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The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence. This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growingpopularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.As a work of cultural criticism that recalls the concerns of Foucault, Hayden White, Zizek, and others Decentering Music examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, Korsyn undertakes a critique ofmusical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, Korsyn suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the "liberal ironist," Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility," and StevenFeld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, Korsyn goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, Korsyn suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas. Rather than impose any single method, Decentering Music empowers readers to choose for themselves by interrogating their own values and ideological commitments, exploring theenabling conditions for statements about music. By demonstrating the complicity of opposing positions and challenging readers to reexamine their own values, Decentering Music will surely provoke debate, while appealing to readers in a variety of fields, and to anyone concerned about the crisis in thehumanities.