CHAPTER 3 | EDIFICATION AND ECONOMICS: THE CAREER OF LOWELL MASON 77
composition with a German-born musician. There, while still in his late twen-
ties, Mason compiled his fi rst tunebook.
Mason found most of the music for his book in other publications, especially
a London collection called Sacred Melodies, from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,
which adapted melodies by European masters to English hymn texts. Mason
took pride in the musical know-how his collection displayed; in a letter to a
friend, he boasted that he had harmonized the tunes correctly, “and I trust
every false relation, and every forbidden progression will be avoided.” Like
Andrew Law, he saw harmonic correctness as a feature that separated the music
of ignorant Yankee psalmodists from what the reformers considered scien-
tifi c music—music based on theoretical knowledge rather than simply talent or
practical experience.
Because no Southern printer then owned a font of music type, Mason trav-
eled north to Boston in 1821 in search of a publisher. The sponsor he found,
Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, had been founded in 1815 to improve “the
style of performing sacred music” and to promote American performances of
music by Europe’s “eminent composers” (see chapter 5). Appearing in 1822, The
Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music won resounding suc-
cess, and money from its sales helped support the society’s activities for years
to come. Although it was Mason’s compilation, the tunebook appeared to be the
work not of an individual but of a respected organization, thus giving it the same
air of authority that marked earlier reform tunebooks such as The Salem Collec-
tion. As for Mason, the fi nancial arrangement he worked out—profi ts were split
equally between compiler and publisher—proved to be the cornerstone on which
he built his career. By 1839, when the last edition was published (a new edition
had appeared practically every year), Mason’s share of the proceeds had reached
approximately $12,000. And to that sacred collection Mason added others, each
aimed at a different clientele.
In 1827 Mason left the banking trade and moved to Boston as leader of music
in several churches and president of the Handel and Haydn Society. Not until
the age of thirty-fi ve, then, did Mason center his professional life on music. But
through shrewd planning, talent, and energy, he entered his new calling at a
level of income and prestige unprecedented for an American musician. Show-
ing great talent as a hymn tune composer, he produced more than 1,100 tunes
for congregations to sing, including Bethany (“Nearer, My God, to Thee”) and
Missionary Hymn (“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”). The line between works
Mason composed and those he merely arranged is not always clear, however, as
shown by Antioch, the tune to which Isaac Watts’s text “Joy to the World” is now
sung as a Christmas carol.
When Mason fi rst published Antioch in 1836, he attributed the tune to
Handel, although the melody has never been found in this form in Handel’s
compositions. Those who know Handel’s Messiah, however, will hear echoes of
it in the hymn tune. The opening four notes (“Joy to the world”) resemble the
opening of the Messiah chorus “Lift up your heads.” And the melody sung later in
the hymn to the words “And heav’n and nature sing” is close to the tune played
by the violins at the start of Messiah’s opening tenor recitative, “Comfort ye, my
people.” From these fragments, Mason composed a new tune for Watts’s text.
Mason’s tune starts high, with a burst of energy underlining the text’s rapturous
mood. His closing is also vivid. In fact, its word repetition, the dividing of text“scientifi c music”Mason’s hymnsthe Handel and
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