THE GHOST OF WILLIAM BILLINGS:

HIS MUSICAL LEGACY IN WORKS BY TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPOSERS

BY

DANIEL RUSSELL JEROME POTTER

BRADLEY WELLS, FACULTY ADVISOR

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS WITH HONORS IN MUSIC

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 20, 2016 Abstract

This paper compares pieces by three different twentieth-century composers that are influenced by the music of William Billings. Billings, a late eighteenth-century New England composer who wrote in the Anglo-American parish-church tradition, has been called the most important early American composer, though his works were viewed as inferior by nineteenth-century scholars because of their rustic style and disregard for European compositional rules. During the twentieth century, composers rediscovered Billings and the shape-note tradition that he influenced and subsequently wrote music based on works by him and his successors. William Schuman’s New England Triptych (1956), along with its various derivations for concert band, and John Cage’s Apartment House 1776 (1976) and Hymns and Variations (1979) use several of Billings’ hymns as source material while William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony (1980-81) adapts hymns from William Walker’s 1835 shape-note tunebook of the same name. Each of these composers adapts their source material in a different way: Schuman’s pieces are fantasias on Billings’ music; Cage’s are musical palimpsests of the original hymns; and Duckworth’s are reincarnations of the original shape-note tunes, preserving aspects of the original pieces but often not their melodies and texts.

The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2

Acknowledgements ...... 4

Prelude: Searching for American Music ...... 5

William Billings and the Rise and Fall of Early American Hymnody ...... 12

William Schuman...... 24

John Cage ...... 32

William Duckworth ...... 37

Postlude: Billings’ Legacy Today ...... 49

Bibliography ...... 53

3 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Acknowledgements

I would like first to express my deepest thanks to Brad Wells, director of the Williams College Concert and Chamber Choirs, for trusting in me that a performance thesis in choral conducting, something never done before, was possible and subsequently allowing me to take up half of his rehearsal time working on the music for my conducting recital. Brad’s course in choral conducting during the fall of my sophomore year started this whole process, and I deeply appreciate the mentorship he has given me these last four years. I would like to thank Professors Tony Sheppard and Marjorie Hirsch, former and current chairs of the music department, for trusting that I had the ability and experience to pursue a thesis in choral conducting and for the constant support in the planning of my recital, for which I must also thank concert manager Jonathan Myers, who helped pull together all of the logistics. I would like to thank Professor Jennifer Bloxam for reading my paper when she was not required to and for giving helpful feedback that better shaped its structure and helped its flow. I would like to thank my parents for their constant support, both emotionally and financially, as I explored my passions in choral conducting. The experiences I gained at summer conducting workshops these past two summers have helped immensely in making this project a success. Finally, I would like to thank the tireless singers of the Concert and Chamber Choirs, who were willing to embrace the music I programmed for my recital despite its difficulty, and the members of the Billings Ensemble, who committed to another choir despite their own busy semesters. You are all wonderful people, and I quite literally could not have done this without you.

4 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Prelude: Searching for American Music

Since European colonists started writing music in the territories that would one day become the United States of America, composers and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have struggled to articulate what defines “American music,” to identify those qualities that make American music distinct. Other regional musical styles have been easier to identify, such as the distinctly British adaptations of the

Italian madrigal, the different dance forms that were popularized across Europe and then imitated in pieces like J.S. Bach’s French and English Suites, and the distinctions seen between Italian, French, and German opera that developed from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Working in the shadow of these incredibly long-lived musical traditions, a natural insecurity developed in American composers about their own national style, engendering a “myth of American musical inferiority.”1 As composer and music critic Kyle Gann writes, “America is so distrustful of its own musical creativity that it continues to project musical achievement on the rest of the world, preserving its own cultural inferiority complex.”2 This distrust diminished the value of the tradition of classical music that developed in America since Europeans first landed on its shores. However, despite public perception that rock and jazz are the only truly American musical traditions, from seventeenth century New England church music through twentieth century minimalism and beyond, American classical music has in fact carved its own place in the rock of musical history.

1 Garry E. Clarke, Essays on American Music (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 3. 2 Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), xiv.

5 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European classical music was seen as the musical ideal, and many American composers believed that they had to follow the European styles if they wanted their work to be respected.

Indeed, “From the beginning the American composer labored under an assumption that crippled his or her creativity: any innovation, any departure from European precedent, would be interpreted as a technical deficiency.”3 In the words of Henry

Cowell, “Transplanted to the United States, the rules of harmony and composition took on a doctrinaire authority that was the more dogmatic for being second hand.”4

In contrast to European composers, who were more often willing to bend the rules for the sake of art, most early American composers felt an obligation to adhere to compositional precedent, lest their music be viewed as barbaric and untamed as the land from which it was written.

