Mark Burnham and Upper Canada's First Tunebook, Colonial Harmonist

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 JOHN BECKWITH Mark Burnham and Upper Canada=s First Tunebook, Colonial Harmonist The context for this article is provided in the memoirs of the Reverend Anson Green, DD (1801B79). Green was a pioneer Methodist circuit preacher and later the book steward of the Wesleyan Methodist Book Room in Toronto, forerunner of the Ryerson Press and the United Church of Canada Publishing House. According to Green, in 1824 the village of Cobourg, population one hundred, consisted of >two small stores ... several mechanics [i.e., workshops], and plenty of taverns.= The one church was Anglican; the Methodists met in the local schoolhouse. The same year Green records that he delivered the >first sermon preached in Port Hope by a Wesleyan minister.= Port Hope was Cobourg=s sister village, about ten kilometres west along the shore of Lake Ontario. The two were shortly to grow into sizeable lake-port towns situated about a hundred kilometres east of Toronto; their populations today are approximately twelve thousand for Port Hope and fifteen thousand for Cobourg. That historic 1824 sermon took place in a shoemaker=s shop and attracted a congregation of six. Port Hope, Green noted, >is full of enterprise and spirit, but so full of whisky and sin that it bears the name of ASodom.@= But, returning in 1836 for the dedication of the Port Hope Methodist church, he exclaimed, >What a marvellous change ...! Now we have a neat little church, well filled, and our morning collection amounted to fifty-three dollars.= In the meantime, at Cobourg, he had recorded in 1832 that the cornerstone of the Methodists= Upper Canada Academy was laid by >Dr Gilchrist of Colborne,= and in June 1836 he was able to describe the opening ceremonies of this historic institution which was later to change its name to Victoria College, eventually relocating in Toronto as part of the University of Toronto (Green, 49B50, 58, 206B8). Green=s description excludes any mention of music, but apparently there was some. The Christian Guardian, official organ of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the Canadas, under the editorship of Egerton Ryerson and A.W. Smith, covered the Academy=s dedication in detail. There we read: >What added much to the interest of the services, was the attendance of Mr MARK BURNHAM, from Port Hope, with an excellent choir of vocal xxxx This article originated as a talk given at the invitation of the music department of Brock university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 University, St Catharines, Ontario, 16 November 2000. and instrumental music, by whom some appropriate pieces of sacred harmony were most admirably performed.=1 This report is tantalizingly incomplete. What was the choir? B a church choir, a choral society, or perhaps a singing school group along the New England model (of which a number of examples existed in early Upper Canada)? What instruments made up the ensemble? What particular pieces did they perform? Were excerpts from Burnham=s tunebook Colonial Harmonist, published by him at Port Hope just four years earlier, part of the program B including perhaps one or two tunes of Burnham=s own composition? So far the answers have not emerged. Burnham had introduced his volume by declaring, >No musical treatise has hitherto been published in this Colony= (i.e., Upper Canada) (>Advertisement,= 3). Previous sacred-music compilations had appeared elsewhere in British North America B in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Lower Canada (Quebec and Montreal) B but his claim was accurate. I want first to give a short identification of Burnham and then examine Colonial Harmonist in some detail. The brothers Asa, Zacheus, and John Burnham, and their sister Hannah Burnham, later Choate, arrived from New Hampshire to settle near Amherst, Upper Canada, between 1797 and 1805. (In 1819, Amherst changed its name to Cobourg in honour of the Saxe-Coburg family to which Prince Albert, cousin and later husband of the young Queen Victoria, belonged.) Their younger brother Mark Burnham was born in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, in 1791, and followed the others to Amherst in 1812. In 1819 he married Sophronia Gilchrist, daughter of the >Dr Gilchrist= who laid the Upper...