Transcending Distinctions between Religious and Secular Musicianship: Nigerian Pentecostals across Popular Performance Settings

This article explores the understudied thematic of Nigerian Pentecostal musicianship, by focusing on overlapping practices, perceptions, and experiences of musicians performing across religious and secular settings in Greece. The implementation of Nigerian Pentecostal music-making principles in secular performance contexts generates transcendent experience and fulfills politics of venue-popularity, similarly to congregational contexts. Largely informed by ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music, I employ a threefold analytic tool to show how music-making blurs the boundaries between popular religious and secular culture, and why this blurring broadly shapes and reflects popular cultural practice.