Billings, William (1746-1800)

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William Billings (1746-1800)

Composer

Beginnings. Born in Boston on 7 October 1746, William Billings was the first American composer. Like Copley, William Billings was a son of the colonial working class. Without the benefit of much formal education, let alone the chance of attending college (which remained a privilege of the genteel class), both men nevertheless managed to realize some remarkable artistic talents. Unlike Copley, however, Billings gave expression to a provincial, American culture instead of aspiring to the cosmopolitan ideal of British culture. At no time in his life would Billings ever achieve the social and economic success accorded to gentlemen, but given his fervent patriotism he may have regarded his artisanal background with pride. From his early teens Billings supported himself as a tanner. Like most colonial musicians, he apparently received his first musical education at singing schools; in 1769 he advertised the opening of his first singing school with John Barry, a former choir director at the New South Church who was probably Billings’s main teacher. Billings never mastered any instrument but instead made the psalm the object of his musical innovations. Because it was integral to religious worship and supported by churches throughout the colonies, the psalm was the most common and important musical form in America before the nineteenth century.

Accomplishments. At the age of twenty-three Billings had already composed more than one hundred original pieces of sacred music, and in 1770 he published his first tunebook, The New England Psalm Singer. Only a dozen or so American-composed tunes had previously been published. Collecting more than 120 new compositions, The New England Psalm Singer was the first published compilation of entirely American music and the first tunebook composed by one American composer. Perhaps even more significant as a sign of both Billings’s intentions and the times in which he lived, he advertised the work as “never before published” and stressed that it was composed by “a native of Boston”—made in America by an American. Published by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who also published The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, a major Patriot newspaper, and including an engraving by Paul Revere, the book suggested that Billings was strongly aligned with the Rebels. His tunebook is striking for the manner in which it boldly signals these nationalist sentiments. For example, Billings’s best-known tune, “Chester,” declares:

Let tyrant shake their iron rod
And slav’ry Clank her galling Chains
We fear them not we trust in God
New Englands God for ever reigns.

His second published tunebook, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), includes a paraphrase of Psalm 137 that refers to the occupation of Boston in 1775–1776. These selections captured the mood of confident defiance with which New England patriots entered the new era.

Innovations. For modern readers what makes the Billings compositions so striking is the manner in which he dispensed with conventions that had dominated the Anglo-American Psalm tradition. His tunes feature dance-like rhythms drawn from the popular music of the colonies, such as the Irish Jig; his melodies are borrowed from traditional Anglo-Irish folk songs such as “Green-sleeves”; and his texts are more secular than literary. His tunes include a four-voice structure—tenor, treble, counter tenor, and bass—and they developed increasing coordination of texts and music by including printed words with the tunes. He also pioneered the fuguing tune, which involved successive vocal entries and an overlapping of sung texts. The end result was a dissonant sound, stripped of European refinements. Before his death in 1800 Billings had published a total of six collections of tunes, which moved toward more-involved musical forms such as the anthem and explored more complex musical textures. The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement (1781) includes two extended concert pieces, which in their unusual choice of keys, variety of effects, and technical virtuosity represent some of Billings’s most polished works. A separately published piece, “An Anthem for Easter,” remains the most popular anthem by an eighteenth-century American.

Impact. Although his music was reprinted by others dozens of times and performed throughout the new United States, Billings died in poverty. His visibility within American music did much to transform music from anonymous aids to religious devotion to an artistic medium, by which composers might project their own distinctive ethos and individual personality. In his prefaces, joke-tunes, and commentary Billings assumed a self-deprecating intimacy (Billings addressed the tune “Jargon” “To the goddess of discord” as a way of answering critics of his music) that helped further to make singing a truly popular art. In its playful exploration of a more natural and primitive wildness, Billings’s music became a model for later American composers, such as Charles Ives, who would also experiment with received European conventions and use popular culture in their search for a distinctive American sound.