In the antebellum US, as shape-note singing moved west and south, it was replaced in the northeast, in large part, by adaptations of bits of classical music recast into hymns for church.

Peter Mercer-Taylor, Professor of Musicology at the University of Minnesota, studies this unusual and fascinating repertoire and has just published a new book called Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America in which he tells the musical, cultural, and personal history of these hymns.

The Elm Ensemble has been recording some of these remarkable hymns, contributing to the growing online anthology of recordings, all of which include downloadable scores for use in worship. We asked Dr. Mercer-Taylor a few questions about the project.

When did you realize what was going on here—that hymn adaptations from major European composers for use in American hymnbooks was not a practice unique to a few connoisseurs but rather a widespread means of creating hymnody in the US throughout the nineteenth century?

I grew up in the United Methodist Church—both of my parents were UMC ministers—so hymn singing was a big part of my life from early on.

And in my later life as a musicologist, I took a particular interest in Mendelssohn. It was probably around 2005 that it first hit me how odd it was not only that I grew up singing a hymn —“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”—to a Mendelssohn tune but that it was one of the best tunes in the hymnal. Those two dimensions of my musical being converged in this very immediate way I’d never given much thought to. I knew I’d seen a few more classical composers’ names attached to tunes and thought it would be fun to start poking into Mendelssohn’s, just to see how many history had cast forth. I came to find most had appeared in the nineteenth century, and that, yes, there had been a lot—I think I found 56 Mendelssohn tunes in print as hymn tunes by the end of the century. My website goes up only to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, so that figure is a little smaller.

The scope of the tradition just kept sneaking up on me incrementally. In basic books about hymnody, you can find casual references to hymn tunes based on classical music. Everyone knows they were there. But that’s mostly because Lowell Mason’s 1822 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection was a major best-seller, and it had around 20 Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven tunes in it.

[Listen to Beethoven’s GANGES]

Where the tradition actually started, where it went, and how big it actually got hadn’t really been looked into. And for me, much of the excitement was finding new surprises around every corner. I was several years into this work—I’d collected a pile of tunes—before I started paying attention to this guy named George Kingsley. He shows up in scarcely any history books. But it turns out he was more into these adaptations than anyone. Fifty-one of the tunes on the website come from his publications, and most music historians have never heard his name. Also later in the research, I realized that the year after Ureli Corelli Hill conducted the New York Philharmonic Society in their first concert ever (in 1842), he published a big book of hymn tunes with a bunch of classical music in it. For him, these were just two different ways to get the word out. I find that fascinating.

How were these adaptations received by churchgoers? Were these intended more for church choirs or the whole congregation?

I haven’t found a lot of diary entries of churchgoers saying, “Wow, that Weber tune this morning blew my mind.” Those would be nice, but that wasn’t really the kind of project this was. It’s hard to say exactly what people made of these tunes, but a lot of people obviously liked them or they just wouldn’t have kept showing up in hymn collections.

As for who actually sang them—choir or congregation—I thrash around at that for a while in my first chapter. Whether congregations actually sang depended on denomination, region, size of the community, wealth, and all kinds of other stuff. If you were in a Methodist congregation in rural Illinois, you probably sang all the time, probably out of a folksy shape-note book. If you were a Congregationalist in Boston, you’d hear more of this higher-brow stuff I’m dealing with, but the choir would do most of the singing.

So yes, it was choirs that kept wanting new tunes all the time, and harder tunes, and these classical music adaptations would never have accumulated like they did without choirs clamoring for them. But some of them also became hits with congregations. (How we know this is a long story, and I share some of it in chapter 1). Weber’s WILMOT, for instance, was sung by a lot of congregations.

You note in chapter 2 that Mason did not himself invent this practice of adaptation in the US. Was this practice begun in England before it made its way to the US?

The practice was begun in England. This sort of thing had started trickling out in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but a big breakthrough was the first volume of William Gardiner’s Sacred Melodies from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, published in London in 1812 and comprised almost entirely of these kinds of adaptations. Then for about a decade, there is a bump in this sort of thing in England. And, yes, books like Gardiner’s were getting to the US. After that, the tradition seems to take off in the US to a much greater extent than in England, but it does hang on in England. The Mendelssohn “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” adaptation, for instance, started out in an English tune book in 1857.

