Methodism refers to a group of Protestant churches whose origins may be traced to a religious society organized by John Wesley (see Wesley (1703–91), which was aimed not so much at theological or liturgical reform but rather at restoring Christianity in its fullest sense, that is, as guide to life on earth and as means to salvation. It acquired its nickname, which was eventually accepted by Wesley, from its emphasis on order and method in daily life, and its strong organization by classes, circuits and conferences. In course of time there have been many splits and reunions within Methodism, due to theological, social and national differences; only the most significant ones are mentioned in this article.
2. Wesleyan Methodism after 1791.
4. The ‘Old Methodist’ hymn tune.
7. Missions and world Methodism.
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
Although it was really the great preacher George Whitefield (1714–70) who initiated the Methodist Revival in both England and America, John Wesley soon came to dominate it. His strong personality and organizing skills made it a formidable movement that overcame the immense resistance it encountered, while the poetic gifts of his brother Charles (see Wesley, (2)) provided the basis for its most effective weapon: hymnody. All three men were ordained Anglican priests. They promoted Methodism as a movement to supplement and heighten the work of the Church of England, not as an alternative denomination. When allowed to do so, they preached in parish churches; when excluded by mounting opposition within the Establishment, they conducted meetings in other buildings or in the open air, but they always avoided the times of church services and urged their hearers to go to church and to take communion regularly.
For this reason the early development of Methodist music did not take place in a context of liturgical worship, despite the founders’ staunch devotion to the Anglican liturgy. Singing occurred primarily in two types of Methodist meeting: the popular ‘preaching service’, which always included two hymns, one before and one after the sermon, and the ‘love feast’ (borrowed from the Moravians; see Moravians, music of the, §2), which ended with the singing of several hymns. Even ‘class meetings’, the small cells of up to 11 members which were the building blocks of Wesley’s organization, often included singing, and Methodists were encouraged to sing hymns in private family devotions. Both Whitefield and Charles Wesley led their followers in hymn singing in the public roads as they travelled from town to town. Sunday schools, introduced in 1780, were yet another context for singing.
Hymns were thus the typical, and indeed the only, form of music in the early stages of the movement. They might be sung anywhere – ideally by all those present. Hence they were monophonic and unaccompanied. John Wesley at once grasped the supreme efficacy of hymn singing to stir up feelings and hopes, to bind a group of disparate people into a worshipping community and, most importantly from his point of view, to instruct his flock in the truths of Christianity as he interpreted them. He therefore paid great attention to controlling the texts, tunes and performing practices of hymnody and devoted much thought to the proper use of music in religious observances.
In the choice of texts Wesley was at liberty to depart from the strict metrical psalm translations to which Anglican parish worship was largely confined. He made use of Isaac Watts’s free paraphrases of psalms (see Congregational church, music of the, §3), as well as hymns by Watts and other authors both Anglican and Dissenting, translations of German Pietist and Moravian hymns (the parallels between Pietism and Methodism have often been pointed out), and, above all, newly written hymns, principally by his brother Charles. Here he was in a position to guide the theology of his followers directly, and he included many hymns of ‘high’ doctrine, especially with regard to the sacraments, as well as more immediate appeals to the emotions, using a graphic imagery and a poetic fancy that were new to public worship.
The early hymns used a wide variety of metres, some based on German originals, others on secular poetry; in particular, trochaic and anapaestic metres, hitherto mostly unknown to Anglican psalmody but familiar enough in popular songs, were favoured. Wesley’s final selection, which became the standard Methodist hymn book, was A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists dating from 1780. In the following year Robert Spence, a York bookseller, published A Pocket Hymn Book; it included many Wesleyan hymns but also a number of popular revival hymns with emotional appeal though little meaningful content, which quickly caught on in Methodist societies. Wesley summarily dismissed these as ‘grievous doggerel’ and brought out his own revision of Spence’s book, with 37 hymns expunged. But the popularity of Spence’s collection, especially in America, exposed a gulf between Wesley’s high tastes and doctrines and the spiritual needs of his people.
His first tunebook, A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, as They are Commonly Sung at the Foundery (1742), known as the ‘Foundry Collection’, was boldly innovative in its choice of musical material. The 43 tunes were printed monophonically. Those taken from English sources included many that were unfamiliar; others were German (some, but not all, borrowed from the Moravians), and some were completely new. Prophetically, for the first time in any English printed collection of hymns or metrical psalms, one tune was taken from opera (a march from Handel’s Riccardo Primo). But the book was incompetently edited and printed and did not succeed.
The Wesleys next turned to a professional musician, Johann Friedrich Lampe, for assistance. Lampe was a member of a theatrical circle which formed close associations with the Wesleys despite their suspicion of dramatic entertainments. (Handel was another, but his three tunes for Wesleyan hymns were not published until 1826.) At Charles Wesley’s request Lampe set 24 of his hymns to music and published them anonymously as Hymns on the Great Festivals, and Other Occasions (1746). The tunes are in an ornate style typical of theatre songs of the time, with melismas, trills, dotted rhythms and figured basses. Nevertheless, they were approved by the Wesleys and quite widely used for several decades. All 24 tunes recurred in Harmonia-Sacra (c1754), a set of 162 tunes compiled and published by Thomas Butts, set mostly for three voices, with figured basses for domestic use. Butts greatly expanded the use of religious parodies of English urban popular songs, some from the theatre.
