Hymntune Index And Related Hymn Materials

An extraordinary resource for organists, church musicians, and librarians. Cataloging over 33,000 melodies sung by congregations world-wide, it provides the source of each and lists related materials.

This is a resource for organists, church musicians and librarians and it catalogues over 33,000 melodies sung by congregations world-wide, providing the source for each one and lists of related materials.

Cataloging over 33,000 melodies sung by congregations world-wide, this resource provides the source of each and lists related materials. --From publisher's description.

Cataloging over 33,000 melodies sung by congregations world-wide, this resource provides the source of each and lists related materials. --From publisher's description.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This fully updated second edition is a selective annotated bibliography of all relevant published resources relating to church and worship music in the United States. Over the past decade, there has been a growth of literature covering everything from traditional subject matter such as the organ works of J.S. Bach to newer areas of inquiry including folk hymnology, women and African-American composers, music as a spiritual healer, to the music of Mormon, Shaker, Moravian, and other smaller sects. With multiple indices, this book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

"The shape-note tradition first flourished in the small towns and rural areas of early America. Church-sponsored "singing schools" taught a form of musical notation in which the notes were assigned different shapes to indicate variations in pitch; this method worked well with congregants who had little knowledge of standard musical notation. Today many enthusiasts carry on the shape-note tradition, and The New Harp of Columbia (recently published in a "restored edition" by the University of Tennessee Press) is one of five shape-note singing-manuals still in use."--Jacket.

The publication by John Wesley of the "Foundery" Collection (1742) marked the establishment of standards for tunes suited to Methodist hymn singing. Early Methodist hymn books in the United States contained words only, but they were cross-referenced with a leader's tune book, beginning with David's Companion (1808). "With One Heart and One Voice" reviews the trends surrounding the styles of tunes selected and analyzes the changes in shape and text for the most frequently used tunes in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Seventy six "core repertory" tunes are analyzed based upon their repeated appearances in most of the tune books published between 1808 and 1878, at which point Methodists finally obtained a hymnal with both words and music, after a half century of experimentation with tune selection. The conclusions reached in this work will allow scholars, hymnologists, and hymn singers to explore the social and musicological influences on hymn tune writing, how long it took for texts to acquire a "fixed tune," how tastes in hymn tunes change ever so slowly, and how many delightful tunes found in the core repertory of the 19th century have been dropped from today's repertoire.