In order to learn to compose, American music students traveled overseas to study with their venerated counterparts, producing “the first generation of

American composers for whom European experiences shaped a collective stylistic identity.”5 John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker,

William Mason, Dudley Buck, Frederick Gleason, and many others all studied in

Germany after the American Civil War and adopted styles similar to the Germanic masters.6 While studying in Europe was greatly beneficial to these American composers in terms of the development of their technical abilities, it limited their

3 Ibid., 1. 4 Henry Cowell and Sidney Robertson Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 8. 5 Alan Howard Levy, Musical Nationalism : American Composers' Search for Identity, Contributions in American Studies, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 4. 6 Ibid.

6 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter innovation, resulting in pieces that imitated the European styles more than they fostered an American tradition. For many, the practices they learned in Germany

“became something for the mind to memorize, not for the spirit to absorb.”7

Imitation limited these composers’ ability to find their own original voice, let alone establish a distinctly American compositional style.

American composers continued to make musical pilgrimages to Europe in the early twentieth century. However, the emergence of French impressionism shifted the focus away from the Germanic tradition, and soon more Americans chose to study in Paris than Germany.8 Edward MacDowell (1861-1908) was perhaps the first American composer to study in Paris, where, along with his classmate Claude

Debussy, he resisted the more academic and regulated approach to composition, instead choosing to experiment in new ways with ninth and seventh chords.9

American composers John Alden Carpenter, Charles Thomlinson Griffes, Amy Beach, and others all began to write in this new French style after the turn of the twentieth century. 10

While some American composers sought to imitate Europeans, others strove to push back against the European tradition. Some, like Charles Ives, simply wanted to create their own unique style, but others more explicitly participated in the first

“full wave of ‘Americanism’ in art music.”11 Many composers attempted to create

American music by including references to American folk music and vernacular

7 Ibid., 5. 8 Ibid., 14. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 21. 11 Ibid., 17.

7 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter styles, including African American gospel and jazz. Czech composer Antonìn Dvořák

(1841-1904) was a major proponent of this method of composition; after he arrived in New York in 1892 to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music, he spent four years studying Native American and black musical idioms. During that time, he wrote several pieces influenced by these musics, including his Quartet, op.

96, The American and Symphony in E Minor, op. 95, From the New World. Dvořák desired to help establish a “national music” in America, famously declaring that

“Negro melody furnishes the only sure base for an American school of music.”12

Many composers went on to pursue this version of “Americanism” in their music, including several students of Dvořák, among them Henry Walley, Henry Rowe

Shelley, and Will Marian Cook. However, their music was met with criticism by the musical elite, who disapproved of their use of “so-called lower genres” and would often refuse to publish their music.13 Additionally, many composers argued that

Dvořák and his students focused on the music of the African population of America at the expense of the other equally valid musical traditions that existed at that time.

On this subject, composer Amy Beach wrote in the Boston Herald,

Without the slightest desire to question the beauty of the negro [sic] melodies…or to disparage them on account of their source, I cannot help feeling justified in the belief that they are not fully typical of our country. The African population of the United States is far too small for its songs to be considered “American.” It represents only one factor in the composition of our nation….We of the north should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish Songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.14

12 Ibid., 18. 13 Ibid., 19-20. 14 Quoted in Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, 7.

8 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

While Beach accurately notes that African Americans are only one part of the

American culture, her assertion is problematic for other reasons. For one, she puts the music of the British Isles and African American music on the same level when clearly they are very different: the music of the British Isles survived relatively unchanged in its journey across the Atlantic, making it the tradition that should be called, in Beach’s words, “not fully typical of our country,” while the music of the

Africans brought as slaves to America truly developed here on plantations with the influence of white culture and Christianity as they were forced to learn a new language in a land that was not their own.

Certain scholars and composers avoid the issue of American musical identity altogether, challenging the notion of one national style by arguing that

“Americanness” in composition comes subconsciously: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” 15 According to this dogma, the origins of the composer define the music’s inherent American quality, regardless of whether it sounds explicitly

“American.” This definition also avoids the issue of classifying “American music” that existed before the creation of America itself; because these composers lived in the colonies that would become the United States of America, their music can be naturally called American.16 However, to take this stance disregards any possibility of a distinctly American musical style, that which differentiates American music from the European tradition. Can we call a piece “American” without knowing that

15 Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 306. 16 Clarke, Essays on American Music, 9.

9 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter the composer is American? Is a foreigner able to write an American piece? What musical qualities actually define the American musical identity?

