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14 books match the query 'Hymns'

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Filling in the Gap

The Post Pentecost Series of Gospel Antiphones

David Eben, Štefánia Hanusa Demská, and Jan Bilwachs

Karolinum Press, 2025

Provides insight into the world of the Carolingian monks and clerics who created the Liturgy of the Hours.

Filling in the Gap recounts the creative process behind a specific part of the Gregorian Office repertoire that has not been addressed so far. By linking historical and liturgical evidence with musical analysis, the study opens new avenues for grouping manuscripts and interpreting their interrelationships. The catalogue of melodies included in this volume contains transcriptions of the post-Pentecost antiphon repertoire from twenty-four manuscripts across Western Europe.

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Hymns / Inni

Giuseppe Verdi

University of Chicago Press, 2007

This newest volume in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi series comprises his only two surviving secular choral works: Inno popolare, or Hymn of the People, for unaccompanied male chorus, and Inno delle nazioni, or Hymn of the Nations, for tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra.

Verdi wrote the brief Inno popolare in 1848 at the behest of the Italian philosopher and patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, intending that it become an anthem for Italy at a time when the country had just driven away its Austrian overlords. He wrote no more independent patriotic pieces until he was asked in 1861 to represent his country with a patriotic composition at a musical jubilee during London’s International Exhibition of 1862. The resulting piece was Inno delle nazioni, the critical edition of which is based on Verdi’s autograph score, preserved at the British Library. Other important sources include the composer's musical sketches, recently discovered in the Verdi family villa, and the performing parts Toscanini used for a BBC broadcast in 1943.

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Millennial Praises

A Shaker Hymnal

Christian Goodwillie

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

From the very beginning in the 1770s, singing was an important part of the worship services of the Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Yet until the early nineteenth century, nearly all Shaker songs were wordless—expressed in unknown tongues or as enthusiastic vocalizations. Only when Shaker missionaries moved west into Ohio and Kentucky did they begin composing hymn texts, chiefly as a means of conveying the sect's unconventional religious ideas to new converts. In 1812–13, the Shakers published their first hymnal. This venture, titled Millennial Praises, included the texts without music for one hundred and forty hymns and elucidated the radical and feminist theology of the Shakers, neatly distilled in verse. This scholarly edition of the hymnal joins the texts to original Shaker tunes for the first time. One hundred and twenty-six of the tunes preserved in the Society's manuscript hymnals have been transcribed from Shaker musical notation into modern standard notation, thus opening this important religious and folk repertoire to modern scholars. Many texts are presented with a wide range of variant tunes from Shaker communities in New England, New York, Ohio, and Kentucky. Introductory essays by volume editors Christian Goodwillie and Jane F. Crosthwaite place Millennial Praises in the context of Shaker history and offer a thorough explication of the Society's theology. They track the use of the hymnal from the point of publication up to the present day, beginning with the use of the hymns by both Shaker missionaries and anti-Shaker apostates and ending with the current use of the hymns by the last remaining Shaker family at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The volume includes a CD of historical recordings of six Shaker songs by Brother Ricardo Belden, the last member of the Society at Hancock Shaker Village.

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O Sing unto the Lord

A History of English Church Music

Andrew Gant

University of Chicago Press, 2017

For as long as people have worshipped together, music has played a key role in church life. With O Sing unto the Lord, Andrew Gant offers a fascinating history of English church music, from the Latin chant of late antiquity to the great proliferation of styles seen in contemporary repertoires.

The ornate complexity of pre-Reformation Catholic liturgies revealed the exclusive nature of this form of worship. By contrast, simple English psalms, set to well-known folk songs, summed up the aims of the Reformation with its music for everyone. The Enlightenment brought hymns, the Methodists and Victorians a new delight in the beauty and emotion of worship. Today, church music mirrors our multifaceted worldview, embracing the sounds of pop and jazz along with the more traditional music of choir and organ. And reflecting its truly global reach, the influence of English church music can be found in everything from masses sung in Korean to American Sacred Harp singing.

