Religious Songs Research Articles

Development of the Religious Character of the Nation through Learning Religious Songs: Teachers’ Perception and Challenges

Songs as learning media provide an aesthetic experience for students and can also teach character. Academics in many countries pay little attention to this issue because songs are mostly used to memorize foreign language vocabulary. This study investigates teachers’ perceptions of using songs to build students’ character. This study focuses on exploring teachers’ perceptions of the development of religious character as a core character in the curriculum in Indonesia through songs. The case study design was employed by involving 45 elementary school teachers spread over several districts in West Java province. This research was carried out in several stages; First, by preparing questionnaires distributed online; Second, by following up the answers to the questionnaire by conducting in-depth interviews; Third, by analyzing the data in an inductive-thematic manner in relation to learning problems, psychological and social issues arose. The research resulted in themes related to teachers’ perceptions of developing students’ religious character through religious songs. Four themes were explored in-depth related to teacher appreciation for songs, the benefits of religious songs, teacher challenges, and instructional design. It can be drawn that the song function was not only limited to developing a cognitive domain that functioned to remember and collect facts and data but could also be a means of developing students’ characters, especially religious characters. From the teacher’s perspective, religious songs were able to develop students’ religiosity dimension, including students’ beliefs, worship, appreciation, knowledge, and morals. Hence, this study contributes to the importance of developing songs related to religious themes to develop national character.

‘Vare Wel Dur Luf’

This article traces the phenomenon of tune indications from their beginning to their use in three sixteenth-century manuscripts which hover on the border between alba amicorum and songbooks. The tune indication, the reference that shows which melody the song can be sung to, forms part of ‘song literacy’, the art of conserving a song beyond the moment of performance. Songs written down in alba amicorum may fill a gap in existing theories about the rapid development of song literacy in the sixteenth century. In addition, concentrating on the tune indicators may help to sharpen the definition of an album-with-songs compared to a songbook. In the Low Countries, tune indicators began to be attached to religious songs in the last decades of the fifteenth century. They were used to communicate new religious texts to an audience and to facilitate overruling sinful worldly texts. In printed collections of secular songs tune indicators seems to have been introduced after 1550 – but it took well into the 1600s before they became conventional in printed song collections. In handwritten collections the tune indicator was not the norm, with one notable exception: in circles of chambers of rhetoric. As alba-with-songs from the sixteenth century show, in the century’s last decades it became fashionable, at least within a small circle of alba owners in the western Low Countries, to provide a tune indicator. In these circles a good tune functioned as an important creative impulse to write new songs, especially semi-religious ones. These alba-with-songs might be considered harbingers of the song-minded Dutch ‘Golden Age’.

That song in my head: a review on Musical Hallucinations

IntroductionHearing music inside our heads is frequent, however some hear it more vividly, constantly and involuntarily. Musical Hallucinations (MH), first described by Baillarger in 1846, are a complex type of auditory hallucination characterized by perception of melodies, music, or songs.ObjectivesThis work aims to review the literature considering MH.MethodsPubmed and Google Scholar search using MeSH term “musical hallucinations”ResultsMH occurs in 0.16% of the population. They´re usually perceived as frightening or annoying. Proposed mechanisms include spontaneous activity triggered by sensory deprivation from hearing impairment, like in visual hallucinations in Charles Bonnet syndrome, and some authors even include MH as a subtype of this syndrome. Indeed, 60% of all patients with MH have hearing impairment or deafness. Other less frequent causes include focal brain lesions involving the auditory pathway and cortex, temporal epilepsy, metabolic or drug intoxication. Psychiatric conditions are uncommon but not impossible, especially in affective disorders. MH most frequently consist in familiar tunes, sometimes of personal significance, religious songs (especially in older patients), childhood songs, folk and popular songs from the radio - suggesting that musical perception is never unlearned but represents a “parasitic memory”, an unchangeable memory feature which can be experienced by relevant neuronal circuit stimulation. Most patients with MH were reported to have no extraordinary musical skills.ConclusionsMH are rare and strongly associated with hearing loss, though investigation of other causes should be sought. Treating the underlying cause is important but remission is not guaranteed.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Popular Art and the Reconfiguration of Political Intolerance in Kenya

Political intolerance is a recurrent feature in any general election in Kenya. The charged political atmosphere during elections has often seen heated verbal tiffs among politicians and supporters of opposing political leanings degenerate into intimidation, violence, eviction of tenants from their houses, discrimination at the workplace, denial of job opportunities, and even murder of political opponents, among many other atrocious acts. This article explores how popular artistic productions deployed by the National Super Alliance (NASA) coalition in the run-up to the 8 August 2017 general elections to galvanise the electorate in its nationwide campaigns implicitly sparked intolerance among their political opponents. The article examines popular art forms such as popular songs, cartoons, memes and popular religious songs that centre on this historical period in the country and are directly associated with the NASA coalition. The article shows how these creative art forms morph into vehicles of political aspirations, codifying political visions and manifestos. They become central to political struggle and contestations over power, and when reconfigured, potentially anchor political intolerance.

