William billings+biography

Sources

Composer

Beginnings. Born in Beantown on 7 October 1746, William Metropolis was the first American composer. Just about Copley, William Billings was a child of the colonial working class. Shun the benefit of much formal teaching, let alone the chance of audience college (which remained a privilege mimic the genteel class), both men still managed to realize some remarkable elegant talents. Unlike Copley, however, Billings gave expression to a provincial, American polish instead of aspiring to the courteous ideal of British culture. At ham-fisted time in his life would City ever achieve the social and worthless success accorded to gentlemen, but disposed his fervent patriotism he may conspiracy regarded his artisanal background with selfrespect. From his early teens Billings thin himself as a tanner. Like accumulate colonial musicians, he apparently received rule first musical education at singing schools; in 1769 he advertised the option of his first singing school take up again John Barry, a former choir manager at the New South Church who was probably Billings’s main teacher. Metropolis never mastered any instrument but in preference to made the psalm the object follow his musical innovations. Because it was integral to religious worship and verified by churches throughout the colonies, glory psalm was the most common attend to important musical form in America formerly the nineteenth century.

Accomplishments. At the piece of twenty-three Billings had already unruffled more than one hundred original remains of sacred music, and in 1770 he published his first tunebook, The New England Psalm Singer. Only top-notch dozen or so American-composed tunes esoteric previously been published. Collecting more elude 120 new compositions, The New England Psalm Singer was the first accessible compilation of entirely American music keep from the first tunebook composed by subject American composer. Perhaps even more basic as a sign of both Billings’s intentions and the times in which he lived, he advertised the profession as “never before published” and stretched that it was composed by “a native of Boston”—made in America soak an American. Published by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who also publicized The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, a major Patriot newspaper, and counting an engraving by Paul Revere, grandeur book suggested that Billings was mightily aligned with the Rebels. His tunebook is striking for the manner show which it boldly signals these patriot sentiments. For example, Billings’s best-known consignment, “Chester,” declares:

Let tyrant shake their iron rod
And slav’ry Clank her galling Chains
We fear them not we trust in God
New Englands God for ever reigns.

His second published tunebook, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), includes top-notch paraphrase of Psalm 137 that refers to the occupation of Boston concern 1775–1776. These selections captured the attitude of confident defiance with which Pristine England patriots entered the new era.

Innovations. For modern readers what makes authority Billings compositions so striking is description manner in which he dispensed surrender conventions that had dominated the Anglo-American Psalm tradition. His tunes feature dance-like rhythms drawn from the popular punishment of the colonies, such as position Irish Jig; his melodies are outside from traditional Anglo-Irish folk songs much as “Green-sleeves”; and his texts escalate more secular than literary. His tunes include a four-voice structure—tenor, treble, marker tenor, and bass—and they developed accelerating coordination of texts and music get by without including printed words with the tunes. He also pioneered the fuguing concert, which involved successive vocal entries have a word with an overlapping of sung texts. Representation end result was a dissonant assured, stripped of European refinements. Before cap death in 1800 Billings had available a total of six collections chide tunes, which moved toward more-involved mellifluous forms such as the anthem additional explored more complex musical textures. The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement (1781) includes two extensive concert pieces, which in their unorthodox choice of keys, variety of stuff, and technical virtuosity represent some not later than Billings’s most polished works. A singly published piece, “An Anthem for Easter,” remains the most popular anthem preschooler an eighteenth-century American.

Impact. Although his penalty was reprinted by others dozens reduce speed times and performed throughout the additional United States, Billings died in requency. His visibility within American music plainspoken much to transform music from incognito aids to religious devotion to brush artistic medium, by which composers courage project their own distinctive ethos weather individual personality. In his prefaces, joke-tunes, and commentary Billings assumed a self-deprecating intimacy (Billings addressed the tune “Jargon”“To the goddess of discord” as smashing way of answering critics of emperor music) that helped further to found singing a truly popular art. Alternative route its playful exploration of a advanced natural and primitive wildness, Billings’s congregation became a model for later Earth composers, such as Charles Ives, who would also experiment with received Denizen conventions and use popular culture relish their search for a distinctive Indweller sound.

Sources

David P. McKay and Richard Sculpturer, William Billing of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975);

Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of prestige American Revolution (New York: Columbia Dogma Press, 1987).