Whitefield's Music: Moorfields Tabernacle, The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), and the Fashioning of Early Evangelical Sacred Song

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This essay addresses the problem of Whitefield's music by focusing on a little-known tune book called The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), the first published collection of music to set texts from Hymns for Social Worship. The Miscellany appears to reproduce music sung at Moorfields Tabernacle and thereby reveal important clues about worship practice there. The tune book is also significant because it appeared at a crucial early moment in the emergence of Evangelical hymnody. Its publication constituted the first division of Methodist music into separate Whitefieldian and Wesleyan strands. Its reception history during Whitefield's lifetime and the next half-century also illustrates the complex process of musical and textual transmission by which Anglo-American Evangelical hymnody was first fashioned. Before engaging with The Divine Musical Miscellany and its legacy, however, it is necessary to consider the background of Moorfields Tabernacle and the community whose music it represented.

Moorfields Tabernacle
Up to the mid-seventeenth century, Moorfields was part of open country beyond Moorgate on the northern edge of London's city walls. The area was first occupied by refugees from the Great London Fire of 1666 who built a ramshackle neighborhood there around a group of four walled fields. In 1676 the Bethlehem Hospital, better known as Bedlam, relocated just outside Moorgate. Its new building, designed by the natural philosopher Robert Hooke, stood at the southern boundary of Moorfields, which remained open space as the city gradually grew around them (Figs. 1 and 2). Whitefield was told that the fields were "given [to the city] by one Madam Moore, on purpose for all sorts of people to divert themselves in." 3 By the mid-eighteenth century, Moorfields had become a popular but seedy promenade filled with open-air markets, auctions, shows, beggars, and buskers. 4 Whitefield returned to Moorfields in the spring of 1741 after his second American tour, only to encounter negative effects of his advocacy of Calvinism against John Wesley's Arminian perfectionism and the division of Methodism it had begun to cause. On Good Friday he reported that "for some time preaching under one of the trees, [I] had the mortification of seeing numbers of my spiritual children, who but a twelvemonth ago could have plucked out their eyes for me, running by me whilst preaching, distaining so much as to look at me, and some of them putting their fingers in their ears, that they might not hear one word I said." 8 Undaunted, Whitefield increased the frequency of his Moorfields preaching to win back the crowds. Sometime during this campaign, "some Free-grace Dissenters (who stood closely by him on that time of trial), got the loan of a piece of ground, and engaged with a carpenter to build a large temporary shed, to screen the auditory from cold and rain." Ironically, the site of the shed was "very near the Foundery" where John Wesley had established his own London headquarters in November 1739.
Whitefield "disliked" this location "because he thought it looked like erecting altar against altar," but he was grateful for the support of his new Dissenting allies. 9 This temporary wooden structure was the beginning of Moorfields Tabernacle. "I have called it a Tabernacle," Whitefield wrote to James Halbersham, "because, perhaps, we may be called to move our tents." 10 This remark reflected his apprehension at this time that he and his followers might be driven off or arrested by Crown authorities for unlawful dissent. By June 3, 1741, however, he had been assured that no prosecution was contemplated and a revival was under way at Moorfields. Whitefield decided to make the Tabernacle permanent. "I have enjoyed the especial presence of God ever since I came to London," he wrote to John Cennick. "I preach three times daily. The Lord is remarkably with me. Congregations increase. I am going to have a society-room joined to the tabernacle. The Lord is really on our side." 11 For the next year Whitefield was constantly on the move as the Evangelical Revival in Britain approached its zenith. Back in London for Easter 1742, he began to organize a religious society-a permanent nonecclesiastical fellowship-at the Tabernacle. As the Moorfields revival continued, a practice developed in which those who fell under conviction during Whitefield's preaching handed him written notes called "tickets," which he shared with his circle of converts and lay evangelists at the Tabernacle in the evening. They in turn ministered to the inquirers who were invited to join the community if they experienced the New Birth. Whitefield first recorded this practice on April 22, 1742, in a letter to Captain Gladman of Philadelphia: society emerged. When he began preaching "at six o'clock in the morning, attended by a large congregation of praying people," there were already ten thousand people on the grounds "waiting, not for me, but for satan's instruments to amuse them." At first all went well.
