within the psalm-singing tradition some very interesting departures from European practice were very soon to appear. There was an inevitable decline in musical literacy after the first generation of the Pilgrims, brought about by the wilderness conditions in which they found themselves; psalm-singing was transformed from a written to a mainly oral tradition, and despite the efforts of the divines and the ‘educated’ musicians to instill what they called “regular singing” (singing, that is, at that neat brisk jogtrot which every church organist still today likes to hear from his congregation), the folk persisted in planting their own fingerprint on the singing of the psalms. It is fascinating to see, at the very beginning of America’s cultural history, the kind of clash between native and imported European tradition that was to recur again and again.
Because it was a folk and an oral tradition and frowned upon by educated people, we have only unsympathetic accounts of what was happening; the people, as usual, had no spokesman. Here is the Reverend Cotton Mather, writing in 1721: “It has been found … in some of our congregations that in length of time their singing has degenerated into an odd noise, that has more of what we want a name for, than any Regular Singing in it.”2 And, in the same year, one Thomas Walter: “I have observed in many places, one man is upon this note, while another is on the note before him, which produces something as hideous and disorderly as is beyond expression bad.”3
We can infer from these and other contemporary accounts that what was happening was that the people, singing unaccompanied as was usual, had evolved their own style, slowing up the putative beat almost to immobility (though probably each carrying within himself his own beat), gradually sinking in pitch and then perhaps jumping up an octave or a fifth to regain his own natural compass. Then, within each enormously prolonged note (as written), each would proceed to ornament each note with “turnings and flourishings,” grace notes and arabesques, with arbitrary alterations of melody and time. It must have been an astonishing noise; one would wish to have had a tape recorder in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the 1690s. And, at least in the country areas, there seemed little that the cultivated musicians could do to prevent it; the people sang in their own way as long as the singing remained unaccompanied and there were not enough trained musicians around to confine their musical devotions to the written note.
Christopher Small at a restaurant in Sitges, Spain, 2008. Photograph by Robert Walser.
This continual clash between those who want to regulate and those who do not want to be regulated recurs time and again throughout America’s history. Thoreau, for example, writing a hundred and thirty years after Cotton Mather, set the matter eloquently: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?”4
The validity of this way of singing, reviled and ridiculed as it was by the cultivated musicians of two centuries, was affirmed by the town bandmaster of Danbury, Connecticut, George Ives, and his son Charles. The persistence of the tradition of spontaneous hymn-singing can be appreciated when we realize that what Charles writes of below must have been taking place in the 1880s: “I remember when I was a boy—at the outdoor Camp Meeting services in Redding, all the farmers, their families and field hands for miles around used to come through the trees—when things like Beulah Land, Woodworth, Nearer My God to Thee, The Shining Shore, Nettleton, In the Sweet Bye and Bye and the like were sung by thousands of ‘let out’ souls. The music notes and words on paper were about as much like what they ‘were’ (at those moments) as the monogram on a man’s necktie may be like his face. Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, sometimes in the quieter hymns with a French horn or violin, would always encourage the people to sing in their own way. Most of them knew the words and music (theirs) by heart, and sang it that way. If they threw the poet and the composer around a bit, so much the better for the poetry and the music. There was power and exultation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity.”5
The proponents of “regular singing” were not slow to take action against what they regarded as the corruption of hymn singing. Innumerable books were published with the intention of schooling singers, and, more important, the institution of singing schools grew up. These were generally run by itinerant musicians, often doubling as peddlers of quack medicines or the like, who would settle in a village or town for a few weeks, announce their intention of instructing those who wished it in regular singing, and conduct classes for all comers in the evenings. This institution prospered for reasons that probably had as much to do with social as with purely musical factors, and became an important part of the life of the New England colonies, right down the eastern seaboard. It was these travelling singing masters who built up a musical community that gave rise in the late eighteenth century to the first group of native American composers.
The group who became known as the First New England School were humble men, who called themselves “tunesmiths” rather than composers, since they regarded themselves as artisans whose function, like that of the blacksmith or wheelwright, was to serve the community. As H. Wiley Hitchcock says:
This was a music completely in tune with the society for which it was written. These journeymen composers had a secure and respected function in Colonial and Federal-era life in general; viewed historically from a point two hundred years later, theirs was a sort of golden age of musical participation in which teachers, composers, singers and populace in general worked together fruitfully. If ever there was a truly popular music, the music of the New Englanders was popular; it arose from the deep, old traditions of early America; it was accessible to all and enjoyed by all; it was a plain-spoken music for plain people, and assessed on its own terms it was a stylistically homogeneous music of great integrity.6
These were down-to-earth men, then, and they had down-to-earth names; among them were Justin Morgan, Supply Belcher, Timothy Swan, and, the best-known and most articulate member of the group, William Billings of Boston. Born in 1746, he was a tanner by trade; quite self-taught in music (though doubtless tutored in a singing school), he abandoned his trade and hung a shingle outside his house which read, simply, “Billings—Songs.” He was apparently a remarkable man; a contemporary description says he was “a singular man of moderate size, short of one leg, with one eye, without any address, with an uncommon negligence of person. Still he spake and thought as one above the common abilities.”7 He published a number of collections of songs, hymn tunes, and anthems, usually prefacing them with pungently expressed opinions, which give the flavor not only of the man but of the confident young society in which he lived in an intimate relationship that must be the envy of many a contemporary composer. For example:
Perhaps it may be expected that I should say something concerning rules for composition; to those I answer that Nature is the best dictator, for not all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any person to form an air … It must be Nature, Nature who must lay the foundation, Nature must inspire the thought … For my own part, as I don’t think myself confined to any rules of composition, laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think (were I to pretend to lay down rules) that any one who came after me were in any ways obligated to adhere to them, any further than they should think proper; so in fact I think it best for every composer to be his own carver.8
Brave words! But Billings has more for us:
Perhaps some may think I mean and intend to throw Art entirely out of the question. I answer, by no means, for the more art is displayed, the more Nature is decorated. And in some sorts of composition there is dry study required, and art very requisite. For instance, in a fuge, where the parts come in after each other with
