How can singing foster our relationships with strangers? And how can singing not just foster relationships, but be a powerful means of hospitality? Dr. Helen Phelan draws on her ethnographic work with a Congolese-Irish choir to show the potential of "sonic hospitality" through singing together.

About Dr. Helen Phelan

Helen Phelan is Professor of Arts Practice at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is an Irish Research Council recipient for her work on singing, ritual and new migrant communities in Ireland. Her most recent book, Singing the Rite to Belong: Music, Ritual and the New Irish, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. As a singer, she specializes in chant from global religious ritual and is the co-founder of the female vocal group Cantoral who released the much acclaimed CD recording Let the Joyous Irish Sing Aloud! in 2014. She is also founder of the Singing and Social Inclusion research group at the University of Limerick.

About Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman

Thanks especially to Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman, this episode's guest interviewer! Josh has been on Music and the Church before discussing Virtuosity, Amateurism, and Amateurishness in Evangelical Worship. Joshua is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina - Pembroke. He teaches music history and music theory in the Department of Music and serves as Interim Assistant Dean of the Esther G. Maynor Honors College.

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Transcript of Singing, Hospitality and the Sacred Stranger, with Helen Phelan, on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza, Ep. 45

Helen Phelan: My name is Helen Phelan. I work in a place called the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. It's at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The Academy was set up in 1994. And it was quite experimental at the time because it was trying to create a space where you would bring together the academic study of performance with theory. And I came into that as a ritual scholar. And so the two areas that I work in mostly are medieval singing - medieval music and chant - and then the kind of work that I was presenting on this morning, which is music and migration. So what are the different kinds of ritual practices that have evolved around new migrant groups in Ireland, and what role is music playing in creating spaces of welcome or hospitality or the opposite?

Joshua Busman: One of the themes of this conference has been the the study of religion - especially the study of congregational music - is already interdisciplinary right from the beginning. But I'm curious, what are your interdisciplinary backgrounds.

Helen Phelan: I was I began my education as a musician. I am a pianist, I have a background in musicology and ethnomusicology, and I moved into liturgical music through ritual studies. I was teaching music, and I was really struck by how much the teaching of music relies on the theory about music, and the big divide between being a musician, making music, singing, playing an instrument - and the way we theorize about it. And at the same time, I was just, you know, earning my keep as a young student, as a church organist, and working in the church. And I really became fascinated by ritual because I think ritual has this kind of holistic sense. It uses the mind the body, it uses all of our senses, our sense of smell…. And I thought, that's a space that brings all of these together. And I wanted to try to understand that better. So that's what brought me into studying ritual, and the way in which music works in ritual to create these spaces where people interact in different ways from the way we do in our normal day to day life.

Joshua Busman: Yeah, I think I remember when I was an undergrad, talking with the professor and talking about my certain interest in r...