Millennial Praises is the first published collection of Shaker hymns. It was first printed by the Shakers in 1812.
Millennial Praises is the first published collection of Shaker hymns. It was first printed by the Shakers in 1812.
The Shakers began writing down their hymns as a means of conveying their religious philosophy to new converts. [1] [2] Thousands of handwritten hymns were recorded in hundreds of manuscripts. [3]
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Shakers began moving west from New York, into Ohio and Kentucky. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, there were at least five communities and as many as twenty in Ohio and Kentucky. [4] [5] This western expansion brought about the idea for collecting the hymns into a printed book. The scribes could no longer keep up with the pace of copying new hymns that were being composed both at New Lebanon in New York and in the western communities, where fully two-thirds of the hymns were being written. [6] From this body of handwritten hymns were selected the 140 hymns published in Millennial Praises. [7]
Millennial Praises was the first published Shaker hymn book. [2] [8] [9] [10] Many printed Shaker hymn books followed. [11] The Millennial Praises hymnal contained only the words of the 140 hymns, without any musical notation. [7] [12] [13] The hymns were about Christ, God, love, praise, work, and the growth of the Shaker communities. [8] The hymns also conveyed the idea that males and females are equal – an idea connected to the value of celibacy in Shakerism. [11] The first hymn in the Millennial Praises reflects the Shaker viewpoint that God is both male and female. [14] The Shakers claimed that nearly all the words in the hymn book were spiritual "gifts", and that only a few words were derived from other sources. [3]
The first edition, compiled by Seth Y. Wells and edited by Richard McNemar of the Union Village Shaker settlement, was titled Millennial Praises Parts I and II Containing a Collection of Gospel Hymns. [15] It was printed at Hancock, Massachusetts, in 1812. [7] [16] The 1813 edition, again published in Hancock, had four parts and was titled Millennial Praises, Containing a Collection of Gospel Hymns in Four Parts, adapted to the day of Christ's second appearing – composed for the use of his people. [15] McNemar composed about 70 of the 140 hymns, and about a dozen were written by Issachar Bates, a Shaker poet. [6] In Spiritual Wine (see hymn illustration), Bates uses the drunkenness one gets from wine as a metaphor for the Shakers' philosophy of drunkenness through spiritual wine. [6]
About the time of the publication of Millennial Praises, the Shakers began to record song melodies using different systems. The "letteral notations" for adaptation of the hymns to music were slowly developed over the next few decades. There were debates as to which system was the best to achieve uniformity among all the Shaker villages. They developed a "tone-ometer" to set a consistent pitch for the songs and a "mode-ometer" to set the tempo. In 1843 Isaac N. Youngs published his instruction manual, A Short Abridgement of the Rules of Music. In 1847 Russell Haskell published his instruction manual, The Musical Expositor. [4] The first hymn book published with musical notation, using many of the Millennial Praises hymns, was produced in 1852 by Henry Blinn under the title, A Sacred Repository of Hymns. [7]
A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, 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.
The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers, are a millenarian restorationist Christian sect founded c. 1747 in England and then organized in the United States in the 1780s. They were initially known as "Shaking Quakers" because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services. Espousing egalitarian ideals, women took on spiritual leadership roles alongside men, including founding leaders such as Jane Wardley, Ann Lee, and Lucy Wright. The Shakers emigrated from England and settled in Revolutionary colonial America, with an initial settlement at Watervliet, New York, in 1774. They practice a celibate and communal utopian lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s. They are also known for their simple living, architecture, technological innovation, music, and furniture.
A hymnal or hymnary is a collection of hymns, usually in the form of a book, called a hymnbook. They are used in congregational singing. A hymnal may contain only hymn texts ; written melodies are extra, and more recently harmony parts have also been provided.
The English Hymnal is a hymn book which was published in 1906 for the Church of England by Oxford University Press. It was edited by the clergyman and writer Percy Dearmer and the composer and music historian Ralph Vaughan Williams, and was a significant publication in the history of Anglican church music.
