The History of Organ Pedagogy in America, Part 1

Part 1 was published in the May 1996 issue of THE DIAPASON, pp. 10-13.

by Sally Cherrington

The Introduction of Organ Voluntaries: The Organist as Solo Performer

Despite the emphasis on the organist as an accompanist in
the first half of the nineteenth century, the playing of voluntaries did not
suddenly commence in 1850.  The use
of voluntaries became common in some churches after about 1810, although in
other churches (particularly those in rural locations) voluntaries were not
played until much later in the century. In 1835, Musical Magazine in New York
City published an article complaining about abuses in voluntary playing, which
contained the following comments on the problem of inappropriateness:

Every real proficient on the organ, knows that voluntaries
upon that noble instrument, ought to consist of broken passages, scattered
chords, etc., etc., which will not seize upon the attention of the listener but
rather soothe his mind, into calm collected meditation. Any thing like a
regular air would here be out of place. Even the learned harmonies of the
Germans, impressive and beautiful as they are, prove for the most part too
spirit-stirring, in their influence, for American voluntaries. Some of our
organists, however, have but little invention, and others but little taste. So
when they should either be silent or be endeavoring merely to soothe the
worshipers into devout meditation, they rouse them by a march, an overture, a
sonata, or a thundering chorus. . . . Such abuses, if tolerated, will bring
voluntaries into disrepute; if not lead to the expulsion of the organ from our
churches.57

Orpha Ochse adds wryly that if the situation was so bad in
the cultural and intellectual climate of New York City, one could only imagine
what sorts of things the untutored village organists were playing for
voluntaries.58

The common complaint of too much showmanship, which had been
levelled at the performance of interludes, was also carried over to
voluntaries. For example, Jane Rasmussen notes that Episcopal churches were
often the first in an area to get an organ, and whenever possible they would then hire a competent organist from Europe, New York, or Philadelphia. The organists often played virtuosic voluntaries as a form of advertising in order to attract students to supplement their church salaries.59 Whether justified or not, this virtuosity was generally considered distracting to the tone of the
service.  In non-Episcopal (or less
wealthy) churches, this problem would probably have occurred somewhat later in
the century due to the later technical development of native players, but it
became a problem nonetheless.

Charles Zeuner

Prior to the publication of Zeuner's collections of organ
voluntaries, most organists who played voluntaries improvised them.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Zeuner presented an alternative for
those who did not yet possess this skill. Zeuner's Voluntaries for the Organ, published in 1830, was the first collection of organ music published in the United States, and consists of six voluntaries.60 Although the use of the term "voluntary" and his designation of the pieces as "Before Service" or "After Service" suggests that he intended the pieces for church use, Zeuner indicated on the score that the pieces were "composed and dedicated to the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston,"61 a secular musical society. However, his second organ publication, Organ Voluntaries, published in 1840, is clearly a volume for the church organist. This is a longer and more comprehensive work than his first collection, and consists of two parts. The first part involves 165 interludes and short preludes in a variety of keys (to be used with hymns). Part II contains "Practical Voluntaries to be used before and after services in churches," with intended uses specified for each piece.62
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  These voluntaries have no pedal parts,
and contain dynamic markings but only minimal registration indications. This
collection forms a sort of bridge between the earlier "methods" and
the forthcoming collections of music with instructive introductions: it is the
first comprehensive printed collection for church use of interludes and (more
importantly) voluntaries, which were becoming the new focus of most organists,
but it does not yet include any of the descriptions and admonishments for
performing them that the later collections include.

The opposite situation occurs in an article from The
American Journal of Music, published in Boston on February 25, 1845, and
entitled "On the Use of the Stops of the Organ."63 The anonymous
author explains that although the organ is the instrument best suited for
extemporizing (voluntaries in church), he has never seen any "practical
treatises" on this subject. Therefore, he provides stylistic and
registration suggestions for voluntary playing. In contrast to Zeuner, this
instructional treatise is all text and no music.

Thomas Loud

Thomas Loud's organ method with its extraordinarily lengthy
title, discussed briefly in the first of this series of articles, was also
published in 1845.64   As the
title suggests, The Organ Study: Being an Introduction to the Practice of the Organ; together with a collection of Voluntaries, Preludes, and Interludes, original and selected; a Model of a Church Service; Explanations of the Stops and their Combinations; Studies for the Instrument; and Examples of Modulation intended to aid the Extempore Student; accompanied by an Engraving and description of the Mechanical construction of the Organ begins with explanations of organ basics important to Loud. These include descriptions of the basic organ mechanisms and stops, as well as practical matters such as beginning and releasing chords (Loud recommends rolling the notes individually from the bottom until all notes are sounding) and playing shakes. Significantly, he uses this material to lead into pointers on accompanying, illustrated in his model service for the Episcopal Church, before turning his attention to playing voluntaries. He does include two sample voluntaries in his "model service":  an introductory voluntary (shown in Example 1) and a voluntary for before the second psalm or hymn (in other words, an offertory). These voluntaries are musically straightforward, with basic registrations provided. Both include trills (shakes), an ornament that Loud seemed to feel was absolutely essential to the church organist's success. While the first voluntary is manualiter, the second indicates that the organist is to play certain bass clef notes with the pedals. Loud, however, provides small notes at these spots for those organists whose instruments do not have pedalboards.

Loud follows his model service with many pages of hymn
preludes and interludes in a variety of major and minor keys before furnishing
15 pages of voluntaries for church use, composed by himself and a variety of
other composers (Rinck, Cross, Russell, etc.). He does include several
voluntaries which are transcriptions, principally of religious works by Haydn.
He avoids the popular music pitfalls decried earlier in this article; although
he does include one "Religious March" by Gluck, it is quite austere
in character. At the end of this section, Loud adds a page illustrating the
"fine effect" of embellishing the end of a voluntary with a simple
suspension, emphasizing again the modest nature of this music.

At the end of his method, Loud provides some interesting
directions showing how to produce registrations of increasing power on instruments varying in size from four stops to modest three- manual stoplists, as well as ways to achieve particular registrations "effects." This leads into his closing and quite notable conclusions on voluntary playing, with which he ends his method. His concern is that voluntaries be consistently used, but not abused:

The style of performing (voluntaries) on this instrument
should always be in accordance with the use made of it, as forming a part of
the service of the Sanctuary; nothing therefore, opposed to the sacredness of
the place, can with propriety be introduced: whatever may be the character of
the Stops made use of, the music should be chaste and solemn, and all the
variety of the instrument, should (in the hands of the efficient performer) be
made conducive to the same subject. . . . Voluntaries should as much as
possible be suited to the subject of the discourse or character of the service
. . . 65

Loud continues by explaining how specific divisions or stops
can help to achieve these lofty goals. He concludes by explaining how to play
"fancy voluntaries," which his text implies are improvised and
probably not for use in church. 
His final admonishment is still applicable for improvisers today: "
. . . above all, remember to stop in time--a common fault with performers is,
that they never know when they have done enough."66

Cutler & Johnson

Before returning to Johnson's important American Church
Organ Voluntaries (mentioned in the first
article), we will make a brief digression to examine another of Johnson's
publications. Johnson originally published the Voluntaries in 1852 under his
name.  When it was republished in
1856, H. S. Cutler's name was included as well (see Example 2 - portraits of
Johnson and Cutler). A discussion of Cutler and the reasons for his addition in
the second edition is beyond the scope of this article, but apparently his
contribution was minimal (it is thought that perhaps he penned the
"Remarks"). Whatever the case, Johnson had originally intended to
write a second book, apparently planned in conjunction with American
Church Organ Voluntaries, called Instructions in the Art of Playing Voluntaries and Interludes and of Composing Simple Music. This book was conceived as a combination of an organ method and harmony book. It is thought that it existed in draft form and that Johnson was using it to teach his organ students. Unfortunately for the history of organ pedagogy, it was never published.67

Instead, Johnson published in 1854 his Practical
Instructions in Harmony, upon the Pestalozzian or Inductive System; Teaching
Musical Composition, and the Art of Extemporizing Interludes and Voluntaries. This book was unique in organ "methods" published to this point in that it was directed at the more sophisticated music student.68 Basically, it is a book of music theory with practical keyboard exercises. It was probably intended as a successor to Johnson's popular Instructions in Thorough Base which had undergone at least six reprints by this time, testifying not only to the need for these types of materials but also to the growing technical sophistication of the organist.

Johnson's Practical Instructions, however, contains no
discussion concerning church voluntaries, but approaches them from a completely
technical standpoint. This is not the case in American Church Organ
Voluntaries. The volume opens with
"Remarks," wherein the editors comment that one should speak of an
"opening voluntary" rather than a "voluntary before the
service" (as Zeuner does), since this voluntary is a part of the service
and should arouse the proper feelings in the listener for the worship which
will follow. They waste no time in criticizing the commonplace habit of playing
popular music, including bits of opera, as voluntaries. They warn the organist
not to give in to popular opinion which supports this sort of music, even if
they are getting pressure from a wealthy person in the congregation who has
money but no taste, ending by saying that in such cases it is better to
"vacate your office and retain the good opinion of all whose good opinion
is worth having" rather than to give in to "depraved taste."69
In regard to voluntaries after the service, Cutler and Johnson admit that there
are differing opinions on the value of playing music while people are leaving. They justify this practice by saying that there is already unavoidable noise at the end of the service as people prepare to leave, and therefore playing
appropriate music while this is happening will remind people for as long as
possible that they are still in the House of God. "What more appropriate
monitor than the solemn Diapasons judiciously managed?"70 The
"Remarks" answer many of the contemporary complaints mentioned
earlier.

The complete pre-publication title of this anthology, Organ Voluntaries, a Complete Collection, adapted to American Church Service, and designed for the use of Inexperienced Organists who have not Progressed far Enough in Their Studies to be able to Play Extemporaneous Voluntaries (i.e., improvised), indicates Johnson's purpose in compiling this collection--providing music for amateur organists. The voluntaries are all manualiter. Numbers 1-35 are opening voluntaries, while numbers 36-41 are opening voluntaries for use on festival occasions. Twelve closing voluntaries are included. Many of the voluntaries are by either Johnson or Cutler, but works by Haydn, Muller, Rinck, and Mendelssohn are included, as well as works by lesser-known composers of that period. The pieces contain some tempo, dynamic, and keyboard indications. The tempi vary, although in both the opening and closing voluntaries the majority of tempi designations provided are moderate. The voluntaries are one to two pages in length and generally homophonic in style. There are only isolated indications of sections with solo stops, marked in tiny print "solo . . . solo ends" (see Example 3 for the first half of an opening voluntary with these frugal registration markings). Thus there is nothing about these pieces which would relate them to popular music. Pinel suggests in the Foreword to the edition that although these pieces seem very plain to our contemporary ears, they would have been harmonically innovative, even "exhilarating," to mid-19th century rural listeners.71 (The harmony, while hardly daring, is more chromatic than that of the average hymns and service music.) One reason for the lack of excess in these pieces (and those in Loud's method) may have been the fact that Protestants were still strongly affected by the recent appearance of organs and conservative views of the appropriateness of instrumental music in
general.72 

The several printings of American Church Organ
Voluntaries testify to its popularity.
Gould comments that in his travels he did visit some congregations where the
voluntaries were appropriate and therefore useful (although he had many
negative experiences as well). Thus, Johnson and Cutler's music or at least the
approach to service-playing which it and Loud exemplified was represented in
practice and was not just a theoretical goal.

Southard & Whiting

Although organ methods from the Continent, American
materials for playing the harmonium or cabinet organ, and other unannotated
volumes of voluntaries appeared after Johnson's anthology, the next significant
collection was that of L. H. Southard and G. E. Whiting, entitled The Organist (1868). This volume is also an anthology of music for service use, with an introduction discussing registration and other useful information for the church organist. However, as will soon become evident, there are many
differences between this collection and that of Cutler and Johnson, despite the
similarity of their subjects and their separation in publication by only 16
years.

In the second half of the 19th century, one can observe the
rise of concert organs and concert organists. Large organs were built at
Tremont Temple in Boston (1853) and the Boston Music Hall (1863). The
increasing popularity and professionalism of orchestras fueled the popularity
of orchestral transcriptions for organ. 
Organists adopted some of the Romantic excesses of European organists,
such as the fascination in trying to recreate "storms" on the organ.
It is noteworthy that the first piece performed on the new Walcker organ in
Boston's Music Hall was the "Overture to William Tell" by Rossini.73
At the same time, the technical improvements and expanded size of organs made
it more practical to perform legitimate organ literature of greater magnitude
than the voluntaries.  The
dedication recitals of organs in churches now were devoted exclusively to organ
solos, whereas previously these events consisted of vocal solos accompanied by
organ with perhaps a few organ voluntaries.74 Several sources mention that Bach
organ works were performed in America for the first time in this period (about
the mid 1860s). Most of the concert organists, however, were English or
European.

In examining The Organist, these changes in organ literature in the second half of the 19th century are reflected.  The subtitle of the volume indicates that it is "a collection of voluntaries, studies, and transcriptions of moderate difficulty," and includes information on registration (which will be explored shortly).  The editors explain in the introduction that "melodious and piquant Voluntaries" are part of the church organist's responsibilities, and that therefore the aim of this volume is to supply opening and closing voluntaries which meet these requirements, complete with registrations.75 Like the Cutler and Johnson volume, this collection was apparently intended primarily for less experienced players who were not yet adept enough to improvise appropriate service music.  It is interesting that, unlike Johnson who taught improvisation based on models of Bach, Southard and Whiting refer the aspiring church improviser to the piano sonatas of Mozart and Haydn as a basis of study, pointing already to a sharp difference in outlook.

The music supplied for opening and closing voluntaries by
Southard and Whiting differs markedly from that of Cutler and Johnson. Even the
titles underscore this difference: although the term "voluntary" is
used in the introduction, the pieces are entitled "Prelude" and
"Postlude" (or "Postludium"--see Example 4). This implies a
slightly different function than the term "opening voluntary" which
Johnson carefully chooses (probably something closer  "voluntary before the service"). In addition,
several of the pieces have titles like "Reverie" or
"Romanza," reflecting a strong Romantic secular influence. The pieces
are much longer than those in American Church Organ Voluntaries
style='font-style:normal'>, and all include pedal parts on separate staves.
Three of the pieces are identified as transcriptions of Haydn, Mendelssohn, and
Mozart. The pieces are very pianistic technically, and include a multitude of
interpretive marks, including articulation, phrasing, and many dynamic
markings. Big chords alternate with solo passages, with all sorts of pianistic
accompaniment figures; one prelude even has a cadenza (#4), and piece #5, a
"Pastorale," contains running scale passages in 32nd notes. The
Postludes are all loud pieces, but the style of the Preludes varies widely, and
one is not always sure which category the pieces with other titles fall
into.  There is even a
"March," one of the styles specifically attacked by church music
critics of the previous generation.

It is interesting that the final piece in The Organist is Bach's "Celebrated Prelude and Fugue in e minor" (BWV 533), as edited by Mendelssohn. This seems to be a direct reflection of the apparently successful introduction of Bach into the concert organ repertoire at this time. It also suggests that organists were no longer expected to be able to distinguish sacred music from secular or concert repertoire, since both were equally acceptable in church. Apparently the responsibility of the organist to musically interpret the text and mood of the hymns and scriptures which had been emphasized earlier in the century was no longer a principal focus.

One of the most conspicuous differences between the two
organ anthologies, however, is in the treatment of organ registration. Here a
brief digression is necessary to survey the changes which had taken place in
organ construction between the writing of these two volumes. Although Americans
had begun building their own instruments instead of importing them from England
in the first half of the 19th century, the English influence remained very
strong.  By 1850, although loud
organs (by early standards) were increasing in popularity, the basic sound was
light and bright, emphasizing the diapasons and flutes, with some reeds and
strings included.  The manuals and
pedalboards were not standardized--both the Pedal and Swell divisions tended to
have incomplete ranges.76 The first large American organ was the Hook and
Hastings instrument installed in the Tremont Temple, Boston in 1853, with four
manuals and 70 stops.77 Thus, from about 1860 on, the enthusiasm for
increasingly louder organs continued, with a bolder, brighter sound appearing.
Console controls and nuances of the expression pedals became more important.
Organs now tended to be placed in the front of the church rather than hidden in
the balconies, and cases were often eliminated.78

These changes say a lot about the change in the role of the
organ in the church service. Around 1841, one writer complained that the organs
were sometimes unsuited for leading congregational singing, one of the possible
problems being that they were too small to really lead the singers and keep
them on pitch.79 However, by about 1850, Gould writes that performances were
gradually getting louder, complaining that in some churches the choir and
congregation combined could not sing above the organ, satisfying only those
"who are more pleased with noise than with sense."80 Johnson and
Cutler warn the organist about playing too loudly while accompanying in their
opening remarks, explaining that the organ should be subordinate to the
singers.81 However, it is interesting that in The Organist
style='font-style:normal'>, although the organs by this time must certainly
have been louder, this warning is never mentioned.

To return now to the topic of registration, both volumes
include information on registration in their introductions, as well as sample
specifications. (See Example 5 for the basic specification list from the Cutler
& Johnson collection.) As might be expected from the changes in organ
building, a much wider variety of stops is mentioned in the later volume. Both
collections describe stops, but Johnson and Cutler add information on the
purpose of some of these stops in worship.  For example, they recommend the diapason as "well
suited to church purposes in general," but guard against using the flute,
which "is a fancy stop, and generally much abused . . . when used as a
solo stop . . . the effect is suggestive of the theatre, or ball-room, rather
than the church."82 Within the pieces themselves, Johnson and Cutler
suggest only one specific stop in the entire volume, sometimes designating
where a solo stop should be used but not suggesting a particular stop. Southard
and Whiting, on the other hand, provide detailed registration suggestions at
the beginning and throughout every piece, as well as directions to use the
couplers, expression pedals, and tremulant. They also suggest in the
introduction that one of the responsibilities of the organist is to create
"striking and delicious effects of the organ," which they advise
requires the use of varied registrations and separate manuals.83

This emphasis on registration, coupled with the changes in
organs observed above, suggest that the role of the organist was changing by
about 1870. Although Johnson and Cutler provide basic material on registration
for the stops generally appearing on a "modern" organ, they are not
as concerned with how the organist applies or combines these stops as they are
with the spiritual effects that various stops induce.  Southard and Whiting, however, comment from the start that
"the chaotic droning and ridiculous combinations of stops which were
satisfying until within a few years, will no longer be endured by Congregations
of average musical culture."84 This implies a concern that the organist
have a greater technical knowledge of registration than was previously
considered satisfactory. But this comment also suggests that the organist is
now expected to start with the registration concepts of "musical
culture" of the society at large and apply them to the service of the
church, reflecting the increasing importance of musical culture in society in
general. This differs from the earlier outlook on registration which assumes
that the organist chooses stops based on their contribution to solemn worship
without regard for (or deliberately in contrast to) the types of sounds
associated with secular culture.

