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Summary

While the reasons for Rev. William Bentley's assessments of William Billings's “better original powers” and that “Still he spake & sung & thought as a man above the common abilities” are difficult to define, they most likely need to be understood in the light of eighteenth-century opinions concerning music and musicians. The Englishman, Charles Davy, writing in 1787, wrote that “the whole business of composing music is generally left to a set of men with no better than a mere musical education” and that “the want of a liberal education amongst musicians is to be lamented, not only as it renders their compositions less perfect, they are, upon this account, less capable of explaining their meaning when they attempt to communicate instruction in writing… .” It seems clear that Rev. Bentley shared some of these same prejudices, especially in relation to singing masters and singing schools.ā1āā1ā

Music has ever been low in this place. They who taught it knew little of composition & had no acquaintance with the best masters. The compositions were not excellent used in the churches, being chiefly mangled from the old Psalmody. Mr. Billings, with more genius than Taste, introduced new composition, but vocal music had its greatest progress in Connecticut.

For Bentley, his American models of “the best masters” were composers such as Jacob Kimball, Jr., Samuel Holyoke, and Andrew Law of Connecticut. Holyoke was perhaps more acceptable since he graduated from Harvard College in 1789, and Kimball and Law because their music matched that of European composers, such as George Frideric Handel and William Boyce. The “taste” that Billings apparently lacked was that associated with the professionally-trained musicians of England and America.

While Billings's music may have fallen short of such critical expectations, the infectious quality of his music and his apt setting of texts was noted by his contemporaries and contributed to its continued use, even if it was not within the cultivated traditions that dominated the nineteenth-century reforms of church music. For example, the writer “Observator” wrote in 1788 that Billings's “melody is simple, noble, and pathetic; and he equally excells in blowing the full trumpet of praise, and is breathing the lively gratitude, or the tender confidence of the believing christian.”

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Singing Sedition
Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings
, pp. 235 - 239
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2017

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