Music in America - 16th Century

1
Music in America - 16th Century

• French Protestant psalm tunes
• Shared with the Indians in La Floride - 1562
• First French attempt at colonization was in
  1562-63 at Charlesfort, S.C.
• Later colonizations
• St. Augustine - 1565
• Jamestown - 1607
• Plymouth - 1620
• In 1564 a second French colony became Fort
  Caroline on the St. Johns River, Florida
• Among the colonists were a spinet player, a horn
  player, 4 trumpet players, 3 drummers, and a fife
  player.
• This colony was destroyed by the Spanish, but the
  French recaptured the fort in 1568 and then -
  went back to France!

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Psalms from the Huguenot Psalter

• Psalm 128 from the Huguenot Psalter (1547)
  Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord
• Psalm 130 from the Huguenot Psalter (1547) Out
  of the depths have I cried unto thee
• Who were the Huguenots?
• In the 16th and 17th centuries, Huguenots were
  members of the Protestant Reformed Church of
  France.

3
Pere Paul Le Jeune

• Some of the earliest records of contact between
  Europeans and Native Americans were in reports
  sent to Paris by 17th century French priests
• PAUL LE JEUNE, a French missionary, was born in
  France in 1592 and died in 1664. He became a
  Jesuit in 1614 and was sent to Canada in 1632 to
  found villages for the Christian Indians. The
  Indians were gradually civilized by Le Jeune who
  returned to France in 1649 where he was made
  procurator of the foreign missions.

4
Spanish Catholic Missionaries

• Juan de Padilla accompanied Francisco Vasquez de
  Coronado in 1540 and Cristobal de Quinones (d.
  1609)
• He may have been the first to teach music in the
  United States!
• Fray Alonso de Benavides arrived the New Mexico
  area in 1626 with
• 3 large choir books, 5 bells weighing 200 pounds
  each, 5 hand bells, a set of flageolet, and a
  bassoon, a set of trumpets, 5 antiphonal books, 5
  choir books for Mass and Vespers, one gross of
  little bells

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Early Music in America

• Revolutionary War Music
• fife and drum bands
• various ensembles
• no trace of early music - no notation - no
  written language
• first serious study of Native American Music (the
  Seneca Indians)
• Theodore Baker 1851-1932 (Uber die Musik der
  Nordamerikanischen Wilden) - completed in 1880,
  pub. 1882 by Breitkopf Hartel
• Alice Cunningham Fletcher 1838-1923 - early
  American scholar of Indian Music - pub. 1893
• Pioneering ethnographer, theorist, prolific
  author, indefatigable public speaker, advocate
  for Native Americans, and women's rights activist
  - Alice Cunningham Fletcher - nicknamed by some
  "Her Majesty."

6
Early Music in America

• First Recordings of Indian music were made by
  Jesse Walter Fewkes 1850-1930 of the
  Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine
• Frances Densmore 1867-1957 recorded and analyzed
  hundreds of Indian songs. Her wortk became the
  foundation for the Smithsonian Collection
• Regarding the native Americans, Captain John
  Smith said
• Their devotion was most in songs which the
  chiefe Priest beginneth and the rest followed
  him
• Columbus believed
• Despite this (tractable, peaceful), he thought
  that the Indians should be made to work, sow,
  and do all that is necessary and to adopt our
  ways.

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Early Music in America

• Christianity - music was part of religion and had
  to be replaced or exterminated
• The end of the 19th and begining of the 20th
  century saw the destruction and loss of a culture
• The history of America since Columbus is the
  story of cultural differences so profound as to
  nearly prohibit any interaction between the
  Europeans and the Native Americans. For this
  reason, the music of the Native Americans plays
  almost no role.

8
MUSIC in the EARLY SETTLEMENTS

• Jamestown - 1607 - John Smith
• Quebec - 1608 - Samuel de Champlain
• Plymouth Rock - 1620 the Pilgrims
• Albany - 1624 - the Dutch
• New Amsterdam - 1626 - the Dutch West India
  Company
• Massachusetts Bay Colony - 1629 - the Puritans
• Williamsburg - 1633 - John Smith

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BOOKS

• The Book of Psalmes Englished both in Prose and
  Metre (Henry Ainsworth 1570-1623) 48 tunes in
  the Ainsworth psalter
• Sternhold and Hopkins (Thomas Sternhold d. 1549
  and John Hopkins d. 1570) - the most widely used
  book of religious text other than the Bible for
  several centuries

10
Puritians

• Puritans brought a collection of 97 four-part
  harmonizations of psalm tunes by the leading
  English composers of the day - Dowland, Morley,
  Tompkins, Tallis - published in London in 1621 by
  Thomas Ravenscroft called The Whole Book of
  Psalms
• 30 clergymen of the colony led by Richard Mather,
  Thomas Weld and John Eliot published in 1640 The
  Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully Translated into
  English Metre - the first book to be published in
  British North America - known as the

11
Bay Psalm Book

• 1st edition - 1700 copies
• 70 editions from 1640 - 1773
• also popular in England and Scotland
• contained no tunes
• became the most widely used psalter
• no attempt to compose American tunes
• the music sounded quite different than today's
  singing

12
Manner of Singing

• Lining out
• Tunes began to deviate from notated versions
• Why did a written tradition became an oral
  tradition
• Today much religious music in the Appalachian
  region is still "lined out"

13
Dissatisfaction with singing

• dissatisfaction with psalm singing in the early
  18th c.
• instructional publications 1721 An Introduction
  to the Singing of Psalm Tunes by the Rev. John
  Tufts (1689 - 1750)
• Clergyman, born in Medford, Massachusetts, 5 May,
  1689 died in Amesbury, Massachusetts, August,
  1750. Graduated from Harvard in 1708, minister
  at Newbury, Massachusetts, from 1714 till 1738.
  Published "Introduction to the Singing of
  Psalm-Tunes, with a Collection of Tunes in Three
  Parts" (Boston, 1715), and a sermon, "Humble Call
  to Archippus" (1829). His work on the singing of
  psalm-tunes was the first publication of the kind
  in New England, if not in this country, and was
  regarded as a great novelty, since not more than
  four or five tunes were known in many of the
  congregations, and those were sung by rote.
• The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained p.
  Boston, 1721 by the Rev. Thomas Walter (1696 -
  1725)

14
Singing Schools

• Singing Schools - Boston 1714 - spread in New
  England and the South
• churches led crusade against musical illiteracy
• remarkable improvement by 1720 with opposition
  only in the rural areas

15
New Collections

• the foundation was laid and new collection of
  music appeared after 1760
• Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston, 1764)
  by Josiah Flagg and many others
• these added more than 300 tunes
• serious and successful challange to Sternhold and
  Hopkins

16
New England Location

• most of the published documents and the majority
  of the collections are from New England and the
  Boston area
• 17th and 18th c. singing by note was reintroduced
  in the singing schools of Virginia
• the great psalm-singing controversy of the 1720's
  was a confrontation between literate urban people
  and rural non-literate people - a pattern
  repeated over and over throughout the history of
  music in America