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The Moment That Changed Everything

This chapter argues that tuning up reorganizes the experience of time, enacting a transcendent interruption of musical temporality. In so doing, this irruptive practice reproduces the incarnation of Christ, sonifying the divine’s appearance in the material world. Smallwood’s paraphrase of the spiritual “Calvary” anchors this chapter, doing for its argument what the crucifixion does for the Gospel Imagination. The chapter’s first section examines the song’s 2001 live recording, a performance whose particularly urgent interpenetration of musical, liturgical, and historical temporalities summons one of tuning up’s most common manifestations—a trope colloquially referred to as “the Baptist close.” Then the chapter turns to three of the gospel tradition’s most canonical renderings of Christ’s Passion, Margaret Douroux’s “He Decided to Die,” David Allen’s “No Greater Love,” and Andraé Crouch’s “The Blood.” These performances reveal an incarnational approach to time: a belief that Jesus’s interruption of human history can be rearticulated through song. As these songs move back and forth between their site of contemporary performance and various scriptural narratives, between conception and crucifixion, and between crucifixion and resurrection, what they offer is no mere retelling: they assert a critique of linear temporality, producing kairos, a transcendent instant that links time and eternity. Kairos is especially evident in the holy dance, a performance of physical ecstasy that is formalized in the gospel vamp. As they tune up, vamps pursue kairos through concurrent movements away from linear time, toward the collective, into the body.