Sound in the Land: Essays on Mennonites and Music.

Marini, Stephen A.

Sound in the Land: Essays on Mennonites and Music. Edited by Maureen Epp and Carol Ann Weaver. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2005. 228 pp. $25.00 paper.

The Mennonites exemplify the church historian's maxim that with religious communities, less is often more. A small Protestant movement of a million or so members worldwide, Mennonites can now be found in more than sixty countries. Divided into two main branches, the Mennonite Church and General Conference Mennonites, as well as several smaller ones, they find their Central European ethnicity profoundly challenged by their North American host culture and flourishing missions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And while their history is rooted in the earliest of Radical Reformation sects, their peace testimony and global evangelism place them at the forefront of today's moral, cultural, and political debates.

Music has played an essential role in negotiating this complex Mennonite identity from the Ausbund, a collection of songs compiled by Swiss Brethren martyrs at Passau in 1564, to the 1992 Hymnal: A Worship Book and beyond. Sound in the Land is a collection of essays and poems that interrogates this musical heritage along with the community's current performance practices. The essays have been collected from the eponymous festival and conference held in the summer of 2004 at Conrad Grebel University College of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Conference organizers stressed two overarching themes: the encounter of present practice with historical traditions and the role of music in Mennonite identity. The materials presented in this volume faithfully address those themes, though in quite different ways, giving the collection a satisfying unity while preventing individual essays from undue specialization.

Editors Maureen Epp and Carol Ann Weaver have set the collection's fifteen essays into four sections, each prefaced by a festival poem. The first section, on hymn traditions, features the title essay by distinguished hymnologist Mary K. Oyer, who reviews the development of Mennonite hymnody since the Ausbund and identifies growing ethnic diversity and stylistic variety as the dominant forces shaping a new musical future. Co-editor Maureen Epp and historian Mark Jantzen offer penetrating studies respectively of the Ausbund's collection of contrafacta--new hymn texts set to familiar tunes bearing previous textual associations--and of the cultural politics of Mennonite peace lyrics in Bismarck's Prussia. The section closes with Katie Graber's study of the Mennonite Church in Madison, Wisconsin, in which she argues that "music can make a person Mennonite" through "a complex interaction and layering of actions, objects, sounds, and words" (73).

The next two sections turn to contemporary composing and music making by musicians "at the edges" (79) of the Mennonite community and by a group of artists with unambiguously Mennonite backgrounds who have struggled to combine that identity with the aesthetic and professional demands of their calling. These papers are primarily biographical studies, ranging from figures like Noble Kreider and Benjamin Horsch, who challenged the norms of Mennonite music education during the twentieth century, to A. M. Friesen, Cate Friesen, and J. D. Martin, popular performers and songwriters whose music defies Mennonite tradition yet finds acceptance in the community.

Marbled throughout these two groups of essays runs a persistent question of identity: is there such a thing as "Mennonite music"? Musicologist Anna Janacek and composer Victor Davies say yes. Janacek cites the importance for Mennonite composers of vocal music as a genre and community as a shaping vocational value, both embodied in the potent four-part a cappella singing of traditional congregations. Davies, non-Mennonite composer of the Mennonite Piano Concerto (1975), was inspired by the tradition's rich hymn repertory of chorales and Kernlieder (gospel songs). Most of the other contemporary composers and artists treated here, however, do not think "Mennonite music" exists, or that their music is Mennonite in any specifiable way. Yet all of them testify to the formative role and continuing allure of their Mennonite backgrounds. They consistently position their artistic callings as mediating between the church's insular musical tradition and the global range of stylistic options now available to it.

The final section of Sound in the Land addresses "experiences of singing today" (177), portraying a community that musically resembles many other American Protestant denominations. Stephen Jacoby reports that ten years after the publication of Hymnal: A Worship Book, a progressive 1992 collaboration between the General Conference and Mennonite Church, two-thirds of United States Mennonite congregations use it while one third still rely on The Mennonite Hymnal (1969). On the other hand, virtually all American Mennonites employ music supplements of some kind, and nearly two-thirds of them project words in worship in the manner of Evangelical "worship and praise" music.

Anna Janacek's study of how the new hymnal's international songs have been used in South Ontario shows that while new African and Latin American hymns found some initial popularity, their overall employment has been modest at best and declining since 1998. Stephanie Krehbiel concludes this section with a nuanced account of tensions between traditional singers and advocates of contemporary "worship and praise" music at two congregations in tiny Freeman, South Dakota. She assigns the tension not so much to musical matters as to the aggressive individualism and emotionalism of contemporary Evangelicalism, whose music challenges the core Mennonite theological value of Gelassenheit, submission of the individual to the community. In Freeman, she reports, mutual forgiveness has kept the community musically integrated, with its Gelassenheit intact.

The last word of Sound in the Land goes to Laura H. Weaver, a seventy-three-year-old Mennonite living "in exile" at an urban service community in Evansville, Indiana, who writes of four-part a cappella singing as a survival strategy" (210). She recounts how the primal sound of Mennonite hymnody has accompanied her peripatetic life and celebrates the fact that her community of memory "is re-created each time I hear and participate in such singing" (215). Weaver's memoir of traditional Mennonite music's engagement with her quite non-traditional life is a fitting personal epilogue for this fine volume.

Conference collections like this are a commonplace of scholarly publishing today, in sacred music just as in any other humanistic or social scientific field. Rarely, however, do they achieve the breadth of range, elegance of execution, and genuine sense of communal inquiry that so abundantly inform Sound in the Land.

Stephen A. Marini

Wellesley College