Book Description

The publication by John Wesley of the "Foundery" Collection (1742) marked the establishment of standards for tunes suited to Methodist hymn singing. Early Methodist hymn books in the United States contained words only, but they were cross-referenced with a leader's tune book, beginning with David's Companion (1808). "With One Heart and One Voice" reviews the trends surrounding the styles of tunes selected and analyzes the changes in shape and text for the most frequently used tunes in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Seventy six "core repertory" tunes are analyzed based upon their repeated appearances in most of the tune books published between 1808 and 1878, at which point Methodists finally obtained a hymnal with both words and music, after a half century of experimentation with tune selection. The conclusions reached in this work will allow scholars, hymnologists, and hymn singers to explore the social and musicological influences on hymn tune writing, how long it took for texts to acquire a "fixed tune," how tastes in hymn tunes change ever so slowly, and how many delightful tunes found in the core repertory of the 19th century have been dropped from today's repertoire.