John Wesley went out of his way to praise Harmonia-Sacra in the preface to Select Hymns with Tunes Annext (1761). But, he explained, ‘I want the people called Methodists to sing true, the tunes which are in common use among them’. To this end he now provided a tune supplement ‘annext’ to the hymnbook, which in later editions gained the title Sacred Melody. He said it had taken him more than 20 years to complete the book. The tunes were once again monophonic, each underlaid with one verse of a hymn. They included selections from both Lampe’s and Butts’s books, plus some from the Foundry Collection and a few from new sources. A second edition, with 12 new tunes, appeared in 1765.
Wesley’s last tunebook was Sacred Harmony (1781), a companion to his 1780 hymnbook. It added figured basses (with, in five cases, a second treble part) and 11 new tunes. Each tune was set to a particular hymn, set out in full with the first verse underlaid. There were also two longer pieces in three vocal parts, The voice of my beloved sounds (from Butts, adapted from a popular song by Henry Holcombe) and Before Jehovah’s awful throne (Martin Madan’s well-known setting of Watts’s Psalm c, elsewhere called ‘Denmark’). In a revised edition, published about 1790, the tune selection was changed slightly, subsequent verses of the hymns were omitted, and Edward Harwood’s popular setting of Pope’s The Dying Christian (‘Vital spark’) and another ‘anthem’ were added. This remained the standard selection of music for British Wesleyan Methodists until the mid-19th century, and it was also influential in North America.
Wesley had no objection to melismas or ornaments, but he criticized long hallelujahs and ‘the repeating the same word so often (but especially while another repeats different words – the horrid abuse which runs through the modern church-music)’. This would seem to imply the rejection of counterpoint in both anthems and fuging-tunes (see Psalmody (ii)), and it is true that Wesley gave little encouragement to either form; the explicit ban on fuging-tunes remained in the Methodist minutes in both Britain and America until the mid-19th century. But the repetition of an entire line of text, or pair of lines, is common to many tunes in Wesley’s books and became, indeed, a recognizable characteristic of Methodist hymn tunes (see §4 below). These ‘repeating’ tunes sometimes had a line marked piano, to be sung by women alone, and the textual repeat marked forte, to be sung by everyone. (Men and women sat on opposite sides of the aisle in most Wesleyan congregations.) According to some sources the last line of each tune was always repeated, whether a repeat was marked or not.
Wesley’s choice of texts and music was a personal one, but because of his unique authority and tireless journeyings it prevailed far and wide for a long time. As in the matter of maintaining the Anglican liturgy, however, there was an acute conflict between his own cultivated tastes and his passionate desire to spread the Word to all classes of people. Many of the ornate tunes that he admired, by Lampe among others, were not really suited to congregational singing by a mass of unschooled people without musical leadership. In spite of this the Methodists soon gained a reputation for the excellence of their singing, which was singled out for praise by John Scott as early as 1744. Vincent in 1787 considered that ‘for one who has been drawn away from the Established Church by preaching, ten have been induced by music’. How did this come about?
The explanation is that the Wesleys, unlike the ordinary Anglican clergy of the day, took an intense interest in the singing of their followers and constantly challenged assistants, class leaders and congregations everywhere to maintain its vitality and elevate its meaning. In 1746 John was already asking ‘How shall we guard more effectually against formality in public singing’? The preface to Select Hymns with Tunes Annext contained his famous ‘Directions for Singing’ repeated in countless Methodist hymnals to this day. In brief, they are: ‘Learn these tunes before any others; sing them exactly as printed; let all sing; sing lustily; sing modestly; sing in time; above all sing spiritually, with an eye to God in every word’. He returned to these matters repeatedly in later conferences. He championed singing by women; he interrupted hymns to ask the people whether they meant what they sang; he condemned ‘complex tunes which it is impossible to sing with devotion’, long hallelujahs and anthems, even though these features were to be found here and there in his own books. He accepted organs, but he was suspicious of their effect in Methodist meetings. Three are known to have been erected during his lifetime, at Bristol, Newark and Keighley.
With more and more conversions to Methodism among Dissenters and those who had no previous religious allegiance, the link with the Church of England, although Wesley would not give it up, became more tenuous. What he still called ‘preaching houses’ others were beginning to call ‘chapels’, and for most Methodists the Sunday morning ‘preaching service’ was the main weekly worship service. Even Wesley could not prevent it from becoming more dignified and formal. Choirs formed, often supported by a bass viol, and would begin to sing anthems and set pieces instead of merely leading the singing.