I mounted my field pulpit, almost all flocked immediately around it. I preached on these words, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so shall the son of man be lifted up, &c." They gazed, they listened, they wept; and I believe that many felt themselves stung with deep conviction for their past sins. All was hushed and solemn. 13 Encouraged by this success, Whitefield "ventured out" to preach again at noon, only to find that "the whole field seemed, in a bad sense of the word, all white, ready not for the Redeemer's, but Beelzebub's harvest. All his agents were in full motion, drummers, trumpeters, merry andrews [clowns], masters of puppet shows, exhibiters of wild beasts, players, &c. &c. all busy in entertaining their respective auditories. I suppose there could not be less than twenty or thirty thousand people." 14 He set up his field pulpit, a portable wooden stand about four feet high, opposite the rows of booths and began to speak. "Judging that like saint Paul, I should now be called as it were to fight with beasts at Ephesus, I preached from these words, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians.' You may easily guess, that there was some noise among the [boothmen], and that I was honoured with having a few stones, dirt, rotten eggs, and pieces of dead cats thrown at me whilst engaging in calling them from their favourite but lying vanities." Once again, however, "far the greatest part of my congregation, which was very large, seemed for a while to be turned into lambs." Whitefield made a third foray into Moorfields at six o'clock in the evening, encountering still more thousands filling the place, many of them flocking to his field pulpit and away from the pleasure booths. One "merry andrew" tried to drive Whitefield off by sitting on the shoulders of another man and attempting to "slash" the evangelist "with a long heavy whip several times." Then his opponents sent a recruiting serjeant with his drum, &c. to pass through the congregation in an attempt to break it up. These efforts failed, but then a large body quite on the opposite side assembled again, and having got a large pole for their standard, advanced towards us with steady and formidable steps, till they came very near the skirts of our hearing, praying, and almost undaunted congregation. I saw, gave warning, and prayed to the captain of our salvation for present support and deliverance. He heard and answered; for just as they approached us with looks full of resentment, I know not by what accident, they quarrelled among themselves, threw down their staff and went away. 15 Whitefield "continued in praying, preaching and singing, (for the noise was too great at times to preach) about three hours," during which many of the erstwhile opponents "were brought over to join the [once] besieged party." Whitefield wrote about this confrontation as if it were a military campaign in which he had deployed singing as a tactical weapon to overcome the shouts and jeers directed at him. Whitefield and his followers returned to the Tabernacle. "With my pockets full of notes from persons brought under concern," he reported, "I read them amidst the praises 13 Ibid., 384-85. 14 Ibid., 385. 15 Ibid. and spiritual acclamations of thousands, who joined with the holy angels in rejoicing that so many sinners were snatched, in such an unexpected, unlikely place and manner, out of the very jaws of the devil. This was the beginning of the tabernacle society.-Three hundred and fifty awakened souls were received in one day, and I believe the number of notes exceeded a thousand." 16 With so many converts flooding the Tabernacle, it was necessary to organize them by explicit rules of prayer, moral behavior, and attendance at worship. No details survive about these arrangements, but "the society-room" Whitefield had built the previous summer now became the permanent home of a new gathered community with the ongoing financial and legal support of London Dissenters. Whitefield's letters continued to enthuse about the Moorfields revival and society through the end of 1742, when he left for his climactic tour of America and the final phase of the Great Awakening that culminated in his public repudiation by the faculties of Harvard and Yale. 17 A glimpse of the beliefs and worship practices at the early Tabernacle is provided by A Confession of Faith, sung by all the Brethren and Sisters at the general Love-Feast, November 4th, 1744. In the Tabernacle, London. This hymn text of nine verses in 8.8.8.8.8.8. meter confirms that early Whitefieldians practiced the love-feast, a "Christian fellowship meal which heightened the concept of love among believers" borrowed by Methodists from Moravian liturgical precedent. John Wesley described the love-feast as a gathering "in order to increase . . . a grateful sense of all [God's] mercies, . . . that we might together 'eat bread' as the ancient Christians did, 'with gladness and singleness of heart.'" 18 On July 20, 1740, Wesley had chosen the occasion of a love-feast at the Fetter Lane meeting in London to break from the Moravians and organize the first Methodist religious society at the Foundery. Thereafter the quarterly observance of this agape meal became a standard feature of early Methodist worship, especially among the small-group "bands." Its simple liturgy included prayer, hymn singing, the sharing of food and drink, testimony by members, and the reading of the society's covenant. Wesley reported that "our food is only a little plain cake and water [at love-feasts]. But we seldom return from them without being fed, not only with the 'meat which perisheth,' but with 'that which endureth to eternal life. '" 19 Singing was a prominent feature of Wesleyan love-feasts from the very beginning. Charles Wesley's poem "Love Feast," first published in the 1740 edition of Hymns and Sacred Poems, immediately became the standard hymn to begin the ritual meal. Its first verse eloquently summarized the meaning and purpose of the Methodist love-feast.
Come and let us sweetly join Christ to praise in hymns divine; Give we all, with one accord, Glory to our common Lord. Hands and hearts and voices raise; Sing as in the ancient days; Antedate the joys above; Celebrate the feast of love. 20 That Whitefield endorsed the love-feast for Moorfields Tabernacle is obvious from the 1744 Confession, but it also added the important detail that men and women met and sang together in this service. During the early 1740s, Wesley had experimented with single-gender love-feasts, but their great popularity and communal purpose gave way to plenary celebrations that Whitefield had also endorsed by 1744. The Confession indicates that this particular love-feast also included a covenant signing, possibly marking the moment when the Moorfields Tabernacle community first adopted a formal statement of its faith and practice. The text reveals the Tabernacle society as a militantly separatist Evangelical community that brooked no compromise. For the next decade Whitefield preached and led worship at the Tabernacle whenever he was in London, but his constant traveling and the continuing growth of the congregation led him to enlist lay preachers including John Cennick, Howell Harris, and Robert Seagrave to preside in his absence. 22 According to Gillies, Whitefield "began to think of erecting a new Tabernacle" at the end of 1752. Plans were drawn up for the building and the foundation was laid on March 1, 1753, at which occasion Whitefield preached from Exodus 20:24: "'an altar . . . thou shalt make unto me, and . . . in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.'" He personally supervised the construction and dedicated the new Tabernacle in June. The peripatetic Whitefield preached in it only a few days "with his usual fervor and success, and to large congregations" before setting off on a tour of Scotland. 23 The new building was designed as a preaching house, not as an ecclesiastical structure. It was square, 80 feet on a side and two stories high (Fig. 3). Seven Roman arched windows pierced the upper story of the main elevation and three of them flanked the entry below. This primary entrance featured a central portal with porch and doors to each side. The Tabernacle's steep slate lantern roof was surmounted by a squat square tower. The building offered no external ornaments except corner pilasters, two more pilasters to each side of the central portal, and a rudimentary cornice and balustrade. The closest architectural parallels to the new Tabernacle's square shape were seventeenth-century Puritan and Quaker meetinghouses, designed for maximal acoustical amplification so that every sermon and testimony could be heard. It seems certain that the Tabernacle was built purposely as a preaching space to provide those ritual and sonic characteristics for Whitefield's ministry at Moorfields. The only descriptions of the new Tabernacle's interior occur incidentally in memoirs written by Whitefield's followers and lay preachers. For example, the Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray-a Whitefield convert who left Evangelical Calvinism to join the Universalist movement and eventually bring it to New England-noted that the Tabernacle had a gallery and no seats.
