Happy semiquincentennial, America! At CRB, we’re celebrating #America250 by playing American composers every day of the week, ranging from centuries-old colonial tunes to contemporary works composed and premiered this very year. We’re also exploring American music here on our blog, highlighting pieces we love and the elements that shaped them, making American music what it is today. So we might as well start at the beginning, right? Enter: Ye olde Erly Musick of America.
While America eventually blossomed into the vast musical landscape that we know today, in the beginning, there was only music by Native Americans and whatever the settlers brought with them.
A lot of the music they brought was religious: one of the earliest significant musical works to be printed in the colonies was the Bay Psalm book, printed on the very first printing press in the colonies in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s also the first book of any kind to be printed in the American colonies, which just goes to show how important music and spirituality were to daily life at the time. Funnily enough, it didn’t even have musical notation in it until later editions, as it was purely composed of what are called metrical translations, allowing the congregation to sing text from the new hymnal while using the tune of hymns they already knew. It’s also one of the rarest books today with only 11 known copies still in existence, and one of the most valuable, fetching a steep $14 million at auction in 2013.
Back to the music. This tradition of applying new lyrics to pre-existing music would continue in a variety of formats beyond simple hymns; our own National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is itself an adaptation of a gentleman’s club song composed by British organist John Stafford Smith, with new words by American colonist Francis Scott Key. This tradition has continued through to the present day, especially in liturgical music.
The influence of choral music and hymnody on the development of musical America cannot be overstated, as it was how most people experienced music in the colonies. And through this music, most people would then have come into contact with music by one William Billings, composer and singing school pioneer. His time teaching singing in Stoughton, MA inspired locals to form the The Old Stoughton Musical Society, which still exists today, as the longest continuously-operating choral society in America. William Billings is also considered by many to be one of the first truly “American” composers. His publications, The New-England Psalm-Singer, The Singing Master's Assistant, and The Continental Harmony, were foundational in establishing a musical identity in early America, and contained a number of his own compositions, which were widely known and republished frequently.
Billings’s compositions even served as the basis for an entirely new genre of American choral music, called “Sacred Harp” or “shape note” singing. While musically inspired by Billings’s works, Sacred Harp music is characterized by its distinct musical notation, designed with idiomatically shaped noteheads (that’s the “shape note” part) to make learning music easier. It’s also characterized by the unique way the performers keep time while they sing:
Sacred Harp began in New England, where the foundational tunebook that gave it its name was composed in 1842. From there, it spread to the American south, and then to the rest of the world, due to its accessible format and characteristically appealing sound.
But even back in Billings’s time, there were other vernacular and folk music practices present as well. The British brought broadsheet ballads, fiddle music, and drinking songs to the colonies, alongside musical practices that were introduced indirectly via the slave trade. But the prevailing Puritan mindset discouraged music-making outside of religious contexts. Furthermore, white colonists saw no need to engage with or preserve materials related to African or Native American folk music, and so it was often thought that there was simply no folk music in the early colonies. But this has since been widely debunked by scholars such as Percy Scholes, in his landmark book The Puritans and Music in England and New England, and Barbara Lambert, in her scholarship related to the two-volume collection Music in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1820, which definitively catalogued evidence of the contrary.
Fife and drum conventions were also brought over by the British, and over time were adapted for American colonial militia communications, essentially functioning as the military and musical “radio” of the time. A specially designated portion of the militia, composed of elders and youths, would typically make up the fife and drum corps, wearing separate colored uniforms to distinguish them as non-combatants. They would also serve as entertainers, playing well-known tunes to keep morale high in between skirmishes. The most famous of these tunes today is far and away Yankee Doodle, originally performed by the British to the colonists as a dig, and then infamously adopted by the colonists to thumb their noses back at the British.
The most famous tune in their time, however, was the anthem Chester by none other than our friend William Billings. Originally composed as a hymn tune released in 1770 as part of The New-England Psalm-Singer (engraved with an ornate frontispiece by distinguished blacksmith and waker-upper of revolutionaries Paul Revere, Billings’s good friend), Billings refashioned the lyrics and re-released Chester in 1778 in The Singing Master's Assistant, reframed as a revolutionary song. It was a breakout hit among his fellow revolutionaries, which established Billings as the unofficial musical voice of the revolution.
Despite the prevalence of music in early America, dedicated concert spaces were few and far between. The earliest performances akin to concerts occurred in theatrical productions like The Beggars Opera as early as 1716. A wider Puritan mindset discouraged the production of theater and general non-religious music-making in the north, but one of the earliest informal concerts occurred in Boston in the great room of British-born organist Peter Pelham, who was the organist at Trinity Church, in 1731. From this point onward, classical music began a steady upward ascent in its propagation and popularity in America.
The establishment of a formal concert space gained momentum as public interest and tolerance for non-religious music making increased. Boston’s Concert Hall, the first of its kind in the colonies, had its first formal concert in 1752 where they allegedly performed works by “the masters,” though no archival materials survive to indicate what exactly they played. Eventually, original American compositions did find their way into the concert hall. A summary of a program from 1770 for the Concert Hall says that, "A new song composed by a Son of Liberty…[was] sung by Mr. Flagg,” while in 1771, a harpsichord concerto was premiered and performed there by one Mr. Selby.
Access to, and thus cultural understanding of, the arts increased over time and with it, an organic blossoming of American musical identity followed. But it took quite a while to shear off the European trimmings that settlers initially included in their musical practices. It would not be until the 20th century that America would shake up its musical identity so much that it couldn’t really be compared to music being made anywhere else. But its multicultural and scrappy do-it-yourself nature have been a consistent throughline from the very beginning, making American music a beloved cultural treasure to the world ever since.
