The Protestant denominations of the Amish (56,200 adult members in the USA in 1990) and Mennonites (380,500 in North America) have a common source in the Anabaptist movement of 16th-century Europe. In the 1520s the first group, the Swiss Brethren, separated from the early Reformers and the Roman Catholics for reasons more radical than those of Luther or Zwingli: believers’ baptism (thus Anabaptists, Rebaptizers), separation of Church and State, and the commitment to discipleship of Christ to the point of rejecting participation in war. Anabaptists emerged in Bohemia, south Germany and the Netherlands within the following decade.
Although a few Anabaptist leaders followed Zwingli’s example in advocating the complete elimination of music from church services, Anabaptists who were persecuted for their faith soon produced a distinctive hymnody. The first publication, Etlicher schöner christlicher Geseng (1564), was a collection of 53 hymns composed by prisoners at Passau between 1535 and 1540. It was followed by Ausbund, das ist etliche schöne christliche Lieder (1583), its first part consisting of 80 Anabaptist hymns from as early as 1524 onwards and its second of all but three of the 53 hymns from the 1564 collection. Up to 1838 the Ausbund appeared in 11 known European editions.
Mennonites, as 17th-century Anabaptists were called – after Menno Simons (d 1561) – took the Ausbund to America in 1683, when they began a long succession of emigrations. The Amish, following the Swiss bishop Jacob Ammann, broke away from the Mennonites in Europe in 1693 over matters relating to stricter discipline and adherence to uniformity of dress. They first emigrated to America in about 1720 and also took the Ausbund with them. It was printed at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1742 and has remained in print ever since. The Ausbund, still the most used hymnal of the Old Order Amish, is thus unique in Protestant hymnody in having been in continuous use for over 400 years.
The retention of past traditions is essential to the Amish, who still speak in a German dialect, dress in 17th-century fashions and reject many aspects of a technological age. Their church singing is unique: always monophonic, melismatic, unaccompanied, non-metrical and extremely slow. Because they do not record their worship on principle, few recordings exist. The Ausbund had no printed tunes. However, a heading to each hymn indicated its association with a secular or sacred folktune, a Latin hymn or a melody from other Reformers; a few hymns named their own tunes. Jackson, the first to trace relationships between the ornamented versions the Amish now sing and the 16th-century forms of the specified tunes, speculated that oral transmission of the melodies at a slow tempo gradually resulted in group alterations and embellishments of the original. (For transcriptions of Amish melodies, see Yoder, 1942; Burkhart; and Hohmann.)
In contrast to the Amish, the Mennonites have, slowly but continuously, assimilated the culture around them. They moved beyond the Ausbund in the early 19th century with two German hymnals: Die kleine geistliche Harfe der Kinder Zions (1803), published by the descendants of the Germantown settlers, and Ein unpartheyisches Gesang-Buch (Lancaster, PA, 1804). Both books consist of selected German hymns, and French Calvinist psalms in Ambrosius Lobwasser’s translation; the 1804 book borrowed 68 Ausbund songs as well.
The most important Mennonite tunebook is Joseph Funk’s A Compilation of Genuine Church Music (1832, rev. 5/1851 as Harmonia sacra, rev. 12/1876 as New Harmonia sacra, 25/1993). Funk had published a German tunebook in 1816, but Genuine Church Music reflected the Mennonites’ appropriation of English. Its oblong format and didactic function paralleled similar American books. Funk began with the rudiments of music and music-reading in the four shapes (mi, fa, sol, la) of W. Little and W. Smith’s The Easy Instructor (1798; see also Shape-note hymnody). The music of Part II, for public worship, included English psalm tunes, American hymn tunes, and revival melodies of the early 19th century. Funk notated some of the oral folktunes, possibly for the first time, and incorporated early American anthems, which are still used in Mennonite congregations. Part-singing – three parts, with the melody in the middle, expanding to four parts in the 12th edition – probably entered Mennonite worship through Funk’s influence.
The first Mennonite hymnal in English was A Selection of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (1847, 7/1877/R; title from 2nd edn, A Collection …). It consists only of texts, and the editors specified that Genuine Church Music be used as the companion tunebook, recommending specific combinations of text and tune. Hymns and Tunes for Public and Private Worship, and Sunday School Songs Compiled by a Committee (1890) borrowed heavily from it.
