Herl, Joseph

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Herl, Joseph

PERSONAL:

Married; wife's name Jenny (a chemistry teacher); children: Anna. Education: Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, B.A.; North Texas State University, M.Mus.; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Concordia University, Nebraska, 800 N. Columbia Ave., Seward, NE 68434. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Musician, organist, composer, educator, and writer. Concordia University, Seward, NE, assistant to associate professor of music, 2000—. Previously worked as church musician for two decades.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright dissertation research grant, 1991; Elias Prize in Hymnology, Westminster College; Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in its field, Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2005, for Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict.

WRITINGS:

Six Hymn Inventions: For Organ, CPH (St. Louis, MO), 1997.

(Compiler and editor, with Paul Grime) Hymnal Supplement 98 Handbook, Commission on Worship of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (St. Louis, MO), 1998.

Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Editorial assistant, The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joseph Herl, an accomplished organist and composer, spent two decades as a church musician before joining academia to teach music history, music theory, hymnody, liturgy, and parish music administration. His academic interests include the historical use of Gregorian chant in Lutheran churches, recent choral music, recent compositions using just intonation, keyboard improvisation, the history and practice of hymnody and liturgy, Latin Lutheran plainchant, the influence of doctrine on worship, liturgical inculturation, the music of the Middle Ages, American art music since 1950, the teaching of harmony, and music in the elementary school curriculum.

Since 1996, Herl has been involved in the production of hymnbooks for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in St. Louis, Missouri. With Paul Grime, Herl compiled and edited the Hymnal Supplement 98 Handbook. He was also editorial assistant with Charles G. Manns for Nicholas Temperley's The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820. "The repertory of Anglo-American Protestant church music is vast: many thousands of tunes by many hundreds of musicians had been composed, harmonized, and published by 1820," wrote Nym Cooke in a review of The Hymn Tune Index in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. "Present-day musicians and musicologists thus may find here an unparalleled laboratory for the study of musical activity on the grassroots level."

Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict provides a new look at the history of music and congregational song in German Lutheran churches. According to Renaissance Quarterly contributor Dane Heuchemer: "As brought forward by Herl, recent scholarship into the Reformation and a more complete reading of the available sources contradict several concepts maintained by historians for many decades."

In the book, Herl delves into how the Lutheran church, centuries after it was founded, was torn over whether music should be sung by a choir or the congregation. As he explores these debates, Herl depicts a gradual transition of musical forms within the church. "The hallmark of Lutheran liturgical development from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was the change from a liturgy that was essentially choral to one that was essentially congregational," the author writes in the book's conclusion. "Choral music thus became a performance for an audience and was set against the music of the congregation, hence the ‘worship wars’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This change did not happen all at once but occurred over a period of about two hundred fifty years."

Herl avoids the usual analyses of musical repertoire and instead deals with events, people, and ideas to provide a better look at what it was probably like to attend a Lutheran church in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Written both for academics and the general public, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, includes an analysis of Martin Luther and the liturgy in Wittenberg, Germany, an examination of the Catholic and Lutheran liturgy, and a summary of debates about congregational hymnals and choral music versus congregational singing. The organ, hymn singing, and performance practice are also discussed.

In the book's conclusion, Herl notes: "In this study, I have attempted to fill in the details and present enough evidence to provide a balanced view; namely, that although the people sang to some extent in sixteenth-century Lutheran churches, it was nonetheless a long time before they took ownership of the liturgy and the Lutheran Church became truly ‘the singing church.’" Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism also includes several appendices focusing on the translations of various 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.

"Joseph Herl … has done a masterful job of assembling and analyzing sources that relate to choral and congregational singing in Lutheran churches of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (with some coverage of the nineteenth century)," commented Paul Westermeyer in Notes, adding: "Many of us have longed for the kind of information this study supplies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Herl, Joseph, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Choice, May, 2005, B. Doherty, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict, p. 1598.

Early Music, May, 2005, Stephan Rose, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, p. 295.

Journal of Religion, January, 2007, Christopher Boyd Brown, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, p. 99.

Journal of the American Musicological Society, fall, 2003, Nym Cooke, review of The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820, p. 710.

Notes, December, 2005, Paul Westermeyer, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, p. 389.

Renaissance Quarterly, spring, 2006, Dane Heuchemer, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, p. 196.

Sixteenth Century Journal, summer, 2006, Maria Craciun, review of Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, p. 560.