HYMNODY OF EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN MENNONITE COMMUNITIES ...

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HYMNODY OF EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA
GERMAN MENNONITE COMMUNITIES:
NOTENBÜCHLEIN (MANUSCRIPT SONGBOOKS) FROM 1780 TO 1835
by
Suzanne E. Gross
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of The University of Maryland in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
1994
Advisory Committee:
Professor Howard Serwer, Chairman/Advisor
Professor Carol Robertson
Professor Richard Wexler
Professor Laura Youens
Professor Hasia Diner
ABSTRACT

Title of Dissertation: HYMNODY OF EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN
MENNONITE COMMUNITIES: NOTENBÜCHLEIN
(MANUSCRIPT SONGBOOKS) FROM 1780 TO 1835
Suzanne E. Gross, Doctor of Philosophy, 1994
Dissertation directed by: Dr. Howard Serwer, Professor of Music, Musicology
Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
As part of an effort to maintain their German culture, the late eighteenth-century
Mennonites of Eastern Pennsylvania instituted hymn-singing instruction in the elementary
community schoolhouse curriculum. Beginning in 1780 (or perhaps earlier), much of the
hymn-tune repertoire, previously an oral tradition, was recorded in musical notation in
manuscript songbooks (Notenbüchlein) compiled by local schoolmasters in Mennonite
communities north of Philadelphia. The practice of giving manuscript songbooks to
diligent singing students continued until 1835 or later.
These manuscript songbooks are the only extant clue to the hymn repertoire and
performance practice of these Mennonite communities at the turn of the nineteenth century.
By identifying the tunes that recur most frequently, one can determine the core repertoire of
the Franconia Mennonites at this time, a repertoire that, on balance, is strongly pietistic in
nature.
Musically, the Notenbüchlein document the shift that occured when these
Mennonite communities incorporated written transmission into their oral tradition.
Elements of oral tradition written down in the Notenbüchlein include ornamentation using
small black notes, and pitch variations within a single tune.
The majority of the tunes are in monophonic form notated in whole and half note
values. A significant portion of the repertoire is in two- three- and even four-part harmony.
Harmonized settings are found scattered throughout the repertoire. Various harmonic
styles suggest an evolving harmonic vocabulary, styles that include archaic parallel folk
harmonies reflective of an oral tradition, unresolved dissonance, and contemporary
eighteenth-century fuging tunes borrowed from the surrounding Anglo-American culture
and set to German texts. Such harmonizations eventually led to the organizing of evening
singing-schools similar to those popular in much of rural eastern America during the
nineteenth century.
INTRODUCTION
The Notenbüchlein Tradition of the Franconia Mennonites
The manuscript songbooks of sacred music compiled in Eastern Pennsylvania
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflect the musical life of the
Pennsylvania German communities during that time. The manuscript hymnals of the
Ephrata Cloister, beautifully illuminated books that include both complete texts and hymns,
are well known and documented.1 Another category of manuscript songbooks includes
those that were intended to be a reference for the tunes of the day, but not for the texts.
Incipits of the texts indicated which hymns were to be sung to the given tune. The texts,
presumably, were to be found in the hymnals, which at this time were mostly without
tunes.2
Three examples falling within the latter category are the Notenbücher, compiled by
Mennonite congregational songleaders; copybooks used by the Schwenkfelder people in
which tunes were in harmonized settings, along with the hymn number for quick reference
to their hymnal;3 and the Notenbüchlein (music booklets) coming from the
interdenominationally supported community schools, and intended for teaching the skills of
singing from notation.
The majority of the Notenbüchlein, the subject of this dissertation, come from
Mennonite communities in Eastern Pennsylvania, east of Lancaster County and north of