A final point of contention regarding registration is
illustrated in the closing comment of the introduction to The Organ
style='font-style:normal'>ist,
where the editors comment that they hope that their collection will "tend
to improve the taste and ability of players, and thereby create a general
demand for more complete and effective organs than are often found outside of
two or three of our largest cities."85 This is in marked contrast to
Cutler and Johnson, who, although they would agree with the goal of improving
the taste and ability of players, are trying to "improve" it in the
opposite direction from the goals of Southard and Whiting. It is noteworthy
that Gould writes in 1853 that organists should be careful that their playing
serves no other purpose than to recommend the organ and organ-builder86--what
Southard and Whiting seem to be suggesting as a positive goal.

It is interesting to note that in looking at the two
above-mentioned church music anthologies, there is scarcely any mention of
accompanying hymns and psalms. This may reflect the new rise of the use of
voluntaries and corresponding lack of suitable literature (thus the focus on
this aspect), or it may be considered a commentary on the relative lack of
importance of hymn-playing to these editors.  Southard and Whiting, for example, ignore the subject
altogether.

In studying the voluntaries in The Organ
style='font-style:normal'>ist, it
becomes apparent that some of the registration changes must have required
pistons, which as stated were becoming more popular. This makes the fact that
this volume excludes a discussion of registering hymns even more interesting,
since changes between verses of hymns to illustrate the meaning of the text
would now have been much easier and smoother. Perhaps due to the emphasis in
earlier years on accompanying, the editors were interested in looking ahead to new directions in church music.

James McCray

James McCray, Professor of Music at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, retired after more than 40 years of teaching. He taught for 25 of them at CSU, and for 10 years he was the Chairman of Music, Theatre, and Dance Department. He has published 25 scholarly articles in various national and international journals such as The American Organist, Music Educator’s Journal, The Choral Journal, and several others. He served a two-year term as the head editor for The Choral Journal. For over 30 years he has written a monthly column on choral music for The Diapason. He is the author of three books; a fourth will be published sometime next year. As a composer, Dr. McCray has published over 100 choral works. He has had commissions from Yale University, Florida All-State Choirs, Texas Music Educators’ Association, and many other colleges, public and private schools, and churches throughout the U.S. He has received the Professor of the Year award from two separate universities (in Virginia and Florida). Dr. McCray was one of 11 Americans designated for the 1992–93 Outstanding Music Educator Award, and in 1992 he received the Orpheus Award, the highest award given by Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. The award read “For significant and lasting contributions to the cause of music in America.”

How did choral music start in the United States?

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
—Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass1

Prologue

Unlike political history, American choral music did not immediately burst forth with significant people and events. Choral music certainly existed in America since the Colonial Period, but it was not until the twentieth century that its impact was significant. The last half of the twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in choral music unprecedented in the history of the country. American choral music came of age on a truly national level, and through the expansion of music education, technology, professional organizations, and available materials, the interest in choral singing escalated dramatically.
It is possible to trace the history of American choral music from its two most basic perspectives:
1. Music that had a functional purpose (sacred)
2. Music created for artistic purposes (secular)
In the early days of America, issues such as food, shelter, and clothing were foremost in the minds of the people. As America became more affluent, the need for greater diversions increased. Music’s purposes reached beyond the amateur, and geographical tastes dictated ever-changing styles and requirements.
Of course the true native Americans were American Indians, but their music remained localized. As an oral tradition, preservation through notation was not a major factor. They and their culture became a minority, and, in many regrettable ways, an unfortunate footnote in American music history. For a detailed account of this true American music see Daniel Kingman, American Music: A Panorama,2 and “Native Pioneers” in Gilbert Chase’s American Music.3 Their influence on the development of American choral music is negligible, although twentieth-century composers have employed some of its characteristics in selected works.
The veritable seeds of American music can be found in the religious traditions carried to the new world by transplanted Europeans. The settlers came seeking religious freedom, but, in so doing, they helped create a narrowly focused view of choral music, which took many years to nurture and broaden. In a penetrating study, The Anthem in England and America by Elwyn A. Wienandt and Robert H. Young, the authors point out:

Austerity also characterized Puritan religious musical expression. While it is true that Puritans have been unjustly accused of a general negative attitude toward the arts, it nevertheless remains that their practice of church music could be sung in unison without accompaniment, and nothing more.4

The early pioneers who came to this country brought with them two types of music: religious and folk. Both played major roles in the musical milieu, but the functional need for church music helped promote choral works. Nearly forgotten are the Huguenot settlements in Florida, which occurred almost fifty years before the landing of the Pilgrims; their music was transplanted and certainly not an original American style. The Puritans in seventeenth-century New England imported the Psalm-singing traditions of the Reformation. Since religion dominated their lives and the lives of everyone in the community even if they were not members of the church, religious music naturally took precedence over that of the secular world. Percy Scholes, in The Puritans and Music in England and New England, corrected the unfortunate stereotype of the Puritans as being universally opposed to music and the fine arts in general.5 Folk music was used on special occasions, but church music was always present. The folk music that survived continued to be transformed throughout succeeding generations, and American folk art prospered and changed during the growth and expansion of the new civilization.

Overview: the 18th century

As the eighteenth century progressed, New England established a more solid, humanized social identity, and it is here where the true “art music” had its foundations. European thinking continued to dominate the music, but because American amateurs were the creators and re-creators, a less professional posture evolved. These stalwart American composers began to create a new personality that represented their culture.
Some of these “native” American musicians are familiar to today’s choral directors, not because of the compelling quality of their music, but more often as an historical contrast to the sophisticated European music of that time. It is highly doubtful that most conductors who program early American choral music do so because they and their audiences are attracted to the beauty and ingenuity of the music, but then that is true with many types of concert music. A high quality level of this music should not be expected—these composers were “Yankee tunesmiths”,6 as labeled by H. Wiley Hitchcock, because they did not have the cultural development and training of their professional European counterparts.
Some of the early American composers whose music remains modestly present in today’s choral repertoire include:
Supply Belcher (1751–1836)
William Billings (1746–1800)
Elkanah Kelsay Dare (1782–1826)
Jacob French (1754–1817)
Christian Gregor (1723–1801)
Uri K. Hill (1802–1875)
Oliver Holden (1765–1844)
Jeremiah Ingalls (1764–1838)
Stephen Jenks (1772–1856)
Justin Morgan (1747–1798)
Timothy Olmstead (1759–1848)
Daniel Read (1757–1856), and
Timothy Swan (1758–1842).
They had professions other than music. For example, Supply Belcher was a tavern keeper; William Billings, a tanner; Oliver Holden, a carpenter; Justin Morgan, a horse breeder; and Daniel Read, a comb maker. Their music is available in performing editions because of the research and effort of musicians in the last half of the twentieth century such as Leonard Van Camp,7 Irving Lowens,8 Lawrence Bennett,9 Kurt Stone,10 and others.
Today it is William Billings whose music receives the greatest frequency of performance, and he has become a standard representative for music of this period. The year 2000 was the 200th anniversary of his death, and choral works such as Chester, A Virgin Unspotted, David’s Lamentation, Kittery, I Am the Rose of Sharon, and The Lord Is Ris’n Indeed received numerous performances in concerts by church, school, community, and professional choirs. Billings generally is acknowledged to be the most gifted of the “singing school” composers of eighteenth-century America. His style, somewhat typical of the period, employs fuguing tunes, unorthodox voice leading, open-fifth cadences, melodic writing in each of the parts, and some surprising harmonies.11 By 1787 his music was widely known across America.
Billings was an interesting personality as well. Because out-of-tune singing was a serious problem, he added a ’cello to double the lowest part.12 He had a “church choir,” but that policy met resistance from aging deacons, although by 1779 a gallery was placed in the church for “the singers”. It was Billings who proclaimed:

He who finds himself gifted with a tunable voice, and yet neglects to cultivate it, not only hides in the earth a talent of the highest value, but robs himself of that peculiar pleasure, of which they only are conscious who exercise that faculty.13
It would seem that problems often faced by today’s church choir directors were also present in the eighteenth century.
Extensive research in the music of this period has provided contemporary conductors with understanding of the style, and background for performance. Two important studies are Alan C. Buechner, Yankee Singing School and the Golden Age of Choral Music in New England, 1760-1800,14 and Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845.15

Overview: the 19th century

In the late nineteenth century, a group of composers came to be known as “The Second New England School.” They included George W. Chadwick (1854–1931), Arthur Foote (1853–1937), Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (1867–1944), and Horatio Parker (1863–1937). Parker, professor of music at Yale from 1894–1919, was possibly the most important American choral composer of the century. He, like many Americans, had been trained in Europe (Munich). His oratorio, Hora Novissima (1891), is a major work that established his place in the history of American music. After its 1893 performances in New York, Boston, and Cincinnati, in 1899 it became the first work by an American to be performed at the famous Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, England. This resulted in commissions for prestigious English choir festivals and the acceptance of an American compositional school by the international community.
Parker’s music is rarely performed today and exhibits Teutonic rather than American tendencies, yet his influence through his teaching of such noted composers as Douglas Moore (1892–1969), Quincy Porter (1897–1966), and the quixotic Charles Ives (1874–1954), indirectly makes him the father of twentieth-century American choral music. Parker, and to a somewhat lesser degree Dudley Buck (1839–1909), serve as transitional figures from the rudimentary choral music that preceded them, to the more solid styles and schools that came after them. In teaching Charles Ives, Parker’s conservatism proved to be more negative than positive, and Ives eventually abandoned the Romantic spirit and style of Parker to become America’s first great composer.16
Parker, a dedicated musician, wrote in a variety of genres, including orchestral and operatic; however, it is in church music where his contributions seem to be most recognized. Erik Routley boldly states that Parker’s Mount Zion is “probably one of the best hymn tunes of its age.”17 His musical style, prudent and old-fashioned, still represented an elevation in the quality level of American choral music at the end of that century. He had developed a solid craft that gave his music more depth than others of his generation or before. His ability to write in larger forms raised the appreciation of the American composer in the international forum.
The only other truly significant American choral composer between Billings and Parker was Dudley Buck. Typical of many nineteenth-century American composers, Buck studied in Europe. As with Horatio Parker, Buck wrote useful, yet conservative, anthems employing solo quartets in alternation with the full chorus. Before 1870 it was customary to write anthems for solo quartet without the choir, and Buck had a “concern for the differing characteristics of quartet and choral music.”18 He composed in all musical forms and was highly regarded in his lifetime. Wienandt and Young suggest that:

Although Dudley Buck was not a threat to the superiority of European composition, he was the best that America could then bring to the field of church music. . . . The American examples of this period are shabby at best. 19
There were, however, productive and relatively important nineteenth-century composers in other fields of music. Men such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), Stephen Foster (1825–1894) and Edward MacDowell (1861–1908) were successful in their areas of interest. Gottschalk’s music is considered to be among the best of the century. As a piano virtuoso, he toured Europe extensively. His adaptation of Creole melodies brought elements of the New World into the salons and concert halls of Europe and South America. This paved the way for the acceptance of an American style, which, even today, is very elusive.20
Undoubtedly, the most prominent choral musician of this middle period was Lowell Mason (1792–1872), although his primary compositional contributions were in hymns and singing books. He helped fashion a more refined style of American hymnody, different from the popular camp meeting songs of the time. His vital gift, however, was in the development and advancement of music education. His career reached a pinnacle in 1838 when he became the Boston Superintendent of Public School Music, which was the first such position in the United States.21
For choral music, though, it was the church that continued to provide the backbone for growth. Protestant Church Music in America, by Robert Stevenson, is a brief but very thorough survey of people and movements from 1564 to the present. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a steady rise in denominations and numbers of churches in America. Each had its own perspective on what was needed musically for their services of worship. Some of the more active denominations producing music of merit were the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the Presbyterians. Men such as James Lyon (1735–1794) and William Tuckey (1708–1781) helped develop church music through composition, but their choral contributions were not particularly important. The use of organs in churches was mildly controversial in some denominations, but eventually that came to be common practice for most. Part of the problem was finding someone who could play the organ. According to Irving Lowens,

As late as 1714, when after much discussion an organ imported three years earlier by Thomas Brattle was installed in Boston’s King’s Chapel, an organist had to be brought from England to Play skillfully thereon with a loud noise.22
As in the preceding century, Protestant church music was the primary vehicle for choral music in America during the nineteenth century. Much of the music was developed through music collections, and often these publications contained European music, which helped to make them more commercially profitable. Of the composers not previously mentioned, some of the most important were William B. Bradbury (1816–1868), George Kingsley (1811–1884), Joseph P. Holbrook (1822–1888), Thomas Hastings (1784–1872), and George K. Jackson (1745–1823).
In the first half of the century, European music dominated concert halls and other professional musical venues, but American church music flourished. Anthem collections by American composers steadily increased. However, as the sophistication levels rose, particularly in the North, there was a need to have more refined music than that in the standard “native” American repertory. Stevenson explains:

Already by 1850 the American denominations had so drawn their social lines that some ministered to the wealthy and elite in big cities, while others served the common folk on farms and frontiers. Speaking of one ‘elite’ denomination in a course of historical lectures given at Berlin in 1854, Philip Schaff claimed that the Protestant Episcopal Church had addressed itself ‘heretofore almost exclusively to the higher classes of society, and had rather discouraged the poor man from joining it.’ With such a constituency, the music published for use in Episcopal churches at mid-century sounded quite a different note from that prevailing in publications for frontier churches, or even for middle-class urban churches.23

Church repertoire
Arguments persisted regarding the function of a church choir. Some felt that it should be to assist congregational singing, while others wanted a group that had its own identity and quality. These opinions on choir function have not ceased, and even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, impassioned cries of support or lack-of-support can be heard from some denominations and/or members within them. After 1865 churches developed their own hymnals, so that styles of music associated with certain denominations became even more established. Congregational singing always was important, but stylistic differences at this time were not limited to the Protestant churches, and in the late twentieth century, even the Roman Catholic hymnals moved toward a more folk-like or gospel-style inclusion.
In most American churches today, the anthem serves as the standard vehicle for choir performances. As traced by Wienandt and Young,24 its history has been long and varied. It is not an American invention, but its development and use was an important factor in the spread of choral music. The anthem is an English derivative of the Latin motet, and as such was more musically complex than simple hymns sung by the congregation; therefore, more accomplished singers and preparations were needed for use in the service, and that concept has been in existence since ancient times.

The word may be followed back to various forms of Antiphon, a term denoting the category of plainsong sung before and after psalms and canticles. It was the function of antiphons to amplify the text of scriptural material to which they were attached. They were numerous because such scriptural sections were used several times each day. References to the antiphon have been traced from as early as the beginning of the Christian era, but the various spellings, forms and meanings in English begin much later, perhaps not until around the eleventh century.25
Of special musicological interest is the word “antine,” which was used in American music in the early years. Kingman states:

There is no such word in English usage. Baring-Gould, collector of the first versions using it, postulates that it is a corruption of the French antienne, which means “antiphon.” Since an antiphon is a piece of liturgical music, the image of every grove ringing ‘with a merry antine’ is a plausible and indeed a rather happy one.26
As stated earlier, the concept of the anthem was brought to this country. In the 1760s the publication of American anthems by “native” composers (Francis Hopkinson [1737–91] and James Lyon [1735–94]) led the way to an ever-expanding market of this genre. In most churches today, the anthem serves as the standard presentation of choir performance. It became a work of several pages’ duration based on a scriptural or poetic text that may or may not be accompanied and almost always is in English.
In European Catholic churches, complete musical Masses were at one time very common, but today they are rare and generally found only in large and very musically active churches; even then, they may only be used on special occasions. Catholic churches throughout America most often celebrate Mass with brief musical intonations by a priest and congregational singing. Those choirs may prepare special music, such as an anthem, but their primary function is to help with congregational singing.
In many Protestant denominations choral singing is used in other places in the service (introits, responses, etc.). Some do not employ the term anthem, but, even if called special music or some other term, its function is that of an anthem. Often ministers and church choir directors differ on the function of the choir. For many ministers, church choirs are, above all, a help for congregational singing, and the preparation of an anthem is a bonus; for most church choir conductors, the opposite may be true. Regardless of their intended function, church choirs that have been successful serve in both capacities, and, for most people, the blending of these functions has been beneficial.
The rise of choral music in America owes much to congregational singing. Congregational response has long been a part of liturgy. Group singing in worship has been a vital part in the development of choral music, especially in America.
The prevailing aspect of congregational singing can be found in hymnody. Briefly, hymnody was an outgrowth of plainsong and originally a monastic technique. Musical hymns were melodies that were, at first, associated with the daily offices; they most often were Psalms, but other Scriptural texts were used as well. Their use continued to expand throughout the early centuries of Christianity, and in the hands of Martin Luther (1483–1546) congregational hymnody became a major segment of worship services in the Reformation. Melodies popular with the people thrived, and it is in this context that American hymnody took shape.27
Erik Routley, in The Music of Christian Hymns, states:

The American tradition of hymnody falls into clearly defined streams which before 1900 were culturally separate, and which during the 20th century began to influence each other . . . We classify these streams as (1) the New England Style (2) the Southern Folk Hymnody (3) the Black Spiritual and (4) the Gospel Song. 28
The New England tradition of hymnody was an outgrowth of Psalm singing, especially linked to the Scottish Psalter and the Ainsworth Psalter. America’s first printed book, the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, attempted to replace those psalters, and did so for many generations. An important feature of the New England tradition was the establishment of singing schools. The intent was to improve congregational singing, but they also can be seen as an endemic factor in the development of choral music in America, because as singing improved, so did the need for music other than simple hymns. In many ways, the interest in the singing schools led the way for church choirs. For example, through diligent rehearsals in the meeting houses, congregational members grew musically proficient and sought special recognition; eventually, people with training sat and performed together in the church’s “gallery,” today called the choir loft.