The General Conference Mennonite Church, organized at Donnelson, Iowa, in 1860, chose and republished a hymnal from south Germany. Successive emigrations from Prussia and Russia greatly enlarged the group. Through these German-speaking immigrants the chorale and hymn traditions of the German Lutherans and Pietists were revived and strengthened. They brought their hymnal, Gesangbuch in welchem eine Sammlung geistreicher, published in Russia in 1844 but harking back to the Prussian Geistreiches Gesangbuch of 1767. Its roots probably extended back to the Dutch Anabaptist martyr hymns of Veelderhande Liedekens (1556). The Old Colony Mennonites of Mexico still use it. In 1890 the General Conference Mennonites published a hymnal, Gesangbuch mit Noten (16/1936), which combined their German traditions. They turned to a mainline Protestant book, Many Voices, when in 1894 they also needed an English hymnal.
In 1969 the Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church published The Mennonite Hymnal (in both round- and shape-note editions), which drew together these historical strands and incorporated songs from the Moody-Sankey revival as well. In 1992 North American Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren published jointly Hymnal: a Worship Book. Mennonites today tend to sing in four parts, either a cappella or accompanied, although until the mid-1960s the Mennonite Church vigorously rejected the use of instruments in worship; the first organ appeared in the General Conference Mennonite Church in 1874.
Other groups of Mennonites have unique musical traditions that reveal their religious, geographic or ethnic situations. The Mennonite Brethren, for example, who began their emigrations from Russia in 1874, were influenced by German Pietism, and their hymns tend to be evangelical and folklike in character.
In 1982 the Mennonite Indian Leaders’ Council published a book of Cheyenne spiritual songs, Tsese-ma’heone-nemeototse, based on traditional Cheyenne music. It illustrates the expansion of Mennonites beyond their Germanic roots to 78 languages on six continents. The Mennonite World Conference handbook of 1990 indicated a total membership of 856,600 adults. This Conference produced an International Songbook in 1978 (3/1997).
R. Wolkan: Die Lieder der Wiedertäufer (Berlin, 1903/R)
J.W. Yoder: Amische Lieder (Huntington, PA, 1942)
G.P. Jackson: ‘The Strange Music of the Old Order Amish’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 275–88
C. Burkhart: ‘The Music of the Old Order Amish and the Old Colony Mennonites: a Contemporary Monodic Practice’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, xxvii (1953), 34–54
H.S. Bender and C.H. Smith, eds.: Mennonite Encyclopedia, i–iv (Scottdale, PA, 1955–9/R) [‘Amish Division’, ‘Ausbund Hymnology of the American Mennonites’, ‘Hymnology of the Mennonites of West and East Prussia, Danzig and Russia’, ‘Music, Church’, ‘Old Order Amish’]
R.R. Duerksen: Anabaptist Hymnody of the Sixteenth Century: a Study of its Marked Individuality Coupled with a Dependence upon Contemporary Secular and Sacred Music, Style and Form (diss., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1956)
R.K. Hohmann: The Church Music of the Old Order Amish of the United States (diss., Northwestern U., 1959)
J.A. Hostetler: Amish Society (Baltimore, 1963, 4/1993)
P.M. Yoder and others: Four Hundred Years with the Ausbund (Scottdale, PA, 1964)
H. Eskew: Shape-Note Hymnody in the Shenandoah Valley, 1816–1860 (diss., Tulane U., 1966)
W. Jost: The Hymn Tune Tradition of the General Conference Mennonite Church (diss., U. of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1966)
A. Kadelbach: Die Hymnodie der Mennoniten in Nordamerika (1742–1860): eine Studie zur Verpflanzung, Bewahrung und Umformung europäischer Kirchentradition (Mainz, 1971)
N. Springer: Mennonite Bibliography, 1631–1961 (Scottdale, PA, 1977)
O. Schmidt: Church Music and Worship among the Mennonites (Newton, KS, 1981)
C.Y. Fretz: Anabaptist Hymnal (Hagerstown, MD, 1987)
M.E. Ressler: An Annotated Bibliography of Mennonite Hymnals and Songbooks 1742–1986 (Lancaster, PA, 1987)
C.J. Dyck and D.D. Martin, eds.: Mennonite Encyclopedia, v (Scottdale, PA, 1990) [‘Amish’, ‘Hymnology’, ‘Music, North America’]
U. Lieseberg: Studien zum Märtyrerlied der Täufer in 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1991)
MARY K. OYER