I have an abiding interest in the music of these two groups, and often perform it at church. I consider myself a practicing Shaker, and their music has an innocent rambunctiousness that I appreciate. I will occasionally post reviews and musicological discussions here. I don't make furniture very well, which is the major interest in Shakers among investors. Has anyone else noticed a strong native American strain in the tunes used by the Shakers? The Irishness of the wordless laboring songs is obvious to me. Is it to anyone else? I have promised to display copies of Shaker music that I have transcribed. "All At Home" is a piece that I sang with my autoharp at church one year, and with the Greenbelt Community Chorus another year. I got it off of the "All At Home" tape I picked up in New Hampshire some time ago. Since then, I have made contact with the singer, Roger Hall of New England.

The Ephrata Cloister was a Sabbathkeeping monastery in the 1700s. Their founder, Conrad Biessel, independently discovered the Sabbath, vegetable shortening, and was the first music theorist in this hemisphere. His 7-part anthems were in German, and predated William Billings' work. I like to play it on my American Zither, a Menzenhauer built in Chicago in 1856.

One book of Ephrata Cloister music has been published by the Cloister Associates, and is available from the giftshop at the cloisters in Ephrata, PA.

While on vacation in Philadelphia in 2007, I discovered one of the original handwritten Ephrata Cloister songbooks in the Rare Books room of the Philadelphia Free Library. The words are in a flowery German script, but were also printed separately, so that the choir members had to hold 2 books to sing properly. I am working on translating and recasting their great Sabbath hymn, "Die Stille Sabbath=Feyr ist angegangen" for an Adventist choir. I have also written a fugue based on one of the themes, and an anthem incorporating the best of each of the 6 different tunes. I will soon link these with this page.

Since my first posting, I found that Biessel's predecessor in composing European style music, Johannes Kelpius, also founded a hermitage in Pennsylvania in the 1690s, and actually baptised Biessel! The site of their hermitage above the banks of Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia is now an opera house. There is a good biography of him at http://www.famousamericans.net/johnkelpius, and plenty more on the web about him and his group.