How might attending to timbre shift the boundaries of the experiences and practices that come under the analytical purview of religion? What timbral qualities render prayer efficacious and invite divine encounter? What cosmological claims and social relations are forwarded through sounds invoked in religious rituals and gatherings? How do marginalized voices and instruments shape worshipping communities? On the other hand, how are dominant identities and attendant structures reified through religiously marked timbre? Such questions about the character of sounds and their implications for religion animate this issue of the Yale Journal of Music & Religion.
Author Biography
Bo kyung Blenda Im is Assistant Professor of Sacred Music and of Divinity at Yale University. She is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular culture and religion in Korea and the Korean diaspora. In her research and teaching she engages questions pertaining to race and racialization, modernity and coloniality, temporality and aesthetics, and the epistemic inheritances of humanistic inquiry. Her book project, Transpacific Modernity and the Forgotten Constant: Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul, reconceives transpacific musical modernity through a restorative chronopolitical framework.
Nathan Myrick is Assistant Professor of Sacred Music, Director of the Sacred Spectrum Project, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Townsend School of Music at Mercer University.
Im, Bo kyung Blenda and Myrick, Nathan
(2025)
"Introduction: The Power of Timbre in Religion,"
Yale Journal of Music & Religion:
Vol. 11:
No.
1, Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1347
