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No. 16 -“From Rote to Note (and Back)”: The checkered history of hymnal development in America, Part 1.
I will always remember a worship committee meeting in one of the churches I served. I was sitting next to a delightful lady, a former soloist in the choir and a strong advocate for traditional music in the church’s worship. The church had established a second service designed around the popular “praise and worship” format, and attendance at it had skyrocketed.[1] We had just heard a report on the new service’s progress, and my seat mate turned to me with a pained expression. “What will we do,” she whispered, “If those young people never learn the great hymns of the church?” “You know,” I replied, “I share your concern, but we need to remember that the church is not a museum. It cannot be our first priority to be a repository for the great sacred art of the past. We must always seek music best suited to bring worshippers to Christ.” I followed that however by saying that the greatest hymns were timeless, but if we believe they are essential to the church’s worship, we need to make teaching them – their music, their textual meaning, and their history – a priority. We have not been doing that.
A theme running throughout my book, Servanthood of Song, is the development of the modern church hymnal, the societal factors influencing that development, those which are causing many present-day churches to jettison their hymnals and return to essentially rote learning of worship songs. The famous quote, “History is written by the victors”, is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but variations on it appear at least back to the time of the French Revolution.[2] Certainly it can be applied to the Regular Singing movement of which nearly all we know comes from the writings of the clergy who advocated for it. Had they written a fictional account of the controversy, I can imagine the reformers depicted as progressives boldly and heroically leading a drive to make their congregations musically literate. In such an account, soon worshippers would be singing full throatedly from a hymnal. The perceived chaos of rote singing in the Old Way would be a thing of the past – forever and ever, world without end. Amen.
Of course, it did not happen that way. Calvinist clergy found themselves torn between two conflicting perspectives – one musical and one theological – which hamstrung their efforts. They saw benefits to a more general understanding of the basics of music reading, but feared the sensual attractions of harmonious praise. The preface to Stephen Day’s, The Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Meter (1640), better known in America as The Bay Psalm Book, stated the problem thus:The singing of Psalms, though it breathe forth nothing but holy harmony and melody; yet such is the subtlety of the enemy, and the enemy of our Lord, and his ways… [3]
The Rev. Thomas Symmes in his “The Reasonableness of Regular singing” asked:
“Is there not great reason to fear that you mistake the Pleasing Impressions made upon your Animal Spirits, by the tune, [for] the Melody you ought to make in your heart to the Lord?” [4]
While singing schools were prolific and incredibly popular across colonial New England, even under ideal circumstances, most worshippers – the older and more conservative, the less musically inclined, etc. – would not have participated. One suspects then that most congregants, if they sang at all, still rote learned the tunes being sung while being led by scholars from the singing school, probably grouped together in the church gallery.
Colonial clergy did not envision their congregations singing hymns from a hymnal. The very notion that books with words and printed music in them would be distributed to all worshippers would have seemed a frivolous expense and a distraction from a time of devotion. They hoped simply that a percentage of their flock, after receiving outside training in the fundamentals of music reading, would be taught to accurately sing the prescribed psalm tunes from books provided them by the singing master. They would then be dispersed about the pews to lead the congregation in singing. Result: congregational singing would improve, and there would no longer be a need for precentors.[5]
The concept of a congregational hymnal would have to evolve over many years. The first such collections were words only and called “songsters.” If you were to worship in nearly any church in America before the 1870s, the songbook in the pew racks would have been a words-only songster. This was partly because musical typesetting was still extremely expensive and not easily adaptable to a hymnal format. Perhaps most important, however, hymns were valued as much or more as devotional texts as they were for their music. The poet, Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886), remembered a family tradition of reading hymn texts for meditation and devotion. Her father, Edward, disliked the new hymnals containing both words and music which were just beginning to appear in the 1860s. The insertion of musical staves with notation seemed to him “to have interfered with the reading of hymns too much.”[6] So universal was the use of words-only collections in the mid-nineteenth century that thousands of pocket songsters along with miniature New Testaments were distributed by the American Tract Society to both Union and Confederate troops during the Civil War. More recently, the evangelist preacher, Alden Wilson Tozer (1897 – 1963) also alluded to the devotional content of hymnody:
I must confess that I am an ardent lover of hymns. In my library, I value a collection of old hymnals. Often on the way to an appointment, I will grab one of these hymnals to read or meditate on. After the Bible, the next most valuable book is a hymnbook . . . Let any new Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of Watts and Wesley alone, and he or she will become a fine theologian. [7]
The evolution in America from the words-only songsters of the first half of the 19th century, first to hymnals with both words and music included, and then to hymnals with text and music on the same page was an agonizingly slow process really not complete until the 1920s. [TO BE CONTINUED]
Best wishes and Peace,
Stan McDaniel
AUTHOR
Stan McDaniel
©2023 Stanley R. McDaniel, All Rights Reserved.
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