SPOTLIGHT ON HISTORYSPOTLIGHT ON HISTORY
Andrew Law and the Reform of Psalmody
A
key fi gure in the transition from “golden
age” psalmody to the reform movements of
the nineteenth century was the Connecti-
cut psalmodist Andrew Law (1749–1821). Though he
graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown
University) in 1775 with a divinity degree, he took
up the career of an itinerant singing master, lead-
ing singing schools along the Eastern Seaboard
from Vermont to South Carolina. His letters reveal
him to have been a zealous religious entrepreneur
whose main disappointment was that he failed to
profi t fi nancially from changes that he helped to
introduce.
Law’s career revolved around three innovations.
First, when he began his work as a compiler, with
the Select Harmony (1779), he placed American com-
positions side by side with British tunes, implying
that the Americans and British were creative equals.
Second, after experiencing a conversion in taste, he
argued in The Art of Singing (1794) that “a considerable
part of American composition is in reality faulty,”largely owing to the New Englanders’ fondness
for “open” sonorities and their habit of placing the
melody in the tenor part. Thereafter, Law system-
atically replaced American music in his tunebooks
with British and moved the melody to the treble
(soprano) part, where it could be more easily heard.
Moreover, in The Musical Primer (1793) he called for a
reform of A merican performance style: “The harsh-
ness of our singing must be corrected. Our voices
must be fi led.”
Third, shortly after the turn of the century, Law
made the most radical change of his career, aban-
doning standard musical notation and copyrighting
his own system, in which the shapes of the notes,
not their position on a staff, indicated the pitches to
be sung. Unfortunately for Law, by the time he pub-
lished his new system, a similar one was already on
the market; William Little and William Smith’s Easy
Instructor (Philadelphia, 1801) would have a power-
ful impact on sacred music in the South. But that is a
story for later in this chapter.Gould names two tunebooks as spearheads of reform: The Salem Collection of
Classical Sacred Music (Salem, 1805) and The Middlesex Collection of Church Music,
or Ancient Psalmody Revived (Boston, 1807). Between them they contain a total of
185 compositions, and all but three are European in origin; in fact, almost the
whole repertory is from the 1770s or earlier. And most of the music is harmo-
nized in block chords, as are Old Hundred and the “common tunes” of the early
Protestant Reformation.
In contrast to most earlier American tunebooks, which were published under
a compiler’s name and whose introductions address readers on a more or less
personal basis, The Middlesex Collection was compiled by the anonymous Middle-
sex Musical Society, and The Salem Collection’s contents chosen by a committee
“whose names, were we at liberty to mention them, would add authority to the
work.” The Salem Collection apologizes for the current “general and most deplor-
able corruption of taste in our church musick”; and the preface to The Middlesex
Collection intones, “The tunes here introduced are recommended by their antiq-
uity, and more by their intrinsic excellence... for the spirit and fl avor of old
wine are always depressed by the commixture of new.” Claiming to represent
right-thinking Christians through the ages, the compilers imply that the best
of all possible sacred repertories had already been in existence for generations.
The forces marshaled by reformers, including the clergy, infl uential lay-
men, and societies devoted to the cause, proved successful. Sacred tunebooksreform tunebooks172028_03_063-085_r3_ko.indd 67 23/01/13 8:12 PM