Musical literacy influences

Two important early writers were Thomas Walter (1696–1725) and John Tufts (1689–1750). Walter’s pioneer book of instruction, The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained (1721), tried to provide rules and methods for sight-reading tunes. Tufts’ An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes in a Plain and Easy Method was also available in 1721, and he tried to instruct through letters instead of notes.29
Throughout the eighteenth century, singing schools and singing school teachers brought music to interested people. Emphasis remained on sacred music; however, the inclusion of secular tunes became more common. William Billings, the most famous of the singing teachers, produced six tune books containing the robust, energetic musical style found in his anthems. Other later significant musical missionaries who contributed to the spread of musical education were Lowell Mason (1792–1872), Thomas Hastings (1784–1872), and Virgil C. Taylor (1817–1891).

Black spirituals, white spirituals, and gospel song

In the South, hymnody progressed in different directions. Folk hymnody was a rural development that heavily relied on the shape-note tradition; this focused on assisting uneducated people to learn how to sing. George Pullen Jackson has been a leader in tracing the history of folk hymnody; he has authored three books dealing with the music and style associated with this genre.30 The white spiritual was a term sometimes used for the hymnody of white settlers in southern states. Music books for this hymnody often use “shape note” characters to assist in reading the music. There were many publications of music which helped spread the shape-note concept. Some of those that merit attention include John Wyeth, Repository of Sacred Music (1810),31 Ananias Davisson, Kentucky Harmony (1816),32 William Walker, Southern Harmony,33 B.F. White and E.J. King, Sacred Harp.34
Black spirituals were transmitted through oral tradition. The first black college, Fisk University, began in 1866. A group of student singers known as The Jubilee Singers toured America, England, and other European countries. They were responsible for spreading the knowledge and interest in Negro spirituals.35
The gospel song was, as Routley indicates:

Hymnody reduced to its simplest terms, it is cast in the form either of a solo song, or of a solo song with refrain, and this it has in common with the Black Spiritual.36

This style of hymnody grew out of the revivals that were particularly popular in the South in the nineteenth century. Evangelistic music existed in the 1730s and is associated with Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), but the true gospel songs became a formidable style around 1859. Typically, they sustain one chord for an entire measure and remain restricted to the three basic triads of tonic, subdominant, and dominant. This permitted strong rhythmic fluctuations and improvisation, which helped generate and intensify the emotional drive, a primary feature of evangelistic denominations. Whereas the other three streams of hymnody (New England style, Southern folk hymnody, and Black spiritual) have roots in foreign cultures, gospel music seems to be an American contribution.
One of many religious groups that came to America and developed a music for their denomination was the Shakers, although this folk-like music was unison, not harmonized, and unaccompanied, and not pure choral music. Possibly the most important may have been the Moravian tradition, which dates from the fifteenth century and is rich in a choral heritage. These people settled in Pennsylvania before 1740 and established communities such as Bethlehem, Lititz, and Nazareth; by 1783 they had expanded south to North Carolina. Donald M. McCorkle, director and editor-in-chief of the Moravian Music Foundation suggests that:
Most of the early Moravian composers were clergymen who wrote music apparently as easily as they did sermons. . . . The anthems and songs created by the Moravians were influenced primarily by contemporary musical trends of Central Europe. Since most of the choral and vocal music by American Moravians is conceived for mixed voices accompanied by instruments, it is quite different both in structure and content from other sacred music written in 18th-century America.37

Their musical past has been preserved and made available through definitive editions released under the title Moramus Editions. Three of the more significant American composers were John Antes (1740–1811), Johann Friedrich Peter (1746–1813), and Johannes Herbst (1735–1812). Peter, perhaps the most outstanding of the Moravian composers, wrote over 100 anthems and arias, as well as six string quintets in 1789, which may be the earliest extant examples of American chamber music. Antes composed twenty-five sacred anthems and twelve chorales, and possibly made the earliest violin in America in 1759.

New secular directions

Less dominant influences on the growth of choral music in America may be seen in the development of secular organizations and events. A product of the singing schools, for example, was the formation of music clubs. Organizations such as the Stoughton Musical Society developed by 1786 and Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, which began in 1815, did much to stimulate interest in choral singing. Often competitions between organizations were held, which encouraged improvements in quality.
In the nineteenth century, conventions and fairs were held, and they helped promote choral singing in America. Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore (1829–1892), through his Peace Jubilees, promoted gigantic mass performances by choirs of 10,000! These festivals involved enormous bands and orchestras; a structure was built to house an audience of 50,000. Villages and towns throughout New England filled their quotas of singers, and each had a local leader who had been instructed in the tempos so that everyone was well prepared when they met together to perform.
There were world’s fairs held in Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1893, and singing played an important part at these international events. For the centennial, new choral works were commissioned from John Knowles Paine (A Centennial Hymn, text by John Greenleaf Whittier) and Dudley Buck (The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, text by Sidney Lanier). Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (which presented 36 choral concerts) featured music performed by some of the younger American composers, including G.W. Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, and Arthur Foote. Female composers were represented in a concert heralding the opening of the Woman’s Building, including music by Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.38
Another important development that fostered choral singing in America was the establishment of music schools and conservatories. Oberlin College had a Chair of Sacred Music in 1835. The first music courses at America’s oldest institution, Harvard College, were not offered until 1862. Other beginnings of note were: 1865, Oberlin Music Conservatory; 1867, New England Conservatory of Music; 1867, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Chicago Musical College. These American schools did not eliminate the continuing process of seeking a European musical education, but as they grew in quality and numbers, they made a musical education more accessible.39
Social amusements were the initial reasons for the development of singing on college campuses. Glee clubs were formed, which performed local concerts for friends, and later they toured to sing for alumni. Eventually, more sophisticated groups developed; they performed the standard European favorites by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and others. Probably the earliest official ensemble was the University Choral Union of the University of Michigan in 1879. Northwestern University, in 1906, was the first school to have an “a cappella” choir—Peter Lutkin, dean of the music school at Northwestern University, founded the Northwestern A Cappella Choir.40
Availability of music was an important factor in helping to encourage music in America. Some noteworthy landmarks in the publishing of music included the 1698 ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book, which contained the first music printed in New England, and the 1761 James Lyon collection Urania, which was the first published setting of Psalms and hymns by a native-born American. Lyon was also active in the establishment of the first public subscription concerts in Philadelphia, and in other early musical ventures.
John S. Dwight (1813–1893) was not a composer, but his work in advancing standards of excellence was important. He was America’s first music critic and editor of the first significant music journal, Dwight’s Journal of Music (1852–1881).
Opera and instrumental music also influenced the growth of choral music in America. While these genres did not have the benefit of the church to encourage their evolution and maturation, they were able to secure ongoing support from individual citizens. Most of the music before the middle of the nineteenth century was European; orchestras had been formed, but they performed repertoire by continental composers. By 1876 subscription concerts had begun in Philadelphia. It was common for orchestras (and opera singers) from Europe to tour in this country, and they too, perpetuated the standard works by recognized European composers.
Theodore Thomas (1835–1905) was an avid young conductor who did much to advance the professional American orchestra. His Theodore Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, toured for many years; in Chicago, Thomas’s orchestra gained a permanent home and evolved into today’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His pioneering helped encourage the formation of major professional orchestras, and before 1900 there were ensembles in St. Louis, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other large cities. Most relied heavily on benefactors who subsidized them financially. Wealthy families such as the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and the Morgans were vital to the development of professional orchestras needed to provide opportunities for the performance of large-scale choral works.41
Opera also depended on the contributions of rich patrons. The public in the nineteenth century had come to opera from a background in minstrelsy, so cultivation of understanding was slow. Even today opera remains a genre that has less universal appeal than many other musical forms. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, there were major opera houses in operation. They brought European performers to the States, which helped develop an established audience. In comparison with other major musical genres such as orchestral, choral, or chamber music, the number of composers who write in this medium remains limited. Cost, technical requirements, and available performances are restrictive factors that have not successfully encouraged a corresponding growth to this vocal art form, yet it did have a modicum of influence on the growth of choral singing.

Summary
The commentary above is a brief examination of some of the events involved in the establishment and evolution of American choral music. There certainly were many other elements that could be pursued in a discussion of this type, but space does not permit a more detailed survey. America is a blend of heterogeneous cultures, and throughout the entire history of the country, people from other places have continued to come to her shores; they brought with them religious, artistic, and social elements of their past, but the most significant factor in any study on the evolution of American choral music must be the influence of the church.
Clearly, choral music began primarily because it was needed in religious ceremonies. In essence, the history of American choral music can be traced through the expansion of musical settings of liturgical words into the secular arena. The twentieth century saw a profound growth of choral singing.
The church, which was the overriding force in the development of choral singing, is now somewhat less influential. In today’s society, one of the controversial issues in the choral field is whether to include sacred music as part of the repertoire of public school ensembles; this is a reflection of that secular expansion, even though a vast majority of quality choral works are based on sacred texts. This change of attitude is a reversal of the past. Singing schools were formed to help people learn to sing religious music, but beginning in the middle of the twentieth century some school systems or administrations began forcefully working to keep music with religious texts from being performed.
Nevertheless, the church remains an important advocate for music, especially choral, yet its interest in styles has seen a rapid shift during the past few decades. That shift has reduced the quality and amount of choral singing, as may be seen in the number of people in church congregations and ultimately church choirs. The church gave impetus to choral singing in this country, and today still is responsible for a large portion of choral performances, as well as the creation of new music. The difference is that it is not the primary leader in the proliferation of choral music, only an equal partner at best.
America was founded on the need and search for freedom in both religious and secular arenas. The church continues to evolve in society, and therefore its music, which has always been an important element, will also evolve. The same may be said for the secular side of society in which music is a vital component. The confluence of the two main forces (sacred/secular) will continue to be a major factor in the development of choral music in the twenty-first century, but the swing away from significant sacred choral music probably will increase just as it did in the twentieth century. 

A recording of William Billings' David's Lamentation

Other choral items of interest:

The Cathedral of St. John Celebrates Ten Years of Cathedral Commissions

Fela Sowande: The Legacy of a Nigerian Music Legend

The Carol and Its Context in Twentieth-century England

American choral music available online from Library of Congress

by James B. Hartman

Notes

                  1.              A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1789), vol. 2. (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 380. Selections from Burney's essay on Purcell, pages 375-416, are reprinted in Michael Burden, Purcell Remembered, 139-141.

                  2.              See "Purcell manuscript acquired by British Library," describing the only known keyboard manuscript of 20 pieces in Purcell's own hand, and the recording of the entire manuscript of Purcell's keyboard works on three period instruments by harpsichordist Davitt Moroney, The Diapason, June 1995, 6.

                  3.              See also The Purcell Companion, edited by Michael Burden (Amadeus Press, 1995), reviewed by Enrique Alberto Arias in The Diapason, November 1995, 8-9. The book contains 11 essays in five sections: Introduction, Background, A Composer for Church and Chamber, Purcell and the Theatre, and Purcell in Performance.

                  4.              The are some inconsistencies in the end date of chapter 2 and the start date of chapter 3, and between the contents outline and the chapter headings in the text, as well as an inaccuracy in the start date of chapter 5.   

                  5.              The date and location of the first performance of Dido and Aeneas has been a matter of speculation. Recent research supporting the title-date connection is cited in King, 173; the problem is acknowledged but not resolved in Burden's introduction to the contemporary reference (Purcell Remembered, 79); Holman concludes "I suspect, however, that the last word has not been said on the matter" (Henry Purcell, 195).

                  6.              (Richard Goodson, the elder?), Orpheus Britannicus, ii (1702, 1711), cited in Holman, 21.

Henry Purcell, by Robert King. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. 256 pages, 103 illustrations, 13 in color. $34.95.

Purcell Remembered, by Michael Burden. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995. xxv + 188 pages, 17 b/w illustrations. $29.95 hardcover plus $5.50 s&h, $17.95 papercover plus $4.50 s&h. Available from the publisher, 133 S.W. Second Ave., Portland, OR 97204-3527.

Henry Purcell, by Peter Holman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xvii + 250 pages, 42 musical examples. $17.95, paper.

Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), one of England's earliest and most notable music historians, wrote: "Unluckily for Purcell! he built his fame with such perishable materials, that his worth and works are daily diminishing, while the reputation of our poets and philosophers is increasing by the constant study and use of their productions. And so much is our great musician's celebrity already consigned to tradition, that it will soon be as difficult to find his songs, or, at least to hear them, as those of his predecessors, Orpheus and Amphion. . . ." Burney attributed the disregard of the work of this superior genius, "equal to that of the greatest masters on the continent," to the changeability of taste in music and to "an inferior band to the Italian opera composers, as well as inferior singers, and an inferior audience, to write for."1 Fortunately for Western musical culture, these impediments to the appreciation of Purcell's music no longer exist.

The level of awareness of Purcell's music in recent years has been increased by the discovery of new manuscripts,2 recordings, progress towards the completion of the comprehensive edition of his works, the publication of books, exhibitions, and other special media events connected with the 1995 tercentenary year. The number and diversity of Purcell's creative output--anthems, domestic sacred music, services, catches, odes, secular vocal music, theater works, keyboard works, consort music--present a challenge to complete comprehension.

In recognition of the tercentenary year, eight books have been published between 1994 and 1996; seven of these will be discussed in these pages in two installments.3 The books in the first group, general in outlook, present the historical background of Purcell's time, provide a picture of his life from scattered sources, and establish a credible context for his compositional genres; those in the second group, more closely focussed and which include two edited collections of essays, deal with specific aspects of the development of Purcell's musical style and performance practices, then and now. All of these works contribute much to deepening our appreciation of this 17th-century master from these diverse viewpoints, ranging from the social and musical setting in which he worked to the opinions of critics and musicians across the centuries.

Robert King is one of Britain's leading baroque conductors. While at Cambridge University he founded The King's Consort, a period-instrument orchestra. He has made over 50 recordings; about one-half of these feature the music of Purcell, for which he researched and prepared his own performing editions. His current project is the recording of all of Purcell's odes, welcome songs, secular solo songs, and sacred music. His historically oriented book, Henry Purcell, provides a fitting introduction to this group of tercentenary publications.

The brief Prologue of the book touches upon several themes identified in other books: Purcell's acknowledged genius; the diversity of his compositions for the church, the opera house, the theater, small domestic instrumental forces, and his royal patrons. It also comments on the lack of information about Purcell himself, who left few letters and no personal diaries. Our present picture of Purcell, therefore, is a composite sketch compiled from scanty references in official records set against the wider historical background, which King treats in considerable detail throughout five chapters, each dealing with a politically defined chronological period.

Chapter 1, "A Restoration Childhood, 1659-1668," covers the period from the dissolution of Cromwell's Protectorate parliament to the "Triple Alliance," the diplomatic triumph of King Charles II. In this period Henry Purcell senior was appointed Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey, where he worked with his counterpart at the Chapel Royal on the choral and instrumental music for the royal coronation. Also, Thomas Purcell, young Henry's uncle, received an appointment as composer at the royal court. The catastrophic plague of 1665--the cause of the death of Henry's father in 1664 might have been due to an earlier isolated outbreak--and the great fire of London in 1666 undoubtedly left lasting impressions on the young Purcell. Whether "the wistfulness that is so prevalent in Purcell's music could therefore be seen as a manifestation of a little boy still crying for his lost father" (p. 42) is perhaps an excessive psycho-biographical speculation, however.

Chapter 2, "Learning the Trade, 1668-1677,"4 reconstructs the musical scene at the Chapel Royal from the time when young Henry became a chorister there at the age of eight or nine to the death of the eminent musician Matthew Locke, court composer and also a friend of Henry's father and uncle. As a chorister, the young Purcell's musical education included lessons from John Blow and Christopher Gibbons, son of Orlando. Although the Chapel boys were encouraged to compose, no composition by Purcell has survived. Along with other boys, he might have acted in London theatrical performances--a formative experience for his later influential years in that context. When his treble singing days were over, Purcell became assistant-apprentice to the supervisor of the royal instruments ("regals, organs, virginals, flutes and recorders and all other kind of wind instruments whatsoever"), a position that ensured contact with court musicians. Whether or not Purcell ever was a pupil of Matthew Locke, the latter's influence on the youth must have been great, partly through the composer's association with the Purcell family, but more directly through the court performances of Locke's music, whose style is reflected in the ode Purcell composed on the death of Locke.

Chapter 3, "Rising Star: Purcell at the Court of Charles II, 1677-1685," chronicles the period from the time when the teenage Purcell was appointed court composer, succeeding Locke, to the death of the royal patron. Commencing with this chapter, the author's discussions of Purcell's compositions include comments on their editions, scoring, musical textures, harmonic language, structural devices, expressive features, and general aesthetic characteristics, all of which provide condensed program notes for the works described. Purcell's compositions in this period included church anthems, the first small-scale songs to go into print, odes and welcome songs for royal occasions, verse anthems, and various instrumental pieces, including the Sonnata's of III Parts, published in 1683. His first commissioned work for the celebration of St. Cecilia's Day appeared in the same year. Only a year before, Purcell had received an appointment as one of the three organists of the Chapel Royal, and a year later he assumed the position of full supervisor and keeper of the royal instruments, following the death of his mentor. The infamous "battle of the organs," an acrimonious contest in 1684 between the builders Bernard Smith and Renatus Harris over the contract for a new organ for the Temple Church was resolved in Smith's favor, after much hostility and a mischievous act of sabotage; the players on Smith's instrument at the trials were Purcell and Blow.

Chapter 4, "Changing Fortunes: Purcell and King James, 1685-1688," covers the short period from the coronation of King James II, for which Purcell set up an organ in Westminster Abbey and contributed a grand, large-scale anthem, to the King's flight from England following political upheavals. During this uncertain time Purcell maintained his position as one of the three organists in the Chapel Royal, but the position of official court composer went to Blow; accordingly, Purcell turned his attention from writing anthems to developing the devotional song--his solo vocal writing at its best--and to his first royal ode. As Purcell wrote less music for the church and more secular vocal music, his compositions began to appear increasingly in printed editions. Even so, his financial affairs suffered on account of the King's decision to open a new Roman Catholic chapel at Whitehall, staffed by highly paid musicians imported from abroad. Purcell was among the royal employees who had to battle for payment for their services, but eventually he was paid "for repairing ye Organs and furnishing Harpsichords."

