Description
Sweet Seraphic Fire brings together two unique bodies of American sacred song: choral compositions from the New England singingschool tradition and the most popular Evangelical Protestant hymn texts in historic American use. In the late eighteenth century the New England singingschool movement produced Americas first great sacredmusic style, employing several genres of unaccompanied fourpart choral compositions with the melody in the lead (tenor) part. The enormous popularity of singingschool music also promoted a canon of hymn texts shared across Americas competing Evangelical Protestant denominations. This recording contains neglected masterworks from the New England singing school that also helped to create the American hymn canon. Marking a more recent turn in this process, we have also included some new settings of traditional Evangelical lyrics written by leaders in the revival of singingschool music that has blossomed in the Northeast since 1976. ! Selection of pieces for this recording was determined by correlating inch The Norumbega Harmony inch our collection of one hundred six historic New England singingschool compositions and thirty contemporary works in traditional stylewith a list of the three hundred most frequently printed hymn texts in America from 1737 to 1960. Stephen Marini