With One Heart and One Voice

""With One Heart and One Voice" reviews the trends surrounding the styles of selected tunes and analyzes the changes in shape and text for the most frequently used melodies in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Seventy-six "core repertory" tunes are examined based on their repeated appearances in tune books published between 1808 and 1878, at which point Methodists finally created a hymnal with both words and music, after a half century of experimentation." "This work allows scholars, hymnologists, and hymn singers to explore the social and musicological influences on hymn tune writing, how long it took for texts to acquire a fixed harmony, how tastes in hymn tunes change ever so slowly, and how many delightful tunes found in the core repertory of the nineteenth century have been dropped from today's repertoire."--BOOK JACKET.