OU Music Lecturer Martin Clarke will present a paper at a conference on Lutheran Music Culture at Uppsala University, Sweden, next week. The conference is one of many events commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Martin’s paper is entitled ‘‘Come, all you people’: Global and vernacular, hymns and liturgical music in contemporary British Christianity’ and explores the Lutheran influence on the growth in popularity of global hymnody in recent decades.
Martin Luther, from Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder
It contends that the use of global hymnody has a complex relationship with historic Lutheran theological principles and practices of church music, and explores two facets of this relationship: the nature of vernacular hymnody in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual church, and the breadth of liturgical possibilities offered by the borrowed global repertoire.