Author: Seth Curtis Beach
Seth Curtis Beach was born on August 8, 1837 in western New York State. He was a Unitarian minister, author, poet and hymnist. The family lived in a log cabin they had built on a fifty acre farm near the village of Marion, New York. His mother and older sister tutored him until he was eight.
In 1858 he enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but transferred to Union College in Schenectady, New York and gradated from there with an A.B. degree in 1863. As a Unitarian, Beach enrolled at Harvard Divinity School to prepare for the ministry. After college he preached as a supply minister for a number of churches eventually settling at All Souls Unitarian Church in Augusta, Maine in 1867. He also served as minister at First Church…
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HAMBURGLowell Mason (PHH 96) composed HAMBURG (named after the German city) in 1824. The tune was published in the 1825 edition of Mason's Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music. Mason indicated that the tune was based on a chant in the first Gregorian tone.
HAMBURG is a very simple tune with…
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TRURO (Williams)TRURO is an anonymous tune, first published in Thomas Williams's Psalmodia Evangelica, (second vol., 1789) as a setting for Isaac Watts' "Now to the Lord a noble song." Virtually nothing is known about this eighteenth-century British editor of the two-volume Psalmodia Evangelica, a collection of thr…
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MELCOMBE (Webbe)Also known as:
ST. PHILIPS
BENEDICTION
GRANTON
NAZARETH
MELCOMBE was first used as an anonymous chant tune (with figured bass) in the Roman Catholic Mass and was published in 1782 in An Essay on the Church Plain Chant. It was first ascribed to Samuel Webbe (the elder; b. London, England, 1740; d.…
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