mease ;

SEMIBEGUN 007: BEYOND YANKEE DOODLES

Air Date: September 14, 2022
Guest curated by Ben Zucker

BEN ZUCKER ON AMERICAN FIRSTS

The narrative of American history, used and abused for all sorts of present ends, is no different when it comes to its music. The first time America was called exceptional, by the French diplomat and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in 1841, it came with a distinct aesthetic qualification. He identifies in the burgeoning United States a political circumstance that “seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” while “the proximity of Europe… allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapse into barbarism.”[1] Even over a century later, music historian H. Wiley Hitchcock writes that admiration for many early milestones in American composed music conflates an aesthetic appreciation with historical or nationalistic importance and other extramusical factors. He assesses the quality of the "music itself" rather disparagingly: “By definition, that was a nascent tradition, which had to begin by borrowing from Europe—attitudes and ideals, notions of style and structure. Almost by definition, its music is poorer in artistic content than its European models.”[2] Such claims serve to simplify musical history and construct a conventional progress narrative. This too is a practice as old as the country itself, as seen in complaints such as those of editor Caleb Emerson, who wrote to the Amherst Handellian Musical Society in 1808 that “the state of our country, though favorable to the general diffusion of knowledge…can hardly hope for the production among us of valuable compositions in music,” going on to call for the importance of musical societies promoting the work of Handel, Haydn, and other Europeans.[3] It flies in the face of celebrations of early American individualism and ‘maverick’ tendencies that mark other historical modes regarding the country in its pre-colonial and post-colonial eras (scholarly and popular alike, given the controversial success of a musical work such as Hamilton).

How do we want to start a story of American music? Why composed music, and why these pieces? To do so through the lens of “classical” composition, while generally acknowledged as far from the whole picture,[4] more readily brings us to work explicitly engaged with advancing a lineage through acts of authorship. Without being overly naive, exploring individual works for their distinct qualities not only helps us place them into dialogue with contemporary musical culture where records can be lacking (for reasons mentioned below), but also reinforces modes of listening that sidestep such historical baggage. While there will always be an obsession with finding “firsts” in a history, here they are better understood as entry points into what could have been by virtue of the revelations of what was. We can position such notable ‘firsts’ in American music not only chronologically, but in terms of style, instrumentation, and identity, setting us up not for a linear narrative of American music, but for what musicologist Charles Hiroshi Garrett calls the ongoing contestation and formation of musical national identity, as American national identity.[5]

The first works reliably identifiable as original American compositions may come from the 1746 Ephrata Cloister, a religious community with a corresponding unique musical system founded by Johann Conrad Beisel. The Codex includes not only works by Beisel, but both male and female community members. As a relatively isolated community, research on the cloister’s music was relatively scant until the past decade. More ‘firsts’, then, are the works published through the widely-distributed colonial publishing apparatuses of Philadelphia: lawyer and Declaration signer Frances Hopkinson’s 1759 sentimental song My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free and James Lyon’s 1761 hymn collection Urania. As early as 1906, historian Oscar Sonneck established these tunes as the earliest original works by Americans. Determining the full extent of original authorship during this period presents historiographical challenges, however. Sonneck’s other writings detail how a lack of cultural infrastructure and copyright law in the developing colonies helped form a rich colonial musical life busily using and appropriating European tunes in songbooks, stage shows, and programmatically eclectic benefit concerts.[6]

This especially played out amongst early hymns and sacred music: the metric interchangeability of hymn text and music meant collections of innumerable variations and adaptations flourished throughout the colonies. Possibly as early as 1723, original music mingled with tunes imported from England, spread by itinerant “Singing-Masters” who taught and compiled hymns for a living.[7] Nevertheless the “Yankee Tunesmiths” or “First New England School” of the Revolutionary War drew upon the extensive tradition of Protestant psalmody, hymnody, and singing schools in the northernmost colonies to create a compositional style distinct from that of English Hymnody. Daniel Read, Supply Belcher, Timothy Swan, Jeremiah Ingalls, Jacob French, and Oliver Holden are among the known composers of this group, but William Billings holds a distinctive place among these individuals for his extremely prolific output, political sentiment, and personal eccentricities.[8] His tunebooks contain outspoken manifestos on musical practice, like the maverick assertion “Nature is the best Dictator, for all the hard dry studied Rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person to form an Air any more than the bare Knowledge of the four and twenty Letters, and strict Grammatical Rules will qualify a Scholar for composing a Piece of Poetry, or properly adjusting a Tragedy, without a Genius.”[9]