Murray also gave a vivid picture of the importance of hymnody to the spiritual fellowship at Moorfields. Once as he departed the building after a service while undergoing a spiritual crisis, Murray encountered a companion who took my hand assuring me, he was glad to see me, and repeating a verse of a hymn, "We shall not always make our moan," etc, which hymn I had often sang, and of which I was very fond. I melted into tears; this man appeared to me as an angel of God, and most devoutly did I bless the Father of my spirit, for sending me such a comforting.
Sunday communion services at the Tabernacle were especially powerful for Murray. "Great numbers attended," he reported, "who were not regular tabernacle worshippers; obtaining a ticket of admittance, they took their seats. It appeared to me like a prelibation of heaven. The Elect of God, from every denomination, assembled round the table of the Lord; a word of consolation was always given, and an evangelical hymn most delightfully sung." 24 By 1753 the Tabernacle had developed into a unique community that was neither Anglican nor Methodist nor Dissenting, unfettered liturgically by either the Book of Common Prayer, Wesley's conference Minutes, or the Westminster Directory for Worship. With its new meetinghouse and its community conceived by Whitefield as a religious society without ecclesiastical affiliation, he was free to prescribe the Tabernacle's ritual practice as he saw fit. Wesley had done the same for his religious societies, and in both cases hymnody proved to be central to the creation of their communal identities.

Whitefield as Hymnist
Hymns for Social Worship was not the first hymn collection Whitefield produced. In 1739 he had published Divine Melody: or, A Help to Devotion. Being, A Choice Collection of Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs for the Use of the Pious and Sincere Christian. Selected, Approved and Recommended by the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (Fig. 4). This little-known work appeared at the same time as John and Charles Wesley's three volumes of Hymns and Sacred Poems and must be considered an effort by Whitefield to compete with it and the brothers' first hymnal, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, published in 1737 at Charles Town, South Carolina, while they were on their mission to Georgia. 25 According to the most recent editors of Hymns and Sacred Poems, the 1739 Wesleyan collection "was intended less for formal Anglican worship and more for devotional use." 26 In its preface the Wesleys attacked medieval Christian hymns by "mystical writers" for their advocacy of justification by works and their practice of "solitary religion." They argued instead for salvation by faith alone in the merits of Christ's atoning sacrifice and insisted that "the gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness." Hymns and Sacred Poems was their early effort to give these theological and ecclesiological imperatives a hymnodic voice.  Whitefield invoked these same devotional and communal qualities in Divine Melody. "So encumber'd are we with the cares of this life," he wrote in the Preface, that a Christian, how willing soever he may be to devote himself to the exercise of Piety, finds it very difficult to preserve his mind serene and undisturbed in his most solemn approaches to God. . . . For this reason he calls to his assistance all the helps he can meet with; and he is pleased when by such helps, his ideas and sentiments of the Supreme being are elevated . . . [and] celebrated in strains expressive of his own sense of those wonderful dealings of God with Man. 28 Whitefield also introduced what would become his characteristic emphasis on the holy affections and heavenly prospect that psalmody produced in the mind and will of the believer. He began the Preface to Divine Melody with an impassioned declaration of these attributes. "Psalmody is one of the most exalted parts of Divine worship," he wrote. "It raises our devotion; it warms our zeal; it spiritualizes our affections; it elevates our soul into a kind of holy rapture; and gives us a foretaste of that ecstatick bliss, which, we hope, shall employ all our powers and faculties in the endless ages of Eternity." 29 The contrast between Whitefield's collection and the Wesleys' Hymns and Sacred Poems is instructive. Both anthologies were structured around clusters of poems from The Temple (1633) by George Herbert, a classic of Anglican devotional poetry that deeply influenced the piety of the Wesleys, Whitefield, and other members of Oxford's "Holy Club" in the 1730s. Several preliminary points about Whitefield's new hymn collection should be underlined as they pertain to its musical appropriation. The first is that, as Whitefield indicated in his subtitle, his hymnal was "more particularly design'd for the Use of the Tabernacle Congregation, in London." In the Preface he wrote that the hymns were "intended purely for Social Worship," by which he meant worship by religious societies like the one gathered at Moorfields rather than in Anglican parishes or Dissenting congregations. 31 These were hymns for para-ecclesiastical fellowships of believers, not formally organized church institutions. Wesley had made the same disclaimer. In both cases these collections were designed to preclude the charge of unlicensed dissent by Methodists. Second, it is important to note the continuing popularity of Hymns for Social Worship. It ran to at least 15 editions during Whitefield's lifetime, including a Philadelphia reprinting in 1768, to 32 printings by 1788, and remained in print into the nineteenth century. 32 This publication record makes Hymns for Social Worship Whitefield's most widely circulated literary work by far, and arguably the one of most lasting impact as well. Since he is not usually regarded as a hymnist, this status of the collection among his publications needs to be emphasized.