KAYUM MIFTAKOV FOLKLORIST, ETHNOGRAPH, COLLECTOR OF ORAL FOLK CREATIVITY

This article describes the colossal collecting work of the folklorist Kayum Miftakov. In the Talas area, he records songs of various themes that are widespread among the local population. These are such songs as songs about love, about sadness, songs about work, religious songs, fairy tales, sayings, fables, riddles, proverbs and sayings, tongue twisters. This article provides brief information about the different genres of oral folk art, and about the activities of K. Miftakov.

A Precious Heritage. The Contribution of Hans Rothe to Slavic Studies

The authors present some of the most important writings of the well-known professor emeritus of Bonn University, Hans Rothe (1928-2021), offering an overview of the main ideas he developed and the methods he applied in his research. Due attention is given to his indefatigable activity as an editor of important, mostly unduly forgotten medieval and early modern texts. His commentary to the first translations of the Bible for many Slavic peoples remains a milestone of Slavic studies. He was a pioneer in fostering research about Slavo-Byzantine liturgical and religious texts, devotional songs, and baroque literature in Russia and Ukraine. No less remarkable are his articles about the Enlightenment and such giants of literature as Lesja Ukrajinka, Deržavin, Puškin and Tolstoj.

Rola pieśni w języku polskim według Piotra Artomiusza i Michała Marcina Mioduszewskiego

The article attempts at answering the question concerning the role attributed to religious songs in the native language by Piotr Artomiusz, a Lutheran pastor and author of the hymnal, and Michał Marcin Mioduszewski, a Catholic priest and a collector of religious music. Their works – the Hymnal of Artomiusz and the Songbook… of Mioduszewski, played a significant role in the then religious communities and serve as a valuable example of transmission of a religious song in Polish. Statements provided by both authors in their collections allow the author to discuss their purpose; the role of the vernacular and the song in Polish in the liturgy and personal piety; the addressees of the collections, as well as the function of Polish translations of psalms. The juxtaposition of authors’ statements reveals similarities and differences in the perception of language and vernacular song in Church. The examination of those statements is crucial for a better understanding of the role of songs in the native language, especially of the song in Polish that became an important element of the tradition of Polish Lutheranism.