While claims of genius are wont to be overstated, Billings’ fugues and anthems are some of the longer and more technically distinctive of the historical repertoire. Even the existence of Jargon, a short piece of purposeful dissonance, is remarkable for appearing in this time period, even if composed as satire. This perhaps exists in parallel, or of a similar urge, to the patriotic energy that led to the creation of tunes such as Chester, sometimes considered the “first” national anthem of the colonies, thanks to Billings’ friendship with Paul Revere and Samuel Adams.

Despite such lofty connections, the Yankee Tunesmiths saw their reputations decline after 1800, as New Englander tastes shifted towards a “Scientific Music” more attuned to the rules of European music of the time. Prominent collections such as Lowell Mason’s The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music and Thomas Hastings’ Dissertation on Musical Taste (both from 1822) accelerated favor towards the style of German-born composers, but this was not a novel phenomenon in itself either. German-American musical life exerted a lasting influence on colonial music due to the missionary and education work of the Moravian Church in Pennsylvania, augmented by subsequent surges in German immigration. Several Moravians are represented here, including John Antes, John Christopher Moller, and David Moritz Michael. What is extremely interesting to hear in these works is a sort of stylistic atemporal drift: one can hear the influence of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart on works all composed in a relatively small span of a few decades at the end of the 18th century. Shortly thereafter, Anthony Philip Heinrich arrived from nearby Bohemia. Known in his time as “America’s Beethoven,” he was the country’s first composer in a line of symphonists including William Henry Fry, George Frederick Bristow, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk to intentionally present an American style of composition to rival the Germanic tradition, albeit unsuccessfully against the imported idealistic heft of Beethoven, the most widely performed composer in American concert halls then as he is today. In addition to Germanic influences, the ongoing arrival and presence of British musicians in the colonies was also a significant factor in the formation of an early American musical life, as typified by the varied activities of figures such as Alexander Reinagle, James Hewitt, and Benjamin Carr, who worked as composers, performers, and publishers.

Influence is, of course, a two-way street, and perhaps the earliest demonstration of the reverse transmission comes not by a musical work, but an instrument: Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica (“armonica”), invented in 1761, and subsequently garnering a repertoire with compositions by Beethoven and Mozart.[10] Franklin’s own compositions, such as his 1778 string quartet, also display an inventive approach to compositional considerations: written in a quasi-Baroque suite structure, and substituting a third violin for viola; furthermore, all instruments are extensively retuned such that the work can be played predominantly on open strings, for a more resonant sound.[11] These all make the resulting work so unusual that some scholars hesitate to attribute it to Franklin for its perceived naivete, rather than view it as a natural consequence of the same intellectual backgrounds of Founding Fathers that lead to distinct early American institutions.

More musical innovations took place outside of such rarefied circles. With a solidifying infrastructure and population influx, various forms of entertainment were able to emerge. Sonneck describes an extensive cultivation of instrumental music in public and private by the end of the 18th century, often with highly ‘miscellaneous’ programs freely combining instrumental or vocal movements, songs, and solos, in which the new could coexist with the popular. The music of Francis “Frank” Johnson, one of the first high-profile Black musicians in the country, is an exemplary blend of contemporary concert and popular forms. Johnson was born free in Philadelphia and grew to prominence in the city’s social music scenes, eventually leading the first American band on a national and international tour. Two orchestrations of Johnson’s Victoria Gallop, both reconstructed and read from the same score, indicate the instrumental flexibility called for in the logistical reality of art-making. Contemporary accounts even describe acts of improvisation on the scores in performance, though these recordings do not reflect that lost dynamic performance practice. Johnson was not an outlier here: his contemporaries included band members such as Aaron J. Connor, whose Valse A Cinq Temps features an early appearance of odd time signatures, and Justin Holland, nationally renowned for his compositions and arrangements for guitar and participation in the abolition movement.