Where do the texts come from? You use the word psalmodic, but many of the texts are not psalms or psalm paraphrases at all, correct?

The hardest thing about working on this repertoire is there’s no good word for the thing I was writing about. Technically, these are “psalm and hymn tunes”—metrical tunes fit to sing a hymn or a psalm to. Back in the nineteenth century, most folks were comfortable just calling this psalmody. All kinds of Watts hymn texts that had nothing to do with actual Psalms were in circulation in a lot of denominations, some of which appear in this anthology (AETOLIA and SYRACUSE are good examples). Today, “hymnody” might be more appropriate.

If you published something in 1840 called a collection of “church music,” it meant it had a lot of psalm and hymn tunes in it. It might also have anthems, but if it wasn’t mostly psalm and hymn tunes—with meters indicated, so you could mix and match texts and tunes— you wouldn’t call it “church music.”

You allude to some healthy competition between all of these hymn compilers and include the shape-note tradition in that competition. By the time Mason and Clifton were adapting and compiling, was shape-note out of fashion in the northeast, or did they help drive it out?

It’s hard to say exactly how much shape-note music was circulating in northeastern households, but by the 1820s, it was pretty clear that shape notes were most strongly associated with what was known as the West and the South. Presumably, it was more like competition for the musical market share that made people on both sides fight so staunchly. But there were publications that went both ways, after all. The 1848 Sacred Harmony was a fairly high-brow book with a lot of classical music in it, edited by this fancy New York organist named Samuel Jackson. But it was put out mostly for use by Methodists, and there were Methodists everywhere, so they issued it in both round-note and shape-note editions.

Are there other examples—other than Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and Haydn’s Austria—of hymns from this repertoire that churchgoers today would recognize, like “Joy to the World”?

“Joy to the World” fits right into this mix, but the tradition I deal with is adaptations only of what they called “modern” composers—Haydn and after. Adaptations of the work of “ancient” composers like Handel had started catching on a little earlier. But that’s a long story.* We do have some really famous specimens of this sort of thing that didn’t appear, at least in the US, until after the Civil War—that is, after the period covered in my book and on my website. Schumann’s Canonbury, based on one of his Nachtstücke, or the Mendelssohn “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” or Sibelius’s Finlandia, for instance.

Culturally, what do you think motivates this classical-to-hymn adaptation? Is it nostalgia for European heritage?

This deserves a much longer answer, but for now I’ll point out a few things. In part, it’s like, “Hey, free tunes.” Because international copyright law didn’t come into existence until much later in the century. There were people seriously committed to classical music who really did want to get it into as many people’s ears as they could in whatever form that took. There was also a value attached to cultural markers of “refinement,” and a lot of folks were starting to recognize Beethoven and Mozart as names refined people were into. A lot of compilers adapt tunes so freely it doesn’t feel like they’re all that attached to the music itself—they just want to put enough notes from the composer in there to be able to stick the name on the tune. A good example of this would be MALLION, which is based on a very famous aria in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Mason and Webb’s adaptation quotes it for about 2 measures before heading off to do totally different things. The end of the hymn tune also refers elliptically to the end of the aria, but you might not hear that.

How much travel was involved in this research? And is there more of this corpus yet to be discovered?

I visited archives in six different states—not any churches but libraries and rare-book rooms. That’s a lot of running around, but it is a lot of fun.

Less fun is locating each tune somewhere in that composers’ output. Compilers almost never name the piece. They just write “Mozart” or whatever at the top of the tune. It then becomes our job to figure out which of Mozart’s 600-odd pieces it came from. So I spent a lot of time turning page after page of everyone’s complete works editions. Some tunes I immediately recognized, but some come from pretty far-flung corners. No, I did not immediately recognize melodic passages culled from the middle of Gluck’s De profundis, for instance, or Haydn’s Der Sturm, or Bellini’s Il Pirata. In that last case, my search was not helped by the fact that my sole nineteenth-century source attributed the tune to Donizetti.

