Songs of the Saron: Ephrata Cloister’s Women Composers

Saron, the building to the left, was constructed in 1743 and served as the dormitory for the celibate Sisters at Ephrata. Saal, on the right, was the Sisters’ meetinghouse, built in 1741.
Ephrata Cloister, PHMC

In the mid-18th century, a small religious community thrived at what is known today as Ephrata Cloister on the banks of the Cocalico Creek in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. Founded in 1732 by German immigrant Conrad Beissel (1691–1768), the group was composed of celibate Brothers and Sisters who lived lives of religious devotion and self-denial, supported in part by the married members of the community, known as the Householders. The celibates believed their daily life would prepare them for Christ’s Second Coming, when they would be united with God for all eternity in a heavenly marriage. This quiet German Anabaptist group became known for its architecture, printing, Frakturschriften (a form of calligraphy, commonly known as Fraktur) and music. Recent research at the Ephrata Cloister historic site has revealed evidence that at least three of the Sisters wrote musical compositions, making them the earliest documented women composers in North America.

The unique music of Ephrata has attracted numerous scholars over the years. Beginning in the late 1950s, Russell P. Getz began research and transcription of Ephrata music, leading to the formation of the volunteer Ephrata Cloister Chorus in 1959 and the publication of some transcriptions in 1971. Lucy Carroll continued Getz’s work, expanding the transcribed repertoire, and began researching 18th-century performance techniques based on original accounts. In 2019 L. Allen Viehmeyer updated his important work, An Index to Hymns and Hymn Tunes of the Ephrata Cloister, 1730-1785, in which he identified several Sisters as authors of hymn texts. Christopher Dylan Herbert has recently expanded on the evidence of female authorship of Ephrata hymn tunes.

In 1746 the Brotherhood at Ephrata presented Beissel with a music manuscript, known today as the “Ephrata Codex” (now in the collection of the Library of Congress). In studying this manuscript, Herbert noticed names written in the margins, including those of three Ephrata Sisters: Föben, Hanna and Ketura. Viehmeyer identified these Sisters as the authors of hymn texts, but in the Codex, their names appear next to texts written by other known authors. This led Herbert to conclude that these Sisters actually composed those melodies.

The Sisterhood

Sisters slept in separate cells, “four paces by two” in size, on narrow wooden benches, their heads propped on small wooden blocks.
Ephrata Cloister, PHMC

The lifestyle of an Ephrata Sister was austere. The Sisters lived communally within the Saron, the Sisters’ dormitory. This four-story building constructed in 1743 had three successive levels with similar floor plans. Each of the floors had a center kitchen area flanked by a work room on each side. Arranged around the work rooms were six sleeping chambers for the Sisters. Each Sister was allotted her own sleeping chamber, a bit of privacy almost unheard of in the 18th century, when it was not uncommon for entire families to share one bedroom, often with more than one person sharing a bed. The Saron has the capacity to house 36 Sisters as built. The adjoining Saal, or Meetinghouse (built in 1741), had similar arrangements on the third and fourth floors to accommodate additional Sisters.

According to the 1745 Die Rose, a book containing the history of the Sisterhood, they lived by a rigid schedule. They awoke at 5 a.m. and prepared for the day with an hour of prayer and meditation in their sleeping chambers. At 6 a.m. they would report to their assigned work area. At 9 there was another hour of prayer. At 10 they returned to their work assignments until noon, when there was another hour set aside for prayers. Returning to work at 1 p.m., they labored through the afternoon until 5, when they broke again for another hour of prayer. At 6 p.m. the only meal of the day was served. They were primarily vegetarians and, as one visitor observed in 1753, the meal consisted of barley boiled in milk, pumpkin mush, bread, butter and water.

After the evening meal, two hours from 7 to 9 p.m. were set aside for reading, writing or music lessons. At 9 they retired to their sleeping chambers to rest until midnight, when they would rise and walk through the narrow corridors to the Saal for a night watch service to await Christ’s Second Coming, prophesied in Thessalonians 5:2 as a return like “a thief in the night.” If by 2 a.m. Christ had not appeared, they retired to their sleeping chamber to rest again until 5, when they would awake and do it all over again. The exception to this would be Saturday, their Sabbath, which started with a worship service for about two hours in the morning, followed by free time until the daily meal was served at 6 p.m. and the routine resumed.