Wesley’s main English centres were London, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. He was also active in Scotland and Ireland: as early as 1749 a Wesleyan hymnbook with 22 tunes was published in Dublin (A Collection of Hymns and Sacred Poems). Two of his Irish converts, Robert Strawbridge and Philip Embury, carried the movement to North America in the 1760s. In 1784 Wesley was compelled to recognize the independence of the United States (which he had opposed) and to ordain ministers to serve American Methodism (despite his lifelong belief that only bishops could ordain). The result was the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), which translated Wesley’s ‘superintendents’ into ‘bishops’ – to his great dismay. The founding bishops of American Methodism were Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, Englishmen appointed by Wesley. He tried to retain control of the worship practice of the American church by sending out an abridged version of the Book of Common Prayer and ordering the use of his 1780 hymnbook. But although the 1784 American Conference loyally accepted his dictates, the liturgy was soon a dead letter. The hymnbook and its tunes had a much longer life in America, but chiefly in settled, urban churches, where organs and paid choirs soon emerged to provide a staid and dignified form of worship. On the ever-expanding frontier very different conditions applied (see §5 below).
In England Wesley’s death was soon followed by departures from his ideas. The decisive split with the Church of England came in 1795, when the Conference allowed unordained preachers to administer the sacraments. Methodism gradually came to regard itself as a church as well as a society. In 1797 the New Methodist Connexion, led by Alexander Kilman, split off from the main body of Wesleyans. It allowed far more power to the laity than the Conference was prepared to give, introducing an effectively Congregationalist form of government.
Mainstream Wesleyanism now moved more clearly in the direction of bourgeois affluence and political conservatism, which tended to be expressed in more formal music. Although Conference at first tried to limit the use of elaborate choir music (1805) and the introduction and use of organs (1808), in 1820 it allowed organs. There was a test case at Brunswick Chapel, Leeds (1828). The trustees of the chapel, mostly successful Leeds businessmen, had decided to put in a large organ. Most of the congregation and local preachers were against it, but they were overruled by the national Conference, now dominated by the conservative Jabez Bunting (1779–1858). It was on this issue that a society of Protestant Methodists split off from the main body, later joining James Everett to form the United Methodist Free Churches (1857).
But Bunting led the main Wesleyan society consistently in the direction of greater formality and paternalistic rule. Large, imposing chapels were built in every town, with a towering pulpit in the centre and an organ and choir stalls behind. Four-part choirs, often reaching a high artistic standard, sang set pieces, anthems and even Anglican chants. The congregation still sang the hymns, often lined out by the minister and led by the choir and organ (or harmonium). In village chapels unaccompanied congregational singing survived much longer, of course. In some places a small instrumental band accompanied the singing, as in Anglican country churches.
A long series of privately compiled tunebooks appeared for the use of Wesleyan societies: some of the most influential were those of James Leach (1789, c1794, c1798), John Beaumont (1801) and William Edward Miller (1803). After the introduction of John Curwen’s tonic sol-fa notation (1842), inexpensive music for Methodist choirs proliferated. It was not until 1877 that the Conference sponsored an official tunebook, The Methodist Hymn Tune Book, edited by George Cooper and E.J. Hopkins.
The development of American Methodism, though entirely independent of that in England, was strikingly similar in its outlines. The itinerancy of ministers, a cardinal feature of Wesley’s organization, gained new significance in the vast spaces of the New World as Methodist ‘circuit riders’ travelled regularly to preach in remote outposts. Almost alone among American denominations, Methodism succeeded in keeping up with the expanding frontier. The MEC grew at an astounding rate, but it too showed signs of the split between high culture and populism. In hymnological terms the issue was whether to allow or outlaw the folk hymns associated with revivals (treated in §5 below). The General Conference banned organs, instruments and choirs in 1804, but many churches had a violin or flute to lead the singing; one Boston church had both an organ and a paid choir. In 1815 the Conference gave instructions for the use of the organ, strictly to assist congregational singing, including (curiously) a direction to continue the bass of the last chord until the next verse of a hymn began.
James Evans, an English Methodist musician recently settled in New York, founded a choir at the John St. church in 1806, and brought out two versions of a tunebook called David’s Companion, one (1808) to go with ‘the Methodist Pocket Hymn-Book’ (i.e. A Pocket Hymn Book: Designed as a Constant Companion for the Pious, Philadelphia, 1790, an American revision of Spence’s ‘popular’ book) and another (1810) for the ‘Large Hymn Book’, probably Wesley’s 1780 Collection, which was still in use in some congregations. In 1821 The Methodist Harmonist appeared, specifically for ‘worshipping assemblies’, as opposed to social or singing societies or revival meetings: its tunes were distinctly ‘classical’, mostly of English origin, with a few anthems at the back. It was commissioned by the General Conference and linked with the official hymnal of the same year, and it pointedly excluded revival hymns. By 1830 choirs existed in many urban churches and they were beginning to sing anthems and other purely choral music.
Methodists, from Wesley onwards, were generally opposed to racial segregation. African Americans were admitted to full standing in their churches. Nevertheless, a group of them seceded to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794. Their leader, Richard Allen, compiled A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns (1801), but without tunes. In the 1840s there were further splits over the issue of slavery: the MEC, South, was separated from its northern counterpart in 1846, while three black Methodist denominations were formed in the Southern states. Other secessions, such as that of the Methodist Protestant Church (1830–1939), were generally concerned, as in England, with greater representation for the laity in matters of policy, but each had its own series of hymnals (see Deschner, 1987). The Free Methodist Church, which split off from the MEC in 1859, maintained a ban on choirs and organs until 1943.
