CHAPTER 1 | CALVINIST MUSIC IN COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA 31
American music, the outcome reached further, touching off a process of singing
reform that reshaped New England psalmody.THE SINGING-SCHOOL MOVEMENT
The Regular Singing controversy was one of many religious debates that marked
early New England life. Cotton Mather, a leading American intellectual of the
time, wrote in 1721 on the values of Puritan sacred music making. His endorse-
ment of biblical texts stresses the importance of words over music. New sacred
verses—hymns—should not replace divinely inspired ones, he believed, merely
because they were more up to date. While he granted the possible merits of
“devout hymns composed by the good men of our own time,” they could not
match the songs “prepared for us by the Holy Spirit of God.”
For Mather and his allies, Regular Singing was a form of prayer. The orderly
singing of a sacred text by a whole congregation, they believed, was pleasing in
God’s sight. But only a reform of congregational psalmody could lead to that
result, because the Old Way lacked such discipline. And indeed, reform began
in earnest around 1720, with two developments particularly helpful to the cause:
psalm tunes were published in tunebooks to guard them from the whim of
oral transmission, and singing instruction became available to congregation
members.
In 1721 two books were published in Boston that emphasized sacred music
over sacred verses. They included not only the tunes but also instructions in
how to sing them. The titles reveal their purpose: John Tufts’s An Introduction
to the Singing of Psalm Tunes and Thomas Walter’s The Grounds and Rules of Musick,
Explained. Both volumes began with an introduction explaining the rudiments
of singing: how to use one’s voice as part of a congregation, including an expla-
nation of the symbols in which the psalm tunes were written.
The appearance of these two books began a new era in the history of Cal-
vinist psalmody in the New World. Between them they bridged the gap between
music as an art with a technical basis and a public ready to learn that technique.
Those who wished to learn could now attend singing schools, which were aimed
at beginners, were taught in the evenings in any available space, and typically
lasted three months (a “quarter”). A singing master was not a clergyman but sim-
ply a musical individual (always male), perhaps recruited by aspiring singers or
perhaps deciding on his own to organize a school and advertise for scholars, who
paid a fee. Moreover, though it grew out of the church’s needs, the singing school
was from the start an institution distinct from the church.
By the early 1720s, then, the elements of a more disciplined psalmody had
been introduced in and around Boston. In some congregations, reform went
smoothly. Once a school was formed, the “scholars” persuaded other church
members to follow their lead, and Regular Singing replaced the Old Way. But in
others, the process could take years, even decades. With no popes or bishops to
hand down decrees, questions about congregational singing and other matters
of worship were put to a vote of church members, and the majority ruled. In
Farmington, Connecticut, the congregation in 1727 upheld local independence
by voting down Regular Singing as a practice “recommended by the Reverend
Ministers of Boston”—by implication, big-city know-it-alls.Tufts and Walter172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 31 23/01/13 9:50 AM