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Brass, Bands and a Text That Is Doctrine

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Brass, Bands and a Text That Is Doctrine

An organ cannot be carried to a burial ground. That practical fact is a large part of why the Moravian Church has a brass tradition at all. Moravian settlements maintained trombone choirs, ensembles of brass instruments playing chorale melodies, and the Easter morning service is the occasion those ensembles exist for above all others. In the older settlements the band also played from the church tower before dawn to wake the town, so the service began for many people as sound heard from bed.

The text is the other unusual thing. Most liturgical texts of this kind are prayers or hymns, and a church may revise them for language without anyone thinking a doctrine has moved. The Easter Morning Litany is a confession of faith, and Moravians treat it as one. Revisions have accordingly been deliberate, infrequent and argued, because changing a clause changes what the church states that it believes, and the service is one of the places where Moravian doctrine is actually to be found rather than merely referred to.

The combination has proved portable. Moravian missions carried the service to the Caribbean, to Labrador, to South Africa and to Central America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is kept in those provinces in their own languages with their own bands. Anyone who has attended it in more than one place reports the same thing: the language differs, the tunes differ a little, and the shape, the darkness, the procession, the names of the dead and the sunrise, does not.

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