Understanding Religious Music: A Smorgasbord

Abstract

Understanding religious music is challenging. Indeed, the whole idea can seem perplexing and problematic. In this paper, a number of ways of understanding religious music are sketched. Seven main models are distinguished: the side-effect model, the ringtone model, the honey model, the addition model, the fitting beauty model, the organic unity model, and the similarity model. Some issues concerning Bach’s Sacred Cantatas are then considered in order to see how these approaches apply in one particularly controversial and puzzling example.