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“The Purest American Stock” Chadwick’s New England Roots The fact is that there were always amateur musicians, and the amateurs—the real lovers—of an art are frequently those who save it. —M. A. DeWolfe Howe, historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, The Boston Symphony Orchestra (1931) Music in the New World George Whitefield Chadwick was born on November 13, 1854, the scion of two venerable New England clans, the Chadwicks of the town of Boscawen and the Fittses of the village of Candia, both situated in southeastern New Hampshire . By and large these families comprised farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers .But there were also a few musicians,and plenty of music was made by them. So much so that—with the benefit of hindsight—it is not impossible to imagine that someone of George’s modest station in the world could become an internationally renowned composer. Music had long been an important part of New England life, and both sides of Chadwick’s family cultivated music in the ages-old fashion of their kinsmen since their arrival in the New World sometime prior to 1650. They made music at home and at church; they made music for their own edification and for entertainment . For some of the Chadwicks and the Fittses, music was a simple joy cultivated casually in the idle moments spent away from their toils; for others it was a passionate pursuit. Music had been the passion of some individuals in America since the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth,Massachusetts,in 1620.Because music’s purpose at the time was primarily to serve worship by illuminating the text of the Bible, the Pilgrims and Puritans arrived with a variety of “Psalters,”books that laid out the texts of the Psalms along with melodies to which they could be sung.One of the Pilgrims’ most popular Psalters was Reverend Henry Ainsworth’s The Book of Psalmes: Englished both in Prose and Metre (Amsterdam,1612),or the Ainsworth Psalter.It comprised a total of thirty-nine monophonic tunes,some simple,others rather long and complex, especially in their rhythm. Another, older volume that traveled to the shores of America with the Puritans was The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1562) by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. Although its music was simple, most thought its texts poorly set. A third Psalter that was 1 Chadwick’s New England Roots | 9 widely appreciated was Thomas Ravenscroft’s The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London,1621),which included a collection of 105 tunes.It presented a number of Psalms in a four-part setting, perhaps indicating the advanced musical ability of some of North America’s earliest European settlers. After a time, an American Psalter was certain to appear. It is entirely possible that a pioneering Chadwick or Fitts may have sung from his own copy of The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1640), better known today as the Bay Psalm Book, the first book of any type published in the colonies. The Bay Psalm Book featured 150 psalms that could be sung to different well-known tunes—musical notation was not included in its earliest editions—after being matched to the appropriate metrical verse. As it turned out, most congregations utilized only a handful of familiar tunes to sing their Psalms. It is possible that the omission of printed music in the Bay Psalm Book, a steep simplification over earlier practice, caused a decline in music literacy in the colonies, although it may have been a response to an already enfeebled situation.There developed in the mid-seventeenth century a musical practice that came to be known as “the old style of singing” (or “the Old Way”). The Old Way, or congregational singing without accompaniment, featured the “lining out”of a song; that is,a principal singer,often but not always a church leader, would sound the tune, which would be repeated in rote fashion by the congregation. This method caused problems, including a continuing decline in musical literacy and huge variations in how the music was sung from congregation to congregation. Thomas Walter, in his The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained (1721) remarked that the tunes featured in the Old Way are “now miserably tortured,and twisted,and quavered,in some churches, into an horrid Medley of confused and disorderly Noises.”1 To religions that sought uniformity in their church services, this problem was particularly vexing. By 1720 there emerged a number...

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