64 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
YANKEE PSALMODISTS
Tunebooks, though overwhelmingly sacred in their texts, were intended to
serve the needs of singing schools, which were not sacred institutions (and in
fact they were too expensive for church use and their music too elaborate for
any congregation). Many tunebooks begin with an explanation of the rudiments
of music notation and then proceed from easy tunes to more and more diffi cult
compositions. Tunebooks also served the needs of musical societies, groups of
singers who banded together for the pleasure of exercising their skills. Rather
than a branch of church music, then, psalmody shared certain traits with popu-
lar music.
From the mid-1780s into the early 1800s, tunebooks featured compositions
by native-born Americans including Daniel Read, Lewis Edson, Justin Morgan,
Timothy Swan, and others, who hailed from the towns and villages sprinkled
across the Massachusetts and Connecticut countryside. In addition to their
trades (Read was a comb maker and storekeeper; Edson a blacksmith; Morgan
a farmer, schoolmaster, and horse breeder; Swan a hatter), they taught singing
schools and wrote music, but without much exposure to the music making of
the cities.
New England psalmody lacked the specialization found in later American
music making. The composers, who had acquired their own musical learning
in singing schools and through personal experience, were writing essentially
for peers, friends, and neighbors. Thanks to subscription and informal inter-
change, even inexperienced composers could get their music into print. And
though the singing was done for the greater glory of God, much of it took place
outside public worship. The fl exibility of boundaries that were later more sharply
drawn—between sacred and secular, professional and amateur, composer and
performer, creator and publisher—has led some to call the late eighteenth cen-
tury a golden age of psalmody.
Daniel Read’s Sherburne (1785; LG 3.1) was a golden-age favorite. As it tells
the story, a band of shepherds are working the night shift. It is a cold evening, the
ground is hard, and they are bored. Suddenly they see a fl ash of light. And there
hovers an angel, sent by God to report some startling news about His family.
Read’s setting, with its homegrown harmony and simple declamation, seems to
encourage the performers to sing as people accustomed to sleeping on cold, hard
ground themselves, as some of Sherburne’s early performers doubtless were.
In this composition, commonplace details and world-changing revelation blend
into one experience.
Sherburne’s musical idiom typifi es a generation of Yankee composers. The
opening shows two harmonic traits that are different from anything a Euro-
pean composer of the time would have written. One is a fondness for “open”
sounds—harmonies that include only the root and fi fth of a chord, omitting the
third. That sound, the simplest of any consonance, resonates well and is easy to
sing in tune. The second unusual trait is a freedom from certain orthodox har-
monic conventions, as in the very fi rst phrase, which ends with a chord built on
the sixth note of the scale (on the word “night”), where a European-trained ear
would have expected a triad on the fourth note.
Sherburne is a fuging tune, an Anglo-American form beloved of psalm-
odists and singers of the period. Beginning with block chords, the texture
explodes at its midpoint into a “fuge”: a section where each voice part enters atLG 3.1fuging tunes172028_03_063-085_r3_ko.indd 64 23/01/13 8:12 PM