William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer 9780691198453

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WILLIAM BILLINGS OF BOSTON

William Billings of Boston EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COMPOSER

B Y D A V I D P. M c K A Y A N D RICHARD CRAWFORD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright (C) 1975 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton and London ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation This book has been composed in Linotype Caslon Old Face Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton Legacy Library edition 2019 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-65576-5 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65718-9

T A B L E OF

CONTENTS

I N D E X OF M U S I C A L E X A M P L E S

vii

I N D E X OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S

viii

PREFATORY NOTE

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

PROLOGUE. Eighteenth-Century Sacred Music in New England

3

CHAPTER I. William Billings's Early Years (1746-1769) CHAPTER

I I . T h e New-England

Psalm-Singer

(1770—1777) CHAPTER

30

41

I I I . T h e Singing Master's Assistant ( 1 7 7 8 )

76

CHAPTER I V . Composer, Poet, Author, Editor (1779-1784)

103

CHAPTER V. American Artist in the 1780s

132

CHAPTER V I . Billings's Final Years ( 1 7 9 0 - 1 8 0 0 )

157

EPILOGUE. The Reputation of Billings and His Music, 1800-1970

190

APPENDIX I. Copyright and William Billings

221

APPENDIX I I . Performance of William Billings's Music

231

A P P E N D I X I I I . Illustrations

257

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by William Billings

269

General Bibliography

279

INDEX

291

V

I N D E X OF M U S I C A L 1.

(Singing Master's Assistant, 1 7 7 8 , p. 1 8 )

MEDWAY

2. Anthem:

EXAMPLES

DAVID'S LAMENTATION

(Singing Master's

Assistant, 1 7 7 8 , p. 2 2 ) 3.

BAPTISM

4.

CREATION

( S u f f o l k Harmony,

94

99 1 7 8 6 , p. 3 7 )

(Continental Harmony,

Vll

1794,

p. 5 2 )

148 179

INDEX OF

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Frontispiece of New-England

Psalm-Singer,

IJJO

259

2. Map of Billings's area of Boston, by Thomas Prince, 1 7 6 9

260

3. William Billings's Holograph

261

4. Title page of Billings's Psalm-Singer's

Amusement,

1781

261

5. Bill of payment to William Billings for teaching psalmody, 1 7 7 9

262

6. Title page of The Porcufine, attributed to Billings, 1 7 8 4

263

Alias The

7. Title page of The Boston Magazine,

Hedge-Hog,

edited by Billings,

October 1 7 8 3

263

8. Song from The Boston Magazine,

October 1 7 8 3

264

9. Broadside text for anthem by Billings, sung at funeral of the Reverend Samuel Cooper, 1 7 8 4

264

10. Hollis Street Congregational Church, 1788

265

1 1 . Title and bookplate Suffolkpage Harmony, 1 7 8 6 of Billings's

266

1 2 . Waterhouse Manuscript

267

Vlll

PREFATORY NOTE

William Billings (1746—1800) was the foremost American musician of the eighteenth century. He wrote more than three-hundred compositions—virtually all of them settings of sacred texts—brought out six musical collections and numerous smaller publications, and was active for three decades as a teacher of singing-schools. Moreover, he wrote vigorous prose and verse, his writings, like his music, reflecting an ebullient, distinctive personality. William Billings of Boston is a study of Billings and his place in the tradition of American psalmody. The biography is introduced by a Prologue describing the main currents of that tradition in Billings's century. The Epilogue, which follows the final biographical chapter, traces Billings's changing posthumous reputation. The book seeks at every point to describe Billings's life and musical career from the perspective of the musical tradition in which he worked. Thus the authors' aim has been to avoid telling Billings's story as if he were an isolated figure. The study was initiated in the early 1960s by David P. McKay, who did the archival research on Billings and found most of the documents here uncovered for the first time. Richard Crawford joined the project later; he contributed the material on American psalmody in general, and the final writing was essentially his responsibility.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this book occupied more than a decade, and many have helped along the way. Most of the research was done in the larger archives of Massachusetts—especially in the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. Invaluable material was also found in the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives in the Statehouse in Boston, the Houghton and Law School libraries at Harvard University, and the Boston Public Library. Many other libraries willingly gave assistance: the Archives, University of Washington, Seattle; the Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax; the Library of Congress; the William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan; and the British Museum in London. Numerous historical societies gave detailed, helpful replies to specific queries; and many local church historians consulted their records on request, whenever there seemed even a faint possibility that Billings might at some time have been associated with their churches. Many individuals with special knowledge of the colonial period were consulted. Dr. James E. Mooney and Miss Mary Brown, both of the American Antiquarian Society, were especially helpful. The former's keen scholastic sensibilities supported and encouraged the project, and the latter tirelessly and cheerfully walked miles along the corridors of stacked books at the Society to find the seemingly endless supply requested over the years. Professor Hans Nathan of Michigan State University, East Lansing, generously made available much information about Billings. Gillian Anderson of Washington, D.C., also discovered several facts and shared them with the authors. Connie Martin of Princeton University Press skillfully edited the manuscript, helping to clear the structure and syntax with many useful suggestions. Others who provided specific help at some crucial stage in the course of research and writing are Mr. Irving Lowens, Washington, D.C.; Mrs. Helen Emery, Wayland, Mass.; Mr. Leo Flaherty, Massachusetts Archives, Boston; Miss Bertha Reynolds, Stoughton, Mass.; Mr. Clois Enson, West Redding, Conn.; Mrs. Helen Waterhouse, Boston; Dean Allen P. Britton, School of Music, University of Michigan; Mr. David A. Sutherland, Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Professor Gilbert Chase of Guilford, Conn., and elsewhere. A postdoctoral fellowship from the Rackham School of Grad-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

uate Studies, University of Michigan, provided Richard Crawford with time to compile much of the general data on American psalmody that underlies this study. Crawford's summer fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society enabled the authors to work together in Massachusetts to complete the manuscript in July and August, I972 '

In closing, David McKay thanks family members for accepting neglect during the course of the study. If the book is useful, perhaps they will think of it as partial repayment. The members of the Crawford family would not accept neglect but they will get another crack at it. David P. McKay, Shrewsbury, Mass. Richard Crawford, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Ill

WILLIAM BILLINGS OF BOSTON

PROLOGUE

Eighteenth-Century Sacred Music in New England It was not purely historical happenstance that the first English book published in the New World was The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Cambridge, Mass., 1640). A metrical version of the Old Testament psalms, the Bay Psalm Book, as the work was called, signals the importance of psalm-singing to the religious faith that stood at the very core of the Puritan settlers' lives. Music has always been a significant force in Christian worship, but precisely because of its impact upon the emotions its role has been the subject of recurrent and unresolved conflict. The emotive power of music is double edged, as likely to set Christians against each other as to unite them in praise of God. Recognizing this fact, and assigning it to satanic influence, the authors of the Bay Psalm Book began their preface with a statement that foreshadowed the musical controversies, at times devastatingly bitter, that were to disturb the surface and influence the development of American musical life during the next two centuries: "The singing of Psalmes, though it breath forth nothing but holy harmony, and melody: yet such is the subtilty of the enemie, and the enmity of our nature against the Lord, & his wayes, that our hearts can finde matter of discord in this harmony, and crotchets of division in this holy melody." 1 In his position as "Teacher of the Church at Boston," John Cotton (1584—1652) attempted to clarify the role of music. His lengthy discussion of the matter, Singing of Psalmes a Gosfel-Ordinance (London, 1647), tacitly supports the classic dichotomy between musician and theologian. The former naturally tends to favor and to compose music for the church that draws upon the full expressive resources of the day's style; the latter, concerned primarily with the effect on the worshiper—Cotton's touchstone of acceptability 1 The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Cambridge: [Stephen Day], 1640), p. [1] of preface.

PROLOGUE

was that music "helpe either the [religious] understanding, or the affection" 2 -—tends to favor the inhibiting of musical elaboration. The attitude of church leaders who have attempted to regulate the role of music in worship, Puritan or otherwise, is based on three interrelated beliefs. First, music is only the medium through which sacred words are delivered; the words express the ideas that constitute worship. Second, simple music carries words more naturally, making them more easily audible and thus communicable, than does complicated music. Third, music to which sacred words should be set differs in some way from music suited to secular use, and the two are not to be confused. These three beliefs have enjoyed special influence among Calvinist Protestants, but did not begin with the Calvinists. The first belief expresses an ancient concern implicit in St. Augustine's declaration that his devotions were enhanced by music only when he was "moved not with the singing, but with the thing sung." In the same passage Augustine (354—430) distinguishes between reason and sense, deploring the tendency of music to beguile the latter, making the senses "run before [reason] and be her leader." 3 More than a millennium later, John Calvin, writing a preface to the Geneva Psalter (1543), still observed Augustine's distinction and found him a useful authority to invoke on the same subject: We must remember what Saint Paul says—that spiritual songs cannot be well sung save with the heart. Now the heart requires the intelligence, and therein, says Saint Augustine, lies the difference between the singing of men and of birds. For a linnet, a nightingale, a parrot will sing well, but it will be without understanding. Now the peculiar gift of man is to sing knowing what he is saying. After the intelligence must follow the heart and the affection. 4 Dealing with the same subject in Boston in 1720, the Reverend Thomas Symmes (1678-1725) invoked the same Augustinian admonition: "Is there not great reason to fear that you mistake the 2 John Cotton, Singing of Psalmes a Gosfel-Ordinance (London: M.S. for Hannah Allen, 1647), p. 60. 3 St. Augustine's Confessions, trans, by William Watts (1631), quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950),

P- 74·

John Calvin, foreword to Geneva Psalter, quoted in Strunk, Source Readings, p. 348. 4

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

Pleasing Imfressions made on your Animal Sfirits, by the Tune, to be the Melody you ought to make in your heart unto the Lord? Do you not mistake the natural Effects of Musick, for the Comforts of the Holy Spirit, and Actings of Grace in your Souls?"5 The tendency of these Christians to deny that the appeal of music to the senses was a stimulus to true piety is related to the second belief: an advocacy of simple music. The famous denunciation Pope John XXII leveled around 1324 against the composers of the Ars Nova, "disciples of the new school," for "intoxicating the ear, not soothing it" by burying the traditional chants in speedy arabesques concludes with an affirmation of simple polyphony based on the perfect consonances. These additions, wrote the pope, "heighten the beauty of the melody."6 Some representatives at the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century were uneasy enough about the elaborateness of liturgical music to propose the abolition of polyphony from the Roman Catholic Mass;7 John Calvin allowed only unharmonized singing in his church;8 and eighteenth-century Lutheranism came to be divided by a quarrel between Orthodox and Pietist factions, the latter advocating a simplicity in musical style that J. S. Bach had to contend with in his younger years.9 Anglo-American psalmody was rooted in this tradition of enforced musical simplicity. 5 The Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, or, Singing by Note (Boston: B. Green, for Samuel Gerrish, 1720), p. 18. Though published anonymously, the sermon is attributed by all authorities to Symmes. Augustine's own spiritual twistings and turnings have been identified as sharing a frame of mind with the colonial Puritans. See Perry Miller, "The Augustinian Strain of Piety," chap. I in The New England, Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939; reprinted, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 6 Quoted in Alec Harman, Anthony Milner, and Wilfrid Mellers, Man and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 122—123. Trans, adapted from H. E. Wooldridge, Oxford History of Music, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), I, 294—296, which reproduces the full text of the pope's pronouncement in both Latin and English. 7 See Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1 9 5 4 ) ,

P- 449· 8 Calvin apparently never issued a written edict forbidding part-singing, but there seems no reason to doubt that it was, in fact, forbidden in Calvinist churches. See, e.g., William Maxwell, The Liturgical Portions of the Genevan Service Book (Edinburgh, 1931), p. 88; quoted in Robert Stevenson, Patterns of P r o t e s t a n t C h u r c h M u s i c ( D u r h a m : D u k e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 5 3 ) , p . 2 1 . 9 See Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, trans, by Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller-Maitland (London: Novello, 1 8 8 5 ; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 3 5 8 - 3 6 6 , but especially 3 6 2 - 3 6 3 .

PROLOGUE After counterpoint crept in, it provided grounds for much con troversy, with the fuging-tune—a type of composition in which one or more sections are composed in imitative texture—coming in for special attack. Samuel Holyoke (1762—1820) claimed early in the 1790s that fuging-tunes produced only a "trifling effect," because "the parts, falling in, one after another, each conveying a different idea, confound the sense, and render the performance a mere jargon of words." 10 Writing near the end of the next decade John Hubbard (1759—i8i°), one of the most influential American reformers, echoed Holyoke's criticism, adding: "Such music can never be of more consequence than an oration well pronounced in an unknown language." 11 Andrew Law (1749—1821) illustrates this attitude in its most uncompromising form. By the end of his life he had come to epitomize a mistrust of what he called musical "science," and he dredged up from an active if crabbed imagination a most unlikely endorsement of his position: "I have been informed that Handel said he would give all his oratorios if he might be the author of [the psalm tune] OLD HUNDRED." 12 First set forth by the Greeks, the notion that different musics possess different ethical properties—the doctrine of ethos, the third belief noted here—has played an important role in the history and development of sacred music. Calvin, noting Plato's "prudent" observation that "there is hardly anything in the world with more power to turn or bend, this way and that, the morals of men," took care to point out that this enormous power could be turned toward things of "good repute," or could "become the instrument of lasciviousness or . . . shamelessness." Christians must be "diligent in ruling" music. 13 There is "a great difference," wrote Calvin, "between the music one makes to entertain men at table and in their homes, and the psalms which are sung in the Church in the presence of God and His angels." 14 "Touching the melody," he concluded, it should "be 1 0 Samuel Holyoke, Harmonia Americana (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T . Andrews, 1791), p. [4]. 1 1 John Hubbard, An Essay on Music (Boston: Manning & Loring, 1 8 0 8 ) , p. 18; quoted in Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1 9 6 8 ) , p . 1 8 3 η . 1 2 Andrew Law, Essays on Music [Hartford: Bowles & Francis, 1 8 2 1 ] , p. 2 6 ; quoted in Crawford, Andrew Law , p. 2 4 4 . 1 3 Calvin, foreword to Geneva Psalter, quoted in Strunk, Source Readings,

P- 347· 1 4 Strunk, Source Readings ,

p. 346.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

moderated [so] that it may have the weight and majesty proper to the subject and may even be suitable for singing in Church." 15 Calvin's apparent style consciousness was rooted in religious rather than musical scruples. By the time of the baroque, however, musicians generally recognized that different situations called forth different musical styles, as demonstrated by Claudio Monteverdi (15671643) ' n h' s distinction between frima frattica (the conservative church style) and seconda frattica (the increasingly expressive secular style) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 16 As communal, nonprofessional genres, psalmody and hymnody did not affect the major national and international styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mainstream of musical practice did, however, affect congregational music both in idiom and ideology. For example, though the differences between sacred and secular musical styles through the baroque and classic eras were by no means fixed, the notion that there was a difference was shared by many musicians and church leaders. Those of Calvinist persuasion adhered to the sober guidelines set out by their leader. The preface to the Bay Psalm Book, noting that "the Lord hath hid from us the hebrew tunes, lest wee should think ourselves bound to imitate them," interpreted God's intent to be "that every nation without scruple might follow . . . the graver sort of tunes of their owne country songs." 17 Within less than a decade John Cotton repeated and amplified the characterization of music offered in the Bay Psalm Book: "The Lord alloweth us to sing [the Psalms of David] in any such grave, and solemne, and plaine Tunes, as doe fitly suite the gravitie of the matter, the solemnitie of Gods worship, and the capacitie of a plaine People." 18 For more than a century and a half after Cotton no one writing about psalmody in America described the Calvinist musical ideal in terms at variance with his. And the ideal was intact in the 1790s, when reformers who disapproved of the elaborateness and style of some of the music in vogue began to detect a frivolous, "secular" taint in music they disliked. When John Hubbard condemned music stolen "from the midnight revel, from the staggering bacStrunk, Source Readings, p. 348. in Leo Schrade, Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 200-204. See also Strunk, Source Readings, pp. 405412, for an explanation of the two practices by Monteverdi himself. 17 The Whole Booke of Psalmes, p. [9] of preface. 1 8 Cotton, Singing of Psalmes, p. 56. 15

ie Discussed

PROLOGUE

chanal, [and] from the profane altar of Comus," 19 in 1808, it was clear to his readers that solemnity, rather than inherent musical vigor, was the quality to be prized above all others in sacred music. The Christian church has carried on a long, often fruitful relationship with music, governed, however, by the kind of uneasy truce man has struck with fire. The obvious and uncanny power of music to affect human emotion (and perhaps even action) caused especially the Calvinist denominations to regard it more with fear than affection, and to restrict it to a limited role in worship. Better to control it, the policy became, than to give it its head, for who knows what damage that might wreak? The chief control was intellectual: the assigned role of music was to stimulate the senses, which in turn stirred the intellect toward an absorbed contemplation of God and his majesty. Cotton Mather (1663—1728) described psalmody around 1720 as an activity in which the singer strives to reach the divinely inspired state in which the text was composed: In Singing our spiritual songs, let us be Inquisitive after those Motions of Piety, which are discernible in the Verse now before us; and let us with a Soul flying away to GOD, for them, try whether we cannot fly with them; and strive to come at the like·, and give not over the struggle, till we feel our selves come into an Holy Symfhony with the Saints who had their Hearts burning within them, when they sang these things unto the Lord. Christian, Behold a lovely Method of getting into those Heavenly Frames & strains which will assure thee of thy arriving one Day, to the same state of Blessedness, and those Everlasting Habitations, which these Favourites and Amanuenses of Heaven, thro' whom our sfiritual songs were convey'd unto us, have been renew'd into.20 When functioning properly, music could be justified as a means toward the end Mather envisioned; if such justification could not be offered to clerical satisfaction, the appeal to the senses had grown too powerful, and retrenching became necessary. Because Calvinists were the cultural leaders of America during the first century and a half of her settlement by the English, it is sometimes thought that their influence prevented any substantial mu19 Hubbard,

Essay on Music, p. 19. Mather, The Accomplished. Singer (Boston: B. Green for S. Gerrish, 1721), p. 13. 20 Cotton

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

sical life from developing in colonial churches. Whatever restrictions the Calvinist guidelines might have placed upon sacred music, they did not govern its development—at least not consistently and systematically. Church leaders set forth their notions about music around the middle of the seventeenth century; they reiterated them at the beginning and again at the end of the eighteenth. Both eighteenthcentury reassertions occurred in response to musical practices that went against the doctrines. During times when the force of the doctrines abated there flourished a homely, healthy native musical tradition in which claims of intellect were set aside or forgotten and the senses were allowed free reign. Music and musical notation became matters of some importance around 1720, when a small group of Congregational ministers in the area of Boston complained in public about the supposed low estate into which congregational psalm-singing had fallen. The charges were that the tempo had slowed to a drag, that only a handful of tunes was generally known, that, furthermore, those that were known were apt to be sung so differently by different congregations, or even by different individuals within a congregation, that they could hardly be recognized. The remedy proposed by such reformers as the Reverend Thomas Symmes and the Reverend Thomas Walter (1696—1725) was to teach the skill of note-reading—-called Regular Singing, singing by rule—and to diffuse that skill as widely as possible. The Boston proposals raised two issues that were to be of central importance to the development of psalmody during the rest of the century. The first is that, though psalm-singing originated as a written practice, there flourished by the 1720s an oral practice based upon but different from the written. The second is that church leaders initiated a movement to restore the written practice by teaching musical literacy, thus sanctioning the most important musical institution in America during the eighteenth century: the singing-school. The wrangle between advocates of oral and written psalm-singing in early eighteenth-century Boston has been, for several good reasons, popular with cultural and musical historians. Information on the controversy is plentiful; implicit in the situation is a narrative describing the decline of a musical practice; and the topic is ideologically interesting, for the relationship between oral and written music, richly connotative of tensions between social and educational classes, is one