Chapter 5, "Maturity Cut Short: Purcell under William and Mary, 1688 [sic]-1695," opens at a critical point in English constitutional history, the declaration in 1689 of William and Mary as king and queen. Purcell had control of the organ loft for their coronation, and he produced the first of six birthday odes for the new queen in the same year. Although royal patronage in music was diminishing, Purcell maintained a busy schedule at court (still as supervisor of the royal instruments) and the Chapel Royal, in addition to his responsibilities at Westminster Abbey. The production in 1689 at a girl's boarding school of an opera, presumed to have been Dido and Aeneas,5 marked the beginning of his career as the leading composer for the London theater. The sources, production, and musical features of his various works for the genre are supplied in appropriate detail throughout this chapter. About a month after the annual celebrations of St. Cecilia's Day in November 1694, Queen Mary died in the smallpox epidemic that was sweeping London; Purcell composed a march and some vocal music for her funeral service in Westminster Abbey, and later, the music for two elegies. Purcell's own premature death at the age of 36, attributed to tuberculosis, was also marked by a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, when some of the music he had composed for Queen Mary's funeral was again played. A brief Epilogue to the book mentions various persons who paid tribute to England's greatest musical figure and to some significant 20th-century performances of his work.

This elegantly produced and thoroughly researched book successfully interweaves highlights of social and political events with the state of music in late 17th-century England. The numerous graphic illustrations of persons, places, and important events of the period that accompany the text, including a double-page, full-color painting of London in flames, bring a sense of immediacy that transcends the verbal accounts. For these reasons this book provides a stimulating introduction to the study of Purcell for the general reader. A useful supplement is a performer's catalogue of Purcell's works intended to aid performers and scholars as a general reference or for concert programming; pieces in the various genres contain information on titles, authors, occasions, composition dates, first performance dates, soloists, choruses, instruments, timing, and Zimmerman classification numbers. A selected discography and a selected reading list of 48 titles, chiefly historical (only six directly on Purcell), complete the volume.

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Michael Burden is Lecturer in Music at New College, Oxford, and directs the New Chamber Opera. He has written widely on 17th- and 18th-century music and 20th-century musical theater. His book, Purcell Remembered, is a unique assembly of selections from various official publications, notices, public documents, letters, diaries, reminiscences, prefaces and dedications to Purcell's published works, and other sources relating to the composer and his times, spanning three centuries. Much of the material derived from these scattered sources is tangential to Purcell's music as such, but taken as a whole it provides an engrossing and instructive account of life in Purcell's day, and therefore it is a useful supplement to Robert King's historical narrative.

An introductory chronology of Purcell's life and works mentions other musical, political, social, and cultural events, some of which may have impressed Purcell. The selections are presented within discrete sections focussing on Purcell's early life and the Chapel Royal, singers and singing, his Sonnata's of III Parts and a battle for an organ, two coronations and a revolution, publishing and pedagogy, the stage, Purcell's death, the Restoration musical scene, recollections and assessments of Purcell's works by commentators, and similar opinions by musicians through the years.

The selections cover Purcell's life span and beyond. For example, several excerpts from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, England's observant and music-loving writer who wrote during the period 1660-1669, include a reference to a meeting in 1660 with Henry Purcell's father or uncle and the composer Matthew Locke, followed by an account of the activities at the Chapel Royal and vivid descriptions of the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. Pepys also remarked on Purcell's first composition, a song included in a collection published in 1667. As for Purcell's death in 1695, his will is reproduced, along with a description of his interment in Westminster Abbey, some letters by his wife Frances and the publisher Henry Playford relating to the posthumous printing of some sonatas, and several odes, including Dryden's praiseful lament for "The God-like Man, Alas! too soon retir'd." The nature of Purcell the man remains obscure, apart from passing references to his "mirth and good humour, which seem to have been habitual to him"; his contemporaries and successors confined their descriptions to his musical abilities as a composer. His adult singing abilities were extolled in 1685 as "wondrous skill" in an adoring ode by Aphra Behn, the first professional writer in England. As an accomplished organist, Purcell often adjudicated the appointments of other organists and advised on the building or maintenance of church organs. Relevant passages are reproduced from church vestry minutes and from the writings of the music critic Roger North (1653-1734) concerning the great battle for the organs between the rival builders Renatus Harris and Bernard Smith, in which Purcell and Blow successfully demonstrated the Smith organ, and Giovanni Battista Draghi played the Harris instrument.

References to Purcell's small-scale vocal works highlight two contrasting subgenres; the high-minded and the down-to-earth. One example of the former was the performance of Purcell's ode for the St. Cecilia's Day celebrations in 1692; his songs, on the other hand, some of the ribald variety with their bawdy allusions, provided communal entertainment in public taverns, alehouses, and coffeehouses. An explanation of the musical structure of catches and glees, and instructions for singing them, appeared in an advertisement to John Playford's 1673 edition and later editions, along with some examples. One entertaining rebus referred to the composer:

His surname begins with the grace of a cat,

And concludes with the house of a hermit, note that;

His skill at performance each auditor wins, But the poet deserves a good kick on the shins.

Glimpses into significant historical events of Purcell's time are provided in eyewitness descriptions of the coronation of King James II in Westminster Abbey in 1685, when Purcell was organist there, and of the joint coronation of King William and Queen Mary in 1689, when Purcell attended to his usual duties at the Abbey, including the provision of a second organ. The last days and funeral rites for Queen Mary, for which Purcell contributed some of the music, are chronicled in several documents relating to the event.

Public awareness of Purcell in his own time and after his death was due in large part to the publishers John and Henry Playford, father and son, who brought out the composer's works. Their artful prefaces and self-effacing dedications--short on content, strong on flattery for royalty and the anticipated subscribers among the public--sometimes featured encomiastic verses on the collections or offered biblical justification for the learning of music. On the other hand, Purcell's opening remarks to his Choice Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinet, published in 1696, were pedagogical in nature, consisting of directions to the performer and "Rules for Graces," a table of ornaments and embellishments. Almost a century later, Charles Burney speculated that Purcell adopted this practice to meet the needs of ignorant and clumsy performers, and that it contributed to the obsolescence of his music.

Today's readers may vicariously visit the productions of some of Purcell's theatrical works over the centuries through the descriptions by witnesses to actual performances, beginning with an account of Dido and Aeneas (?) in 1689; George Bernard Shaw's quirky review of a 1889 production of the same work provides contrast, as do the critical commentaries on later revivals by Gustav Holst and Thomas Beecham. Appropriate selections from advertisements, prologues, reviews, and recollections relating to performances of Dioclesian, King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen are included here, along with several assessments of the state of opera in England through the years. A summing-up by Sir George Dyson in 1932 acknowledged the freshness and beauty of Purcell's music for his stage productions, but attributed their lack of consistent plots and unified design to the entertainment-driven desires of the public.

The assessments of Purcell by musicians, historians, journalists, and other writers over the years consisted mainly of flattering tributes; insightful critical evaluations did not appear until recent times. For example, an unsigned contribution to the Universal Journal in 1734 described Purcell as "a Shakespear in Musick," possessed of "a most happy enterprizing Genius, join'd with a boundless Invention, and noble Design [who] made Musick answer its Ends (i.e.) move the Passions"; William Boyce, writing in 1768, praised him as "a Genius superior to any of his Predecessors . . . . equally excellent in every thing he attempted." Nevertheless, in 1893 C. Hubert H. Parry, while admitting that Purcell was the greatest genius of his age, criticized his excesses in realistic expression and his faulty judgment in matters of choral style that involved occasional lapses into innocent bathos and childishness. Peter Warlock, writing in 1927 about Purcell's fantasias, found their advanced perfection of form and content sufficient to include them in England's most significant contributions to the world's great music. A wide-ranging and perceptive review of Purcell's place in English music, written by Donald Francis Tovey in 1941, opined that Purcell was born either 50 years too soon (to gain access to the resources of Bach and Handel) or 50 years too late (to be master of the Golden Age). Sir Jack Westrup, formerly chairman of the Purcell Society for almost 20 years, writing in 1959, deplored the repetition of the limited amount of Purcell's music performed in inappropriate "realizations" from erroneous copies. Quotations by contemporary British composers Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, and Peter Maxwell Davies reveal their attraction to Purcell that initiated performances of his works--Davies deplores note-perfect but emotionally insensitive "authentic" performances--that contributed to the renewal of interest in the master in England and elsewhere.

Michael Burden's three-century harvest of written fragments about Purcell and his times provides in words the same sense of immediacy that Roger King's illustrated historical narrative does in pictures. Purcell Remembered includes a center section of 17 small monochrome illustrations, some of which duplicate the more opulent chromatic pictures in King's volume. A multidimensional understanding of the Purcell could therefore be achieved by reading both volumes in parallel.

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Peter Holman is now Senior Associate Lecturer at Colchester Institute of Music, following a teaching career at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and elsewhere. In addition to writing for scholarly journals, he maintains an active performing career as a harpsichordist, organist, and director of The Parley of Instruments and musical director of Opera Restor'd. His book, Henry Purcell, provides the context for understanding the various genres within which Purcell worked: his small-scale domestic works, both vocal and instrumental, and his large-scale public works in church music, the odes, and theater music.

An opening chapter on Purcell's musical world covers the salient events of his life span: the re-establishment of musical life in the Restoration period, the role of secular musicians and performing groups, Purcell's service as a choir boy at the Chapel Royal and his early musical instruction, his duties as a music copyist, his first post as custodian and repairman of musical instruments, his activities as court composer, his succession to the position of organist at Westminster Abbey, the decline of royal patronage of music, the political accommodations of musicians, and life in the theater. Again, we are reminded that little is known about Purcell the man from direct evidence, but attempts have been made to draw character implications from the handwriting of the person described in a later poetic reference as one whose "Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye, Himself as Humble as his Art was High."6

Nearly all Restoration songs dealt with some aspect of love (usually from the male viewpoint), and Purcell's contributions to the genre--dance songs, declamatory songs, and dialogues--have always been greatly admired. The humble catch, too, was mostly preoccupied with wine and women, although Purcell provided untrained amateurs and off-duty musicians with settings of various topics: politics, loyal toasts, newsworthy events, bell-ringing, and others. The Italian influence in England was felt in both performance practice and repertory, and several ground-bass songs by Italian composers were models for Purcell and his contemporaries. Holman gives some detailed consideration to Purcell's musical language in the songs, such as the affective associations of certain keys, the colors obtained through different keys in unequal temperament, and other melodic and harmonic devices relating words, music, and emotion. Other forms treated in the same chapter include symphony songs (inappropriately called "cantatas") performed in the royal apartments, verse anthems and theater songs, some of which became models for succeeding generations of song writers.

Genre distinctions prevail in the discussion of instrumental music, such as fantasias and pavans in the contrapuntal tradition, and overtures and chaconnes as orchestral forms. Holman draws comparisons with earlier forms by Purcell's predecessors and similar works by his contemporaries, and speculates on Purcell's intentions for them as composition exercises or performance pieces. At the same time, notwithstanding the admiration of English musicians for Italianate sonatas, the relationship between Purcell's sonatas and those by Italian masters remains unresolved, as does the rationale for their sequential order in collections. As for Purcell's keyboard music, recent discoveries of Purcell manuscripts have helped to resolve some questions of Purcell as author or arranger of harpsichord works. Several organ voluntaries are now known to have been falsely attributed to him, and many others undoubtedly never were written down, due their improvisational nature.

Insofar as the tradition of cathedral music was unfamiliar to the generation that had lived through the period of the proscription of singing in church services and the destruction or dismantling of organs, Purcell and his contemporaries had much to do to rescue earlier practices and develop new repertory. Holman's discussion of church music follows Purcell's development from his youthful preoccupation with contrapuntal forms to his later absorption of the melodic, harmonic, and structural features of the Italian style. As a writer of anthems, however, Purcell perhaps owed less to Italian music than to Matthew Locke, whose compositions provided the model for works that synthesized formal counterpoint with expressive, soloistic, vocal writing and daring harmonies, but without Locke's polychoral style. The distinguishing features of Purcell's symphony anthems are discussed in some detail, including the Italian harmonic influences and sense of drama. Some useful background information accompanies the account of Purcell's last church music written for Queen Mary's funeral and performed again at Purcell's own funeral.

Apart from Purcell's three famous odes, Welcome to All the Pleasures; Hail, Bright Cecilia; and Come, Ye Sons of Art, Away, the remainder have been neglected partly on account of the toadying texts of these celebratory or welcoming compositions; besides, little is known about their origins or the circumstances of their performance. Purcell's experimentation in this genre involved contrapuntal and ground-bass writing, along with new ways--including the sophisticated Italian influences--of combining voices and instruments. The superb writing style, controlled structure, and grand scale of the ode on St. Cecilia's Day, Purcell's most popular choral work, inspired Handel to produce a birthday ode; this marked the beginning of the English secular choral tradition, according to Holman.

The reopening of the London theaters around 1660 and the presence of instrumental groups to accompany the plays also offered creative opportunities to Purcell. His first music for the theater was performed in the early 1680s, but he dropped out of the scene for almost a decade for reasons unknown. Equally obscure are the inspiration, circumstances, dating, première, foreign musical influences, and political and allegorical meanings of Dido and Aeneas. The resumption of Purcell's career in the commercial theater in 1690 was marked by the production of more than 40 works in the remaining five years of his life, including the landmark Dioclesian, the first semi-opera, followed by King Arthur and The Fairy Queen of the same genre. Holman's discussion of these and other later stage works touches upon the integration of music and action, in addition to other more purely musical issues.

The discussion of each facet of Purcell's output contains assessments of both its glories and shortcomings, with respectful consideration of unresolved and controversial issues surrounding dating, style, and other historical circumstances. The reader's assimilation of this material, however, could have been aided by a system of subheadings to identify the subtle shifts in focus and subject imbedded in the seamless flow of information within each section. Moreover, the book lacks a concluding chapter that would provide a general assessment of Purcell's accomplishments within his own time and his influence on future generations. Nevertheless, the author's enthusiasm for Purcell's music and his comprehensive treatment of its distinct genres undoubtedly will contribute to the renewal of both scholarly and practical interest in the composer and his music far beyond the heightened exposure both received during the tercentenary year. A bibliography of 204 books, articles, and general reference works; a list of 108 edited music collections; and an index of Purcell's works by genre provide the necessary documentation.      

Charlie W. Steele

Charlie W. Steele is director of music ministries/organist at Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterian Church, Brevard, North Carolina, and an adjunct music faculty member at Brevard College, where he teaches applied organ. He holds BA (with Honors) and MA degrees in music from Radford University, Radford, Virginia, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Kentucky.

A significant part of America’s musical
heritage originating in the nineteenth century is the popular shape-note tunebooks that were an outgrowth of the “singing schools.” These collections, which, in their musical notation, used different shapes of note-heads for each syllable of a solfège system, are anthologies of the styles and genres of American music of the time, both sacred and secular. Nineteenth-century American shape-note tunebooks serve as sources for an important body of music—shape- note hymn tunes—which has been, and continues to be, assimilated into the late twentieth-century editions of the hymnals of mainline Protestant denominations.
The availability and popularity of the shape-note tunes in current hymnals has inspired organ composers to use them as cantus firmi for organ chorale preludes and variation settings. As a result, a wealth of organ chorale settings using shape-note hymn melodies has been published in the twenty-five years spanning 1980–2005. Many of these organ works were composed for use as voluntaries in the worship services of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Christian church; moreover, some of the compositions are important contributions to the organ concert literature.

Origins
The shape-note phenomenon traces its origins to the psalm singing of New England. Congregational singing in the churches of the early eighteenth century had, in the opinion of the clergy and musicians of the day, fallen into a deplorable state. One person, eloquently describing the state of congregational singing in 1724, said, “The Singing appears to be rather a confused Noise, made up of Reading, Squeaking, and Grumbling, than a decent and orderly part of God’s worship.”1 In order to improve the state of congregational singing, a form of musical education, the “singing school,” was developed. Its purpose was to teach congregations the elements of music so the people could sing “by note, instead of rote.”2
One of the earliest books developed for use in singing schools was John Tufts’s An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes, which appeared in the 1720s. Tufts’s book utilized the four-note system of solfège (fa, sol, la, mi) that had been imported to America from England. Tufts used abbreviations of the syllables on the musical staff rather than traditional music notation. Tufts’s system, as it appeared in his book, is shown in Figure 1.
In 1801, William Little and William Small compiled what is considered the first shape-note collection, The Easy Instructor. Rather than using conventional notation, the two men devised a system in which the four syllables—fa, sol, la, mi—were each notated with a different note-head shape. The collection became so popular that, according to Marion Hatchett, thirty-four editions or printings of The Easy Instructor were published between 1802 and 1832.3 The shapes, as developed and notated in Little and Small’s collection, are shown in Figure 2. Using these four shapes, a major scale notated in shape-notes consists of the sequence demonstrated in Figure 3.
For the many Americans who had little or no formal musical background or education, this new approach to notation made music reading much simpler. The singers needed to know only the shapes of the notes; they did not have to deal with a music reading system in which locating the tonic note depended upon the ability to distinguish key signatures. The shape-note system did have one major disadvantage—no means was devised to indicate accidentals by using shapes. As many of the tunes used in the collections were diatonic in nature, this disadvantage evidently was not a major concern to either the compilers or the singers.

