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Inside This Issue George Handy’s Bloos by Benjamin Bierman Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport Composing Queer, review by Howard Pollack Nine Hours with Jelly Roll Morton, review by Jeff Taylor Alvin Lucier, review by David Grubbs |
American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee
Psalm 100 from the Ainsworth
Psalter, 1612 With over 17,000 indexed tunes, the online Hymn Tune Index offers a unique site for
researching English-language hymns printed between 1535 and 1820. Created and
administered by Nicholas Temperley, the index grew out of Temperley’s
research for his book, The Music of the
English Parish Church (Cambridge
University Press, 1979), and received its initial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities
in 1982. Only printed English-language hymns, either in bound collections or
sheet music form and dating from 1820 or earlier, have been indexed.
Manuscript sources, printed hymn texts without musical notation, and hymns
with non-English texts have been excluded.1 Researchers can access both printed and online
versions of the index. The 4-volume Hymn Tune Index (Oxford
University Press, 1998) correlates the contents of 1,744 main collections
plus 800 subordinate collections, while the online database2 includes
thirty-nine additional main collections (for a total of 1,773) plus ten
subordinate collections discovered since the published version appeared. In
addition to this expanded coverage, the site includes a tutorial on how to
code and read the abbreviated incipits. With several search options and sorting methods, the online database generates new opportunities for research on sacred hymn performance, publications, and composition up to 1820. The online database is particularly useful for American music scholarship when used in conjunction with the printed index and related bibliographic and reference publications, such as The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, edited by Richard Crawford (A-R Editions, 1984) and American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1910: A Bibliography by Allen P. Britton, Irving Lowens, and Richard Crawford (American Antiquarian Society, 1990). Given these parameters, the online index provides detailed
insight into the early life of the published American hymn up to 1820. By
manipulating the data—using multiple windows simultaneously and sorting
by source, date, region, tune number, attribution, etc.—it is possible
to correlate and compare at a glance the contents of the three main psalters
used in the early settlements. These include the Pilgrim’s Ainsworth Psalter of 1612 (AinsHBP 1), published in Amsterdam; Thomas
Ravenscroft’s 1621 collection (RaveTWBP a), favored for private use by
the Puritans and published in London; and the London-based Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter (P
E4), first published in complete form in 1562 and used in public worship by
Anglicans.3 Moreover, the online site provides a detailed publication history
for each tune contained therein, from the sixteenth to early nineteenth
centuries, in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the colonies and later
the United States, and elsewhere.4 Extending this process to include the earliest music published in New England reveals intriguing connections between the earliest written-tradition source in this region and both its transatlantic progenitors and colonial descendants. The earliest editions of the Bay Psalm Book, beginning in 1640, printed new text versions that reflected the stricter religious attitudes of their compilers (including John Cotton and Richard Mather), but referred the user to pre-existing psalm tunes drawn from Ravenscroft and Sternhold and Hopkins, some of which were included in the Ainsworth psalter as well. The ninth edition of 1698 (TS BayA a) reproduced musical notation for thirteen tunes drawn from John Playford’s Introduction to Music, including a core group of three tunes contained in all three earlier psalters; two tunes shared by Ainsworth and Ravenscroft; three tunes drawn from Ravenscroft alone; plus five versions of tunes published by John Playford from the 1650s-1670s.5 As such, the 1698 Bay Psalm Book represents a versatile and, within its own context, contemporary amalgamated repertory for the new colonial society. Moreover, a search of these thirteen tunes in the online index, sorted by date and region of publication, reveals a correlation between the 1698 collection and growing immigrant communities of New England.6 For example, the tune “Windsor” (271a) had been standard in Scottish psalters since 1615, and appeared for the first time in an Irish psalter in or around 1698, the same year as the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book. Thus, Scottish, Scots-Irish, and Protestant Irish immigrants to New England around the turn of the century could have encountered an already familiar hymn in the psalm book of their new world. Similarly, the continual reprinting of this tune in Scottish, Irish, English, and American publications through to 1820 may reflect, at least partially, a shared musical repertory working in tandem on either side of the Atlantic. In this way, the online index illustrates not only the ancestry but the lineage to 1820 of the tunes of the 1698 Bay Psalm Book, which enjoyed variable success. In addition to “Windsor,” the ubiquitous “Psalm 100 (Old)” or “Old Hundred” (143a) and “Low Dutch” (or “Canterbury,” 