Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch . By Daniel Jay Grimminger. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2012. xxi + 213 pp. $85.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Sacred Song and the Pennsylvania Dutch . By Daniel Jay Grimminger . Rochester, N.Y. : University of Rochester Press , 2012. xxi + 213 pp. $85.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis 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 Brudergemein, 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. …