CHAPTER 1 | CALVINIST MUSIC IN COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA 35
Striking an aggressively American note, The New-England Psalm-Singer bore
the stamp of its time and place. The titles of many tunes refer to Boston and
the surrounding area, including Massachusetts counties, cities, and towns,
and Boston churches (New South, Old Brick). But even more unusual was the
glimpse of himself that Billings offered his readers. In the book’s introduction,
he approached the public as a man of Boston and a musician of the New World.
As Billings saw it, composers either were blessed with artistic inspiration or they
were not. On “ t he r u les of composit ion,” he w rote: “Nature is the best Dictator, for all
the hard dry studied Rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person
to form an Air [i.e., compose a melody]... without a Genius.... Nature must
inspire the Thought.” Confi dent of the “genius”—the intuitive inventiveness—
that linked him w ith nature’s inspiration, Billings then added: “For my ow n Part,
I don’t think myself confi n’d to any Rules for Composition laid down by any that
went before me.”
Billings also gained historical attention by launching his career on the eve of
American independence in a city that played a key role in the confl ict. Far from
disguising his own sympathies, Billings celebrated them. The engraver of The
New-England Psalm-Singer’s frontispiece, for example, was Paul Revere, strongly
identifi ed with Boston’s patriot faction. Like James Lyon, Billings published his
work by subscription, but he apologized in an advertisement for omitting the
subscriber list from his book for want of space. Given Billings’s links to Boston’s
patriots—he was also friendly with the arch-agitator Samuel Adams—it would beK Paul Revere’s
frontispiece for William
Billings’s The New-England
Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770)
encircles a picture of seven
singers with a canon, or
round, that sets a sacred
text but was apparently
performed on a social
occasion.Billings’s “genius”172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 35 23/01/13 9:50 AM