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Music

American Eras

Music

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Institutions of Musical Life. Like the other arts in the colonies, music before the Revolution had a limited institutional base: there was almost no opportunity for the professional training and performance of musicians and composers. For this reason Americans acquired their taste for music through amateur performance, which relied almost entirely on the importation of sheet music of European composers such as Antonio Lucio Vivaldi and

George Frideric Handel and instruments such as the spinet and harpsichord. Emulating the habits of the British gentry, fashionable men and women on this side of the Atlantic used their leisure time to practice “accomplishments” that they could share with other members of respectable “society.” Most musical activity centered around concerts in the home, where genteel women sang and played guitar, for example, while men played violin and flute. The most accomplished musicians of the day were some of the wealthy Southerners—Thomas Jefferson, for example, collected musical instruments such as the pianoforte and performed in amateur concerts at the governor’s mansion at Williamsburg—or the planter families who came to Charleston to escape the summer heat and take part in “public times,” when concerts and plays were sponsored by the St. Cecilia society.

Church Singing. In church singing the new music of James Lyons and William Billings would not have been possible without changes that made vocal training more accessible and popular and helped to disseminate a taste for music as an art, separate from the needs of religious devotion. The musical life of the colonies prior to and during the Revolutionary era was dominated by psalms. Psalms were part of the larger democratizing of scripture that the Protestant Reformation had set in motion with its commitment to reading and devotion in vernacular languages rather than in Latin. Furnishing common people with simple religious ballads to be used in worship, psalms translated scripture from the Old Testament into metrical verses that were easy to remember and perform by nonliterate and literate people alike. In the eighteenth century alone more than 250 publications were devoted to psalmody, making such popular works as the Bay Psalm Book (1640) and Isaac Watts’s Psalm of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719) as common in the colonies as almanacs and spellers. The English composer William Tansur was the most widely known psalmodist before the Revolution through compilations such as Royal Melody Complete, first published in Boston in 1767, but selections from which were being sung in America shortly after its printing in Britain in 1755.

Singing Schools. Singing schools brought young men and women together and became a primary means of keeping youths interested in church. Taught by itinerant musicians, singing schools trained young people in basic rules of vocal performance, typically meeting two or three times a week for three months, and concluding with a public performance of newly learned selections. Paul Revere’s engraving at the front of William Billings’s The New England Psalm Singer (1770), depicts a leader and six male singers seated around a table in a home or perhaps an inn but not a church. This engraving illustrates the way that psalmody increasingly served a social function instead of being confined to churches. Psalms were sung for recreation at various places where people gathered, and with the proliferation of singing masters and new kinds of psalms that introduced national and secular themes there was obviously worry that people were performing sacred music as a form of social entertainment instead of assisting believers in religious worship. In the preface to his The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778) Billings included advice on how to run a singing school. Although these schools were often sponsored by churches and sometimes held on church property, Billing’s warnings to other singing masters suggests that the young adults and teenage boys and girls who attended them had other things besides solemn piety on their minds: “4. No unnecessary conversation, whispering, or laughing, to be practiced...and above all I enjoin it upon you to refrain from all levity, both in conduct and in conversation, while singing sacred words.”

Profane Amusements. Teaching vocal skills that students used outside of church—at spinning bees, funerals, and Election Days—the schools spread a taste for music as a form of social recreation and secular entertainment. Like itinerant singing masters, roving musicians brought a wider range of music lessons to students throughout the colonies. The increased number of skilled singers led to the introduction of choirs in churches, which in turn led to the introduction of instrumental accompaniment on pitch pipes, bass viols, and small orchestras with wind and string instruments by the 1790s. As a result services increasingly resembled concerts. Singing had been an active means of participation in religious devotion for all church members, but it increasingly became an occasion for aesthetic appreciation, where members passively listened to virtuoso performances by their more skilled brethren. By meeting and stimulating a demand for musical training, these new institutions helped to build cultural support for professional composition and performance that blurred the distinction between sacred and secular. By the 1770s organists played both in church services and in public concerts.

From Sacred to Secular. The development of new institutions in the musical life of the colonies during the 1760s and 1770s both contributed to and expressed profound changes taking place in colonial music. The publication of two works of vocal music in this period illustrates the growth of secular composition styles and the improved quality of musical performance. In 1763 the publication of James Lyon’s Urania introduced the colonies to more sophisticated compositions in psalm singing that had become fashionable in Britain. Especially in New England, conservative religious tradition had emphasized the sacred purpose of vocal music and discouraged instrumental performances as a distraction to spiritual devotion and, like theatre, a danger to public morality. Congregational and Presbyterian churches focused their singing on scripture, such as the use of David’s psalms for the praise of God, and relied on “lining-out,” having a deacon lead the congregation by reading the psalm line by line. As the first American tunebook to contain “ornaments,” Urania moved colonial tastes towards neoclassical eloquence and paved the way for secular

modifications of sacred music through hymns, anthems, and fuguing tunes. These compositions were more complex than psalms, requiring singers to master trills and graces, lengthy four-part choruses and other kinds of aesthetic embellishment. Containing detailed explanations of tempo and rhythm and printing words under notes, Urania helped to improve the quality of musical performance in the colonies by introducing variety into psalmody and inviting vocal training amongst a wide audience.

William Billings. The publication of Urania and other European compositions spurred a revival of colonial singing. In 1770 The New England Psalm Singer: or, American Chorister, the first volume of music composed by an American, was published in Boston. Its author, twenty-four-year-old William Billings, was the first American composer of great importance, and as the title of his work indicates, he stood at the beginning of a new tradition and was concerned with developing an indigenous musical idiom. Rejecting European models of composition, Billings introduced innovations in form that expressed something of a declaration of musical independence. His second published work, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), was the first tunebook published after the outbreak of war and included musical settings of patriotic texts written by Billings himself that dealt explicitly with the war. It was also the only American tunebook of the eighteenth century by a composer that included many tunes already familiar to the public, and more than fifty of its tunes appeared in later compliations published by others. Billings’s music was reprinted and performed throughout the 1780s and 1790s and was so popular that one Philadelphia critic declared in 1788 that Billings was “the rival of Handel.”

Sources

Gilbert Chase, America’s Music from the Pilgrims to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987);

Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: Norton, 1983);

David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, Willing Billing of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975);

Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

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