Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
1.6 Congregational Singing in Finland and Ingria in the Nineteenth Century
In the first half of the nineteenth century, congregational singing in Finland and Ingria was mostly unaccompanied and in unison; in addition, it was not of general interest. Attention was paid to churchwardens and organists as conductors of con-gregational singing only if their work was particularly commendable or remarkably poor. Right at the beginning of the century, in the Hämeenlinna Deanery, there were attempts to activate churchwardens to establish and rehearse singing groups that would lead congregational singing in the Divine Services. Magnus Jacob Alopaeus (1743–1818), who served as bishop of Porvoo from 1809 to 1818, also occasionally intervened in the congregational singing. In his 1812 visitation in Valkeala parish, Alopaeus gave instructions to sing earnestly and evenly without anyone raising his voice above the others. In Anjala in 1813, he said that singing had to be steady and restrained and that the verses had to be started and ended at the same time. In the Diocese of Turku (see Map 4), churchwardens’ poor singing was also occasionally pointed out (K. Jalkanen 1976, 64–65).
In the 1840s serious attention began to be paid to the improvement of congrega-tional singing in Finland. There were many reasons for that: religious and nacongrega-tional awakening, the rise of Finnish culture, the general progress in educational matters and impacts from other Lutheran countries, especially Sweden (K. Jalkanen 1976, 65–66). The question about congregational singing was handled for the first time in the clergy conferences of both the Turku and Porvoo Dioceses in 1842. In Turku, Archbishop Erik Gabriel Melartin (1780–1847) encouraged his clergy to ensure that the churchwardens taught young people in hymn-singing at confirmation schools for a few hours each day. In Porvoo, Bishop Karl-Gustaf Ottelin (1792–1864) urged the clergy, when recruiting churchwardens, to pay special attention to their skills so that they could teach four-part singing at the confirmation school (Minutes of the 1842 Clergy Conference in Turku, 65; Circular letter of the Porvoo Diocese 7 Sep-tember 1842; Rosenqvist 1935, 411).
Many pastors and members of the bourgeois intelligentsia started to consider the standard of congregational singing poor. They claimed that it was incoherent, even chaotic, and among ordinary people, regular and uniform congregational singing was unknown. Many churchwardens could not read music at all but sang by heart.
They also sang in a loud voice, which was considered more important than correct and ‘aesthetic’ singing (e.g. Suometar 9 February 1855; Oulun Wiikko-Sanomia 3 De-cember 1859 and 10 March 1860; Sanomia Turusta 2 March and 11 May 1860. See also Hagelin 1837, III–IV, and Vapaavuori 1997, 119–121). Moreover, due to a lack of printed chorale books, people were singing hymns by using local chorale variants that differed from one another in different parishes or villages; even an individual
Oulu
Vaasa
Turku
Jyväskylä Kuopio
Porvoo
Helsinki
Viipuri
Diocese
of Turku Diocese of Porvoo
Map 4. The dioceses of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, 1812–1851.
singer could have his or her own version. Naturally, there was also similar variety in singing liturgical melodies, as seen from the hand-written chorale books. Conse-quently, contemporary descriptions explained situations where parishioners sang in a loud voice and mostly without listening to the singing of the others (e.g. Bucht 1857, 5; Colliander 1874, 26; Suometar 8 December 1854). From the 1880s onwards, the Finnish newspaper Inkeri, published in Saint Petersburg, had similar descriptions of the standard of congregational singing in Ingrian parishes (see e.g. Inkeri 29 Sep-tember 1889).
The newspaper Inkeri ran a serial story in 1891 (from 4 January to 19 April) in which a narrator from the Ingrian countryside told of his brother Simo, who performed his military service as a servant to an officer in Saint Petersburg. In the story, Simo also visits Saint Mary’s Finnish Church in 1845. The description of congregational singing corresponds to those published in Finnish newspapers, but unlike them, the vernacular singing style and its incoherence was not seen as negative thing but rather as a source of enthusiasm. As the author, a pseudonymous -mi -ka describes it:
In particular, church-singing enchanted a man like my brother. Here, every-one shouted as best they could. And although our Simo was never a par-ticularly singing boy – he hardly knew a single melody from the Hymnal at the time – that general shouting appealed to him in this unfamiliar church, and to his surprise he found that his voice was heard, even over many other voices, if he really got excited.28 (Inkeri 22 February 1891. Transl. by the author.)
However, Simo actually got overly excited, and during the next hymn, he shouted so loud that people were turning to look at him. A familiar lady kindly instructed him after the Service:
28 ‘Erittäin oli kirkkolaulu hurmaawa weljeni kalttaiselle miehelle. Täällä huusi jokainen minkä jak-soi. Ja waikka meidän Simo ei koskaan ollut erittäin laulawa poika, tuskinpa tunsi hän silloin ainoata-kaan nuottia wirsikirjasta, niin weti toki tuo yleinen huuto tässä wieraassa kirkossa hänenkin muainoata-kaan- mukaan-sa, ja ihmeekseen huomasi hän että kyllä se hänenkin äänensä kuuluu, jopa käypi monen toisen äänen ylikin, jos oikein innostuu.’
