This is a study of the chorale and tune books the Pennsylvania Dutch produced between 1786 and 1883. By “chorale book” Daniel Grimminger means “any book that contains German chorales solely,” and by “tune book” he means “a printed score that may contain genres outside of the German chorale repertoire” (9). He provides a complete list of the books under consideration in the introduction (Table 1, pp. 4–5).

While “Pennsylvania Dutch” has often been applied to “Amish and Mennonite separatists,” Grimminger applies it here to the whole group of ethnic Americans who spoke “Pennsylvania Dutch” which he defines as “a peculiar form of Low German, resembling the dialects of the Palatinate region from whence many Germanic immigrants came in the colonial and early republic eras of American history” (10). Not to be confused with the “Netherlands Dutch,” “Pennsylvania Dutch” is used here to refer to all the “Germanic people of Pennsylvania” (9). This includes Kirchenleute, Lutherans, and Reformed who sometimes worshiped in union churches, Sektenleute, the “Plain People”—Amish, Mennonites, Brethren, and Ephrata Cloister folks who came from the sixteenth century Swiss and German Anabaptists (12), and Brüdergemein, the “‘Unitas Fratrum’ or ‘Moravian Brethren’ who “were somewhere between the Kirchenleute and Sektenleute theologically and socially” (14) and who receive less attention here. George Fenwick Jones chose the analogous term “Georgia Dutch” for the Salzburgers who came to Georgia in the eighteenth century (George Fenwick Jones, The Georgia Dutch [Athens: The University of Atlanta Press, 1992]).

Keying off the categories Stephanie Grauman Wolf used for the assimilation process of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Grimminger runs the chorale and tune books he is studying through the grid of retention, adaptation, acculturation, and amalgamation (3). These central categories form the core of the book. They are preceded by a foreword by Don Yoder—an expert on this material—a preface that introduces the topic with thanks to those who helped in the research, and an overview of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. They are followed by the Pennsylvania Choral Harmony as a summation of the whole spectrum and some concluding implications.

This book is the result of “scouring archives and libraries” and building a collection of chorale and tune books. Grimminger donated his collection to the Lutheran Music Foundation's Samuel Putnam House in Paris, Ohio. He has a lifelong connection to Paris and has written about it (Paris [Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2010]). His interest therefore is “personal” as well as scholarly, and he terms his approach “emic” (xix). He includes the study of furniture and artifacts (in chapter 1) to give a “holistic” view of the culture.

Though there are studies where many of these chorale and tune books are referenced and analyzed, there is no other study where they are brought together in one cluster like this. Grimminger ably describes them with ample illustrations. His intent is to make “a reference and guidebook for librarians and bibliophiles” and “a textbook for scholars and musicians” which is accessible to “a wide variety of people” in order to “strengthen German-Americans' sense of cultural identity” (xix). He hopes “musicologists, theologians, and church music scholars” will “benefit from the assimilation model” (161).

Grimminger has carefully researched the books he has studied. Readers can find reliable detail about them. The point of the study, however, is to provide perspective and group the books into the grid of the assimilation model. Grimminger gives characteristics of the assimilative process, including retentive ones (57–58), adaptive and acculturated ones (96–97), and amalgamative ones (124–125). By comparing them, the reader can see the progression in language from German to an Anglo-American look to English, from little need for instruction in Introductions to pedagogical and then didactic ones, from a European genre to few chorales and then the few chorales joined by anthems, in notation from engraved plates to shape notes and then round notes, in voicing from two voices with unrealized figures to three to four voices to four voices with more common intervallic leaps of a sixth, and in theology from all sacred texts with themes of grace and justification to sentimentality to revivalism's influence away from sacraments and liturgy.

Grimminger does not chart these characteristics in the same way when he gets to the 1840 Pennsylvania Collection, but he follows them in the discussion (143ff.): bilingual, a “peculiar” introduction now with Italian musical terms, English, shape notes (“advanced assimilation”), a three to four voice mix, and the lack of a distinct revivalist theology. Thomas Weber's Pennsylvania Choral Harmony which “appeared in various guises from 1844 to 1889” (150) was “the last major tune book in Pennsylvania to use the German language and to articulate Dutch identity” (141). Grimminger notes its commercial turn when he says, “Weber was a businessman” (150) whose “motive was economic” (151). This book, therefore, “firmly rooted in a postretentive stage of assimilation . . . combined retentive, adaptive, acculturated, and amalgamated features” (150). Liturgical and theological concerns were not important, and “music serves the main goal of pleasure and ‘profit’—even the financial profit of the compiler” (153).

There were deep theological, liturgical, and musical cleavages that attended the conflicts between the Kirchenleute and the Sektenleute, between the Lutherans and the Reformed, and between the confessional themes of the Reformation and those of nineteenth century revivalism. These cleavages transcend assimilative grids and point to levels of complexity beyond the scope of his study. Perhaps the most telling insight here is that assimilation into the American environment led to a commercial conclusion.