Book DescriptionSixteenth-century Lutherans sang hymns in church-true or false? In this book, Joseph Herl draws on hundreds of liturgical documents, contemporary accounts of services, sermons, instructional and polemical writings on church music, and other sources to show that quite often the answer was "false " He then traces огцых the path of Lutheran church music for the next two centuries to show how Lutherans acquired their reputation as the "singing church " This path was treacherous and fraught with conflict In the sixteenth century, Lutherans were buffeted by Catholicism on one side and the Swiss Reformation on the other In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lutheran churches were caught up in a debate over a new style of church music that many found more entertaining than devotional This debate was to have a strong impact on musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries By the end of the eighteenth century, Lutherans were trying to hold their own against a newsecularism, and many clergy favored a wholesale revision or even abandonment of the historic liturgy in order to make worship more relevant in contemporary society Herl paints a vivid picture of these developments, using as a backdrop the gradual transition from a choral to a congregational liturgy The author eschews the usual analyses of musical repertoire and deals instead with events, people and ideas, drawing readers inside the story and helping them sense what it must have been like to attend aLutheran church in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries Parallel developments in Catholic churches are discussed, as are the rise of organ accompaniment of hymns and various questions of musical performance practice Although written with academic precision, the writing is clear and comprehensible to the nonspecialist, and entertaining anecdotes abound, including stories about the congregation that pelted the preacher with vegetables and the organist who had just three postludes: the hoppity, the skippity and the jumpity The appendixes include translations of several important historical documents and a set of tables outlining the Lutheran mass as presented in 172 different liturgical orders The bibliography includes 400 Lutheran church orders and reports of ecclesiastical visitations read by the author.  Сектор газа2004 г 354 стр ISBN 0195154398.