PROLOGUE

of the most important recurrent themes in the history of American music. Moreover, the differing reactions of musical historians to the Regular-Singing controversy provides an excellent illustration of how historical fashion changes from one generation to the next. 21 As frequently happens in such matters, the published polemics in the Regular-Singing controversy issued from only one side. The advocates of written practice took aim at the oral tradition in a lively succession of pamphlets designed to discredit the "usual way of singing." An attack published in 1725 described the Usual Way in terms bordering on the comic: Where there is no Rule, Men's Fancies (by which they are govern'd) are various; some affect a Quavering Flourish on one Note, and others upon another which (because they are Ignorant of true Musick or Melody) they account a Grace to the Tune; and while some affect a quicker Motion, others affect a slower, and drawl out their Notes beyond all Reason; hence in Con gregations ensue Jarrs & Discords, which make the Singing (rather) resemble Howling. 22 One man's howling may be another's serenade, however, and the reformers found it no easy task to convert their opponents, whose voices drawled on even as their pens gathered dust. It is true that some of the objections to Regular Singing stemmed 21 The classic account is George Hood, A History of Music in New England (Boston: Wilkins, Carter & Co., 1846; reprinted, New York: Johnson, 1970), pp. 82-87, with quotations from the polemical literature relating to the controversy, pp. 87—139 especially. Other accounts of interest include chaps. I and Π in Frederic Louis Ritter, Music in America . . . New Edition (New York: Scribner's, 1883; reprinted, New York: Johnson, 1970); Henry Wilder Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody (Cambridge: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1940; reprinted, Hamden: Shoe String Press, 1961), pp. 97-111; Allen Britton, "Theoretical Introductions in American Tune-books to 1800" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1949), pp. 75— no; Gilbert Chase, America's Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), chap. 11, pp. 22—40; Alan C. Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools and the Golden Age of Choral Music in New England, 1760—1800" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, i960), pp. 5-56; Ralph T. Daniel, The Anthem in New England Before 1800 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 9—15; and Robert Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America (New York: Norton, 1966), chap, hi , pp. 21-31. 22 A Brief Discourse Concerning Regular Singing (Boston: B. Green Jr. for John Eliot, 1725), p. 7.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

from an absolute ignorance of it. One singer, according to the Reverend Thomas Symmes, expressed the belief that in Regular Singing the solfa syllables, themselves tinged with "popery" to singers in the oral tradition, replaced the words of the Psalms. 23 Another, with the credulousness that superstitution feeds, scoffed at the notion of music composed for two voice parts, under the impression that "the Treble & Bass must be sung with the same voice." 24 With this kind of material in hand, it is not surprising that historians have generally presented the Regular-Singing controversy from the reformers' point of view. Yet, as ill informed as singers of the Usual Way may have been, and as pointed as the reformers' refutation of their positions, the practice in which they set such store cannot be brushed off lightly. Allen Britton was the first to point out that the controversy was not a simple black and white matter of the right way of singing against the wrong, but rather a struggle between two different approaches to music-making. Symmes himself provides evidence of this notion of alternatives by his refusal to condemn out-of-hand the practice he sought to reform. "Before I was pretty well acquainted with the Rules of Singing," he admitted, "I rather fancy'd the Usual, rather than the Regular way." 25 Looking carefully at the reformers' polemical descriptions of the decline of Regular Singing after the midseventeenth century, Britton detected something more than a mere dismissal of the Usual Way. The reformers, according to him, present "convincing evidence of the existence of a distinctive musical idiom possessing some degree of charm, at least for certain members of the congregations," some of whom, complaining of Regular Singing, found, "It is not so Melodious as the Usual Way." 26 One of the central assumptions of the reformers' position was that, because psalmody was instituted in Calvinist worship as a written practice, the oral tradition represented an abandonment of notation and hence a corruption of the original practice, rather than, as their opponents seemed to believe, a return to the way it was in the beginning. Symmes explained the Usual Way as the result of an evolutionary process: 23 Thomas

Symmes, Utile Dulci. Or, A Joco-Serious Dialogue, Concerning Regular Singing (Boston: B. Green, Jr., for Samuel Gerrish, 1723), p. 17. 24 Symmes, Utile Dulci, p. 19. 2 5 Symmes, Utile Dulci, p. 18. 26 Britton, "Theoretical Introductions," p. 85. The quotation is from Symmes, Utile Dulci, p. 11. 11

PROLOGUE The Declining from, and getting beside the Rule was gradual and insensible. Singing-Schools and Singing-Books being laid aside, there was no Way to learn; but only by hearing of Tunes Sung, or by taking the Run of the Tune (as it is phrased). The Rules of Singing not being taught or learnt, every one sang as best pleased himself, and every Leading-Singer would take the Liberty of raising any Note of the Tune, or lowering of it, as best pleas'd his Ear, and add such Turns and Flourishes as were grateful to him; and this was done so gradually, as that but few if any took Notice of it. One Clerk or Chorister would alter the Tunes a little in his Day, the next, a little in his and so one after another, till in Fifty or Sixty Years it caus'd a Considerable Alteration. If the Alteration had been made designedly by any Master of Musick, it is probable that the Variation from our Psalm Books would have been alike in all our Congregations; whereas some vary much more than others, and 'tis hard to find Two that Sing exactly alike. The Alteration being so gradual, it is no wonder that People are ignorant when it was made, or that there is any at all. 27 This interesting passage repays close scrutiny. When singing-books were "laid aside," the colonists sang by ear. "Everyone sang as best pleased himself," Symmes writes. But that statement is shown to be an exaggeration by what follows: a "leading-singer" or "clerk" took over the leadership of congregational singing. Thus, the maintenance of the repertory, originally established by notated music read by the worshipers, passed to individuals whose authority lay in their memories and voices. When the scarcity of books or a congregation's lack of literacy caused psalters as well as singing-books to be "laid aside," another oral practice filled the void, a practice that was obviously well established in the colonies by 1647, when John Cotton described and sanctioned it: "It will be a necessary helpe, [to the congregation] that the words of the Psalme be openly read before hand, line after line, or two lines together, that so they who want either books or skill to reade, may know what is to be sung, and joyne with the rest in the dutie of singing." 28 This technique, line-by-line reading of a text to be sung, is called lining-out. By the beginning of the eighteenth cen27 28

[Symmes], Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, p. 8. Cotton, Singing of Psaltnes, p. 62.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

tury it was apparently a universal custom in New England churches for tunes to be lined-out by a deacon or clerk, and when reformers began to criticize the practice, its proponents reminded them of its antiquity.29 An expedient had hardened into a dogma, for lining-out was originally nothing more than a stopgap. John Cotton, the chief spokesman for the tradition in the mid-seventeenth century, had said so in so many words: "Where all have books and can reade, or else can say the Psalm by heart, it were needlesse there to reade each line of the Psalm before hand in order to singing."30 29 Symmes, Utile Dulci, pp. 13-16. There is room for doubt about whether it was customary in New England churches for leaders to "line-out" texts (read them line by line) or to "set" the tunes (sing the texts line by line; the Oxford English Dictionary supports the distinction between the two). The evidence rests on the side of the former. A clear description of lining-out appears in Cotton Mather's Ratio Disciflinae . . . A Faithful Account of the Discifline Professed and Practised; in the Churches of New-England (Boston: for S. Gerrish, 1726), p. 52:

In some [churches,] the Assembly being furnished with Psalm-Books i they sing without the stop of Reading between every Line. But ordinarily the Psalm is read line after line, by him whom the Pastor desires to do that Service; and the People generally sing in such grave Tunes, as are most usual in the Churches of our Nation. Percy Scholes, one of the few modern authorities who has confronted the question, offers the belief in the Oxford Comfanion to Music, 9th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), that lining-out, rather than setting the tune, was the New England custom: It has been stated that the American practice was for the precentor or an elder to sing a line and for the congregation to sing it after him. This may have been so in some places . . . but it would seem that they were exceptional and that reading in the spoken voice (or on a monotone, as in some parts of Scotland in the nineteenth century) was the usual custom of the precentors, (pp. 504-505) Accounts of the practice in works by other 20th-century scholars—Louis Benson, The English Hymn (New York: George Doran, 1915; reprinted, Richmond: John Knox Press, 1962) ; Chase, America's Music·, Daniel, Anthem in New England—seem to be in general agreement with Scholes's position, though Stevenson's Protestant Church Music in America does offer one quotation in which a clerk in a backwoods Scotch-Irish congregation in 1775 is described apparently setting a tune (p. 31). Important details about congregational singing in New England churches are still missing. One can infer, however, that most larger congregations operated early in the 18th century with both a deacon and a precentor, the former lining-out the text, and the latter, facing the congregation, "leading" through the sheer power of his voice. 30 Cotton, Singing of Psalmes, p. 62.

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Symmes may not have condemned lining-out explicitly, but the practice was at least partly responsible for some of the faults the reformers found in congregational singing. The interjections of text between musical phrases must have snuffed any possibility that momentum might be generated. One opponent aptly described lining-out as "praising God by Peace-meal."31 Surely the practice implies a slow, fitful tempo. Another difficulty was the widely documented incompetence of many deacons. James Franklin's wildly overdrawn charge against an imaginary deacon could not have made its point unless his readers had suffered under real ones: "I am credibly inform'd, that a certain Gentlewoman miscarry'd at the ungrateful and yelling Noise of a Deacon in reading the first Line of a Psalm; and methinks if there were no other Argument against this Practice (unless there were an absolute necessity for it) the Consideration of it's being a Procurer of Abortion, might prevail with us to lay it aside."32 In addition to his theory of how the Usual Way evolved, Thomas Symmes made other statements that support the contention that a new oral idiom had attached itself to psalm-singing in America: And further I affirm, the most of the Psalm-Tunes, as Sung in the Usual way, are much more like Song-Tunes, than as Sung by Rule; because you've more Supernumerary Notes & Turnings of the voice in your way, than in ours. An Ingenious Gentleman, who has prick'd [i.e., set down in musical notation] Canterbury, as some of you Sing it, finds (as I remember) no less than 150 Notes, in that Tune, in your way, whereas in our's, there are but 30. Did we propose so many Crotchets, and Quavers, and Semi-quavers and Demi-semi-quavers, in every Tune, I should not wonder if you were discouraged from endeavouring to learn to Sing.33 In the Usual Way of singing, "some Notes are sung too high, others too low, and most too long, and many Turnings of, or Flourishes with the Voice, (as they call them) are made where they should not 31 Boston,

New England Courant, February 17/ 24, 1724. England Courant y Feb. 17 /24, 1724. The publisher of the newspaper was James Franklin (1697-1735), brother of Benjamin. It should also be noted that lining-out was common practice in Great Britain as well as the colonies, and the quality of singing there drew sharp criticism from clergy and others. See, e.g., Benson, English Hymn, pp. 106-107. 33 Symmes, Utile Dulci pp. 44-45. i s2 Neiu

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

be, and some are wanting where they should have been."34 Others writing in support of reform describe the Usual Way in terms quite similar to Symmes's. The anonymous pamphlet quoted earlier presents the following: "Drawing out the Notes to such a length is the occasion of their Tittering up and down, as if the Tunes were all composed of Quavers, and make 'em resemble Tunes to Dance to."35 Thomas Walter described the tunes sung the Usual Way as "miserably tortured, and twisted, and quavered," and claimed that "in the Country" tempi were inclined to be so slow that "I my self have twice in one Note paused to take Breath."36 Ironically, present-day knowledge of how the colonists' Usual Way of singing sounded rests almost entirely upon descriptions by its opponents. A handful of published sources does contain transcriptions of British oral psalmody in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.37 While the extent to which British tradition might reflect early eighteenth-century colonial practice remains a matter of speculation, the transcriptions do correspond with certain general traits noted by the Boston reformers. British and American sources agree that the basic tempo of singing the Usual Way was very slow, and that within that slow tempo improvising voices tended to move quite rapidly. Perhaps the most tantalizing hint the reformers offered about singing in the Usual Way was their claim that it resembled secular practice— "Song-Tunes," in Symmes's words, or as another writer put it, "tunes to dance to." If this characterization is taken at face value, a most unusual improvisatory practice may be inferred. Accepting the notion that the pace of the basic melody was very slow, one would have to imagine that the performers still succeeded in imparting to the tune the kind of rhythmic propulsion the reformers seem to have associated with profane music. For example, the performance of the [Symmes], Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, p. 10. Brief Discourse Concerning Regular Singing·, p. 7. 36 Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Mustek (Boston: J. Franklin, for S. Gerrish, 1721), pp. 2, 4. 87 Two sources that contain transcriptions of embellished psalm tunes are A New and Easie Method to Learn to Sing by Book (London: William Rogers, 1686), from which an example appears in Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America, p. 27, and Matthew Camidge, Psalmody for a Single Voice (York and London, 1790), an example of which appears in Chase, America's Music, p. 37. Another source records embellished organ accompaniments of psalm tunes, The Psalms by Dr. Blow Set Full for the Organ . . . As They are Play'd in Churches or Chafels (London: I. Walsh, 1731). 34

35

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tune CANTERBURY, which Symmes claimed was characteristically overlaid with five times the number of notes of the original tune, could only have resembled dance music by taking the form of brief, independent melodic fragments within the framework of the complete melody. The possibility that such a style existed seems most unlikely. The sound of a voice decorating a slow-moving, underlying melody would differ from the sound of a voice singing a lilting secular song in much the same way that an ornamental melody in what Bela Bartok called "parlando-rubato" style would differ from a "tempo-giusto" melody. 38 Even if the former employed far more notes than the latter, the tentativeness of the underlying pulse would make it seem languor ous by comparison and markedly dissimilar in character. It would appear that the reformers' identification of the Usual Way with secular practice was rhetorical rather than actual. Even in its inaccuracy, however, it may have been an effective argument against the Usual Way, for violations of solemnity were not taken lightly in colonial sacred music-making. Another aspect of colonial improvisatory practice should also be mentioned. It has been suggested that the small store of psalm tunes sung in the colonies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries functioned as melody types, rather than always as complete tunes.39 The notion of melody types implies melodic units smaller than the standard four-phrase psalm tune, allowing for the possibility that a performer could become so absorbed in his elaboration of a single phrase that he forgot the next. There is some evidence to indicate that even the few well-known tunes were not always preserved inviolate; the first phrase of one might lead inadvertently to the second phrase of another. The best-known instances of this kind of event are recorded in Samuel Sewall's diary, where they are acknowledged somewhat sheepishly as errors.40 One passage in Symmes's Utile Dulci, however, seems to suggest that such things were not 38 Bela Bartok, Hungarian Folk Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). As summarized in Bruno Nettl, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 6263, "parlando-rubato" style is elaborately embellished and flexible in tempo, while in "tempo-guisto" singing the tempo is strict and the melodic line less ornamental. 39 See Britton, "Theoretical Introductions," p. 87. See also Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America., p. 22. 40 Samuel Sewall, Diary 1674-1729, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 5th ser., v-vil, 1878-1882. Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America, gives a resume of Sewall's singing activities on pp. 16—18.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

always considered mishaps. The following bit of dialogue occurs between N., a neighbor who advocates the Usual Way, and M., Symmes, the Master: N. I hear that one of our New Singers, (that is a Pillar among us) says, That there are Six Excellent Tunes, and if a Man fall into any one of them, he may make Principal Melody. M. A goodly saying indeed! . . . Suppose N. when the Man falls into one of those Gimm [smart, spruce, tidy] Tunes, he should unhappily Turn out again, as they tell me, he does, on some occasions; whether that won't spoil the Harmony?41 No further explanation occurs, and the passage remains ambiguous. However, if one reads it with the notion of melodic types in mind, a chain of possibilities begins to suggest itself. Symmes's neighbor seems to treat the "six excellent Tunes" as a stock of more or less interchangeable parts, the image of the singer "falling into" one or another of them suggests that musical destinations are not necessarily predetermined, and the phrase "make Principal Melody" carries the connotation of on-the-spot creation. Symmes's writings as a whole reflect some sympathy for singing in the Usual Way, but his comment that a singer's modulation from one tune to another would "spoil the Harmony" seems to reveal some misunderstanding of the tradition. There is no indication that harmony was a matter of concern to singers who followed the Usual Way. In fact, descriptions of the practice reveal an every-man-forhimself attitude, one that apparently made singing in the Usual Way at its best a kind of inspired but uncoordinated heterophony. All of the reformers insisted that the practice they were denouncing was characterized by the simultaneous coexistence of different tempi, not to mention the lack of pitch unanimity. One reform adherent complained to the New England Courant in 1724 that "the Singing appears to be rather a confused Noise, made up of Reading, Squeaking, and Grumbling,"*2 apparently the kind of murmur often found by design in the music of Charles Ives. Symmes's Utile Dulci was more specific about the same sort of thing: the Beauty and Harmony of Singing consists very much in a just Timing & Turning the Notes: every Singer keeping the exact Pitch the Tune is set in, according to the part he Sings. 41 42

Symmes, Utile Dulci, pp. 23-24. New England Courant, Feb. 17 / 24, 1724.

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Now you in the Usual Way, are very faulty on this account. Hence you may remember, that in our Congregation we us'd frequently to have some People Singing a Note or Two, after the rest had done. And you commonly strike the Notes not together, but one after another; one being half way thro' the Second Note, before his Nei'bour has done with the First &c.43 Coordination between singers was a virtue of Regular Singing the reformers were especially fond of emphasizing, perhaps because so little existed in the singing of their opponents. From all indications, the Usual Way amounted to a style of solo singing that was transformed by circumstances into a style of congregational singing. Valued by its proponents as more "melodious" than Regular Singing,44 it provided a freedom they were reluctant to forfeit. Their reluctance, no less implacable or understandable than the reformers' zeal in their own cause, helps to explain the bitterness of the controversies touched off by Regular Singing throughout the century. 45 Britton pointed out that the Usual Way was in fact an indigenous oral practice, which was well established by the end of the seventeenth century, and which survived the reform to continue through much of the eighteenth in certain parts of the country.46 Moreover, Britton suggests that the oral tradition may have had an influence beyond its irritating effect on the reformers: "There can be no doubt that this unschooled manner of singing was closely allied with the folk song of the period, of which little is now known. . . It quite possibly provided the musical heritage from which the first American psalm-tune composers (Billings, French, Jenks, Read, Ingalls, et al.) derived the unique idiom in which they wrote." 47 Thus, Britton rather dramatically changed the perspective from which the Regular Singing 44 Symmes, Utile Dulci p. 11. Symmes, Utile Dulci i p. 19. i "Theoretical Introductions," p. 87, comments: "'singing by rule' meant changing the whole style of church music; that is, substituting for a highly ornamental idiom susceptible to much individual expression one in which all members of the congregation were expected to sing evenly together in time and tune." 48 Though perhaps most likely to remain undisturbed in outlying areas, the practice was not confined to them. John Adams noted in August 1774., that the psalm-singing in a church in New York City "is in the Old Way, as we call it—all the drawling, quavering, Discord in the World." Diary and Autobiografhy of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 11, 104. 47 Britton, "Theoretical Introductions," p. 87. 43

45 Britton,

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

controversy was viewed by pointing out that the Usual Way represented a real American folk tradition. Some historians further developed this interpretation; for example, in Gilbert Chase's America's Music the reformers are anything but heroes, appearing instead as establishment heavies, seeking to crush the creativity of the folk by imposing a standard and artificial practice on them.48 Each side of the controversy between oral and written traditions has its own strengths and weaknesses. As attractive as the notion of an indigenous, improvisatory native tradition of sacred music may be, and as pure as may have been the intentions of the humble colonists who made it, the fact remains that it is a limited vehicle for collective congregational expression. On the other hand, however conducive participation in a controlled, communal, congregational song may be to religious contemplation, the spontaneous musical outpouring of the individual may well possess uncanny beauty and foster true piety just as effectively. In defense of the reformers, however, it can be demonstrated that their preference for written over oral music had a good deal to do with the creation in the eighteenth century of a written American repertory of sacred music. IT was clear to the Boston reformers in the 1720s that the lack of

coordination implicit in the style would make any attempt to improve the Usual Way of singing impossible. The popularity of the Usual Way, especially with country people, surely stemmed more from their familarity with it and a visceral recognition of its Tightness, than from the improvisatory freedom it allowed. The fact remains, however, that talented singers in the Usual Way would be inclined to exercise their growing musical powers in ever-more-ingenious vocal flourishes, thereby "improving" themselves far beyond the point of consonance with their fellow singers in the congregation. The reformers wished for a style in which singers would be united in pitch and rhythm, achieving the kind of unanimity that Thomas Symmes found exemplified in the Old Testament, II Chronicles 5 :13: "There was a perfect Harmony between the several Parts of the Mustek. If an Harmony, or a pleasant and Regular Agreement of Sounds or Voices, and the avoiding all Ungrateful Discords were not to be required, the Holy Ghost would not have put this upon Record for an Example to us in Singing."49 The "perfect harmony" of the music 48 49

See especially Chase, America's Music, pp. 22-23. [Symmes], Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, p. 13.