The text of Hymns for Social Worship offers several clues to the nature and practice of Whitefieldian worship. Whitefield said that he freely adapted the hymns in his anthology for the use of religious societies so that "all may safely concur in using them." This remark referred to his editorial approach that winnowed out controversial theological or sectarian references and consistently employed a first-person-plural rhetoric that could include all in his denominationally diverse congregations. He also delivered a very strong opinion about the length of hymn-singing. His hymns "are short," he wrote, "because I think three or four Stanzas, with a Doxology, are sufficient to be sung at one Time. I am no great Friend to long Sermons, long Prayers, or long Hymns. They generally weary instead of edifying, and therefore I think should be avoided by those who preside in any public worshipping Assembly." 33 Whitefield divided Hymns for Social Worship into two sections, the first consisting of 132 hymns with eight Doxologies and three dismission lyrics, and the second containing 38 "Hymns for Society and Persons meeting in Christian-Fellowship." Whitefield maintained this division of the Hymns through its early editions, then added a supplement of 26 hymns for the sixth edition in 1757. 34 By the sixteenth edition (1770), the last one published during his life, the supplement had grown to 44 hymns and the total number of lyrics to 232. 35 Whitefield followed Watts and Wesley by titling each of his hymn texts, but unlike Wesley he did not organize them into a comprehensive thematic scheme. The most striking literary element of Hymns for Social Worship was the preponderance of "particular meter" hymns that did not follow the standard psalm measures of Common (8.6.8.6.), Short (6.6.8.6.), and Long Meter (8.8.8.8.). Both Whitefieldian writers and Charles Wesley used new metrical forms to give a distinctive voice to their Evangelical message. The most unusual liturgical form in Hymns, however, was its six "dialogue hymns," a genre of antiphonal praise in which the congregation was divided either spatially or by gender. All of these textual and ritual features of Whitefield's Hymns found musical expression in a London tune book published a few months later called The Divine Musical Miscellany.

The Divine Musical Miscellany
The Divine Musical Miscellany, being, A Collection of Psalm, and Hymn Tunes: great part of which were never before in Print (DMM) was a substantial anonymous tune book featuring a thorough introduction to musical theory and performance, as well as 68 psalm and hymn tunes arranged in two parts for melody and bass with first-stanza text underlay and thorough-bass notation for keyboard accompaniment. The tunes follow no obvious order, none of them are attributed by the compiler, and the composers of most of them remain unknown. 36 The Miscellany appeared at a crucial moment in the development of Evangelical hymnody.  39 The precise chronology of DMM and Harmonia is still unsettled, owing to the absence of a date certain on the latter imprint. In 1952 Maurice Frost reported that the Miscellany, dated 1754, was "one of the few [tune] books of this type and period which deigns to print a date on the title page!" (Fig. 5). He lamented that Harmonia, while apparently printed in the same year, could not be more precisely placed in time and concluded that absent further evidence, "Harmonia-Sacra came after the Divine Musical Miscellany." 40 The Hymn Tune Index accepts this dating, noting a reference to an advertisement for DMM in the May 1754 issue of the Scots Magazine that states it was compiled "for use with George Whitefield's Hymns for Social Worship." 41 Moreover, Butts added a third treble part to DMM's tunes, suggesting that he adapted them from an earlier version.  The matter of precedence is important because DMM shares a great deal of repertory with Harmonia, no fewer than 51 tunes amounting to 75 percent of DMM's total repertory. If DMM is the earlier collection, it may be regarded as the source of Whitefieldian music that Butts incorporated into Harmonia and thence into Wesleyan Methodism. The reality, however, was more complex. Frost commented that "we cannot be sure that tunes common to this book and Harmonia-Sacra may not have been part of a common stock which the editors adopted Moorfields Tabernacle, but also for Dissenters, English Moravians, and Wesleyan Methodists. The compiler clearly had these larger constituencies in mind, and conceived DMM as what might legitimately be considered the first interdenominational Evangelical tune book. Whitefield himself was an Evangelical ecumenist, seeking in his ministry not a new sectarian organization but a fellowship of born-again believers from every denomination. In its combination of Evangelical texts, DMM's overall conception was Whitefieldian, even though not much more than one-quarter of its texts came directly from Hymns for Social Worship. Put another way, not all who purchased and used DMM worshipped at Moorfields, but they were all Whitefieldians in the fluid multidenominational sense of the term during the mid-1750s.
The Most important, DMM presented a new tune repertory for Whitefield's music. The tune book was remarkably innovative. Just eleven of its 68 tunes were reprints. Twenty-six tunes were new variants of previously published tunes, and 31 were published for the first time. These 57 tunes, if not categorically Whitefieldian in origin, were almost certainly sung at Moorfields. DMM set 37 of these tunes to texts by Watts and another 19 to lyrics from Hymns for Social Worship. The new tunes are especially important, but DMM's variants also record the oral transformation of earlier tunes in their communities of use, including Moorfields, while the reprints indicate the musical background of the compiler and those communities. Given the musical needs of a new religious movement like Whitefield's, it seems inevitable that its earliest tune book should include at least some popular tunes already familiar to adherents. So it is with the borrowed tunes of DMM. BURFORD and WIRKSWORTH were very well established psalm tunes written in the 1720s by the country psalmody composers John Chetham and James Green, respectively. Other popular reprinted tunes were much more recent. notable examples, the reprinted tunes in DMM provided a repertorial foundation of some very well established Anglican psalm tunes and a few popular new ones, but with only limited Wesleyan influence.
