Guy L. Beck

The gradual disappearance of sacred music and sacred sound as recurrent academic categories… lie partly in a misguided understanding in the West of religion as merely a set of beliefs and doctrines incorporated in scripture or sacred texts…. After the invention of the printing press, the radical shift from hearing scripture chanted or sung aloud by priests in churches to the reading of the printed word in churches and homes led the way to the modern academic attachment to written language as the primary carrier of religious meaning.

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