The main-line MEC continued to grow phenomenally in size and wealth, reaching ten million by 1860. The 1853 preface to Family and Social Melodies noted that ‘well-instructed, powerful choirs’ were in place in the churches in and around New York but that congregational singing was failing. The same was true of urban churches in the South and West, but in rural communities fuging-tunes (despite the official ban) and folk hymns were used in worship, sung from shape-note books. A new official Hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1878), with tunes in four-part harmony, was produced under the direction of the General Conference. Its preface said that it was intended ‘for all classes, from the elite of metropolitan society, to the emancipates of the rice swamps and cotton plantations’, but in fact folk and gospel hymns were thinly represented. The MEC, South, followed suit in 1889. By the end of the century a solid, rich, thoroughly ‘Victorian’ sound of four-part harmony with organ or harmonium prevailed in middle-class Wesleyan circles, one that is most fully represented in The Methodist Hymnal of 1905, prepared jointly by the Northern and Southern conferences.
At an early stage in its history Methodism was split in half on a purely theological issue. Wesley, with his high-church background, held to the Arminian view that Christ died for all believers and that it was open to anyone to accept Christ’s offering of forgiveness and then, certain of ultimate salvation, to strive for perfection on earth. But Whitefield took the Calvinist position of predestined salvation for the elect only, despite its seeming inconsistency with the notion of conversion and revival.
Many Calvinistic Methodists, such as Augustus Toplady and John Newton (both distinguished hymn writers), remained in the Church of England as leaders of its Evangelical wing. Whitefield’s Tabernacle in London had its own collection, Hymns for Social Worship (1753), and tunebook, The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), and the tunebooks of Thomas Knibb were also designed for the use of this sect. Wesley’s hymns were often emended to reflect Calvinistic theology.
Whitefield gained a powerful patron in Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who as a peer’s wife was entitled to maintain nominally ‘private’ chapels. But she seceded officially from the Church in 1781 and formed the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. Perhaps because of its upper-class converts, this group had greater musical influence than its numbers might have warranted; three books of hymn tunes by Benjamin Milgrove (1768, 1771, 1781), composed for the Countess’s chapel in Bath, were very widely adopted, as was that of Thomas Haweis (c1791), one of Lady Huntingdon’s chaplains.
The Lock Hospital, London, was a centre for Calvinistic Methodism, and its chaplain, Martin Madan, compiled for its use both a hymnbook and a tunebook which were widely influential. He commissioned leading musicians such as Felice Giardini, Charles Burney and Samuel Arnold to provide tunes, and wrote some highly successful ones himself. The tunebook, A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes … to be had at the Lock Hospital (generally known as ‘The Lock Hospital Collection’), came out in numbers between 1762 and 1792. It introduced a new style of church music based on the elegant, treble-led galant idiom of contemporary opera seria; and yet there is evidence that in the Lock chapel, at least, congregations were able to master these ornate tunes (see Temperley, 1993). The Surrey Chapel, London, where Rowland Hill was minister and Benjamin Jacobs organist, was another important musical centre. Later, in 1847, James Sherman described ‘the union of nearly three thousand voices rapturously and harmoniously singing the praise of their Saviour and God’ at the Surrey Chapel, in chants and set pieces as well as hymn tunes.
There was bitter strife between Wesleyan and Calvinist leaders in the later 18th century, conducted in pamphlets and in the journals of the two sects (The Arminian Magazine and The Gospel Magazine respectively). With the decline of predestinarian doctrine, however, the Calvinist branch gradually became a set of licensed, independent dissenting societies hardly distinguishable from Congregationalists. Their liturgy was generally that of the Church of England, or something very close to it, but with greater emphasis on sermons and congregational singing.
Wales was a country which Wesley had tacitly left to the Calvinists to evangelize. Howel Harris (1714–73), backed by Lady Huntingdon, founded a college at Trevecca, and the preachers trained there (in both English and Welsh) were so successful that Calvinistic Methodism soon became the leading denomination. It remains so today, although its name is now the Presbyterian Church of Wales. Because in the 19th century this was the only vital church that embraced the Welsh language, it became the chief repository for the outpouring of hymns and choral singing for which the Welsh are famous. In contrast to an austere, puritanical way of life, a bare style of church architecture and an uncompromising form of service, the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists seem to have released their emotions only in hymn singing. Whole congregations often sang in four parts unaccompanied, with the help of tonic sol-fa notation and frequent musical meetings and festivals. William Williams (1717–91) and Ann Griffiths (1776–1805) were the best known of a long series of Welsh hymn writers whose verses in translated form have since spread over much of English-speaking Christianity. Welsh folksongs were often adapted as hymn tunes in the earlier days, and this is the probable origin of the splendid anapaestic tune ‘St Denio’. The great period for composed Welsh hymn tunes was the 19th century, which yielded such longtime favourites as Edward Jones’s ‘Gwalchmai’, Joseph Parry’s ‘Aberystwyth’ and Thomas John Williams’s ‘Ton-y-Botel’.
