on Aileen Dillane, I argue that these videos denounce the “criminals to cops” narrative tying Irish Americans to white nationalism and Trumpism. I then turn to critical race theory to consider the harms of conflating race and ethnicity in acts of solidarity, especially amidst the return of Northern Irish sectarian violence.

Sandra Joyce
‘You worked and fought and prayed and died’: The 1916 Song Project and Irish Historical Commemoration Through Song”
The Easter Rising 1916 against British rule is regarded as having precipitated the events leading to Ireland becoming an independent political entity in 1922.  However, independence came at the cost of the island being partitioned, and the creation of the troubled region of Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom.  The civil war which was fought from 1922-23 has shaped the course of Irish politics ever since.  

The interpretation of the events of 1916 have proven to be extremely controversial over many decades, primarily because of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Music has been part of the polarising of the so-called two communities (presented as binaries of Catholic vrs Protestant; nationalist vrs unionist; republican vrs loyalist).  The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is unilaterally seen as bringing peace to Northern Ireland but of course, the establishment and definition of peace is always a complex matter. To this day there are some groups who view Ireland as having an “unfinished revolution”, calling for the spirit of 1916 to be reinvigorated.

In this paper I focus on a commemorative project that I was involved in, entitled the 1916 Song Project, which in 2016 brought together 10 traditional singers to research, compose and perform songs about the Rising and associated events.  My paper explores three related yet distinct autoethnographic perspectives on my personal, lived experience: first, growing up in the West of Ireland in the 1970s/1980s; second, as an Irish traditional singer; and third, of the 1916 Song Project.  I position these experiences in wider cultural contexts by referencing relevant contextual literature.  The paper is also informed by two interviews conducted with fellow participants on the project, as well as journal reflections on my role and experience of it. 

This paper will explore music's part in helping post-colonial societies come to terms with and make sense of the legacy of colonialism, in this case through commemoration of a major historical event.  I will finish the paper with a performance of the song - I composed its air for the project.  The title of this paper is taken from a line of this song.

Anushka Kulkarni
(De)-Mythifying Gandhi: the Language of Myth in Philip Glass’ Satyagraha 
Philip Glass’ Satyagraha (1979) is an operatic biopic of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s life in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. With a libretto stitched together from Sanskrit excerpts of the Bhagavad Gita, the opera unfolds thematically, with vignettes depicting the development of Gandhi’s satyagraha philosophy – the ideological foundation for his nonviolent resistance of British colonial rule and fight for Indian independence. Drawing their opera’s primary textual and thematic content from the Bhagavad Gita, Glass and librettist Constance DeJong universalize Hinduism for consumption in a western context. In doing so, they position Gandhi as a mythical forerunner for movements of resistance in twentieth-century United States. Casting Martin Luther King Jr. as the presiding “guardian spirit” of Satyagraha’s third and final act, Glass and DeJong forge a connection between Gandhi’s activism, both in South Africa and India, and the African American civil rights movement. Glass and DeJong moreover foreground the continued web of exchanges instigated by British imperialism and highlight the rich interlacing of ideological, cultural, and artistic impressions that emerge from the colonial encounter of several cultures and peoples. Viewed through the conceptual lens of Roland Barthes’ semiology of myth, the opera Satyagraha itself becomes a mythological product. From this perspective of myth analysis, I ultimately interrogate the consequences of Gandhi’s mythification and question whether Satyagraha’s activism is truly subversive or whether it falls into a tautological trap and maintains the very power structures it seems to condemn. 