The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice

The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice Edward Piñuelas In the nexus of literature from within chattel slavery, music has provided scholars of various slave traditions a potent material for reading the influences of enslavement on everyday life in bondage, as well as the remnants of that life in contemporary culture. It was slave music that caused W. E. B. Du Bois to “set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men” (536), and provided Frederick Douglass “[his] first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery” (51). In short, the music of the enslaved and their immediate descendants has provided a window into aspects of the experiences of enslaved people not easily communicated through written testimony, as well as a medium for expressing Black subjectivities in ways denied by the mechanisms of racial slavery. This is especially true in the United States, where the work song and the spiritual have come to form their own genre of literature, offering expressive traditions that exceeded and often resisted those of the master class. These traditions have served as the fundamental building blocks of culture and civil society throughout the United States and have been essential to freedom struggles and political organization since slavery’s abolition. Shana L. Redmond’s recent work on Black music in social and political movements within the Diaspora provides a poignant example of how the spiritual provided postbellum movements with the rhythmic and thematic material to mobilize African American laborers and community organizations (Anthem 146–47). This turn to Black music as a political object began in the antebellum period, when abolitionists pointed to the music and songs of enslaved communities, particularly western religious hymns and spirituals, as evidence of slaveholders’ failing attempts to dehumanize their captives. [End Page 161] Ironically, the very music used by abolitionists to condemn the peculiar institution provided the slaveholding class evidence of its uplifting, indeed humanizing, effects. Many supporters of slavery heard in work songs signs of contentment and in religious songs signs of salvation. As Roger D. Abrahams explains in his historical account of slave music in the antebellum South, “[s]inging and dancing were regarded as signs of happiness, in spite of the fact that many whites could understand that the songs were often about the agonies of separation and alienation” (xix). These interpretations were more than mere misreadings of the often veiled expressions of sadness and resentment among enslaved singers, more than mere selective understandings that sought to confirm biases and assumptions already in place. They resulted from a mode of listening that sought to make meaning of a foreign, though familiar, phenomenon by relating it to assumptions common among members of the master class. In seeking to abstract from the material elements of slave music—the ephemeral, physical, and spatial phenomena of sounding and hearing—slavery’s advocates resorted to discursive practices contingent upon a disembodied, interchangeable, exchangeable enslaved body, a body that does not mark its domain with sound, but communicates only as sign. This reliance on exchangeability and reified value echoes what Saidiya V. Hartman notably identifies as the “fungibility” of the enslaved, the “joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity” (21). Faced with a material form of which they were neither the catalyst nor the prescribers, slaveowners and slavery’s supporters often described the music of the enslaved according to narrative frameworks based on this fungibility, not unlike those used for interpreting slave value, productivity, and soundness. These frameworks fundamentally disembodied enslaved voices so as to provide members of the master class a grammar of slave sound. In the process of figuring African American voices through the mechanics of fungibility, these proslavery depictions of Black voices likewise figured an antebellum southern soundscape loaded with numerous cultural and social values meant to buttress the moral argument in favor of the peculiar institution. While opponents of slavery sought to correct the misreadings produced by this body of proslavery literature, I argue here that even in seeking to assign enslaved voices alternative meanings, meanings that [End Page 162] were themselves salvos...

Zbrodnicze umysły i muzyczne harmonie. „Tajemnica Edwina Drooda” Charlesa Dickensa jako utwór protodetektywistyczny

The paper analyses the role of music in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel and its relation to the criminal puzzle which — for obvious reason — was left unsolved. Contrary to the traditional cultural associations (harmony, beauty, order), music in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is related to darkness, which shrouds the places where it is performed (the cathedral, Jasper’s room); it also functions as the background of various disharmonies (physical indisposition, quarrel, signs of hatred, fear). The theme of the only two religious songs that are referred to is sin and wickedness. On the one hand, considering the fact that music is John Jasper’s domain, the discordance not only functions as an “ethical metaphor” and externalization of the man’s character, but also points to him as the murderer of his nephew. On the other hand, the aforementioned songs foreground the motif of repentance or turning away from sin, which undermines the ostensibly obvious conclusions concerning Jasper’s guilt.
 Similarly to the detective novel of the (much later) Golden Age period, the hints prompting the puzzle’s solution are provided here, though they are not univocal, leaving a shadow of doubt as to the guilt of the most obvious suspect. Yet, contrary to the genre conventions, the clues appear mainly on the implied level of communication, available to the implied reader deciphering textual patterns and not merely “observing” the presented reality.

Elderhood in Protestant Religious Contexts: Stepping Stones in Religious Language

Elderhood is an emerging concept for making meaning in older age, often contextualized in spiritual but not religious traditions. But what kinds of frameworks for elderhood are woven into protestant religious contexts? This paper explores 943 texts written by Finnish older adults in study groups organized by a pensioners’ organization. A key finding is that religious language – known through religious songs and prayers learned by heart at school – offers a medium to explore and express their elderhood. The writers creatively use the rhythm and wordings of these textual patterns to position themselves as a group of older persons with a special contribution to make to society. These results will aid examining elderhood and its potential in various contexts where the concept might not be explicitly used. This examination potentially leads to new ways to support experiences of elderhood and thus to offer an alternative view to countering ageism.

Transnational and Translational Aspects of Global Christian Congregational Musicking

What happens to a worship song as it crosses geographical, cultural, and theological borders? How does this reallocation modify the role a song performs—and is performed—in context? This essay examines how religious songs that flow along transnational networks are transformed in the process of localization. It focuses particularly on how translation, conceived of broadly to encompass verbal and non-verbal aspects, happens within these processes. I argue that, while lyric translation remains a core component of these phenomena, it is but one of the multiple processes of localization that occur when a song travels. Throughout such processes, theology is (re)interpreted and songs are performed differently even as local congregations perceive their engagement with these repertoires as a type of connection to broader worshiping networks. Towards this end, it follows “Mighty to Save”, an Australian worship song, on its transnational path to re-localization within the context of Brazilian gospel. Analyses of the lyrical and musical translations and transformations the song is subjected to can shed further light upon the complex dynamic of transnational flows of religious repertoires in today’s interconnected world.

