Singing Sedition: Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings by Charles E. Brewer (review)

Seven men surround a table in a windowed parlor, one leading the others in a performance from shared tunebooks. A circular engraving of the words and music they sing envelops them like the sound of their voices in the small room where they sit. The song is a round. The table is also round, making a visual pun and an elegantly proportioned image. Paul Revere's famous frontispiece to William Billings's New-England Psalm-Singer (1770) also adorns the cover of Charles Brewer's recent book, Singing Sedition: Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings. The piety of Billings's work is nothing to remark upon—he is nothing if not a recognized composer of sacred music. And the piety of Revere's scene is equally apparent. The men are not in church, but the text of their canon, authored by Boston clergyman Mather Byles, is a chorus of praise to Jesus. What Brewer wants to convince us of is something less visible—that a meeting of such a singing society could well have been an occasion for radical political agitation.

This is hardly a foregone conclusion, as there is no indication of sedition in the frontispiece. If anything, there is evidence to the contrary, as Byles was a known loyalist. There is nothing overtly political about the engraving, however, and in this respect it resembles the majority of Billings's music. There is the familiar exception of "Chester" along with a handful of other patriotic psalm tunes and anthems, but Brewer is not really interested in these easy cases. Rather, he wants to expand the scope of the political interpretation of Billings's work beyond the core of routine examples, demonstrating a deeper integration of religion and revolution than has previously been recognized. If Brewer does his job, we will learn to discern patriotic sentiment in songs that otherwise seem politically inert.

He does. Brewer's command of Billings's life and music and of the immediate cultural context of eighteenth-century Boston put beyond question his political interpretations of psalm tunes like "Shiloh" and anthems like "I Am the Rose of Sharon," which otherwise seem merely sacred. Through detailed explorations of sermons and biblical commentaries, letters of Billings's associates and contemporaries, the lives of church and municipal leaders, religious observances ranging from weekly services to occasional days of fasting and thanksgiving, and political events like the Boston Massacre (1770) and Siege of Boston (1775–76), Brewer shows that religion and politics were inseparable in Billings's world. Given the paucity of direct evidence of Billings's political thought, this contextual investigation legitimates Brewer's political readings of Billings's seemingly apolitical compositions.

Brewer's assessments of allegory, allusion, and theological nuance in Billings's anthems and psalm tunes offer a profound contribution to our understanding of this repertoire. It must be noted, however, that his legitimating contextual discussion represents neither a body of evidence nor an overall argument that is fundamentally new. Unfailingly rigorous and informative as they are, his extensive inquiries into the people, events, and texts surrounding Billings do not always seem warranted either because the work has already been done in some fashion or because the connection to Billings remains indirect. At times the framing discussion takes on a life of its own, becoming incidental and out of proportion to the insightful analyses of Billings's work. The interpretive payoffs can seem small as a result.

Much of the first chapter is devoted to Samuel Adams, showing (1) that he was a voice of sedition in Boston, (2) that his political and musical activities were linked, and (3) that Adams's political ideas likely reached Billings and other members of Boston's less educated classes through participation in singing societies. This is all valid, but it is not exactly news. The first point is common knowledge, while David...