Note: This post is the first of three parts that will ultimately cover musical developments in the United States from 1620 to 2000. These sessions will be interspersed with those covering a traditional review of the Western European classical periods of music. Though aspects of classical music are included, the main thrust is presenting America’s dominant religious and secular music traditions. The secular tradition includes both folk and popular types including those that emerged from the confluence of multiple musical styles.
Difficult Beginnings
It was in the early 1600 when Western Europeans began coming to the shores of North America in pursuit of land, natural resources and opportunities related to expanding the territories under the control of the English, French and Spanish. This was 100 years after much of the Caribbean region had already seen inhabitation by Europeans. In general, the Spanish tended to settle the area around Mexico and the northern portion of South America. The French tended to come into the area we now know to be Canada. The English tended to migrate up and down the mid-Atlantic coastline of North America. The settlements later officially became the colonies of England. As a result, what free time was devoted to the making of music included continuing the traditions and habits related to music in the homeland, England.
During the 1700’s people from other countries (France and the Netherlands) began coming to Colonial America. These settlers also brought with them their religious practices and beliefs as well as their music preferences.
Cultural Setting of the 1700’s
The “art music” of the colonists followed the traditions of Europe. Musical development in the colonies fell behind the developments in Europe for several reasons:
1. People occupied with settling new land
2. Puritans thought arts were frivolous or evil
3. Few wealthy families to serve as patrons for art and music
4. “Cultural inferiority” complex
This situation allowed America’s folk music to take on a distinct character influenced by ethnic backgrounds that mixed in the New World.
Psalm singing was the earliest documented music-making in the Colonial America. Psalm singing implies the singing of metrical translations of the Psalms. This means that the texts were written in such a way that the words created a rhythmic pattern in addition to the development of a rhyming patter for the last words for each line.
An example of a metrical psalm is the following block of text.
All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:
Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell,
come ye before him and rejoice.
- The Bay Psalm Book (1640) was the first book printed in North America.
- In the eighteenth century, singing schools trained amateurs to sing psalms and anthems in parts.
- William Billings (1746–1800) issued several collections of psalm and hymn settings, and anthems. Example: The Continental Harmony (1794)
- Most of his four-part settings were homophonic harmonizations on newly composed melodies
- His later collections included fuguing tunes, which use imitation.
Two types of Psalm singing developed in the colonies. One was notated and used in the urban areas where the population density was such that access to printed books was supported. In the rural area, where most of the people weren’t musically educated, the people relied on memorization. Therefore, teaching a new hymn means “lining out” the texts and tunes.
Singing Schools were established to improve the singing of the Psalms. These one-week “schools” also provided a social outlet.
Music Leaders in America – early 1800’s
William Billings: 1746 - 1800
- Born and lived in Boston, Massachusetts
- Widely regarded as the father of American choral music
- Wrote for four-part chorus, singing a cappella
- First American published composer of psalms and hymns and the inventor of “fuguing songs”
- A passionate advocate of the Revolution, Billings adapted many of his hymns as war songs with new lyrics
Lowell Mason: 1792 - 1872
- Leading figure in American church music
- Composer of over 1600 hymn tunes - “Joy to the World”
- Established music education in the United States
- Transformed American church music
- Championed the cause of having congregational singing be accompanied by organ
Our Earliest Organizations
One of the first music societies developed in the US was The Handel and Haydn Society. It was founded as an oratorio society in 1815 by Boston merchants. The intent was to bring Boston audiences the best of the old (Handel) and the best of the new (Haydn) in concerts of high artistic quality. They were an early promoter of composer Lowell Mason whose compositions were strictly for use in a church setting.
The United States Marine Band was established by act of Congress on July 11, 1798. It is a band of the United States Marine Corps and the oldest of the United States military bands. As such, it can be said that it is the oldest professional musical organization in the United States.
An American Composer
Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864), is known as the “father of American music”. He was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the last half of the 19th century. His songs — such as “Camptown Races”, “Old Folks at Home”, “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Old Black Joe”, and “Beautiful Dreamer” — remain popular over 150 years after their composition.
In 1846, Foster moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and became a bookkeeper with his brother's steamship company. While in Cincinnati, Foster penned his first successful songs, among them “Oh! Susanna” which would prove to be the anthem of the California Gold Rush in 1848–1849.
Later he returned to Pennsylvania and signed a contract with the Christy Minstrels. It was during this period that Foster wrote most of his best-known songs including “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair” (1854), written for his wife Jane Denny McDowell. Many of Foster's songs were used in the minstrel shows that were popular at the time. Although many of his songs had Southern themes, Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, by river-boat voyage (on his brother Dunning's steam boat, the James Millinger) down the Mississippi to New Orleans, during his honeymoon in 1852.
Foster attempted to make a living as a professional songwriter and may be considered innovative in this respect, since this field did not yet exist in the modern sense. Due in part to the limited scope of music copyright and composer royalties at the time, Foster realized very little of the profits which his works generated for sheet music printers. Multiple publishers often printed their own competing editions of Foster's tunes, not paying Foster anything.
Foster moved to New York City in 1860. About a year later, his wife and daughter left him and returned to Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1862, his fortunes decreased, and as they did, so did the quality of his new songs. Early in 1863, he began working with George Cooper, whose lyrics were often humorous and designed to appeal to musical theater audiences. The Civil War created a flurry of newly written music with patriotic war themes, but this did not benefit Foster.
Foster died with little to his name in spite of his fame. The last song he every wrote was published two weeks after his death -- “Beautiful Dreamer”.
The Minstrel Show
The minstrel show was an American entertainment form consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music. It was first performed by white people in blackface. After the Civil War black people took over performing in the shows.
The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. Spirituals (known then as jubilees) entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry.
Sacred Harp
Sacred Harp singing is a tradition of sacred choral music that took root in the Southern region of the United States. It is part of the larger tradition of shape note music, a type of printing method used in Singing Schools through the South.
The term “Sacred Harp” refers to the human voice. The name of the tradition comes from the title of the shape note book from which the music is sung, The Sacred Harp. The book still exists today in various editions.
“Shape note” music means that the notes are printed in special shapes that help the reader fluently identify them on the musical scale. There are two prevalent systems, one using four shapes, and one using seven.
When Sacred Harp singers begin a song, they normally start by singing it with the appropriate syllable for each pitch, using the shapes to guide them. For those in the group not yet familiar with the song, the shapes help with the task of sight reading. The process of reading through the song with the shapes also helps fix the notes in memory. Once the shapes have been sung, the group then sings the verses of the song with their printed words.
Sacred Harp groups always sing a cappella, that is to say, without accompanying instruments. There is no single leader or conductor; rather, the participants take turns in leading. The leader for a particular round selects a song from the book, and “calls” it by its page number.
As the name implies, Sacred Harp music is sacred (Protestant Christian) music. Many of the songs in the book are hymns that use words, meters, and stanzaic forms familiar from elsewhere in Protestant hymnody. However, Sacred Harp songs are quite different from mainstream Protestant hymns in their musical style: they are often polyphonic in texture, and the harmony tends to deemphasize the interval of the third in favor of fourths and fifths. In their melodies, the songs often use the pentatonic scale.
In their musical form, Sacred Harp songs fall into three basic types. Many are ordinary hymn tunes, mostly composed in four-bar phrases and sung in multiple verses. Fuging tunes contain a prominent passage about 1/3 of the way through in which each of the four choral parts enters in succession, in a way resembling a fugue. Anthems are longer songs, less regular in form, that are sung through just once rather than in multiple verses.
Prof. Songer
JCTC - Downtown
