Music from Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

A little over three weeks ago, Bright Shiny Things released Voices in the Wilderness, a world-premiere recording of four-part a cappella sacred music from eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The music was composed by residents of the Ephrata Cloister, which was established in what is now Lancaster County. The community had its origins in the pietistic Schwarzenau Brethren movement of Alexander Mack from the German village of Schwarzenau. Johann Conrad Beissel brought the movement to Ephrata in Pennsylvania in 1732.

The recording marks the first time that this music has been performed by a professional ensemble. Christopher Dylan Herbert selected, transcribed, and edited the original Ephrata manuscripts. Of the eleven selections on the album, only two have an explicitly identified composer, identified as Sister Föben, meaning that this is the work of the first known female composer in America. Composers of the music on the remaining nine tracks have not yet been identified (and may never be).

Words took priority over music in pietist hymns. Thus, all the selections that Herbert prepared are four-part homophonic settings with embellishment kept as spare as possible. All of the texts are in German, and the accompanying booklet provides English translations. The music itself is strophic, presumably to make sure that both the vocalists and the congregation concentrate more on the words.

The performance of Herbert’s selections took place at the Ephrata Cloister, most likely in the structure known as the praying building:

photograph by Hermann Luyken, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

He arranged for one-to-a-part singing by soprano Elizabeth Bates, countertenor Clifton Massey, tenor Niels Neubert, and bass Steven Hrycelak. Having gone to high school in a suburb of Philadelphia, I had been aware of the extent to which Pennsylvania accommodated a diversity of religious practices when settlement began in the seventeenth century. (As might be suspected of education during the middle of the twentieth century, little was said about the practices of the tribes living on that land before the arrival of both the Dutch and the English.) Voices in the Wilderness provides a new perspective on one of those religious practices.