PROLOGUE

that accompanied Solomon's placing of the Ark of the Covenant in the temple at Jerusalem was no accident, Symmes demonstrates, but resulted from "great Care." Chenaniah, a "Man of Skill," had been "appointed to instruct them in Singing." 50 The Boston reformers had realized that Regular Singing—singing by rule, or singing from musical notation—was the force that would redirect psalmody according to their wishes. In case adherents to the Usual Way were inclined to condemn Regular Singing as "popery," Symmes was ready with a scriptural precedent: he claimed Chenaniah as a biblical teacher of singing-schools. Singing-schools provided the forum in which musical literacy was taught, and thus they became the means through which the desired musical reform took place. Symmes recommended: "People that want Skill in Singing . . . [should] procure a Skilfull Person to Instruct them, and meet Two or Three Evenings in the Week, from Five or Six a Clock, to Eight." 51 Had it gone on to suggest that instruction continue for some three months, Symmes's description, with modifications to accommodate local conditions, would have accurately covered the format of most American singing-schools of the next century. The development of the singing-school in eighteenth-century America is well documented in other sources. 52 It is enough to say here that schools may have been established in the colonies during the seventeenth century, that the earliest recorded Boston singing-school was founded in 1714, 53 and that the reform movement had helped to make the singing-school a familiar New England institution by the end of the 1720s. Of special importance to the present inquiry is an aspect of the singing-school related to but not subsumed by its instructional function: tunebooks were published for singing-school use. A survey of tunebooks printed in the colonies before the revolutionary war demonstrates that the skill of musical literacy, apparently almost nonexistent around 1700, was not uncommon seventy-five years hence, offering powerful testimony to the success of the often haphazard, much maligned singing-school movement. 50

[Symmes], Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, p. 12. See the Old Testa-

ment, I Chronicles, 15:22. 51 [Symmes], Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, p. 20. 52 For the most complete account see Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools," chaps. II—HI. 53 Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America, p. 30. See also p. 30 and p. 53 for references to the Virginia singing-school described by William Byrd in 1710.

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The earliest American publication to include music was, appropriately enough, the Bay Psalm Book—specifically the ninth edition, published in Boston in 1698. 54 As was customary for metrical psalters in the Anglo-American tradition, this publication was devoted almost entirely to psalm texts. Tucked in at the end of the volume was a brief instructional preface and thirteen textless tunes, harmonized for two voices. Succeeding issues of the Bay Psalm Book also carried a handful of tunes that were, from the eleventh edition of 1705 to the twenty-fourth of 1732, unharmonized. In 1721 the reform movement bore fruit in two Boston publications of considerable importance: Thomas Walter's Grounds and Rules of Mustek, Explained and John Tufts's Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes (1721 edition lost; 1723 edition extant). 55 Both began with rather detailed introductions explaining the rudiments of note-reading and continued with collections of psalm tunes, mostly harmonized for three voices. Tufts's and Walter's little works set the tone of sacred-music publication in America for the next generation. With the exception of the twentyfifth and twenty-sixth editions of the Bay Psalm Book (1737, 1742), which carried a sizable supplement of thirty-nine tunes, later editions of Tufts and Walter were the only tunebooks published in America before the 1750s. That decade did see the appearance of three new items: a tune supplement James Turner engraved to go with John Barnard's psalms (Boston, 1752), 56 William Dawson's Youths Entertaining Amusement (Philadelphia, 1754), 57 and a supplement 54 The Psalms Hymns, and Sfiritual Songs, of the Old & New-testament, 9th ed. (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen for Michael Perry, 1698). This item is no. 817 in Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imfrints through 1800: The Short-Title Evans (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1969). Items in the National Index, which is an updating of Charles Evans's monumental American Bibliografhy, are reproduced in the Readex Microprint edition of Evans. Evans numbers are supplied for titles cited below. 55

Walter's work is Evans 2303. The earliest edition of Tufts so far dis-

covered is the third (1723), owned by the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and described in detail in Theodore M. Finney, "The Third Edition of Tufts' Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes," Journal of Research in Music Education, XIV, no. 3, Fall 1966, pp. 163-170. The fifth

edition

(1726), Evans 39856, has been reproduced in facsimile with an introduction by Irving Lowens and published by Harry Dichter (Philadelphia, 1954). 56 See Evans 6820 for this untitled collection of psalm tunes in three parts, published in Boston by James A. Turner, 1752. 57 Dawson's collection was assigned no. 7181 by Evans, but no copy was

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compiled and engraved by Thomas Johnston (Boston, 1755)- SS represented in these half dozen items, which, when all printings are counted, number more than thirty separate issues, no more than seventy-four different tunes were printed in English-language publications in America before 1760—almost all from the British repertory and harmonized in block chords. The same group of tunes was reprinted in book after book, keeping the repertory small and uniform in style. During the 1730s, '40s, and '50s the stylistic uniformity of psalmody in Great Britain began to give way. Together with the traditional tunes set simply in block chords, a growing fashion appeared for more music displaying texture changes and melismas, including fuging-tunes, which contained brief sections in imitation.59 This new, more elaborate style, cultivated by British psalmodists of the period, including William Tans'ur (1706—1783), William Knapp (16981768), and John Arnold (c. 1720-1792), slowly gained favor in the American colonies. Collections by Tans'ur, Knapp, Arnold, and others circulated in America during the 1750s and '60s; 60 moreover, their music began to appear in tunebooks printed in the colonies during the latter decade. Urania (Philadelphia, 1761), compiled by James Lyon, is the earliest signal of the dramatic increase in the size and stylistic range of the printed repertory of psalmody that took place during the 1760s. Its 198-page length dwarfed all previous American musical publications, and its inclusion of elaborate, modern British music (more than a dozen anthems and set-pieces; several hymn tunes, as well as a selection of psalm tunes), most of it never before published in America, make it a landmark in American psalmody.61 Two publications by Josiah Flagg of Boston, the Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (1764) and Sixteen Anthems (1766), further established the Amerilocated until 1970, when one turned up in the Library Company of Philadelphia. It is not reproduced on Microprint. 58 Johnston's collection is untitled, and carries a brief introduction, which begins, "To learn to sing." Several different printing's have been discovered, one of which is bound at the end of a collection of hymns by Isaac Watts, Evans 41176. 59 See Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 243-244. 60 Lowens, Music and Musicians, pp. 246-247, identifies British musicians influential in the colonies. 61 Da Capo Press published in 1974 a facsimile edition of Urania with an extensive introduction by Richard Crawford.

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can tunebook as a forum for the publication of "modern" music. Finally, the American editions of William Tans'ur's Royal Melody Comflete (London, 1755; Boston, 1767 and thereafter) and Aaron Williams's Universal Psalmodist (London, 1763; Newburyport, 1769 and thereafter) 62 represented another important step toward broadening the restrictive stylistic framework in which American psalmody had developed. Between 1760 and 1770 some three hundred tunes had been added to the colonial store of psalm tunes; in a decade the printed repertory had burgeoned far beyond oral command. James Lyon (1735-1794), Josiah Flagg (1737—c. 1795), and Daniel Bayley (1729—1792), the last the key figure in the Tans'urWilliams publications, established the importance of the tunebook compiler in American psalmody. The compiler, sometimes though not necessarily a composer himself, performed the important task of selecting music for publication. The wide variety of music that appears in the works brought out by Lyon, Flagg, and Bayley shows that by the end of the 1760s the personal preferences of individual compilers, acting essentially on their own, were beginning to determine what music was brought to the public in printed form. During the rest of the century tunebook compilers, free from ecclesiastical authority but usually taking care to weigh tradition and to balance public taste against their own, played a crucial role in determining the repertory, and hence in shaping the tradition of psalmody. It is impossible to explain the American tunebooks of the 1760s without singing-schools. The increase in the printed repertory indicates that note-reading was no longer a rare skill, which in turn demonstrates the effectiveness of the singing-school. Though slowed somewhat by the war (1775—1781), the repertory of American psalmody continued to increase throughout the rest of the century. By 1800 well more than a thousand different compositions had been printed in American tunebooks.68 When that figure is set beside the handful of tunes that were common property of worshiping colonial Christians early in the century, the seventy-odd tunes available in American tunebooks by 1760, and the approximately four hundred tunes printed before 1770, it is clear that the tradition was utterly transformed by 62 See Irving Lowens and Allen P. Britton, "Daniel Bayley's 'The American Harmony,' A Bibliographical Study," Papers of the Bibliografhical Society

of America, XLIX, 1955, pp. 340-354. 63 Richard Crawford has compiled a thematic index of American-published sacred music through 1810 (unpublished).

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the impact of musical literacy, and that the decade of the 1760s was a crucial time in that transformation. An essentially oral musical repertory is slow to change. Moreover, when that repertory is also sacred, the tunes which comprise it are so firmly rooted in the religious memory and consciousness of the worshipers that they tend to take on an almost liturgical significance. There is no reason to think that the Boston reformers wished to violate that feeling. They did not recommend changing the tunes; they just wanted them sung more accurately. However, they chose to pursue that end by encouraging the development of a skill, notereading, that would soon destroy the notion that the small stock of psalm tunes held in common in New England had any special religious significance. Once people could read music, the tunes sung in church no longer comprised their entire sacred repertory but just a portion of it. They could now choose to sing any music that struck their fancy. It is one of the ironies of American musical history that New England religious leaders advocated the skill of note-reading as a guarantee of musical uniformity. For by the 1760s that skill had become just the opposite: an agent of musical diversity. American Protestants in the latter part of the century showed an increasing inclination to sing sacred music that was not congenial to church leaders. Thus, the end result of the Boston reformers' advocacy of singing-schools was something very different from what they had originally intended. BY THE end of the 1760s the repertory of American psalmody was large, varied in style, and almost entirely European. It was rapidly to grow much larger. Between 1770 and 1800 at least eighty new tune collections appeared, while the preceding years of the century had produced no more than a dozen. What is most striking about the tunebooks of this period, together with the enormous increase in the size of the repertory, is the increasing contribution of native composers. From 1770, an ever-growing proportion of the music in American tunebooks was written in America. The American psalm tune composer of the eighteenth century lacked the musical credentials that most European professional musicians took for granted. For the most part his "training" was meager, probably amounting to no more than attendance at a singing-school, a study of the music and rules for composition in British and American

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tunebooks, and practical musical experience. European musicians could rely on solidly established musical institutions—church, court, and theatre—for employment and the nourishment of their skills. In New England the predominantly Calvinist church had no need for professional music-making, no court life existed in either the colonies or the new nation, and theatrical music remained sporadic and generally under foreign or immigrant control until the nineteenth century. Thus the only institution at hand to foster the gifts of the musically inclined American was the singing-school. During the latter part of the eighteenth century the American singing-school represented a total musical community. Formed with the purpose of training performers to sing psalms and to read music, it created a need for teachers and published music. As the American tunebook changed from a pamphlet of established European tunes to a native compiler's selection of his favorite pieces, the stimulus for the singing-scholar or singing-master to add to the repertory was increased, and thus the circle was completed. A musically inclined youth attended a singing-school, gained the modest technique required for notating and harmonizing tunes that he heard in his imagination, wrote them down, perhaps circulated them in manuscript, and saw them into print where they served to inspire some other singing-scholar with a creative bent. 64 The tunebooks were repositories of community practice; run off in small quantities from engraved plates, and circulated over a limited territory, they represented a modest and unassuming folk art. Composers were not yet separated from performers by the depth of experience that western art music demands of its serious practitioners. They were composing for neighbors and friends, and their tunes were apt to be printed by someone in the 64 In an autobiographical notice Oliver Holden (1765-1844) wrote: "Had 2 month's instruction in a Singing· School 1783—during which I attempted a little composition." Quoted in David McCormick, "Oliver Holden, Composer and Anthologist" (S.M.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1963), p. 161. Members of the family of Timothy Swan (1758-1842) reported that at sixteen he enrolled in a singing-school, and that MONTAGUE, one of his best-known tunes, was composed the next year. See Sterling E. Murray, "The Life and Music of an Early American Composer: Timothy Swan (1758-1842)" (Master's thesis, University of Michigan, 1969), pp. 4-8. A memoir of Merit Woodruff (1780-1799) explains that he had been composing for several years before his untimely death by drowning at the age of nineteen. See Merit Woodruff, Devotional Harmony [1801], pp. [3]—4. Evans 39140.

PROLOGUE

community, rather than by a professional printer whose sole motive was monetary.65 The relationship between creator and audience resembled that found in certain kinds of folk music.66 Although one recent scholar has called the last several decades of the eighteenth century "the Golden Age of Choral Music in New England," 67 a nineteenth-century counterpart, Nathaniel Duren Gould, who himself had taught singing-schools, looked back from the 1850s on the period 1770-1800 with a rather different view: So far as real devotional music was concerned, the thirty years referred to was a dark age. Many a sincere worshipper had the same feelings of a certain Pope, when he was disposed to banish music from the churches entirely, because the tunes were so inappropriate. Although there was no Palestrini to write suitable music, yet there were always very many who appreciated good music, and were anxiously waiting for a change in public sentiment, that they might introduce it, and were ready to lend a helping hand and voice to bring about so desirable a reformation.68 Gould had an explanation for why the so-called dark age had come upon psalmody during the period in question: he blamed the "negligence of the churches": During the aforementioned period, and for many years afterwards, ministers and churches who ought to have had a voice, if not the direction, in this part of public worship, suffered it to be wrested from them, and to be managed and executed generally by those who apparently had no higher object in view than to please, astonish and amuse. The music sung was so constructed that none but the choir could take part in its performance. Ministers, Christians, and all good men, and men of correct 65 See Richard Crawford, "Connecticut Sacred Music Imprints, 17781810," pt. II, Notes, xxvu, no. 4, June 1971, pp. 672-675. 66 Alan P. Merriam, The Anthrofology of Music (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 124-125, deals with the question of musical professionalism and the varying· degrees of it that exist in different nonliterate societies and oral musical traditions. 67 Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools." 68 Nathaniel D. Gould, Church Music in America (Boston: A. N. Johnson, 1853; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1972), p. 58. See p. 5 above for reference to the "certain Pope" Gould may have had in mind.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

taste in regard to music, looked on, sometimes grieved and sometimes vexed. But they had let go their hold, and the multitude had the whole management of it, and sung what and when they pleased; until finally hearers had well-nigh given up all interest in the subject, and settled into indifference. 69 In Gould's view, strict clerical control was indispensable in sacred music. Traits which from one viewpoint mark late eighteenth-century American psalmody as a flourishing, uniquely healthy practice—that it grew naturally in the lower echelon of society rather than being imposed from the top, drew upon the indigenous musical style practiced by common people, and was rooted in sense experience—were seen by Gould as worthy of condemnation rather than praise. Gould's assessment is an excellent indication of the way in which the Calvinist criteria noted earlier, having been set aside during the latter part of the eighteenth century—an age golden or dark, as the case may be-—were reestablished in the nineteenth. Gould's opinion that "Ministers, Christians, . . . all good men, and men of correct taste in regard to music" bore responsibility for the musical decline may have been his own; but his evaluation of psalm and hymn tunes composed by Americans during the period was shared by many. By the 1790s a few American composers had begun to confess doubts that their music was worthy of public attention, and at least one prominent native musician was assuring the public that it was not. Andrew Law's Musical Primer (1793) contains the earliest printed attack on the style of American composers. "A considerable part of American composition is in reality faulty," 70 Law wrote, going on to assert that European compositions—British psalm and hymn tunes seem to have been all the European music he knew or cared about—were musically superior to native compositions. Law, who had been among the first American compilers to print music by his countrymen, revamped his publications, and after the turn of the century he published almost no music by American composers. Other signs of the same attitude appeared. The Massachusetts Comfiler (Boston, 1795), by Hans Gram, Samuel Holyoke, and Oliver Holden, reveals a reform stance by drawing its music almost exclusively from European sources, and by including a far more detailed Gould, Church Music in Americay p. 5 9 . Law, Musical Primer (Cheshire, Conn.: William Law, 1793), p. 5. Quoted in Crawford, Andrew Law, p. 105. 69

7 0 Andrew

PROLOGUE

explication of standard eighteenth-century harmonic practice than had ever been printed in America. William Cooper's Beauties of Church Music (Boston, [1804]) includes in its preface a historical assessment that foreshadows Gould's: "It has become a general opinion among good singers, that the music in use before the revolution in 1775, is much better than that which has succeeded,"71 or in other words the profusion of American music composed and published after the war is inferior to the British music that preceded it. (Cooper, by the way, retained some favorite American tunes in his book, but he "corrected" what he considered to be their compositional flaws.)72 For the anonymous compiler of the Salem Collection the stylistic difference between American and European psalmody was a religious issue as well as a musical one. The supposedly inferior sacred music circulating in America was "not less offensive to a correct musical taste, than it is disgusting to the sincere friends of publick devotion."73 This point of view appears generally to have been shared by bettereducated Americans, including the clergy. A number of pamphlets printed early in the nineteenth century preserve sermons and addresses on sacred music; most advocate reform, dismissing with contempt the efforts of native composers.74 The clergy's influence in the matter is hard to judge, but by around 1810 the cause of musical reform had triumphed, if not in rural areas, at least in the larger eastern cities. Tunebooks that contained nothing but European music harmonized according to European standards were not at all uncommon, and within a decade such publications were generally accepted as emblems of "good taste." The musical style developed by native American composers had come to be viewed as an unwelcome survival from an earlier, cruder time. It was generally accepted among advocates of 71 Cooper, Beauties of Church Music (Boston: Manning & Loring, [1804.]), p. iii. 72 For one example of the kind of musical bowdlerization to which Yankee tunes were subjected by 19th-century reformers, consult Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America, p. 67, where the original version of Lewis Edson's LENOX is printed alongside an "improved" version published in 1858 by Thomas Hastings. Another, earlier "improvement" of LENOX appears in George W. Williams, Jacob Eckhard's Choirmasters Book of i8og (Columbia: Univer-

sity of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 41. 73 The Salem Collection of Classical Sacred Musick (Salem: Joshua Cushing, 1805), p. [iii]. 74 See especially Hubbard, Essay on Music, and Francis Brown, An Address on Music (Hanover: Charles & William S. Spear, 1810). And see the Epilogue below, pp. 190—196, for a fuller explication of these reformers' ideas.

