ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an alternate reading of music-making in these Edmonton congregations by beginning not with the group, but with the individual. It discusses a relatively compact illustration of how individuals might collaborate in making an emergent, shared musical practice. But, to make it clear why such a move is necessary, it explores the ways scholars of music have imagined group and individual identities. The musical institutions of church music genres might be imagined to enable, or even perhaps are certain kinds of sociability, ways of interacting and in the most human of terms, contexts for friendship and relationship, for love and community. And, while congregations offer a remarkably deep historical set of affects and symbols, musicians, such as Russ, draw on their individual musical activities from many other places in instantiating – and therefore, also changing – their congregation's musical sensibility. Joel was a worship leader at River West Christian Church.
