Scratch notes on Taiping hymnography

Taiping pastors are responsible for gathering up their flock for worship services. They're also responsible for escorting them to the designated places of worship (IRL, the Taipings never built dedicated churches; I'm not sure how their sacred architecture plays out in Andalusada.) In some cases, they may or may not also be responsible for escorting their flock from the churches too. (All those conditionals are necessary because the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is not noted for its organization.)

Which highlights one of the things that makes the Taiping Christian religious experience different from all others: it's actually more collective than any other Christian mode of worship. The Taiping faithful are formed into groups before they actually assemble into a single congregation, and because the pastor's responsible for handling them as such, they can also leave as groups, rather than going in peace as individuals.

It also doesn't synchronize exactly with the service.

And because of Taiping distinctivies, both IRL and in Andalusada, I have every reason to guess that Taiping piety involves a lot of very loud processional hymns (and a somewhat smaller number of recessionals.)

Attempts to establish a common cycle of processional and recessional hymns, for the sake of standardization, have all met with failure. As is ever the case with Taiping Christianity, chaos reigns.

Music of the UCNA

What does music sound like within the UCNA? It depends a bit on who's there to compose it.

The Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia is not a nation-state. In terms of its self-identity, it falls somewhere between the USA and a very lucky Habsburg Empire. Rather than establishing a national folk music corpus to assert its nonexistent common roots, the UCNA's musical voice is going to evolve as organically as its identity.

And at heart, that identity is formed from the intersection of the following groups:

• The Biladi core: The arbiters of high culture aren't from the Moorish diaspora; they're former khassa families of Seville, the equivalent of White Russian émigrés. They're extremely conservative, and have the money and connections to establish themselves as the arbiters of haute couture; preserving the old ways just so is all-important to a lot of them. Nonetheless, that kind of traditionalism is going to be another big ingredient in what comes out.
• The Maghrebi periphery: Independent of the Andalusis, there's also a fair number of Maghrebis. At its height, imperial Seville did achieve its historic destiny, completely controlling the Strait of Gibraltar and building an empire in northwest Africa. It is NOT wealthy, and NOT the arbiter of culture, but it's still an influence. Perhaps more importantly, that influence is also going to extend to West Africa - and may include the blues scale.
• Former French America: In addition to the Louisiana Purchase, France also controlled more of what IRL was the Anglophone Deep South. I'm not sure what this is like culturally, because while some of this is Guisard* and quite conventionally French (if from different regions thereof), other parts could very well be Farrellite. And French Farrellitism brings with it many cultural details that are uniquely its own - including, quite possibly, polyphonic singing.
• The Moorish diaspora: With the 19th-century implosion of Seville's empire, the UCNA is continually reinforced by immigration from across its diaspora. Most of the Iberian New World, Portuguese or Sevillan, is unstable at best, and there's a steady flow of refugees and guest workers who are sending money home to form a melting pot.
• Aboriginal populations: The UCNA isn't founded with manifest destiny in mind; it's founded as an exercise in reactionary pique. As such, the idea of supplanting the aboriginal populations isn't really on their agenda, so much as neatly subordinating them into the tapestry of Andalusian society. (In the beginning, in particular, the UCNA is quite happy to support the aborigines, to keep the European subjects from dominating the political landscape. It's cheaper to pay off the Cherokees than the French.)
• European (and Europeanizing) neighboring states: The UCNA has a lot of borders. I have only the vaguest idea what it's been exposed to in the Caribbean. On its southern border, it has Axamalia, a Hispano-Baltic Texas (a lot of Güntherites flee there after the Baltic crises of the late 18th century; they're why the G.P. of Mexico arose at all, and a second wave after the "Burning Thirties" leads to a successful war of independence in the early 1840s.) In the northeast, there's a Dutch-Anglo-Scottish confederal republic (on the model of the United Provinces) that congealed out of earlier turbulence. Up north is the big worry in the form of Canada*, including New Ireland (the Saint Lawrence River Valley; as Gaelic here as it is Francophone IRL) - oddly enough, a likely place to produce something recognizably akin to modern country music, if considerably more Celtic. Simply by convergence, osmosis, and cross-border exchanges of ideas (and immigrant populations), this is going to be the random element in the recipe.

So what does this blend into?