1 See Betty Jean Martin, "The Ephrata Cloister and Its Music, 1732-1785: The
Cultural, Religious, and Bibliographical Background" (Ph. D. dissertation,
University of Maryland, 1974).
2 This practice of separating the text and tune was common in the New
England singing-school books of the mid-eighteenth century. By the late
eighteenth century, text and tune were wedded in the English oblong singing-
school books. German Pennsylvania seems to have been several decades
behind in this regard.
3 The Schwenkfelders took their name from Caspar Schenckfeld, a sixteenth-
century forerunner of Pietism. For more on the Schwenkfelder copy books,
see J. Edward Moyer, "The Hymn-Tunes of the Schwenkfelders" (unpublished
master's thesis, Westminster Choir College, Princeton, N.J., 1942).
Philadelphia, an area for which the term Franconia is used.1 It is this body of
Notenbüchlein, found in public collections in the United States, that comprises the source
material of the present study.2 The Notenbüchlein coming from Lancaster (Mennonite)
Conference communities as well as non-Mennonite communities remain the subject of
future research.
The Notenbüchlein in question are not unknown to the scholarly world. Their
beautiful title pages have been studied by cultural historians. Known as Fraktur, this type
of art, popular throughout the Pennsylvania-German culture during the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, was child-oriented and education-related. This Pennsylvania-German
art has been studied at length by scholars of folk art, and is therefore dealt with in this
dissertation only in passing.3 The musical contents of these booklets, however, have not
been studied. A window into the contemporary music repertoire, these Notenbüchlein are a

1 While Skippack was for a long time the center of Mennonite activity north of
Philadelphia, the little village of Franconia came to be associated with the
region, largely because of a semiannual ministers' meeting held in the
Franconia Meetinghouse just outside the village of Franconia. By 1840, the
area represented by these meetings included twenty-two congregations in
Montgomery, Bucks, Chester, Berks, and Lehigh counties. Today, the area is
referred to as the Franconia Conference of the Mennonite Church. See J. C.
Wenger, History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference
(Telford, Pa.: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937),
48-56.
2 Notenb_chlein in private collections as well as the four booklets in the
Jordan Museum of the Twenty, in Ontario, Canada, are not included in this
study.
Based on the relatively small number of extant Notenb_chlein that
originated in the Lancaster area, we can presume that the tradition never took
hold there as it did in the Franconia area. The Free Public Library does have
one manuscript songbook in its collection from Manor township in Lancaster.
Written for Johann Jacob Koch by schoolmaster Jacob Botz, this so-called Botz
Hymnal seems to have served a different function from that of the Franconia
booklets. The book includes several verses for each hymn, for example,
suggesting that it was viewed as a hymnal, and not as a note-reading book. We
can therefore assume that the Notenb_chlein tradition, as defined below, is
limited to the Franconia area, as well as to Southern Ontario, where many
Franconia people migrated because of the Revolutionary War. See Michael S.
Bird, Ontario Fraktur: A Pennsylvania-German Folk Tradition in
Early Canada (Toronto: M.F. Feheley, 1977).
3 For an up-to-date bibliography on the study of Fraktur, see Mennonite
Encyclopedia, Vol. V (Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing
House, 1990), 310.
record not only of texts known to the community, but also of musical performance practice,
descriptions of which have not yet appeared in print.
State of Present Research
American Mennonite hymnody in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has
received little attention to date. Richard Byron Rosewall of the University of Minnesota
wrote a dissertation in 1969 on the singing school movement in Pennsylvania during the
nineteenth century in which he included information about several Notenbüchlein.1 He
largely overlooked the early years of Notenbüchlein production (1780-1800), and
furthermore claimed that these manuscript booklets were part of the nineteenth-century
weeknight singing school movement, when, as will appear, in fact, they were part of the
school curriculum for children.
A German dissertation by Ada Kadelbach (1971) presents an overview of the
hymnody as reflected in the published hymnals of the period.2 Also serving as an
overview is a dissertation written by Paul Yoder on nineteenth-century sacred music in the
Mennonite Church.3 Philip Stoltzfus has written a lengthy senior seminar paper at Goshen
College (1987) on the 1804 Lancaster hymnal, the Unpartheyisch Gesangbuch, in which
he outlines theological themes found in the hymn texts.4 However, there is as yet no study
of Franconia hymnody at the turn of the nineteenth century. This dissertation, therefore,
attempts to break new ground in the study of the music of the Pennsylvania German
Mennonites in the early post-colonial period of the United States.

