Marginalia

Abstract

Musical tone, mood, pitch, rhythm, meter, major or minor key all directly affect worshipers’ involvement. A printout hymn text could not even begin to describe all the factors and feelings experienced by the accompanying music. In a deeply percipient overture, Jennifer Wakeling proposes “a general theological symbolic structure of textless music in Christian worship” because “when textless music is performed as a stand-alone act in Christian worship, it possesses the capacity to function as a symbol through which Christian meaning can be generated at experiential, reflective, and transformative levels.”