I’m sure there are piles more of these things out there. I looked at the major publications by the major compilers, but there are hundreds and hundreds of tune books I did not consult. As I say in the book’s introduction, my picture of this repertoire is a little like an early nineteenth-century map of the western half of North America. The rough contours are there, there are a lot of details waiting to be filled in.

* Pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world in the first half of the nineteenth century who knew anything about higher orders of European composition (the term “classical music” was only just starting to get used) referred to “ancient” music as being the music of Handel’s generation and earlier and “Modern” music as Haydn’s generation and after. Just as we basically agree about what Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and so on refer to, ancient and modern were the normal, everyday designations—not just among tunebook compilers. Weirdly, most people today use our blanket term early music to cover exactly what ancient music used to mean, but we don’t have a modern counterpart to modern music.

Top image. George Kingsley’s Templi Carmina (Northampton: Hopkins, Bridgman and Company, 1853) and The Sacred Choir (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1838).

New Creation, Arise is a new hymn by Zebulon M. Highben (music) and Sally Messner (text) written for the people of Christ Church Lutheran, Minneapolis, in honor of their cantors, Rev. Robert Buckley Farlee and Rev. Martin A. Seltz, on the 40th anniversary of their ordination.

The new tune is named LAKE STREET NEW. The occasion for the composition—celebrating the ministry of Farlee, Seltz, and Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis’s Longfellow Neighborhood—naturally led to a text focused on the murder of George Floyd, the variety of ways this injustice was decried, the suffering of oppressed people everywhere, and the summons Christians now must hear to continue fighting for a more just world.

[Listen to New Creation, Arise and sing with us.]

We asked Sally and Zeb to tell us about their vocations as church musicians and about their collaborations in creating this new hymn.

When did you first get interested in church music and why did you decide to pursue it as a career?

Sally. I grew up in Georgia and began singing in the adult choir at my home church in ninth grade, after I was confirmed. At Valparaiso University, I was drawn to the intersection of music and theology. As a voice performance major, I connected most with the sacred arias, especially those from Bach’s passions and cantatas. During my senior year at Valpo, I looked into seminary graduate programs in music and theology and enrolled in Luther Seminary’s Master of Sacred Music program. My first job in church music was as a quarter-time music intern at a large downtown Methodist church in Minneapolis. As I became familiar with the church music scene in the Twin Cities, I realized that full-time careers in church music are possible. Since my time at Luther Seminary, I have been living out the call to serve as a musician in the church in some capacity—from section leader to choir member to director of music. For almost twenty years, that’s meant a part-time position supplemented by other professional work. I’m now fortunate to have a full-time position in a congregation in Michigan where I can focus my energy and creativity on all aspects of developing an engaging church music program.

Zeb. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a music educator but also felt called to attend seminary. I grew up in a part of Ohio where I didn’t know you could be a full-time church musician. All the churches in my town—from big parishes to small ones—had part-time musicians who tended to also work full-time as high school choir directors or elementary music teachers. As a college senior, I started investigating seminary MDiv programs and was excited to discover the Master of Sacred Music program at Luther Seminary, a joint degree with Saint Olaf College. I attended Luther Seminary both as an MSM and MDiv student and eventually dropped the latter. My interests in worship, liturgy, and music—especially choral music and hymns—found a perfect fusion in the MSM program.

Sally, how do you approach hymnwriting? The text to New Creation, Arise seems to be a mix of biblical images and socio-theological ideas. What’s going on in this text?

Sally. Most of my hymnwriting has been biblical paraphrases, primarily psalms. When I choose a text to paraphrase, I read it several times, live with it for a while, and see what images and other words come to mind. In all of these past instances, I was working with a tune already in mind, so having a meter helped create a linguistic framework as the language of the paraphrase bubbled up. With New Creation, Arise, I was working without a tune. I started with the new creation text in 2 Corinthians while also having in my head and on my heart the recent protests and devastation in Minneapolis’s response to the murder of George Floyd. The pain of the community we’d called home for nine years weighed heavily on me. Then I started thinking about the Beatitudes and looked at both Gospel texts, being drawn more to Matthew’s version as I thought of all the black and brown mothers, fathers, and children—including the children imprisoned at our border. I reflected on their generations of struggles, their belovedness, their blessedness. Micah and Revelation also make an appearance in the text. The hymn text began to form into a sort of trinitarian shape, but I didn’t want to leave the community singing in the second person, as if we can remain onlookers. We the church—the Christian community—are also blessed in spite of our shortcomings and our sins. And we are and will always be called to help and serve our neighbors who are hurting.

