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At their peak membership before the Civil War, Shakers numbered about 6,000; today fewer than ten remain at the only active community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Yet the Shakers have had a large impact on the culture of the United States. Shaker furniture, architecture, and boxes have become emblematic of rural simplicity. The Shaker song "Simple Gifts," written in 1848 by Joseph Brackett, now circulates worldwide, thanks to Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and Sydney Carter's hymn adaptation "Lord of the Dance."
Music played a central role in Shaker life from the time founder Ann Lee and a small group of followers arrived from England in 1774. Songs--almost always monophonic--were used in personal devotion, religious instruction, and worship. Shakers danced in their worship services, and because instruments were forbidden until about 1870, they sang the music. Some outsiders derisively noted resemblances between Shaker melodies and secular tunes.
An enormous body of untapped primary sources on Shaker music exists. The Shakers developed systems of notation and wrote down an estimated 10,000 songs in more than 850 manuscript tune books. The vast majority of these songs have not yet been transcribed into standard notation. Among thousands of Shaker letters and diary entries are descriptions of musical practices, and several Shaker theorists produced instruction books. Daniel W. Patterson calls these sources "the richest documentation we have for any branch of American religious folksong of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (foreword to Millennial Praises, ix).
Anyone studying Shaker music faces particular challenges. The first stems from the heterogeneous assortment of people who have written about Shaker culture--photographers, feminists, communitarians, religious studies scholars, history buffs, classical composers, sociologists, folk singers, and antiques dealers, to name a few. Information about Shakers is widely available, yet sometimes inaccurate, and references to musical practice can be incidental or imprecise. Second, the abundance of primary sources makes it challenging to define a project that is significant but focused. Third, the Shakers' peculiar usage of certain common words and their florid nineteenth-century syntax mean that direct quotations are often lengthy and need considerable explanation. ("Unite" and "labor," for example, have specific and complex meanings.) Finally, Shaker music is not only a historical artifact, but also a living tradition...