Victoria Roskams
Teutonophilia or Teutonophobia: Late Victorian Fictional Composers, Imperial Envy, and the Right to Remain
This paper will use George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), and the depictions of Teutonic-Slavic composers in both, to map a discourse of ‘imperial envy’ in Victorian Britain’s conception of its musical culture, revealing affinities with the present day. Although British national identity is no longer so directly marked by imperialism, nonetheless Britain’s assessment of the role and vitality of music is coloured by its relations with other nations, as continually demonstrated during the Brexit negotiations. My paper will show that, then as now, music’s value – and the right of foreign musicians to remain in Britain – was determined primarily in economic terms, and additionally by a sense of nationalist aggrandisement. 1871 saw the unification of the German states and, subsequently, Germany’s forays into imperialism, resulting in the Scramble for Africa. Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling (2001) have explored how Britain’s musical self-conception in this period was shaped by an intertwined cultural and imperial rivalry with Germany. The founding of the Royal College of Music in 1883, and the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, were consciously motivated by this ideology. I will demonstrate how Klesmer, in Eliot’s novel, and Svengali, in Du Maurier’s, enable us to understand this ideology: from Eliot’s use of the German composer to critique British philistinism, to Du Maurier’s study of music’s role in complicating national identity. As I demonstrate, novels not only serve as historical artefacts of a bygone era’s valuation of music, but actively participated in still-relevant musical discourses.

PANEL

Decolonising a Colonialist Musical Institution in Brexit Britain: Views from Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London
English conservatoires, like Trinity College of Music, were bastions of British colonialism as their curricula and examining and teaching methods were exported around the empire. That the Faculty of Music at Trinity Laban is housed at Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College – formerly a seat for training military men to be exported around the globe –seems fitting. However, while many in arts and humanities are “deocolonising,” as this roundtable will show, we at Trinity are confronted not only with our institution’s colonialist legacies, but also Brexit and Tory funding cuts, which compromise decolonisation attempts and make our institution less accessible.

Uchenna Ngwe will speak about confronting the dominant, colonial narratives in conservatoire formation, and explore how previously excluded histories of African, Caribbean and Black British voices can be amplified and incorporated into Higher-Education pedagogy and performer training. Aleksander Szram will reflect on building a new undergraduate curriculum that aims to create a post-postcolonial environment and nurture individual learners from across the globe. Sophie Fuller will reflect on mentoring the masters-level group project “Identity, Creativity and Performance,” during Brexit and Black Lives Matter. Here, discussions of nationality and ethnicity have become particularly transformative for white British students confronting these topics in relation to their own identities. Finally, Ann van Allen-Russell and Michelle Meinhart will discuss decolonising the undergraduate music history while navigating myriad tensions amongst students – from embarrassment over colonialism, to resistance to decolonisation, to fears of no longer being welcome in this country.

This conundrum at Trinity is indicative of a tension that pervades many British musical institutions presently. Even while the 2021 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition and BBC Radio 3 have consciously incorporated more diversity, new BBC programs such as Being Beethoven and Romanticism and Revolution point to a continued reverence to the canon. While admittedly musical institutions are knowingly not emblematic of social demographics in Britain today, institutions like Trinity can be seminal in changing the narrative of British music.

Brian Barone
Freedom Highlife: Postcolonialism and Musical Thought in Independence-Era Nigeria
When formal British rule ended in Nigeria on October 1, 1960, music was crucial to discourses of independence and nationhood. Not only did musicians pen songs to mark the occasion, such as E.C. Arinze’s “Freedom Highlife,” but in outlets like Nigeria Magazine music regularly appeared as a topic through which Nigerian writers and photographers figured the cultural dimensions of the postcolonial nation. This paper therefore examines Nigerian discourses of independence, nationhood, and postcoloniality as they appeared in and through discussions of music. Tracing the work of intellectuals of the late colonial and early independence periods—including Mbonu Ojike, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela Sowande, and Akin Euba—as well as fora such as Nigeria Magazine and the journal Black Orpheus, it outlines and analyzes a moment in which musicians and scholars posed fundamental questions about what colonialism had meant for music in Nigeria, and what an independent, national “Nigerian music” was or might be. Most strikingly, for the thinkers studied here the end of colonialism necessitated the torsioning of received (English-language) categories—even such fundamental ones as “music” and “sound.” As a result, their work offers a set of rich and early examples of postcolonial musical theorizing that sheds light on both Nigerian music history and ongoing debates in music studies. Finally, then, this paper emphasizes the continuing relevance of postcolonial Nigerian musical thought to efforts to think the history and present of music at a global scale.

