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A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word hymn derives from Greek ὕμνος (hymnos), which means "a song of praise". A writer of hymns is known as a hymnist. The singing or composition of hymns is called hymnody. Collections of hymns are known as hymnals or hymn books. Hymns may or may not include instrumental accompaniment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Parsonsfield is a town in York County, Maine, United States. The population was 1,898 at the 2010 census. Parsonsfield includes the villages of Kezar Falls, Parsonsfield, and North, East and South Parsonsfield. It is part of the Portland–South Portland–Biddeford, Maine metropolitan statistical area.
Orlando Gibbons was an English composer, virginalist and organist who was one of the last masters of the English Madrigal School. By the 1610s he was the leading composer and organist in England, with a career cut short by his sudden death in 1625. As a result, Gibbons's oeuvre was not as large as that of his contemporaries, like the elder William Byrd, but his compositional versatility led to him having written significant works in virtually every form of his day. He is often seen as a transitional figure from the Renaissance to the Baroque periods.
A singing school is a school in which students are taught to sightread vocal music. Singing schools are a long-standing cultural institution in the Southern United States. While some singing schools are offered for credit, most are informal programs.
Lowell Mason was a leading figure in American church music, the composer of over 1600 hymn tunes, many of which are often sung today. His best-known work includes an arrangement of Joy to the World and the tune Bethany, which sets the hymn text Nearer, My God, to Thee. Mason also set music to Mary Had A Little Lamb. He is largely credited with introducing music into American public schools, and is considered the first important U.S. music educator. He has also been criticized for helping to largely eliminate the robust tradition of participatory sacred music that flourished in America before his time.
"Away in a Manger" is a Christmas carol first published in the late nineteenth century and used widely throughout the English-speaking world. In Britain, it is one of the most popular carols; a 1996 Gallup Poll ranked it joint second. Although it was long claimed to be the work of German religious reformer Martin Luther, the carol is now thought to be wholly American in origin. The two most-common musical settings are by William J. Kirkpatrick (1895) and James Ramsey Murray (1887).
George Luther Stearns was an American industrialist and merchant in Medford, Massachusetts, as well as an abolitionist and a noted recruiter of black soldiers for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
William Tudor was a leading citizen of Boston, sometime literary man, and cofounder of the North American Review and the Boston Athenæum. It was Tudor who christened Boston The Athens of America in an 1819 letter. His brother Frederic Tudor founded the Tudor Ice Company and became Boston's "Ice King", shipping ice to the tropics from many local sources of fresh water including Walden Pond, Fresh Pond, and Spy Pond in Arlington, Massachusetts.
George Frederick Root was an American songwriter, who found particular fame during the American Civil War, with songs such as "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom". He is regarded as the first American to compose a secular cantata.
Wally Harper was an American musical director, composer, conductor, dance arranger, and musical supervisor for many Broadway and Off-Broadway productions. For three decades from the mid-1970s, he worked with Barbara Cook as pianist, music director and arranger.
Henry Ware Jr. was an influential Unitarian theologian, early member of the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, and first president of the Harvard Musical Association. He was a mentor of Ralph Waldo Emerson when Emerson studied for the ministry in the 1820s.
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was an American journalist, author, reformer, and abolitionist. Sanborn was a social scientist, and a memorialist of American transcendentalism who wrote early biographies of many of the movement's key figures. He founded the American Social Science Association, in 1865, "to treat wisely the great social problems of the day". He was a member of the so-called Secret Six, or "Committee of Six", which funded or helped obtain funding for John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry.
The Yale Collection of Musical Instruments, a division of the Yale School of Music, is a museum in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1900 by a gift of historic keyboard instruments from Morris Steinert, and later enriched in 1960 and 1962 by the acquisition of the Belle Skinner and Emil Herrmann collections. Initially housed under the dome of Woolsey Hall, it was moved in 1961 to a historic Romanesque structure on Hillhouse Avenue, constructed in 1895 for the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.
A hymn tune is the melody of a musical composition to which a hymn text is sung. Musically speaking, a hymn is generally understood to have four-part harmony, a fast harmonic rhythm, with or without refrain or chorus.
Edward Jones was a Welsh harpist, bard, performer, composer, arranger, and collector of music. He was commonly known by the bardic name of "Bardd y Brenin", which he took in 1820, when King George IV, his patron, came to the throne.
John Parry, commonly known by his bardic name Bardd Alaw, was a Welsh harpist and composer.
Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer was one of the foremost scholars in African-American gospel music.
"We Are Coming, Father Abra'am", is a poem written by James S. Gibbons, set to music by eight different composers, including Stephen Foster. William Cullen Bryant published one version (with music by Luther Orlando Emerson. Bryant's newspaper originally published the poem and, because it was originally published anonymously, many assumed it was his, and it was widely republished, so Bryant issued a statement denying his authorship. The poem and music came in response to a call by Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1862 for volunteers to fight for the U.S. in the American Civil War.
Church music during the Reformation developed during the Protestant Reformation in two schools of thought, the regulative and normative principles of worship, based on reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther. They derived their concepts in response to the Catholic church music, which they found distracting and too ornate. Both principles also pursued use of the native tongue, either alongside or in place of liturgical Latin.
References
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). . Encyclopedia Americana .