The underexplored history of Black composition in the early United States gives yet another instance of another kind of ‘first’ that we could use in considering just where and how an “American” musical style emerged, if we can consider one to have simply done so at all. Gathering the outpouring of work from just a few decades, even music which may not sound so remarkable today might, via their peculiarities, point towards conscious creative struggle as fully foundational to the country’s ever-changing identity.

For example, even as the aforementioned “scientific” vocal music assumed prominence in Northern states, Southern hymn collections such as Ananais Davisson’s Kentucky Harmony (1816) were already reacting to such reactions, concurrent with the Second Great Awakening and Southern Baptism. Returning to Billings-esque open harmonies and fugues, the music survived for decades as the folk-religious tradition of Sacred Harp/shape-note singing, as exemplified by intense works such as the hymn Idumea (always a hit at Sacred Harp singings and made especially so after its appearance in the 2003 film Cold Mountain[12]). Such music became the focus of a subsequent early nationalist musical imaginary, as figures of the 20th century such as Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, and John Cage helped shape a conception of these tunes as American musical history. “For here is true style!” Charles Seeger said of the Southern shape-note hymn tradition.[13] But all of these musics are stylized, and all of them are true. I highly encourage this to be just a starting point—each piece on its own points to an extensive additional repertoire well worth exploring, be it for the composer, the medium, the performers and performance practice, and of course, the sheer joy of musical discovery.

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage Books, 1945.
[2] H. Wiley Hitchcock, “A Monumenta Americana?,” Notes 25, no. 1 (1968): 7, https://doi.org/10.2307/894141.
[3] Emerson, Caleb. A discourse on music: pronounced at Amherst, N.H. before the Handellian Musical Society, September 13, 1808. Amherst, N.H.: 8.
[4] Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 7, offers a brief overview of the expansion of studies in American music in the 20th century, amongst other sources.
[5] Ibid, 4-5.
[6] Examples abound in Sonneck O. G. 1907. Early Concert-Life in America (1731-1800). Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. For further study on the reuse of European music in secular contexts, see Goodman, Glenda. “Transatlantic Contrafacta, Musical Formats, and the Creation of Political Culture in Revolutionary America.” Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 11, no. 4, 20 Oct. 2017, pp. 392–419, 10.1017/s1752196317000359.
[7] Temperley, Nicholas. “First Forty: The Earliest American Compositions.” American Music 15, no. 1 (1997): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3052695.
[8] Nathaniel D. Gould, History of Church Music in America (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853): 46. Physically, Billings was blind in one eye and had shorter limbs on one side of his body. Contemporary accounts of Billings speak to, amongst other things, his “stentorian” voice, temper, and snuff habit far exceeding typical usage of the day.
[9] William Billings, The New-England psalm-singer; or, American chorister. Containing a number of psalm-tunes, anthems and canons. In four and five parts. (Never before published.) Composed by William Billings, a native of Boston, New-England (Boston, New- England: Printed by Edes and Gill, 1770): 18. 
[10] An extensive list of this repertoire can be found here: https://www.thomasbloch.net/en_glassharmonica.html.
[11] Grenander, M. E. “Benjamin Franklin’s String Quartet.” Early American Literature 7, no. 2 (1972): 185.
[12] “The Cold Mountain Bump: Hollywood’s Effect on Sacred Harp Songs and Singers.” 2013. The Sacred Harp Publishing Company. December 31, 2013. http://originalsacredharp.com/2013/12/31/the-cold-mountain-bump/.
[13] Charles Seeger, “Contrapuntal Style in the Three-Voice Shape-Note Hymns.” The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Oct., 1940): 488.

ABOUT BEN

Ben Zucker engages in acts of creative juxtaposition and speculation, contributing to experimental music scenes across North America and the UK with concert works, jazz and ambient albums, scores for media, and frequent performances on brass, percussion, voice, and electronics as a soloist, bandleader, and collaborator. He has been acclaimed as a "master of improvisation" (IMPOSE Magazine), and “more than a little bit remarkable” (Free Jazz Blog), and recognized as a New Composer Talent by the International Audio Branding Academy. They currently live in Chicago, finishing doctoral studies at Northwestern University while working as a performer, teacher, administrator, and organizer.