250h) became staples in the early American repertory, turning up in hundreds of printings through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “Old Hundred” and “Windsor” appeared both in Ainsworth and Ravenscroft, while “Low Dutch” is found only in Ravenscroft. Two contrasting cases involve the tunes “Lichfield” (536a) and “Oxford” (201e). Both variants of these tunes appeared in Playford’s 1658 psalter (PlayJl c), and after 1698 each tune was reprinted virtually continuously over a sixty-eight year span before disappearing from American sources in 1766, on the eve of the emergence of the first homegrown compositional school.7 The ability to trace a single English-language hymn over centuries and continents is a unique feature of the existing online Hymn Tune Index. The database’s design allows for numerous opportunities to place colonial, early federal, and antebellum works within an international context. A more in-depth analysis of the migration of these tunes, starting with the Hymn Tune Index’s database, could offer an opportunity for reimagining the music of these communities in the rituals and living memories of the first settlers. Yet, the latest entries in the database predate the explosion of hymnody in the nineteenth century. To cite just a few: the foundational hymns of Lowell Mason, Fanny Crosby, Ira David Sankey, William Bradbury, and Thomas Hastings formed the sonic landscape of nineteenth-century America, and many of their works remain in print today. This vast and significant repertory remains understudied at least in part due to the absence of bibliographic resources, as is the case in the earlier period.8 To address this lacuna, the chronological range of the Hymn Tune Index will be expanded during the coming years in an attempt to locate, identify, and index all known English-language hymn tunes published between 1821 and 1900. As in the original database, the new phase will document each hymn tune according to its melodic profile (including variants), text version, text and musical authorship and attributions, and publication history (including place of publication, edition, compiler, publisher, etc.), and will contain additional information concerning the hymn and its published collection. Because of the potentially overwhelming scope of the project, the indexing will be tackled in at least four stages, with each stage focusing on publications from a limited period: 1821-1840, 1841-1860, 1861-1880, and 1881-1900. A team of international scholars is working towards this goal, led by Professor Nicholas Temperley and myself at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The project will take many years to complete. It is hoped that, eventually, the expanded Hymn Tune Index will prove as valuable a research tool for studies in nineteenth-century music, history, religion, and cultural studies as the original has for hymn tunes up to 1820. —Gayle Sherwood
Magee University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Notes 1 For specific
criterion regarding limitations concerning the length, instrumentation,
texture, and form of hymn tunes in the collection, see HTI: Scope
(http://hymntune.music.uiuc.edu/about/scope.asp). Accessed 2 April 2006. 2 The Hymn Tune Index (http://hymntune.music.uiuc.edu/default.asp).
Accessed 2 April 2006. 3 The index refers to this collection as
“Starnhold” and Hopkins, reproducing the spelling of the first edition. 4 For this
publication, I have focused almost exclusively on identical appearances of
the hymn tunes in question. The online database allows for comparison of
variants at various levels, which expands the search criteria exponentially. 5 Irving Lowens, “The Bay Psalm Book in
17th-Century New
England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 8/1
(Spring 1955), 26-29, suggests connections
not to Playford’s psalm collection but to his 1667 text (and later
editions), Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick. Lowens also
suggests that an earlier, no longer extant edition of the Bay Psalm Book may
have included written notation. See also D.W. Krummel, “The Bay Psalm
Book Tercentenary, 1698-1998,” Notes 55/2 (December 1998), 281-87. 6 For estimates of immigrants by ethnic group
up to 1700, see Aaron S. Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants
to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the
American Revolution,” The Journal of American History 85/1 (June
1998), 45-46 and 60; for immigration estimates by ethnic group ca. 1700, just
after the 1698 Bay Psalm Book, see ibid, 71; and Fogleman, “Migrations
to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700-1775: New
Estimates,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22/4 (Spring
1992), 698. 7 Since “Lichfield” had been renamed as “London” in 1721, these English-named tunes may have fared
poorly with pre-war colonists. More significant perhaps is that both tunes
disappeared—at least temporarily—from British collections by the
end of the eighteenth century as well. 8 A sampling of book-length studies in
nineteenth-century American hymnody includes: James R. Goff, Jr., Close
Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (University of North Carolina
Press, 2002); June Hadden Hobbs, “I Sing for I Cannot Be
Silent”: The Feminization of American Hymnody—1870-1920
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); and Carol A. Pemberton, Lowell
Mason: His Life and Work (UMI Research Press, 1985). ISAM home Who we
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