Bibliographic information:
Callaham, Scott. “Sing to the LORD a New Song (in Chinese)! An L2 Songwriting Experience at the Intersection of Faith and Scholarship.” Artistic Theologian 7 (2019): 61-87.
Description:
Description
Both language and music are highly ordered systems of communicative expression. Even so, language is by no means merely a structure for encoding, transmitting, and decoding information, and music is much more than a framework for the inscribing, performing, and hearing of sound and rhythm. Through acts of seemingly unbounded artistic creativity, language and music separately stimulate flights of human imagination as few other influences can. Then when combined together in song, language and music uniquely plumb the depths of the soul. It is little wonder that Scripture repeatedly urges God’s people to “Sing to the LORD a new song” (Ps 96:1-2, 98:1, 149:1; Isa 42:10). This study examines songwriting from a fresh perspective, that of writing songs in the composer’s second language (in this case, Chinese) without reference to a pre-existing first language edition.
Publisher:
School of Church Music, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (website: http://artistictheologian.com/journal/artistic-theologian-volume-7-2019/)