Early-American hymns live again thanks to University of Minnesota professor

Those who grow up in Christian churches sing hymns that, like magic, seamlessly integrate sacred words and lovely music by classical composers.

But the magic arrived late. The process involved was complicated and often haphazard, "sort of like the Wild West," in Peter Mercer-Taylor's words.

"Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," for instance, was not always sung to a Felix Mendelssohn composition. Instead, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a well-intentioned but chaotic movement found arrangers across the land attempting to amalgamate hymnal texts and classical themes.

Mercer-Taylor's herculean efforts to chronicle and compile these efforts has brought the University of Minnesota music professor an National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication. The goal: to create a website of contemporary choral and piano recordings of nearly 280 early-American hymn tunes, tied to his book Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America.

Both the website (no domain name yet) and the book will emerge in October. The fellowship allows Mercer-Taylor to collect and cull performances of these obscure works.

"The purpose [of the book] is to tell the historical story," Mercer-Taylor said, "but the purpose of the website is to lay out the entire anthology, so people can sit down and thumb through it."

And listen to it. Mercer-Taylor is casting a massive net to persuade choruses to record 19th-century text/tune combinations.