Simeon should not shout in the church as terribly as he did today. It no longer feels like singing in honour of God, but an evil scream that bothers people in the house of the Lord.29 (Ibid. Transl. by the author.)
The Organist of Saint Nicholas’ Church in Helsinki (the present-day cathedral), Ru-dolf Lagi (1823–1868) did not like congregational singing as much as Simo. Accord-ing to his description, it was incoherent and disorganised at every level. It is no won-der that Lagi, along with many other contemporary experts, wanted to standardise it.
The congregation, which in its entirety is not always endowed with lungs as strong as its churchwarden, regardless of the ornaments, et cetera, cannot hold the notes as long as him, and consequently, reaches the fermata at the end of each verse long before him. Usually, it is the feminine part of the congregation endowed with a livelier temperament that first finishes its line, then comes the more phlegmatic male part and finally the church-warden who holds the fermata as long as there is still a single air particle left in his lungs. When accompanying singing on the organ, the organist considers it his duty to hold the fermata even for a while longer until the churchwarden has lost his breath in order to reveal that his instrument, however, has the strongest lungs.30 (Minutes of the 1864 Clergy Confer-ence in Kuopio, 176. Transl. by the author.)
Finland and Ingria were not alone. The situation was similar in Lutheran Europe as a whole at the turn of the nineteenth century (Siitan 2003, 18). However, the Swedish musicologist Folke Bohlin (1993, 126–127) does not describe congregational singing in Sweden at that time as arbitrary chaos but rather uses the term
‘multiheteropho-29 ‘Simeonin ei pitäisi huutaa niin hirweästi kirkossa, kuin se tänään tapahtui. Se ei tunnu enää laululta Jumalan kunniaksi, mutta pahalta kiljumiselta, jonka kautta ihmiset Herran huoneessa tulewat häirityksi.’
30 ‘Församlingen som i sin helhet icke alltid är begåfvad med lika starka lungor som dess klockare orkar oaktadt driller etc. icke hålla ut tonerna lika länge som denna och hinner följaktligen till ferma-ten vid hvarje versrads slut vida tidigare än denna. Vanligen är det den med ett lifligare temperament begåfvade qvinliga delen af församlingen som först blifver färdig med sin versrad, derpå kommer den mer flegmatiska manliga delen och sist klockaren som uthåller fermaten så länge ännu en luft-partikel finnes qvar i hans lungor. Beledsagas sången af orgel anser organisten sin skyldighet vara att uthålla fermaten ännu en stund sedan klockaren redan mistat andan för att dymedelst ådagalägga att hans instrument dock har de starkaste lungorna.’
ny.’ The whole congregation, therefore, sang the same melody, but without the need for complete unity. The slow pace of the singing had led the people to try to enliv-en the long tones by decorating them with melismata. Naturally, Bohlin continues, this did not happen in the same way every time and every place, but local variants and ways of singing emerged, which the Swedish musical elite consciously set out to eradicate as early as the end of the eighteenth century. Anders Dillmar (2001, 29–36) points out that there is a large amount of Swedish evidence of older – by which he means the time before Hæffner’s 1820 Chorale Book – ‘individual-related’
hymn-singing. Based on previous research, Dillmar summarises its characteristics with words such as powerful, slow, rhythmically and melodically heterophonic, richly ornamented, sometimes in forms of glissandi and vocal tremors. It is clear that into-nation was based on older conceptions of tonality and that the free singing situation has resulted in singing rich in sound and dissonance.
The Norwegian scholar Harald Herrestal (1995, 44–45) has also pointed out that in the eighteenth century, the congregation in Norwegian churches did not care about the unity of singing, either; everyone sang as if they were alone in the church, just how they had learned in their childhood. In Iceland, this practice continued until at least the 1870s (ibid., 45). In Estonia, Livonia and Courland, the standardisation process of congrega-tional singing happened at about the same time as in Finland (Siitan 2003).
In this thesis, I am focusing on the attempts to standardise congregational singing in nineteenth-century Finland and Ingria from three perspectives. Firstly, in Chapter 2, I dig into the thoughts and ideas that created the inspiration for standardising congregational singing. Secondly, in Chapter 3, I present how the standardising pro-cess was put into action, which phenomena had an impact on it, and what kind of interaction there was between the Lutheran church and the other (music) culture of the society. Finally, in Chapter 4, I turn to the impacts the thoughts and ideas and the standardising process itself had on liturgical melodies, i.e. how they changed dur-ing the nineteenth century. There is a small conclusion at the end of each chapter;
broader conclusions come in Chapter 5. At the end of the thesis, there is a long
Ap-pendix 1, which includes detailed tables on the contents and background materials of all of the nineteenth-century printed collections of liturgical music. Appendix 2 is a timeline that summerises the key events of the study.
Ingrian parishes have Finnish, Swedish, German and Russian names, and many Finnish town and municipalities both Finnish and Swedish names. In this thesis, I always use the Finnish names.