Music academic completes new edition of the first Methodist tune book

OU Music’s Prof Martin Clarke has recently completed a new edition of the very first tune book used by the early Methodist movement. Although eighteenth-century copies of A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, As they are commonly Sung at the Foundery (1742) have survived, the volume’s many editorial and printing errors have meant that it has long been given only brief attention by scholars. Commentary on it has tended to focus on those problems, rather than what the collection might reveal about the sound-world of early Methodism.

Methodism emerged in the second quarter of the eighteenth century as a revival movement within the Church of England, with the brothers John (1703–91) and Charles Wesley (1707–88) prominent among its early leaders. They saw the singing of hymns as a crucial tool in evangelism and teaching. Charles wrote thousands of original hymns, while John was very active as a writer, editor, translator and compiler of hymns and hymnals. The full and robust musical participation of everyone who attended Methodist meetings was central to making hymns one of the movement’s most distinctive features. This volume, commonly referred to as The Foundery Collection, was the first of several tune books issued under John Wesley’s authority in the eighteenth century.

The Foundery Collection contains only forty-three tunes, but in their musical variety, they reveal much about how early Methodism might have sounded. Tunes are drawn from many different sources and traditions, including some from the established repertoire of English metrical psalm tunes, many borrowed from Germanic sources, and a melody borrowed from an opera by Handel, the most famous composer of the day. The psalm tunes show the influence of the Wesley brothers’ upbringing in the Church of England. The Germanic tunes reflect the close contact between the early Methodists and Moravian Christians in London, Europe and America. Their thorough integration of communal singing into all aspects of religious life made a great impression on John Wesley and is reflected in his translations of some of their hymns and the inclusion of tunes he most likely learned from them. The adaptation of a melody by Handel is indicative of Methodism’s presence among London’s theatrical community, who were very familiar with the fashionable art music of the period. Handel would later compose three original tunes for words by Charles Wesley, while another theatre composer and musician, John Frederick Lampe, published a collection of twenty-four original musical settings of Wesley’s words.

The poor editorial and printing standards of The Foundery Collection mean that it is essentially unusable in its original form. This new edition brings together versions of the forty-three tunes from contemporaneous sources in which they were printed to a much higher standard. By setting these versions of the tunes to the hymn texts contained within The Foundery Collection, the new edition opens up the possibility of gaining a greater insight into how early Methodist meetings might have sounded. Recordings of one verse of each hymn, featuring baritone Jon Stainsby, have been released alongside the edition, helping bring new life to this often maligned but undeniably important volume.