The Music of the Ephrata Cloister

As a musicologist, I have had the opportunity to delve into the history of the Ephrata Cloister, an eighteenth-century celibate commune that was located in Lancaster County. The solitary sisters and brothers of Ephrata produced a variety of printed hymnals and music manuscripts, leaving behind a large corpus of material that is now located in various libraries, archives, and private collections in the United States and United Kingdom. An affiliated nineteenth-century Pennsylvanian commune known as Snow Hill carried on some Ephrata traditions, and its residents created copies of Ephrata music manuscripts. If you wish to learn more and/or visit the Ephrata Cloister, click here.

Among my Ephrata-related findings are the following:

• The uncovering and recognition of American women composers:

  • Sister Föben, born Christianna Lassle (1717–1784)

  • Sister Ketura, born Catherine Hagamann (1718–1797)

  • Sister Hanna, born Hannah Lichty (1714–1793)

• A descriptive catalog of extant Ephrata and Snow Hill music manuscripts

• The translation and interpretation of one of the first American music theory treatises, the preface to the 1747 hymnal Das Gesäng der einsamen und verlassenen Turtel=Taube

Media

I have been featured by several media outlets for my work.

Publications

Here is a list of my Ephrata-related scholarly works and creative activity (including a performance edition of music and an album) resulting from my research. You can view my page at academia.edu to access some of these materials.:

[Ephrata Community] and Schwester Föben (Christianna Lassle). “Music of the Ephrata Cloister.” Edited by Christopher Herbert, with David Fuchs and Anthony Petruccello. Fayetteville, AR: Classical Vocal Reprints, 2020. Click here to purchase this sheet music.

[Ephrata Community]. “Rose=Lilie=Blume Sequence,” from Das Gesäng der einsamen und verlassenen Turtel=Taube. Critical Edition by Christopher Herbert. Ephrata Cloister Associates, 2018.

“’A Most Valuable Curiosity’: Music Manuscripts, Authorship, Composition, and Gender at the Ephrata Cloister in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania.” Journal of the Society for American Music 16, no. 4 (November 2022).

“The Sounds of Ephrata: Developing a Research Methodology to Catalog and Study Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvanian Music Manuscripts.” Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 76, no. 2 (December 2019): 199–222.

“A Sweet ‘Bitter-Sweet’ Find in an Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvanian Music Manuscript.” Library of Congress Blog Post, 2019. https://blogs.loc.gov/music/2019/05/a-sweet-bitter-sweet-find-in-an-eighteenth-century-pennsylvanian-music-manuscript/

“Voices in the Pennsylvania Wilderness: an Examination of the Music Manuscripts, Music Theory, Compositions, and (Female) Composers of the Eighteenth-Century Ephrata Cloister.” D.M.A. diss., The Juilliard School, 2018.

“Voices in the Wilderness: Music of the Ephrata Cloister.” Christopher Herbert, producer. Bright Shiny Things, 2019–2020, audio recording.
Click here to order the album.