I dropped a big stone on the water snake… Poetic and the Folk Image of a SNAKE

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the linguistic and cultural image of the snake in Polish language and Polish folk culture, functioning within three different but complementary genre-based models: (a) mythological, which echoes are present in belief stories, records of beliefs, and descriptions of practices; (b) biblical (religious), Judeo-Christian, settled in aytiological legends, wedding speeches, religious and historical songs (c) colloquial (common sense), confirmed mainly in colloquial phraseology. In the first model, the snake appears as the guardian of the house and the enclosure, a living creature, friendly to people and animals, whose presence ensures happiness and prosperity; in the second – the serpent is a symbol of evil, sin and Satan; in the third, the most stabilized features of the snake are: wisdom, prudence, but the most of all cunning and sly. The features that emerge especially from the mythological and religious model are the basis for the interpretation of the poetic creation of a snake from Czesław Miłosz’s poem Rue Descartes, in which the lyrical subject combines all evil that has happened to him in his life with in breaking of the ban and just punishment for killing a water snake coiled in the grass.

SEKAR RARE SEBAGAI MEDIA PEMBELAJARAN NILAI ETIKA HINDU DI PENDIDIKAN ANAK USIA DINI

Dharmagita is a sacred religious song that is sung during religious ceremonies. Within a specific scope, Dharmagita can be sung at the level of formal, non-formal and informal education. Because the benefits are very important for Hindus, and even used to accompany dances that are profane and sacred, children's play, and even worship to Ida Sanghyang Widhi wasa. Sekar rare as a children's song that has a cheerful character, as an accompaniment to children's games today needs to be raised from an early age to an adult level, with the aim of fostering social sensitivity, courtesy, sradha bhakti, as Hindu ethical values. In reality, it is rarely used by PAUD teachers because of the lack of references, and they are still focused on implementing a complete curriculum, so it needs to be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to study about sekar rare as a medium for learning Hindu ethical values in PAUD. The method used in the meaning of rare sekar is qualitative descriptive. Data analysis refers to interpretive data and facts. There are several Hindu ethical values contained in Dolanan, Gending Janger, and Gending Sanghyang, namely divine values, compassion values, national values, sradha bhakti values, and social values.

Roman Catholic Church and Greek Catholic Clergy in Relations to the Orthodox Church in Poland between 1951 and 1970

After World War II, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sought to liquidate the Greek Catholic Church. In 1946, a non-constitutional synod was held in Lviv which liquidated the Greek Catholic Church and incorporated it into the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly, Romanian communist authorities liquidated the Greek Catholic Church in 1948 and the same took place in the Czech Republic two years later. In the Polish People’s Republic, the authorities did not even try to make the liquidation bear the marks of legality. The communist authorities considered that resettlement of the hierarchs and most of the clergy as well as the Greek Catholic followers to the Soviet Ukraine and the rest of them to the west and north of Poland solved the problem. However, the priests and their followers made every effort to re-establish the Greek Catholic Church in Poland. Greek Catholic clergy tried to find their faithful in the place of settlement and, if possible, start their pastoral service in the native rite. This is how regular services in Chrzanów began. Taking advantage of the kindness of some Roman Catholic priests, Greek Catholic liturgies began to take place in Cyganek, Bytów and Kwasów. The faithful, who were deprived of priests, also began to organize their own religious life. They met in larger groups in private homes, where they prayed and sang religious songs. They tried to celebrate the holidays according to the Julian calendar and in accordance with the native tradition. Because of that, the communist authorities decided to make the Greek Catholics convert to the Orthodox Catholic Church. Therefore, Orthodox Catholic institutions were opened for the Greek Catholics on the basis of the Greek Catholic Church in Poland. Despite initial success, the initiative ended in failure. Most of the Orthodox Catholic institutions collapsed after Greek Catholic liturgy had been resumed as the faithful returned to their church.

