Hutterite Songs

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 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 handwritten 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,...