Twenty-six tunes in DMM-nearly 40 percent of its corpus-were variants of previously published compositions (Table 1). Even the smallest melodic change to a psalm tune could make a significant difference for its performance and popularity. Many compilers therefore edited previously published tunes according to their own compositional sense or a local performance practice. Not surprisingly, most of DMM's variants were revisions of earlier Wesleyan Methodist tunes that reflected their oral processing over years of singing at Moorfields. But the largest group of tunes in DMM, 31 of them, were original. The compiler highlighted this feature in his subtitle, stating that DMM was "a Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes: greater part of which were never before in Print." This sizable corpus established DMM as a major new musical source for Whitefieldian and Wesleyan Methodists alike, as well as for London Dissent. Once again, Watts's texts dominated these settings, but HUNTINGTON, for example, was published with Blest are the sons of God by the Whitefieldian lay preacher Joseph Humphreys. Four of DMM's tunes for John Cennick's dialogue hymns from Hymns for Social Worship offer the most direct evidence of performance practice at Moorfields. They also illustrate the musical range of the collection. Cennick, Whitefield's early colleague and one of his lay preachers at Moorfields, was the originator of the Evangelical dialogue hymn. 45 He experienced the New Birth as a young Anglican shoemaker in 1737 and took Whitefield's Journals as his spiritual guide. After Whitefield and the Wesleys met him in Oxford in 1739, they invited Cennick to join their revival at Kingswood near Bristol, where he is credited as becoming the first Methodist lay preacher. Wesley also appointed him a master in his school for colliers there. Described by a recent biographer as "a simple man" whose "earnest exhortations and colourful illustrations made him effective as a preacher," Cennick founded the first Methodist tabernacle at Kingswood in 1741. 46 Cennick aligned with Whitefield during the Calvinist-Arminian controversy and became a leader of Calvinistic Methodism in the early 1740s, even as he was becoming increasingly attracted to Moravian faith and practice. He had known James Hutton, the English Moravian, since his conversion, and he had met the Methodists at the moment of greatest Moravian influence on their emerging movement. At worship the Moravians practiced antiphonal singing among their various "choirs" of single and married members, evidenced by Thomas Hutton's antiphonal English-language texts in his Collection  49 Whitefield included just six of Cennick's dialogue hymns in Hymns for Social Worship, but their controversial form led him to defend them in the hymnal's preface. "I think myself justified in publishing some Hymns by way of Dialogue for the use of the Society," he wrote, "because something like it is practiced in our Cathedral Churches; but much more because the Celestial Choir is represented in the Book of Revelations, as answering one another in their heav'nly Anthems." The cathedral reference seems to have been to the practice of chanting the Psalms antiphonally. The scripture references were to Revelation 5:11-14, in which the heavenly host and "every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea" sing antiphonal praise to the Lamb, and to Revelation 19:1-8, the singing of the multitudes at the marriage feast of the Lamb.
DMM provided music for four of these dialogue hymns. The first pairing is We sing to thee thou son of God, set to NEWINGTON tune. It requires two groups of singers, most likely divided down the middle of the Tabernacle, who sing two lines at a time in alternating sequence (Fig. 6). 1 We sing to thee thou Son of God, Who saved us by thy grace. We praise thee Son of Man whose blood Redeemed our fallen race. In Ho pilgrims, (if ye pilgrims be)/KINGSLAND, however, the two groups are distinguished lyrically as Christian pilgrims and those who want to join them. Cennick's text adds an element of dramatic dialogue and mutual instruction that heightens the ritual action of the antiphonal singing, with the "inquirers" singing first and the "pilgrims" second (Fig. 7).  The two other dialogue hymns in DMM complicate the nature and performance of the genre by introducing gendered groups of singers. Rise, o ye seed of David rise, Cennick's first Moorfields dialogue hymn set to BRAINTREE, divides the congregation into gender groups with the men singing first to the women, who then respond (Fig. 8).  The gendering of singing groups is most explicit in Tell us, o women, we wou'd know, a Bunyanesque lyric set to FINSBURY tune that Cennick called "The Pilgrims Hymn, in a Dialogue" (Fig. 9). Here the men begin by asking the women a series of questions that seem to acknowledge their more rapid progress on the way of spiritual pilgrimage. Eventually the men reveal that they too are following on the same road and express their resolve to join the women in reaching the "City built by God." 4 Thither we travel, nor intend Short of that Bliss to rest: Nor we, 'till in the Sinner's Friend Our weary Souls are bless'd. 53 In an Evangelical movement that feminized the soul's regenerating affections and regarded converts like Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Sarah Pierrepont Edwards as spiritual archetypes for all believers, it is not entirely surprising to find this strong endorsement of female piety in the lyrics written by John Cennick on the verge of his embrace of Moravianism. More instructive for the practice of Whitefield's music, however, is the clear implication that the worshipping congregation at Moorfields was organized for singing by gender on at least some occasions. Whether this gendered singing was also spatial-whether worship at the Tabernacle separated the genders-cannot be determined from these texts. They do not require spatial separation, but they also could express it. These scores for Cennick's dialogue hymns also demonstrate a direct relationship between the compiler of DMM and worship at Moorfields. It is highly unlikely that Whitefield himself was the musical editor of DMM, as Maurice Frost implied, but it is beyond question that the tune book's compiler witnessed dialogue singing and other praise at Moorfields.
The scores of these dialogue hymns also display the stylistic range of Whitefield's music. Three of the four tunes are in major key and triple time. NEWINGTON and BRAINTREE follow the well-established style of early English country psalmody, based on Tate and Brady's Supplement to the New Version of Psalms (1700/1708). Their half-note movement in 3/2 adagio "mood of time" is enlivened, with restraint, by occasional dotted figures and brief quarter-note melismas.
By contrast, FINSBURY appropriated the melodic and rhythmic techniques of London theater music, as did KINGSLAND, the outlier in minor key and the very fast tempo of 2/4 or "allegroallegro." These florid tunes featured large intervallic leaps, extended quarter-note melismas, and, in KINGSLAND, cadential triplets.
