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 groups, such as the Methodists, remained predominantly British and Anglo American, Moravian Church communities boasted an almost globally representative membership.54
The founding of the Moravian missions in Pennsylvania began in 1740 with the arrival of a Moravian group from Savannah, Georgia. In 1735, Zinzendorf and the leadership of the Moravian Church had established a settlement in the new British colony of Georgia. That year, several Moravians had traveled to the colony, where they occupied a house in the center of Savannah. But while the missions in the Danish Caribbean thrived, the outbreak of war between England and Spain in 1739 destroyed the Moravians’ hopes for further missionary work in the southern British colonies. Fleeing Georgia, they sought refuge in the northern British colonies, arriving in Philadelphia in 1740 on the sloop of George Whitefield, a notorious and celebrated English revivalist. Whitefield had met the Moravians in Savannah while working with John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Whitefield’s destination in Pennsylvania was “Nazareth,” a 5,000-acre tract of Delaware land including the village of Welagameka that he had recently purchased from the Penn family at the Forks of the Delaware River. He intended to build a school for orphans and the children of slaves from the surrounding European settlements. Whitefield himself soon departed for England, but he appointed the Moravians to build the school in his absence, and allowed them to plan their own settlement on his land. However, within a year, theological disagreements about styles of prayer and Scripture reading erupted between landlord and tenants and the Moravians were evicted. It was then that the Moravian Church purchased its own parcel of Delaware land eleven miles south of Whitefield’s tract along the Lehigh River at the abandoned village of Menagachsuenk. There, in 1741, they began to construct their first newly built North American community, Bethlehem.
This new town was to be a geographical and spiritual center that would provide people, materials, and financial support for an expansive mission program. Its location on what was at the time the western boundary of the Pennsylvania Colony was ideal for a variety of missionary purposes. The area stretching from Bethlehem and the Lehigh River Valley southward to Philadelphia, including the Tulpehocken Valley, and the towns of Lancaster and Germantown, was the center of an active German religious diaspora. Lutherans, German Reformed, Arminians, Socinians, Schwenkfelders, German Old Tunkers, New Tunkers, New Lights, Inspired, Sabbatarians, Hermits, Independents, and Free Thinkers had all settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. For Zinzendorf, this offered an unprecedented opportunity to unite these disparate sects under one German church. Although Zinzendorf’s ardent plan for a united German church community never materialized, Pennsylvania also offered the chance to live in close proximity to many different Native American communities. By 1748, in accordance with Zinzendorf’s Heiden Collegia, at least 132 missionaries had been sent out from Bethlehem to work in communities from Pachgatgoch, Connecticut, to Meniolagomeka and Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Rauch’s small Christian congregation at Shekomeko, New York, would also eventually relocate to the area around Bethlehem, where they would build several new communities with other Native Christians from various tribal affiliations and backgrounds.
At the height of the Moravians’ presence among Delaware, Wampano, Haudenosaunee, Shawnee, and Mohican communities in the 1740s and 50s, the number of Native Moravians living at any one time in mission communities numbered at more than 250 individuals. A catalog of Native baptisms from Pachgatgoch lists 471 men, women, and children who were baptized from the beginning of the mission era to 1769.55 But this early period of Moravian mission history was relatively brief. Surrounded by escalating conflicts between Native Americans, European settlers, and the European colonial empires of France and England during the Seven Years’ War, Native Moravian communities in eastern Pennsylvania were eventually destroyed or abandoned, and many members of the Native Moravian congregation fled westward into the Ohio Country. There, Native Moravians would struggle to maintain viable communities along new spatial, political, and cultural frontiers that would arise in the wake of the American Revolution. After the massacre at Gnadenhütten in March 1782, this once-vibrant community of Native Christians was reduced to a handful of families and individuals. Although the Moravian missions continued into the nineteenth century, with the establishment of new communities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Ontario, the flourishing numbers of Native Christians who had chosen to live as Moravians, and the vital musical practices that had sustained the first forty years of the missions, no longer characterized life in these newer communities.
Re-Sounding the Moravian Missions
In writing this book, it was my desire to create a rich and inclusive narrative of sound and musical practices in the first forty years of the Moravian missions in North America. But I wondered whether a written book could truly capture the complex affective geographies of past soundscapes. Eventually, I came to the realization that if I wanted to create a new type of history—a sonic history—I would need to consider the possibility that communicating in sound might be an even more effective way to tell the story of the Moravian missions. It was the desire to incorporate sound into the book that led me to available digital technologies,