From medieval chorales to “Amazing Grace,” West Gallery music to Christmas carols, English church music has broken through the boundaries of time, place, and denomination to remain familiar and cherished everywhere. Expansive and sure to appeal to all music lovers, O Sing unto the Lord is the biography of a tradition, a book about people, and a celebration of one of the most important sides to our cultural heritage.

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Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns

An Introduction

Alan Lenzi

SBL Press, 2011

A thorough text for students of ancient Mesopotamian religion and the Hebrew Bible

Alan Lenzi places Akkadian prayers and hymns within both a religious studies perspective and a Mesopotamian studies perspective. Complete with vocabulary glosses, grammatical notes, literary commentary, and comparative suggestions to biblical material, this book provides a crucial tool for accessing ancient texts related to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible.

Features:

Background essays
Discussion of classes of Mesopotamian prayers and their comparative use in biblical studies
Akkadian text, transliteration, translation, and commentary
Notes on vocabulary and grammar

Alan Lenziis Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East at University of the Pacific. He is the author of Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project).

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Sedulius, The Paschal Song and Hymns

Carl P. Springer

SBL Press, 2013

This is the first complete English translation of the poetic works of Sedulius, a Christian Latin poet of late antiquity whose biblical epic and hymns were enormously popular during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The introduction places the poet and his works into his historical and literary contexts, followed by the Latin text of Sedulius’s poetic works with English translation on facing pages. Notes on linguistic and historical matters are designed to help the reader with little or no Latin and only some familiarity with Sedulius’s classical and biblical sources. Appendices supply texts and translations of incidental related materials, including Sedulius’s dedicatory letters; biographical notices, subscriptions, and laudatory poems associated with Sedulius’s works in the manuscript tradition; and representative excerpts from Sedulius’s own prose paraphrase of the Paschale Carmen. The volume includes a bibliography and index.

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Sing Them Over Again to Me

Hymns and Hymnbooks in America

Edited by Mark A. Noll and Edith L. Blumhofer

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Hymns and hymnbooks as American historical and cultural icons.

This work is a study of the importance of Protestant hymns in defining America and American religion. It explores the underappreciated influence of hymns in shaping many spheres of personal and corporate life as well as the value of hymns for studying religious life. Distinguishing features of this volume are studies of the most popular hymns (“Amazing Grace,” “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”), with attention to the ability of such hymns to reveal, as they are altered and adapted, shifts in American popular religion. The book also focuses attention on the role hymns play in changing attitudes about race, class, gender, economic life, politics, and society.

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Singing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land

Hymnody in the History of North American Protestantism

Edith L. Blumhofer

University of Alabama Press, 2008

The latest scholarship on the role of hymns in American evangelicalism

Music and song are important parts of worship, and hymns have long played a central role in Protestant cultural history. This book explores the ways in which Protestants have used and continue to use hymns to clarify their identity and define their relationship with America and to Christianity. Representing seven groups—Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Holiness, Hispanics, and Evangelicals—the nine essays reveal how hymns have helped immigrants to establish new identities, contributed to the body of worship resources, and sustained ethnic identity.

Individual essays address the music of the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, America’s longest running and most successful independent radio program; singing among Swedish evangelicals in America; the German hymn tradition as transformed by Mennonite immigrants; the ways hymnody reinforces themes of the Wesleyan holiness movement; the history of Mercer’s Cluster (1810), a southern hymnal that gave voice to slaves, women, and native Americans; and the Presbyterian hymnal tradition in Canada formed by Scottish immigrants.

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Spencer Kimball's Record Collection

Essays on Mormon Music

Michael Hicks

Signature Books, 2020

At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960s. It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball’s record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place. There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism’s best-known scholar of musical life.

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The Hymns on Faith

Jeffrey T. St. Ephrem the Syrian

Catholic University of America Press, 2015

Ephrem is known for a theology that relies heavily on symbol and for a keen awareness of Jewish exegetical traditions. Yet he is also our earliest source for the reception of Nicaea among Syriac-speaking Christians. It is in his eighty-seven Hymns on Faith - the longest extant piece of early Syriac literature - that he develops his arguments against subordinationist christologies most fully. These hymns, most likely delivered orally and compiled after the author's death, were composed in Nisibis and Edessa between the 350s ans 373. They reveal an author conversant with Christological debates further to the west, but responding in a uniquely Syriac idiom. As such, they form an essential source for reconstructing the development of pro-Nicene thought in the eastern Mediterranean.

