Early American Anthems (review)

Abstract

CRITICAL EDITIONS Early American Anthems. Edited by Karl Kroeger. (Recent Researches in American Music, 36-37.) Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2000. [Pt. 1: Anthems for Public Celebrations. Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xxv; 6 plates (3 p.); score, 185 p.; crit. report, p. 187-92; indexes of composers and opening lines, 1 p. ISBN 0-89579-459-4. $75. Pt. 2: Anthems for Special Occasions. Acknowledgments, p. vii; score, 166 p.; crit. report, p. 167-73; indexes of composers and opening lines, 1 p. ISBN 0-89579-460-8. $65.] Karl Kroeger, easily the most prolific editor of early American sacred music, offers in these newly published volumes of the series Recent Researches in American Music a selection of anthems for church services and special occasions. The two handsomely produced volumes published by A-R Editions contain fifty-two musical settings of mostly prose sacred texts first published between 1761 and 1810. The forty-five composers represented here range from nativeborn, part-time musicians with a modicum of training to immigrant musical professionals from England and elsewhere. They lived and worked in communities as diverse as New York City and Mt. Holly, Vermont; they wrote music variously for Congregationalist meetinghouses and for Catholic churches; and while some, such as Boston's William Billings (1746-1800), have made a name for themselves in histories of American music, others, such as W. Newcomb, are biographical nonentities. Kroeger's selection of music is as diverse as the composers these pieces represent. There are anthems for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Fast Day, meetinghouse dedications, ministers' ordinations, funerals, charity meetings, and a marriage. Lengths range from the 28 measures of Raynor Taylor's (ca. 1747-1825) lively Hallelujah Chorus to the 399 of Daniel Hardy's (1773-1833) Thanksgiving anthem O Come, Let Us Sing unto the Lord, this edition's real tour de force. Kroeger's many years of studying the sacred music of early America have paid off well here; few scholars could produce as rich a representation of this particular repertory. While some of the very finest early American anthems are missing-Justin Morgan's (1747-1798) Judgment anthem Hark, Ye Mortals, Hear the Trumpet or Billings's setting of As the Hart Panteth (Psalm 42) come immediately to mind-it is true that Kroeger has edited these elsewhere (Two Vermont Composers: The Collected Works of Elisha West and Justin Morgan, Music of the New American Nation, 7 [New York: Garland, 1997], 125-36; The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), The Complete Works of William Billings, 1 [Boston: The American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981], 138-51). What we do have here will certainly enrich the repertories of choruses and choirs for years to come. All this said, Kroeger would likely agree that these volumes do not present the real glories of early American sacred music. The modest musical training of most composers active in America between 1760 and 1810 allowed them to excel only at the miniature scale of the psalm or hymn tune that sets a four-line stanza of text and averages sixteen measures in length. Some of these tiny pieces-whether by the well-known Billings or by rural unknowns-are arguably as beautiful and powerful as any choral music of comparable length. The early American anthem, on the other hand, suffers from the often-fatal malady of tonal monotony. Its composers knew nothing of true modulation and usually could not sustain interest over the longer stretches of time that anthems need. In the present edition, David Men-ill's (fl. ca. 1799) Thanksgiving anthem Grateful Songs and Anthems Bring is an egregious example: its 109 measures seesaw between G and D, and the occasional threemeasure phrase (where four measures are expected) cannot adequately offset the tonal predictability. Many early American composers seem to have been aware of this shortcoming and attempted to compensate for it by creating interest through means other than tonal variety. …