Sisters at Ephrata created hand-illuminated music manuscripts and wall charts in a calligraphic form called Frakturschriften, or Fraktur.
Ephrata Cloister, PHMC

Despite this rigid schedule, the Sisters experienced a certain amount of independence typically unavailable to women in the 18th century, when daughters, wives and mothers were seldom more than chattel. The societal hierarchy in Europe and North America was based on Christian theology in which God is male. As a result, it was a male-dominated world and women had few rights. The 18th century world operated within the confines of coverture, in which any property a woman might own prior to her marriage became her husband’s. But at Ephrata, God was seen as androgynous, with Christ representing a male’s fieriness, and Sophia, God’s female aspect, representing a wise, motherlike and sometimes disciplinarian figure. Although Ephrata’s founder did not view women as equal to men, he did believe that subordination was a desirable trait in both men and women. This allowed for greater equality between genders within the Ephrata community than in the outside world.

Working communally, the Sisters were free from the drudgery of 18th-century domestic work, as well as childbearing and child rearing in an era when women in America bore seven children on average. The Sisters provided for their own needs during the day, not those of the Brothers. They might be assigned to work in the kitchen gardens or to preserve food in season, hand-copy the musical notations into manuscripts, spin wool or flax, or prepare the one meal they ate each day. They were responsible to themselves and to the community at large, answering only to Conrad Beissel. They had access to education and were encouraged to express religious devotion by writing music texts, composing musical melodies, and creating ornate illuminated manuscripts containing Frakturschriften.

Music at Ephrata

In 1741, while George Frideric Handel was composing Messiah in Europe, Ephrata’s founder was establishing his own methodology for composing hymns. Beissel’s composition system first appeared in three manuscripts dated 1746: “Ephrata Codex”; Die Blume Saron, or The Flowers of Saron (in the collection of Ephrata Cloister); and Music of the Ephrata Brethren (in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). The system was printed the following year as the preface to the 1747 hymnal Das Gesäng der einsamen und verlassenen Turtel=Taube (The Song of the Lonely and Forsaken Turtledove), printed by the Brotherhood at Ephrata. This was the first hymnal containing all original poetry printed in America.

Beissel considered musical composition, lyric writing and singing to be not only a way to praise God but also a spiritual discipline to provide focus and a means of meditation as the work was created and performed.

Those who made up the choir were subject to additional dietary restrictions, with no meat, dairy, eggs, honey, beans or beverages other than water to be consumed.

The lyrics and melodies of the music created at Ephrata can still be heard in concerts and recordings by the Ephrata Cloister Chorus. Here the chorus performs from a balcony in the Saal.
Ephrata Cloister, PHMC

The composition, like the lives of the celibates, was rigidly controlled. As Christopher Dylan Herbert notes in his recent dissertation, the music consists primarily of four parts: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Each piece was to begin and end with the same note to provide symmetry. The melody was created in the soprano line with each text syllable receiving one note. Beissel provided a chart showing each note to be placed below the melody note to create four-part harmony. For instance, if a soprano was to sing an F, then the tenor and bass were to sing a D and the alto an A. As Herbert explains it, “The result is music composed almost as a paint by numbers painting is painted.” Yet, using this musical composition structure, Beissel, along with the Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata, would go on to compose more than 1,000 original melodies.

Many visitors to Ephrata remarked on the unusual singing. Writing in 1771 Jacob Duché commented, “I almost began to think myself in the world of spirits, and that the objects before me were ethereal.” Although most of the hymns were constructed primarily in four-part harmony, there were exceptions to this rule, as some contain a fifth part; however, little is currently known about its significance.

The hymns were sung a cappella, without musical accompaniment, as Beissel believed the voice was a person’s musical instrument. As noted above, the Sisters were responsible for hand-copying the musical notations for Ephrata hymns into manuscripts; text was printed in a separate book. Thus, when singing at Ephrata, one held a book with the music and another with the words.

Ephrata’s Women Composers

But who were these women composers? As individuals we know little about them.

