The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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 the same notes, but even here, art is subservient to genius, for fancy goes first and strikes out the work roughly, and art comes after and polishes it over.9
Billings was fourteen years younger than Haydn, ten years older than Mozart, but his music inhabits another world than that of European classicism. In some ways it seems to hark back to an earlier European style; it is modal rather than tonal, with a folkish flavor, deriving perhaps from the Anglo-Celtic folk tradition. It is to all intents and purposes non-harmonic; certainly tonal functional harmony plays no part in its repertory of expressive means. Any conflict between the needs of chord progression and the shape of an individual melodic line is invariably resolved in favor of the latter, even if this produces a harmonic clash, so that astounding dissonances unknown in contemporary European music are used freely and often without any feeling of need for resolution. Open and parallel fifths, both proscribed by European rules, are heard here so frequently that it is clear that the sound was positively enjoyed by these composers and their congregations. To harmonically attuned ears the music may sound tonally monotonous, the more so as modulation, apart from the occasional perfunctory movement to the dominant, is virtually non-existent, but to feel this is to miss the point of the music, which is concerned with other matters, and pursues its concerns in a remarkably stylish and consistent way. The music is mainly for unaccompanied chorus—at least, no accompaniment is provided, although wind and even string instruments might join in doubling the vocal parts should they happen to be available. Keyboard instruments were rare and played no part in the world of these composers—which may have been a contributing factor to the absence of harmonic device in their works, obliging them to think in terms of lines rather than of chords (the role of the keyboard, with its power of bringing complex textures under the control of a single individual, in the development of tonal harmony has already been remarked on).
A typical New England anthem consists of a number of short sections cunningly put together, with chordal sections alternating with sections in simple imitative counterpoint (“fuging”) and remarkable manipulation of textural effect in which the whole group may be set against one, two or three voices, as well as contrasts of tempo, dynamics and vocal timbre, all used as structural rather than as decorative elements. That the first western non-harmonic music since the Renaissance should have been composed in a society founded on the ideal of individual liberty (Billings was an active supporter of the Colonial cause and wrote not only its principal rallying-song, Chester, but also an eloquent Lament Over Boston on the occasion of the burning of the city by the British) by a musician who believed that “every composer should be his own carver” and that “nature must inspire the thought” should come as no surprise to the reader who has thus far followed the argument of this book.
Billings, like his colleagues, was very concerned for the manner of performance; many of his ideas would have shocked his European contemporaries, and even today show a very cavalier attitude to the demands of traditional tonal-harmonic music, especially the importance it assigns to the real bass. He liked, for example, to have male and female voices on each part, producing an octave, and occasionally a double-octave, doubling—a kind of organ sonority in six or eight parts. His ear was very idiosyncratic, but it is clear that he knew the kind of sound he wanted:
Suppose a company of forty people; twenty of them should sing the bass, and the other twenty should be divided according to the discretion of the company