There are many other reasons that utopian and pietistic cultures contribute to our understanding of diaspora as a myth of modernity. These cultures, often to great extreme, openly reject modernity, for example, in their dress. The sacred journey of diaspora, then, receives its impetus from the images of modernity from which it flees. It is for such reasons that utopian and pietistic diasporas transform the music culture of a European land of origin, without, however, abandoning that music culture completely. After four hundred years of diaspora, the Amish still sing in German, if indeed a German that most closely resembles a language spoken in the sixteenth century.
Music plays an extraordinarily important historical role in utopian and pietistic communities.
Not only does music distinguish these communities from the world around them, thus strengthening the feeling of diaspora, but it encodes the essential narrative of the community's history. Each time these songs are sung, the history of diaspora is remembered and made real to provide the modern context for the diaspora. The images of historical resistance may be vivid, for example, when a martyr meets his or her death in a pietistic song, or it may be hidden in a complex, internal structure. One of the most distinctively American aspects of the musical landscapes of modernity is the sacred history of most American musics. Accordingly, the sacred journey of American history becomes an experience that represents American Selfness by creating modern and postmodern juxtapositions of Otherness.