Kingdom songs are the hymns sung by Jehovah's Witnesses at their religious meetings. Since 1879, the Watch Tower Society has published hymnal lyrics; by the 1920s they had published hundreds of adapted and original songs, and by the 1930s they referred to these as "Kingdom songs" in reference to God's Kingdom.
Hymns are an important part of the history and worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"While shepherds watched their flocks" is a traditional Christmas carol describing the Annunciation to the Shepherds, with words attributed to Irish hymnist, lyricist and England's Poet Laureate Nahum Tate. It is listed as number 16898 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
Theodore Norbert Marier was a church musician, educator, arranger and scholar of Gregorian Chant. He founded St. Paul's Choir School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1963, and served as the second president of the Church Music Association of America.
Mount Lebanon Shaker Society, also known as New Lebanon Shaker Society, was a communal settlement of Shakers in New Lebanon, New York. The earliest converts began to "gather in" at that location in 1782 and built their first meetinghouse in 1785. The early Shaker Ministry, including Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, the architects of Shakers' gender-balanced government, lived there.
Issachar Bates was among the most prolific poets and songwriters among the early 19th century Shakers. Several of his songs, poems, and ballads are known outside of the Shaker movement, including "Rights of Conscience," written around 1808 and included in the Shakers' first printed hymnbook, Millennial Praises, and "Come Life, Shaker Life", written between 1835 and 1837.
Hancock Shaker Village is a former Shaker commune in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It emerged in the towns of Hancock, Pittsfield, and Richmond in the 1780s, organized in 1790, and was active until 1960. It was the third of nineteen major Shaker villages established between 1774 and 1836 in New York, New England, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. From 1790 until 1893, Hancock was the seat of the Hancock Bishopric, which oversaw two additional Shaker communes in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and Enfield, Connecticut.
Isaac Newton Youngs was a member of the Shakers. He was a prolific scribe, correspondent, and diarist who documented the history of the New Lebanon, New York Church Family of Shakers from 1815 to 1865.
The Chinese New Hymnal was published in the early 1980s and is the main hymnal used by the Protestant churches registered through the TSPM in present-day China.
Lucy Wright was the leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also known as the Shakers, from 1796 until 1821. At that time, a woman's leadership of a religious sect was a radical departure from Protestant Christianity.
"The Morning Breaks, the Shadows Flee" is an 1840 hymn written by Latter Day Saint apostle Parley P. Pratt.
"What Wondrous Love Is This" is a Christian folk hymn from the American South. Its text was first published in 1811, during the Second Great Awakening, and its melody derived from a popular English ballad. Today it is a widely known hymn included in hymnals of many Christian denominations.
The early chronology of Shakers is a list of important events pertaining to the early history Shakers, a denomination of Christianity. Millenarians who believe that their founder, Ann Lee, experienced the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Shakers practice celibacy, confession of sin, communalism, ecstatic worship, pacifism, and egalitarianism. This list cover the periods from 1747 to 1826. This spans the emergence of denomination in the mid-18th century, the emigration of the Shakers to New York on the eve of the American Revolution, and subsequent missionary work and the establishment of nineteen major planned communities.
The Union Village Shaker settlement was a village organized by Shakers in Turtlecreek Township, Warren County, Ohio.
Hymnody in continental Europe developed from early liturgical music, especially Gregorian chant. Music became more complicated as embellishments and variations were added, along with influences from secular music. Although vernacular leisen and vernacular or mixed-language carols were sung in the Middle Ages, more vernacular hymnody emerged during the Protestant Reformation, although ecclesiastical Latin continued to be used after the Reformation. Since then, developments have shifted between isorhythmic, homorhythmic, and more rounded musical forms with some lilting. Theological underpinnings influenced the narrative point of view used, with Pietism especially encouraging the use of the first person singular. In the last several centuries, many songs from Evangelicalism have been translated from English into German.
In 1812–13, the Shakers published their first hymnal.
