An Introduction to America’s Music

78 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

between upper and lower voices, and the energetic effect of the repeated notes all

recall the fuging tune, a form by then long scorned by New England reformers.

Yet its attribution to an “eminent composer” and “scientifi c” harmonization—

avoiding open sonorities and parallel fi fths—distinguish it from both older

psalmody and Southern shape-note hymnody.

Other tunes of Mason’s depart even further from the earlier style, a topic to

be taken up later in this chapter, after exploring Mason’s activities as a teacher

and businessman.

MASON AS TEACHER OF CHILDREN

Like psalmodists and hymnodists before and after him, Mason taught singing

schools in hopes of improving teenagers’ and adults’ musical taste through per-

formance. Around the time that he moved to Boston, however, the newly insti-

tuted public schools there placed fresh attention on children, whose potential

for making music had never received much notice. Mason grasped the advan-

tages of teaching young children to sing before their taste was formed, so they

could learn to appreciate “good music” as they developed their singing skills.

Around 1830 Mason formed the earliest known singing school for children,

which he taught free of charge. The class grew quickly: from six or eight at the

start to fi ve or six hundred a few years later. And after a year of teaching gratis,

he began to collect fees and to devote more of his energies to secular teaching,

especially of children.

In 1833, in collaboration with George James Webb, an immigrant musician

from England, Mason helped to found the Boston Academy of Music, which

taught both sacred and secular singing. Soon he was offering teachers’ classes

through the academy and published his Manual of the Boston Academy of Music

(Boston, 1834; eleven more editions by 1861) to serve them. The introduction of

vocal music into public schools had been one of the academy’s main objectives

from the start, and in 1837, with three assistants, Mason approached the Boston

school board and offered free singing classes in the city’s public schools for the

coming year. The success of that volunteer experiment led the board to declare

vocal music a regular school subject in 1838 and to hire Mason and his

associates as teachers. He taught music in the Boston schools until 1855.

By all accounts, Mason was an outstanding teacher with a com-

manding personality. But what gave him authority as a teacher of other

teachers was a systematic method of instruction. In honing his tech-

niques, Mason learned much from William Woodbridge of Boston,

who in the 1820s had studied the educational methods of the Swiss

educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, which were then being applied

to music by German pedagogues. According to George F. Root, one of

Mason’s associates in the Boston public school venture, Woodbridge

made Mason a promise: “If you will call together a class, I will trans-

late and write out each lesson for you... and you can try the method;

it will take about twenty-four evenings.” Mason agreed, and the class

was assembled. “Speaking to Dr. Mason once about this remarkable

class,” Root relates, “I asked him what those ladies and gentlemen paid

for that course of twenty-four lessons. ‘Oh, they arranged that among

themselves,’ he replied. ‘They decided that fi ve dollars apiece would be

K Lowell Mason (1792–

1872) not long after he

moved from Savannah,

Georgia, to Boston.

music in public schools

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