Connecticut Sacred Music Imprints, 1778-1810

Abstract

From the time, late in the seventeenth century, when the editors of the Bay Psalm Book added a tune supplement to that already venerable and successful psalter, through the nineteenth century's first decade, perhaps as many as 300 different works containing sacred music were published in America. Some 250 titles survive. Their geographical distribution is pretty much what one might expect. Nearly three-quarters were issued in New England, with Massachusetts itself responsible for more than half of the total. Pennsylvania supplied some 15 per cent, and Connecticut another eighth (121,2 per cent); New Hampshire (7 per cent), New York (5 per cent), and Maryland (3 per cent) furnished the rest of the collections whose place of publication can be traced. These figures would seem to substantiate the notion, unspoken perhaps, but implicit in many discussions of American music, that Massachusetts was the center of activity during the period called by one writer The Golden Age of Choral Music'l-a period during which native-born composers created a distinctive repertory of sacred music. Massachusetts was indeed the center for sacred music publication in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century America. And it was the birthplace and home of the dominant figure in American psalmody, William Billings (1746-1800) of Boston. In one of the few contemporaneous historical statements on American psalmody, Rev. William Bentley of Salem, writing in 1797, noted Billings's chief contribution: Mr. Billings, with more genius than Taste, introduced new composition. But, Bentley continued, vocal music had its progress in Connecticut.2 It is surely noteworthy that Bentley, himself the compiler of a hymn collection, a close observer of sacred music, and a lifetime resident of Massachusetts, should identify Connecticut as the place where vocal music had its progress-especially since Connecticut could lay claim