Chooi Foong Chong
The Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra: A Postcolonial Analysis
Malaysia, a British colony from ca.1771-1957, founded the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) in 1998 to boast of the nation’s wealth and cultural standing. During the MPO’s first 10 years, 96% of its musicians were non-Malaysian, and the country allegedly spent ~CAD 160 million on maintaining the orchestra (Aziz, 2008; Proarte, 2008). My thesis examines these overall questions: Why did this Muslim nation pour so much money into establishing and maintaining a Western orchestra, particularly in the contexts of the nation’s colonial history and continuing efforts to shape a postcolonial society? What related issues arise from this colonial import? For postcolonial nations, decolonization is frequently an ongoing process that involves unpacking a colonial heritage while navigating the country’s own internal diversity and concomitant needs (Ashcroft et al, 2013). Any uncritical adoption of Eurocentric models could inadvertently repeat the colonial-era belief in “the need for the colonized to be ‘raised up’ through colonial contact” (ibid.). Studies on the continued practice of Western art music (WAM) in former colonies have revealed problematic power dynamics akin to those of the colonial past operating along the axes of class, race, and gender (Bull, 2016; Kok, 2006). Thus far, institutions engaging in WAM – such as the MPO – have yet to be studied even as other aspects of Malaysia’s colonial heritage have come under postcolonial critique. By teasing out the complexities in racial power dynamics, I scrutinize the struggles involved in forging and defining a unified music identity in a multicultural, multiracial country with a colonial history (Smith 2017; Gabriel, 2020). Specifically, I contend that the institutionally sanctioned and continued importation of a foreign culture heavily associated with its colonial past not only complicates the inherent fragility in Malaysian cultural identity but is also detrimental to the processes of decolonization and the nation’s continued search for a unified music identity.  

Hilary Donaldson
Parable, Ritual, and the “Colonizing Impulse” in Curlew River
In this paper I examine critical interpretation of Curlew River (1964), Benjamin Britten’s (1913–1976) parable for church performance, as a means of interrogating its complex relationship to empire, Orientalism, and ritual. Britten conceived of the composition during a 1956 visit to Japan, by re-fashioning the Japanese Nō play Sumidagawa within an English ritual framework. What has not yet been explored, however, is how strongly his parable turns on the reference points of the distinctive Paschal Vigil service, an ancient rite of Christian initiation.

Britten’s 1956 visit to Japan, sponsored jointly by the British Council and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), eventually inspired the creation of Curlew River. While Phillip Brett has written that Britten’s treatment of the Japanese original evinces a concerted attempt to “resist the colonizing impulse” and that the opera rather “acknowledges and celebrates difference,” this and similar analyses evade the Orientalist elements in Britten’s music, elements which often signify the otherworldly, the social other, and the sexually deviant and dangerous. Scholars’ absolution of Britten’s “colonizing impulse” is further complicated by his imperious assessment of Japan and its people, expressed in private letters at the time. When Curlew River’s debt to the Vigil is moved to the foreground of interpretation, the ways the opera ultimately upholds the English colonial project are foregrounded as well.

Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis
“Where the Queen Lives”: Post-Colonial Perspectives on Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in the Music of Emcee Chosan
Sierra Leonean-born emcee Chosan was raised in an estate within the N18 section of London. He chronicled his experiences growing up in Edmonton on his track “N18” featured on his album Glare La Musica (2017). Chosan outlined living with his mother in an apartment and their eventual transition into a home that she purchased. He recalled observing the rampant neighborhood crime and violence surrounding them. Throughout this period, Chosan was fully immersed in London’s Sierra Leonean diaspora community – a thriving enclave of Sierra Leoneans spread across the city. However, Chosan used “N18” as an opportunity to lyrically dispel misperceptions of London as a place where everyone lived lavishly. After emigrating to the United States, and publicly explaining that he once resided in London, Chosan encountered assumptions that he “grew up rich” or “grew up where the Queen lives” (Chosan 2018). These misconceptions led him to speak up about the realities of London and post-colonial Sierra Leone in his music.