[Listen to New Creation, Arise and sing with us.]

Zeb, how do you approach the composition process?

Zeb. Because I write vocal music almost exclusively, I always start with the text. I usually memorize it and try to tease out any “natural” musical elements in the text itself—the rhythm inherent in the syllables, the melodic contour suggested by important words, and so on. This almost always leads to crafting a melody first. Harmony, structure, form, and other elements usually come later. This approach to composition is one I was taught by David Cherwien, who learned it largely from Alice Parker.

What about Sally’s text made you go for this style of tune? What was the biggest challenge in setting the text?

Zeb. The number of syllables in Sally’s text almost immediately suggested a compound meter. The repeated elements like “Blessed are you” and “New creation, arise” reminded me of folk-based hymns and songs with similar structures. The biggest challenge was certainly trying to figure out appropriate text stress and melodic patterns that fit with the irregular number of syllables per line—9.8.11.10.10. There aren’t many (perhaps not any) other tunes with such a pattern. But Sally and I worked together to adjust elements of both text and tune, which is how we ended up repeating the first phrase and lengthening the overall structure. Collaborating with a poet (especially a friend!) is always a richer experience and makes for a better hymn.

Sally, what was it like working with Zeb on this project? Had you worked with him before?

Sally. Zeb and I were seminary classmates and have worked together on many things, mostly in performance capacities. This is our first hymn collaboration. Zeb is a gifted composer and crafted the perfect tune for this text—it embraces the deep lament the text expresses and also lifts up hope, propelling us toward justice. Musically, the folk style of the setting evokes the communal nature of struggling against systems of oppression and the Christian church’s history of supporting and leading movements against forces of oppression. Zeb and I had an engaging back and forth over a few places in the text and in the setting of the music. The way we refined it over the course of a month or so from our first drafts only made the final hymn better—and this could come only from open dialogue.

How do you know Bob Farlee and Martin Seltz, and what does it mean to you to create new music for the church in their honor?

Sally. I first met Bob and Martin when I worked at Augsburg Fortress 15 years ago. Then my family became members at Christ Church Lutheran, where they both are cantors. Josh and I (and Anni and Sim at times) sang in the church choir and were involved in a music series at the church. Our family were members at Christ Church for only four years, and in that short time, that community truly became home for us. Bob and Martin are thoughtful musicians and theologians who love their people. They want to help us sing and sing well. Through their own work on hymnals and in hymn writing, they’ve given so much to generations of church musicians and congregations. I am glad to offer something new to honor their years of service and gifts to all of us.

Zeb. I’m not sure how long I’ve known Bob and Martin, or even exactly how we met! But it was certainly some combination of our various involvements with Augsburg Fortress, the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians, Valpo’s Institute of Liturgical Studies, and living and working for a few years in the Twin Cities. They have been friends and mentors, and I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to write something in their collective honor. Both of them have given so much to the church, and especially to its song.

•••

Thanks to Philip Potyondy—friend, forester, and member of the Brass Messengers—for his images of damaged buildings on or just off of Lake Street in Minneapolis.

• Listen to New Creation, Arise and sing with us.
• Check out the Elm Ensemble’s Hope for the Journey playlist.
• Subscribe to the Elm Ensemble to hear great sacred music in context.

New Creation, Arise_LAKE STREET NEW_melody (PDF Download)
New Creation, Arise_LAKE STREET NEW_harmony (PDF Download)

Sunday, April 7, 2019

4:30pm | Saint James Episcopal Church, Dexter

[Listen to music from Hope for the Journey.]

