An Introduction to America’s Music

68 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

published in the Northeast after 1805 show a quick drop-off in American musi-

cal content and a corresponding rise in European. Addressing the public as

an unnamed “we” and making pronouncements that brooked no argument,

ancient music advocates won their purpose by launching a reform process in the

name of religion.

EDIFICATION AND PRAISE

The reformers’ approach raises a basic question: To what audience is sacred

music addressed? Hitherto, the main goal of Christian sacred music was to

praise God, and praise could be delivered in many forms. In a Handel orato-

rio, God is praised through the composer’s artifi ce and the performers’ skill. At

the other end of the spectrum is the congregational hymn, which requires no

great skill to perform but is deemed worthy because of the spirit in which it is

sung. Such a spirit, whether confessing sin or making “a joyful noise unto the

Lord,” was certainly alive among New England choirs and singing schools, for all

the criticisms that reformers leveled at their rowdy fuging tunes and anthems.

Whether in oratorio, hymn, or anthem, the singing was directed toward the

ear of the Almighty. But the reform of early nineteenth-century New England

psalmody partakes of a different spirit—one centered not on praise but on edi-

fi cation. Rather than God, its main recipients were the worshipers themselves,

and especially those seeking moral and social uplift.

Shortly after 1800, a split opened up in Protestant sacred music that was to

have lasting reverberations in America. Those who made edifi cation their ideal

believed that worship was a solemn affair deserving its own kind of music,

separate from secular music in sound, idiom, and style of performance. But

Christians who held to praise as an ideal were inclined to understand sacred

expressions, music included, as an extension of everyday life. The God they wor-

shiped was more attuned to what was in the hearts of His worshipers than to the

piety of their manner or the particular sounds with which they praised Him.

Nowhere was that attitude more evident than in the camp meeting. This

new form of worship emerged from the Second Great Awakening, a surge of reli-

gious renewal between the 1780s and 1830 that brought a fervent Christianity to

the northern, western, and southern fringes of the young republic. (An earlier

series of religious revivals in the 1730s and 1740s is known as the Great Awaken-

ing.) Held in the countryside, camp meetings were gatherings at which frontier

worshipers camped out for several days of prayer and singing in an atmosphere

of spiritual renewal or revivalism. Crowds could be large, sometimes number-

ing in the thousands, and people might travel long distances to attend.

Old-line Calvinism had held that only a certain number of Christians were

predestined for salvation, while other souls burned in hell for their sins. The

Second Awakening, in contrast, promoted the alternative of “free grace,” open-

ing the possibility of salvation to all sinners, dependent on an act of repentance

and belief. Worshipers at camp meetings sang religious songs that expressed the

emotion-fi lled moment of salvation, and they sang them without the benefi t of

any tunebook, by fi tting simple sacred verses to familiar folk melodies. In time,

the oral traditions of the camp-meeting praise song would leave their mark on

the composition of notated sacred music.

On the one hand, the reform of sacred music in New England, as a move

away from praise and toward edifi cation, had shifted the focus toward human

the Second Great

Awakening

camp-meetings songs

172028_03_063-085_r3_ko.indd 68 23/01/13 8:12 PM