A very characteristic type of tune was cultivated in British Methodism between about 1780 and 1850. Percy Scholes (1955) gave a description of it, while rightly pointing out that it was not an exclusively Methodist product. Maurice Frost (1957) even denied that there was any such thing as a Methodist hymn tune. The truth is that the type originated in Methodist circles and spread to other Dissenting groups, but was generally avoided in the Church of England.
It seems to have come into being as a result of the particular conditions under which Methodism arose. There was the influence of mid-18th-century secular music, through theatre musicians such as Lampe and Giardini, which catered to Lady Huntingdon’s aristocratic converts and the patrons of the Lock Hospital. There were Wesley’s own, very decided opinions, more particularly his desire for lively singing by all, including women, and his hostility to counterpoint and the vain repetition of single words. There was the need to appeal to the masses without departing from Wesley’s canons of good taste. And there was the idiom of the texts, with their unusual metres and sometimes almost amorous appeals to personal emotion.
The typical tune that emerged was melodious, even pretty, and in the major mode. It often had a second, equally tuneful subordinate part, moving mostly in parallel 3rds or 6ths, either of similar compass or in a treble-tenor relationship; the bass was inclined to be static. In other words, the texture was that of the ‘galant’ or early classic style, and for the most part the compositional rules of that style were well observed; but it long outlived the departure of galanterie in secular music. The melody was often ornate, with two or three notes to many of the syllables, and could easily take ornaments such as the turn, appoggiatura or trill. Uneven syllable lengths were normal, whether in triple time or by unequal division of common-time bars. Dynamic contrasts between phrases were sometimes a feature, probably implying sections for women alone (and so marked in W.E. Miller’s David’s Harp … Adapted to Mr Wesley’s Selection of Hymns, London, c1803). Usually there would be repetition of some lines of the text, delaying or reconfirming a cadence or half-cadence. Sometimes fuging entries crept in, despite Wesley. But the most typical feature of all was the final cadence, of a very definite, foursquare kind, consisting of three chords: tonic 6-4, dominant 7th, tonic.
Prototypes can be found in the collections of Butts and Knibb and in the Lock Hospital Collection. Madan was perhaps the originator of the type: his most durable composition, ‘Helmsley’, and the tune he most successfully popularized, ‘Hotham’, both exemplify most of the characteristics listed above. But the heyday of the ‘Old Methodist’ tune came later. It was developed by composers such as James Leach, John Beaumont and Samuel Stanley around the turn of the century. The tune in ex.1, though composed by a Baptist, Gabriel Davis of Portsea, and published by him about 1802, was quickly adopted in Methodist sources such as William Green’s Companion to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Hymns (London, c1808), from which this two-voice version is taken; and it was still in the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933. (For a later example – Richard Boggett’s ‘Eccles’, c1840 – see Rainbow, 1981, p.163.) A more widely familiar specimen is ‘Antioch’, generally sung to the Christmas carol ‘Joy to the world’: it is regarded as American and is often ascribed to Lowell Mason, but it actually originated in an English Methodist source of the early 1830s (see Wilson, 1986).
Mass religious meetings in the open air often allowed for a free expression of spiritual feelings that was hardly possible in a church or meeting-house under the direct control of a minister. Wesley strove to limit such undisciplined outpourings, but in the frontier lands of North America they had begun to flourish long before Methodism was formally organized. Whitefield began outdoor preaching in Georgia in the 1730s. Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Great Awakening’ in New England in the 1740s and 50s, and Henry Alline’s revival movement in Nova Scotia after 1776, drew mainly on Congregationalists and Presbyterians.
The ‘Second Great Awakening’ (1800 onwards), though started by a Presbyterian, was soon dominated by Methodists, because they alone had a well-developed frontier network. Families would travel by waggon over large distances to an agreed meeting place, usually a rectangular field or clearing of several acres, where they would lodge in tents for a weekend or even a whole week. For many living in remote settlements these ‘camp meetings’ were their sole experience of religion in a large public setting. In the space surrounded by the tents and waggons, several meetings might be carried on simultaneously, with preaching, discourse and singing. At night, singing and extempore prayer continued by candlelight. Emotion was unrestrained at these meetings, while the intellectual message of Methodism was diluted or stripped away, giving place to simple-minded, subjective texts sung to catchy tunes with strong rhythms. The MEC Conference disapproved of camp meetings and was suspicious of the violent physical tremblings and convulsions that were almost a conventional part of the scene. Some of the splits in the Methodist movement were brought on by these issues.
As most participants had no books, the singing depended at first on Lining out by the preachers, but a natural development was the ‘spiritual song’. A succession of verses was improvised by a preacher or other leader and the congregation responded by repeating each line, echoing the last few words, responding in a predictable way or singing a repeated refrain such as ‘Glory hallelujah’. As there was no possibility of musical instruction, leadership or accompaniment, the tunes had to be either well known (as with ‘folk hymns’) or very easily learned (as with ‘spirituals’). There was little reason to write down, still less to print, these orally transmitted songs, until they began to be adopted in more settled worship situations or in singing schools.
