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A
fter winning independence from England in 1783, Americans realized
that the unique political circumstances of their lives offered fresh cul-
tural possibilities, including musical ones. The idea of American musi-
cal distinctiveness was fi rst embodied, as discussed in chapter 1, in the work of
William Billings. This chapter explores how that idea, as it applies to the realm
of Protestant sacred music, spread fi rst among Billings’s fellow psalmodists in
New England and later throughout the territories of the new republic. As musi-
cal literacy grew, however, so did musical sophistication and a sense that the
infant nation had far to go before it could match the mature musical culture of
the Old World. In the same way that New England psalmody was the fruit of an
earlier reform movement—the drive for singing schools to bring sacred singing
under the control of musical notation—the spread of psalmody gave rise to new
calls for reform. By the mid-1800s Protestant sacred music in America divided
along lines refl ecting not only sectarian differences but regional, class, and edu-
cational ones as well.THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW ENGLAND
PSALMODYThough it began as early as 1720, the Regular Singing movement’s call for musical
literacy was slow to gain momentum. The printing of tunebooks grew gradually
over the next decades. With peacetime came a new burst of energ y from tune-
book compilers, and the last two decades of the eighteenth century saw substan-
tial growth, peaking in the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century, when more
tunebooks were printed than in the entire eighteenth century. A look at those
tunebooks reveals that William Billings, for all his fame, was just one of many
New Englanders who composed and published sacred music in the late 1700s.CHAPTER
3
“HOW SWEET THE
SOUND”
Sacred Music in the New Republic
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