DMM was one of the first Evangelical tune books to contain a significant amount of this adapted music from the London stage. A clear indication of its influence at Moorfields occurred in the choral hallelujahs appended to all four dialogue hymns. Hallelujah singing was related to the practice of singing doxologies after hymns that Whitefield endorsed, but it was far more stylistically adventurous and modern. In all four cases in DMM, the hallelujahs changed time signature, typically accelerating from the tempo of the hymn proper. In BRAINTREE and FINSBURY, the hallelujah section shifted from triple time to common or double time, while in KINGSLAND it moved the other way, from common time to triple time. Most important, these hallelujah sections invited singers at the Tabernacle to perform the complex melismatic lines, large intervallic leaps, and dotted rhythms of London theater music in the service of congregational praise to God. It was a heady innovation that seems especially to have characterized Whitefieldian sacred song.

Reception History of The Divine Musical Miscellany
The influence of DMM's new and variant tunes and their paired texts can be established empirically by tracing their reception history in tune books published during Whitefield's life and the half-century that followed it. Given the notorious difficulties in assessing Whitefield's influence-even during his lifetime he was both everywhere and nowhere-this approach promises at least a new way to address that question, and perhaps a new answer as well. Analysis of the reception history of the Miscellany through the Hymn Tune Index reveals a very wide range of text and tune afterlives. On the one hand, neither the text nor the tune for eight of DMM's pairings was ever reprinted. A similar number appeared just twice or thrice. The four dialogue hymns provide a good example of these pairings that made little or no subsequent impact. FINSBURY with its dramatically gendered text was never reprinted after DMM, and BRAINTREE appeared only once in 1761, without text, in The Psalm Singer's Pocket Amusement by Abraham Milner. NEWINGTON was reprinted in R. Williamson's two tune books, A Collection of Psalm Tunes with a Thorough Bass (1762) and Harmonia Sacra, or Divine and Moral Songs (1770), both times with an altered text. KINGSLAND had the widest circulation of the dialogue hymns because it was reprinted in the 1754 and 1768 editions of Thomas Butts's popular Harmonia-Sacra was well as in Milner's Pocket Amusement, but none of those tune reprintings included Whitefield's original texts. These findings demonstrate that the dialogue hymn did not spread to other Dissenting or Anglican communities despite Whitefield's advocacy and direct involvement with its development and performance.
Other DMM tunes flourished while their paired texts largely disappeared. Six new and variant tunes of this type were reprinted more than 100 times each before 1820, but far fewer times with their original texts: ARMLY (131/15), BETHESDA (181/8), ELENBOROUGH (103/33), HUNTINGTON (113/7), KINGSBRIDGE (144/4), SUTTON (211/6). In some cases, this text replacement occurred immediately. SUTTON, the most popular new DMM tune, originally set To God the only wise from Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Fig. 10). Just months later, however, Thomas Butts paired it with Charles Wesley's Thou very Paschal Lamb in Harmonia-Sacra. 54 Butts changed the text again in the 1768 edition of Harmonia to Wesley's Commit thou all thy griefs. 55 During the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, SUTTON migrated to Watts's Behold the lofty sky, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century it wandered to more than a dozen different texts while remaining popular enough to find a place in Richard Crawford's core repertory of early American psalmody. 56 While this text replacement process was not as immediate or extensive for the other DMM tunes, it is nonetheless quite striking that the Miscellany's most popular tunes soon lost their association with their original texts. Another pairing from DMM illustrates the converse pattern of a text continuing on after its associated tune had been abandoned. In this case the text was Cennick's Children of the heav'nly king, published with a musical setting for the first time in DMM. The tune was PLYMOUTH, a new variant of John Christian Jacobi's 1720 melody ON THE LOVE OF GOD that was first revised in Wesley's Foundery Collection before DMM's compiler altered it yet again. The DMM pairing enjoyed considerable popularity, being reprinted 14 times by 1776. Subsequently, however, Children of the heav'nly king found other musical settings, including the tune WARREN by William Billings of Boston, that gradually replaced PLYMOUTH after 1790. By 1820 PLYMOUTH had been reprinted 28 times, but Children of the heav'nly king had become one of the most popular early Evangelical hymns, appearing in 78 tune books by that date.