Sister Hanna was born Hannah Lichty in Germany in 1714 and died at Ephrata on October 31, 1793. She is memorialized in the anonymous death register kept by the Ephrata community with the following: “She moved to Eftate in the year 1739, was an only child, thus left her father’s house and became a faithful fellow warrior of Jesus Christ, and thus took an edifying and blessed end. She was by family line a Lichte and there were already awakened people in Germany.”

Sister Föben (Phoebe) was born Christianna Lässle in 1717 in an unknown location and died on March 4, 1784, at Ephrata. She was the daughter of Peter and Anna Catarina Lässle of Baden-Würtemberg who came to America in 1729 with Alexander Mack Sr., founder of the Brethren Church. Jacob Funk (Brother Kenan) noted in his listing of community deaths that “she lived with the sisters 47 years.” Her parents were likely Householders. Her younger sister and brother, Sister Rosa and Brother Isai, were also members of the celibate community.

Sister Ketura was born Catherine Hagemann in 1718 in an unknown location and died at Ephrata on October 10, 1797. The daughter of Heinrich and Magdalena Hagemann, she came to Ephrata with her parents and brothers after a spiritual awakening at Falckner’s Swamp (in today’s Montgomery County), possibly in 1735. Two of her brothers became celibate members, Brother Nehemia and Brother Nathan. Another brother, like her parents, remained a Householder. We have a bit more insight into her life than the other two Sisters, thanks to an estate inventory recorded in the Lancaster County Register’s Office on October 25, 1797. That inventory lists books valued at 16 shillings, spectacles, a spice box, scissors and cotton, as well as spinning wheels that are believed to be the ones held in Ephrata’s collection.

Above, A page from the “Ephrata Codex” showing credits for Hanna and Ketura. Below, Two pages with melodies credited to Föben.
Library of Congress

Thanks to the scholars who have researched Ephrata’s music manuscripts and transcribed them into modern notation, the melodies of the Sisters and Brothers can still be heard today in recordings by the Ephrata Cloister Chorus and at concerts at the historic site and throughout Pennsylvania.

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At its height in the 1750s, the small community at Ephrata numbered only about 80 Sisters and Brothers and 200 married Householders and their children. Although the last celibate Sisters died in 1813 and the remaining Householders formed the German Seventh Day Baptist Society of Ephrata, which was dissolved in 1934, the community left behind a lasting legacy in today’s historic site that preserves a model of William Penn’s Holy Experiment of religious freedom in Pennsylvania, with the still-standing structures that once echoed with the sounds and songs of the Sisters and Brothers at work and in worship.

Further Reading

Bach, Jeff. Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. / Carroll, Lucy. The Music of the Ephrata Cloister. Ephrata: Ephrata Cloister Associates, 2003. / Getz, Russell P., ed. Ephrata Cloister Chorales: A Collection of Hymns and Anthems Composed by Conrad Beissel. New York: G. Schirmer, 1971. / Herbert, Christopher Dylan. “Voices in the Pennsylvania Wilderness: An Examination of the Music Manuscripts, Music Theory, Compositions, and (Female) Composers of the Ephrata Cloister.” D.M.A. diss., The Julliard School, 2018. / Viehmeyer, L. Allen. An Index to Hymns and Hymn Tunes of the Ephrata Cloister, 1730-1785. 2nd expanded ed. Ephrata, PA: Ephrata Cloister Associates, 2019.

Ephrata Cloister preserves the site of an 18th-century religious community, known for its original music, illuminated manuscripts, distinctive architecture, and prolific publishing center. For information on tours, exhibits, special events, music concerts and other information, visit ephratacloister.org.

The author thanks her colleagues at Ephrata Cloister, curator Kerry Mohn and museum educator Michael Showalter, for sharing their knowledge and providing insight on the music and collections of Ephrata for this article.

Elizabeth Bertheaud has been involved with Ephrata Cloister since 1993, first as a Keystone intern, then as a seasonal guide and member of the board of the Ephrata Cloister Associates, and starting in 2008, the historic site administrator. Her personal interests include women’s history, with a focus on 18th-century textiles and clothing, open hearth cooking, and gardening, as well as architecture and tombstone art. At home she is most often found with a needle in her hand, making 18th-century clothing, cross-stitching or knitting.