During his 1753 visit to Ephrata, Reverend Israel Acrelius attended a Sabbath worship service. At the gathering he said the singers held two books, one printed on the Brotherhood press containing the words, the other penned by the Sisters holding the musical notation. Singing the music required looking back and forth between the two volumes, “which custom would be more difficult if the singing were not performed so regularly every day.” Like others who heard the Ephrata choirs, Acrelius was complementary of the songs he heard. Beyond the sounds, was also witnessing a remarkable feat on the frontier: the merger of three highly refined arts. At a time when Handel was composing the Messiah, Gainsborough was painting British aristocracy,…show more content… Blum arrived with knowledge of four-part harmony that he taught to the Sisterhood in a singing school. When the Sisters grew unhappy with Blum they shared their new found musical knowledge with Beissel who replaced Blum in directing the choirs. Blum left Ephrata saying, “the singing broke my neck.” Now equipped with an awareness of writing basic melodies and the complexities of harmony, Beissel developed his own system of creating distinctively Ephrata music. He outlined his composition methods in a treatise on harmony that first appeared in manuscript form in 1746, and published as the preface to the hymnal Voices of the Lonely and Forsaken Turtle-Doves the following year. The Chronicon Ephratense quotes Beissel as saying, "the angles themselves, when they sang at the birth of Christ, had to make use of our rules." The statement of these rules in his treatise became one of the first of its kind published in…show more content… The original poetry could run from eight to over one hundred stanzas, often expressing the depravity of earthly life, the sacrifices of acetic life, and the rewards of eternal life in heaven. Rather than stanzas, there are also a few through-composed works where Biblical passages, such as the entire Song of Solomon or several chapters from the Book of Revelations are set to music, without repetition of the melody. With text in hand, the composer then constructed the melody using what Beissel labeled “master notes” and “servant notes.” Using the “masters” a melody was created with each syllable of the text receiving a note in the soprano staff. Once the melody was fashioned, Beissel provided charts showing which “servants” follow each “master.” It was simply a matter of matching the “servants” on the alto, tenor, and bass lines to their “masters” creating four-part harmony. To make the music accessible to both the Brothers and Sisters, the music is written with a “Movable C-clef” that marks the line on the staff indicating middle C. In this way, the singers could take the same manuscript and transpose the notes up or down and octave as necessary to match their respective voice parts and maintain four-part