Collections
The invention of the shape-notes led to a proliferation of published music collections using the new notation system. During the first half of the eighteenth century, numerous compilers published editions of the shape-note tunebooks. George Pullen Jackson, one of the twentieth-century pioneers in the research of the shape-note tradition, lists thirty-eight collections published in the four-shape system between 1798 and 1855.4 Twenty-one of the books Jackson designated as works by compilers who lived in the South. Richard J. Stanislaw’s more recent research provides evidence of an even larger number of four-shape collections. Stanislaw lists some ninety-five tunebooks published in the four-shape system in the United States between 1798 and 1859.5
A significant contribution of the shape-note collections was their function as a repository of American tunes from the oral tradition. Though these types of tunes had appeared in hymnals or collections, such as the United States Sacred Harmony (1799) and The Christian Harmony (1805), the first shape-note hymnal to incorporate a large number of oral tradition tunes was John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music: Part Second (1813).6 Irving Lowens observes that forty-four of the tunes in this collection were “folk hymns.”7 The Repository of Sacred Music: Part Second played an important role in the dissemination of these tunes. According to information provided by Lowens, Ananias Davisson, the compiler of the influential Kentucky Harmony and the Supplement to Kentucky Harmony, used fifteen tunes from Wyeth’s Part Second collection. William Walker, in his Southern Harmony, “borrowed” twenty of these tunes.8

Walker’s Southern Harmony
A significant source of the shape-note tunes found in today’s hymnals is Walker’s The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion (hereafter referred to as Southern Harmony). One of the most popular and successful of the nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks, Southern Harmony stands as an important “anthology” of the musical styles and genres of its day. As Harry Eskew notes, it is probably the first shape-note collection to be compiled in the “Deep South.”9 The legacy and tradition of this popular collection continues even today at the “Big Singing Day” held annually in Benton, Kentucky.
Walker was born on May 6, 1809, in South Carolina, near a small village known as Cross Keys.10 Around the time he was eighteen years of age, Walker’s family moved to a small community called Cedar Springs, near Spartanburg, South Carolina.11 In 1835, Walker married Amy S. Golighty, the sister of Thurza Golighty, the wife of Benjamin Franklin White, who would become the compiler of The Sacred Harp.12 Not only is 1835 the year Walker married Amy, it is the same year he published his first and most popular shape-note collection, Southern Harmony.13 In addition to Southern Harmony, Walker compiled three other collections during his lifetime, including the Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist, The Christian Harmony, and Fruits and Flowers.14 Although Walker is considered the compiler of Southern Harmony and his name graces the cover, the work was initially a joint project of Walker and his brother-in-law, B. F. White.
After its introduction in 1835, Southern Harmony underwent several revisions, with the final one being the 1854 edition.15 During the years of its publication, the collection was obviously popular, as Walker later claimed that 600,000 copies of it had been sold.16
Harry Eskew cites several reasons why Southern Harmony is a significant shape-note collection: 1) its use as textbook to learn to read music, 2) its role in continuing early American psalmody, and 3) its function as a “musical companion for numerous word-only hymnals.”17 Eskew also notes that Southern Harmony is “significant as a repository of melodies from oral tradition” and that “Walker and other rural-oriented singing school teachers/compilers drew from the rich oral tradition of the Anglo-American folksong to provide melodies for many hymn texts.”18 Walker, in the preface to the first edition of Southern Harmony in 1835, states that he had “composed the parts to a great many good airs (which I could not find in any publication, nor in manuscript), and assigned my name as author.”19 It may be surmised that many of these “airs” were popular melodies or folk tunes of the day that were passed on by oral tradition. Hymnologist Austin C. Lovelace recounts that, “When Walker was going around doing singing schools, he always asked if anyone had some good tunes. He would then write them down and claim them as his own.”20
Sources of texts and tunes are indicated for some of the hymns, though often no source is documented for either. Glen Wilcox relates that approximately one-fourth of the hymn texts were by Isaac Watts.21 Of the 341 tune names in the index, Wilcox maintains that about 250 of them can be attributed to 110 composers, with the remaining tunes being anonymous.22 For the 1854 edition, Walker added 73 tunes to his collection. It is interesting to note that, according to Eskew, approximately half of the tunes Walker added in 1854 were “in the style of the folk hymn.”23
Southern Harmony incorporated some important “firsts” regarding several hymn tunes. The 1835 edition marked the first time the text “Amazing Grace” and the tune New Britain were joined together in a shape-note collection; the edition of 1840 contained the first appearance of the tune Wondrous Love with the text “What wondrous love is this;” and the 1854 edition has one of the early appearances of Dove of Peace.
The inclusion of the American tunes in this remarkable shape-note collection has helped to preserve them for future generations. Unlike its popular counterpart, The Sacred Harp, which has undergone a number of revisions over the years of its existence (even as recently as 1991), Southern Harmony has had no additions or corrections to its music since the final version of 1854. As it stands, Southern Harmony is a repository of musical styles and tastes of nineteenth-century America, particularly of southern and rural America. Eskew remarks that, “No wonder Southern Harmony was so popular: the hymns . . . were united with tunes which had circulated among the people for years in oral tradition, and they were furthermore printed in easy-to-read shape-notation!”24

New England “reforms”
As the shape-note tradition moved into the southern and western states, a mid-to-late nineteenth-century movement emerged in New England to eliminate American tunes, as found in shape-note tunebooks, from church hymnals and music collections. New England reformers, among whom were Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings, considered music and hymns of European background and influence to be superior to America’s “folk-style” music. Hymn tunes and music composed in the European style were “based on ‘scientific’ principles producing ‘correct’ harmonies.”25 It is ironic that the New England area, whose musicians gave America its singing schools and shape-notes, is the same geographic area that led reforms contributing to the demise of shape-note singing and the use of these tunes in hymnals.
Jackson, in White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands, devotes a chapter to the subject of the disappearance of folk-hymns as denominational hymnals began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Though the 1889 edition of the Methodist Hymnal contained a number of the tunes, the 1905 edition included only four of what Jackson calls “fasola popular tunes”—Lenox, Nettleton, Mear, and Greenville.26 Jackson’s research points out that the Service of Song (1871), a hymnal used by southern Baptists in more urban areas, embodied only nine tunes from the “fasola” tradition.27 Another hymnal used by Baptists in the early twentieth century, Modern Hymnal (1926), incorporated only seventeen of what Jackson refers to as hymns of “specific southern fasola making or adoption.”28
Jackson ascertains that the Philadelphia publishers, suppliers of hymnals to southern Presbyterian churches, “avoided all indigenous songs of the southern and western revival.”29 An examination of Presbyterian hymnals of the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century certainly underpins Jackson’s observation. The Presbyterian hymnals of 1874, 1895 (revised in 1911), and 1933 all contain some hymn tunes—just as today’s hymnals do—common to Southern Harmony and other similar collections. These tunes, however, are primarily ones with an identified composer—tunes such as Azmon, Coronation, and Duke Street. Based on this author’s examination of the index of tune names in each of these three editions of hymnals, Nettleton seems to be the only anonymous shape-note tune included in Presbyterian hymnals until the appearance of the 1955 edition of the hymnal.30
As late in the twentieth century as 1940, American shape-note tunes held little respect among some scholars who were interested in serious hymnody. Henry Wilder Foote, in Three Centuries of American Hymnody, spends little time focusing on the history or importance of the tunes. His writing contains remarks such as, “While in general their effect on American hymnody has been neither permanent or valuable . . . the folk hymn was suited to revivals and social gatherings like out-of-door camp meetings . . . and in any case they fall outside the main current of American hymnody.”31 As one can surmise from Foote’s statements, Raymond Glover’s supposition that the efforts of musicians like Mason created a standard whose “effects may still be seen in today’s mainline hymnals” is certainly supported.32 Fortunately, these effects initiated by the “scientific” musicians of the nineteenth century experienced a reversal in the late twentieth century.

Twentieth-century acceptance
Five Protestant denominational hymnals—Southern Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran (ELCA), Presbyterian (USA), and United Methodist—were selected to be surveyed as to their inclusion of shape-note tunes. These particular hymnals were chosen because of the importance each denomination places on hymnals and hymn singing and because of the reputation each denomination enjoys regarding the quality of their hymnals. The survey included an inspection of ten hymnals to discern the number of tunes that appear to be of shape-note origin. African-American spirituals, frequently designated as American folk tunes or melodies in older hymnals, were not within the parameters of the research. The numerical results of the American tune survey, shown in Table 1, verify the thesis that there is a definite increase in the number of shape-note tunes in the current editions of mainline denominational hymnals compared to the previous editions. In the Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian hymnals, the growth in the number of tunes is significant. Though there is an increase in the number of shape-note tunes in the most recent hymnal of the Methodist Church, the percentage does not indicate an increase because the hymnal contains a larger number of total hymn tunes. The 1966 edition contains only 417 hymn tunes, whereas the 1989 edition includes 504 tunes.
Because denominational hymnals use various sources for their tunes, some of the shape-note tunes included in hymnals have indications of possible composers. An example is the tune Nettleton, identified in two hymnals as being composed by John Wyeth.33 The tune did appear in the 1813 edition of Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, but it originated from the “camp-meeting repertory of Methodists and Baptists.”34 Given that the tunes were sometimes part of an oral tradition before they were notated in hymnals, it is difficult for musicologists and historians to trace their exact origin.
Among the various shape-note collections of the nineteenth century, William Walker’s Southern Harmony serves as an important source of American shape-note tunes, especially in the more recent editions of the selected hymnals. In each denomination, the number of hymn tunes attributed to either William Walker or Walker’s Southern Harmony shows a significant increase. The frequency of their attribution as a source may be observed in Table 2.

Factors in 20th-century
acceptance
Based on the information and statistics indicated above, it is clear that there is a significant increase in the number of shape-note tunes included in recent hymnals. This phenomenon prompts one to reflect on what factors may have led to the increased presence of these tunes in the hymnals of the late twentieth century. Communications by this author with several persons who served on editorial boards of different hymnals help provide some possible answers to this question.
David W. Music, a member of the editorial board of The Baptist Hymnal (1991), suggests three main factors he believes are responsible for the growth in the number of shape-note hymn tunes incorporated into recent hymnals. Outlining these factors, Music states:

The increase in the number of shape-note tunes is due to a number of factors including: 1) the bicentennial of the USA in 1976 with church musicians seeking to honor their country by searching out some of its native expressions. I think this parallels the English folk song recovery that occurred with the 1906 English Hymnal; 2) the broadening of the base of congregational song to include a wider diversity of styles and types than before (including black spirituals, world hymnody, American Indian pieces, Taizé, Iona Community, plainsong, newly-written hymns, etc.); 3) in a few cases these melodies have become familiar outside the church (or at least outside the hymnal) and have subsequently been incorporated into them; a good example is Resignation (“My shepherd will supply my need”), which everybody learned from the Virgil Thomson choral arrangement, later realizing what a great congregational text and tune combination this is. Perhaps related to this was the increased respectability gained by these often very simple tunes through their use by significant American composers such as Thomson and Aaron Copland.35
The factors that Music considers significant are echoed by others who have been involved in the editorial process of recent hymnals. Carlton Young, editor of the 1966 and 1989 Methodist hymnals, refers to the 1906 English Hymnal and the increase in diversity in hymnals as significant factors in the selection of tunes. Young asserts that “most mid-20th-century mainline USA Protestant hymnals followed the lead of R.V. Williams” and “reflected the work of folklorists such as Cecil Sharp.”36 Young also observes that “The increased number of USA folk melodies in TUMH ’89 [The United Methodist Hymnal] continues this trend in mainline hymnals, but is also related to the increased number of Native American, Latino, African-American, Asian, and gospel songs.”37
Ray Glover, editor of The Hymnal 1982, affirms that “The inclusion of a goodly number of American folk tunes in The Hymnal 1982 was, I believe, our response to the growing awareness of the great, rich repository we have in, largely though not exclusively, Southern folk hymnody from the shape-note tradition.”38 Likewise, Carl Schalk, who initially served on the editorial board of the Lutheran Book of Worship, feels that the inclusion of American folk hymn tunes was a way to become more American, much in the same way Vaughan Williams used the English folk song.39 Schalk considers the American folk tunes a source that “had not been tapped before” and a “looking back to some kind of heritage.”40 The editor of The Presbyterian Hymnal (1990), LindaJo H. McKim, echoes a similar sentiment, observing that “The tunes really are a part of who we are and for that reason need to be included in any collection coming out of the Americas today.”41 Marion Hatchett mentions the influence of Vaughan Williams and comments that the inclusion of three American folk tunes in the 1906 English Hymnal made it “respectable” for Americans to use these type of tunes in their own hymnals.42

The organ chorale prelude
The genre of the organ chorale prelude is helping to perpetuate the unique body of tunes stored in the nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks. The term “chorale” originally referred to the tune used with a hymn text in the sixteenth-century German Protestant Church.43 Over time, the distinction between “chorale” and “hymn” (“a song in praise of God”) has blurred to the point that the two terms are now used interchangeably.44 Today, “organ chorale” and “chorale prelude” are generic terms referring to pieces composed in the tradition of the chorale prelude, whether they are based on a chorale, a Protestant hymn tune, or even a religious ethnic folk song. They may still serve as introductions to the singing of hymns or chorales. More often than not, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century liturgical setting, a chorale prelude functions as service music. It may be performed as a prelude, a postlude, as a selection during the collection of the offering or the serving of communion, or as music covering movement in other parts of the liturgy.
The performance of chorale preludes is not limited to liturgical use. Chorale preludes occupy an important role as part of the literature performed on organ recitals and concerts. A scanning of the recital programs listed each month in The Diapason reveals that various works of this genre are included in many recitals. The works may range from the large settings of J. S. Bach to the jazz-influenced pieces of Johann Michel. For example, of the 20 recital programs listed in the February 2010 issue of The Diapason, at least 24 of the total selections performed appear to be some form of a chorale prelude.45
Because the hymnals of the early-to-mid twentieth century contained very few, if any, American shape-note tunes, it was not until their inclusion into mainline hymnals that they became familiar to many organists and to the general concert or church audience. Even though the tunes were neglected by hymnal committees during the first half of the twentieth century, some significant organ settings of American shape-note tunes did appear around the middle of the century. These settings, however, were not inspired by the composer’s familiarity with tunes found in a denominational hymnal; instead, they seem to be the result of the composer’s acquaintance with a shape-note collection, primarily The Sacred Harp.
Twentieth-century American composer Gardner Read composed a number of organ works, among which are two collections of shape-note hymn tune settings. Read relied on a copy of The Sacred Harp as the source of the tunes used in his collections. In the scores of both collections, Read notes that the “preludes are based on authentic old hymn-tunes found in the 1902 edition of ‘The Sacred Harp,’ a collection of white spirituals and Southern hymns, first published around 1850.”46 Eight Preludes on Old Southern Tunes, opus 90, was published in 1952, and the publication of Six Preludes on Old Southern Hymns, opus 112, followed in 1963. Of the fourteen tunes Read employed in these two notable collections, seven of them are found in Southern Harmony.
Samuel Barber’s Wondrous Love: Variations on a Shape-note Hymn, written in 1958 for the inaugural recital of the new Holtkamp organ at Christ Episcopal Church, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, is primarily a concert piece.47 As the publication of the work predates any inclusion of the tune into a mid-to-late twentieth-century denomination hymnal, one could posit that Barber’s piece helped contribute to the popularity of the Wondrous Love tune. In his reference to the tune’s source for the composition, Barber notes in the score that the tune was “published in the ‘Original Sacred Harp,’ Atlanta, Ga., 1869.”48 The score also contains a reproduction of a four-part harmonization of Wondrous Love, probably taken from the 1911 edition of The Sacred Harp, as the copy credits the alto part to “S. M. Denson, 1911.”49

Growth since 1980
In late twentieth to early twenty-first century America, the publication of chorale preludes based on shape-note tunes has increased significantly. This trend, during the period from 1980 to 2005, can be confirmed by consulting reference books that list published organ works and chorale settings. In a repertoire list compiled by this author, a total of 238 organ pieces, based on 46 different tunes found in Southern Harmony, were documented. Of the works in the repertoire list, only 46 (19%) were composed prior to 1980. The significant number of organ chorale preludes based on these tunes is a direct result of the growth in the number of shape-note tunes appearing in recent hymnals.
Five shape-note tunes found in Walker’s Southern Harmony (1854)—Foundation (The Christian’s Farewell in Southern Harmony), Holy Manna, New Britain, Wondrous Love, and Dove of Peace—are popular tunes found in hymnals of the late twentieth century or, as in the case of Dove of Peace, have recently become popular. The information shown in Table 3 compares the inclusion of these hymn tunes between the previous and present editions of the five selected denominational hymnals.
A look at the occurrence of these five popular shape-note tunes as cantus firmi for organ chorales helps illustrate the growing use of the tunes by composers of organ literature. For example, Jean Slater Edson’s book, Organ Preludes: An Index to Compositions on Hymn Tunes, Chorales, Plainsong Melodies, Gregorian Tunes and Carols, published in 1970, contains a meager listing of published organ works based on shape-note tunes. For the five tunes considered, Edson’s index identifies the following number of chorale preludes: Foundation – 5; Holy Manna – 1; New Britain – 4; Wondrous Love – 5; and Dove of Peace – 0.50
In 1987, Dennis Schmidt published the first volume of An Organist’s Guide to Resources for “The Hymnal 1982.” Compared to Edson’s book of 1970, Schmidt’s number of listings indicates a slight increase in the quantity of published organ settings using the five tunes. In Schmidt’s first volume, the number of works cataloged for each of the selected tunes includes: Foundation – 4; Holy Manna – 4; New Britain – 7; Wondrous Love – 6; and Dove of Peace – 0.51
A second volume of Schmidt’s An Organist’s Guide to Resources for “The Hymnal 1982” appeared in 1991. Compared to the first volume, the second volume confirms a continued increase in the number of organ settings of American tunes. For the five tunes, volume two lists the following number of organ settings: Foundation – 23; Holy Manna – 7; New Britain – 30; Wondrous Love – 15; and Dove of Peace – 0.52
The repertoire list of organ compositions based on shape-note tunes from the Southern Harmony, compiled by the author, substantiates the growth of these published works between 1980 and 2005. The number of organ works in the repertoire list using the five selected tunes as cantus firmi is summarized below:
Foundation (The Christian’s Farewell) – 22, 3 published prior to 1980
Dove of Peace – 7, all published since 1996
Holy Manna – 15, 1 published prior to 1980
New Britain – 33, 5 published prior to 1980
Wondrous Love – 30, 4 published prior to1980
The phenomenon of many new shape-note based organ works is, no doubt, a result of composers discovering shape-note tunes as they began to appear in new editions of hymnals. Robert J. Powell, retired organist/choirmaster of Christ Church, Greenville, South Carolina, and a well-known composer of organ and choral music, is the contributor of a number of individual pieces and collections based on shape-note tunes. These tunes are an important source for Powell in his work as a composer. Powell states:

Because many American folk hymns appear in present-day hymnals, I have found they have been influential in my compositions, not only because there are so many from which I have created anthems and organ pieces, but also for their use of modal melodies and uncompromising harmonies.53
Michael Burkhardt, formerly a member of the music faculty at Carthage College and currently on the staff of Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Livonia, Michigan, is the composer of a significant number of chorale preludes for the organ. Included in his output are several settings of shape-note tunes. In a personal correspondence with this author, Burkhardt supports the thesis that the growth in the use and appearance of the American tunes in hymnals is a contributing factor to the increasing number of organ compositions utilizing the tunes. Burkhardt comments that:

An increase in the number of early American tunes in hymnals has certainly been an impetus for my settings in the American Folk Hymn Suite and in various other organ publications. But an even greater motivation for me is that these hymns are truly hymns of the people and, more specifically, hymns birthed by the people of this country. I love the ruggedness of the tunes as well as their unique qualities, individualities and the texts with which they are associated. . . . I hope that perhaps in some small way an organ setting or two of mine might excite someone regarding this great genre of hymnody.54
Samuel Adler, professor of composition at the Juilliard School of Music, has composed a set of organ chorale preludes based on early American tunes, one of which is Foundation. Entitled Hymnset: Four Chorale Preludes on Old American Hymns, the work was premiered in 1984 and published in 1987.55 In correspondence with this author in reference to Hymnset, Adler states that “I have always felt that we do not have enough Chorale Preludes on these beautiful hymn tunes and so while I was in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts I wrote one of these Preludes a week.”56 Clearly, Adler’s sentiment that there is a need for more chorale preludes using American tunes is one that echoes in the minds of other American composers and organists. The result has been a profusion of chorale preludes representing various levels of difficulty, length, quality, and effectiveness. This particular body of organ literature deserves to be both performed and recognized for the continuing role it plays in exposing both church and concert attendees to the music of Southern Harmony and similar nineteenth-century collections.

