Psalmodic Adaptation as Musical Translation

The psalmodic adaptation of classical music constitutes a distinctive creative act in instances in which we find adapters not simply importing excerpts essentially unchanged (a chiefly curatorial service), but making substantive musical decisions to bridge the gap dividing art music from psalmody. This chapter explores such “translational actions,” unfolding in four phases. The first concerns low-level decisions, involving rhythm, ornamentation, and texture. The second centers on syntactic challenges that arise in drawing brief excerpts from larger works (negotiating European passages that begin and end in different keys, for instance). The third focuses on “purposeful substitution”: the replacement of musical effects inappropriate to psalmody with wholly different effects calculated to achieve comparable goals. The fourth explores adaptations that challenge the very notion of a one-to-one correspondence between “excerpt” and “psalm tune”: tunes that draw on more than one European movement, say, or adjacent pairs of tunes drawn from a common source.

Epilogue

IN THE DECADES leading up to the Civil War, the realms of classical music, Protestant Christian song, and mass-market popular music vibrantly converged in a single American repertoire. That convergence, the topic of this book, was temporary. Few of the cultural conditions that brought this repertoire into being persist to the present day. The notion that the United States is a normatively Christian nation is far from extinct, but its ultimate extinction seems likely. And most of Protestantism’s cultural trappings have thankfully lost whatever veneer they once enjoyed of unselfconscious universality. Choral music, meanwhile, is still performed in professional, ecclesiastical, convivial, and domestic settings alike. But most music enjoyed by Americans in daily life is recorded music, and when they make music themselves, it is mostly other kinds of music they make. Perhaps most important, that gulf that separated antebellum Americans’ nascent awareness of European classical music as a thing of value from opportunities for the actual experience of that music—the gap whose bridging comprised a core justification for this repertoire of psalmodic adaptations—has closed. For the great majority of Americans who care to seek them out, almost any of the European works tabulated in ...

An Immigrant’s Musical Memoir

This chapter centers on the 1819 Original Collection compiled by Arthur Clifton, an English musician who had emigrated to Baltimore in 1817 (changing his name, from Antony Corri, in the process). Though not a commercial success, this pathbreaking volume was the first American publication to present a substantial body of material drawn from European classical music in psalmodic form, containing 21 psalm and hymn tunes culled variously from the work of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Such adaptations had been enjoying a modest vogue in England since around the turn of the century, but only half a dozen or so had appeared in the United States. Clifton relied on existing London publications for inspiration—many of the European melodies he includes had already been adapted by English compilers. But he returns to the classical music sources themselves in almost every case, developing his own meticulously crafted body of adaptations.

Heyday

The vast expansion of the American music-making infrastructure through the 1840s brought with it a vast expansion of interest in psalmodic adaptations of classical music. Hundreds of such adaptations appeared in a gathering wave of activity that crested around 1850. This chapter’s survey of this midcentury mania sets off with George Kingsley, whose 1838 Sacred Choir (with 24 tunes culled from major composers’ work) spearheaded this wave, and whose commitment to such adaptations proved more energetic and sustained than any contemporary’s. The discussion goes on to center on two hubs of activity in turn: New York (home to such compilers as Ureli Corelli Hill, Elam Ives, William Bradbury, and Thomas Hastings) and Boston (where the effort was led by Lowell Mason and Benjamin Franklin Baker). The chapter closes with reflections on the manifold reasons for the practice’s steep decline after about 1853.

Institutional Certification

The 1822 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music contains 21 psalm and hymn tunes drawn from the work of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, all based closely on adaptations already circulating in London. The volume represented a novel conceptual convergence of the stylistically Europeanized sacred tune books of the earlier “Ancient Music” movement and the Handel and Haydn Society’s own existing compilations of (non-psalmodic) classical music abstracts. With sales reaching around 50,000, this astonishingly popular volume provided thousands of Americans their first exposure to such adaptations. It also launched the career of its compiler Lowell Mason, who would emerge as the era’s most influential American musical figure, active as compiler, teacher, administrator, and conductor. Central as psalmodic adaptations of classical music were to this landmark 1822 volume, however, such adaptations did not immediately catch on, making only sporadic appearances in American tune books over the following fifteen years.

Antebellum Psalmody in Its Cultural Context

Christian worship factored centrally in the American circulation of psalm and hymn tunes in the 19th century, but the repertoire traveled far and wide beyond actual church services. Musical societies, conventions, singing schools, social gatherings of a religious nature, and domestic settings all provided venues for the singing of psalmody. This chapter undertakes a broad exploration of the place of psalm and hymn tunes in pre–Civil War American culture. In its closing stretch, however, it pivots toward those vibrant registers of American sacred music-making that lay beyond the Europeanized psalmodic practices that form this book’s focus. Psalmodic adaptations of classical music would never have been encountered by most of the nation’s enslaved, nor by most Native Americans. They also had little impact on the lives of many in the country’s southern and western regions who preferred the markedly different psalmodic tradition associated with “shape notes.”

Introduction

THIS IS NOT an autobiography. This book’s central characters were in their graves decades before the Oklahoma in which I grew up—far from the American Northeast that was home to most of them—even achieved statehood.1 But the American musical journey I trace in these pages has stronger autobiographical overtones than we might expect....