1 Richard Byron Rosewall, "Singing Schools of Pennsylvania, 1800-1900"
(University of Minnesota, Ph.D. dissertation, 1969).
2 Ada Kadelbach, "Die Hymnodie der Mennoniten in Nordamerika (1742-1860)"
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universit_t, Mainz, Ph.D. dissertation, 1971).
3 Paul M. Yoder, "Nineteenth-Century Sacred Music of the Mennonite Church
in the United States" (Florida State University, Ph.D. dissertation, 1961).
4 Philip Stoltzfus, "Partheyisch or Unpartheyisch?: Theological Themes in the
Hymns of Ein Unpartheyisches Gesang-Buch" (Senior Seminar paper, Goshen
College, Goshen, Ind., 1987).
Methodology
Since no systematic work on the Notenbüchlein in Mennonite communities has
been done to date, the first step in this study was to transcribe the verbal and musical
contents of the booklets. Appendix B presents the written contents of each of the booklets
studied. Appendix D lists the musical incipits for each tune, indicating the Notenbüchlein
in which that tune is found.
The second step was to trace the hymns, both text and tune (Appendices C and E,
respectively). I was able to identify over eighty percent of the texts in pre-existing sources.
Much more difficult was the task of tracing the tunes. Approximately one-half of the tunes
are traceable through text incipit. The genius of hymnody is such, however, that tunes and
texts often lead separate existences. Systematically combing through Zahn's Die Melodien
der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenlieder,1 and all of the possible English-American
publications that might have been used as sources for tunes only, would be a sizeable
undertaking and is left for future research.2 Within the framework of a single dissertation,
an analysis of the tunes based on internal data is possible, however, and has proven to be
musicologically very fruitful.
Of equal interest to the provenance of the hymns is an interpretation of the corpus
with regard to Mennonite history and culture. The first two chapters establish a historical
and musical context, making possible a discussion of the contents from a cultural point of
view. Chapter One focuses on the European setting that gave birth to the Anabaptist
movements, some groups of which later came to be called Mennonites. This is followed
by the story of their emigration to Eastern Pennsylvania. The aim of Chapter Two is to

1 Johannes Zahn, Die Melodien der deutschen evangelischen
Kirchenlieder, aus den Quellen gesch_pft und mitgeteilt, 6
vols. (G_tersloh, 1893, reprinted in Hildesheim: Georg Olms
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963).
2 While an additional handful of tunes have been identified in this manner (in
passing, as it were), identifying the rest is beyond the scope of this study.
provide a sketch of the hymnodies of the various religious groups whose interaction in
Pennsylvania led to the eclectic hymnody of Pennsylvania Mennonites.
The singing tradition of the Franconia Mennonites in both private and public
worship, as well as in the interdenominational schoolhouse, is also addressed in this
chapter. The former is done through a recounting of oral history as told by Brethren and
Mennonite historian Isaac Clarence Kulp.1 For the latter, I explore what is known about
three contemporary schoolmasters, two of whom were Mennonite, the third a Lutheran.
Together, schoolmasters Christopher Dock, Andreas Kolb, and Johann Adam Eyer provide
some understanding of the interdenominational schoolhouse at the end of the eighteenth
century. The question of who the schoolmasters in the various schools actually were in the
period following Johann Adam Eyer and Andreas Kolb, both of whom taught in Mennonite
communities until 1787 and 1803, respectively, is largely unanswered. Records are
scanty, and documents such as the Notenbüchlein are, for the most part, not signed. While
Fraktur experts have speculated as to authorship based on artistic styles, much more
research remains to be done in the area of schoolhouses and schoolmasters -- again,
research that goes beyond the limits of this dissertation.
Building upon the historical and cultural context of the first chapters, the remaining
chapters focus on the Notenbüchlein themselves. Chapter Three introduces the
Notenbüchlein as a genre by describing the various characteristics that define them.
Chapters Four and Five deal with the texts. The first of these chapters provides an
overview of the complete repertoire. The following highlights thematic material in
translation, the sum of which offers an understanding of the theology taught in the inter-
denominational schools. The chapter begins by providing the theological context for

