The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing

The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing embraces an open-ended interpretation of socio-musical practices that can be described with the term community singing. The volume exemplifies community singing as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses diverse methodologies and objects of inquiry, and in the process brings together recent research from the fields that have historically engaged with the practice of group singing, including group dynamics, ethnomusicology, music history, music education, music therapy, community music, church music, music performance, sociology, political science, Latin American and North American studies, media studies, embodied psychology, theology, and philosophy.

Chapters are divided into eight interdisciplinary sections: "Media and the Imagination of Community", "Singing in Place-Based Communities", "The Practitioner's Perspective", "Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture", "Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation", "Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum", "Singing and Political Action", and "New Paradigms". Each is prefaced with an introduction that traces the common threads running through the methodologically and topically diverse chapters that examine culturally specific narrow instances of community singing, each confined to a given time and place, in significant detail.

The chapters explore community singing as one of two phenomena: the practice of singing as community--the utilization of collective song by communities of place or preference, and the singing of community into existence--the creation or identification of a new community, through singing, that did not exist before. Both practices can profoundly affect participants. The Handbook considers why communities are motivated to sing, what their activities mean, and how practitioners can improve the experience of singing together.

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Georgia, where she also directs the orchestra and coaches the old-time string band. She studies participatory music-making traditions of the past and present, employing both historical and ethnographic methodologies. She has published on the American community singing movement, mediated sing-alongs, Sacred Harp singing, old-time string band music, and music history pedagogy, and is also active as a cellist, fiddler and fiddle teacher, and singer.

Kay Norton is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University. Her 2016 monograph, Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (2016) incorporates threads from musicology, anthropology, philosophy, medical history, psychology of music, and neuroscience to argue the centrality of the melodious voice in human experience. Concurrently with that ongoing work, she presents and publishes on US American sacred music. She teaches research methodologies, gender in music, music in human experience, and nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, and is a lifelong community singer.

