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Church Music In America
John Ogasapian
A survey from 1600 to present day
The history of American church music is a particularly fascinating and challenging subject, if for no other reason than because of the variety of diverse religious groups that have immigrated and movements that have sprung up in American. Indeed, for the first time in modern history— possibly the only time since the rule of medieval Iberia under the Moors—different faiths have co-existed here with a measure of peace— sometimes ill-humored, occasionally hostile, but more often amicable or at least tolerant—influencing and even weaving their traditions into the fabric of one another’s worship practices even as they competed for converts in the free market of American religion.
This overview traces the musical practices of several of those groups from their arrival on these shores up to the present, and the way in which those practices and traditions influenced each other, leading to the diverse and multi-hued pattern that is American church music at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The tone is non-technical; there are no musical examples, and the musical descriptions are clear and concise. In short, it is abook for interested laymen as well as professional church musicians, for pastors and seminarians as well as students of American religious culture and its history.
John Ogasapian†was professor of Music History at the Univesity of Massachusetts, Lowell. He received his PhD in musicology from Boston University and is an authority on the organ and its music in America. He has published numerous books, articles, essays, and reviews and served as editor of the Organ Historical Society’s quarterly journal, The Tracker, from 1991 to 1999. He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Protestantism, American National Biography and the New Grove Dictionary of Music. He died in 2005 just after submitting the final version of this manuscript.
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