The Role of Religious Songs in the Public Speeches of John Paul II during his 1st Pilgrimage to Poland

The aim of this article is to examine the functions and circumstances of reli­gious hymns and songs that accompanied the papal speeches during John Paul II’s 1st pilgrimage to Poland. The paper is not about the musical set­ting of the liturgy, or the songs sung, for example, while waiting for the start of a meeting with the Pope, but about those songs that were performed during his speeches, sometimes interrupting, and sometimes complementing them. The research question is: what role did religious songs play in John Paul II’s public speeches during his first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979? In order to answer this question I analyzed available video (https://jp2.tvp.pl) and audio materials from that pilgrimage. Three homilies were used as research mate­rial: the homily delivered in Warsaw at Plac Zwycięstwa on 2 June 1979 and the homily given in Częstochowa on 6 June 1979, during the Mass for pilgrims from Upper Silesia and the Dąbrowa Basin, in addition to the homily delivered in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 7 June 1979. This is followed by the speech deliv­ered at Lech Hill in Gniezno on 3 June 1979, the speech addressed to young people gathered at the Krakow Skałka on 8 June 1979, and, finally, conversa­tions with young people gathered under the window at Franciszkańska 3 in Krakow.

Empty Night: Kashubian “Home Liturgy” in the Context of Death

Based on ethnographic field research and thanatological literature, this article analyzes the continuing, but rapidly disappearing, Kashubian custom of bidding farewell to a deceased member of the local community known as “empty night”. Its essence is the night prayer vigil in the house of the deceased, performed by neighbors and relatives. The prayer consists mainly of singing religious songs on “the last things”—in particular about purgatory, human fragility, God’s mercy, and the Passion of Christ. The efforts of the orants are motivated by the concern for the salvation of the soul of the deceased, that is, the shortening and relieving the purgatorial punishment. The centuries-old tradition of “empty night” has been rapidly disappearing over the past 50 years as a result of both economic and social transformations, the gradual erosion of living faith, and the abandonment of the priority of salvation by younger Kashubians. The progressive medicalization of life and change of the approach to death play a crucial role in weakening the tradition of the ancestors. Thus the traditional “empty night” becomes a relic of “tamed death,” giving way to its tabooization and the illusion of “technological immortality”.

An Analysis of Figurative Language in The Song Lyrics By Saif Adam

AbstractThe aim of this study was to identify the types of figurative language used in the lyric of Saif Adam songs and the dominant types of figurative language found in the lyric of Saif Adam songs. The method used in this study is a descrptive qualitative method. This research used the theory of Perrine. The researcher found 8 types of figurative language used in Saif Adam’s song lyrics such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, personification, simile, litotes, metonymy, and paradox. The data were collected by reading the lyrics of Saif Adam’s song. There were 14 of hyperbole, 3 of Irony, 20 of metaphor, 11 of personification, 10 of simile, 5 of litotes, 10 of metonymy, and 7 of paradox. This study found that the most dominant type of figurative language was metaphor with the percentage of 25%. It was followed by hyperbole with the percentage of 17.5%. Then, it was followed by personification with percentage 13.75%,. simile and metonymy with the percentage of 11.3%. And also it was followed by paradox and litotes with the proportion of 7.9% and 5.6%. Irony was the least dominant one with the percentage of only 3.4%.Key words : Semantics, Figurative language, Song, Religious Song, Lyric.

Духовные песни в контексте интеркультурной и интерконфессиональной коммуникации

Paraliturgical song production provides opportunities for interdisciplinary research of interethnic, intercultural and interreligious relationships. It opens up the possibilities for understanding the development of cultural identity created by intensive cultural communication of Latin and Byzantine spirituality and is an integral part of the spiritual life of believers from the very beginning of Christianity. The contribution explains the different linguistic, cultural and ethnic confessional aspects that have influenced the formation of the cultural identity of users of such non-liturgical religious songs.

La copie de l’hymne à Asclépios d’Apollonia d’Illyrie (SEG 65 397)

Abstract A lead tablet from Apollonia in Illyria exhibits the last strophe of a paean to Asclepios, that is transmitted in its entirety on inscriptions from four other cities. This article presents some alternative readings of the new fragmentary version and analyses its variants through the prism of the interaction between the local dialect of the Corinthian colony and the literary Doric of traditional choral lyric. Moreover, some linguistic discrepancies between the different versions of the hymn may have been conditioned by specific local characteristics of religious songs.

Шар шаҗн болн лам-гелңгүдин дүрмүд хальмгудын амн үгин түүклəнд

Article reviews the Kalmyk oral stories about Buddhist deities and Kalmyk monks. Studying of the features of folk texts (epic “Jangar” and religious songs) shows that the Kalmyk folklore is unusually rich in its content. Considered religious oral stories reveal the spiritual culture and Buddhist worldview of the Kalmyks.