Summary
The heritage of American tunes contained within the shape-note tunebooks of the nineteenth century, whether they are called shape-note, folk-hymn, or American folk tunes, represents an important body of music, which, in the past thirty years, has been reclaiming its rightful place in American hymnody. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the rediscovery of this music prompted mainline Protestant denominational hymnal editors and committees to include many of these tunes into their new editions of hymnals.
The current availability of shape-note tunes in the hymnals of mainline Protestant denominations has, since 1980, significantly affected organ literature. A number of tunes once unknown are now common in many hymnals; as a result, organists and composers have been, and continue to be, drawn to them as fresh sources of cantus firmi. This growing body of organ literature represents music of a wide range of difficulty, effectiveness, compositional creativity, and usefulness.
The shape-note collections of the nineteenth century, including the popular and significant Southern Harmony, helped preserve the tunes and harmonizations that are part of our American history and hymnody. The hymnals of the late twentieth century, with their inclusion of a representative body of American shape-note tunes, have assisted composers, organists, and concert and church attendees in rediscovering this music. The organ literature resulting from this rediscovery will assist in the preservation of these tunes for new audiences and generations to come. ■

 

by James B. Hartman

The Centennial Facsimile Edition of The Organ, Vols. I & II, May 1892-April 1894, Everett E. Truette, editor and publisher, Boston, was published in 1995 by The Boston Organ Club Chapter of the Organ Historical Society, P.O. Box 104, Harrisville, NH 03450-0104.  It was prepared from an original copy owned by the Spaulding Library, New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, under the direction of E.A. Boadway, Alan Miller Laufman, and Martin R. Walsh. (Available for $59.95 from The Boston Organ Club, P.O. Box 371, Brushton, NY 12916-0571.)

Everett Ellsworth Truette was among the leading figures on the musical scene in the United States around the turn of the century.1 Born in Rockland, Massachusetts, in 1861, at the age of seventeen he was already participating in recitals at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he was studying organ, piano, harmony, counterpoint, and theory. In 1883 he was among the earliest graduates to receive the Mus. Bac. degree from Boston University's College of Music, where he had served as organist at other graduation ceremonies. Subsequently he studied organ with Augustus Haupt in Germany, Alexandre Guilmant in France, and William T. Best in England, over a two-year period. In addition to teaching organ, piano, harmony, and theory at his large studio in Boston--it contained a three-manual, 19-stop, tracker pipe organ, in addition to a grand piano and a pedal piano--he was organist and choirmaster in a church in Newton, Massachusetts, and served as conductor of two large choral groups. He also maintained an active career as an organ recitalist, playing over 400 concerts and dedicatory programs throughout the country. His other accomplishments included the publication of over thirty organ compositions, collections of organ music, and anthems, issued by his own company, along with a successful book on organ registration, first launched in 1919. One of the founders of the American Guild of Organists in 1896, he was active in that association as its first Secretary and later as Dean. He was editor of the Organ Department of The Étude for seven years until 1907, and continued to write for that magazine until 1928. Seven months before his death in 1933 he played his last recital at the church where he had served as organist and choirmaster since 1897.

Early in the 1890s Truette conceived the idea that culminated in his most ambitious literary venture, the publication in May 1892 of the first issue of The Organ. In his inaugural editorial, Truette admitted the limited audience for such a publication, and described the magazine not as a partisan or trade journal, but as an educational enterprise for the discussion of topics of interest to music students, professional musicians, and lovers of organ music generally. His general aim was to broaden the familiarity of these people with the construction and uses of the organ through information about notable organs, technical and tonal matters, organ concerts, new organ music, and the sayings and doings of prominent persons associated with the instrument.

During its short existence only two volumes--twenty-four issues in all--of The Organ were published, and the categories of its contents varied hardly at all. There were biographical sketches of past and contemporary composers of organ music, contemporary recitalists, and organ builders; and descriptions of recent organ installations in the United States and historic organs in England and Europe. One article described the first organ in the United States, imported from England by a wealthy Boston merchant around 1700.2 Each issue included two or three organ pieces, some composed or arranged specially for the journal. Other recurrent contents included articles on organ construction and organ playing; specifications of new organs, programs of organ recitals, a question and answer column, correspondence in the form of reports and letters from near and far, a section of miscellaneous announcements about organists and their activities ("Mixtures"), and a column of humor ("Cipherings").

Although Truette's editorial at the end of the first year expressed satisfaction at the confidence shown by readers, subscribers, and advertisers, in the penultimate issue he announced that publication would be suspended. The reasons were primarily financial, related to a continued financial depression: many subscribers and advertisers were in arrears, and Truette was unable to meet payments to composers and writers for their published items. Reminding his readers that remittances for the balance of unexpired subscriptions would be forthcoming, and that back issues could be purchased at the regular rate of twenty-five cents each, Truette ended by saying, "we close the mucilage pot, hang up the scissors, and say au revoir."3

The highly informative and entertaining material contained in the twenty-four issues of The Organ is of great historical significance. Taken as a whole, its contents present a broad panorama of the state of the organ culture in the United States in the mid-1890s: organ building, organ playing, prominent recitalists, major events, and opinions on topics of interest to the musical community.

Organ Building

The organ builders of the Boston area--the focus of organ building in New England in the concluding decade of the nineteenth century--and in neighboring northeastern states were responsible for the installation of many large instruments in prestigious churches and other locations.4 Advertisements by the following organ builders ap-peared in almost every issue of The Organ.

The Roosevelt Organ works, managed by Frank Roosevelt (1865-1894) after the death in 1886 of his father who founded the company in 1872, was responsible for two of the largest organs in the world: a four-manual, 115-stop instrument in a Garden City cathedral in 1883, and a four-manual, 107-stop instrument in the Chicago Auditorium in 1889. When the company closed in 1893, various rights and patents relating to adjustable combination action, wind chests, and electro-pneumatic and tubular action were transferred to Farrand & Votey, a Detroit company.

The Farrand & Votey firm emerged from a buy-out of the Whitney Organ Company in the mid-1880s by the family of one of the partners, William Farrand (1854-1930). The company built a large four-manual instrument for the gigantic Chicago Exposition in 1893, and installed equally large instruments in the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, and in various churches. The other partner, Edwin Votey (1856-1931), invented the self-playing Pianola in 1895, shortly after the company began building organs for the Aeolian Company, with which it eventually merged.

Although the Hook factory of organ building was well established by 1860, and Francis Hastings (1836-1916) became a partner in 1871, Hook & Hastings of Boston acquired its name upon the death of one of the founders, George Hook (1807-1880). The factory operated at its peak level of activity at that time, producing an average of 46 instruments a year, including larger instruments of up to 81 speaking stops, along with several models of small, ready-made, moderately priced stock instruments, available on short notice.

Another prominent Massachusetts builder was George S. Hutchings (1835-1913), who entered the organ factory of Elias and George Hook at the age of twenty-two, leaving in 1869 to form a new association with several other Hook employees. In 1884 he began building organs under his own name, some of considerable size featuring patented changeable combination pistons. He constructed more than 600 instruments during his lifetime, including a three-manual tracker organ installed in Everette Truette's Boston studio in 1897.5

James E. Treat (1837-1915) had been working with various organ building firms for over twenty-five years before he connected with a wealthy interior decorator, Edward F. Searles, who commissioned Treat in 1886 to build an organ for his opulent mansion in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (Everett Truette was one of two organists who gave the opening program). Searles later subsidized the establishment of a factory for Treat, which became the Methuen Organ Company. In this enterprise cost was no object, the best materials were used, and the most competent workmen were hired. Treat's advertisements in The Organ warned "No specifications for competition--Prices not the lowest." For a time Treat was treasurer of the United States Tubular Bell Company, Methuen, Massachusetts, another Searles' business that advertised its products for churches, turret clocks, and public buildings in The Organ ("Ding-Dongs, 2 bells; Peals, 4 bells; Chimes, 8, 13 and 15 bells"). Among Treat's other installations was the Searles Memorial Organ in Grace Church, San Francisco, in 1894 (in memory of Searles' wife who died in 1891); Everett Truette played a demonstration program at Treat's factory before the organ was delivered. The organ and the church were destroyed in the disastrous earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco in 1906. One of the pallbearers at Treat's funeral was Everett Truette.

George Jardine & Son, New York, was the concluding incarnation of a family enterprise that flourished in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. For most of that time, the firm was led by the son, Edward, who was a church organist and frequent recitalist in inaugural programs for Jardine organs. The firm's largest "Grand Organs" included several four-manual instruments in churches in and around New York, and one in a Pittsburgh cathedral; three-manual in-struments were placed in churches as far away as San Francisco and New Orleans.

Samuel Pierce (1819-1895) learned pipemaking in the Hook factory, but moved to Reading, Massachusetts, in 1847 to open his own shop, from which he supplied many organ builders in Boston and elsewhere with pipes, pipe organ materials, and other accessories. His advertisement in The Organ boasted, "Front Pipes Decorated in the Highest Style of the Art"; Pierce had a special department in a separate building re-served for this facet of his operations.

Although the Mason & Hamlin Organ & Piano Company built a few stock-model pipe organs in the 1890s, they were noted for their elaborate reed organs, with two manuals and pedals, and decorative dummy pipe facades; these instruments were powered by the strong arms of boys or young men who worked a handle on the side of the case. The company's advertisement in The Organ featured the "Liszt Church Organ," described as "the most perfect instrument of its class, superior to small pipe organs."  These claims were accompanied by a letter from Alexandre Guilmant, who testified that the organ "is of beautiful tone and will be very useful to persons wishing to learn to play the Great Organ."

Other organ builders whose advertisements appeared in The Organ included Carl Barkhoff, John H. Sole, Johnson & Son, William King & Son, Morey & Barnes, M.P. Möller, Cole & Woodberry, Woodberry & Harris, Geo. H. Ryder, Henry F. Miller, and J.G. Marklove. In addition, the Henry F. Miller & Sons Piano Company, Boston, offered "The Pedal Piano--Indispensable to Organists."

Organ Recital Repertoire

The content of organ recital programs in the mid-1890s was determined by a variety of factors: the performers' backgrounds, training, musical interests, and technical abilities; reverence for musical tradition and the attraction of the new; the perceived musical preferences of audiences; and the tonal resources of the organs.6 During the two years of its publication, The Organ printed the programs of 136 organ recitals, consisting of 956 selections in all. Of these, 264 (28 percent) were transcriptions of works by major composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as symphonic or instrumental movements, operatic overtures, and marches. The most frequently performed arrangements were from Wagner's operas Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, and pieces from Handel's Samson and Occasional Oratorio, along with his ever-popular Largo. Audiences heard interpretations of marches by Chopin (Funeral March), Gounod (Funeral March), Mendelssohn (Wedding March), Meyerbeer (Le Prophète, Schiller Festival March, and others), Schubert (Marche militaire); and operatic overtures by Flotow (Stradella, Martha), Rossini (William Tell), and Weber (Oberon). The frequency of performance of organ transcriptions of works by these and other composers is given in this table:

                  Number                Percent

Wagner                 36            14

Handel 27            10

Mendelssohn    19            7

Gounod                 14            5

Rossini 11            4

Schubert               10            4

Weber  9               3

Beethoven          8               3

Chopin 8               3

Meyerbeer          7               3

Haydn  7               3

Flotow 7               3              

The inclusion of transcriptions and arrangements in organ recitals was also widespread in Canada and England, and the practice attracted much criticism, even though it served the valuable function of providing the general public with opportunities to hear works that otherwise would remain unknown. In its second issue, The Organ reprinted a letter from a London magazine by the English organist William T. Best (1826-1897), perhaps the greatest concert organist of the nineteenth century, on the topic of organ arrangements.7 Best was responding to an article by Walter Parratt, Organist to the Queen, who was hostile to the practice of arrangements, calling them "examples of misapplied skill" that were having "a disastrous influence over organ music, as in the majority of such programmes two-thirds at least are arrangements of orchestral and choral works." Best retorted by pointing to "the father of all arrangers," Bach, and other musicians whose integrity would not allow them to select music unsuitable for the organ; even Guilmant, he pointed out, had recently engaged in the practice. Furthermore, he added, "in endeavoring to raise the musical taste of the humbler classes, the municipal authorities of our large towns did not intend their concert organs to be restricted to the performance of preludes, and fugues, and somewhat dry sonatas." Best argued that a well-arranged slow movement of an instrumental work was preferable to a dull specimen of original organ music. Even so, he thought that the higher forms of musical composition should only be introduced warily and gradually. Best had a very large repertoire, and his concert programs always included several arrangements. A sketch of his career included this assessment of his abilities:

Mr. Best's skill in handling the organ is something marvellous. When playing, his two hands perform feats of registration which would require three hands for most any other performer; and those who consider the organ a "cold instrument" have but to listen to his playing to become convinced that one who is so thoroughly skilled in manipulating the resources of the organ can produce effects of expression and tone-coloring which they never thought were possible.8

As for original works, Alexandre Guilmant's organ compositions were the most frequently performed, led by his Marche funèbre et chant séraphique and several of his Sonatas. Bach's Preludes and Fugues were played often, particularly the dramatic Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, but there was only a single performance of a Chorale Prelude. Handel was represented by his Organ Concertos, and Mendelssohn by his Sonatas, and Preludes and Fugues. Works by composers of the day included favorites by Batiste (Communion in G, Offertoires), Buck (Variations on The Last Rose of Summer), Dubois (March of the Magi Kings, Toccata in G), Lemmens (Storm Fantasia), Salomé (miscellaneous works), and Spinney (Harvest Home, Vesper Bells). Some short pieces by George E. Whiting, a member of the organ department of The New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, were played as frequently as Widor's Symphonies. Rheinberger's Sonatas also were played from time to time. The frequency of performance of original works for organ by these composers is given in this table:

                  Number                Percent

Guilmant              78            11

Bach      55            8

Salomé 38            6

Dubois 35            5

Handel 34            5

Batiste  31            5

Buck     28            4

Mendelssohn    24            3

Lemmens            21            3

Rheinberger       21            3

Spinney                 20            3

Whiting                 19            3

Widor   19            3

Frequent Performers

Of the 136 organ recitals reported in The Organ during its brief existence, many were played by organists who were unknown outside their own immediate neighborhoods; only two such recitals involved women organists. These concerts were not always stand-alone events, but were shared with assisting artists: violinists, instrumental ensembles, vocal soloists, and choirs. Nevertheless, about half of the recitals were played by only six performers, several of whom toured extensively. The most active players were Harrison M. Wild, Chicago (14 percent of reported recitals), whose 128th recital was reported in 1893; Clarence Eddy, Chicago (10 percent), J. Warren Andrews, Minneapolis (7 percent), and William C. Carl, New York (7 percent).

  Clarence Eddy was the subject of a biography that described him as the most widely-known organist in the country.9 Eddy, who showed musical ability at the age of five, studied organ with Dudley Buck before becoming a church organist at the age of seventeen. Later he received instruction in Germany from Augustus Haupt, who characterized him as "undoubtedly a peer of the greatest living organists." Soon after his appointment at the First Congregational Church in Chicago, Eddy began his recital career. After joining the Hershey School of Musical Art in 1876 as general director, he gave a remarkable series of one hundred weekly organ recitals without repeating a number; the concluding program in 1879 contained music composed specially for the occasion. Eddy dedicated more organs than any other organist of his day, including the great Auditorium organ in Chicago, and he gave recitals at the Paris Exposition, the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and the Vienna World's Fair, in addition to concert tours in the United States and visits to Canada. Eddy's other activities included his appointment as one of the judges for two organ music competitions sponsored by The Organ, his efforts in organizing the 1893 North American tour of Alexandre Guilmant, and his series of fifteen concluding recitals on the Festival Hall organ at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where a total of 62 recitals were played by various organists. A review of one of Eddy's dedication recitals testified to his gifts as a player, as well as exhibiting the laudatory style of music reviews typical of the time:

His programme of last evening was carefully arranged, and was carried out in the most masterly and artistic style. The most difficult subjects were brought out clearly and distinctly, while the intricate part of his work was interpreted with a sweet and sympathetic touch. There is an individuality about Mr. Eddy's playing that distinguishes him from the less skilful performer. With him the organ is not the noisy instrument it often appears when in the hands of unskilled players, but under his touch the great pipes breathe forth the most eloquent notes, and those who were strangers to the wonderful melody that can be obtained from so large an instrument were astonished at the ease with which he was able to control its wonderful resources. The hearers manifested the warmth of their appreciation by long and frequent applause. The programme was chosen with great care and embraced masterful compositions from Händel, Wagner, Flotow, Gounod, that were selected with the view of testing the instrument. . . . The Storm Fantasie of Lemmens, a descriptive piece, was superbly rendered. . . . 'The Old Folks at Home,' with variations, went to the hearts of the hearers, and elicited prolonged applause.10

Eddy also contributed letters to The Organ, including a long discourse on organ pedaling, in which he concluded that "an absolutely free and independent use of the heel in pedal playing . . . is as important as a skilful employment of the thumb upon the manuals,"11 and another on playing the organ from memory, in which he maintained (referring to the most noted organists of his time, such as W.T. Best, Alexandre Guilmant, Eugene Gigout, Charles Widor, and others) that "organists are heard at their best when they are unhampered by the mental strain attendant upon committing to memory the compositions they play."12   

The only visiting recitalist reported in The Organ was France's distinguished organist and composer, Alexandre Guilmant. He was the subject of a biographical article that commented on his youthful demonstrations of musical ability as an organist and composer, his period of study with Jacques Lemmens in Belgium, his frequent inauguration of or-gans and concert performances throughout Europe, and the compositional style of several of his organ pieces.13 The journal devoted considerable attention to Guilmant's North American tour in the fall of 1893, arranged by Clarence Eddy, in which the virtuoso played thirty concerts in less than eight weeks, including four at the Chicago World's Fair. The Chicago correspondent offered qualified praise for the master's performances:

At present everything with us is Guilmant. . . .

