Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
Читать онлайн книгу.
songs in Mohican communities. Moravians also emphasized teachings about the divine that connected with already existing spiritual understandings of manitou or spirit beings. Jesus was presented primarily as a God who had become a man, a great warrior who was killed, yet whose wounds and blood held redemptive, life-giving power. Rather than relying on biblical texts and exegesis, Moravian missionaries presented a distinctly embodied version of Christianity that particularly resonated with Mohican communities.44 Moravian rituals and songs formed the core of missionary practices in North American mission contexts.
When Rauch arrived in the New York Colony in 1740, the Brüdergemeine (Brethren’s Community), known in English as the Moravian Church, was a new church body and its religious practices were still very much in development. The first Moravian community of Herrnhut (The Lord’s Watch) had been established in 1722 in southeastern Saxony. In the early 1720s, the young German nobleman Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf had purchased a large acreage along the Zittauer Straße, a road connecting the nearby towns of Löbau and Zittau, following his marriage to fellow noblewoman Erdmuthe Dorothea Reuss. At the time, the young couple could scarcely have foreseen the consequences of that purchase. By 1722, together with religious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia, members of the persecuted Protestant denomination of the Unitas Fratrum, they had established a small Christian town on their lands. Although the immediate aim of the community was to provide a sanctuary for Protestants persecuted by the Hapsburg Empire, in 1727, the community developed an entirely new mission. At a worship service on August 13, 1727, Zinzendorf and his fellow “Herrnhuters” sensed a particularly strong presence of the Holy Spirit in the church building, mirroring the biblical tale of the day of Pentecost. Although the worshippers that day hailed from many different Protestant backgrounds—Lutheran, Pietist, Unitas Fratrum—this experience of religious revival impelled them to come together as an entirely new church: the erneuerte Brüdergemeine (Renewed Brethren’s Community). Their religious fervor also encouraged them to move beyond the boundaries of their small community to spread the Christian message. Within the next twenty years, the people of Herrnhut had founded a transcontinental and transoceanic network of Christian missions stretching from Tibet to Suriname.
According to Zinzendorf, he had foreseen the development of this mission network in a dream in 1723. In this dream, the Holy Spirit had revealed to him a landscape with many Christian towns similar to the community of Herrnhut.45 It was this specific method of planned spiritual landscapes and towns—communities that resembled each other in both worship and spatial construction—that would fuel the development of more than thirty newly constructed international settlements, in addition to numerous outlying missions such as Shekomeko that were established in already extant towns and communities. The planning of each new Moravian community’s physical structure was approved in Europe, and then constructed with natural materials available on site. Most settlements were built around a central town square, and contained communal houses and worship spaces, as well as gardens, trade buildings, and agricultural fields. Lifeways in Moravian communities were also predictably replicated based on a system of communal living called the Oeconomie (Economy), in which community members contributed their earnings directly to the church. Moravians were divided into gendered “choirs” based on age and marital status. The desired goal was to create a shared, spiritual space where each person could live solely for the purpose of serving Christ without fear of monetary poverty. Christ, and not a human church official, was the elder of all Moravian communities. At meetings, his presence was signified by an empty chair and his will was ascertained by casting of lots (das Los).46 Lots were an important arbiter of not just communal decisions but also individual choices. Moravians carried pieces of paper or “lot chips” in their pockets that could be cast to invoke a randomized answer or “Christ’s will.” Lots settled disputes, interpreted Scripture, and sanctioned marriages, missionary activities, and social customs. The entire social organization of Moravian communities depended on the lot as an arbiter of social and spiritual will (fig. I.2a–d).
Lots also governed worship practices, including music. All Moravians learned to publicly demonstrate their improvisational abilities in daily musical worship services, called Singstunden (singing meetings). In a Singstunde, individual hymn-verses and phrases of chorale melodies, from a memorized repertory of several thousand preexisting hymns, were extemporaneously combined by a community member called a Liturg (worship leader, liturgist), and repeated by other participants to create a Liederpredigt (hymn-sermon). The Liederpredigt was itself a sounded explication of a particular scriptural passage called the Losung (watchword) that was chosen from a set of hymn verses and scriptural passages selected by Zinzendorf.47 If no suitable verses could be drawn from the memorized repertory to suit the Losung, then the liturgist would improvise a new hymn. The entire practice was called “singing from the heart” (aus dem Herzen gesungen). The soundways of Moravian communities were therefore as planned as the buildings and communal living practices. The choir system immersed community members in a daily cycle of religious hymns and prayers, directing the entirety of life to spiritual contemplation and a close relationship with God. As these practices were replicated in each community, they constituted a worldwide community based on divinely communicated sound.48
Transmitting the Gospel through singing was therefore an important part of Moravian missionary practice. Moravians did not rely on literacy to impart Christian teachings. Instead, rituals (baptism, communion, Singstunden), songs, and prayers were the main methods of connecting with potential Christians.49 New Moravians were taught to improvise hymns as a way of channeling the Holy Spirit, a practice that required extensive training and study to learn. Moravians were also encouraged to sing in their own languages, and Moravian hymns in German were sometimes macaronic (sung in two or more languages) or incorporated “loan” words from various languages such as Hebrew, Mohawk, Mohican, Arawak, and Latin. Multilingual Singstunden and other worship services were characteristic forms of worship in Moravian missions, a practice that Joanne van der Woude has termed “polyglot harmony.”50 Polyglot singing reflected the Moravian belief that singers were pre-sounding the voices of the multiethnic Christian community that would gather around the throne of God at the end of the world. In the end-time, the cacophony of the tower of Babel would be silenced and all people would sing with one voice.51 On Earth, in anticipation of that great awakening at the end of time, Moravians could improvise and sing multilingual hymns as a way of channeling their future divinity through the singing body.
Fig. I.2a Box of lots in German and English belonging to the Provincial Elders Conference. OC 210, MAB. Photograph by author.
Fig. I.2b Gold silk drawstring lot bag, with gold cord and tassels, containing 51 scrolls with daily watchword texts. OC 510, MAB. Photograph by author.
Fig. I.2c–d Lot boxes and chips. M.20, M.26, and M.28, UA Herrnhut.
Multilingual hymns were also a way to reflect a localized and indigenized version of Christian practice, and Moravians believed they further demonstrated the presence of the Holy Spirit in potential Christians. Missionaries were taught that the Holy Spirit must first be active in the hearts of those “who would hear the message.”52 Moravian missionaries should not concern themselves with converting large groups of people, but rather with seeking those who freely responded to the Christian message: “We are like servants at their master’s door who scratch softly so that those who will want to hear will hear, while others not so inclined can ignore us.”53 Zinzendorf claimed that conversion was only accomplished through the Holy Spirit, and encouraged missionaries to only baptize those who they sensed had an intuitive feeling of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. But the work of conversion did not happen without missionaries themselves and the transmission of their particular beliefs and cultural norms. It was the distinctive worship practices of the Moravians that attracted a wide variety of people to join their church communities. While other Protestant