SACRED MUSIC IN NEW ENGLAND

"good taste" that the only sensible course for a homegrown musician with an urge to compose was to imitate his European betters. 75 SACRED music in America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries appears now as a tradition both fostered and inhibited by its ties to the church. The church provided the framework through which singing-schools were established and tunebooks published, and even among Calvinists singing could be an activity of highest spiritual significance. What Augustine called "the thing sung" was nothing less than praise of an omnipotent God and supplication for the salvation of the singer's eternal soul. Yet, even as the church fostered singing, American church leaders periodically showed a tendency to establish and enforce standards of musical decorum. Intended to insure uniformity in performance and appropriateness in repertory, the standards had the effect of discrediting and eventually inhibiting the efforts of American musicians who remained indifferent or opposed to them. With the conscious rejection of these composers' music, the tradition linking the Ainsworth Psalter, the Bay Psalm Book, Thomas Symmes, James Lyon, Daniel Bayley, and Andrew Law was broken. The peak of that tradition was reached during the latter eighteenth century when the institutions and skills for the nurture of psalmody—its use in worship, its publication and distribution, an already widespread musical literacy, and a profusion of singingschools for its further extension—stood at the service of the native composer, and the European stylistic framework that was later to be imposed remained to be discovered. It was this tradition that William Billings of Boston inherited. 75 [Hans Gram, Samuel Holyoke, and Oliver Holden,] Massachusetts Compiler of Theoretical and, Practical Elements of Sacred Vocal Music . . . Chiefly selected or adapted from modern European publications (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1795) avowed as its purpose the dissemination of European musical vocabulary in America. The preface to the work begins:

Many American votaries of sacred music, have long since expressed their wishes for a compendium of the genuine principles of that science. At the present period it becomes necessary that greater attention be paid to every mean for improving that important part of divine worship, as good, musical emigrants are daily seeking an asylum in this country, (p. [iii] )

CHAPTER

I

William Billings's Early Years 1746-1769 Information on William Billings's early years is scant. The son of a Boston shopkeeper, he, like others of yeoman class, left only a bare trace on the written record, and the years that lie between birth and maturity, even for the famous, are usually the hardest to document. Billings was to contribute substantially to the written record himself. Unfortunately, however, by the time anybody thought him worth more than a few lines of biographical notice he was long since dead, and his name, while still familiar to American practitioners of sacred music, was seldom invoked except as a symbol of a bygone, unlamented musical era. On August 6, 1736, the Reverend Charles Chauncey of Boston united William Billings and Elizabeth Clark in marriage. 1 The 1 Frank J. Metcalf, American Writers and Comfilers of Sacred Music (New York: Abingdon Press, 1925; reprinted, New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), p. 53. The importance of Metcalf's research cannot be overestimated. He was a tireless scholar who searched everywhere for data about early American music, and most of his findings are based on 18th-century sources. Occasionally Metcalf was led astray. For example, he erroneously gave Billings two wives (see p. 54), a mistake repeated in the Dictionary of American Biografhy, ill, s.v. "Billings, William." The error is corrected in Carl Lindstrom's "William Billings and His Times," Musical Quarterly, xxv, 1939, p. 48zf. Metcalf seems never to have examined the legal records in the Suffolk County Courthouse. Here he would have found wills for both William Billings Sr. and his wife, Elizabeth, and he would also have found specific mention of their child, William. Metcalf apparently did not examine the church records for this period either, for these contain data about the composer's brothers and sisters. Metcalf's discovery of family and municipal records, however, was extremely important, for these allowed him to suggest a genealogy. The family Bible listed the composer, his wife, and their children, with their dates of birth; the municipal records furnished information about the marriage of the composer's parents, in A Refort of the Record Commissioners of the City of

THE EARLY YEARS

groom's lineage is unknown; the bride, born March 7, 1706, was the daughter of William and Rebecca Clark. Within a few years of the marriage the Billings family was affiliated with the Congregationalist New South Church, located at the east end of Summer Street in Boston. There is no sign that their affiliation was more than routine. Mrs. Elizabeth Billings is found among those listed in the "Baptismal Covenants and not [admitted] to Full Communion" on June I, 1740. The same records trace the growth of the family, setting down the dates on which Billings babies were baptized at New South Church: John Billings Lydia Billings Lydia Billings Sarah Billings William Billings Mary Billings

July 6, 1740 (p. 57) October 4, 1741 (p. 61) February 20, 1742 [i.e. 1743] (p. 66) September 9, 1744 (p. 71) September 28, 1746 (p. 77) June 29, 174? (p. 101). 2

(The Billings family Bible lists the composer's birthdate as October 7. 3 The suggestion of prenatal christening, however, is easily dispelled. In 1752 British Parliament replaced the Old Style or Julian Calendar with the New Style or Gregorian, and by legislative stroke September 3 became September 14. 4 The eleven-day change places Billings's baptism on October 9, two days after his birth.) No further mention of the family of William and Elizabeth Billings is found in the New South Church records: no family member is listed among "Full Boston, containing the Boston Marriages from I J O O to 1750, XXVIII (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1898), 195. Though some Boston church records are incomplete, they still provide a fairly thorough listing of baptisms, marriages, participants in Communion, and, less thoroughly, deaths. No William Billings other than the composer appears in these records during the second half of the 18th century, except for a son of Richard and Ruth Billings, who was buried as an infant on October 27, 1766, Christ Church, Boston. 2 "Records and Index: New South Church, 1719-1812" manuscript, City Hall Annex, Boston. 3 Metcalf, American Writers, reproduces opposite p. 54 a facsimile of a page from "the family Bible of William Billings," which records the birthdates of the composer, his wife, and their children. The Bible is now in the possession of Oliver Daniel, Vice-President of Broadcast Music Inc., New York City. 4 See, e.g., Encyclofaedia Britannica (1966), s.v. "Calendar."

31

THE EARLY YEARS

Communions," none among "Marriages," none among "Deaths." An exhaustive search of records of other Boston churches indicates nothing more about the family at this time, though it does show that in later years William Billings the younger for a time held a pew in the Hollis Street Congregational Church. 5 In 1760 William Billings Sr. died. His will, dated February 5, 1760, directs: "I bequeath Unto my Wife Ester [sie] Billings unto my brothers George & Robert Billings and unto my son William Billings—one Shilling Each in full of their parts & Shares of my Estate." 6 One might assume from the will that the senior Billings died in dire poverty. However, there survives a Bond to Pay, dated March i, 1760, in which the sum of 100 pounds is assigned by William Billings Sr. to Henry Laughton, "in consideration of his friendship expense and care of me in my sickness." The legal documents covering the settlement of the senior Billings's estate indicate a serious rift in the family. A bequest of one shilling in a will was a device used to discourage heirs from contesting an unfavorable legacy, 7 and by using that mechanism the elder Billings was able, in effect, to disinherit his widow, brothers, and son. The senior Billings's will indicates that at his death William Billings, not yet fourteen, was his only surviving son. (Since John Billings, baptized in 1740, is not mentioned in the will it appears that he had died in the meantime.) Elizabeth Clark Billings survived her husband by four years. Her estate inventory, dated September 27, 1764, lists possessions valued at slightly less than six pounds. 8 Although no records have survived to show the place or duration of the younger Billings's formal education, it is likely that it terminated with his father's death. It may have ended even before 1760, perhaps William Billings is not mentioned in the Hollis Street Church Records and Index: 1732—1849, manuscript, City Hall Annex, Boston. He is, however, listed among the "Proprietors of Pews from 1731 to 1810" in George L. Chaney, Hollis Street Church from Mather Byles to Thomas Starr King, 173 21861 (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1877), p. 62. It is quite possible that the church records now in existence are incomplete. 6 Both the Suffolk County Deeds and the Suffolk County Probate Court Records, which carry this notice, are in the courthouse in Boston. Lindstrom, "William Billings and His Times," p. 481, accounts for the discrepancy between the two names "Ester" and "Elizabeth" used for the composer's mother. 7 Reported in conversation between David P. McKay and Mr. Leo Flaherty, staff member of Massachusetts Archives, 1965. 6 Suffolk County Probate Records. 5

THE EARLY YEARS

coinciding with his parents' apparent estrangement. In the midnineteenth century, Nathaniel Gould, who had known people who knew Billings, wrote of the composer: "His opportunities for even common education were very limited." 9 There is no reason to doubt Gould's word. It is assumed that whatever formal education Billings did receive was in Boston public schools. The South Writing School in Common Street was located only a short distance from New South Church. 10 If, as seems likely, the Billings family lived in the neighborhood of their church, perhaps young Billings attended the South Writing School until responsibility for supporting the family fell upon his shoulders. (See Appendix III, Figure 2, for a contemporaneous map of the section of Boston in which Billings spent his life.) Faced with the necessity of learning a trade, Billings seems to have moved from schoolroom to tannery. The tanner's trade was a natural one for a colonial American youth of yeoman class to follow, provided he was not squeamish about dirty hands and foul smells. The process, which remained essentially unchanged from the arrival of the English settlers until well into the nineteenth century, required a modest amount of inexpensive equipment, and apprenticeship could begin at an early age. Youngsters often began to learn the trade through the monotonous job of preparing the bark, which contains the tannic acid essential to the process. A horse drew a shaft around a heavy millstone, which crushed the bark in its path, while the apprentice "walked behind the horse, rake in hand, drawing upon or from the bed the crushed pieces, to be again and again crushed by the stone in its weary round." As described by one author late in the nineteenth century, tanning was seasonal and relatively uncomplicated work: [In the eighteenth century] the appliances for tanning were simple and rude to the last degree. A few oblong boxes, called vats, dimensions usually four by seven feet, by five feet in depth, made of plank were sunk in the ground. These were for soaking, liming, and tanning. A shed was erected, often open toward the south. . . . Beneath its shelter the preparation of the hide for the bark was made. This consisted of soaking and rinsing, removal 9 Nathaniel D. Gould, Church Music in America (Boston: A. N. Johnson, 1853; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1972), p. 43. 10 Robert Francis Seybolt, The Public Schools of Colonial Boston (/6351 Tis) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 10.

THE EARLY YEARS

of hair. . . . If this operation were performed in the fall of the year the contents of the vat remained undisturbed until the following spring, when they were taken out thoroughly tanned. 11 Tanning was a respectable, if not a highly skilled or elegant trade, and there is no sign that any social stigma was attached to tanners. William Billings's tanning career seems to have begun quite early in his life. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who in the mid-i840s spent some time gathering Billings memorabilia, reported in 1847: "When a boy he worked in a Tanyard at the foot of Boston Common." 12 A later nineteenth-century source is more specific: "William Billings owned a tannery on Frog Lane (now Boylston), near Eliot Street, in 1760." 13 This reference does locate the shop in the neighborhood where Billings spent most of his life, but the date seems too early and the ownership questionable. A lad in his early teens with an inheritance of a single shilling would hardly have been in a position to buy his own tannery, nor would he be a likely candidate for being set up in business by someone else. One of the most authoritative commentators on Billings's career, Nathaniel D. Gould, reports: "In early life [Billings's] occupation was that of a tanner" 14 implying that Billings left the trade once he became involved in music. That implication is false. During the years 1787 to 1796 Billings held the post of Sealer of Leather in the city of Boston, 15 and the many references to him in the records of Suffolk County Deeds and Suffolk County Probate Court refer to him as a tanner and never as a musician. 16 Billings may have set aside tanning for music and other 11 Edward H. Dewson, "The Tanning Industry of the South Shore of Massachusetts Bay, and Counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Plymouth," Shoe and Leather Reforter, October 17, 1895, p. 795. 12 Alexander W. Thayer, "Mr. Thayer's Catalogue Continued," The World of Music, IV, no. n , May 15, 1847. 13 Frank W. Norcross, "The Hide and Leather Trade of Suffolk County," Professional and Industrial History of Suffolk County, Mass. (Boston History Co., 1894.), III, 370. There is no Eliot Street near Frog Lane, but Thomas Prince's map of Boston (1769) shows Essex St. near Frog Lane (see below, Appendix III, Figure 2), and this is the area of Billings's activities. Gould, writing of Billings as a tanner, notes, "The building in which he labored was located in Eliot-street, in Boston" (Church Music in America, p. 43). Doubtless Norcross got "Eliot St." from Gould. 14 Gould, Church Music in America, p. 43. 15 See below, p. 158—159. 16 Billings's estate inventory is an example.

THE EARLY YEARS

activities from time to time, but the records indicate that he practiced his trade throughout most of his life. Precisely when William Billings evinced a serious interest in music is not known. It seems likely, however, that he received his earliest musical instruction at singing-schools, as most other eighteenthcentury American musicians did. 17 There is nothing to indicate that Billings ever became proficient on an instrument, a fact possibly explained by his physique. Gould described him as "somewhat deformed in person, blind with one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered," 18 the latter handicap perhaps limiting his hand movement. The sources agree, however, that Billings's deformities did not extend to his voice, which Gould described as "stentorian." Taken together with Billings's physical disabilities, the existing musical culture of New England and especially the kind of music-making in which the Boston citizenry was involved made it virtually inevitable that he would realize his musical gifts in the field of psalmody. The matter of Billings and instrumental music deserves further comment here, for what may be the earliest surviving reference to his interest in music relates to that topic. In the summer of 1764— Billings was seventeen at the time—a Boston newspaper printed an interesting musical item from a correspondent who signed himself "W. B." "Having seen lately advertis'd a Variety of Musical Instruments," he wrote, "I tho't it a proper Time just to transcribe, and request you to publish, the following." W. B.'s offering was a lengthy quotation from an unidentified tract praising vocal music over instrumental. The encomium reads in part: As the sweetest of all musical Sounds is the human Voice, so the Highest Glory of the Art is the directing and accompanying it, the following its Modulations and expressing the Sense of those Words in which it adds Meaning to Melody. The introducing this into Music is the Triumph of the human Voice alone: The Music of the Birds; the Notes of the sweetest Instruments, are but dead Sounds; they tinkle in the Ear, but they convey no appropriated Idea. The Voice gives Sentiments with its Harmony, and on a double Score awakens every Passion of which 17 18

See Prologue, fn. 64. Gould, Church Music in America, p. 46.

THE EARLY YEARS

the Heart is capable. . . . Concertos and Sonata have their Praise, and they deserve it; but it is to the Appropriation of Sounds to Sense, that the supreme Honors of the Science always have been and always will be paid.19 No evidence beyond the initials exists to identify W. B. as William Billings. Among his more-than-three hundred published compositions that have survived, however, none is instrumental, no indication of lost instrumental works has been found, and there is no reason to think that the composer's involvement with instruments went beyond the pitch pipe. The possibility that W. B. was Billings is not farfetched. Writing in the Musical Quarterly, Carl Lindstrom suggested the identity of an early music teacher of Billings: At some time during his youth [Billings] is supposed to have had musical instruction from John Barry, of whom genealogical records state that he was born in May or June, 1735, the only son of Charles Barry (Du Barry), a Frenchman who settled first in Virginia and went to Boston in 1730. John Barry was described as a superior singer and at one time led the choir at the New South Church.20 Lindstrom does not give his source for this information, but the Billings family's association with New South Church provides at least a circumstantial link between him and Barry. Moreover, Billings's earliest recorded appearance in public as a professional musician was with Barry as an associate. The Boston Gazette of October 2, 1769 carries the following notice: "John Barrey & William Billings Begs Leave to inform the Publick, that they propose to open a Singing School THIS NIGHT, near the Old South Meeting-House, where any Person inclining to learn to Sing may be attended upon at said School with Fidelity and Dispatch." It may be that this was not the twentythree-year-old Billings's first singing-school, though no evidence of an earlier one has been found. But whatever his training may have been, his command of the rudiments of music was surer than most of his rivals in the profession, for we have it on his authority that by the 19 Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, July 12, 1764. Supplement. Information from Hans Nathan. 20 Lindstrom, "William Billings and His Times," p. 481.

THE EARLY YEARS

spring of 1769 he had already composed upwards of one hundred original pieces of sacred music.21 Singing-schools were devoted to teaching the fundamentals of vocal performance. Tone production, note-reading, and ensemble singing were three topics that usually received especial attention. The circumstances and organization of schools varied greatly, as did the competence of the masters, but a duration of three months with two or three weekly meetings appears to have been standard. The scholars were mostly young adults and teenagers, the master usually an itinerant musician. Often sponsored by churches, many singing-schools were held on church premises, though sometimes a special room was rented for the meetings.22 Ideally, each scholar purchased the tunebook chosen as text by the master, though this stipulation was probably not consistently honored. At the conclusion of the singing-school term the scholars sometimes presented a public program, a "singinglecture," in which an address on music was delivered by a clergyman and several newly learned musical selections were sung. In the preface to the Singing Master's Assistant (1778) Billings set down some advice for singing-masters. Mundane as they may seem, the matters that Billings enumerates were surely the ones that teachers found themselves most occupied with, and that more than any others determined the success or failure of a school. Observe these Rules for regulating a Singing-School As the well being of every society depends in a great measure upon GOOD ORDER, I here present you with some general rules, to be observed in a Singing-School. 1st. Let the society be first formed, and articles signed by every individual; and all those who are under age, should apply to their parents, masters or guardians to sign for them: the house should be provided, and every necessary for the school should be procured, before the arrival of the Master, to prevent his being unnecessarily detained. See below, Chap. II, p. 60. See Alan C. Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools and the Golden Age of Choral Music in New England, 1760-1800" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, i960), pp. 198-206, which describes the various kinds of places in which schools were held. 21

22

THE EARLY YEARS

2d. The Members should be very punctual in attending at a certain hour, or minute, as the master shall direct, under the penalty of a small fine, and if the master should be delinquent, his fine to be double the sum laid upon the scholars. —Said fines to be appropriated to the use of the school, in procuring wood, candles, N.B. The fines to be collected by the Clerk, so chosen for that purpose. 3d. All the scholars should submit to the judgment of the master, respecting the part they are to sing; and if he should think fit to remove them from one part to another, they are not to contradict, or cross him in his judgment; but they would do well to suppose it is to answer some special purpose; because it is morally impossible for him to proportion the parts properly, until he has made himself acquainted with the strength and fitness of the pupil's voices. 4. No unnecessary conversation, whispering, or laughing, to be practised; for it is not only indecent, but very impolitic; it being a needless expence of time, and instead of acquiring to themselves respect, they render themselves ridiculous and contemptable in the eyes of all serious people; and above all, I enjoin it upon you to refrain from all levity, both in conduct and conversation, while singing sacred words; for where the words God, Christ, Redeemer, &c. occur, you would do well to remember the third Commandment, the profanation of which, is a heinous crime, and God has expressly declared he will not hold them guiltness [sic] who take his name in vain; and remember that in so doing, you not only dishonor God and sin against your own souls; but you give occasion, and very just ground to the adversaries or enemies of music, to speak reproachfully. Much more might be said; but the rest I shall leave to the Master's direction, and your own discretion, heartily wishing you may reap both pleasure and profit, in this your laudable undertaking. 23 With one exception Billings's "Rules" represent an experienced singing-master's practical advice on dealing with the problems of the singing-school. Organizational matters, the importance of punctuality 2 3 William Billings, The Singing Master's Assistant (Boston: Draper and Folsom, 1778), pp. 16-17. Quoted from 3rd ed., 1781.

THE EARLY YEARS

and decorum—these are requisite for any gathering devoted to purposes beyond the purely social. The author's recognition that scholars may dispute the teacher's right to assign them to certain voice parts displays his knowledge of the workings of the amateur chorister's mind, and the depths of feeling that such decisions could evoke. The warning that violations of the Third Commandment be held a "heinous crime" is, at least on the face of it, the lone exception to the thoroughly practical tone of the Rules. Perhaps it indicates a strain of piety in Billings not discernible in his other writings. Or perhaps its importance to him lay more in its effectiveness as a technique for securing order than in a belief that such violations were as dishonorable as he makes them out. Billings's Rules imply two facts about singing-schools that should not be overlooked: that scholars were generally quite young, and that for most the recreational aspects of the singing-school were more important than the instructional or devotional. The matter of the scholars' behavior was a recurrent concern of those who ran them. 24 Whatever musical abilities the singing-master may have possessed, it was his skill as a leader and disciplinarian that determined his school's success. The accent was on "master" rather than on "singing." Records that survive show that, as well as maintaining his connection with the tanner's trade throughout his life, Billings also continued to teach singing-schools. Billings identified himself as a singing-master in a copyright petition of 1772. He taught in Weymouth in 1771) in Stoughton and Providence in 1774 and 1775, and in Boston schools in 1778, 1779, 1782, 1785, and 1786. No later schools can be traced, but Billings continued as late as 1798 to 24 As early as 1720 Thomas Symmes had asked: "Suppose some Young People are too light, profane and airy while they are learning the Tunes, is that a sufficient Plea against Singing by Note?" T h e Reasonableness of, Regular Singing, or, Singing by Note (Boston: B. Green, for Samuel Gerrish,

1720), p. 17. The later history of the singing-school shows that Symmes's fears were not without foundation. In 1778 Rev. Ebenezer Parkman complained of the singers' "abominable" behavior at a Northboro, Massachusetts, school (see Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools," p. 342). And William Bentley's diary, telling of a seduction at a singing-school in Salem in 1791, notes public "invectives against Singing Schools as corrupting Morals." See William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem: Essex Institute, 1905—1914.), I, 261-262. Thomas Hastings's later accounts of singing-schools show that order continued to be a problem in the mid-i9th century (see Buechner, "Yankee Singing Schools," p. 181) .

THE EARLY YEARS

list his occupation in the Boston city directory as "singing master," showing that he continued to practice the trade. Throughout the better part of his life Billings's activities were entertwined with the singing-school movement. Yet singing-masters were legion compared with composers, and it was as a composer that Billings was to make his chief contribution.