1 Isaac Clarence Kulp has been interested in the Pennsylvania-Mennonite and
Dunker tradition ever since his youth. He has a wealth of information gleaned
from discussions held over the years with older members of the community,
many of whom have since died. These include his Great Uncle Reinhardt
Gottschall, a Franconia Mennonite Vors_nger (song leader) who taught Kulp
much about the nineteenth-century singing tradition.
establishing the Anabaptist-Pietist theological continuum that characterizes the Franconia
communities at this time. Forty-six hymns whose incipits are found in fifty percent and
more of the Notenbüchlein are then examined from the point of view of Anabaptism and
Pietism. The chapter concludes with a summary of the repertoire found in the eighty-one
texted hymns, also from the point of view of Anabaptism and Pietism.
Chapters Six and Seven focus on the tunes. The first of these deals with issues of
notation. The following chapter examines the repertoire from the point of view of tune
ancestry. Chapter Eight concludes with a discussion of the phenomenon of a culture
caught between the "old way" and the "new way," the former being the slow, non-
rhythmic, monophonic musical style, and the latter being music characterized by diversified
rhythm and harmony.
Throughout Chapters Three through Eight, the interpretation of the contents
revolves around two assumptions: 1) that the texts and tunes of the Notenbüchlein reflect
the theology and aesthetics taught in the schoolhouse, and 2) that this pedagogy, in turn,
reinforced, if not influenced, the world view and aesthetics of turn-of-the-century
Franconia Mennonites.
Typographical Conventions
Capitalization of German. Capitalization of words in the original sources is
inconsistent, even within the same source. Therefore, in keeping with guidelines of
German scholarship dealing with similar materials, all nouns are given in lower case, the
exceptions being: first letter of first word in a sentence or title, the words "Gott," "Herr,"
"Jesus," and names of people and places.1

1 See Johannes Schultze, "Richtlinien f_r die _u_ere Textgestaltung bei
Herausgabe von Quellen zur neueren deutschen Geschichte," in Bl_tter f_r
deutsche Landesgeschichte (Neue Folge des
Korrespondenzbl_tter, herausg. von Georg Wilhelm Saute u.
Otto Renkhoff, 98. Jahrg. 1962), 10.
Use of the word Notenbüchlein. While not all of the booklets include the
word Notenbüchlein on the title page, enough carry this designation to warrant the use of
the term to represent the genre as a whole. Notenbüchlein is both a singular and a plural
noun.
Spelling of school names and place names. American place names are
given in the American English spelling. And finally, I have chosen the term Anglo-
American to refer to anything of British or English-American origin.
Acknowledgements
First, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the Mennonite communities out of
which this topic emerged: the Franconia Mennonite Conference. Without their active
interest in their own history, and their attempts to conserve documents from their past, I
would not have had the opportunity to explore this part of Franconia history. I would also
like to acknowledge my own Mennonite upbringing, the roots of which are Swiss
Mennonite on my mother's side, and Franconia Mennonite on my father's side. My four
years in Switzerland as a child as well as my growing up in the Mennonite community of
Goshen, Indiana have contributed to my special perspective on the subject of this
dissertation.
I would like to thank everyone who has helped me along the way during these last
five years: Jan Gleysteen for introducing me to the topic, Mary Jane Lederach Hershey for
her generosity in sharing information she has collected on the Notenbüchlein, Isaac
Clarence Kulp for his willingness to be interviewed, and for his enthusiasm regarding the
Brethren-Mennonite history of the Franconia area, Amos Hoover, who graciously allowed
me to use materials in his extensive book collection, Joel Alderfer for his time and photo-
copying of materials at the Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania library,
Harleysville, Pa., Dennis Moyer for his help at the Schwenkfelder Library, Pottstown,
Pa., Joe Springer for his help at the Mennonite Historical Library, Goshen, Indiana, and