Though we cannot rave over this master's technique, we are carried away by the wonderfully clean and neat treatment of all his numbers. The breadth and truly marvellous conception of whatever he undertakes are indeed wonderful.

In his improvisations we expected more dash than was given; but a tone-poet, like a word-poet, is not always inspired. . . .

  In all his numbers Mr. Guilmant was encored and re-encored, and in some instances had to get off the organ bench twice, and even three times, before he was allowed to proceed.14

During his tour Guilmant played other recitals in various cities in the United States and Canada. In Boston, 5,000 people attempted to secure the 2,200 available tickets for Guilmant's two concerts. An enthusiastic reviewer stated:

Mons. Guilmant has raised organ playing to a point of virtuosity equal to the work of the celebrated pianists, and with him there is no chance to grumble at the "impossibilities of the organ." His playing of the above programme [works by Bach, Salomé, Lemmens, Schumann, Tombelle, Dubois, Best, Chauvet, Martini, Mendelssohn, and six of Guilmant's own compositions] was magnificent.

Guilmant's advent in this country is proving to sceptics that the organ is a concert instrument, and that organ recitals will draw as large and enthusiastic audiences as the best orchestras. . . .15

On his tour through Eastern Canada, Guilmant found a copy of Mendelssohn's Elijah on a hotel piano in Niagara Falls, and he impressed the guests with his playing of several selections and an extemporized fugue from the score, along with a few of his own compositions. He was met by a former Parisian organist in Hamilton, Ontario, visited the Mason & Risch piano factory in Toronto, and played for an audience of 5,000--many standing--at the inauguration of a new organ in a Montréal cathedral. Guilmant felt quite at home on the Casavant instrument because all the stop names were in French.16

Occasionally The Organ ventured onto the international scene by publishing the recital programs of several English organists; in particular, William T. Best, who performed not only in England but also in Australia, where he played a series of twelve inaugural recitals on the new organ in Centennial Hall, Sydney, in 1890.17 The programs of Auguste Wiegand, the Belgian organist who became City Organist in Sydney, Australia, were also reported, along with those of several other performers in that country.

Timely Topics: Organ Design and Construction

Of all the preoccupations of organists in the last decade of the nineteenth century, as reflected in the columns of The Organ, some were unique to that period, while others still are matters of interest today to experienced players and students of the organ alike. Most of the issues related to organ construction have long since been settled, but they were matters of intense interest at the time.

It should be recalled that organ building at the time was in a state of flux, and there was no universal agreement on many aspects of organ layout and construction. An article in the inaugural issue, "The Evolution of the Swell-box,"18 which touched upon both design aspects and their implications for performance, stimulated a debate that continued unabated for about six months. Responding to the author's claim that "the excess of Swell" was incompatible with the highest principles of organ construction, some writers advocated the "multiple swell" governing all divisions of the organ as a means of greater expression and control, while others opposed the idea as more mechanical gadgetry that smothered the organ's tone.19

The position on the console of the balanced swell pedal was also a matter of spirited debate. Truette himself initiated the topic and published the opinions of his fellow organists on various builders' practices that ranged from center to extreme right, high or low above the pedals. Some favored having the pedal sunk into the case directly over upper B or C of the pedal keyboard, while others (including William C. Carl) preferred it midway so that either foot could be used. Harrison M. Wild, the Chicago organist, facetiously suggested that "For many organists (?) the best position would be to the left of the pedal-board, just out of reach."20

In the concluding decades of the nineteenth century, organ builders in the United States and Europe were constructing instruments of enormous size for installation in large buildings world-wide. This issue was raised in an article on "Monster Organs,"21 which inquired whether organs having more than a hundred or more speaking stops were compatible with the highest grade of concert performances. On the issue of quality over quantity, William T. Best was quoted as stating that no organ needed more than fifty stops, and that "the varieties of organ tone are few, and the repetitions of the organ-builders are simply a nuisance to the player, though very useful to the builder from the white elephant point of view after erection." Although one correspondent demurred from Best's prescription, appending a specification of an ideal instrument of eighty registers, another agreed with Best in principle, but deplored the reckless distribution of colorless stops in many organs, and advocated a more scientific system of tonal design in organ construction. Later in the debate one correspondent despaired of defining the "ideal organ," while another submitted a specification for a three-manual, 54-stop, practical organ, claimed to be suitable in every way for any purpose. The journal later published a list of twenty of the world's largest organs that included these having 100 or more speaking stops:22

Town Hall, Sydney, Australia, 5/128 [126], Hill & Son, 1889;

Cathedral, Riga, Russia [Latvia], 4/124, Walcker, 1883;

Cathedral, Garden City, 4/115, Roosevelt, 1883;

Albert Hall, London, 4/111, Willis [1872];      

Auditorium, Chicago, 4/100, Roosevelt, 1889;

St. Sulpice, Paris, 5/100, Cavaillé-Coll, 1862 (reconstructed);

Cathedral, Ulm, Germany, 3/100, Walcker, 1856;

St. George's Hall, Liverpool, 4/100, Willis, 1867.

                 

At the other extreme, the W.W. Kimball Company, Chicago, developed a two-manual, eight-stop portable pipe organ, with pneumatic action throughout and a new system of feeders; the two pedal stops were vibrating free reeds exhausting into qualifying tubes. This space-saving instrument (all enclosed in a swell box), with its dimensions of six feet wide, three feet, six inches deep, and seven feet high, was designed with a detachable pedal board so that it could be taken down, boxed, and set up by anyone.23

An alleged decline in organ building generally was attributed to unhealthy competition among manufacturers committed to various "hurry-up" methods, low-grade materials, and "a maximum of claptrap mechanism, overblown stops, and cheap construction." At the same time, the author hoped that an "ebb of the swell-box flood, which . . . threatens the inundation of the entire instrument" would restore fine voicing and preserve the distinctive character of each manual.24

The business side of organ building was addressed in a discussion of organ builders' rights, common points of mutual interest, safeguards against delays in construction, redress for losses, and the negotiation of contracts with church organ committees. It was recommended that a convention of organ builders be held in Boston for the consideration of these matters.25

A series articles on "The Hope-Jones System of Electrical Organ Control,"26 described the technical details of the English inventor's new system of connecting a moveable console to the organ mechanism by a flexible cable, the second- or double-touch keyboard for bringing into action another rank of pipes, the replacement of stop drawknobs by stop keys, and a rapid sforzando pedal. It was claimed that these innovations in construction would also bring about a revolution in organ playing through the instantaneous attack made possible by the elimination of cumbersome mechanisms.27

The possibilities of the introduction of electricity into organ construction inspired a visionary speculation on "The Future of the Organ."28 The author imagined a new process of musical composition, in which the notation--perhaps as elaborate as that of an orchestral score--would be instantly translated into sound through electrically-sensitive ink. In this whimsical system, notes would be perfectly executed, along with appropriate registration and expression, as if emanating directly from the mind of the composer. Although instruments would still have manuals and pedals for those unable to compose in this fashion, present organs would someday seem tame and unwieldy relics of the past!

Timely Topics: Organ Playing

As part of its declared educational mission, The Organ offered miscellaneous advice on performance, either in the form of short articles or in a question and answer section. For beginners in particular, an article in an early issue advocated a mastery of manual parts on the piano, followed by slow practice on the organ using the soft stops, to achieve accuracy and clarity.29 A later article on pedal playing covered the proper seating position on the bench, locating the relative position of the notes, exercises in intervals, and playing hymn tunes.30 A discourse on registration touched on classes of organ tone, and offered general guidelines for combining stops for different contexts, such as chords, arpeggios, solos, accompaniment, and special effects.31 A uniquely practical piece consisted of a measure-by-measure discussion of the registration of the Adagio from Mendelssohn's First Organ Sonata, which was published in the same issue.32

For organ students and experienced players alike, there were two collections of "Don'ts."33 These assorted proscriptions denounced sliding about on the seat when playing pedal passages, swaying back and forth anytime, using the tremulant when accompanying singers, improvising every prelude and postlude ("How can your congregation stand your music all the time?"), keeping the right foot on the swell pedal, changing combinations before the end of a phrase, grumbling when the pastor announces different hymns on Sunday from the ones provided on Saturday, and forgetting to turn off the water motor, among other things.

The perennial problem of how to get an adequate amount of organ practice time in cold churches during winter months was addressed by a recommendation submitted by an ingenious organist: construct a tent over the console, heated by a kerosene lamp to raise the temperature of the miniature studio to room temperature in ten minutes.34

For players at all levels of accomplishment, the issue of whether one person can be both a good organist and a good pianist, and whether practice on one instrument is injurious to performance on the other, was discussed in terms of differences between piano and organ keyboard touch, finger position, legato playing, overlapping tones, and fortissimo playing.35 The discouraging conclusion was that it would be impossible for any one person to achieve the artistic heights of both Guilmant and Paderewski, for example; the required hours of practice would be prohibitive in an already too-short life. Nevertheless, among the advantages a country piano teacher might expect by becoming an organist included greater opportunities for being heard on both instruments, and the career advantage of working in the "elevated atmosphere" of a church. Piano students, on the other hand, were said to regard their art solely from the "Bohemian side."36

The early issues of The Organ announced that eight pages of organ music would be found in every number, a large part of which would be composed or arranged specially for the journal, the rest selected from the best writers for the instrument. This project was carried out consistently throughout the period of publication: a total of 45 selections by 26 composers were printed. These consisted mainly of short andantes, marches, and other melodies designed for players of modest technical abilities. Only two transcriptions were among them: Wagner's Wedding Processional from Lohengrin, and a Serenade by Gounod arranged by Everett Truette. Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Widor were among the composers of original works, along with Batiste, Dubois, Merkel, Salomé, and others whose pieces were often heard in organ recitals of the time. Truette published five of his own short pieces.

The center of formal instruction in organ playing in the 1890s was The New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, whose organ department had been established about twenty years before its advertisements appeared in The Organ; a brief history of the institution was published in a later issue of the journal.37 In 1894, two three-manual pipe organs, two two-manual pipe organs, and ten two-manual reed organs manufactured by the Estey Company specially for the needs of Conservatory students, were available for instruction and practice. In addition to the regular courses in organ playing, there were other classes in choir accompaniment, improvisation, and organ construction and tuning (a special nine-stop, two-manual, uncased organ was erected specially for the use of this class). The student tuition for a ten-week term in classes of four was $20.00; organ practice was 10 cents per hour and upwards. The board of instruction consisted of George E. Whiting, Henry M. Dunham, and Allen W. Swan, all of whom were frequent recitalists in Boston and surrounding areas. Thousands of organ students received their training at the Conservatory, and many of them later filled important positions throughout the United States and in Canada.

MORE POWER NEEDED

Minister.              "I think we should have congregational singing."

Organist.              "Then we must have a new organ."

"Why so?"

"This instrument isn't powerful enough to drown 'em out."

--Topeka Capital.38

Notes

                  1.              This biographical information is derived from an introductory essay on Everett E. Truette by E.A. Boadway, preceding the facsimile reproduction of The Organ, hereafter TO.

                  2.              Edwin A. Tilton, "The Brattle Organ," TO, I (December 1892): 173-75.

                  3.              TO, II (April 1894): 275.

                  4.              The following details of the lives and activities of these builders are derived from Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), and Barbara Owen, The Organ in New England (Raleigh: The Sunbury Press, 1979).

                  5.              Photograph in Owen, Plate XIV-25, 604.

                  6.              For a brief discussion of the organ literature of the late nineteenth century, see Owen, 269-71.

                  7.              "Organ Arrangements,"  TO, I (June 1892): 31, 41.

                  8.              "W.T. Best." TO, I (July 1892): 53-54.

                  9.              TO, I (October 1892): 125.

                  10.           TO, I (January 1893): 211.

                  11.           TO, I (September 1892): 114-15.

                  12.           TO, II (May 1893): 7, 17.

                  13.           "Alexandre Guilmant,"  TO, I (April 1893): 269-70.

                  14.           TO, II (October 1893): 137.

                  15.           "Alexandre Guilmant in Boston," TO, II (October 1893): 139.

                  16.           William George Pearce, "Through Canada with Alex. Guilmant," TO, II (January 1894): 211-12.              17.           "Organ Concerts," TO, I (July 1892): 65-6. Of the total of 83 pieces he played there, 29 were transcriptions; Best included one of his own compositions in every program.

                  18.           TO, I (May 1892): 6-7, 17.

                  19.           The unusually large swell-box of the Gray & Davidson organ under construction in 1858 in the Town Hall, Leeds, England, was the site for a merry celebratory dinner where the designers, builders, and others feasted on choice entrées, salmon, and venison, all washed down with a dozen bottles of sparkling and six of '34 port wine, in the novel environment gayly decorated with flags and banners. "Dinner in a Swell-box," TO, I (September 1892): 113-14.

                  20.           "The Location of the Balanced Swell-pedal," TO, I (January 1893): 197-98.

                  21.           TO, I (July 1892): 55, 65.

                  22.           "Comparative Table of the Largest Organs of the World," TO, II (December 1893): 175.

                  23.           W.S.B. Mathews, "Portable Pipe Organ," TO, II (August 1893): 90-91, reprinted from Music.

                  24.           "The Decline of Church Organ-building in the United States," TO, I (February 1893): 234.

                  25.           "For the Protection of Organ Builders," TO, II (October 1893): 126-27.

                  26            Commencing in TO, I (March 1893): 246.

                  27.           The blind English organist, Alfred Hollins, quoted William T. Best's opinion on "Hopeless Jones," who "plays his organs at the end of a long rope which ought to be around his neck." A Blind Musician Looks Back (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1936), 167.

                  28.           TO, II (March 1894): 248.

                  29.           Thomas Ely, "The Art of Practising on the Organ," TO, I (August 1892): 78-79, reprinted from the London Musical Herald.

                  30.           Horatio Clarke, "For Beginners in Pedal Playing," TO, II (January 1894): 199.

                  31.           "Registration for Beginners," TO, II (February 1894): 223-24.

                  32.           "A Few Hints on Registration," TO, I (October 1892): 127, 137.

                  33.           "A Chapter of Don'ts," TO, I (October 1892): 139; "A Second Chapter of Don'ts," TO, I (November 1892): 162.

                  34.           TO, II (January 1894): 197.

                  35.           "An Organist and a Pianist," TO, II (January 1894): 197-98.

                  36.           Albert W. Borst, "Should a Music Teacher Be an Organist as Well as a Pianist?" TO, II (October 1893): 127-28, reprinted from The Étude.

                  37.           "Organs and Organ Teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music," TO, II (March 1894): 247-48.

                  38.           "Cipherings," TO, I (April 1893): 287.

Ewald Kooiman

Dr. Ewald Kooiman is Professor Emeritus “Ars Organi” at the Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. An international concert and recording artist, he twice recorded the complete organ works of Bach on historic organs.

Finger substitution

It is generally assumed that silent finger substitution was
used extensively in nineteenth-century organ playing and increasingly so in the course of that century. I don’t want to bother the reader with countless citations to support this statement--just one from a recent article by Hermann J. Busch:

It is widely acknowledged that a perfect legato, attained by
an intensive use of silent finger substitution for example, became the basis of organ playing in the nineteenth century . . .1

In his Organ Technique,2
published in 2002, Jacques van Oortmerssen takes a remarkably different
standpoint in this regard, one that goes totally against the prevailing
opinion. According to van Oortmerssen, the technique of silent finger
substitution was used sparingly in the nineteenth century; if it was used at
all, then only in a few special cases.

Generally speaking, I think that it is only to be applauded
if somebody challenges generally accepted opinions. It is to be expected,
however, that whoever does this has done his homework; in other words, he or she offers valid arguments in order to convince the reader.

First off, here is what van Oortmerssen tells us about
manual technique in the nineteenth century:

Silent finger substitution was only allowed on long notes
and over short stretches (Ex. 8); only in chorale-playing was the unlimited use of this technique found.3 

August Reinhard: Studien für Harmonium

If we ask ourselves what the certainty of the author is
based on, we end up with music example 8 from the above citation. Oddly enough, that example does not refer to an organ method or to an organ work, but to the Studien für Harmonium (Studies for Harmonium), opus 74, by August Reinhard. Van Oortmerssen refers remarkably often to this work for harmonium (and indeed to harmonium methods in general) without even trying to prove that we are dealing with an important source of information for playing nineteenth-century organ music here. Nor does he mention or cite a single organ method that might support his statements. His main witness, really
his only witness, is the aforementioned harmonium method of August Reinhard.

Even if I were willing to follow the author’s misplaced line of thought that August Reinhard’s harmonium works can give
us essential information about the interpretation of nineteenth-century organ music, I would still believe that the rules van Oortmerssen thinks to find in Reinhard don’t do Reinhard’s intentions justice. To support this
statement, first of all a citation from the preface to Reinhard’s Studien
style='font-style:normal'>:

. . . [W]hether one attains the most perfect legato by
changing fingers on one key or by skillfully sliding with the same finger from
one key to another is irrelevant as long as one indeed attains it.4

Van Oortmerssen gives the same citation on page 40 of his
book and draws quite a remarkable conclusion from it:

From his examples, it is apparent that this does not mean
that one can choose freely between both techniques. Substitution can take place
only at the moments when there is time to do so.