Three original pairings from DMM, however, did find great and lasting popularity through the early nineteenth century. All of the tunes were variants. AN HYMN FOR EASTER SUNDAY was the fifth published variant of the famed tune that set Jesus Christ is risen today in the anonymous 1708 collection Lyra Davidica. DMM's variant retained the lyric. The variant was reprinted 192 times before 1820, mostly with the Lyra Davidica text but also with Charles Wesley's alternate lyric Christ the Lord is risen today (Fig. 11). The most lasting Whitefieldian text and tune pairing, however, was the 7.6.7.6. Doubled Meter poem Rise my soul and stretch thy wings by Robert Seagrave, set in DMM to the tune AMSTERDAM. Seagrave (1693-1759) was an early associate of Whitefield and Wesley who took the Calvinist side in the doctrinal controversy of 1739-41 and later preached regularly at Moorfields. DMM was the first tune book to present a musical setting for Seagrave's lyric. John Julian identified Rise my soul as one of Seagrave's original lyrics in his Hymns for Christian Worship, partly composed, and partly collected from various Authors (1742), and subsequent editors and interpreters have followed this attribution. But the lyric does not appear there, and its first publication at present remains unknown. It may have been an occasional hymn written for the Moorfields congregation, because Whitefield published it in Hymns for Social Worship, through which it gained transatlantic celebrity. 58 Seagrave was an unabashed advocate of "hymns of human composure" championed by Whitefieldian and Dissenting communities for worship by those "properly conversant on the Subject of Free-Grace." In the preface to his Hymns for Christian Worship, he defended "the use of . . . their own Compositions" by such congregations as an exercise of their Christian liberty, "provided they speak a Language altogether agreeable to the Scripture, and such as arises from true Christian Experience." Seagrave reported that "in the Place where I am ministerially concern'd, and some others, Hymns of the kind here publish'd, have been attended with singular Usefulness. Flatness and Deadness of Spirit are in a great measure remov'd, and, I trust, the spirit of true Devotion is breathing amongst us." 59 The Hymn Tune Index lists 165 tune book printings of Rise my soul by 1820. The 7.6.7.6. Doubled text also appeared in virtually every major Evangelical worded hymnal and supplement

The Divine Musical Miscellany and the Fashioning of Early Evangelical Hymnody
The examples considered thus far illustrate various aspects of text and tune reception of the Whitefieldian repertory from DMM, but they do not address the larger questions of why and how Whitefield's words and music arrived at their later destinations. There are, however, clear patterns of tune and text transmission in the decades between DMM's publication and 1820 that give an initial answer to these questions. Analysis through the Hymn Tune Index shows how the compilers of these later tune books handled DMM's texts and tunes, thereby supplying a broader account of Whitefield's music and the fashioning of early Evangelical hymnody.
The pattern of tune acceptance and text replacement from DMM that began with Butts's 1754 Harmonia-Sacra continued through the 1760s in five other tune books within the Methodist-Evangelical Anglican orbit. In 1761 John Wesley published his second tune book, Select Hymns with Tunes Annext, a collection of 102 texted tunes that competed with Harmonia. He reprinted 35 tunes from DMM but replaced even more of their texts than Butts had, allowing just two of them to remain. Wesley retained this textual pattern in his slightly expanded 1765 collection called Sacred Melody, which remained the standard Wesleyan Methodist tune collection for many years. In response to Wesley, Thomas Butts recast the second edition of his Harmonia-Sacra in 1768 for Evangelical Anglicans, particularly the London elite who supported the city's new charitable hospitals. For this market, Butts included virtually all of the 41 DMM tunes he had reprinted in 1754 but did not restore any original texts from DMM that he had replaced with Charles Wesley's lyrics. R. Williamson's two London tune books contained four tunes from DMM, all of them with lyrics different from their Whitefieldian originals. It is clear from these sources that during Whitefield's lifetime, Wesleyans continued to sing DMM's tunes while rejecting its texts and theology.
An alternative pattern emerged from London's Dissenters, who began to embrace the Whitefieldian collection's original text and tune pairings. The first Dissenting compiler to reprint any of DMM's tunes was Thomas Knibb, a London Presbyterian, in his Collection of Tunes in Three Parts, that are now us'd in the several Dissenting Congregations in London (1755). Knibb provided treble harmony parts for each of his 82 tunes, borrowing many of Thomas Butts's aware that Whitefieldians, like Wesleyans, were creating a distinctive body of Evangelical sacred song through the effective use of "Particular Metres." Knibb keyed the scores of these "Methodist" tunes to Whitefield's Hymns for Social Worship, giving "Mr. G.W." and the appropriate page number from the tenth edition of Hymns for Social Worship (1760) as the text attribution. 68 The Psalm-Singers Helper represented a huge expansion of Whitefield's music into Dissent. What Knibb did with it editorially underlines a crucial difference between Wesleyan and Dissenting appropriation of the Whitefieldian corpus. Whereas Butts and Wesley accepted DMM's tunes but rejected its texts, Knibb's Evangelical Calvinist theology enabled him to preserve 12 of the 18 original text and tune pairings he compiled from the Whitefieldian tune book. Not surprisingly, he assigned texts from Watts to the other six tunes.
Two of DMM's original text and tune pairings found their way via Knibb into Urania, a pioneer colonial American tune book published at Philadelphia in 1761 by the Presbyterian minster James Lyon, but the most important Dissenting redactor of DMM after Knibb was Aaron Williams, a Welsh engraver, singing master, composer, and clerk of the Scots Presbyterian Church in London Wall. 69 In 1763 Williams published The Universal Psalmodist for the use of London Dissenters. In his preface, he closely followed Whitefield's apology for singing psalms and hymns in worship. He cited the same apocalyptic biblical imagery of praise as Whitefield had done, with the same implication of hallelujah singing after hymns. The grandeur of singing praise, he wrote, is abundantly evident from Scripture, especially the Revelations, which abounds with heavenly anthems, where we are told, that the Angels and Archangels join in singing Hallelujahs, etc. to Him that sits on the throne, and to the Lamb forever and ever. And shall we be shamefully silent? Should we not join in the Chorus, as we term it, or rather imitate their strains, by joining to sing the praises of almighty God, for his wonderful works of creation and providence, but, above all, for the great work of redemption, which far exceeds our highest praise. 