Gather with us to hear and sing music that will remind us of God’s love for us, fill our hearts with song, and strengthen us for the road ahead.

Featuring the music of

• J. S. Bach
• Abbie Betinis
• Claude Goudimel
• Bobby McFerrin
• Robert Buckley Farlee

Reception to follow. Service and reception are free and open to the public. Childcare is provided.

Evensong at Saint James programs are sung choral services led by the Elm Ensemble, a group of professional and amateur musicians from around the Midwest. The services are a great opportunity to invite friends in the community to Saint James to hear beautiful sacred music, to experience a unique worship event, and to socialize with people in our community at the reception.

Musical Notes

This evensong program focused on music and texts that remind us of God’s abiding and unconditional love for each and every one of us. Below is a downloadable PDF of the bulletin.

Abbie Betinis’s 3-part motet Blessed Be the Lord, My Rock was written on September 12, 2001, as a tribute to the victims and survivors of the tragedies the day before. The moving text from Psalm 144 escalates to two 4-part chords, continues softly in unison “rescue, me, deliver me,” and closes tenderly with, “I will sing a new song to thee, O God.”

Bobby McFerrin is known for is one-hit foray into pop music stardom and, perhaps to some, for his remarkable career as a classical singer, conductor, and educator. The full title of his composition sung today is The Twenty-Third Psalm (Dedicated to My Mother), and in it you hear not only the comforting and famous message of the twenty-third psalm but also McFerrin’s deep conviction that women and particularly mothers are central to the ongoing health of the world and to having some sense of (divine) peace on our journeys.

The hymn Hope of the World was written by Georgia Harkness and was selected from over five hundred others in a search for a hymn to be used at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in October 1954. The theme of the assembly was “Jesus Christ, Hope of the World.” Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher, considered by many to be one of America’s first prominent female theologians. She was involved in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.

Eric Milner-White’s well-known text was simply and beautifully set by Minneapolis-based composer and Lutheran cantor Robert Buckley Farlee. Called to Ventures assures us of God’s love despite our ways being difficult, unclear, or simply unknown to us at this moment.

[Subscribe to the Elm Ensemble to hear great sacred music in context.]

 

Sunday, September 30, 2018
4:30pm | Saint James Episcopal Church, Dexter

Refugees, exiles, asylum seekers, immigrants. Like the Israelites and Jesus and his family, millions of people around the world move away from home and homeland seeking safety, employment, and a new life.

The modern American state was built by immigrants, ancestors to many of us. Do we now see ourselves as the new natives, protecting our borders from intruders? How do we interpret the biblical language of the “promised land” and the “city on a hill” in our contemporary contexts? Where is our final resting place? Where, or who, is our home?

Gather with us in a brief vespers service to hear and sing music exploring these biblical themes and music by immigrant composers as we experience together a beautiful evensong liturgy.

The gathered assembly will have many opportunities to join in the singing. Free childcare is provided. Reception to follow. Service and reception are free and open to the public.

And a few days earlier, come to our next Coffee & Conversation event—Immigration in Michigan: Our Neighbors’ Stories.

[Subscribe to the Elm Ensemble to hear great sacred music in context.]

[Download PDF of the bulletin]

Notes on Music

What images come to mind when we hear the words immigrant and refugee? Where are these people from and why did they—willingly or unwillingly—leave the country of their birth to take up residence in a foreign land? What forces led them here?

This evening’s musical selections include pieces from three composers born in Europe who eventually lived and worked in the US.

Jean Berger

Born to a Jewish family in Hamm, Germany, and originally named Arthur Schlossberg, Berger studied musicology in Vienna and Heidelberg while at the same time becoming an accomplished pianist and conductor. He earned a doctorate in Heidelberg, accepted a post as assistant conductor at the major opera house in Mannheim, and studied composition with the chief cantor of the city’s mainstream nonorthodox synagogue. While leading an opera rehearsal in Mannheim, he was forcibly removed by Brown Shirts (SA). After the Nazi Party seized power in Germany in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he took the French name Jean Berger and toured widely as a pianist. From 1939 to 1941, he was assistant conductor at the Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro and on the faculty of the Brazilian Conservatory. In 1941, he moved to the United States and served in the US Army beginning in 1942. In 1943, he became a US citizen and worked in the Office of War Information producing foreign-language broadcasts and USO shows until 1946. From 1946 to 1948, he worked as an arranger for CBS and NBC and toured as a concert accompanist. In 1948, Berger moved into the academic world, serving on the faculty of Middlebury College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Colorado Women’s College in Denver. Several of Berger’s pieces have become standards in the choral repertoire, “The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee” perhaps the most well known and often performed.

