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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE             CONTACT: Roland Hutchinson
October 22, 1996                              (201) 509-2165
                                     rhutchin@email.njin.net



COMPOSER WILLIAM BILLINGS OF BOSTON TURNS 250.

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EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: In paragraph 2, "fuging tunes" is correctly
spelled.  (Following the usage of standard reference works including
the New Harvard Dictionary of Music, "fuge" and "fuging" refer to a
style used in Anglo-American hymnody, so spelled to distinguish it
from "fugue," a related style and genre of European art music.)
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On Sunday, October 6, more than 130 singers from New England and
around the world met at the Central Burying Ground on Boston Common,
thought to be the site of William Billings' unmarked grave.

On a crisp and clear fall afternoon, amid slate headstones on a
tree-covered hilltop from which, in the 1780s, one might have spied
Billings walking from his house on Newberry Street to his Frog Lane
tannery, the gathered "friends of Bill" joyfully sang hymns, fuging
tunes, anthems, and canons for three hours in celebration of the
Yankee tunesmith's 250th birthday. Portions of the event were recorded
by National Public Radio's Performance Today for broadcast on the
following day, October 7, the actual anniversary of Billings' birth.

Participants included early-music and choral amateurs and
professionals, composers, musicologists, and shape-note singers, among
them several singers from the U.K. who gamely tolerated more than one
singing of Billings' best-known work, the militantly anti-British
Revolutionary War hymn "Chester."  Singers took turns leading the
music, in the egalitarian manner of a modern American shape-note
convention.

On Tuesday, October 8, many of the same singers reconvened at King's
Chapel, Boston, for a second celebration. The audience for the regular
Noon-Hour Recital Series was invited to join in the singing--and many
did, including the members of the sixth-grade choir from the nearby
Advent School, who had prepared Billings' well-known canon "When Jesus
Wept." Birthday cake, washed down with New England apple cider,
concluded the celebration.

More information about these events, and about Billings and his music,
is available at http://www.njin.net/~rhutchin/billings96


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