CHAPTER II

The New-England. Psalm-Singer ι770-ι777 Fall in New England, with its crisp, invigorating days, enters in sharp contrast to the lazy heat of late summer. For William Billings the fall of 1770 must have been especially exhilarating, for it saw the completion and publication of the New-England Psalm-Singer, his first tunebook. It would be difficult to find another single publication in the history of American music —in the history of western music, for that matter—whose priority in its tradition is more conspicuous than that of Billings's collection. Among earlier tunebooks published in America, only James Lyon's Urania made any point of identifying music composed in the colonies. Taking Urania's half-dozen American-composed tunes, and adding tunes from other American compilations that have not been traced to non-American sources, it appears that roughly a dozen American-composed psalm tunes were published before 1770.1 Billings's New-England, Psalm-Singer, with its one hundred twenty-odd original compositions increased that figure tenfold. It was the first published compilation of entirely American music; moreover, it was the first tunebook produced by a single American composer. The title page of Billings's work suggests that the compiler1 In Urania (Philadelphia, 1761) Lyon identified PSALM 8, PSALM 23, PSALM 95, WATTS, a setting of Sternhold & Hopkins's "The Lord descended from above," and a setting of Tate & Brady's "Let the shrill trumpet's warlike voice," as "entirely new" compositions. Some earlier candidates for the title of first published American composition have been traced, however, to John Tufts's Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes. The third edition (Boston: T. Fleet, for Samuel Gerrish, 1723) contains both PSALM 100 NEW and SOUTHWELL NEW, neither of which has been traced to nonAmerican sources. See Theodore M. Finney, "The Third Edition of Tufts' Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes," Journal of Research in Music Education, XIV, no. 3, Fall 1966; see also Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 53-55, for a discussion of PSALM 100 NEW.

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composer, far from being reticent about his nationality and relative youth, was eager to use them as credentials: The New-England Psalm-Singer: or, American Chorister. Containing a number of Psalm-tunes, Anthems and Canons. In four and five parts. Never before published. Composed by William Billings, a native of Boston, in New-England. Matthew xxi. 16. —Out of the mouth of Babes and Sucklings thou hast perfected praise. James v. 13. —Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. O praise the Lord with one consent, and in this grand design, Let Britain and the Colonies, unanimously join. Though not the first to carry an American title, 2 the New-England Psalm-Singer was the first American tunebook to display the rubric "never before published" on its title page, identifying the music as brand new. The compiler, moreover, was the composer, and he was a "native" of Boston as well. Billings advertised his music as made in America by an American. The scriptural quotations on the title page of the New-England Psalm-Singer seem especially characteristic of William Billings. The first is surely a reference to his age. Though he never does say in the book exactly how old he is, he begins his preface with an apologetic paragraph asking critics to be "tender" with "Errors which through Inexperience may happen to have escaped the Notice of a Youth, in the Course of so large a Volume." The second quotation, standard though it may be, seems an especially appropriate choice for Billings. Scriptural statements about music-making are plentiful; that he chose the one he did, rather than, say, an admonition that singing is a Christian duty, suggests a playful attitude toward music, which he was to make more explicit in later tunebooks. The third quotation paraphrases Tate and Brady's versification of Psalm 135. It was a custom of Billings, especially as he grew older, to alter even the 2 Daniel Bayley's reprinting of William Tans'ur's Royal Melody Comflete and Aaron Williams's Universal Psalmodist bore the general title American Harmony (Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, 1769 et seq.), though the music was almost entirely European. See Irving Lowens and Allen P. Britton, "Daniel Bayley's 'The American Harmony,' A Bibliographical Study," Papers of the Bibliografhical Society of America , XLIX, 1955, pp. 340—354. Bayley also issued in Newburyport several editions (1770, 1771, 1772, 1780, 1785) of the Essex Harmony, named after the county of its origin.

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biblical texts he set to music, and the local, topical twist of this quotation is a harbinger of the licenses he was to take in the future. The local references on Billings's title page are fully supported by what follows, and nothing illustrates this fact better than the tune titles. 3 Faced with the task of naming more than a hundred new tunes he had composed himself, Billings responded with a list that itself would almost enable the scholar to locate where the work was composed or published. Not all of the titles are American—AFRICA, ASIA, EUROPE, for example—and a few hark back to the older practice of calling tunes after their texts—PSALM I8, PSALM 45, HYMN FOR CHRISTMAS. Among Billings's few nongeographical titles, however, many have a ring topical for Boston in the 1770s—FREEDOM, LIBERTY, UNION—and an overwhelming majority of the geographic titles are not only American but refer specifically to Boston and environs. Massachusetts counties provide several—HAMPSHIRE, MIDDLESEX, NANTUCKET, SUFFOLK; cities and towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut account for several more—AMHERST, DEDHAM, FAIRFIELD, HAVERHILL, HEBRON, MEDFORD, ROXBURY, UXBRIDGE, WALTHAM ; Boston churches—NEW SOUTH, OLD BRICK— and Boston thoroughfares—ORANGE STREET and PURCHASE STREET, for example, both just around the corner from Billings's tanning shop—supply additional titles for the New-England Psalm3 The practice of applying names to psalm and hymn tunes was established in the Anglo-American tradition by Thomas Ravenscroft's Whole Booke of Psalmes (1621). Earlier collections had generally identified tunes only by the texts to which they were to be sung, e.g., Psalm 100 or Psalm 148. Ravenscroft (c. 1590-c. 1633) assigned titles to all tunes in his collection, and by the end of the 17th century his innovation had become custom. Robert Guy McCutchan, Hymn Tune Names (New York & Nashville: Abingdon Press, '957)1 PP- 15-16, explains that actually Thomas East, in his Whole Booke of Psalmes (1592), was the first to give specific names to tunes, a contention supported by Nicholas Slonimsky in Baker's Biografhical Dictionary of Musicians, 5th ed. (New York: G. Schirmer, 1958), p. 418. East, however, named only three of the many tunes he printed, while Ravenscroft named all 100 of his. As the number of texts and tunes in print increased, the wider possibilities for variety weakened the hard-and-fast link that had existed earlier between text and tune, e.g., Psalm 100 could be sung to tunes other than OLD HUNDRED, as long as the meter of the tune matched that of the text. Most of the tunes in the British collections Billings knew carried specific titles—especially geographical locations (CANTERBURY, BANGOR), perhaps linked historically with the tune, or saints' names (ST. DAVID'S, ST. ANNE'S), sometimes associated with the composer's home church.

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Singer. It is impossible to reconstruct the precise state of mind that existed at an earlier time, but one imagines that a Bostonian of the early 1770s, picking up and thumbing through a copy of Billings's work, must have felt a gratifying shock of recognition. Frontispiece, title page, and tune titles help to give the book a native flavor as familiar as codfish cakes. Paul Revere's frontispiece to the New-England Psalm-Singer is surely the most famous picture inspired by the tradition of American psalmody. (See Appendix III, Figure 1, for a reproduction of the frontispiece.) It depicts a leader and six male singers sitting around a table singing from tunebooks, the picture encircled by a musical staff on which is written a canon composed by Billings. The value of Revere's frontispiece as a commentary on performance practice seems limited. Perhaps the engraver's intent was to picture a performance of the frontispiece canon itself, written for six parts in one with a supporting ground bass. If not, it is hard to imagine why Revere chose to depict a group that, by the absence of both youngsters and women, would have been unable to perform most of the music in the collection. An interpretation of Revere's engraving from a performance-practice standpoint would reveal that the leaders of groups of singers beat time with their hands, and that singers shared books and were apt to keep their places by pointing to the notes—perhaps the musical equivalent to moving the lips while reading silently to oneself. The frontispiece is more interesting for the scene it depicts than for any specific information about how the music might have been performed. "There is every reason to believe that Revere designed as well as engraved the plate," writes Clarence Brigham about the frontispiece, "as the drawing is crude and no English original is known." 4 4 Clarence S. Brigham, Paul Revere's Engravings (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1954; reprinted, New York: Athaneum, 1969), p. 89. The question of originality is relevant, because much of Brigham's study is devoted to uncovering and comparing Revere's engravings with the originals he copied. Brigham writes, "Revere engraved all of the music for the book," but admits that "no charge for the engraving appears in Revere's Day Book, nor is any bill for the work known" (p. 89). While he surely did engrave the frontispiece, which bears his signature, the likelihood that Revere also did the music is not high. The quality of the music engraving in the New-England Psalm-Singer, compared with an earlier work Revere engraved throughout, Josiah Flagg's Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston: Paul Revere, 1764), appears to great disadvantage, and indeed looks so different on the page that it is hard to believe that the same man did both. The dissimilarities

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Brigham's statement is accurate as regards the drawing itself. But the idea of a picture encircled by a canon notated on a musical staff was not original with Revere, for a frontispiece of that design appears in William Tans'ur's Royal Melody Comflete (London, 1755) and is repeated in the Boston printing of 1767, copied by John Ward Gilman of Exeter, New Hampshire. The picture is very different from the one in the New-England Psalm-Singer: Tans'ur's frontispiece shows a man working in a book-lined study, apparently noting down music in a manuscript music book. However, since Billings was familiar with Tans'ur's collection it seems almost certain that the idea for the New-England Psalm-Singer frontispiece came from Tans'ur. Perhaps the most valuable thing about Revere's frontispiece is that, by picturing singers seated around a table, it locates the scene in a parlor or perhaps an inn, but surely not in a church. Thus it helps to make an important point: psalmody fulfilled a social as well as a religious function, and, rather than being confined to churches, sacred music was also sung for recreation in homes and other places where people gathered.5 Psalmody as both social and religious music is exemplified in between the music engraving on the title page of Billings's work and the rest of the music in the collection, in such things as clef signs and eighth-note flags, can be seen at a glance. The New-England Psalm-Singer, however, does resemble another work very closely in engraving style, Flagg's Sixteen Anthems (Boston, 1766). The title page of that collection reads, "Engraved and Printed by Josiah Flagg," yet Brigham writes: "Revere undoubtedly engraved the music for this volume. It is exactly like his work in the 1764 volume, and even more like the later New England Psalm Singer of 1770. . . . Flagg himself, in spite of the imprint, was not an engraver. He was a close friend of Revere and presumably would have engaged no other engraver to do his work" (p. 38). Brigham's contention that the engraving of Sixteen Anthems closely resembles the engraving of Flagg's Collection is hard to verify with the naked eye. He is, however, absolutely right about the engraving similarities between Sixteen Anthems and Billings's work. Flagg was a jeweler as well as a musician, so he presumably had some manual skill; he appears on the title page of Billings's collection as a seller of the book and he advertised a music pen in it as well, thus linking himself specifically with the collection; and he claimed to have engraved a collection of his own that resembles the engraving style of the New-England Psalm-Singer in every detail. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that he, not Revere, was the engraver of the music in Billings's work. 5 Revere's frontispiece thus supports the description of the social use of psalm and hymn tunes offered in Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 177.

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Constance Rourke's The Roots oj American Culture, where the author sets forth a perceptive claim for the importance of verse, metrical poetry, in the cultural life of colonial America. Not only for the telling of stories but for many purposes verse had made a common language all through the colonial era. Both the literate and the illiterate had some command of it. Verse was a spirited mode of popular communication or address, whether it set forth an argument or launched a satire or mourned the passing of a citizen. Broadside verses had been published in increasing abundance on all themes, cresting high, widely distributed, often flowing into song, particularly during the Revolution. Rhythm, as Gummere has said, provides the simplest form of social consent, and the rapid pounding tetrameters and pentameters with their emphatic rhymes could draw a community together, express its dominant thoughts and emotions and make these contagious. Verse used in this fashion belonged to the realm of literature with a purpose—practical letters—as did the related forms of oratory, pulpit eloquence and pamphleteering. The intent of all these forms was to stir, instruct, reprove, applaud— and to establish social communication. 6 "Often flowing into song," Miss Rourke writes, referring to broadside verses and their symmetrical regularity. She neglects, however, to mention another conspicuous genre that illustrates the thin line separating verse and song: Anglo-American sacred music based on metrical psalms and hymns—devotional poetry for singing. It would be hard to overestimate the democratizing influence of the Protestants' translating and rhyming of the Old Testament Psalms. Verse made Scripture portable. 7 Once set in meter, the psalms were easily accessible and easy to remember—as Miss Rourke explained, at the command of "both literate and illiterate." Verse translations of the psalms presented no puzzle to the understanding, and the obscurities found in prose translations disappeared, as if a gardener's hand had turned an overgrown patch into tidy rows. Cast into familiar rhyme schemes and repeated again and again, metrical psalms were 6 Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 15. 7 The format in which psalms and hymns were customarily published contributed to their portability. A pocket-sized volume measuring 3x5 inches or less was standard.

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apt to stick to the memory like burrs, becoming harder to forget than to recall. Metrical psalms in the Anglo-American tradition were conceived primarily as religious ballads for common people, and a glance at their publication history in America suggests how deeply these modest verses must have been engrained into the general consciousness. During the eighteenth century alone, there appeared in print more than two hundred fifty publications devoted to metrical psalms, a figure comparable to the most frequently printed nonreligious publications—almanacs, for example, or spellers.8 All but a handful were accounted for by the three most popular: the Bay Psalm Book (1640), Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms of David (London, 1696), and Isaac Watts's Psaims of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (London, 1719). (The many collections of hymns published during the same time are not included in this total.) The wide availability and uncomplicated character of devotional verse for singing gave psalmody a role in American musical life that was recreational as well as religious. The importance of the relatively obscure William Tans'ur (1706— 1783) to the development of psalmody in America has been recognized by many earlier scholars. Tans'ur carried on a long and apparently peripatetic career in England. 9 Not a great deal is known about him, for he belongs to a British tradition of parish psalmody that has received little scholarly attention. What is known has come down mostly through his numerous publications. Tans'ur's influence in the American colonies was manifested especially through Royal Melody Comflete, which found its way across the Atlantic not long after its publication in 1755. Music from Tans'ur's collection was being sung in Boston as early as 1762, as noted in the diary of the schoolmaster John Tileston: "Nov. 16—The Tansur Singers at my House." 10 In 1764 Daniel Bayley of Newburyport brought out a new, These figures and conclusions have been arrived at after thorough search through Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney's National Index of American Jmfrints through 1800: The Short-title Evans (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1969). 9 See the Dictionary of National Biography, printing of 1959-1960, XIX, s.v. "Tans'ur, William." 10 D. C. Colesworthy, John Tileston's School, Boston ijy8—iy8g; ιγόι— 1766 (Boston: Antiquarian Book Store, 1887), cited by Carl Lindstrom, "William Billings and His Times," Musical Quarterly, xxv, 1939, p. 482η. 8

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somewhat altered edition of Thomas Walter's Grounds and Rules of Mustek, which had been circulating in the colonies for nearly half a century, under the title A New and Complete Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Music. The lengthy preface was divided into two parts, the first Walter's venerable treatise in shortened form, the second an edited version of the introduction to Tans'ur's Royal Melody ComfIete. Having assumed prominence as a teacher-theoretician on an equal footing with one of New England's most esteemed authorities, Tans'ur next appeared as a compiler, albeit in absentia, when the Royal Melody Complete was printed in Boston (1767). From a publisher's standpoint, the New and Complete Introduction and the Royal Melody Complete were ideal items, for both went unaltered through numerous editions, 11 and Tans'ur became the Anglo-American psalmodist most widely known in the colonies before the Revolution. Exactly when William Billings might first have encountered Tans'ur's Royal Melody Complete is not known. Perhaps he was even one of the "Tansur Singers" mentioned by John Tileston in the years 1762—1764, for by his mid-teens his predilection toward music would surely have begun to assert itself. It may be of some significance that the only known Billings holograph is preserved in a copy of the Boston edition ( 1767) of the Royal Melody Complete, owned by the Library of Congress. 12 (See Appendix III, Figure 3, for a photograph of the page preserving Billings's writing.) The Royal Melody Complete and the New-England Psalm-Singer correspond beyond the frontispieces. Tans'ur's book seems to have been the principal model Billings followed when in 1770 he brought the N ew-England PsalmSinger into print. The prefatory material in Billings's collection is long and unusually heterogeneous. After a short introductory statement by the author dated October 7, 1770, there appears a rather dense seven-page Tileston's diary also notes "1763, Aug. 9—The Singers at my House" (p. 75) ; "1764, Feb. 23—Singers at my House" (p. 76). 11 The Neiu and Comflete Introduction received at least four different printings in 1764, and others in 1765, 1766, and 1768. Lowens and Britton's "Daniel Bayley's 'The American Harmony,'" describes the many printings and eight numbered editions of that work between 1767 and 1774. 12 See Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 246. Hans Nathan argues convincingly that, contrary to what Lowens suggests here, there is no evidence that the Library of Congress copy was owned by Billings.

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"Essay on the Nature and Properties of Sound," not written by Billings himself. Following the essay and a poem by the Reverend Mather Byles comes the instructional part of the introduction, including eight pages of diagrams and musical examples, then another dozen of prose explanation, in which notation, solmization, rhythm, and other matters of technical importance are discussed. A brief personal note by the author and a "New England Hymn" by Byles conclude the introduction. The "Essay on the Nature and Properties of Sound" deserves some special mention. Billings disclaimed credit for it himself, but wrote that the author's modesty forbade him to reveal his identity. Later authority has assigned it to Dr. Charles Stockbridge (1734—1806) of Scituate, Massachusetts.13 According to the author of the essay, it is "designed only to give a general Notion of the Nature and Properties of Sound to those, who have not had the Advantages of a Philosophical Education."14 Beginning with an explanation of how sound is produced, the essay then gives an anatomical description of the ear, explaining briefly how it receives sounds and transmits them to the mind. There follows a discussion of musical tones and a description of consonance and dissonance in Pythagorean terms. The conclusion of the essay, an account of how victims of sometimes-fatal tarantula bites are able to dance off the effects to musical accompaniment, was a widely circulated belief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and should not be allowed to discredit the author's scientific standing.15 The "Essay on the Nature and Properties of Sound" is a creditable performance. Though learned, it is George Hood, A History of Music in Nemi England. (Boston: Wilkins, Carter & Co., 1846; reprinted, New York: Johnson, 1970), p. 167, asserts, "The Essay was written either by Dr. Charles Stockbridge, of Scituate, Mass. or the Rev. Dr. Byles." The American Antiquarian Society has a copy of the New-England Psalm-Singer purchased by Mr. Samuell May in 1772. On p. 2 is written, "I was informed lately by the venerable Perez Morton, late Attorney Genl. that the late Dr. Charles Stockbridge of Scituate was the Author of the Essay. N.M." [Nahum Mitchell?] A biographical sketch of Stockbridge appears in Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Biografhies of Harvard Graduates (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1965), xm, pp. 492493. See below for more on Perez Morton. 14 William Billings, Neiu-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 13

1770), p. 3·

15 Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Comfanion to Music, 9th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 1011-1012, carries an informative account of the matter.

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neither incomprehensible nor dry, and it rewards attentive reading. Granting the merits of the essay, however, its connection with practical psalmody is at best indirect. More than anything else it exemplifies the experimental quality of the New-England Psalm-Singer. Perhaps Billings, whose credentials were surely open to question, included the essay as a kind of talisman, which might tend to identify him as a man of intellect and discernment. Or perhaps he imagined that the colonial public would welcome the opportunity to view music in a scientific context—especially if the context were set forward by an American. Or perhaps the author of the essay was a powerful patron and supporter, whom Billings felt obliged to honor. However the essay found its way into the New-England Psalm-Singer, it had no precedents in colonial tunebooks, and similar scientific inquiries are not found in later publications. The American tunebook was both a manual for developing musical skill and a repository of music through which that skill could be exercised. It was not, however, a compendium of materials for intellectual delectation. The essay seems to indicate that Billings thought of the New-England Psalm-Singer as an intellectual contribution to a public beyond those interested in music, and as such it would seem a misreading of the public. Anticipating the spirit and substance of later introductions to collections of original music, Billings begins his work by calling attention to his exertions. Despite the rigors of having composed some one hundred twenty-five pieces, however, he explains that he has had to be coaxed by others to bring them into print. (It would appear from tunebook introductions that American composers of the eighteenth century often had to be dragged, manuscripts presumably clutched in their hands, to the printshop by insistent friends.) 16 Billings's admission of the probability of compositional sins was also to become part of the introductory litany. Altho' this Composition hath cost me much Time and Pains; yet I little thought of exposing it to public View: But being repeatedly importuned by my Friends, I was at last prevailed upon 16 See, e.g., Oliver Holden, American Harmony (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1792), p. [2]: "When the following- pieces of Music were composed, it was not the intention of the Author to make them public; and no motive could have induced him to do it, but the request and patronage of his friends." Or Samuel Babcock, Middlesex Harmony (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1795), p. [2], in which the author confides that only "after much solicitation" was he "induced to let the following Pieces appear in print."

