Puritanism and Music in Colonial America

Abstract

T THE intense dogmatism of the seventeenth century-when religion dominated men's thinking as perhaps at no other time-would supposedly have affected musical life in an almost predictable relationship between views espoused and music experienced. The complex of attitudes bound up in Calvinism are crucial to a test of this supposition because, for one reason, there was a numerical preponderance of Calvinists in the colonies, and for another, there is widespread confusion among contemporary authors concerning the effect of Calvinism upon music. Some time ago writers generally assumed that Calvinism acted as a depressant on music. But a school of Puritan apologists arose claiming this assumption to be unfair and untrue. The chief of these apologists, Percy A. Scholes, equates Puritanism with Calvinism, and this is the sense in which the word puritan will be used-that is, meaning Calvinist. The Puritans of New England will be designated with a capital P as a specific group of Calvinists. A close reexamination of the whole question reveals little of the extenuation for puritans that has been claimed for them in relation to music. Nor were the depressant effects of puritanism on music confined to the seventeenth century. They were apparent throughout the colonial period, in both Europe and America, in secular music as well as sacred, even after many prohibitory tenets had been dropped from the original dogma or greatly moderated. Puritanism, in fact, has never lost its sting from that time to this. It should perhaps give us pause to realize that the great musicians of western culture from the Reformation to the present have been Roman Catholic, Lutheran, high Anglican, or Jewish. They were (or are) not necessarily orthodox, but their orientation has been nominally in a world-outlook or set of values other than Calvinist-no matter how watered down the brand of Calvinism. The correlation of religious attitudes and musical life has been so clear-cut that one wonders how certain eminent scholars could have thoroughly beclouded it.