| FEL-267903-20 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Peter Jameson Mercer-Taylor | Classical Music in Pre-Civil War American Hymnody: A Digital Anthology for Listening and Singing | 7/1/2020 - 12/31/2020 | $30,000.00 | Peter | Jameson | Mercer-Taylor | | | | University of Minnesota | Minneapolis | MN | 55455-2009 | USA | 2019 | Music History and Criticism | Fellowships | Research Programs | 30000 | 0 | 30000 | 0 | Preparation of an open-access digital anthology of almost 300 hymn melodies published in the United States before 1861 derived from European classical music.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War,
American compilers of sacred tune books crafted hundreds of hymn tunes from
melodic stretches of European classical music. Hymn tunes being the
best-selling genre of music in the U.S. at the time, it was through these melodies that
many Americans first encountered classical music. This repertoire has all but
vanished today, and has been only very fleetingly explored by scholars. The
website proposed here will provide an online anthology of 276 pre-Civil War
hymn tunes that borrow material from Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and other
European composers, culled from over 70 antebellum American publications.
Modern scores and recorded piano renditions will be provided, but the website
will also offer a platform for sharing recordings of these tunes by whatever
ensembles choose to submit them, forming a growing, crowdsourced repository of
performances that, it is hoped, might serve as a hub for the reclamation of
this repertoire in modern musical life. |