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The Lucca Choirbook

Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 238; Lucca, Archivio Arcivescovile, MS 97; Pisa, Archivo Arcivescovile, Biblioteca Maffi, Cartella 11/III

Edited and with an Introduction and Inventory by Reinhard Strohm

University of Chicago Press, 2009

More than forty years ago in the state archives of Lucca, Italy, musicologist Reinhard Strohm noticed that bindings on some of the books were unusual: they consisted of the pages of a centuries-old music manuscript. In the following years, Strohm worked with the archivists to remove these leaves and reassemble as much as possible of the original manuscript, a major cultural recovery now known as The Lucca Choirbook.

The recovered volume comprises what remains of a gigantic cathedral codex commissioned in Bruges around 1463 and containing English, Franco-Flemish, and Italian sacred music of the fifteenth century—including works by the celebrated composers Guillaume Du Fay and Henricus Isaac.

This facsimile of the choirbook includes all the known leaves, ordered according to their proper placement in the original codex. In the introduction, Strohm tells the fascinating story of this choirbook, identifying its early users and reconstructing its travel from Bruges to Lucca.

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The Makers of the Sacred Harp

David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note singing. Where other studies of the Sacred Harp have focused on the sociology of present-day singers and their activities, David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan concentrate on the regional culture that produced the Sacred Harp in the nineteenth century and delve deeply into history of its authors and composers. They trace the sources of every tune and text in the Sacred Harp, from the work of B. F. White, E. J. King, and their west Georgia contemporaries who helped compile the original collection in 1844 to the contributions by various composers to the 1936 to 1991 editions.

The Makers of the Sacred Harp also includes analyses of the textual influences on the music--including metrical psalmody, English evangelical poets, American frontier preachers, camp meeting hymnody, and revival choruses--and essays placing the Sacred Harp as a product of the antebellum period with roots in religious revivalism. Drawing on census reports, local histories, family Bibles and other records, rich oral interviews with descendants, and Sacred Harp Publishing Company records, this volume reveals new details and insights about the history of this enduring American musical tradition.

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The Proper of Time

Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, Volume 1

Andrew Wadsworth

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

Cantate Domino is a five-volume commentary on the texts of the newly translated hymns of the Liturgy of the Hours. The hymns which recently appeared for the first time as a single corpus of English texts, will be included in the forthcoming USCCB revised edition of the Liturgy of the Hours. The hymns are drawn from among the very finest authors of the first millennium: Ambrose, Prudentius, and Gregory the Great together with later authors such as Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII, and twentieth century authors who composed new hymns to be used in the psalter and celebration of the saints in the present Universal Calendar. The commentary concentrates on the Latin texts of the Liturgia Horarum, elucidated by the recently approved International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) translations. Commentaries have been prepared by a team of international scholars who bring both the depth of their knowledge together with the insights of those who have prepared liturgical texts in English during the sixty years of ICEL's existence. Previously unpublished material from ICEL's archives, including documents of the Consilium, which prepared the Latin texts for the liturgical books promulgated after the Second Vatican Council, will appear alongside commentaries which identify and explain biblical, classical, and liturgical allusions in the liturgical texts in a way that is of service to clergy, religious, liturgists, and students of the liturgy as well as the non-specialist reader, and all who seek to pray the Prayer of the Church with greater understanding.

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We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moveran

Biography of a Song of Struggle

David Spener

Temple University Press, 2016

The activist anthem “We Shall Not Be Moved” expresses resolve in the face of adversity; it helps members of social movements persevere in their struggles to build a better world. The exact origins of the song are unknown, but it appears to have begun as a Protestant revival song sung by rural whites and African slaves in the southeastern United States in the early nineteenth century. The song was subsequently adopted by U.S. labor and civil rights activists, students and workers opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and by Chilean supporters of that country’s socialist government in the early 1970s.

In his fascinating biography, We Shall Not Be Moved, David Spener details the history and the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung. He analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses to explore how songs can serve as an invaluable resource to participants in movements for social change.

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