New York Jews after World War II revolutionized their weddings, abandoning traditional customs like fasting and the ritual bath and introducing innovations such as photographers, floral wedding canopies, and “kosher style” catering. Yet, despite these transformations, one aspect remained unwavering: Jewish dance music. Scholars have suggested that klezmer, the traditional instrumental dance music of Ashkenazi Jews, declined during this period (e.g., Netsky 2015, Feldman 2016, Rubin 2020), but I argue that its symbolic significance grew, solidifying its role as a key marker of Jewishness at American weddings. In this paper, I explore the relationship between wedding music and American Jewish identity in early postwar New York (1945–1960). Drawing on archival research, sound recordings, and over eighty oral history interviews with musicians and married couples, I explore how the varied wedding musical repertoires – including jazz, pop, Latin music, and klezmer – reflected the diversity of New York’s Jewish communities. As I show, Jewish dance music was an immovable feature of Jewish weddings that transcended denominational, socio-economic, linguistic, and political boundaries. This study re-evaluates the interplay between music, identity, and diaspora, highlighting music’s crucial role in maintaining diasporic communities (Brubaker 2005, Lidskog 2016). I illustrate that Ashkenazi Jewish dance music persisted even as many other rituals disappeared, thanks to its broad accessibility, aesthetic adaptability, and deeply embodied nature. Despite the transformations of the postwar period, this music exhibited meaningful continuities with Ashkenazi traditions, making it an effective means for signaling Jewish identity that persists at American weddings to this day.

This paper examines the entanglement of gospel music with British monarchy-sponsored events, foregrounding the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (2018), the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II (2022), the coronation of King Charles III (2023), and the coronation proms. These widely publicised occasions, positioned gospel within state rituals, shaping its reception in British popular culture. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) and Melvin Butler’s analysis of gospel’s diasporic presence (2005, 2010, 2019), I argue that gospel’s presence in these events reveals a complex negotiation of race, national identity, and diasporic belonging. While gospel music in the UK was historically cultivated in British-Caribbean Pentecostal churches through adaptations of African American stylisation, these royal performances were mediated by institutional constraints determining gospel’s expressive aesthetics. The Kingdom Choir’s rendition of Stand by Me (2018), arranged through multiple revisions at the behest of royal representatives, exemplifies this negotiation. By altering gospel’s sonic characteristics while retaining its emblematic presence, the monarchy engaged in selective inclusion, signifying multiculturalism within controlled limits. This study also considers gospel music’s broader trajectory in British public life, tracing its historical emergence in Caribbean-Pentecostal communities and increasing visibility in mainstream British culture. By interrogating the monarchy’s role as a gatekeeper of musical representation, this paper demonstrates how gospel’s indexical function (Turino 2014, Peirce, 1931) is reconfigured within British state rituals. These performances raise critical questions about recognition, the mediation of Black sacred music in national spectacles, and the entanglement of gospel with Britain’s imperial legacy.

The Lord’s Prayer (the Prayer), taught by Jesus to his disciples and a key element of Protestant liturgy worldwide, expresses Hong Kong’s transforming cultural identity through its many lives. Previous research has explained how, prior to the 1980s, Hong Kong churches used various musical settings of the Prayer that distorted the Cantonese pronunciations of the text. Cantonese, a tonal language, features pitch inflections in every syllable. Only when a song melody preserves these inflections in its lyrics’ pronunciation can it be regarded as “ngaamyam” – pitch-fitting. When Cantonese gained prominence in the British colony before its return to China, old settings of the Prayer declined. Local Christians embraced new ngaamyam songs for worship but produced no ngaamyam settings of the Prayer, deeming it too challenging, and choosing to recite the text in Cantonese instead. However, many ngaamyam settings of the Prayer emerged and gained popularity in the 2010s. This study investigates the return of the Prayer in Hong Kong’s churches through musical, theological, and sociological analysis supported by ethnographic research. It examines how the Prayer’s multiple lives shape and exemplify the spiritual and cultural identity of Hong Kong’s Christian community. The initial decline of its musical settings reveals how church music interacts with global theological trends and local societal changes. Meanwhile, its resurgence as ngaamyam versions marks the city’s shift towards post-materialism and the church community’s polarizing political views. Ultimately, this study illustrates how religious musicking practices can inform and engage the continuing process of postcoloniality and identity formation.