Ephrata's Women Composers
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
In the mid seventeen hundreds, at the Ephrata Cloister just east of here, three women were composing sacred music. Sister Foben, Sister Ketura, and Sister Hanna, wrote intricate hymn melodies and texts for their congregation's worship. The Ephrata Cloister was an unusual religious community founded by Johann Conrad Beissel, and it gave women and men alike roles in its devotional life.
The sisters' compositions were collected in hymnals that still survive. At a time when women composers were nearly invisible in the Atlantic world, these three were creating original sacred music in a Pennsylvania German community that few outsiders ever knew existed.