The folk hymn, as Tallmadge pointed out, is more properly a ‘hymn set to a folk tune’. The text was often by Charles Wesley (Jesu, lover of my soul), Toplady (Rock of ages), Newton (Amazing grace) or another classic Methodist author. But the tune was derived from Anglo-Celtic folksong, often using gapped or modal scales. Many of these have been identified in American published tunebooks, such as Amos Pilsbury’s The United States’ Sacred Harmony (Boston, 1799), Jeremiah Ingalls’s Christian Harmony (Exeter, NH, 1805), John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (Harrisburgh, PA, 1813/R), Ananias Davisson’s Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, VA, 1816), Allen D. Carden’s Missouri Harmony (St Louis, 1820), William Walker’s The Southern Harmony (Philadelphia, 1835), and the many shape-note books that followed in southern and western states.
An extraordinary style of harmony was evolved for these tunes, based on 4ths and 5ths more than 3rds, with much incidental dissonance and parallelism, preserving the modal flat 7th at cadences, and ending on bare 5ths rather than full triads. One of the most famous of these tunes, ‘Idumea’, was probably adapted by Davisson from a folksong. The version of the tune given in ex.2 follows his corrections to the subordinate parts made for the 2nd edition of Kentucky Harmony (1817). The tune is carried in the tenor, which may have been doubled at the upper octave by women’s voices. Some tunes were newly composed in a similar style, notably by the Methodist minister Elkanah Kelsay Dare (1782–1826), who contributed nine to Wyeth’s book. Of course, the folk hymn was never an exclusively Methodist phenomenon, but it exemplifies the Methodists’ unabashed adoption of secular songs.
The other type of revival hymn was the spiritual song or, simply, spiritual. Instead of relying on previous knowledge of the tune, it traded on easy accessibility of both text and music. The text was deliberately popular in diction, avoided complexity of thought or the type of self-questioning severity that the Wesleys had stressed, and appealed directly to feeling. Its message of hope in the future life as consolation for present misery was to become quite general to Methodism in the 19th century. Some spirituals made use of call-and-reponse structures, and also of refrains, which were often transferred from one hymn to another. Texts of this type are already found in A Pocket Hymn Book (1781). Stith Mead, a MEC preacher in Virginia, printed Shout old Satan’s kingdom down in A General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs Now in Use (Richmond, VA, 1807). It begins thus:
This day my soul has caught on fire, Hallelujah!
I feel that Heaven is coming nigher, O glory Hallelujah!
Chorus
Shout, shout, we’re gaining ground, Hallelujah!
We’ll shout old Satan’s kingdom down, Hallelujah!
The tunes of spirituals remained unprinted for some time. Some early examples are found in The Wesleyan Harp (1834), with rudimentary basses. In the preface the compilers, Abraham D. Merrill and William C. Brown, defended their choice of tunes to please the ‘pious heart’ rather than the ‘scientific ear’. Other tunes appear in Moses L. Scudder’s The Wesleyan Psalmist (1842), which is mostly monophonic. Some were gathered retrospectively in Marshall W. Taylor’s Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies (1883). Harmonization of spirituals in simple, ‘correct’ block chords was a comparatively late development, a result of their gradual adoption in Sunday schools and then in the regular worship of urban churches. Tunes of this kind are found in Isaac B. Woodbury’s The Lute of Zion … Designed for the Use of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1853). They were an ancestor of both Gospel music and the late-19th-century Spiritual. They were certainly cultivated in both white and black Methodist churches, although often opposed by the authorities, including the African MEC. They may have appealed to blacks, in part, because of chance similarities to African music. Certainly, the negro spiritual added lively rhythms and a style of vocalization that were uniquely African-American.
In England the first camp meeting was led by the American evangelist Lorenzo Dow at Mow Cop, Staffordshire, in 1807. It precipitated the formation of the Primitive Methodist Connexion in 1810. This organization was closely linked to radical politics and in the course of the 19th century won a large following among the urban working classes. Primitive Methodists were nicknamed ‘Ranters’. The term was probably due in part to the harsh mode of vocal production used in their singing; this can also be heard in present-day Sacred Harp singing in the southern USA. The Ranters carried the Methodist practice of religious parody to its extreme, picking up drinking-songs and lewd ballads and adapting them as hymns. Many joined them initially because they were attracted by the lively singing and wanted to participate. A Manchester Primitive Methodist recalled that at camp meetings in about 1820 ‘people, chiefly young ones, used to run up to hear us, thinking we were singing a favourite song. But they were disappointed therein; nevertheless, they were arrested and often charmed by the hymn, which at times went with power to their hearts’ (Kendall, c1906, ii, 33). Hymn singing overflowed from chapel and camp meeting into everyday working life.
