Choirs in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1800-1860

Abstract

In his perceptive volume The American Musical Landscape, Richard Crawford suggests that constant tension between polar opposites of cosmopolitan and provincial forces is a dominant theme of American musical history.' Thus by end of eighteenth century American publishers offered a provincial repertoire in tunebooks used by Presbyterians and Congregationalists in contrast to European music imported by liturgical churches (Episcopalian, Lutheran, Roman Catholic).2 The formal establishment by John Wesley of Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in America at Christmas Conference of 1784 signaled advent of a new ecclesiastical body in America: an evangelical, nonestablished church whose congregational singing emphasized hymns rather than metrical psalmody still commonly in use in Presbyterian and Congregational circles. Roger Deschner has noted that the first American Methodists met in humble rooms; their music consisted of unaccompanied singing of hymns learned by rote. The church held to these ways longer than most denominations because of its close association with set-