Ausbund

The Ausbund did not begin as a hymnal. Its core is a group of hymns written by Swiss Brethren who were imprisoned in the castle at Passau in the later 1530s, and the texts read as what they are: accounts of interrogation, of refusal, of executions witnessed and expected. They were circulated among Anabaptist congregations in manuscript, printed together in 1564, and enlarged in 1583 into substantially the book that is still in use.

That origin explains the shape of the collection. It is not arranged by the church year, because the people who wrote it were not running a church year. It is not devotional in the way later Protestant hymnody is devotional. A large part of it is martyrology set to metre, naming individuals, places and dates, and it was sung by congregations who understood themselves to be next. Anabaptists were being executed across the German speaking lands in the decades the book covers, by Catholic and by magisterial Protestant authorities alike, and the hymnal is one of the movement's primary records of that.

What makes it unusual as an object is that it never stopped being used. Continental Anabaptism largely moved on, adopting new hymnals from the eighteenth century, and it is the Amish who carried the Ausbund to Pennsylvania and kept it. The book in an Amish hand today is recognisably the 1583 collection, in the German of that century, printed without music, and sung by people whose everyday speech is a different dialect entirely.

The Ausbund contains no notation. It never has. Each hymn carries an instruction naming the tune it goes to, usually by quoting the opening words of another song, and the tunes themselves have been carried entirely by ear since the sixteenth century. What that oral transmission has done to them is the most striking thing about Amish singing: the melodies have slowed down so far that the original tunes are barely recoverable inside them. A single syllable may be spread across four or five notes, and a hymn of a dozen stanzas can take most of an hour.

The singing is unaccompanied, in unison, and without harmony. There is no instrument, no choir and no director. A Vorsinger, a lay man of the congregation, sings the first syllables of each line alone and the congregation comes in behind him, so the pace is set line by line rather than beat by beat. Nobody conducts, and there is no attempt at the blend a trained choir aims for.

One hymn holds a fixed place. The second hymn of every Amish worship service is always the same, and it is known simply as the Loblied, the hymn of praise. Because it is invariable, it is the piece an outsider is most likely to hear and the one Amish children learn first. The rest of the service's singing is chosen, but that slot is not, and its constancy across settlements that otherwise differ in dress, technology and church discipline is one of the things that makes the Amish recognisable to one another.