 This paper investigates how Chosan’s song “N18” illustrates connections to his life in London and his Sierra Leonean heritage. It explores the establishment of Sierra Leonean diaspora communities in London and highlights how they reflected an influx in migration from Sierra Leone to London since the country’s national independence from Britain in 1961. The paper incorporates interviews from seven years of fieldwork with Chosan. It also includes lyrical, musical, and video analyses to demonstrate how Chosan offers post-colonial perspectives about Sierra Leonean diaspora communities and their lasting impact on his life.

Sarah Kwilecki
Music and Imperialism: The Case for Handel in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
Samuel Butler’s satirical-utopic novel Erewhon was published in 1872 at the height of British Imperialism. The novel depicts an imagined region of New Zealand called “Erewhon,” a pre-industrial country lacking machines, described as “backwards” by the British narrator, i.e., the sick and poor are treated as criminals and the criminals treated as diseased.  Thomas J. Remington describes it as, “a work that holds a mirror up to that [Victorian] society presenting it recognizably as it is, but in a strangely reversed perspective.” Despite the uncanny qualities of Erewhonian society, the narrator is convinced he can “convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit to the shareholders.” (Butler, 258). Erewhon has received a considerable amount of critical attention concerning the settler-colonial and utopic aspects of the novel, specifically, by Porsche Fermanis, Anna Neill, Theresa Shrewry, amongst many others. Robert Manson Myers and Ellen T. Harris have also chronicled Butler’s admiration of Handel, but there is little scholarship on the appearances of Handel’s music in Erewhon. I seek to understand how Handel functions in the novel as a symbol of imperialism and Britishness. My paper will explore the centrality of Handel’s music in nineteenth-century Britain, Butler’s admiration of Handel’s music, and the specific moments in the novel where the narrator inserts Handel within the colonial landscape. Through this analysis I hope to demonstrate, in Erewhon, that the idea of Handel represents Britishness and functions as cultural currency both at “home” and in the Empire.

PANEL

Rivers of Babylon: The Complex Post-Colonial Trajectories of Black British Gospel Music
Since African Caribbeans arrived in the UK on the Empire Windrush in 1948 signaling the beginnings of mass post war immigration, Black Majority Churches (BMCs) have been central to their social, political and religious lives. It was in these churches that choirs, ensembles, praise and worship teams and soloists, in dialogue with American gospel, West African gospel, and various popular music styles, developed a set of distinctive practices we term Black British Gospel Music. As this panel demonstrates, Black British Gospel Music is a diasporic river rooted in the diversity of Black Majority Churches (BMCs) from which a number of distinct streams are flowing.

Three papers examine these distinct yet intersecting streams of Black British Gospel Music. The first paper sets the scene for its birth as a movement in Britain, asserting its genesis in Black Majority Churches, specifically, African Caribbean Pentecostal churches in the post-war years.  It argues for a recovery of gospel’s silenced Caribbean past, in order to identify elements of its colonial history influenced by Euro-British and Euro American Christianity.  The second paper articulates the challenges inherent to decolonising congregational music in British Black Majority Churches (BMCs), given that BMCs draw heavily from a congregational song canon whose songwriters are overwhelmingly male and white. The third paper follows gospel music’s migration outside British BMCs to community gospel choirs. Differences in choir members’ racial and/or ethnic backgrounds often determines how gospel’s multi-layered meanings are parsed, which in turn forms members’ racial and religious imaginations. These papers together demonstrate that Black British Gospel Music is heir to the intertwining musical legacies of African diasporic migration and colonialism, and remains a powerful means of building and navigating postcolonial identities. 

