Songs of Light, 1977

Songs of Light, subtitled The Bruderhof Songbook, is a songbook (a hymnal, really, but with a larger than usual percentage of material of folk origin) published by the Hutterian Society of Brothers that grew out of the communal Christian settlement at Sannerz, Germany in the 1920s. (In 1930 the Sannerz commune, centered around Eberhard and Emmy Arnold and their family, merged with the preexisting Hutterian Brotherhood (Bruderhof). This songbook appears to draw mostly from, and be aimed mostly at, the Hutterians of Sannerz lineage.

Contents

Songs of Light contains 376 numbered songs; including prefaces and indexes, the book is 541 pages long (so many songs occupy more than one page). The songs are divided into three sections, General (1-262), Christmas (263-340), and Easter (341-376). A large number of the songs are bilingual, with full German and English texts. Few if any of the songs are in any other languages (except for Latin phrases in some, like In Dulci Jubilo. However, many of the songs are of non-German origin, including a large number of African-American Spirituals.

Editors

The title page says that the book is "Compiled and edited by the HUTTERIAN SOCIETY OF BROTHERS from EBERHARD ARNOLD and many other sources"; the Music editor is Marlys Swinger and the Art editor was Gillian Barth.