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to commit it to the Press. . . . Perhaps there may appear in the Eyes of the Accurate much Incorrectness that I was not able to discern; therefore would beg the Critic to be tender, and rectify those Errors which through Inexperience may happen to have escaped the Notice of a Youth, in the Course of so large a Volume.17 In his introduction Billings also explained that because he believed tunes in Common Meter (a stanza form with four lines alternating eight and six feet) were overemphasized, he had tried "to have a sufficiency in each measure." A look at the tunes confirms that Billings did achieve a balance among the three predominant metrical patterns of Anglo-American psalmody—forty-four psalm tunes are in Common Meter, thirty-seven in Long Meter (8.8.8.8.), twentyfour in Short Meter (6.6.8.6.), and thirteen tunes in "Particular" Meter, or any pattern other than the first three. Billings concluded the introduction with a brief, intriguing statement about musical style: "In the Composition I have been as plain and simple as possible; and yet have tried to the utmost of my Power to preserve the modern Air and Manner of Singing." Two rather distinct ways of setting text may be observed in the New-England Psalm-Singer. One is the strict block-chord style found in eighteenthcentury settings of the older psalm tunes (for example ASIA, OLD BRICK, UNITY); the other, which predominates especially in tripletime pieces, is somewhat more elaborate, with passing-tones filling in melodic gaps, and occasional textural changes and florid passages, and seems to be what Billings meant by "the modern Air and Manner of Singing" (as in BRATTLE STREET, OLD SOUTH, or TAUNTON, a fuging-tune). What makes this passage particularly interesting is the sense of style consciousness it reveals. Though Billings offered it only as a passing point and did not elaborate on it, the statement is prophetic of issues that were to pervade the intellectual climate surrounding American psalmody. Billings's recognition that his music was in some sense "modern"—the degree of melodic ornamentation would seem to be the key point here—-is supported by a survey of eighteenth-century British tunebooks, which began to take on an increasingly florid character around mid-century.18 As has been noted, Billings composed under the influence of the British models he knew. Billings, New-England Psalm-Singer, p. z. All other quotations from the "preface" appear on the same page. 18 See the Prologue above, p. 2 2 . 17

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One other American compiler, Simeon Jocelin (1746-1823), writing in 1782, acknowledged that a new, increasingly elaborate style had recently become fashionable: "It is very obvious, that Psalmody hath undergone a considerable revolution, in most of our religious assemblies, within the course of a few years, not only with respect to the method and order of singing, but even the tunes formerly in common use, are now generally laid aside, instead of which, those of a more lively and airy turn are substituted."19 What Jocelin described here was surely the musical style Billings referred to as "modern." As described in the prologue to this study, when reformers complained early in the nineteenth century that psalmody had gone into decline around the time of the war, one of the features they deprecated was its lack of sobriety—it became what Jocelin called "airy." The largest part of Billings's introduction, sixteen pages in fact, is devoted to explaining the rudiments of music. Typographical problems make the task more difficult than it might have been. The printing of music was still a fairly rare thing in America prior to the Revolution, and printers did not own fonts of music type. The first font to be consistently employed for the printing of polyphony was imported from England in the mid-1780s by Isaiah Thomas,20 and during the following twenty years music printed from type gradually came to supersede the earlier tunebooks printed from engraved plates.21 Prior to the war, however, engraved plates were used almost exclusively. Billings's introduction combines many examples of musical notation with a lengthy prose explanation of them and other musical matters. Since, however, Billings's printers, Edes and Gill, had no music type, the musical examples were engraved on copper plates and reproduced together, while the explanatory material was set in type and became a separate section. The reader who hoped to learn from Billings's introduction was thus obliged to leaf back and forth between example and explanation, as between page 1, where the gamut appears (poorly engraved and in what for a beginner must have been inscrutably complicated form), and page 10, where it is 19 The Chorister's Comfanion (New Haven: for Simeon Jocelin Doolittle, 1782), p. [1]. 20 See Worcester Collection (Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1786), p. 1. 21 For a comment on the importance of that change see Richard "Connecticut Sacred Music Imprints, 1778—1810. Part n," Notes, 4, June 1971, pp. 673-675.

and Amos verso, 2nd Crawford, xxvil, no.

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

explained. The material dealing with the fundamentals of music need not be described here, but it does show the influence of William Tans'ur's Royal Melody Complete. The most obvious similarities between the New-England Psalm-Singer and Tans'ur's volume are found in the glossary, which Billings seems to have taken over almost verbatim from Tans'ur. Other less obvious correspondences may also be found throughout the introduction: phrases here and there are identical or are close paraphrases; items are treated in similar succession; diagrams are copied.22 When these facts are taken together with the knowledge that Billings quoted Tans'ur in the introductions to the Singing Master's Assistant (1778) and the Continental Harmony (1794),23 the other two major prefatory essays he wrote, his debt to Tans'ur is emphasized. As Allen Britton has shown, Billings was no plagiarist; he did not plug large segments of Tans'ur's theoretical introduction into his own. Rather he seems to have taken Tans'ur as a guide, to have pondered over Tans'ur's introduction and assimilated it, then recast it into somewhat different form, perhaps in combination with materials from other sources. The best-known passage in Billings's introduction—indeed the best-known statement from the whole tradition of American psalmody—is found in the composer's advice "To all Musical Practitioners." This text has been the chief basis upon which Billings has been claimed as the very prototype of the Yankee iconoclast. "Perhaps it may be expected by some," he begins, "that I should say something concerning Rules for composition." To these I answer that Nature is the best Dictator, for all the hard dry studied Rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person to form an Air any more than the bare Knowledge of the four and twenty Letters, and strict Grammatical Rules 22 Allen P. Britton, "Theoretical Introductions in American Tune-books to 1800" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1949), pp. 183—187. See also William Tans'ur, Sr., The Elements of Mustek Disflay'd. (London: for Stanley Crowder, 1772). Similarities between this work and Billings's Singing Master's Assistant (1778) were noticed by the authors too late to explore them in the present study. No edition of Tans'ur's work before this one has been seen. However, the preface is dated London, June 25, 1766, suggesting that it might first have appeared in the 1760s. If it did, perhaps Billings had opportunity to consult it before completing the New-England Psalm-Singer. 23 Hans Nathan, "Introduction" to William Billings, Continental Harmony (facsimile reprint, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), p. ix.

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

will qualify a Scholar for composing a Piece of Poetry, or properly adjusting a Tragedy, without a Genius. It must be Nature, Nature must lay the Foundation, Nature must inspire the Thought.24 Lest his rhetoric alarm some of his readers, Billings warned against misinterpretation. Admitting that "perhaps some may think I mean . . . to throw Art intirely out of the Question," he denied the charge, treating "art" as a synonym for "rules of composition," in agreement with Noah Webster's first lexicographical work, the Comfendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806, where art is defined as "cunning, device, skill, science, trade."25 "The more Art is display'd," wrote Billings, "the more Nature is decorated. And in some sorts of Composition, there is dry Study requir'd, and Art very requisite. For instance, in a Fuge, where the Parts come in after each other, with the same Notes; but even there, Art is subservient to Genius, for Fancy goes first, and strikes out the Work roughly, and Art comes after, and polishes it over." Having defined the separate roles of inspiration—"nature," "genius," "fancy"—on the one hand, and intellect—"art," or "rules of composition"—on the other, he went on to show that even the authorities advocate flexible application of the latter. I have read several Author's Rules on Composition, and find the strictest of them make some Exceptions, as thus, they say that two Eighths or two Fifths may not be taken together rising or falling, unless one be Major and the other Minor; but rather than spoil the Air, they will allow that Breach to be made, and this allowance gives great Latitude to young Composers, for they may always make that Plea, and say, if I am not allow'd to transgress the Rules of Composition, I shall certainly spoil the Air, and Cross the Strain, that fancy dictated. The resounding conclusion of Billings's advice to "Musical Practitioners" taken by itself, as it sometimes is, may read as an outright dismissal of the intellectual basis of psalmody or even an outburst of truculent patriotism: Billings, New-England. Psalm-Singer, p. 19. Noah Webster, A Comfendious Dictionary of the English Language ([Hartford]: Sidney for Hudson & Goodwin, Hartford; and Increase Cooke, New-Haven, 1806), p. 18. 24 25

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

For my own Part, as I don't think myself confin'd to any Rules for Composition laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think (were I to pretend to lay down Rules) that any who came after me were any ways obligated to adhere to them, any further than they should think proper: So in fact, I think it is best for every Composer to be his own Carver. Therefore, upon this Consideration, for me to dictate or pretend to prescribe Rules of this Nature for others, would not only be very unnecessary, but also a great Piece of Vanity.26 In the context of the entire passage, however, it expresses a skepticism of more modest proportion. Billings did not dismiss the "rules" out of hand; having consulted what "several Author's" had to say upon the subject, he saw that they themselves were inclined toward bending the rules when rules conflicted with musical necessities. It must be emphasized, moreover, that what Billings meant by "the rules for composition" had a specific, rather limited meaning within the framework of psalmody. American musicians of the eighteenth century restricted themselves mostly to composing settings of single stanzas of metrical poetry, only occasionally venturing to compose larger pieces—anthems—where musical form became a problem. As set forth in the two works available to American psalmodists that treat the "rules for composition" most exhaustively, Tans'ur's Royal Melody ComfIete, which Billings knew, and John Arnold's Comfleat Psalmodist, the rules consist chiefly of advice on dissonance treatment and part-writing. That component of British psalmody available in print to American composers around the time of the Revolution consisted of nothing more than these matters of detail. Beyond that, the composer was forced to accept the authority of his ear. (For more on what Billings meant by "the rules" see below, pp. X7iff.) When taken as a whole, Billings's "Advice to Musical Practitioners" is less startling than it might at first appear. One could take the phrase "I think it best for every Comfoser to be his own Carver" in the spirit of Billings's description of the differing roles of "fancy" and "art"—fancy provides the materials and art polishes them—and interpret the verb "carve" to mean "to shape." Webster's first dictionary, however, gives a less metaphorical meaning, "to choose," and it seems most likely that Billings meant that in the passage in question. In saying that he did not think himself "confined to any rules for 26

Billing's, New-England Psalm-Singer, p. 20.

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

composition" laid down by earlier musicians, he was saying nothing more than almost any composer might have said: there would seem to be only one way a postmedieval composer in Europe or America could answer the question "Do you consider yourself 'confined' by the rules musicians have laid down before you?" It is, then, not so much the substance as the timing and tone of Billings's remarks that make the introduction of the New-England Psalm-Singer worthy of its special fame. Irving Lowens shrewdly suggested a decade ago that Billings's skill as a writer had much to do with his reputation as the dominant figure in American psalmody.27 Billings was a poet, a man who enjoyed wordplay for its own sake, and especially in collections after the New-England Psalm-Singer one can hardly find a page he wrote that does not contain some striking or unusual use of language. Moreover, together with his obvious love for the sound of words, Billings wrote with a directness and a flair that carries the impress of his highly distinctive personality and gives the reader a tangible and almost constant awareness of the writer's presence. Billings was unequipped for anonymity. When his writings are placed alongside those of his fellow composer-compilers, he stands out as a waggish, earnest prodigy in a crowd of sober, circumspect, faceless folk. As suggested, Billings's later writings are somewhat more unbuttoned than his earlier. Yet flashes of the ebullient, self-deprecating directness that illuminates his style can be seen in the New-England PsalmSinger as well. Having omitted, for example, an explanation of repeat signs from his introduction, he had them printed in the back, with the comment: "The reader is desired to excuse my inserting the following Explanatory Piece so much out of Place, but the Reason is because it intirely slipt my Memory till the Introduction was Printed."28 There is no sign that the twenty-four-year-old composertanner was intimidated in the least by his public debut in print. Billings's music was not the only native contribution to the NewEngland Psalm-Singer. The introduction is graced by several poems, and during the course of the book several hymns by Americans may be found. Foremost among them was the Reverend Dr. Mather 27 Irving Lowens, review of The Continental Harmony by William Billings, facsimile reprint edited by Hans Nathan, Musical Quarterly, XLVIII, no. 3, July 1962, p. 399. 28 Billings, New-England Psalm-Singer, p. [109].

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

Byles (1707-1788),29 grandson of Increase Mather, and prominent New England poet, whose text was set by Billings for the canon framing the frontispiece, who furnished the text for HOLLIS STREET, and who also contributed two of the three poems that appear in the introduction. Byles's most famous poem on music, "Down Steers the Bass," which Billings and Daniel Read each set later, is included, apparently taken by Billings from a published collection of Byles's works. However, Byles's "New-England Hymn," frequently anthologized in the three decades following, made its first appearance in print in the New-England PsaLm-Singer.30 Its prominent position in the book—printed in oversize type and placed just ahead of the music—suggests that it might have been written specifically for inclusion in Billings's work, a distinct honor for the young composer. Billings's and Byles's paths crossed more than once, but all that is definitely known about the two men's personal relationship is that Billings at a later date became a member of Byles's Hollis Street Congregational Church.31 One of the puzzling minor mysteries centering around Billings's New-England Psalm-Singer is the identity of "P. M.," to whom six texts in that work are assigned. One possibility is that "P. M." stands merely for "Philo-Musico," lover of music, a common designation in eighteenth-century tunebooks. In that case, the poet who contributed these texts may well have been the "Philo-Musico" who signed the poem "On Musick" which appears on page 19 of the New-England Psalm-Singer. (That effort is dated "Cambridge, Sept. 30, 1770," suggesting that the author may have been connected in some way with Harvard College.) It is possible that Billings himself wrote the texts under the P. M. title, but two facts contradict that possibility. The famous text to CHESTER, beginning "Let tyrants shake their iron rod," universally attributed to Billings,32 though never signed 29 Clifford Shipton's sketch of Byles in Sibley's is reprinted in Shipton, Nena England. Life in the iSth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

!963)1 PP- 226-253. 30 See C. Lennart Carlson's introduction to Byles's Poems on Several Occasions (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1940). 31 See Chap. 1, p. 32. 32 Billing's indicates in the Singing Master's Assistant that he wrote the text for CHESTER. In Daniel Read, American Singing Book (New Haven, 1785) the text is attributed to Billings and newly set by Read to a tune called NEW ENGLAND.

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

by him, is not signed "P. M."; moreover, no explanation comes to mind why Billings, who dated his preface "Boston, Oct. 7, 1770," might a week earlier have completed a poem across the river at Cambridge. It would not be surprising, had Billings himself written the texts in question, to learn that he hesitated to identify himself. Yet the evidence does not support the notion that he was "P. M." An article in the Boston Musical Gazette, April 7, 1839, clears up the mystery by reporting that the initials "were intended to indicate no doubt the late Perez Morton," attorney general of the state of Massachusetts, who apparently had had some firsthand acquaintance with Billings in his younger years.33 Morton (1750-1837), a member of the Harvard Class of 1771, was in residence at Cambridge at the time Billings's work was published. As a man with literary proclivities and one who gained some distinction as an orator later in his life, Morton is a logical choice for author of the texts signed by "P. M."34 One further matter besides the music in the New-England PsalmSinger remains. At precisely the time that Billings was preparing his collection for the press, George Whitefield (1714—1770), the great English revivalist preacher, died in Newburyport, Massachusetts.35 Billings was quick to seize on this additional opportunity to render his tunebook topical, inserting at the end of his collection: "An HYMN compos'd by the Rev. Mr. WHITEFIELD, with design to be sung at his own Funeral, And here inserted at the Request of a Number of his Friends."36 As it turns out, the hymn, twelve stanzas of "Ah, lovely 33This

information is from Hans Nathan. See also fn. 13 above. was the husband of Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (17591846), according to the Dictionary of American Biografhy, XIII, s.v. "Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp," "considered by her contemporaries the chief American poetess." Biographical material on Perez Morton appears throughout Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia: The Life and Works of Sarah WenfJiorth Morton 1759-1846 (Orono, Maine: University Press, 1931). See especially pp. 23—25. 35See also fn. 53 below. Whitefield died September 30. Immediately an unseemly battle over his remains erupted among the Massachusetts clergy. As reported in the Massachusetts Gazette, October 11, 1770, a committee from South Church, Boston, wanted to return Whitefield's body to Boston "to be buried among his friends," but Pastor Parsons of Newburyport refused "to permit the Corps being buried but from his own House and before his own Pulpit!" 36 Billings, New-England Psalm-Singer , p. [no]. 34Morton

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

appearance of Death," was not Whitefield's at all, but had been written in the 1740s by Charles Wesley. 37 However, it was probably all the same to Billings's readers, who after becoming accustomed to using tunebooks addressed chiefly to citizens of another time and place, must have been gratified to be offered a book in which an event as recent as the famous preacher's death was commemorated. Billings's New-England Psalm-Singer contains 126 compositions, including 118 psalm and hymn tunes, five extended works—four anthems and one set-piece—and three canons, including the one in the frontispiece. Most are written for four voices, with a few for five. The music is set in open score with the melody assigned to the tenor. A footnote on page 1 of the music explains: "No doubt the reader will excuse my not adapting words to all the tunes as it is attended with great inconvenience." Texts do appear with the longer compositions, where the repetititon of words and the absence of meter makes careful underlay necessary. Likewise, hymn texts that would not appear in the usual devotional collections are included—texts by Mather and Samuel Byles, for example, and the texts by P. M. Otherwise the tunes remain textless, with some carrying only meter indications, and some also specifying the psalm or hymn to which the tune is to be sung. Like most American compilations of the prewar period, Billings's work was not self-contained, but was meant to be used together with texts from Tate and Brady's New Version or Isaac Watts's Psalms of David, both frequently reprinted and widely circulated in New England throughout the eighteenth century. The cultural significance of the New-England Psalm-Singer has been described. An examination of the music supports that evaluation, for Billings's work contains four tunes that became standard items in American tunebooks published during the next four decades and must be considered central to the American core repertory for the period ending around 1810—AMHERST, BROOKFIELD, CHESTER, and LEBANON. Several other tunes achieved lesser but still significant circulation —AFRICA, HINGHAM, and SUFFOLK especially. For each tune that found its way into the repertory, however, the New-England Psalm-Singer contained four that never saw print again: of the 126 compositions, the work contained only twenty-six which were reprinted during the period 1770-1810, and of those, five appeared 37 John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology, 2nd rev. ed., with new supp. (London: Murray, 1907; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1957), p. 32.

