![]() ![]() ^ John Warthen Struble, The History of American Classical Music:.Murray, " Timothy Swan and Yankee Psalmody," The Musical Quarterly 61 (1975), pp. For God and Country: Scriptural Exegesis, Editorial Intervention, and Revolutionary Politics in First New England School Anthems (PhD). Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. America’s Music, from Pilgrims to Present Revised Second Edition. "William Billings and the Yankee Tunesmiths". ![]() Princeton and London: Princeton University Press. The works of the early New England composers were rediscovered in the 1950s, with compositions such as William Schuman's use of Billings' tune " Chester" in his New England Triptych (1956), which he later expanded into the Chester Overture. These selections captured the mood of confident defiance with which New England patriots entered the new era. It includes a paraphrase of Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon") that refers to the British occupation of Boston in 1775–1776. The New England Psalm-Singer (1770) was followed by a second and more popular collection, the Singing Master's Assistant (1778). Here we find the defiant, " Chester", sometimes called "America's First National Anthem", for which Billings composed both the lyrics and the tune: Published by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who also published The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, a major Patriot newspaper, and including an engraving by Paul Revere. He advertised the work as “never before published” and stressed that it was composed by “a native of Boston”-made in America by an American. At the age of twenty-three Billings had already composed more than one hundred original pieces of sacred music, and in 1770 he published his a tunebook, The New England Psalm Singer, the first book in which all the compositions were by an American. William Billings was part of the colonial working class. The first influential tunesmith was William Billings (1746–1800), a native of Boston, who was a self-taught amateur musician and a tanner. Many of the traits that may be thought unique to American psalmodists in fact characterize the compositions of their British cousins too. Their books were issued by Daniel Bayley in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1769, 1771, 17 under the title The American Harmony, or Universal Psalmodist 1769, 1771, 17).įor the most part the Yankee composer's source of information about harmonic practices derived from the music and writings on music of such comparatively unskilled English composers as William Tans'ur (1706-1783) and Aaron Williams (1731-1776), who were themselves somewhat outside the mainstream of European sacred music. The self-taught Yankee tunesmiths learned composition from composers of West gallery music such as William Tans'ur's A New Musical Grammar' (1746) and Aaron Williams. Anglo-Celtic heritage, and love of metric psalmody and the hymns of Isaac Watts are other common characteristics. All were craftsmen who worked part-time as itinerant singing school teachers, which gave them opportunities to sell their self-published tune books. The Yankee tunesmiths were definitely not a "school": all were self taught, scattered across New England, and did not share common publishers or affiliations. Other scholars working from a classical music perspective worked backwards, beginning with research into the Boston Classicists ( "Boston Six") of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, who were first defined as a "school" in 1966, then Hitchcock explicitly defined as this group as the " Second New England School" in 1969, generating the term "First New England School" as a by-product. Shape note singers who have kept this music alive to the present day sometimes use the term "Yankee tunesmiths", as did academic musicologists such as H. "Yankee tunesmiths" or "First New England School" They composed primarily psalm tunes and fuging tunes, which differ enough from European fugues to warrant the spelling "fuge". The principal tunesmiths were William Billings, Supply Belcher, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan, Lewis Edson, Andrew Law, Timothy Swan, Jacob Kimball Jr., and Jeremiah Ingalls. Their music was largely forgotten when the Better Music Movement turned musical tastes towards Europe, as in Thomas Hastings's 1822 Dissertation on Musical Taste and other works. Yankee tunesmiths (also called the First New England School) were self-taught composers active in New England from 1770 until about 1810. ![]()
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