Religious Studies Speaker Series: Braxton Shelley, Ph.D.

The Religious Studies Speaker Series Presents:

Braxton Shelley, Ph.D.

2:00PM-4:00PM, Wednesday, April 16. Register here to attend via Zoom.

“The Gospel Imagination”

Description: “Between the first and last words of a Black Gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. This talk explores the reasons why the vamp is so central to the Black Gospel tradition. We will discover the work—musical, cultural, and spiritual—that the gospel vamp does and the transformative power of Black Gospel more broadly.”

Braxton Shelley, Ph.D. is Professor of Music, of Sacred Music, and of Divinity at the Yale Divinity School. A partial list of his publications can be viewed here. Dr. Shelley’s lauded musicological analysis of Gospel music, “Analyzing Gospel” can be read freely on the University of California press’ website, and will be especially helpful for students or anyone attending the talk with limited background in the study of African America Religious Traditions and Black Church music.

Dr. Shelley is a path-breaking theorist of African American sacred music, and the faculty director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He is a scholar, an ordained minister, and an experienced church musician. Dr. Shelley is the recipient of many awards, including the Paul A. Pisk Prize in 2016 by the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Einstein Award from the AMS, the Kunst Prize from the Society of Ethnomusicology, and the Adam Krims Award from the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society of Music Theory.

Dr. Shelley’s first book, Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (OUP 2021) was hailed by Professor Cornel West as “the best book written on Gospel Music”. His second book, An Eternal Pitch: Bishop G.E. Patterson and the Afterlives of Ecstasy (UC Press 2023) analyzes the great preacher’s musical style, his use of radio and other media, and the digital reverberation of his ministry after his death in 2007. Professor Shelley has nearly a dozen articles and book chapters in press or published. He is also a frequent guest lecturer and clinician.

The Religious Studies Speaker Series is made possible by a grant from Oakton’s Educational Foundation.