Jan Bender

Jan Oskar Bender was born in Haarlem, Holland, on February 9, 1909, and moved to Lübeck, Germany, at age 13. As a teenager, he studied organ in Lübeck at the Marienkirche with Karl Lichtwark and Walter Kraft. In 1930, Bender went to Leipzig to study with Karl Straube, then returned to Lübeck to study with the young composer Hugo Distler. Bender served as organist at St. Gertrudikirche in Lübeck from 1934 to 1937, then at Lambertikirche in Aurich from 1937 to 1952, interrupted twice for active duty in the German army. He was wounded during his first tour of duty, losing his left eye to shrapnel. At the end of the war, Bender surrendered to Allied forces in France and, while in an American POW camp, completed his Auricher Singbüchlein. From 1953 to 1960, Bender served as cantor and organist at the Michaeliskirche in Lüneberg, where J. S. Bach had sung as a choir boy. Bender’s compositions became known to prominent Lutheran church musicians in the US, and in 1954 he was invited to become a “house composer” for Concordia Publishing House in Saint Louis. Bender eventually moved to the US for work, first at Concordia Teachers College in Seward, Nebraska, and then at Wittenberg University in Ohio. He composed prolificly and also played numerous organ recitals around the country. Bender moved back to Germany when he retired and died at his home in Hanerau, Germany, on December 29, 1994.

Gerhard Krapf

Gerhard Krapf was born in Meissenheim, Germany, in 1924. He studied piano and organ in his youth and at the age of 18 was drafted into the German army. He was wounded six times in the course of his military service and did not know the war had ended when he was captured by the Russian army on May 10, 1945. Krapf began composing in the years that followed as he worked in labor camps, writing his compositions on cement bags. After his release, he completed music degrees in Germany and emmigrated to the US in 1953 for further study. Krapf founded the organ department at the University of Iowa and served as professor of organ there from 1962 to 1977 and at the University of Alberta from 1977 to 1987. Krapf composed mostly organ music and in much of his choral music chose biblical texts as inspiration.

Jesus the Refugee

French artist Luc Olivier Merson’s arresting 1879 painting Rest on the Flight into Egypt, in highly romanticized but deeply empathetic fashion, shows the isolation and vulnerability of Mary, Joseph, and their baby son. Fleeing persecution at the hands of local authorities, and with help from the three magi, the Holy Family takes refuge in Egypt. Joseph dozes beside a dying campfire while their donkey grazes. On the left, Mary and the infant Jesus sleep in the arms of the sphinx, its eyes turned to heaven. Merson never traveled to North Africa, but his use of archeological detail creates the illusion of an eyewitness account.

Do we see scenes like this today, of desperate travelers, exhausted and alone? How do we respond?

Promotional Materials

[Download PDF of Evensong Poster]

Sunday 29 April 2018
4:30pm | Saint James Episcopal Church, Dexter

Featuring songs of hope and comfort from The Sacred Harp

Gather with us in a brief vespers service to hear and sing music from the Sacred Harp shape-note tradition. First published in 1844, Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King’s now-famous hymnal is packed with vivid lyrics and familiar tunes, many of which adorn our modern hymnals.

The Elm Ensemble will lead the singing of a variety of selections from the hymnal, chosen to highlight the Easter themes of hope, comfort, and celebration of life. We will remember those in our community who suffer, especially those who suffer because of gun-related violence.

The gathered assembly will have many opportunities to join in the singing. Free childcare is provided. Reception to follow. Service and reception are free and open to the public.

[Subscribe to the Elm Ensemble to hear great sacred music in context.]