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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE             CONTACT: Roland Hutchinson
August 20, 1996                            (201) 509-2165
                                           rhutchin@email.njin.net


ATTENTION: ARTS EDITOR, CONCERT LISTINGS (CLASSICAL)


EDITOR: The following background/feature copy may be of interest to
you or to your readers in connection with the Billings 250th Birthday
observance on Boston Common on Sunday, October 6, 1996.  Please credit
the writer, Roland Hutchinson, if practical.


BILLINGS THE MUSICIAN
	Best known as the composer of the defiant Revolutionary War
battle hymn "Chester" ("Let Tyrants shake their iron rod...") and of
church music ranging from simple hymn settings to elaborate anthems,
William Billings was a pioneer both of musical composition and of
music publishing before, during, and after the American
Revolution. Born into a family of small tradesmen in Boston, Billings
was apparently self-taught in composition.  His gift for melody and
lively counterpoint astonished and inspired early New Englanders, many
of whom Billings personally taught to sing and to read music at his
"singing schools," courses for musical amateurs that he offered from
time to time in Boston's churches and throughout the region. 
	The profession of singing-school master was practically the
only way that a New Englander could earn a living through music at a
time when instrumental music was still little cultivated, and when
even in so important a city as Boston only a handful of churches
possessed organs--partly because of the Puritan disdain for
instrumental music in church, partly because of economic necessity. It
was not much of a living, at that: even Billings, the most
distinguished composer in colonial and revolutionary New England, a
man hailed in far-off Philadelphia as "the rival of Handel," had to
have a "day job."  He continued in his trade as a tanner of hides and
later as a civil servant in order to support his family, and he found
it necessary to live in modest circumstances in his old age,
complaining of his poverty, but nonetheless leaving an small estate,
valued at eight hundred and thirty-six dollars, to be divided among
his six surviving children.

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
	Billings' compositional style is based in the vigorous musical
idiom of the 18th-century English country parish church, spiced with a
strain of fierce Yankee independence--amounting at times to willful
eccentricity--that would hardly be found again before the advent of
20th-century modernists such as Charles Ives. Indeed, in the 20th
century, a number of modern American composers have embraced not only
Billings' artistic attitudes, but the actual notes of his scores,
which have been used as the basis for everything from extended
symphonic and concert works to the soundtrack of the long-running
"Where's Boston" multimedia show.

REPUTATION DAMAGED
	Although it was enormously popular during the his lifetime,
both in New England and elsewhere on the continent, Billings' music
fell out of favor in urban centers in the decades following the
composer's death in 1800, as it was gradually but steadily replaced by
the more restrained church music of Boston's Lowell Mason and other
composers trained in up-to-date, fashionable European styles. 
	These younger composers wrote music that was more technically
polished according to the standards of the professional music
conservatory, a new institution both in America and in most of Europe
at the time. More importantly, their music embraced the new era's more
genteel notions of religious and musical decorum. Utterly
unthreatening to the quiet, rarefied, and sentimental devotional
atmosphere favored by the elite religious leaders of the period, this
music was calculated to serve in a soft-spoken, measured, but highly
effective crusade against all remnants of the boisterous political,
religious, and musical enthusiasms of Billings' day.

CONSIDERED AN ODDITY
	Nineteenth-century writers on music, devoted as they were to
the new style of church music, found Billings at once quaint,
repulsive, and somehow fascinating--the very embodiment of the Bad Old
Days, superseded by progress and refinement in taste.  He was to them
a somewhat peculiar musical ancestor, to be revered with the duty that
youth owes to age, but only grudgingly, and with the greatest of
circumspection.
	They depict him personally as a sort of prodigious
monstrosity: "Billings was somewhat deformed in person, blind with one
eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a
mind as eccentric as his person was deformed. To say nothing of the
deformity of his habits; suffice it to say, he had a propensity for
taking snuff that may seem almost incredible...." (Nathaniel D. Gould,
Church Music in America, 1853). 
	His singing did not fare much better: "Never have I heard a
louder, harsher, or more inharmonious singer. I have sung with him,
agreeably to the fashion of the times, with all my might, without
being conscious, that I enunciated a sound, so completely was my
utterance downed by his overpowering screams." (John Pierce, letter to
Lowell Mason & G. J. Webb, Aug. 8, 1839). 
	As for his music, it received during the 19th century at best
a halfhearted and condescending appreciation as a relic of days gone
by: "Whatever may be said of Billings' music, and however deficient it
may now be considered in good taste, as well as most other respects,
it certainly gave great delight in its day, and many of those now
living, who were accustomed to hear it in their youth, are much
inclined to prefer it to the more elaborate and learned music of the
present day." (the Boston Musical Gazette, Apr. 17, 1839).