70 Williams followed Knibb's precedent by reprinting 21 tunes from DMM, 11 of them with their original texts, including Ye servants of God your master proclaim/HALLIFAX and Children of the heav'nly king/PLYMOUTH. Interestingly, more than half of Williams's original DMM text choices differed from those of his fellow Presbyterian Knibb, indicating that Dissenting compilers exercised a significant degree of editorial freedom. Williams also arranged AMSTERDAM into a four-part version with melody in the tenor and harmony for treble, alto, and bass. This new arrangement was reprinted almost immediately in Boston by Josiah Flagg in his 1764 tune book A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes, engraved by Paul Revere. 71 Flagg's Collection was one of the first true tune books published in New England after Thomas Walter and John Tufts had pioneered the genre in the British colonies during the Regular These were the religious institutions most closely associated with Whitefield, yet by the 1760s they had abandoned all the tunes of DMM and many of the texts in Hymns for Social Worship. Selina (1701-91) was Whitefield's greatest aristocratic patron during his life and executor of his will for the Bethesda Orphan House. She built her chapel at Bath and a seminary at Trevecca in Wales for the evangelist and his followers. After his death her Connexion of chapels was the closest thing to an organized Whitefieldian denomination on either side of the Atlantic. 76 Yet at some time in the 1760s Selina appointed the composer Benjamin Milgrove as precentor of the chapel at Bath. Milgrove seems to have set out on a wholesale revision of the Connexion's sacred music. He published 26 tunes between 1768 and 1771 that created an alternative musical repertory for worship in what had been Whitefield's most prestigious congregation. Even more surprisingly, most of the texts Milgrove set were not taken from Hymns for Social Worship. Only six of the 26 came from that source, though Milgrove set other texts by Charles Wesley, William Hammond, and other writers whom Whitefield had championed. 77 The other absence was not quite as total, but it followed the same pattern of tune exclusion. The Lock Hospital was founded in London in 1746 by William Bronfeild (1712-92). It quickly gained charitable support from aristocratic patrons as well as Evangelical Anglican clergy. In 1759 Martin Madan, a wealthy lawyer, convert of John Wesley, fervent Whitefieldian, and accomplished musician, volunteered to serve as chaplain of the hospital. With his own funds he financed the building of a chapel for the hospital and began to prepare a musical program for worship there. Madan made the Lock Hospital chapel into a major redoubt in the improvised Whitefieldian institutional array in London. The patients were not healthy enough to form their own choir, so Madan explored ways to create a congregation of accomplished singers. With the help of Charles Lockhart, the chapel organist, he enlisted notable London composers including Felice Giardini, Felice Alessandri, Charles Burney, and John Worgan to write new harmonized tunes in the Italianate "gallant" style favored by the city's elite. 78 In 1762 Madan began publishing folios of a dozen of these tunes for use by congregants and other wealthy patrons of the hospital. The popularity of these short collections was so great that Madan produced an omnibus anthology of them in 1769 called A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes Never Before Published. 79 His affinity for Whitefieldian hymnody was evidenced by the presence of 35 texts from Hymns for Social Worship, more than one-third of the collection. But while these texts survived at the Lock Hospital, their associated music from DMM was completely abandoned in favor of the new tunes that Madan had sponsored. Oddly enough, both Milgrove and Madan retained the Moorfields ritual of dialogue hymns in their tune collections, but without DMM's music or lyrics. At root, both of these Whitefieldian musical leaders seem to have been motivated to create a more stylish contemporary repertory of praise for their aristocratic and elite constituencies than Moorfields offered.
DMM had far less impact on the development of early Evangelical sacred song than the collections of John and Charles Wesley, but it was a crucial source for both Thomas Butts's Harmonia-Sacra and emergent Dissenting hymnody. The reasons for this pattern are not as obvious as they might at first appear. Certainly the huge and often brilliant corpus of Charles Wesley's sacred poems must be considered decisive. Whitefieldians had nothing like Wesley's hymns, published in 81 collections between 1739 and 1785, though writers like Cennick, Seagrave, and Hammond made significant contributions to Evangelical Calvinist praise. But the discrepancy in musical influence has other dimensions that have not been as generally noted. A major part of the difference must be assigned to the failure of Whitefield to organize an effective network of religious institutions among his followers to promote and distribute his hymnody. Whitefield was dedicated above all else to his preaching mission. He lacked the institutional genius of John Wesley and had no interest in organizing his own Evangelical Calvinist sectarian movement. Aside from Bethesda, Whitefield's institutional homes at Moorfields, Bath, and the Lock Hospital were built, supported, and governed by his wealthy followers and were not subject to his direct discipline. Whitefield created neither the system of religious societies nor the powerful book trade that secured a huge audience for the hymnody of the Wesleys. The reception of his music therefore depended on its eclectic appropriation by London's Evangelical Calvinist Anglicans and Dissenters and American Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.
Yet when George Whitefield died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 30, 1770, his music was being sung across the entire Evangelical movement. A dozen of the new and variant tunes from DMM had become standards among Wesleyans and Evangelical Calvinists alike. And his Hymns for Social Worship had been continuously in print since it was published in 1753. Whitefield could take pride that his ecumenical vision for Evangelicalism had extended into the realm of praise. Immediately after Whitefield's passing, Hymns for Social Worship became more popular than ever, appearing in 20 further editions between 1770 and 1794. But its popularity gradually waned in both Britain and America during the early decades of the nineteenth century. With the relentless procession of new editions of Watts's hymns and psalms and new collections of Evangelical Calvinist poetry appearing regularly in both nations, Whitefield's lyrics soon fell prey to the same process of replacement among Reformed denominations that Wesleyans had initiated with Butts's Harmonia-Sacra in 1754.
Nonetheless, DMM's tune repertory continued to exert a powerful if masked influence on Evangelical hymnody. Ten of its new and variant tunes were reprinted more than 100 times by 1820. Another five achieved 67 reprintings or more. These numbers represent an impressive achievement for a collection of just 68 tunes. For decades these popular tunes were reprinted once or twice each year in an ever-diversifying range of Evangelical tune books. Few eighteenthcentury tune collections could make the same claim. Reprints of these tunes-ALCESTER (87),