Joyful Singing

A Story of Lutheran Sacred Music in Texas

Benjamin A. Kolodziej

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781506486161
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506486178
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: North American History

This is the tenth in a series of monographs--Shaping American Lutheran Church Music--published by the Center for Church Music, Concordia University Chicago, River Forest, Illinois., highlighting people, movements, and events that have helped to shape the course of church music among Lutherans in North America.

In this volume, Benjamin A. Kolodziej uncovers and records the story of the Lutherans who undertook the daunting and uncertain work of carving out a new life in a new land, and of the music that accompanied them. The book is rich in historical and contextual detail, and Kolodziej overcomes the difficulty of delineating different Lutheran sects--immigrants aligned to whatever iteration of the Lutheran church was available, --to tell the stories of the church's past in clear and compelling prose.

The book will be a great help to scholars, historians, and musicians alike.

1

Lutheran Musical Antecedents in Texas

In 1851, from his office at the Pilgermission St. Chrischona, situated on the bucolic, rolling hills outside of Basel, Switzerland, seminary administrator Christian Spittler wrote an entreaty to supporters for the financial provision of a relatively new missionary venture. Under Spittler’s auspices, the St. Chrischona evangelical training school had sent missionaries throughout the world, which most recently had included an ambitious enterprise in Jerusalem—which he had had to abandon. Now, though, his concern turned to a place even farther removed than the Middle East and for which success was even less assured. He informed his benefactors that “six brothers are leaving for Texas, and much equipment is required. Some kind help for this task would strengthen my weak faith. . . . Their help will be necessary for these six men to set up a little church with God’s help and later proselytize among the Indians.”1 The previous year, Spittler had sent two missionaries, Adam Sager and Theobald Kleis, charged with surveying the needs of this vast mission field, complete with its recalcitrant colonists, blistering summer heat, stifling humidity, and an impertinent native population that was anything but receptive to the Christian faith.

Figure 1.1 Pilgermission St. Chrischona, an evangelical training facility on the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland. (Source: C. F. Schlienz, The Pilgrim Missionary Institution of St. Chrischona [London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1850]: frontispiece.)

Lutherans had been in Texas less than a decade when Sager and Kleis arrived to evaluate the situation in 1850. Henri de Castro, a French diplomat of Jewish-Portuguese extraction, had become an American citizen and, while consul general for Texas president Sam Houston, had launched a campaign to recruit immigrants to Texas. The country—for Texas was an independent nation from 1836 to 1846—offered generous land grants for European colonists to settle and farm the land.2 Eventually administered by the Mainzer Adelsverein, some 2,100 immigrants from German territories, Swiss cantons, and the Alsace arrived in Galveston between 1842 and 1847, eventually settling in the rolling hills of Central Texas, west of San Antonio, where they established the colonies of Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, among others. The Alamo had fallen a mere six years before the first colonists’ arrival, and conditions were primitive, but the industrious Teutons worked the land, building the necessary infrastructure. The first public building in Fredericksburg, the Vereinskirche—built in 1847 as a combination church, schoolhouse, and town hall—is notable for its Carolingian architecture, its eight-sided design reminding the colonists not only of their cultural heritage (it is reminiscent of the court chapel at Aachen) but also of their spiritual legacy, the eight-sided iconography a traditional symbol of baptism.3 This perhaps represented an attempt to bring their own culture to the forests and plains of Texas, establishing a Germanic civilization in which the church had represented the cornerstone of daily life.4

Figure 1.2 The Vereinskirche in Fredericksburg, Texas, represents a transplanted northern European architectural style. (Source: Walter F. Edwards, The Story of Fredericksburg [Fredericksburg, TX: Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce, 1969]: 14.)

Naturally, to re-create the civic and ecclesiastical culture of Europe in the expanses of Texas, one needed spiritual leadership, a prerequisite that Spittler at St. Chrischona had endeavored to fulfill. It was in this environment that Sager and Kleis had ministered and into which Spittler would soon send six more shepherds for the flocks. Ultimately, the seminary would send over 120 missionaries to Texas between 1850 and the first decade of the twentieth century.5

The Earliest Lutheran Music in Texas

The reconstruction of the liturgical life of these early pioneers in Texas is fraught with difficulty for lack of records. These immigrants hailed from various German states, representing the Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic traditions, their own cultural background nuanced in differences rather than monolithic in vision. At the instigation of the two St. Chrischona missionaries and through the leadership of Rev. Caspar Braun, an 1847 St. Chrischona graduate who had been sent to Texas after a term in Pennsylvania,6 the First Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Texas (hereafter, Texas Synod) was founded in Houston in 1851, aligning itself with the old General Synod, which itself issued from the patriarch Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg during the days after the American Revolution.7