SURVIVAL IN NEW ENGLAND
	But try as they might, the self-styled reformers could not
suppress Billings' music completely. It survived, not merely as dusty
old volumes in antiquarian libraries, but as living musical
tradition. Despite enormous cultural pressure descending from the new
arbiters of musical taste in the big cities, the stirring music of
Billings and other old Yankee tunesmiths--music conceived as
participatory music to be actively sung rather than as concert music
to be passively listened to--remained popular in out-of-the-way places
throughout the country, patiently awaiting rediscovery by the musical
world at large during the 20th century. 
	In Massachusetts, the Old Stoughton Musical Society, the
oldest choral performing organization in the United States, has been
singing Billings since the Society was founded in 1786, and the
Society's archives contain a record of Billings himself teaching a
singing school in Stoughton as early as 1774. 

SOUTHERN TRADITION RETURNS TO THE NORTH
	In the American south, particularly in rural areas of Georgia,
Alabama, and surrounding states, Billings' music and much of the style
of singing that he enjoyed have been continuously preserved among
shape-note singers from the Sacred Harp tradition. ("The Sacred Harp"
is a tunebook containing old New England Music side by side with
American folk hymns, early camp meeting songs, and other more recent
music, first published in 1844 and continuously in print in various
revisions to the present day. Its distinctive "shape note" musical
notation simplifies the process of learning to read music by assigning
a particular shape of notehead to each note of the musical scale;
singers need to master only one set of shapes instead of the twelve
major and twelve minor key signatures of conventional music notation.)

	Since the 1970s, the Sacred Harp tradition has grown and
spread from the South to New England and elsewhere across the
country. A large number of shape-note singers, fresh from the 21st
Annual New England Sacred Harp Singing held at Wellesley College on
October 4 and 5, will be joining in the Billings celebration. In
addition to singers from across North America, this group is expected
to include singers from the United Kingdom who are well acquainted
with the English roots of Billings' musical style.


A SINGULAR HONOR
	It was perhaps inevitable that, with the steadily growing
interest in earlier music that been evident since the early years of
this century both in concert life and in the academy, even those
American musicians unconnected with the few, scattered remnants of
Billings' performance tradition would eventually become curious about
their own musical history. With interest spurred by the bicentennial
of the American Revolution in 1976, Billings' music has been heard in
concerts and recordings by the Gregg Smith Singers, the Boston
Camerata, His Majesty's Clerks, and other first-rank American
ensembles. 
	Music historians, too, have taken an interest in Billings,
with significant research appearing as early as 1907. Billings'
collected musical works were published in a new, meticulously edited,
critical edition between 1977 and 1990 under the joint imprint of the
American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts. In four opulently produced and massive volumes, the
edition provides quite a contrast to Billings' own printings, which
were small, oblong books whose production quality was plagued by
chronic shortages of good paper and of copper engraving plates. 
	The Billings edition was the first complete critical edition
ever undertaken of works of any American composer--and it arrived none
too soon, a mere hundred and twenty-seven years after the first such
collection devoted to a European master (Johann Sebastian Bach)
published its first volume. Billings has thus taken his place beside
Mozart, Haydn, and his other European contemporaries on the shelves of
the great public and university music libraries of the world, where
musicians of all nations--including our own--can come to witness and
study the earliest musical fruits of Yankee ingenuity.

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