This talk studies the musicality of internet culture and theorizes music’s place in contemporary media ecologies. Anchored by the remediation of Black gospel online, this presentation is an exercise in media archaeology and digital phenomenology that shows how social media users play with the materiality of musical sound—and the other media with which it is promiscuously entangled—to aestheticize social mediation itself. I argue that that the internet is an instrument of sociality whose affordances are never more apparent than when put to musical use. Coordinating form with (frequently) satirical content, the phenomenon I theorize as “digital antiphony” is frequently animated by the replicative force of internet memes. Even as these exchanges stretch across media, visible and audible, musical sound makes these dynamics especially analyzable. Whether making, remaking, or attending to musical and memetic media, social media users approach aesthetic forms with a practiced technicity, producing expressive-cultural patterns that media companies appropriate and encode into successive iterations of their applications. Oscillating between the creators that made them and the infrastructures that host them, these digital media collectively constitute a sociotechnical form of antiphony.

Minister, musician, and musicologist, Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity at Yale University, where he is also faculty director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church. A specialist in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology. His award-winning first book, Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination, develops an analytical paradigm for gospel music that braids together resources from cognitive theory, ritual theory, and homiletics with studies of repetition, form, rhythm, and meter. Healing for the Soul is the winner of four book prizes, including: the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, the Emerging Scholar Award-Book from the Society for Music Theory, the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the inaugural Portia Maultsby Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. His second book, An Eternal Pitch: Bishop G.E. Patterson, Broadcast Religion, and the Afterlives of Ecstasy, was published in November 2023 by the University of California Press. Braxton D. Shelley received a BA in Music and History from Duke University, a Master of Divinity and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Rev. Dr. Shelley is the composer of gospel selections including, Don’t Faint,” “Due Glory,” “Say So”, and “Kept,” which have been ministered at conferences, concerts, and worship services across the country. He is currently embarking on a new recording project, “Your Name,” which is slated to appear in late 2023.

Sponsored by the College of Music, Department of Religious Studies, and supported by a generous gift from Dr. Lauren Harris.