CHAPTER 3 | EDIFICATION AND ECONOMICS: THE CAREER OF LOWELL MASON 83
MASON’S RIVALS, COLLABORATORS, AND LEGACY
Once Lowell Mason began exploring Americans’ appetite for edifi cation, other
musicians recognized that a burgeoning market stood ready to be tapped.
Thomas Hastings, Mason’s sometime collaborator, shared similar goals, and his
hymn tune Toplady (sung to the text “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” by Augustus M.
Toplady), which was also included in their Spiritual Songs for Social Worship, dis-
plays style features nearly identical to those of Olivet. In his later years Hast-
ings considered Mason a rival. A letter he wrote in 1848 sarcastically described
Mason’s idea of doing good as being in a position to “multiply and sell books.”
Two younger men, both students of Mason’s, built on his legacy of organized
musical instruction. William B. Bradbury, a native of Maine, enrolled in the
Boston Academy of Music and sang in one of Mason’s church choirs in the early
1830s. After teaching music in Maine and New Brunswick (1836–40), Bradbury
took a post as organist and choir leader in a New York Baptist church. There he
established classes for children similar to Mason’s in Boston. His fi rst tunebook,
The Young Choir (1841), continued that educational emphasis, and it was followed
by others aimed at Sunday schools. The sales of Bradbury’s tunebooks reached
more than two million copies. Among the popular hymn tunes he composed are
Woodworth (“Just as I am”) and China (“Jesus loves me! this I know”), the latter
published in 1862. Bradbury also showed something of Mason’s knack for busi-
ness. In 1854 he helped to found a piano-making fi rm in New York, and in 1861
his publishing company opened in the same city.
Another musician who carried Mason’s message in new directions was
George Frederick Root. Born in 1820 on a Massachusetts farm, Root grew up
hoping to be a musician. Yet he never played organ or piano until, at age eigh-
teen, he moved from his hometown of Sheffi eld to Boston, where his fi rst teacher
ordered him to begin teaching an even ranker beginner. After a brief struggle to
make his “clumsy fi ngers” negotiate a keyboard, he began playing the last hymn
in church services, apparently so the regular organist could leave to play another
service. Root later explained his quick acceptance into the professional ranks as
more a matter of opportunity than of talent. Lowell Mason had “just commenced
what proved to be a revolution in the ‘plain song’ of the church and of the peo-
ple,” he recalled. And Mason’s “methods of teaching the elementary principles of
music were so much better... than anything... seen [before]” that those who
were early in the fi eld had very great advantage.
In Root’s autobiography, Mason is his respected mentor, model, and eventu-
ally colleague. Root sang in the Boston Academy Chorus in 1838, and by 1840
he was teaching as one of Mason’s assistants in the Boston public schools. The
following year, Mason hired him as an instructor in one of his teacher-training
conventions, and three years later Root moved from Boston to New York, where
he led a church choir and taught from Mason’s books in various schools, includ-
ing “young ladies’ academies” and the New York State Institution for the Blind.
In 1853 Root enlisted Mason to be one of his collaborators at the fi rst of several
three-month normal institutes (courses for training teachers) in New York City.
Root granted that a hierarchy of musical genres existed, with European
masterworks at the top. Indeed, he was a lover of the classics, especially Handel’s
Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and the works of Beethoven and Wagner. But he
was also a practical man who had a clear sense of his own abilities, and early inWilliam B. BradburyGeorge F. Root172028_03_063-085_r3_ko.indd 83 23/01/13 8:12 PM