I fail to see how the above citation would limit finger
substitution to a few special cases, as van Oortmerssen wants us to believe. We
will see in the following that Reinhard’s examples do not at all limit
the use of substitution to long notes. Something similar is found in
Reinhard’s footnote to study no. 19 in the aforementioned book. Van
Oortmerssen cites the beginning of this study but leaves out the footnote. This
is understandable because it puts his rules in a very different perspective:

Series of thirds or sixths that are to be played legato
require a careful, but more or less individual, fingering. Skillful change of
fingers on one and the same key [and] careful sliding from one key to another
will be best to help surmount the difficulties.5

Again, I don’t find any restriction here on the use of
finger substitution. Quite the contrary, sliding and substitution are offered
as equivalent possibilities here.

In the Harmonium-Schule
(Harmonium School), opus 16, by the same author we read the following under the
heading “Der Fingersatz” (Fingering):

Since the harmonium requires mostly perfect legato playing
and since this requires careful fingering, special attention needs to be paid
to the latter. In order to move without any disturbing interruption from one
tone or chord to another, the finger must often be exchanged for another one
while it keeps the key down.6

It seems to me that Reinhard states very clearly here that
finger substitution is a central means for legato playing. Moreover, this is
the only special technique he mentions under the heading “Der
Fingersatz.” I do not find a trace here of the rules that van Oortmerssen
thinks he has found. Here is another clear example in this context from
Reinhard’s Harmonium-Schule (Example
1). It is hard to maintain that these are examples of substitution on long
notes. The technical exercises for finger substitution in the same method are
not limited to long note values either (Example 2).

Even if we were to believe (as van Oortmerssen does) that
the harmonium works of August Reinhard offer central information for fingering
in nineteenth-century organ music, we clearly must conclude that van
Oortmerssen’s rules 
don’t do Reinhard justice at all. Reinhard does not know of any
restriction regarding finger substitution. He does, however, emphasize on
various occasions the individuality of a chosen fingering and points out that
there are usually various possibilities.

Franck’s Bach Fingerings

Since van Oortmerssen discusses finger substitution
elsewhere in his book as well, we will now see whether we can find more
convincing arguments there. After citing Fétis, who praises Lemmens for
his frequent use of finger substitution, van Oortmerssen gives the following
comment:

In practice, finger substitution was rather infrequent.
Fingerings by Franck found in the works of Bach are basically the same as those
found in sources from German-speaking areas. In general, silent finger
substitutions, today so popular because of a lack of something better, were
rarely used. The reasons for restricting these substitutions are very
straightforward: they deform the hand, increase tension, and have a bad
influence on tone production, tone control, position playing, and orientation.7

Let us take a closer look at this reasoning: Franck
supposedly used the same fingerings as his German contemporaries; these fingerings made very little use of silent finger substitution. Van Oortmerssen refers to an article of Marie-Louise Jaquet-Langlais, published in 1988 in the French journal L’Orgue.8 In this article,
Marie-Louise Jaquet tells us how around 1968 Jean Langlais (her then-teacher and later husband) mentioned to her that around 1887 César Franck had provided fingerings for 31 organ works of Bach, notated in Braille, on request of the director of the Paris School for the Blind (Institution des Jeunes Aveugles; Franck maintained a very good relationship with the organ class at this institute).

At the time Jaquet wrote her article, the young American
organist and musicologist Karen Hastings (a student of Jean Langlais) was busy
deciphering all those fingerings. Jaquet’s article is based on two works
only: the Prelude and Fugue in D Major,
BWV 532, and the Concerto in A Minor, BWV 593. Jaquet notes that Franck makes
frequent use of substitution: “There are many substitutions among those
fingerings.”9

I do not find anything in this article that would support
van Oortmerssen’s statement in the very least, in fact quite the
contrary. But that is not the end of the story. Since 1990, we have extended
and detailed information about this matter from the very person who studied it
carefully: the aforementioned Karen Hastings. She prepared a transcription in
regular music notation of all the 31 organ works Franck provided with fingerings;
analyzed the fingerings and pedaling indications; and published them in The
American Organist.10 (Van Oortmerssen,
however, does not mention Karen Hastings and her fundamental study at all.) One
of the conclusions from this article makes short work of van
Oortmerssen’s claim: “Franck’s fingerings include a multitude
of substitutions.”11 That is completely at odds with what van Oortmerssen
writes: substitution was not exceptional at all; on the contrary, it was used
frequently by Franck in his Bach edition.

In the rest of this article I will show that this is
consistent with what happened in the German countries. Van Oortmerssen is
absolutely right in pointing out the similarities between Franck and the German
tradition; only the similarity is completely different from what he maintains.
His statement about Franck’s fingerings is now proven plain wrong;
moreover, in his Bach edition, Franck frequently prescribes fingerings that, in
the words of van Oortmerssen, “deform the hand, increase tension, and
have a bad influence on tone production.”

Here is a third citation from van Oortmerssen’s book:

Special techniques were often extensively covered in
historical organ method books. Considering the overwhelming quantity of
exercises, one could easily come to the conclusion that a certain technique had
to be applied frequently. Finger substitution is a very good example. The
number of exercises in organ methods could suggest that this technique could be
applied without restriction. Looking at the music itself, we realize that this
is not the case and that finger substitution was, especially in Germany,
chiefly used for chorale playing.12

What is van Oortmerssen saying here? If I understand him
correctly, it is this: many organ methods offer a multitude of exercises for
silent finger substitution; however, do not conclude that this means that this
technique could be used unrestrictedly: it was mainly used for hymn playing.

I find this a very remarkable argument. Why would a method
offer an “overwhelming quantity of exercises” for something that is
used only on a modest scale? And why would a method offer exercises for finger
substitution on short note values, something that did not occur in the practice
of hymn playing (after all, hymns were sung slowly)? And how does the author
know all this? Not on the basis of analysis of nineteenth-century organ
methods, it seems to me, but only because of his penetrating view:
“Looking at the music itself, we realize that this is not the
case.” I find this a very puzzling statement: by “looking at the
music itself” one can ascertain that all those exercises in the methods
were excess baggage, because this technique was only used on a modest scale
anyway.    

I invite the reader to take a careful look at the situation
together. I will first give some citations from nineteenth-century organ
methods and some examples from pieces with fingerings by the writers of the
respective methods. I will then give some more examples from organ works with
fingerings. We have to ask ourselves two questions in order to find out whether
van Oortmerssen’s claims are based on facts: (1) was the use of finger
substitution outside hymn playing exceptional; and (2) was finger substitution
only used on long note values.

Friedrich Schütze: Practische Orgelschule

The Practische Orgelschule normal'> (Practical Organ School) of Friedrich Wilhelm Schütze (1838) was
widely used during the nineteenth century. Many editions appeared of this book
and of its companion volume, the Handbuch zur praktischen Orgelschule
style='font-style:normal'> (Handbook to the Practical Organ School). The
influential author writes in the Handbuch zur praktischen Orgelschule
style='font-style:normal'>: 

Equally important as the passing under and crossing over of
the fingers is--for organ playing in particular--the so-called silent
finger substitution . . . The substitution must always happen as quickly as
possible; after the substitution, the disengaged fingers always have to move
immediately [to their position] over the new keys.13

This citation mentions silent finger substitution as a very
important technique for organ playing (certainly not for hymn playing
exclusively), and the author’s emphasis on quick substitution surely does
not point to any restriction to long note values; after all, on long notes the
player has lots of time for substitution.

August Ritter: Die Kunst des Orgelspiels

August Gottfried Ritter is another author who has been very
influential on the development of nineteenth-century organ playing. In the
earliest editions of his Die Kunst des Orgelspiels
style='font-style:normal'> (The Art of Organ Playing, part 1), he does mention
the use of finger substitution, but we also find fingerings that seem to come
straight from the eighteenth century. This example comes from the third edition
(Example 3).

Over the years we find in successive editions of
Ritter’s organ method an increasingly frequent use of finger
substitution, although he does not strive for the kind of consistency that we later
find with Dupré. That, by the way, is a remarkable quality of many
nineteenth-century fingerings: in addition to finger substitution one also
finds other kinds of fingerings, for example using the little finger or the
thumb various times in a row. That often makes for fingerings that beg the
question: why sometimes finger substitution and in other, similar moments, use
the same finger on successive notes. With all the searching for legato playing,
there was apparently a fairly wide range in the degree of legato that was
desired or attainable. The following two examples with fingerings of August
Ritter and Marcel Dupré, respectively, may serve to clarify the great
differences between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century approaches
(Examples 4a & 4b: Erschienen ist der herrliche Tag
style='font-style:normal'>, BWV 629).

The second part of Ritter’s Kunst des Orgelspiels
style='font-style:normal'>, sometimes called Praktischer Lehr-Cursus
im Orgelspiel, was thoroughly revised by
the Swiss organist Alfred Glaus and published as “Neue Ausgabe”
(New Edition) by Peters (c. 1915); I believe it is still available. Glaus
expands the use of finger substitution even more than Ritter had done in the
later editions; the following example shows that finger substitution is in no
way restricted to long note values (Example 5).

Johannes Worp: Praktische Orgelschool
style='font-style:normal'>

In 1877, the Dutch organist Johannes Worp published a
Praktische Orgelschool (Practical Organ
School). The following examples were taken from this method: they are all works
from the organ literature provided with fingerings by Worp; first, the
beginning of a piece by Kühmstedt (Example 6). On the basis of the
fingerings prescribed here it cannot possibly be concluded that silent finger
substitution was quite rare and limited to long note values. The following two
examples (printed anonymously in Worp’s book) require frequent finger
substitution on eight notes (Examples 7a and 7b).

The above examples from three organ methods may have caused
some doubt regarding van Oortmerssen’s statement; the following two music
examples can only increase this doubt. They are organ arrangements of
Bach’s Fugue in E major (BWV 878)
from The Well-tempered Clavier II.
The first example is from Jan Albertus van Eyken’s Fugen aus
dem Wohltemperirten Clavier, published in
the 1850s15 (Example 8: van Eyken).

The second appears in the aforementioned organ method by
Johannes Worp (Example 9: Worp). There are very remarkable differences between
these two arrangements, both in the use of fingerings and of pedal indications.
Van Eyken uses silent finger substitution sparingly, whereas Worp makes
extensive use of it. Both had studied in Germany, but the differences are
remarkable. Indeed, as far as both fingering and pedaling are concerned,
various traditions coexisted during the nineteenth century.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> 

I come to my conclusion:

(1) There is no support whatsoever for van
Oortmerssen’s claim that during the nineteenth century silent finger
substitution was used infrequently outside hymn playing, neither in the organ
methods from the period nor in the music itself. In none of the many
nineteenth-century organ methods that I have examined over the years have I
ever encountered anything that points in the direction of van
Oortmerssen’s rules. While it is true that silent finger substitution is
particularly often used in hymn playing, there is no mention anywhere of any
restriction to hymn playing or to long note values.

(2) Van Oortmerssen’s main argument, the reference to
August Reinhard’s Studien für Harmonium, has been shown not to be
convincing or sufficient evidence in the least: I have shown that there is no
mention of restricted use of finger substitution here either.

(3) Van Oortmerssen’s claim that in his Bach edition
Franck makes the same infrequent use of silent finger substitution as his German
contemporaries is completely contradicted by those who have seen and studied
Franck’s fingerings.

If I discuss this matter so extensively it is not in order
to say unpleasant things about a colleague, but because it is my opinion that a
completely wrong picture is drawn here--and disseminated on a large
scale--of both German and French practices during the nineteenth century.

Pedal Technique

On page 40 of his book, van Oortmerssen reaches the
following conclusion about nineteenth-century pedal technique: “ . . .
[T]he heel was used sparingly because its overuse also encouraged tension and
made tone control considerably more difficult.” And on page 37 we read:
“Gliding from one key to the next and silent foot substitutions are two
techniques used sparingly.” Alternating toes in pedal playing remains the
rule, “ . . . even in extremely high or low positions on the
pedalboard.”

During the nineteenth century, a lot of discussion was going
on about what was the best pedal technique, and I agree with van Oortmerssen
that the general tendency is to use alternating toes as the basis and norm of
pedal playing. That does not mean, however, that little use was made of the
heel; some made extensive use of silent foot substitution as well.

On page 39 of his book, van Oortmerssen cites August Ritter
(not from an original edition, but the early-twentieth-century edition by
Alfred Glaus). The citation can be translated as follows: “It is true
that the use of the feet in which the toes of both feet alternate on a regular
basis--which we have practiced until now--has to be considered the
main technique.”16

There is something funny going on in this citation: the
“It is true that” (“zwar,” in the original German)
implies that the sentence does not end where van Oortmerssen put a period.
Indeed, the original text does not have a period here but a semicolon. The text
then continues:

. . .  it is not
sufficient for all situations, however. One uses one and the same foot various
times after in a row by alternating the toe and the heel, or even--e.g.,
with two or three upper keys in a row--the so-called ball of the foot. The
supple strength of the ankle, a prerequisite for elegant pedal playing, will
only get fully developed through this new technique.17

According to Ritter-Glaus, then, toe-heel technique is a
necessary expansion of the technique of alternating toes. If we take a look at
what Ritter himself writes about this matter, things get even more interesting.
We see that Glaus left out a thing or two in his edition; these deletions
happen to be particularly instructive for our topic. In the ninth edition
(1872) of Ritter’s Praktischer Lehr-Cursus im Orgelspiel
style='font-style:normal'>we read:

Although the use of the feet in which the toes of both feet
alternate on a regular basis--which we have practiced until now--has
to be considered the main technique and practiced as such, because it is the
easiest and encourages a clear pedal playing, it is however not sufficient for
all situations. It creates particularly great inconveniences when the pedal
part moves now in the high, now in the low range: a fast motion [down or up] of
one foot would disturb the quiet posture. Similarly, only with great difficulty
can quick runs be played legato and flowingly using this technique. Therefore,
in such cases one and the same foot is used various times in a row by
alternating the toe and the heel, or even--e.g., with three upper keys in
a row--the so-called ball of the foot. Although this greatly facilitates
legato playing, the danger of lack of clarity is lurking. Therefore, attention
has to be paid to a decisive attack by means of the ankle. However, all this
should not be considered the main thing, but only a useful expansion of pedal
technique, and applied accordingly.18

So Ritter states clearly that toe-heel technique comes in
the second place after the technique of alternating toes. But it is
nevertheless an important technique, especially when the feet have to be used
quickly, one after the other, high and low on the pedalboard. Ritter knows yet
another remarkable use of toe-heel technique: in the first part of his Kunst
des Orgelspiels, he says that it is
advisable to play tones that belong to the same chord with the same foot. After
giving pedal indications for the theme of Bach’s Fugue in C
Minor, BWV 546, Ritter prints the chorale
prelude Meine Seele erhebt den Herrn,
BWV 648, with a remarkably frequent use of toe-heel technique (Example 10). It
really is remarkable how toe-heel technique suddenly plays a leading role
here--and how Ritter uses the left foot twice in a row in mm. 30–31,
making legato playing impossible.

In his aforementioned Bach edition, Franck sometimes asks
for remarkably modern pedaling too. The following examples are taken from the
article of Marie-Louise Jaquet-Langlais (Example 11).

An important difference with modern pedal technique is the
frequent use of silent foot substitution. What van Oortmerssen says about this
technique, namely that it was “used sparingly,”19 is simply not
true. Precisely the authors who strongly favor the use of the toes make
frequent use of silent foot substitution. To me, that seems a perfectly logical
consequence of their preference for playing with the toes alone: by means of
silent foot substitution, legato can be attained also on large intervals. Here
is an example, again from van Eyken. It is the Fugue in C-sharp Minor
style='font-style:normal'>, BWV 849, from The Well-tempered Clavier I
style='font-style:normal'> (Example 12).

As we see, van Eyken takes the use of alternating toes as
his point of departure, which often leads to impractical solutions in our
modern eyes. If alternating toes is not possible, he favors silent foot
substitution over the use of the heel.

In hymn playing, silent foot substitution was used very
often. I could give countless examples, but will limit myself to two. The first
one is from Güntersberg’s Der fertige Orgelspieler
style='font-style:normal'>20 (Example 13: 1 = right foot; 2 = left foot). My
second example comes from the aforementioned Praktische Orgelschool
style='font-style:normal'> of J. Worp (Example 14).

On page 39 of his book, van Oortmerssen tries to make a
connection between the pedal technique and the style of the work; in other
words, the degree of the use of the heel would depend on the style of the work
in question. He remarks that “[i]n a non-legato style the heel was not
used at all.”

As an example, he gives the beginning of a movement from the
Sixth Sonata of Samuel de Lange Jr. Van Oortmerssen clearly thinks he can
derive a rule from this single case. Such a rule never existed, however. An
example? August Ritter gives in his Praktischer Lehr-Cursus im Orgelspiel
style='font-style:normal'>, opus 15, a trio whose pedal part is to be played
non-legato (“sempre staccato”). This is quite similar to the
indication in the trio by Samuel de Lange, printed on page 39 of van
Oortmerssen’s book: the original edition reads “poco
stacc[ato]”21 (Example 15).

It is clear from Ritter’s pedal indications that there
is no question here of exclusive use of the toes. Finally, close study of the
two organ arrangements of the fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier II
style='font-style:normal'> printed above makes clear how far the opinions about
pedal technique were apart. With van Eyken, we see a strong preference for
alternating toes, some use of silent foot substitution, and the heel used very
sparingly. Worp, on the other hand, makes extensive use of toe-heel technique
and--as a consequence--hardly uses silent foot substitution.

I believe that the reality of pedal playing in the nineteenth century was much more complicated and colorful than what van Oortmerssen leads us to believe.  

The author extends his thanks to the Nederlands
Muziekinstituut, The Hague, for making available photocopies of compositions by
van Eyken; and to Dr. Joris Verdin for making available various Reinhardiana.

Translation: Dr. Jan-Piet Knijff, Queens College/CUNY.

* This article first appeared as “Zin en onzin over
stomme vingerwisseling en pedaalapplicatuur in de 19e eeuw” in Het Orgel
100 (2004), no. 3.