From the powerloom days onward, we hear a great deal about singing in the factories, with the women in particular lifting their voices above the clatter of the looms in exuberant Methodist hymns such as Perronet’s ‘All hail the power’, to the handsome hexatonic tune called ‘Diadem’ in the hymnbooks, though country people know it better as ‘The ploughman’s dream’. (Lloyd, 1967, p.327)
In the United States, revivalism gained middle-class support after 1850 with the setting up of permanent Methodist camp-meeting sites such as Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and Round Lake, New York, and the introduction of revival services in local churches and Sunday schools. Simple texts and music characterized the Sunday-school songs of Isaac Woodbury, William Bradbury, George F. Root and Phebe Palmer Knapp, and it was from such sources that gospel songs arose. Both Ira D. Sankey and Fanny Crosby were Methodists, but the Moody-Sankey revival movement which swept both Britain and America in the 1870s was not embraced by the established Methodist churches in either country. Instead, it relied on a broader, interdenominational appeal. So do most of the revivals of more recent times, such as those of Billy Graham and the ‘televangelists’. As often as not, modern revivals have taken place in large public halls or stadiums rather than open spaces. The resulting acoustical change has facilitated the coordinated mass singing of hymns by thousands, with accompaniment by organ or brass band, while loudspeakers have enabled a leading singer to dominate the crowd.
British and American Methodists continued to follow parallel though independent courses during the 20th century. In Britain the Wesleyans were reunited in 1932 with the United Methodists (formed by an earlier union of 1907 between the New Connexion, the United Methodist Free Churches and the Bible Christians) and the Primitive Methodists. In the USA the MEC, the MEC South, and the Methodist Protestant Church reunited in 1939 as The Methodist Church, which in 1968 was joined by two Evangelical churches of German background to become the United Methodist Church. In Australia, Canada and other predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, similar reunions have taken place, and in all there has been a steady progression in the direction of social reform and ecumenical experiment. In Canada the Methodists joined with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1925 to form the United Church of Canada, established by Act of Parliament; in Australia, the same combination (delayed by several decades of Presbyterian opposition) formed the Uniting Church in Australia in 1977.
However, formal reunion has not brought an end to the wide divergence of tastes and traditions in Methodist worship music. The rich heritage of four-part choir singing in ‘mainstream’ churches reached its apogee before World War I and continued to flourish for several more decades; there was an increase in liturgical forms, including Anglican-style chanting, anthems and responses, and a revival of emphasis on the sacrament of Communion, which was made the main Sunday service by the British Conference in 1975. The Methodist Church Music Society was formed in 1936; the Choir and Musical Journal was published from 1910 to 1964. In the USA the National Fellowship of Methodist Musicians (later the Fellowship of United Methodist Musicians) was founded in 1956 and published Music Ministry (1959–75). Many American city churches continue to practice elaborate choral music with organ accompaniment, often supported by a professional music staff including a ‘music minister’. Several seminaries run courses in music, and in 1959 the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, introduced a master’s degree in sacred music. In Britain there has been a relative decline in choir music, but the organ has remained the preferred accompanying instrument and was still found in 95% of British Methodist churches in a 1996 survey, although only 50% of these were pipe organs.
At the same time, many Methodist churches (and new, offshoot denominations) have been receptive to gospel songs and to the continuing influence of various forms of popular music. The charismatic movement has made considerable impact, often replacing hymns with ‘songs’, organs with bands, and hymnbooks with projection screens. This is especially the case in African-American Methodism, where bands based on the electric guitar, supported in some cases by piano, string bass, or wind instruments, accompany a freewheeling and relaxed type of singing by large choirs led by soloists with microphones. Swaying, clapping and other body movements play a part in this music, and in some churches dancing is also encouraged.
A few gospel songs were included in the 1935 edition of The Methodist Hymnal (USA), but it was the 1964 edition that first made a serious attempt to reflect the musical pluralism of the Church by including negro spirituals, folk hymns and gospel hymns, while at the same time broadening the ‘classical’ repertory with hymns from German, French, Latin and Greek sources, and even plainchant. The effort was further extended in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal edited by Carlton Young, which also reflects the desire to recover the practice of psalm singing, both in prose and metre. At the same time there have been many unofficial hymnals representing divergent cultures, such as Songs of Zion (1981), devoted to the black American religious tradition.
In Britain the relatively conventional 1933 Methodist Hymn Book was supplemented by Hymns and Songs (1969), containing some popular hymnody, and by the ecumenical Partners in Praise (1979). The later official book, Hymns and Songs (1983), is more restrained than its American counterpart in the effort towards catholicity of taste; it is supplemented in the majority of churches by Mission Praise or one of several other collections giving space to popular or ‘happy-clappy’ materials. The Methodist Service Book provides orders of service with music, borrowing freely from the traditions of other denominations but including the Covenant Service, the only one that is still distinctive and unique to Methodism.
The Methodists were a missionary body from the start. In 1786 Thomas Coke preached to 1000 negroes in Antigua and was appointed by the British Conference as their ‘agent’ in the West Indies and later as General Superintendent of Foreign Missions. From the first the missionaries opposed slavery, arousing the bitter resentment of the Dutch and British traders in the West Indies; emancipation in 1834 brought negroes in their thousands to Methodist services.
