Keeping with Elizabethtown College’s rich history of Anabaptistism and Pietism, the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist studies recently had the opportunity to bring Christopher Herbert to campus.
Herbert is an assistant professor and head of the vocal department at William Paterson University. He received a Doctorate in Musical Arts from the Julliard School and while there, worked on a doctoral thesis that he is still expanding upon.
It was this thesis on the musical traditions of the Ephrata Cloister that brought Herbert to Etown College. Earlier on in Herbert’s research he reached out to Director of the Young Center Jeff Bach about his plans after he read Bach’s “Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata.”
Herbert describes this text by Bach as “the book to go to if you want to write about the theology of Ephrata.”
It was quite significant for Herbert to be presenting on this topic at the College because according to him: “In many ways, my journey began here [at the Young Center] because the first Ephrata manuscript I saw was at Elizabethtown because of my relationship with Dr. Bach.”
The Ephrata Cloister was a tight-knit, celibate religious community based in Lancaster County whose history largely lacks documentation. Herbert wanted to study Ephrata because he wanted to explore what to him is “an important part of our history as Americans that has gone forgotten” and that still requires “work to be done in preserving, archiving, and creating critical editions of the music [of Ephrata.]”
The music of the Ephrata Cloister is particularly unique because it utilized an entirely unique form of notation that can be quite “difficult to translate.”
Herbert described “their system of composition” as “very much paint by number… the idea was if somebody wrote a melody, then anybody could harmonize it.”
Contrasted with most contemporary music composition, the cloister places central focus on the Soprano in four-part harmonies which Herbert says is “really rare in the history of music.”
The music at the Ephrata Cloister “uses a more austere, four-part style” and is exclusively acapella. Herbert admitted that his research caused him to have to “really interrogate the way in which [he] view[s] music,” given the atypical musical composition in the Ephrata Cloister.
Herbert presented on the role of gender in the cloister.
“The gender aspect is really interesting,” Herbert said. “I’m honored to be able to give voice to these women who have been forgotten… and as a man I’m still trying to figure out my role in that.”
Given the celibacy and isolation of the community, women had “a much different situation than what you usually see in colonial America” that allowed them to “own their voice in a way that has much more agency than people at the time.”
Herbert’s thesis vis-a-vis gender in Ephrata is that he believes he has stumbled upon the two first American female composers within the cloister. This is in direct contrast to the most popular theory about the music of Ephrata, referred to among scholars in the field as the “Owinski Thesis.” This thesis simply postulates that comrade Beissel was the sole composer in the Ephrata cloister.
While there is certainly contention to this theory, the postulation that composition was done by both the brothers and the sisters in the cloister is a take that thus far only Herbert has maintained. Such is to be anticipated when working with such a niche topic, and Hebert was seemingly amused by just how invested he had become in the subject.
Herbert’s presentations on the Ephrata Cloister ultimately serve to reveal quite a lot about authorship, community identity, gender, academia, religion and society—all topics that continue to engage the College population.