Paper 1: The Future of the Past: Recovering the African Caribbean Pentecostal Roots of Black British Gospel Music 
Dulcie Dixon McKenzie
As a religious musical artform in Britain, the heritage of Black British gospel music is yet to be realised in social consciousness and in academic frameworks.  This paper will illustrate a conduit of an African Caribbean Pentecostal past and the development of Black gospel music in 21st century Britain.  Any study of Black gospel music requires multiple lenses and methodological clarity, and this paper borrows insights from Caribbean religious history, African American ethnomusicology and theomusicology, to interrogate the history of Black British gospel music expressed amongst African Caribbean Pentecostals (ACP).  A major part of Black Christianity in Britain is the experience of African ancestors in the Caribbean and their subsequent migration to Britain as ‘British subjects’ in the postwar years; and this paper will make connections with an African Caribbean colonial past shaped by Euro-British and Euro American Christianity, in order to make sense of the development of Black Pentecostalism in the Caribbean and Britain.  After a brief outline of the rise of ACP churches in Britain, it looks at the role of ACP liturgical practices nurturing the musical talents and aspirations of African Caribbean descendants who would become pioneers and participants of Black British gospel music. 

Paper 2: Decolonising Congregational Music
Pauline Muir
Music is central to the worship life of Black Majority Churches (BMCs) in the UK. Indeed, these environments are often signified by their musical expertise and performance outputs. BMCs are also responsible for the nurturing and training of many singers and musicians established in both the secular and gospel music field. However, this representation is not visible in the systemic frameworks that embody congregational music in the UK.

Recent campaigns in UK universities have seen staff and students seeking to decolonise the curriculum. Supporters of the movement are attempting to disrupt the canon of male whiteness, dismantle hierarchies of epistemologies that place western civilisation as the pinnacle of knowledge and disaggregate structural arrangements that maintain a cultural imperialism. While detractors resist changes protesting a ‘woke domination’, many recognise the need in a post-colonial society to address historical inequalities and to engage a plurality of alternative voices in the curriculum.

My argument is that a similar movement is needed regarding congregational music. The Christian Congregational License International (CCLI) is the Christian equivalent of PRS and PPL and is the best mechanism of systematically assessing church music repertoires, both globally and nationally. Perusal of the charts indicates that this canon much like the academic curricula is overwhelming male and white. This raises many questions about the accessibility and the relevance of this system in the UK for not only for BMCs, who rely heavily on songs topping the CCLI charts but also for an increasingly multi-cultural church. Using semi- constructed interviews with members of UK BMCs and representatives from UK CCLI this paper will explore some of the nuances and complexities of decolonising congregational music in the UK.

Paper 3: One in the Spirit?: Community Gospel Choirs and the British Racial Imagination
Monique M. Ingalls
Gospel music has been nurtured for many decades in Black Majority Churches; however, as part of a wider resurgence in choral singing, gospel has increasingly found a musical home outside churches in community gospel choirs. While some of these choirs are ethnically and/or racially diverse, others are homogeneous, with members hailing predominantly from either Black Caribbean, Black African, or white British backgrounds. The formation of choirs along racial and ethnic lines attests to the continued marginalization of Black minorities in a religious musical expression long considered “their own,” and raises complex issues of cultural ownership, appropriation, and de-sacralization. Drawing from participant-observation in four choirs before COVID-19, align with surveys and Zoom interviews conducted thereafter, this paper probes the ways that discourses of race and ethnicity, sometimes mediated through religious discourse, operate in contemporary British gospel community choirs. Using Schneider’s retooled concept of appropriation and Johnson’s dialogic performance of blackness as interpretive aids, I argue that British gospel community choirs represent distinct musical worlds that share certain musical practices but differ in how they parse gospel’s multi-layered meanings. And I demonstrate the ways gospel choirs play simultaneous, contradictory roles in promoting relationships across difference on the one hand, while facilitating social separation on the other. Further, gospel choirs do not merely reflect pre-existing processes of inclusion or exclusion; rather, choir performances and their accompanying discourses inform the ethnic and racial imaginations of their members. Gospel choirs can thus powerfully illuminate how participatory music-making contributes to racial formation in contemporary British society.