In 1813 the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society was set up and began activities in Ceylon, Java, the Cape of Good Hope, Sierra Leone and Canada. More than Anglican missionaries, the Methodists concentrated their efforts on the indigenous peoples; white settlers were drawn in only incidentally. By 1881 they were so well established in South Africa that a separate Conference was set up there: and by 1946 there were over a million non-white Methodists in the Union of South Africa. Methodists were active all over Africa, although their work formed only a part of the immense Christian effort in that continent throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Asia they were, naturally, much less successful in the face of the ancient, developed religions of the region. In the Indian subcontinent the Methodists formed unions with other Protestant churches to form the Church of South India (1947) and similarly united churches in North India and Ceylon.
American Methodists have also undertaken worldwide missions, concentrating their efforts more especially among Amerindians and in Latin America: the MEC Missionary Society was set up in 1819. American Methodist missions have been extensive in East Asia, with a particularly notable thrust in China, and also in Continental Europe, where there are vigorous minority churches in Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. The (American) African MEC established an effective mission for black South Africans, which by 1950 had spread to many other anglophone African countries. Autonomous Methodist churches have been established in most countries around the world.
Everywhere, participatory singing has been one of the chief attractions of Methodism. How far the English and American tunes have been modified or replaced to reflect indigenous culture has varied greatly from region to region. In continental Europe each country’s traditional hymn tunes have been increasingly substituted for those of Anglo-Saxon origin. Amerindians have been encouraged to use their own music: as early as 1845 Thomas Connuck, a Narragansett Indian, collaborated with Thomas Hastings in compiling Indian Melodies, a set of Methodist hymns with Amerindian tunes.
But Latin American and Asian Methodist churches have continued to use predominantly ‘Western’ music for their singing – American gospel hymns or more classical styles, according to the social level of the congregations. In Korea, for instance, where there is a very large Methodist community, there have been some experimental Christian adaptations of the traditional p’ansori (a form of sung and spoken drama accompanied by a drum), but Western music remains overwhelmingly the norm. In Mexico, where the MEC began operations in 1873, several hymnals in Spanish had been published before 1900: by 1962 there were 33,000 Methodists, and there are many more today. The Mexican Conference’s Himnario especial (1956) had about 270 hymns with harmonized tunes. The majority were gospel songs; a few were based on popular ‘Spanish songs’, and some newly composed ones in a similar style, notably by Vicente Mendoza, pastor of the Iglesia Metodista de la Trinidad, Mexico City. Nevertheless, the two favourite hymns were Santo, santo, santo, Señor omnipotente (‘Holy, holy, holy’, with Dykes’s ‘Nicaea’) and Firmes y adelante (‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, with Sullivan’s ‘St Gertrude’). Popular coritos and estrebillos with religious texts were used for youth meetings, but the marachi-type bands used by Pentecostals were strictly excluded by the Methodists.
Undoubtedly, Africa is the region in which indigenization has gone farthest and deepest. The British Methodist missionaries, by comparison with Anglicans, were less closely associated with the colonial establishment and were historically identified with the poor and oppressed. For these reasons they were more readily accepted by indigenous peoples and, in turn, paid greater respect to their culture. For instance, in Ghana, where the first Methodist church was formed in 1835, a new type of music called the Fante Lyric developed in the later 19th century; it was unique at the time in drawing entirely on native musical resources. The Fante songs used translated biblical texts but in a verse-chorus pattern based on Asafo. Methodist missionaries wisely allowed them to flourish alongside Western hymns, and 15 of them were printed (Debrunner, 1967; for an example see Warnock, 1983, pp.137–9). Since the songs were improvised, the missionaries took steps to see that the soloists were familiar with Christian doctrine and scripture. This was ‘the first mass movement towards an Africanized hymnody’ (Warnock) and has continued to the present.
Another reason for the success of Methodist missions in Africa was their use of simple gospel hymns, which also had a call-and-response or verse-chorus pattern that made them easily imitable by African converts. The brass and percussion bands they used to accompany the music also proved an attraction. Instead of staff notation British Methodist leaders used Tonic Sol-fa, which was a much easier medium for training African musicians who, in turn, would teach the music orally to a choir or congregation. They were often the pioneers in the general movement towards indigenization of Christian music that has accompanied the independence of former African colonies since 1957 (see Anglican and Episcopalian church music, §11).
Robert Kauffman, a missionary of the United Methodist Church (USA), founded the All Africa Church Music Association in 1961 and has been a leader in stimulating church music with an African identity. This includes the ‘composition’ of new music, often in fact growing out of improvised group experiences. Some African music originates in English hymns, but these have been so altered and elaborated by Africans that the result sounds almost purely African in style. In other cases, African secular songs were either adapted to Christian texts or used as a model for new songs in similar style (Axelsson, 1974, p.99).
After World War II efforts were made to bring together the leaders of Methodism from around the world. A World Methodist Council, founded at Oxford in 1951 and meeting every few years since then, has been politically fruitful. In 1993 a General Board of Global Ministries was formed ‘to gather, receive, and share’ music from all cultures, and has produced Global Praise 1 (New York, 1997). However, as each country’s Methodists adopt local forms, musical disparity must inevitably increase. Little now remains of the music that Wesley personally admired and promoted. But his exhortations to sing all together ‘lustily’ and ‘spiritually’ are still the backbone of Methodist music throughout the world.
GroveA (‘Methodist Church, music of the’; R. Deschner)
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