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!

2. 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

5. 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.”

7. 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

9. 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