Choir festival of praise and worship: Sängerfest 2007

Over nine hundred people gathered inside Central Heights Mennonite Church for MHSBC’s first Sängerfest (Festival of Song).  This intergenerational event featured the Pacific Mennonite Children’s Choir directed by Wes and Kim Janzen, Tony Funk’s Valley Festival Singers, and two choirs from Bakerview: the Liturgical Choir also led by Tony Funk and the Fellowship Choir directed by Ernie Block.  An added highlight was Dr. John B. Toews’ historical sketch on the origin of Sängerfest and four-part singing in Russia.

 Neil Matthies led the audience in singing,  culminating in the ‘Mennonite anthem’ Praise God From Whom all Blessings Flow’ and the Hallelujah Chorus. Special thanks to pianists Carmen Fast, Irene Funk, Betty Suderman and Linda Stobbe.

 The planning committee, consisting of Ben Stobbe, Tony Funk, Neil Matthies, Ernie Block, John Neufeld, and Helen Rose Pauls, was inspired by the enthusiastic response from choirs and directors, and plans are underway for a similar event in March 2009.

Sängerfest: A historical sketch
by Dr. John B. Toews

Sängerfest celebrates a long-standing Russian Mennonite tradition.  Singing by numbers, Ziphern, had been introduced to Mennonite children in Prussian schools.   Among the early Mennonite settlers to Ukraine were at least four Prussian-trained teachers, among them Tobia Voth who taught singing by ciphers during the 1820s.
 Hymn books brought along by the settlers had only words; people depended on the song leader, or Vorsänger, to remember the tunes.  Sometimes this could have unsettling results as in this account:

“The song leader assumes his place… and announces number 358 and begins singing in a powerful voice.  But the others are not to be outdone…50 voices join in so energetically and with such gusto that it seemed they wished to topple the walls of Jericho or set the Midianites to flight.  They sing with full lungs.  There is to be sure much variation in tone between C and A.

“The preacher sits down, leans over towards the Vorsänger and whispers: I would like to have the hymn “Folget mir ruft uns das Leben!”  The Vorsänger replies in a whisper that all can hear: “I am not certain whether I know the tune, I will try it quietly first.”  But his self confidence gets the better of him, he announces the song and begins to sing immediately with full force.  But something is wrong – and all stop singing.  He tries the melody to himself again but it doesn’t want to work.  Again everyone is silent, waiting until the song leader has found the key to the mystery…but he doesn’t give up.  Instead, he begins to sing tentatively, searching for familiar ground, and as he discovers familiar melodic tunes, his voice grows more and more strong.  An old grandmother joins in with a shaky voice-- the confidence of the Vorsänger is bolstered by the sign of familiarity, his voice swells to an intense roar, so that all are carried along by it.  The melody does not completely fit the metre of the text, so the ends of the lines that don’t fit are swallowed up.  The hymn roars on, like the rattling of swords and the pounding of the surf, so that the loose window panes in the old frames begin to rattle. And our dear Lord God must certainly be pleased.  The service closes with the Aaronic blessing, and all stand up from the unpainted benches strengthened and comforted…”

 In 1837, Prussian-trained teacher Heinrich Franz compiled a hand-written hymnbook with cipher notation which was used in the schools for two decades.  Franz published a hymnal in 1860, stating,  “The holy art of singing has lost much of its beauty, clarity and correctness since it has been preserved and carried on solely by ear.”

 Although children sang in four-part harmony, singing in the churches still followed the old practice, and there was great resistance to the new ways.  “A generation which had sung solely by ear and became quite accustomed to disharmony and melody embellishment naturally found the new music strange,” stated  Toews.
 A diary from the 1860s shows how things went in one settlement:

• Jan 9, 1860.  “The minister, Isaac Klassen, compared such singing to a pub song and made all sorts of inappropriate comments about it…   He himself got up during the four part singing in order to pronounce the benediction.  Two persons immediately left the service.”
• Feb. 8, 1860.   Diary writer Jacob Epp tries to mediate:  “I told them cipher singing was nothing new but something old which the notes in very ancient songbooks proved.  They (Isaac Klassen and his wife) talked themselves into such a feverish pitch that their faces reddened and their facial features became twisted.”
• March 20, 1866.  The community has built a new church.  At the service the schoolteacher Heinrich Olfert is in attendance as are many of his students.  “At the conclusion of the service a cipher melody (Ziffernmelodie) was sung.  The children joined in with ringing voices.”
• April 7, 1868.  “At the end of the sermon song number 108 was sung according to numbers.  Jacob de Veer walked out and waited in the cloakroom until it was finished.”
• April 21, 1868.  “de Veer rushed out in anger and drove home without taking his daughter.  Peter Peters slammed the church door so hard when he left that it sprang open again.”
• April 28, 1868.  At a funeral service for Jacob Epp’s grandson, Jacob de Veer “suspected they would sing cipher melodies so while the funeral guests were taking their places, he walked about in the vestibule with his cap on his head and his steaming tobacco pipe in his mouth.  When the singing began, he made quick tracks for home.”
• Finally March 7, 1879.  “Peter Peters has not attended a public worship service since April 21, 1868--- but now his defiance has come to an end---only Jacob de Veer persists in his obstinacy.”

 By September 1893, a festival in Rückenau, Molotschna, had 7 Mennonite choirs with 120 singers and 2,000 listeners.  The next year, there were 11 choirs with 300 singers rendering 50 different songs.  Some of the 2,500 guests drove 200 kilometers by enclosed wagons – and yes, there was Faspa with coffee and zwieback.  For Mennonites in Russia the choral festival was now a permanent institution.

 The evolution of choirs and choir music was an interdependent process.  In the transition to four-part singing, elementary and secondary school children used Bernhard Natorp’s cipher tradition.  As musically literate adults, they enhanced their singing skills by participating in church choirs.  In 1880, Heinrich Franz published a second edition of his Choralbuch.  Not long after, a new generation set to work expanding the number of choir songs available.  For example, in 1886, H. Janz published 96 hymns in cipher notation that he called Liederstrauss (Bouquet of Songs).  He borrowed freely from five different hymn collections.  As he stated, “They are mostly new songs, but with a few older, familiar ones added.”  He felt his small hymnal could be used “in worship services, in homes, Sunday School and especially choirs.”

  In 1889, enterprising Mennonite musicians began to publish songbooks especially suited for choirs.  All were in cipher notation and all borrowed freely from other sources.  In the 1890s,  the growing compendium was named Liederperlen (Pearls of Song)  When the last volume was published in 1915, Mennonites in Russia had some 935 choral works at their disposal.

 Revolution and civil war, the bloody tyranny of Stalin’s rule, the disruption of WW II—these events meant emigration to Canada in the 1920s, dispersement to labour camps in the former Soviet Union in the 1930s, flight and emigration to Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

 But amid all the difficulties in adapting to strange lands, there was singing – singing in four parts and from cipher notation.  When survivors of Stalin’s holocaust begin to organize their churches in remote places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Kirghizia, the old songs were not forgotten and cipher notation trained a new generation of singers.

 One hundred and seventy years ago, a lowly village school teacher on the vast Ukrainian steppes dreamt of hearing children sing.  Soon elementary and secondary schools re-echoed with the songs of children and adolescents.  That dream was encapsulated in one hymnbook and subsequently impacted Mennonites scattered throughout the globe.