NEW-ENGLAND PSALM-SINGER

only in Billings's own later collections, leaving a total of twenty-one that other compilers chose to include in their tunebooks.38 These figures provide support for the composer's later description of his first tunebook as "my Reuben, my first born"—the reference being to the eldest and most problematic of the twelve sons of Jacob, the Old Testament patriarch. "[To] my great mortification," Billings wrote later of the New-England Psalm-Singer, "after impartial examination, I have discovered that many of the pieces in that Book were never worth my printing, or [public] inspection."39 As concerns some 80 percent of the tunes, Billings's fellow compilers apparently agreed with him. The fact remains, however, that the composer's "Reuben" brought joy as well as mortification, for it included BROOKFIELD, the tune by Billings that received the most printings through 1810, and CHESTER, the composer's most famous tune, which became one of the most popular of all revolutionary war songs. The impressive creative effort that brought the New-England Psalm-Singer into print shortly after Billings's twenty-fourth birthday was only partly manifested in the publication of the work. For, as Billings informed his readers, he had in his possession at the time of his first work's publication "another Volume . . . consisting chiefly of Anthems, Fuges and Chorus's, of his own Composition."40 These new pieces, it would appear, had been written since March 1769; in a note to "the generous subscribers" to the New-England Psalm-Singer Billings wrote: "The Author having to his great Loss deferred the Publication of these Sheets for Eighteen Months, to have them put upon American Paper, hopes the Delay will be pardoned."41 Thus, the "babe" out of whose mouth the New-England Psalm-Singer had been "perfected" had completed the music in the collection at the age of twenty-two. Moreover, having finished one volume, he had set to work on another, completing that within a year and a half, while at the same time presumably earning his living as a tanner, conducting at least one singing-school, and securing a publisher for his first volume. Other American psalmodists may have begun to compose 38 The information is taken from an unpublished thematic index of American sacred music through 18 10, compiled by Richard Crawford. 39 William Billings, Singing Master's Assistant (Boston: Draper and Folsom,

1778), p. [2]. 40 41

Billings, N e i39>

1 8 8

Billings, Abigail Adams, 159, 182, 183ns birth, 76-77 Billings, Elizabeth Adams (daughter of composer), 159, 183 & n; birth, 103 Billings, Elizabeth Clark (mother of composer), 260; death, 3 2 ; marriage, 30; mentioned in church records, 3 1 ; parents, 3 1 ; will, 3 on Billings, George, 32 Billings, John, 3 1 - 3 2 Billings, Lucy (daughter of composer), birth & death, 104 Billings, Lucy (another daughter of composer), 160, 183 & n; birth, 168 Billings, Lucy Swan (wife of composer), 72, 104, 1 5 9 ; death, 182 & n Billings, Lydia, 31 Billings, Mary, 31 Billings, Billings, Billings, Billings, 3i

Peggy, 183 & n; birth, 159 Rachel, birth & death, 76 Robert, 32 Sarah (sister of composer),

Billings, Sarah (daughter of composer), 159, 1 8 3 ; birth, 104

292

INDEX Billings, William, Sr. (father of composer), death, 3 2 ; marriage, 30; will, 3011 Billings, William, biographical & personal: birth, 3 1 ; buys house, 1 0 4 ; church affiliation, 32 & n, 57, 265; death, 1 8 5 ; education, 3 2 - 3 3 ; employment, 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 , 168, 1 8 3 ; estate inventory, 1 8 5 ; financial distress, 157, 164, 167, 1 6 9 ; grave site, 185 & n; holograph, 48; holograph reproduced, 2 6 1 ; illness, possible, 7 6 7 7 ; marriage, 3on, 7 2 - 7 4 ; mortgages house, 1 6 4 ; municipal jobs, 156, 158 & n, 1 6 9 ; obituaries, 1 8 5 1 8 6 ; patriotism, 63-66, 68, 7 5 ; personal habits, 1 8 7 ; physical appearance, 35, 1 8 6 - 1 8 7 ; as political figure, 1 6 9 ; as Sealer of Leather, 34, 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 & i 5 9 n ; as tanner, 33~35 & 34 n > wartime activities,

rules for singing-school, 3 7 - 3 8 ; as singer, 3 5 ; as singing-master, 3 9— 40, 262, (Boston) 36, 115—117, 134, 136, 253, (Dover) 183, (Needham) 183, (Providence) 7 3 74 & 74n, (Stoughton) 72, 234, (Weymouth) 71 & n; and Tans'ur's music, 48; texts in Continental Harmony, 1 7 7 ; texts in PsalmSinger's Amusement, 1 2 0 - 1 2 1 ; as writer, 56, 78n, 81-88, 1 2 2 - 1 2 4 , 143-146, 176-177 evaluations: Billings evaluated, 1 8 7 - 1 8 9 ; by Barbour, 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 ; by Chase, 2 1 8 ; by Dwight, 2 0 9 - 2 1 0 ; by Edwards, 2 1 6 - 2 1 7 ; by Gould, 207—208; by Hastings, 2 0 3 ; by himself, 50—51, 60, 88; by Hitchcock, 2 1 9 ; by Hood, 205; by Metcalf, 213—214; by Mitchell, 204; by Perkins, 2 1 0 ; by Ritter, 209; by Sonneck, 2 1 1 2 1 3 ; by Thayer, 205—207; twentieth-century evaluations, 2 1 5 - 2 1 6 publications: occasional publications, 1 3 2 ; see al-

75

musical & literary. as anthem composer, 96—102, 1 1 3 ; anthem texts, 9 7 - 1 0 1 , 113-114, 1 7 8 ; benefit concert for, 1 6 3 ; career summarized, 1 5 7 ; and cello, 2 1 6 ; claimed as first American psalmodist, 1 4 0 ; as composer, 61, 90—91, 147, 149—150; as editor of Boston Magazine, 124, 127, 1 2 9 130, 263; harmonic style, i 6 7 n i68n; method of composition, 1 7 1 1 7 5 ; music characterized, 188; music performed in concerts, 1 5 1 - 1 5 3 ; music published by others, 1 3 6 140 & i39n, 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 , 1 9 6 - 1 9 7 , 202, 2 2 5 ; music published in England, 1 5 4 ; music published in twentieth century, 2 1 4 ; musical training, 3 5 - 3 6 ; and organ, 2 5 1 2 5 2 ; performance of music, App. II passim-, piece on death of Washington, 184ns and pitch pipe, 2 1 6 ; as poet, 1 1 7 - 1 2 1 , 1 4 1 - 1 4 3 ; reputation, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 , 1 5 5 - 1 5 6 ; "rules for composition," 55, 1 7 2 - 1 7 3 ;

so

ANTHEM

PSALM

PSALM

127, ANTHEM

47, for

ANTHEM EASTER,

T H E BIRD and T H E LARK, PEACE,

AN ANTHEM, & bibliography; tunebooks, see Continental Harmony, Music in Miniature, NewEngland Psalm-Singer, Psalm-Singer's Amusement, Singing Master's Assistant, Suffolk Harmony, & bibliography Billings, William (son of composer), birth & death, 104 Billings, William (another son of composer), 183 & n; birth, 159 Billings family Bible, 2 1 3 Billings family, church affiliation, 3 1 32 Billings and Holden Collection, 7on, 200; introduction quoted, 201 Billings and Holden Society, Boston, 200

293

INDEX BIRD,

THE,

and

THE

LARK

(Bil-

BRATTLE STREET ( B i l l i n g s ) , 267

lings), 1 4 1 n, 2 7 1 , 2 7 7 ; published, 181 Book of Common Prayer, 97 Boston, Mass.: Aretinian Society, 1 5 2 ; Brattle Street Church, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 , 134, 1 8 6 ; Brattle Street Church, organ, 2 5 1 & n; British occupation, 64, 76; composers fall from favor, 1 9 7 ; concert life, 160 & n; First Church, 133-136; First Church, organ, 2 5 m , 252—254; Hollis Street Church, 32, 57, 152, 260; Hollis Street Church, pictured, 265; King's Chapel, 136, 152, 1 6 3 ; map in 1769, 260; New South Church, 3 1 - 3 3 , 36, 67, 260; Old South Church, 36, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 , i35n, 249; Old South Church singing-school, 262; psalmody ca. 1720, 9 - 2 2 ; psalmody, Billings's place in, 1 3 2 ; reformers in 1720s, 1 5 ; South Latin School, 1 1 5 , 1 1 7 ; South Writing School, 3 3 ; singingschools, 20; singing-schools of Billings, 39; Stone Chapel, see King's Chapel, this entry; Tans'ur's music sung, 4 7 ; Trinity Church, 132, 1 5 2 ; tunebook publication, 1 6 1 163 BOSTON ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

"Brattle-Street Collection" Psalm and Hymn Tunes],

[LXXX 200

BRIDGEWATER ( E d s o n ) , 2 3 0

Bridgewater Collection (Brown), 200 Brigham, Clarence, 44-45 & 44n45n, io9n, 1 1 in British psalmody, as model for Americans, 2 1 2 Brittain, Luther, i83n Britton, Allen, n , 18, 53, 216, 243 Bromfield, Edward, i35n, 250; organ, 249 BROOKFIELD (Billings), 59-60, 90,

" i j 137) i39> > °3> " 5 l88

2

Brookline, Mass., 207 Brown, Bartholomew, 200 Brown, Francis, 1 9 0 - 1 9 1 Brown, William, 153 Brown University, 74 Brownson, Oliver, i38n, 247 Bull, Amos, 96, I38n Byles, Mather, 49 & n, 59, 129, 1 3 2 133) I77> 247) 2 5 1 ; loyalist politics, 65; poetry in New-England Psalm-Singer, 56-57 Byles, Samuel, 59 Byrd, William, of Virginia, 2on Caccini, Giulio, 239 C A L V A R Y ( B i l l i n g s ) , see S T . T H O M A S

119

CALVARY (Read), 199 Calvin, John, 4, 5 & n, 6-7 ; opposed to instrumental music in church, 249

Boston Handel and Haydn Society, 210 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection (Mason), 202 Boston Magazine, 130, 1 3 2 , 1 4 5 - 1 4 6 , 278; content, 1 2 6 - 1 2 7 ; first i s s u e described, 125 ; proposal, 124—125; reorganization, 1 2 8 ; second issue, 1 2 9 ; song in, 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 ; song reproduced, 264; title page reproduced, 263 Boston Massacre, 65 Boston Tea Party, 65 Boyer, Daniel, 1 1 6 , 262 Brady & Tate, see New Version of Psalms

Calvinist beliefs about music, 4, 8, 27 Cambridge, Mass., 57-58 Campbell, John P., 1 9 1 , 194 canon: defined by Billings, 8 7; discussed by Billings, 89 CANTERBURY, 14,

16

Capen, Theophilus, 72 Carp enter, [Asahel?], 13811 Carr, Benjamin, 96 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 239 Chase, Gilbert, 218 Chauncey, Charles, 30, 2 5 2 - 2 5 3 , 253n CHESTER (Billings), 59-60, 75, 90,

294

INDEX H I , 1 1 7 - 1 1 9 , 137, 139, 182, 247; popularity, 70 & n; stimulates Revolution, 67; text attribution, 57ns text quoted, 63-64 "choosing" notes, 2 35n Chorister's Comfanion (Jocelin & Doolittle), 139 & n, 2 2 8 - 2 3 0 ; Billings's music in, 1 3 8 - 1 3 9 Christian Harmonist (Holyoke), 6 in Christian Harmony (Ingalls), 267 Christian Hymns, Poems and Spiritual Songs (Relly), 147 Christmas, puritan opposition to, 1 4 4 145 CIVIL AMUSEMENT

(Hall),

199

Clark, Rebecca, 31 Clark, William, 31 Clarke, John, 128, 253 & n; funeral sermon for S. Cooper, 134 Clements Library, 1 1 on, n 6 n Cobb, David, 182 Cole, Fannie L. Gwinner, 216 Cole, John, 96 Collection

of Hymn

Tunes

(Law),

i38n Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes ( F l a g g ) , 22, 44n-45n, 2 2 1 ; title page, logn Collection of the Psalm and Hymn Tunes used by the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, i2 5n Colman, Colonel, 163

influence, 1 8 0 ; introduction, 1 7 0 1 7 1 ; publication, 1 6 6 - 1 6 9 ; scription proposal, 1 6 7 ; texts, 177 Cooper, Samuel, 1 3 3 ; death, 1 3 4 ; funeral broadside reproduced, 264 Cooper, William, 28, 192 copyright, 139n-14on, 166, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 , App. I fassim-, Billings's Suffolk Harmony, 266; influence, 229-230 & n copyright law: English, 2 2 1 ; federal, 229; Massachusetts, 227-229, 266 Cotton, John, 3, 7, 1 2 - 1 3 Cotton, M., 226 Cowley, A., i2 5n Crawford, Richard, iogn CREATION ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 7 0 , 1 7 8 ,

Daniel, Oliver, 3 m, Daniel, Ralph, 97, 2 1 5 ; on Billings's 112—113 Dartmouth College 193 DAVID'S

214 1 0 1 , 1 3 3 , 178, stylistic growth, Handel Society,

LAMENTATION

(Billings),

89, 2 4 1 ; music quoted, 99; text quoted, 98 Deaolph, [Amasa? Mark Antony?], i]8n

COLUMBIA ( B i l l i n g s ) , 7 5 , 1 1 9 & n

Columbian Harmony (Robbins), 196 Columbian Repository (Holyoke), 6in Committee of Correspondence, 65 compiler, role in psalmody, 23 Comfleat Instructor for the Violin (Victor), 1 4 m Comfleat Psalmodist (Arnold), 55

180;

music quoted, 1 7 9 ; text quoted, 177, 180 Croft, William, criticized, 198 Cushing, Joseph, 69 Cushing, T . , 226

DEERFIELD

CONNECTION ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 7 0

Continental Harmony (Billings), 53, 67, 95, i23n, 2o6n, 207, 2 3 1 , 267, 2 7 1 - 2 7 2 ; advertised, 1 8 2 ; content, 170, 1 7 7 - 1 8 0 ; copyright, 229; date of composition, 1 6 5 ; evaluated, 1 8 0 ; frontispiece, 1 7 0 ;

295

(Billings),

see

THOMAS

TOWN

Delaware Harmony (Fobes), 196 Deming, John, 1 1 6 , 262 Dialogo delta musica antica (Galilei), 102 Dickinson, Clarence, 214 Divine, Father (George Baker), 86 Divine Songs (Wood), 162 Dorchester, Mass., i 6 o n - i 6 i n DORCHESTER ( B i l l i n g s ) , 95

Dover, Mass., 183 "Down steers the bass," poem (Byles),

57> 119

INDEX Draper, Edward, 77 Dufay, Guillaume, 172 Dunbar, Elijah, 1 6 i n

Fox turned Preacher, see The Porcupine, or Fox turned Preacher Framingham, Mass., 162 FRAMINGHAM (Billings), 1 1 1 , i i 2 n , 113 Franklin, James, 14 French, Jacob, 18, 79 & n, 96, 162 & n, 200 FRIENDSHIP (Lyon), 2 24n fuge, j 4 fuging, Billings's defence of, 17 5— 1 7 7 ; defined by Billings, 109 fuging-tune, 6, 22, 178, 203, 210, 2 1 5 , 240; attacked, 192, 1 9 4 ; Billings's style, 1 1 3 ; described, 9 1 - 9 3 > history of, 91 s performance of, 238 Fux, J . J., 191

DUNSTABLE ( B i l l i n g s ) , 9211, 9311

Dunstable, John, 172 Dwight, John Sullivan, 209 DYING

CHRISTIAN

(Billings),

see

"Vital spark of heavenly flame" Easy Instructor (Little & 196—197 Edes, Benjamin, 65, i23n Edes & Gill, 52, 65, 68-69 EDOM (West), 1 9 8 - 1 9 9 EGYPT ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

Smith),

177

Elements of Mustek Disflay'd (Tans'u r ) , 53n, 87n Eliot, John, 87, 1 2 7 - 1 3 0 , 252 Elliot, Deacon, 69 Elson, Louis, 2 1 7 EMMANUEL (Billings), iogn, 119, 1 4 3 ; text quoted, 1 2 0 - 1 2 1 EMMAUS ( B i l l i n g s ) , 95

Encyclopedia of Music (Moore), 6in Episcopal church in Boston, 78n Essay on Music (Hubbard), 1 9 3 - 1 9 6 Essex Harmony (Bayley), 42n, i39n Essex Harmony, pt. II, 200 ethos, doctrine of, 6—8 EUROPE ( B i l l i n g s ) , 93 & n, 1 1 8 , 267

Eustis, William, 182 Evangelical Harmony 162

(Belknap),

Evans, Charles, 78 Everett, Edward, 66 Exeter, N.H., 45, 197 EXETER ( B i l l i n g s ) , 95

Farmington, Me., 162 Federal Harmony, 14.111, i82n Fielding, Henry, 8 1 - 8 2 & 82n Fields, W. C., 86 Filtz, Anton, 152 Finney, Ross Lee, 2 1 5 Fisher, William Arms, 214 Flagg, Josiah, 69; as compiler, 2 3 ; as engraver, 45n, 259 Folsom, John, 77

Galilei, Vincenzo, 102 gallery orchestra, 255 & n Garrett, Allen, 2i8n Gates, Capt., 75 Gentleman and Lady's Musical Companion (Stickney), 79, 137, 224; price, 1 1 7 n GERMANTOWN (Billings), reproduced, 267 Giardini, Felice, 195 Gill, John, 65 Gillet, Alexander, 1380 Gilman, John Ward, 45 Gilman, Samuel, 2 55n Goldman, Richard Franko, 214 GOLGOTHA (Billings), iogn, M & n Gould, Nathaniel D., 28, 35, 130, 203, 207-209, 2 1 5 ; anecdotes about Billings, 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 ; on Billings and Samuel Adams, 66; on Billings's education, 3 3 ; on Billings's trade, 3 4 ; describes Billings, 1 8 7 ; on eighteenth-century psalmody, 26-27 Gram, Hans, 27, 96, 162, 1 6 6 ; and Billings's music, 1 6 4 ; keyboard skill of, 164—165 Greenleaf, John, 1 3 3 GREENFIELD ( E d s o n ) , 2 3 0

296

Greenwich, Mass., 1 1 in, 273

INDEX Grounds and Rules of Mustek ter), 2 1 , 48, 206

(Wal-

HACKERS

repro-

HALL

(Billings),

duced, 267 Hall, Levi, 7 3 - 7 4 & 74.11 "Hallelujah" Chorus (Handel), 152, i6in Hallo well, Me., 201 Handel, George Frederic, 6, 1 2 3 , 1 5 3 , • 5 5 - 1 5 6 , 172, 19°) 1 93) !95> criticized, 198 HANOVER (Billings), text quoted, 1 1 8 Harmonia Americana (Holyoke), 79n, 162 Harmonia Sacra (Butts), title page, io9n Harmonic Minstrelsey (Janes), 18on, 196 Harmonist's Companion (Belknap), 162 Harmony of Harmony (French), 1 8 m , 267 Harmony of Maine (Belcher), 162, 230 Harrisburg, Pa., 197 HARTFORD (Billings), io9n Harvard College, 5 7 - 5 8 , 72, 82, 1 1 5 , 162, 228, 253n, 266 Hastings, Thomas, 2 8n, 39n, 188 & n, 202—203, 2 0 9 HATFIELD (Billings?), 267 Hawkins, A., i2 5n Hawkins, Sir John, 87 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 210 Heard, William, 169 Heath, Sukey, 267 HEATH ( B i l l i n g s ) , 92n, 94 HINGHAM ( B i l l i n g s ) , 59

Hitchcock, H. Wiley, 122, 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 hogreeve, job described, I58n Holden, Oliver, 25n, 27, 5on, 79 & n, 96, 1 6 1 & n, 162, 183, i85n, 200, 2 1 7 ; anti-fuging remarks, 1 7 6 ; becomes editor of Worcester Collection, 165 Hollis, Thomas, 2 53n HOLLIS STREET ( B i l l i n g s ) , 57

297

Holt, Benjamin, 200 Holyoke, Samuel, 27, 6in, 79 & n, 96, 165, 200 i anti-fuging remarks, 6, 175 Hood, George, 203, 205, 209 Hopkinson, Francis, i j i n Howard, John Tasker, 2 1 7 Howe, John, 1 1 in, 273 Hubbard, John, 6 - 7 , 193 & n, 1 9 4 i95 Hutchinson, Thomas, 222, 226 Hymn on Peace (Wood), io5n, 1 4 m hymnody, related to musical mainstream, 7 imitation, defined by Billings, n o INDEPENDENCE ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 1 9

Ingalls, Jeremiah, 18 instrumental vs. vocal music, 3 5 - 3 6 Introduction to the Singing of PsalmTunes ( T u f t s ) , 21 & n, 4 i n Ives, Charles, 17 JARGON (Billings), 86-87, 89, 1 1 9 , 1 5 4 ; explained, 82—83 & 83ns printed in nineteenth century, 204 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 1 5 Jenks, Stephen, 18 Jocelin, Simeon, 140, 225n, 247; on style in psalmody, 52 JORDAN ( B i l l i n g s ) , i n , 1 5 0 , 2 0 3 ; in

nineteenth-century collections, 202 Johnston, Benjamin, 106 Johnston, Thomas, 22 & n, 106 JUDEA

(Billings),

90,

119,

143

Juhan, Alexander, 153 Kern Alter und neuer, i25n Kimball, Jacob, 79 & n, 162, 165, 200 King (Oliver?), i38n Knapp, William, 22, 204, 2 1 7 Lady's Magazine (London), i25n Lafayette, Marquis de, 134 LAMENTATION

lings); 75,

OVER

BOSTON

11

7, "9S

(Bil-

described, 9 7-9 8 ; text quoted, 64; text printed by Thayer, 205

INDEX Lassus, Roland de, 175 Latham, William, 18411 Laughton, Henry, 32 Law, Andrew, 6, 29, 105, n o n , n 6 n , 196 & n, 200, 225n, 247; Billings tunes in Select Harmony, 75; exclusion of Billings's music, 1 3 7 ; as musical reformer, 2 7 ; reform statement, 1 9 0 - 1 9 1 ; as student in Providence, 74; and tempo, 242 Law, Samuel Andrew, 1 1 on The Lawfulness, Excellency and Advantage of Instrumental Mustek, 250 & n

