CHAPTER 1 | CALVINIST MUSIC IN COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA 33
stable from the 1740s to 1775. The religious culture of Philadelphia was also more
tolerant and more diverse than Boston’s, with substantial numbers of Angli-
cans, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Quakers, as well
as Reformed “dissenters,” including Lyon himself, whose Presbyterian faith
marked him as a tolerant kind of Calvinist.
Urania was published by subscription, a commercial practice that allowed
a work to be proposed for publication with a minimum of investment. To
enroll subscribers, a publisher would offer copies of the book at a prepublica-
tion discount. Only if enough subscribers were found would the work then be
printed, as was Lyon’s 198-page volume in June 1761, with a list of subscribers
in the front.
James Lyon’s bold act of entrepreneurship lies behind this landmark of
American music history. Not only did Lyon use commercial means to sell his
book, but he also designed his collection for broad appeal. Urania’s musical con-
tents offered something for every sacred singer: standard psalm tunes, left text-
less so that worshipers could sing them to their preferred psalter; plenty of choir
music, including anthems—elaborate choral works by British composers, often
with biblical texts; and hymn tunes apparently geared to home performance, as
suggested on the title page: “adapted to the use of churches and private families.”
Urania was the fi rst American tunebook to bring psalmody into the commercial
arena, relying on subscription and advertising and tailoring its contents to
attract customers. From a Puritan perspective, the process bears a distinctly sec-
ular fl avor, but then, in 1760s Philadelphia the Puritan perspective carried little
weight. Urania showed how psalmody, a mode of sacred expression, could fi nd a
niche in a public marketplace.
The absence in New England of any effort similar to Lyon’s suggests how
small a role musical learning had so far played in the tradition of psalmody. But
that would soon change. By the 1760s singing schools and Regular Singing were
spreading musical literacy and feeding interest in more-elaborate sacred music
throughout the reg ion, as suggested by the roster of church choirs formed in New
England after midcentury, especially in Massachusetts. Boston’s First Church had
a choir by 1758, followed by many others through the next dozen years.K Henry Dawkins
engraved this elaborate
title page for James Lyon’s
Urania (Philadelphia, 1761).marketing psalmody172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 33 23/01/13 9:50 AM