Secular Music in Reform and Dispersed-Harmonic Tunebooks, 1820-1850

Abstract

In nineteenth-century America, tunebooks—collections of hymnody and psalmody in settings suitable for amateur performance—served and reflected multiple facets of musical culture. Although their most obvious purpose was to offer music for use in the church service, such collections also figured in domestic music-making and provided repertoire for recreational singing societies. In addition, they served as pedagogical aids in singing schools, the predominant vehicle of music education at the opening of the century. These same singing schools furnished a growing number of Americans with the skills to pursue vocal music inside or outside of church. A constant demand for new tunebooks by this increasingly musically literate public had already fostered a lively native school of composition, including such figures as William Billings, Daniel Read, Supply Belcher, and Joseph Stone. The repertoire of these collections includes anthems and through-composed pieces along with psalm and hymn tunes of all descriptions: plain and florid, British and American. The majority of such pieces set sacred texts. Despite their relative scarcity, however, secular songs hold a distinctive role in the tunebook repertoire and can serve to elucidate the more fundamental issue of competing styles of part-writing. Examination of these atypical pieces offers a glimpse into a facet of tunebook culture currently afforded little attention. During the time period encompassed by this study, two styles of part-writing dominated American hymnody: dispersed-harmonic and reform. Although proponents of both movements shared an interest in increasing musical literacy and mproving standards of church-musical performance, the two had strikingly different ideologies and musical characteristics, as will be described below. Such dissimilarities persist in the area of secular music. Dispersed-harmonic and reform tunebooks reflect divergent attitudes regarding the appropriate uses of secular tunes, whether secular and sacred music should be stylistically distinct from one another, the topics raised by secular texts, and the performance contexts in which secular music was sung. The reformers, always concerned with regularizing church music, express more closely-defined views of secular song. Dispersed-harmonic compilers tend to take less prescriptive approaches to the subject, as evinced by the lack of a musically distinct secular style and the Christianization of secular pieces within the repertoire. This examination of twenty-seven tunebooks—encompassing reform, dispersed-harmonic, and mixed types—reveals differences in the two part-writing styles specific to the secular repertoire, while further clarifying the basic distinctions between the two.