The Brandstetter Tunebook: Shape-Note Dissemination and the Germans of Western Maryland

In the Special Collections Division of the University of Maryland’s Per-forming Arts Library there exists a small, oblong tunebook, measuring nineteen centimeters in length and ten centimeters along its spine. There is a single gathering of pages, bound by thread and surrounded by a gray cardboard cover. The cover has no ornamentation or title, but inside, the handwritten title page includes both a name and date, which suggest that the book was prepared in or around 1820 for, or by, a certain Maria Brandstetter of Washington County, Maryland (see fig. 1).¹

Tunebooks are not unusual in the history of nineteenth-century American music, but this one exhibits some surprising features. First, unlike the printed English-language tunebooks of compilers such as John Wyeth and Ananias Davisson, nearly half of the Brandstetter book’s contents are chorales in German.² Unlike German-language tunebooks produced in early nineteenth-century America, the Brandstetter book is curious in that the other half of its contents are American songs—hymns and fuging tunes in English—and the book’s music is copied in shape notation.³ As we shall see, the Brandstetter tunebook from the mountains of western Maryland provides a window into the culture of a frontier community, and it also allows us to rethink the passage of shape notes from their beginnings in eastern Pennsylvania to the pivotal Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the early nineteenth century. Through an understanding of the settlement of western Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley, we can see how the history and culture of German migrants from Pennsylvania merges with the development and dissemination of shape-note hymnody.

Figure 1.

Title page of the Brandstetter tunebook.

Courtesy of the Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland Libraries.

George Pullen Jackson uncovered and told the story of the “Fasola Folk” and their shape-note hymnody in the 1930s, and this has remained the basic narrative ever since his publications.⁴ Accordingly, America’s home-grown, accessible notation in triangles, circles, squares, and diamonds moved southward from Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Winchester and Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the 1810s. Here, Ananias Davisson’s Harrisonburg print shop became a major publishing center for shape-note hymnody, and the tradition quickly spread throughout the mid-Atlantic and southern United States. Once in the South, this specialized notation took on a life of its own, transforming itself into what is today commonly thought of as the Sacred Harp tradition.

As told, this story leaves a gaping geographical hole, that is, the hundred or so miles between compilers and singers in Harrisburg and those of the northern Shenandoah Valley. The Brandstetter tunebook, however, suggests that Washington County, Maryland—along with other medial towns in southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland—could fill in a portion of this gap, thus better explaining the migration of shape-note hymnody. There is still another important reason to give this tunebook a closer look. Musicological studies often privilege large cities and urban areas, but in doing so the discipline can easily miss significant elements of nineteenth-century musical life. Incorporating into the historical narrative a manuscript tunebook belonging to an individual, like that of Maria Brandstetter, draws a more complete picture of early nineteenth-century musical and ethnic culture in such isolated, rural, and largely unexamined areas as western Maryland. Thus, through the Brandstetter tunebook we can better understand one community’s musical life and the role that community came to play in the most native musical tradition of the young United States.

In order to thoroughly investigate the Brandstetter tunebook, we will isolate the unique qualities of the source and investigate each aspect within its particular context. As stated previously, the tunebook contains a mix of American hymnody and German chorale tunes. Since each of these genres comes from separate musical traditions, it is imperative that we be clear about the historical circumstances surrounding each tradition’s existence in early nineteenth-century America. In addition to the musical contents of the Brandstetter book, we...