Liturgical uniformity was a priority to these Lutherans, and early on, the Texas Synod adopted the General Synod’s liturgy and the 1849 Deutsches Gesangbuch für die Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in den Vereinigten Staaten, known informally as the Wollenweber Gesangbuch, after its Philadelphia-based publisher.8 The “Württembergische Gesangbuch” had provided much of the source material for the Wollenweber Gesangbuch, as it had for Muhlenberg’s Erbauliche Liedersammlung over half a century prior. The Choralbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Württemberg, first published in 1844, served as the musical companion for organists and choirs whose congregations utilized the Wollenweber Gesangbuch. This Choralbuch, containing 210 tunes to supply the 710 texts in the hymnal, mostly employs the isorhythmic versions of the tunes, favoring the ponderously reverent to the invigoratingly joyful.9 Musical leadership was probably minimal given the strictures of pioneer society, but likely reed organs, so ubiquitous on the American frontier for their light weight and durability, supplied much of the musical leadership. However, these early missionaries were so committed to the importance of music in the spiritual life of these early Texan Lutherans that they brought over at least one pipe organ to aid in the task.

Figure 1.3 Rev. Caspar Braun served as the first president of the Texas Synod. (Source: “Notable Interred,” Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, TX, https://glenwoodcemetery.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Braun-Casper.webp [accessed February 2, 2022].)

Figure 1.4 The Wollenweber Gesangbuch continued in the tradition of “mainstream” American Lutheranism as established by Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg. (Source: Deutsches Gesangbuch für die Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in den Vereinigten Staaten [Philadelphia: Wollenweber, 1849].)

In 1958, Texas organ builder Rubin Frels happened upon an old railroad depot in the small hamlet of Raisin, Texas, located between Houston and San Antonio, inland from the coast. Within this inhospitable structure had lain, apparently for some time, a small, decrepit chamber organ of curious construction. It was old and certainly not indigenous to its present location, its decoration evoking a gentrified past. In order to establish the provenance of this chamber organ, Texan organist and musicologist Dr. Susan Ferré did much scholarly research that, when coupled with a thorough restoration by Dr. Susan Tattershall, led her to assert that one of the first two St. Chrischona missionaries, Adam Sager, had brought this organ to Texas as a “gift from the St. Chrischona mission to Texas.”10 Constructed of walnut, oak, and pine, its manual compass is limited, but its 8 Gedackt, 8 Suavial, 4 Prestant, and 2⅔ Quint create a shimmering, undulating sound. A primitive and virtually inaudible pedal with only an “8 Bass” of open wood was crudely added to the instrument later. This instrument, which previously had been housed at Trinity Lutheran Church in Victoria, Texas, and then later at Meyersville, Texas, is probably the first pipe organ of any type in the state. According to Ferré’s and Tattershall’s research, this organ from an unknown builder could date from as early as the eighteenth century, as suggested by “certain similarities to instruments of South German and Northern Swiss origin.”11

To transport even a small chamber organ to the New World was no small feat, demonstrating the importance the first Lutheran pastors in Texas placed on music in the church, a fact not always discernable later in church and parish histories in Texas, which dedicate more historical discernment to the processes of parsonage building and the development of church social events than to general church practices, much less liturgical piety. Spittler himself, in establishing St. Chrischona in an extant but dilapidated Basel church building, had an organ built for the chapel in 1843, an indicator of his commitment to sacred music.12 As St. Chrischona was and still is an ecumenical seminary, this is an important fact to note. If at times their orthodox Lutheran credentials were brought into question, particularly as they engaged with the nascent Missouri Synod in the state, there was certainly no Zwinglian liturgical aestheticism in the missionaries’ spiritual formation. This little chamber organ demonstrates at minimum the importance these early missionaries placed on congregational singing. Spittler, in his canvasing for funds and matériel for the six additional missionaries he sent to Texas in 1851, explicitly states the need for Kirchengesangbücher, or hymnals, for the immigrants. Sager must have been musical himself, as the minutes from a synodical convention held in May 1859 at Meyersville, Texas, record that “Pastor Sager had brought along his organ from Victoria for the expressed delight of congregational singing.”13 Although there is no way to document its actual liturgical application when it arrived in Texas, the organ’s presence does speak to the intention of the St. Chrischona seminary to encourage singing in the mission field. Certainly, congregational singing was no afterthought to these Lutheran pioneers in Texas.

None of the preceding thumbnail history deals specifically with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), whose settlers had only begun to arrive in the United States in the late 1830s, and even then established themselves only locally elsewhere in the country. Texas history avoids a clean delineation among the different Lutheran sects; immigrants would align to whatever Texas iteration of the Lutheran Church from their homeland was available to them, usually arranged along national lines...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Center for Church Music
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Lutheran Musical Antecedents in Texas
• 2 Intertwining Fortunes: The First Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Worship in Texas
• 3 Kilian as Composer, Hymn Writer, and Liturgist
• 4 The First Pipe Organs and Early Musical Practices
• 5 Lutheran Sacred Music in the Heart of Texas
• 6 A New Direction for Advanced Sacred Music Studies in Texas
• 7 The Developing Vocation of the Church Musician
• Epilogue