Ars et musica in liturgia: Essays Presented to Casper Honders on His Seventieth Birthday.

Roberts, Kenneth (American writer)

Edited by Frans Brouwer and Robin A. Leaver. (Studies in Liturgical Musicology, 1.) Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press 1994. [206 p. ISBN 0-8108-2948-7. $29.50.]

This slim volume is a collection of eleven very specialized essays dealing with aspects of Protestant church music of the past four hundred years written by Dutch, Swiss, Austrian, English, German, and American liturgical music figures. Four essays are in German and one is in Dutch (all with brief summaries in English); the remainder are in English. There is also a setting of the Introit for Easter, with Dutch and English texts underlaid, by the Dutch composer Wim Kloppenburg. An English-language preface by the editors outlines the career of Casper Honders, Professor of Liturgiology at Groningen University, and pays homage to his years of practical work in the Dutch church and educational system. There is also a large bibliography, organized chronologically, at the beginning of the volume. A supplementary bibliographical addendum is found at the end of the volume (why could it not have been combined with the opening one in the process of editing, considering the leisurely publishing schedule?). A brief biographical sketch of each contributor is noted in a full English-language section at the end. It appears that a Dutch-language edition was published earlier, close to the birthday celebration of Honders.

Topics of individual essays range from "19th-Century Church Music in Iceland," "Organ Registration and Accompaniment in 10th-Century Germany," essays dealing with the fourth part of the Christmas Oratorio and the four duets from part 3 of the Clavierubung by Johann Sebastian Bach, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Engadine (Swiss) hymnody, a service in Dutch and English at the Rotterdam Scottish Church in 1801, a New York Psalter of the Dutch Reformed Church from 1767, and the use of the organ in English worship services (contrasted with German organ usage). It is a true grab bag of essays, without any common thread, in the Germanic Festschrift mode. None of the contributions would seem to shed a blazing scholarly light; they usually deal with a small facet of the world of liturgical music, and are interesting in a curious byway fashion.

Of some interest is Albert Clement's writing on Bach's four duets, which he suggests are numerologically related to some home worship ceremonies in the Bach household (a theory related to that recently proposed by Michael Marissen in his The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995]). Alan Luffs essay on the lack of the chorale tradition in England, and, thus, the quite different organ repertories belabors the obvious. The brief musical composition is designed for unison congregation/choir with organ and is based upon the Dutch psalm tune, harmonized in a conservative modal manner. The short essay by the Bern University scholar Andreas Marti is interesting, for it shows Heinrich Schutz dealing with the famous anti-Semitic Gospel of Matthew text (27:25) in a theological perspective (he says little about the meaning of this in Bach, however). Persons interested in liturgical music may find tasty nuggets here, but only larger music libraries need have it on hand.