The New England Singing School: Ritual Change and Religious Culture in Revolutionary America

Abstract

AbstractThe New England singing school brought more than a new form of musical training to colonial and Revolutionary America. It also touched off a process of ritual change that permanently altered the religious culture of New England Congregationalism. The singing school first emerged in the early eighteenth century as a vehicle through which ministers asserted their cultic control over a restive laity. By mid‐century, however, the emergence of itinerant lay singing masters had created a class of ritual specialists who challenged the traditional institutional authority of the clergy. The process of change intensified still further in the Revolutionary era as singing school scholars formed choirs who demanded special status as a lay community of ritual performers. By the end of the Revolution, the New England singing school had also changed the content of Congregationalist religious culture itself by providing a new ritual repertory of American musical settings for the sacred poetry of Isaac Watts that quickly replaced traditional Puritan psalmody.