Massachusetts Compiler (Gram, Holyoke, Holden), 27, 162, 1 6 5 ; functional harmony explained, 1 9 1 5 quoted, 2 9n Massachusetts Collection (Mann),

LEBANON

quoted, 94 MENDOM (Billings), I09n, 1 1 1 & n Merbecke, John, 1 0 1 Meridian Harmony (Sanger), 196 Metcalf, Frank J . , 2 1 3 - 2 1 4 ; researches on Billings, 3on~3in metrical psalms, 46-47 Middlesex Collection, 198, 200 Middlesex Harmony (Babcock), 162 Middlesex Musical Society, 195 MILFORD (Stephenson), 203

(Billings),

59,

118;

cor-

rections, 88 LENOX ( E d s o n ) , 28n, 2 3 0 LEWIS-TOWN ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

177

Lindstrom, Carl, 2 1 7 lining-out, 1 2 - 1 4 & i3n & i4n, 1 7 1 , 208 "Lock Hospital" Collection (Madan), 200 Lowens, Irving, 48n, 56, io9n, 136, 1 7 1 , 2 1 5 ; on fuging-tune, 9 1 - 9 3 Lowinsky, Edward, 174 Luening, Otto, 2 1 5 Lutheranism and music, 5 Lyon, James, 29, 4. in, 1 5 3 , 2 1 2 , 25on; as compiler, 2 3 ; as composer, 224 & n M'Culloch, John, 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 MacDougall, Hamilton C., 217 Machias, Me., i83n MACHIAS (Lyon), 224n Madan, Martin, 155, 190 M A J E S T Y ( B i l l i n g s ) , 90 MANCHESTER ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 1 1 ,

inn

MARBLEHEAD ( B i l l i n g s ) , 95

Marietta, Ohio, 154 154

Martini, Jean Paul Egide, 153 MARYLAND ( B i l l i n g s ) , 92n, 93n, 1 3 9 ,

188 Mason, Lowell, 188, 202

Mather, Cotton, i^n, 250; opposes instrumental music in church, 249; on psalmody, 8 Mather, Increase, 57 May, Joseph, i84n MEDWAY (Billings), 92n, 9 3 ; music

MILTON ( B i l l i n g s ) , 93

Mitchell, Nahum, 49n, 87, i84n, 200, 203-204 & 203n, 208-209; Billings article reprinted, 2 0 7 ; on Billings's JARGON, 8 2 - 8 3 ; o n Samuel Adams, 66 MODERN M U S I C ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 0 8 ,

115,

1 1 9 , 121—122, 206 Monson, Mass., i83n MONTAGUE (Swan), 25n Monteverdi, Claudio, 7, 102 MONTGOMERY ( M o r g a n ) , 1 9 8 - 1 9 9 Moore, Jacob B., 6in Moore, John Weeks, 6 in MORPHEUS (Billings), reproduced, 267

Mangier, Joyce Ellen, 74n

MARSHFIELD ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

i8in, 196-197 Massachusetts Harmony, i39n, 14111 Massachusetts Historical Society, 128, i84n

Morton, Perez, 49n, 58 & n, 65n. See also P. M . Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp, 58n Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 2 1 0 deMuris, Jean, 87

298

INDEX Music in Miniature (Billings), 93 & n, 107, 109, 1 1 8 , i39n, 1 4 1 , 170, 178, 206, 227, 2 3 1 , 267, 2 7 2 ; characterized, 1 1 0 ; content, 1 0 5 1 0 6 ; format, 104.; publication, 106 music printing, 25, 52, 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 , 1 3 3 , 264 Musical Magazine (Hastings), 202 Musical Magazine ( L a w ) , n o n Musical Primer ( L a w ) , 1 9 0 ; quoted,

diated by Billings, 8 8 ; significance, 4 1 , 68-69; S ° U Providence, 74; subscribers, 6 2 - 6 3 ; texts, 59, 1 1 8 , 247; title page discussed, 4 2 ; tune titles, 43-44, 260 NEW JERUSALEM (Ingalls), 1 9 8 - 1 9 9 NEW

PLYMOUTH

(Billings),

see

PLYMOUTH

NEW ENGLAND ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 5 4

New Universal Harmony (Bayley), 1 1 0 , 224 New Version of the Psalms (Barnard), 21 New Version of the Psalms (Brady & T a t e ) , 59, i05n, 1 1 7 , 147, 177, 247-248 & 248ns importance in colonies, 47 New York City, psalmody, i8n New York Harmony (Seymour), 196 Newberry Library, i84n Newburyport, Mass., 47, 58 Newport, R.I., 1 3 3 Nightingale, Samuel, 74 & n Norman, John, co-publisher of Boston Magazine, 1 2 5 ; as music engraver, 1 4 1 & n, 261 Norman, William, 1 2 6 ; music type, 264

New England Harmony, 137 "New-England Hymn," poem (Byles),

NORTH PROVIDENCE

27 musical reform, 6-7, 27-29, 52, 1 8 9 1 9 8 ; criticized, 197-200 musical style, American, 1 7 5 ; American vs. European, 27-28 Nathan, Hans, 48n, i84n, 243 Needham, Mass., 183 N eu-vermehrt-und vollstandiges Gesang-Buch, i2 5n New American Melody (French), 79n, 1 4 m , 162 New and Complete Introduction (Bayley), 48 New Collection of Psalm Tunes, 105, 141

57) 65

New-England Psalm-Singer (Billings), 79, 82, 89, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 , 1 1 2 , I2

3 > 136-137) 39 > n

I

n

l68

> 7> i8

216, 2 3 1 , 267, 2 7 2 - 2 7 3 ; Chap. 11 •passim; advice "to Musical Practitioners," 5 3 - 5 6 ; Billings describes pride in, 8 1 ; content, 59; copyright attempts, 69, 2 2 1 - 2 2 7 ; e n " graving, 44-45 & 44n-45n; Essay on Sound, 4 9 - 5 0 ; evaluated, by Hood, 205; by Sonneck, 2 1 1 ; by Thayer, 206 & n; experimental quality, 50; frontispiece, 44; frontispiece reproduced, 259; fugingtunes, 9 3 ; introduction, 4 8 - 4 9 ; music printed by other compilers, 59-60, 78; popularity, 69—70; price, i i 7 n ; published, 69; repu-

Norman & White, 1 2 7 - 1 2 8

94

(Billings),

92n,

Northampton Collection (Mann), i8in Northboro, Mass., 39n, io5n, 162 Northern Harmony ( M a x i m ) , 1 8 i n OLD HUNDRED (Bourgeois), 6, 198 Oliver, Peter, 67 Olmsted, Timothy, 225n organ, in Boston Congregational churches, 135 & n, 2 4 9 - 2 5 3 ; in First Church, Providence, 74ns in Trinity Church, Boston, 1 3 2 - 1 3 3 ; suggested use of in performance, 2

54

"P. M . " (Perez Morton), 57, 59 Palestrina, G. P., 26, 1 7 4 - 1 7 5 paper making, 61—62

299

INDEX PSALM 8 ( L y o n ) , 4 m PSALM 23 (Hopkinson), 4 m

Parker, Samuel, 128, 1 3 2 - 1 3 3 , 251 Parkman, Ebenezer, 3911, 145 Paul, Saint, 4, 144 PEACE,

AN

ANTHEM,

see

PSALM 34 (Stephenson), 2 0 3

anthems

cited "God is the K i n g " Peck, John, 177 Penniman, Amos, 169, i83n, 185 Penniman, George, i83n performance practice, accompaniment, 2 4 8 - 2 5 5 ; dynamics, 2 3 7 238; fuging, 238; instrumental doublings, 236; ornamentation, 239-240 & 239ns physical arrangement of choir, 2 4 0 - 2 4 1 ; solo passages, 2 3 8 ; tempo, 2 4 1 - 2 4 6 ; text stanzas, 246-248 & 248ns vocal production, 2 3 7 ; voice parts, 2 3 1 236 Pergolesi, G. B., 195 Perkins, C. C., 2 1 0 Perotinus Magnus, 174 Peters, Phillis Wheatley, 134, 264 Philadelphia: Billings's music printed in, 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 ; concerts in, 1 5 2 - 1 5 3 PHILADELPHIA ( B i l l i n g s ) , 92n, 93n,

95) 139

Philadelphia Harmony (Adgate), 196 Pierce, Edward, 66, 187, 207 Pierpont, Benjamin Jr., 78 PILGRIM'S FAREWELL

(French?),

73

& n Pilsbury, Amos, 162 plain tune, 95; described, 89-90 Plato, 6 Plymouth, Mass., First Church, 70 PLYMOUTH ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

PSALM 95 (Lyon), 4 m PSALM 1 0 0 N E W ,

4m

Psalmodia Evangelica ( T . Williams), I54n Psalmodist's Comf anion (French), 73n, i62n psalmody, "ancient," 2 0 0 - 2 0 2 ; British, 22—23; instrumental accompaniment of, 2 55n; oral tradition, 9 - 1 8 , 24; as profession, 1 6 1 ; in Puritan life, 3; recreational function, 45 & n; related to musical mainstream, 7; stylistic changes, 51-52 Psalm-Singer's Amusement (Billings),

104, 138) i39 > i4i> 7> 273n

22

274; characterized, 108, n o , 1 1 4 1 1 5 ; comments by Thayer, 206 & n; content, 1 0 9 ; date of composition, 1 1 2 ; music printed by other compilers, i n ; prefatory comments, 1 0 7 ; printing history, 1 1 1 ; posthumous edition, i n , 1 8 i n , 196, 274; publication, 1 0 7 ; texts by Billings, 1 1 9 ; title page, 108 & n; title page reproduced, 261 Psalms of David ( 1 7 6 7 ) , 78n, i25n Psalms of David, Imitated (Watts), I 2 247-248 & 248n; importance in colonies, 47 Purcell, Henry, 1 9 5 ; criticized, 198 Pythagoras, 87

59> *+7> 77> °5>

267

Pope, Alexander, 1 1 1 Pope, William, i83n Pope John X X I I , 5 The Porcufine, or Fox turnedPreacher (Billings), 1 2 2 , 143, 146, 278; attribution, 122, i 2 3 n ; described, 1 2 3 - 1 2 4 ; title page reproduced, 263 Prince, Thomas, i35n, 249 Providence, R.I., 39, 7 3 - 7 4 & 74n, 137ns First Church, 74ns First Church, organ, 2 51

Rabelais, Francois, 86 RAYNHAM (Billings), reproduced, 267 Read, Daniel, 18, 57, 2 1 7 , 224 REDEMPTION (Billings), text quoted, 121 Regular Singing, 9—11 & ion, 18 Relly, James, 147 & n, 149—150, 247

300

RESIGNATION ( B i l l i n g s ) , 1 1 3

"responsive" tunes, 9 1 ; described, 90 RETROSPECT (Billings), 97-98 REVELATION ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

170

INDEX Revere, Paul, 68, 134, 206; as engraver, 44-45 & 4 4 n-45n, 259; as patriot, 64-65 Revolutionary War, 76, 103 RICHMOND ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

137

Ritter, Frederic Louis, 130, 209 Robbins, Chandler, 70 Root, George F., 202 Rossini, Gioacchino, 239 Rourke, Constance, 46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1 9 1 Rowland, David, 74n Roxbury, Mass., 75, 78 Royal American Magazine, 124 Royal Melody Complete (Tans'ur), 23> 4 « , 47, 55, 1 1 3 , 2 2 i , 2 6 1 ; frontispiece, 4 5 ; influence on Billings, 48, 5 3 ROYALSTON (Wood), 105 Rudiments of Music ( L a w ) , I38n, 267 Rural Harmony (Kimball), 79n, 162 Russell, Joseph, 135 Sacred Dirges . . . on the Death of General George Washington (Holden), i84n Sacred Harmony ( 1 7 8 8 ? ) , 1 4 m Sacred Harp (White & K i n g ) , 175 ST.

THOMAS

(Billings),

170,

177,

18 on Salem, Mass., 39n, 1 1 6 ; East Church, 115 Salem Collection, 28, 192, 196 S A P P H I C ODE. See

SAPPHO

SAPPHO ( B i l l i n g s ) , 90, 1 3 7 , 2 2 5

scavenger, job described, i58n Scholes, Percy, 13ft Schuman, William, 2 1 5 Schiitz, Heinrich, 102 Scott, Levi, i83n Scott, Minnie Fowler, i83n Sealer of Leather, job described, 1590 secular music, separateness from sacred, 1 5 1 Selby, William, 96, 152, 164 Select Harmony (Bayley), 1390 Select Harmony (Brownson), i39n

301

Select Harmony ( L a w ) , 75, 1 3 7 - 1 3 8 ; price, 1 1 7 n s title page, io9n Select Number of Plain Tunes ( L a w ) , 105, 137 Selection of Sacred Harmony, 154 Sermon on Sacred Music (Campbell), 191 set-piece, 96; defined, 89, 95 "setting the tune," i3n Sewall, Samuel, 16 & n Shakespeare, William, 1 5 5 - 1 5 6 shape-note singing, southern, 237 & n Shays' Rebellion, 159 SHILOH

(Billings),

118,

141,

144,

1 4 6 - 1 4 7 ; text quoted, 1 4 2 - 1 4 3 Shrewsbury, Mass., 2 55n Singing Master's Assistant (Billings), 53> 75) 1 0 3 - 1 0 5 , 1 1 2 , i23n, 124, I 39 n > 154) 157) 17O) l 8 l > 2 0 5 ) 2 3 1 , 274-277, Chap, i n -passim; characterized, n o ; content, 8 9; copyright attempt, 77, 2 2 7 ; evaluated by Sonneck, 2 1 1 ; by Thayer, 206 & n; fuging-tunes, 9 3 - 9 5 ; music printed by other compilers, 7 8; organ mentioned, 2 5 1 ; prefatory comments, 1 0 7 ; printing history, 78; publication, 7 7 ; purpose, 80; reasons for success, 79-80; significance, 77—78; text in, 247; texts by Billings in, 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 ; title page, 80 Singing Master's Assistant, 4th ed. (Billings), introduction, 78n Singing of Psalmes a Gospel-Ordinance (Cotton), 3 singing-school, 9, 26; Billings's rules for, 3 7 - 3 8 ; effect on repertory, 2 3 2 4 ; function and description, 3 7 ; purpose, 20; recreational function, 39 & n; relationship to church, 29; trains composers, 24-25 & Sixteen Anthems ( F l a g g ) , 22, 45n, 113 Smart, Christopher, 1 1 5 & n Sonneck, Oscar G., 1 5 0 - 1 5 1 , 160, 2 1 0 - 2 1 3 , 25on Sons of Liberty, 65

INDEX South Hadley, Mass., 13711 "southernizing," 17 3

Tate & Brady, see New Psalms

SOUTHWELL N E W ,

TAUNTON ( B i l l i n g s ) , 93

4m

Stamp Act, 62, 65 Stephenson, Joseph, 91, 152, 203-204 Stickney, John, i37n, 2 2 4 - 2 2 5 ; and tempo, 242n STOCKBRIDGE ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

137

Stockbridge, Charles, 49 & n, 82 Stone Chapel, see King's Chapel Stoughton, Mass., 39, 7 1 - 7 2 , 137n, i 6 o n - i 6 i n , 225 ; Billings's singingschool, 234 Stoughton Collection, 7on, 200—201 Stoughton Musical Society, 7 1 - 7 2 , i6in Stoughton Musical Society's nial Collection, 201 Strong, Joseph, i38n SUDBURY

(Billings),

see

Centen-

WEST

SUD-

BURY

SUFFOLK ( B i l l i n g s ) , 59

Suffolk Harmony (Billings), 1 1 2 , I23n, 134, 138, 1 3 9 ^ 146, 1 8 1 , 206n, 2 7 7 - 2 7 8 ; content, 1 4 6 - 1 5 0 ; copyright, 228 & n ; published, 1 4 1 ; text by Billings, 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 ; texts in, 2 4 7 ; title page reproduced, 266 SUNDAY (Billings), discussed, 9 1 ; text quoted, 90 Swan, Rachel, 72 Swan, Robert, 72 Swan, Timothy, 25n, 200, 225n Symmes, Thomas, 4, sn, 9, 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 4 - 1 7 , 19-20, 29, 390 Symfhonia Grandaeva Rediviva, 201 & n

7 on,

tanner's trade described, 3 3 - 3 4 Tans'ur, William, 22, 1 1 3 , 1 7 1 , 204, 2 1 2 , 2 1 7 ; anthem texts, 97; fuging-tunes, 92; influence in America, 4 7 ; influence on Billings, 53 & n taste, 27, 189 Tate, Nahum, 1 2 0 - 1 2 1

Version of

Thayer, Alexander W., 34, 75, 122, i23n, 183, 203, 206, 208—209, 2 6 3 ; lecture on American psalmody, 205 Thomas, Isaiah, 126, i39n, 1 4 1 , i 6 i n , 164, 183, 264; on Billings, 1 4 0 ; and copyright law, 2 2 8 - 2 2 9 ; a s music publisher, 1 6 5 - 1 6 6 ; typographical music printing, 52 Thomas and Andrews, 1 6 1 , 180, 185ns tunebooks, 1 6 5 - 1 6 6 THOMAS

TOWN

(Billings),

i8on-

i8in Tileston, John, 47-48 Topsfield, Mass., 162 Townsend, David, 163 Townshend Acts, 62 Tractate on Church Music, 2 5 3n Trent, Council of, 5 T R U E P E N I T E N T ( B i l l i n g s ) , see

HAT-

FIELD

Tuckerman, Edward, i64n Tuckey, William, 1 5 3 Tufts, John, 21 tune supplement, 1 0 4 - 1 0 5 tune titles, 43 & n tune with extension, 91, 95 ; described, 90 tunebook, eclectic, 1 3 7 - 1 3 9 [Tunes], (Johnston), 22 & n, 106 [Tunes] (Turner), 21 & n Tunes in Three Parts, i2 5n, 216 Turner, James, 21 Two Anthems (Selby), 1 4 m Union Harmony (Holden), i82n, 184 Unitarian controversy, Boston, 78n United States Sacred Harmony (Pilsbury), 162 Universal Psalmodist (Williams), 23, 42n, 205, 221 Urania (Lyon), 22, 4 1 , 137, 2 2 1 ; title page, iogn "Usual W a y " of singing, 1 0 - 1 2 , 15, 17-18

302

INDEX verse in American culture, 46

WEYMOUTH ( B i l l i n g s ) , 267

VICTORY ( B i l l i n g s ) , 267

"While shepherds watched their flocks," poem (Tate), text quoted, 120—121

Village Harmony, 196 Virginia, singing-school, 2 on Virginia, University of, 1 1 5 " W . B . " letter, 3 5 - 3 6 Wagner, Richard, 210 Wallach, Moses, 169 Walter, Thomas, 9, 15, 21 Washington, George, death of, 1 8 4 ; memorial service, 251 WASHINGTON

(Billings),

92n,

94,

139 Washington, Ky., 1 9 1 Waterhouse manuscript, i64n, 267 Watts, Isaac, 1 1 7 , 132—133, 150, 199. See also Psalms of David, Imitated WATTS (Lyon), 4 m Webb, Thomas, 2 1 0 Webster, Noah, dictionary, 54—55 Wesley, Charles, 59 West, Benjamin, i38n W E S T SUDBURY ( B i l l i n g s ) ,

Whitefield, George, 1 7 7 ; death, 58 & n Whole Booke of Psalmes (East), 43n Whole Booke of Psalmes (Ravenscroft), 43n Williams, Aaron, 1 5 2 - 1 5 3 , 1 7 1 , 195, 204, 2 1 2 Williams, Thomas, 154 Wood, Abraham, 105 & n, i38n, 162, 200 Woodbury, Isaac, 202 Woodruff, Merit, 25n Worcester Collection, 125, 139 & n, 140, 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 , i82n, 184, 228; Billings's music in, 1 3 8 - 1 3 9 The World of Music, 206 Wyeth, John, 197 Wyeth's Repository, 196 Youths Entertaining A musement (Dawson), 21 & n, i25n

18in

Weymouth, Mass., 39, 71

303

Library

of Congress Cataloging

in Publication

Data

M c K a y , David P 1927William Billings of Boston. Bibliography: p. 1 . Billings, William, 1 7 4 6 - 1 8 0 0 . I. Crawford, Richard, 1 9 3 5 joint author. II. Title. ML410.B588M3 783'.092'4 [B] 74-19035 ISBN 0-691-09118-8