A Different Drummer—American Music

      From Music, Society, Education

       (1977)

      It is a characteristic of tonal-harmonic music that it requires a high degree of subordination of the individual elements of the music to the total effect. Not only is the progress of each individual voice required to conform to the progression of chords, but also each individual note or chord is meaningless in itself, gaining significance only within the context of the total design, much as the authoritarian or totalitarian state requires the subordination of the interests of its individual citizens to its purposes. It is therefore interesting to see in the music of those British colonies, which become the United States of America, a disintegration of tonal functional harmony taking place long before such a process became detectable in Europe, and it is not too fanciful to view this as one expression of the ideal of individual liberty on which the United States was founded, an ideal that, however meagerly realized or even betrayed during the course of its history, has never quite disappeared.

      The colonists who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century had left behind the last days of a golden age of English musical culture. Many were, in the words of the first Governor of the New England colonies, “very expert in music,” and although the Pilgrims and Puritans favored sacred over secular music, they had no objection to secular instrumental music, and even dance, as long as decorum was preserved. However, the Mayflower and her successors had little room for any but the most essential cargo, and only the smallest and hardiest musical instruments could be accommodated—certainly nothing so bulky and liable to damage as a virginal or organ. So far as is known, the early colonists could and did enjoy only music that was simple and functional, that is, social music and worship music. As far as the former is concerned, we do know that there were instruments around, though what they played is unclear—possibly from English collections like those of Thomas Ravenscroft, and later John Playford. Secular song was not unknown, not only in the Anglo-Celtic ballads, which belonged to the ancient oral rather than to the literate tradition, and which in America proved extremely durable, but also songs from the various collections that had crossed the Atlantic with them. Worship music, on the other hand, meant almost exclusively the singing of the psalms in metrical translation, a practice that was not unknown in England even in the Established Church. This may seem a limited repertoire, but there are after all a hundred and fifty psalms, many of which are very long, and their emotional range is very wide. The version favored by the early colonists was that of Henry Ainsworth, who used a variety of poetic meters and provided no less than thirty-nine different tunes, which were printed at the back of the book in the form of single lines of melody. Dissatisfaction was, however, early expressed by the Puritan divines, who alleged that faithfulness to the literal word of God was too often sacrificed to literary grace, and in 1640 a new metrical translation was made by a committee and published—the first book to be printed in the New England colony.

      The translations were made into only six metrical schemes, mostly in four-line stanzas, so that the same tune could be used for several psalms, and the number of tunes that needed to be learnt was kept to a minimum. The new psalm book was adopted, after much disputation, throughout the New England colonies by the end of the seventeenth century; under the name of Bay Psalm Book it ran through innumerable editions over the next century. It was not until the ninth edition, of 1698, that tunes were provided—a mere thirteen—to which the psalms could be sung.

      Irving Lowens makes a valuable comment on the American culture of this period:

      The story of the arts in seventeenth century New England is the tale of a people trying to plant in the New World the very vines whose fruit they had enjoyed in the Old, while, at the same time, it is the chronicle of the subconscious development of a totally different civilization. The seventeenth-century history of the Bay Psalm Book is a case in point, for although the psalm-tunes may superficially appear nothing more than a parochial utilization of certain music sung in the mother country, a mysterious qualitative change took place when they were sung on different soil. Here, they proved to be the seed from which a new, uniquely American music was later to flower.¹

      The first flowers did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, but even 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.