Hutterite Songs (review)

Reviewed by: Hutterite Songs Doreen Helen Klassen Hutterite Songs. By Helen Martens . ( Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies.) Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2002. [ xxi, 330 p. ISBN 1-894710-24-X $29.] Music examples, bibliography. For the past several decades, folklorists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and literary scholars have been engaged in vigorous debate over the nature of oral transmission of both texts and music. Helen Martens's revision of her doctoral dissertation on the origins and aural transmission of Hutterite hymn tunes (Hutterite Songs: The Origins and Aural Transmission of Their Melodies from the Sixteenth Century [Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1968]) is a welcome addition to this literature. Hutterite Songs traces the musical roots of the 450-year-old tradition of unaccompanied unison singing among the Hutterites, a communal society that now resides in central and western Canada but had its roots in the Protestant Reformation. Using both musical and sociological data, Martens links traditional Hutterite hymn tunes to a myriad of sacred and secular sources emanating from the medieval period to the German Reformation in the early sixteenth century. For this revision, Martens examines "the relationship between Hutterite history and music, Hutterite theology of music, and their singing practices" (p. xxi). This objective is addressed [End Page 462] most explicitly through an overview of Hutterite history (chap. 1) and a brief discussion of Hutterite musical aesthetics and singing praxis (chap. 2), although these themes continue to thread their way throughout the ensuing discussion. Martens devotes the majority of her book (chaps. 3-9) to identifying and contextualizing musical precedents for Hutterite hymn tunes associated with Die Lieder der Hutterischen Brüder (The Songs of the Hutterian Brethren, or LHBr). While hymn texts in this official Hutterite hymnal (edited by the Hutterite Brethren of America [Scottdale, PA: Mennonitisches Verlagshaus, 1914]), have been passed down via hand-written manuscripts since the early sixteenth century, melodies for the 347 songs are not notated in the hymnal. Instead, they are indicated by tune-names only, making the task of tracing through four centuries of oral tradition a daunting one. Martens's persistence in finding musical precedents was fueled in part by her quest to disprove German music scholar Franz Magnus Böhme's assertion that folk melodies still in the active repertoire in the late nineteenth century "[could] be traced back no further than the eighteenth century" (Franz Magnus Böhme, Altdeutsches Liederbuch [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1877] p. lxx, quoted in Martens, p. xvi). Her persistence was generously rewarded. Careful perusal of historic sources enabled Martens to find transcriptions of all but two of the more than 180 Hutterite melodies designated for LHBr song texts. Subsequent recording of these melodies among Canadian Hutterites in the mid-1960s often revealed a surprising similarity to a wide range of counterparts from earlier centuries. Thus, Martens was able to demonstrate that Hutterite hymns still sung in the twentieth century have their sources in genres such as medieval liturgical chant (chap. 5), Renaissance court songs (chap. 3), sixteenth-century sacred and secular folk tunes (chaps. 4 and 9), and Reformation hymnody (chaps. 6-8), all extant well before Böhme's eighteenth-century cutoff point. As Martens notes, it is surprising that a group which was scattered and almost decimated by religious persecution shortly after its beginning has maintained a centuries-long hymn tradition. In fact, she notes that Hutterites still sing about forty of their original melodies, including "Es warb ein Knab nach ritterlichen Dingen," a melody "German scholars had declared lost" (p. 291). Present-day Hutterites themselves were surprised to discover that the melody they use for their communion hymn is that of a thirteenth-century Catholic chant, "Pange lingua." Inclusion of both original and present-day versions of many of these tunes allows the reader to enter fully into Martens's discussion. For the curious reader, the endnotes offer a wealth of information and substantiate textual comments concerning the socio-historical context of Hutterite music making. The endnotes, for example, offer further insight into the Hutterite proscription against instrumental music (p. 113, n. 9) and the Meistersinger song-writing tradition (p. 116, n. 63; p. 188, n. 14). Additionally, they...

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