List of Contributors
Introduction: Singing as Community, Singing into Community, and Growing the Singing Community
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis and Kay Norton
Part I. Media and the Imagination of Community
Introduction to Part I. Media and the Imagination of Community
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
1. Mediated Community Singing
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
2. Selling with Singalongs: Community Singing as Advertising in Cinema, Radio and Television
Malcolm Cook
3. Singing into a Smartphone: The Persuasive Affordances of Karaoke and Lip-Syncing Apps
Byrd McDaniel
4. What the Pandemic Couldn't Take Away: Group Singing Benefits That Survived Going Online
Kay Norton
5. Virtual choirs and issues of community choral practice
Cole Bendall
6. Community Singing in the Age of Coronavirus: The Case of Collegiate A Cappella
Joshua S. Duchan
Part II. Singing in Place-Based Communities
Introduction to Part II. Singing in Place-Based Communities
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
7. "Some Old Remembered Song": Music at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, 1825-1840
Glen W. Hicks
8. New Music for Old Prayers: Identity Construction and Community Building in Zimbabwean Black Jewish Synagogues
Lior Shragg
9. Vernacular Christmas Carol Singing in the Southern Pennines of England
Ian Russell
10. "Take Me Out" to "Sweet Caroline": Collective Singing in the Ballpark
Matthew W. Mihalka
11. "Singing Their Heads Off": Sing-along Behavior in the Nightlife of Northern England
Alisun Pawley
12. Brigadoon in the Heights: Fostering Intimacy, Community, and Activism through Secular Leftist Hymnody
Eve McPherson
Part III. The Practitioner's Perspective
Introduction to Part III. The Practitioner's Perspective
Kay Norton
13. Benefits of Community Singing for Cancer Patients, Survivors and Caregivers
Amy Clements-Cortés and Joyce Yip
14. "It's about the Relationships": Epiphanies in Songleading
Roger Mantie and Glenn Marais
15. "Everyone Can Sing": Class Choirs in 0th through 3rd Grades and the Significance of Community Singing for Pupils' Social Wellbeing and School Engagement
Lars Ole Bonde and Stefan Ingerslev
16. Singing for Singing's Sake? Community Singing in Norwegian Schools
Anne Haugland Balsnes
17. "Scare Away the Dark": The Promotion of Singing to Create Post-Secondary Academic Communities
Trudi Wright
18. Songs of Diversity: Three Case Studies of Community Singing, Identity, and Well-being
Catherine Birch, Ruth Currie, Wayne Dawson, and Stephen Clift
Part IV. Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture
Introduction to Part IV. Identity: Values, Ethnicity, and Inherited Culture
Kay Norton
19. Community Choirs: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusivity
Kayla Drudge and Anna E. Nekola
20. Blend and Balance in Trans* Choral Musicking
Holly Patch
21. Peace and Harmony Prevailing: Masonic Singing in the US
Andrew Schaeffer
22. Singing Jewishness: The Musical Nostalgia of Jewish Congregational Melodies
Rachel Adelstein
23. Sacred Sounds and Social Justice: Singing the Spirituals in an Interracial and Multigenerational Community Choir
Aleysia K. Whitmore and Marquisha L. Scott
24. Women Singing in a Rural North Indian Community: A Case Study
Kamlesh Singh, Suman Sigroha, and Bharti Shokeen
Part V. Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation
Introduction to Part V. Identity: Politics, Patriotism, and Assimilation
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
25. A "Badge of Americanism": Group Singing as Political Expression in the Early United States
Laura Lohman
26. Singing at Ellis Island
Dorothy Glick Maglione
27. Community Singing in Flint and Baltimore, 1917-1920
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis and Alan L. Spurgeon
28. The Disney Chorus: Singing Along to the Studio's Forging of American Musical Identity
Gregory Camp
29. Spectacle and Empire: Imagined Community and the Crystal Palace Handel Festivals
Charles Edward McGuire
30. Estonian singing traditions as an impetus for community building and expressing Estonian cultural heritage in Australia
Naomi Cooper
Part VI. Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum
Introduction to Part VI. Transgressing Borders, Seeking Asylum
Kay Norton
31. The Voices of Hope: A Traveling Miracle
Susan Bishop
32. Community Singing as Counterculture in a Women's Prison
Amanda Weber
33. Border Transgressions: Song, Story, and Communal
Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros
34. Singing, Suffering, and Liberation in the Concentration Camps of the South African War
Erin Johnson-Williams
35. Music, Emotion, and Asylum: Wellbeing Mapped Through Choral Singing
Jane W. Davidson, Benjamin P. Leske, and Amanda E. Krause
36. Selectively Staging the "Beloved Community": Sacred Harp Singing and Racial Politics in the Folk Revival
Jesse P. Karlsberg
Part VII. Singing and Political Action
Introduction to Part VII. Singing and Political Action
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
37. New Firebombs in Old Bottles: Social Mobilization and Cultural Resonance of Protest Songs
Marek Payerhin
38. From "Preguntitas sobre Dios" to "Solo le pido a Dios": Protest and Piety in Latin American Community Singing
Marcell Silva Steuernagel
39. March for the Beloved: A Brief History of a South Korean Protest Song
Jarryn Ha
40. "Cielito Lindo" or "Son de la Negra"?: Mariachi, Latinidad, and the Trump Administration
Cameo Flores
41. Youth, Group Singing, and Peacebuilding in Urban Zimbabwe
Simbarashe Gukurume
42. The Role of Hate Songs among Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Fans: The Entrapping Loop of Hatred
Moshe Bensimon and Shiran Hen
Part VIII. New Paradigms
Introduction to Part VIII. New Paradigms
Kay Norton
43. Music and Human Flourishing in Christian Communities
Nathan Myrick, Benjamin Gessner, and Johnathan Alvarado
44. By the Rivers of Babylon: Re-membering Community through the Affordance of Congregational Singing in Greek Orthodox Churches in the United States
Alexander K. Khalil
45. Community Singing, the Church of England, and Spirituality: The Singer, the Song, and the Singing
June Boyce-Tillman
46. Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes of Entrainment in Communal Singing
Guy Hayward
47. From Art Music to Heart Music: The Place of the Composer in Community Singing
Fiona Evison
Index