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A Collection Of Gospel Hymns In Ojibway And English Anonymous



Four of his original stanzas are included in the Psalter Hymnal along with a fifth anonymous and apocalyptic stanza first found in A Collection of Sacred Ballads (1790). The fifth stanza was first published separately in the 1859 edition of The Sacred Harp and joined to Newton's text in Edwin O. Excell's Coronation Hymns (1910); it has been associated with Newton's text ever since. The Hymnal 1982 Companion calls it "an example of a 'wandering' stanza in [common meter] that appears at the end of a variety of hymns in nineteenth-century hymnals" (Vol. Three B, 671).




A Collection of Gospel Hymns in Ojibway and English Anonymous



The history of Canadian printed collections, with music, of hymns and metrical psalms - traditionally the grass-roots of the 'sacred music' repertoire - starts with Stephen Humbert'sUnion Harmony (Saint John, NB, 1801; later editions 1816, 1831, 1840). This is a substantial (over 300 pages) oblong-octavo volume resembling publications of US composers of the Revolutionary era such as Swan, Read, Belknap, and Billings, each of whom in fact is represented in it by several tunes. Tunes from contemporaneous English sources are also found, and there are over two dozen original works by the compiler, Humbert (hymn tunes and anthems), who often approximates the angular harmonies of his colleagues in New England and sometimes adopts their 'fuguing tune' format, whereby a crudely imitative texture is applied to the final phrase or two of a verse, as a contrast to chordal treatment of the earlier 1ines. In his introductory 'Advertisement' to the 1816 edition Humbert defends this style. 'Gagetown' and 'Singing school' (the latter to his own text) are examples. 'Halifax' with its dramatic changes of tempo and metre, and the graceful, wide-ranging 'Remembrance' well represent his non-fuguing practice.


These two compilations establish the two main influences found in succeeding tunebooks and hymnals. The US oblong format, with melody in the tenor part, predominates in the first part of the 19th century. Only gradually does the British upright reintroduce itself after 1860. US tunes from the popular 'Yankee tunesmiths' were familiar throughout much of the 19th century in Canada, to judge from the continual reappearances of 'China' by Timothy Swan, 'Russia' by Daniel Read, and 'Lenox' by Lewis Edson, even though by the end of the century the latter two are reharmonized and divested of their original 'fuguing' character. The newer and more musically 'literate' style of tune, associated in the USA with Lowell Mason, infiltrates from the 1840s on as do Victorian favourites by Dykes, Gauntlett, and Stainer. After the mid-century, Canadian collections reflect the new appeal of the gospel style, though some do so only in separate appendices devoted to music for evangelical occasions.


To the music of the traditional psalters and the 18th-century Handelian inheritance some tunebooks add folk hymns - some of whose melodies, often reminiscent in their modality and phrasing of Anglo-Celtic, German, and French folk songs, derive from an influential New England collection, Jeremiah Ingalls' The Christian Harmony (Exeter, NH 1805). Such incorporations suggest the existence of an improvised-hymnody practice in early Canada comparable to that found in some US regions - a point which in 1991 had yet to be thoroughly explored by scholars.


Some pre-Confederation collections contain original tunes and characteristic harmonizations that deserve revival. Such sources are Mark Burnham's Colonial Harmonist (Port Hope, Ont 1832 - the preface says 'no musical treatise has hitherto been published in this Colony'), the large and anonymously edited Harmonicon (Pictou, NS 1836; later editions 1841, 1855), J.P. Clarke'sCanadian Church Psalmody (Toronto 1845), Davidson's Sacred Harmony already noted, and George Linton's The Vocalist (Toronto 1865 or 1867). Notable individual tunes are Burnham's modal 'Hermitage,' a tune called 'Toronto' attributable to Davidson, 'York New Church' by W.H. Warren, and Clarke's 'Christ Church,' with its quotation of a phrase from Haydn's Creation.


Hymnology - especially research in Canadian hymnody, ie, in the repertoire of tunes and texts produced in Canada - has become increasingly emphasized. Wesley Berg and Peter Letkemann have investigated the music of the Mennonite hymns, and ethnomusicologists such as Beverley Diamond have studied hymns as a factor in native cultures. A conference convened by the Institute for Canadian Music at the University of Toronto, 7-8 Feb 1986, brought together scholars from various centres representing several disciplines (music, church history, cultural studies); the proceedings were published as Sing Out the Glad News, borrowing the title of a Canadian gospel-song collection of 1885. The same year, 1986, saw publication of CMH, vol 5, an historical anthology of 310 tunes, some in several versions, drawn from over 60 tunebooks and hymnals published in Canada before the middle of the 20th century.


The singing of hymns in Canada goes back to the 17th century when Récollet and Jesuit missionaries (see Missionaries) arrived from France to plant the Christian gospel in the new land. They employed the hymn not only as a vehicle of worship, but also as an evangelical tool, a means of spreading the faith. According to the Jesuit Relations their training must have been considerable, for they not only led the singing at worship but they also instructed their converts on the best mode of singing. 'All the savages,' it states, 'have much aptitude and inclination for singing the hymns of the Church, which have been rendered into their language' (vol 60, p 145). Antiphonal singing between men and women was employed frequently. Native melodies with a minimum of alteration supplemented French songs. Four-part singing at Quebec in 1646 is documented. Accompaniment was provided by viols or violins brought from France and probably also by flutes and recorders. After the middle of the 17th century an organ was in use in Quebec City to support the singing. Up to the time of the British era in Canada the singing of hymns was as a rule confined to religious instruction. Hymns were sung at Mass, but not by the congregation, whose participation was limited to certain liturgical responses.


With the arrival of the protestant settlers in the Maritimes and the Canadas came considerable diversity. The tradition of metrical psalms was cultivated especially by the Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, and later Methodists, and gradually these groups, and to a limited extent the Baptists and Congregationalists, assimilated the new reflective and instructional hymns (including texts by Watts, Newton, and the Wesleys) to their repertoires. Prior to the early 19th century hymnbooks and psalters were imported, and most were without music. The use of a precentor to lead the singing, and the device of 'lining-out' - the singers repeating each line of a hymn after a precentor or teacher - are frequently mentioned. The same tune could be sung to a variety of different hymns, since metrical patterns were few. Through the use of sight-singing methods found in the imported collections and in the earliest locally-published tunebooks, aided sometimes by the singing school movement, many adults and children acquired familiarity with a basic fund of tunes and texts, participating in them not just in church but in social and home groups as well.


By the end of the 19th century the influence of gospel music had made itself felt. Denominational hymn-and-tune collections of the early 20th century incorporated some of the best-known US and Canadian gospel songs, sometimes with misgivings over their affront to traditional ideas of appropriateness and good taste. These developments however proved a mere hint of the popularization of hymn singing brought about through the advent of radio and recordings and later through the pop revolution of the 1960s. 2ff7e9595c


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