These are not easy questions to answer, assuming it is possible to answer them at all. As Kyle Gann writes, “The problem is that Americanness in music has been searched for in the qualities of the music itself, music that is far too diverse to generalize about.”17 Instead, he suggests that it makes more sense to look for the

Americanness in music in the shared social circumstances of its composers, as these elements subconsciously influence creative acts. In America, the ideals of freedom and the inherent wildness of the new continent inspired a tradition of innovation and creativity, creating a so-called “tradition of originality.”18

Boston composer William Billings (1746-1800) was arguably the first

American composer to embody this “tradition of originality.” A tanner by trade,

Billings spent much of his life writing psalms, hymns, and anthems that he published in several volumes that were well-liked by the public and supported him financially.

Billings explicitly disregarded the strictness of European musical tradition, incorporating parallel octaves and fifths that went against the common practice period rules of composition. He famously wrote, “I don’t think myself confin’d to any

Rules for Composition laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think

(were I to pretend to lay down Rules) that any who came after me were any ways obligated to adhere to them any further than they should think proper.”19 From

17 Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, xiv. 18 "What Is American About American Music?," American Public Media, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_gann02.html; American Music in the Twentieth Century, xiii. 19 William Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 4 vols., vol. 1 (Boston: American Musicological Society & The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981), 32-33.

10 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter these ideals emerged a canon of music which has since captured the hearts of many twentieth-century composers and has contributed to the continuation of the shape- note tradition of hymn singing.

This paper explores the use of the music of Billings and his successors as source material in works of three twentieth century composers: William Schuman’s

New England Triptych (1956) and its derivations for concert band; John Cage’s

Apartment House 1776 (1976) and Hymns and Variations (1979); and William

Duckworth’s Southern Harmony (1980-81). Each of these composers created distinctly American pieces inspired by the first American musical tradition, their compositions showing traces of William Billings, his eighteenth century spirit guiding composers 200 years later.

11 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

William Billings and the Rise and Fall of Early American Hymnody

William Billings was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 7, 1746 to

William Billings, a Boston shopkeeper, and Elizabeth (Clark) Billings.20 As a teenager he was apprenticed to a tanner, but by the early 1760s, he started composing sacred choral works.21 Though he continued his career as a tanner throughout his life, his choral compositions became his lasting legacy. Between 1770 and his death in 1800,

Billings published six tunebooks, five that featured exclusively his compositions, leaving to his name over 250 different hymn tunes and nearly 50 anthems.22 Though his music was viewed as inferior and ignored by many scholars until the mid- twentieth century, Billings remains the most important American composer of the late 1770s, and “admirably represents the musical culture of our new nation.”23

In addition to working as a tanner and developing his skills as a composer,

Billings taught at various singing schools in New England, going so far as to found a school of his own in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1774.24 Singing schools, institutions that grew up out of the “regular singing” controversy of the 1720s, were places where parishioners, young and old, could take classes in the rudiments of singing, specifically of part-singing that was used in sacred choral music of the

20 Ibid., xvi, lxv. 21 Ibid., xvii. 22 James Murray Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), xii. The tunebooks are listed here in order of publication: The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), Music in Miniature (1779), The Psalm Singer’s Amusement (1781), The Suffolk Harmony (1786), and The Continental Harmony (1794). Of these, Music in Miniature was the only tunebook that included works of other composers. 23 Ibid., xi; Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, ix. 24 Hamilton Crawford Macdougall, Early New England Psalmody; an Historical Appreciation, 1620-1820 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 49.

12 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter time.25 As a composer himself, Billings used the singing schools to promote his own choral music in addition to earning income from teaching classes, and the popularity of his music during his lifetime made this source of income feasible. However, due to a reform movement in church music, interest in these schools began to taper in the

1790s, and they had all but vanished by 1810.26

Though many scholars and composers would like to believe Billings invented an entirely new American style of music, he followed an English tradition of sacred choral music.27 This style, which developed in English country churches, is much different from the Classical and Baroque styles of instrumental and vocal music that emphasized the polarity of the treble melody and the bass and relied on the compositional rules of the common practice period. The compositional style of

Anglo-American parish-church composers, who were largely self-taught and “were often employed as country singing masters, or as clerks in small parish churches,” consisted of almost entirely four-part a cappella music and relied on an additive compositional process: the four vocal lines would be composed in sequence, starting with the tenor, the melody.28 Each following part, the bass, the treble (what we now call the soprano), and the counter (what we now call the alto), would imitate as much of the “air” of the tenor, that is, its general melodic and rhythmic qualities, as possible, and would be composed according to the rules of “consonant counterpoint motion” that were found in theoretical treatises from as early as the late fifteenth

25 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xv. 26 Macdougall, Early New England Psalmody; an Historical Appreciation, 1620-1820, 69; Nicholas E. Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 42. 27 Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings, xiii. This reform movement will be discussed in more depth below. 28 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xviii.

13 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter century.29 This method of composition, classified by William Tans’ur in his A

Compleat Melody (London, 1734), leads to pieces that contain four independent melody lines that interact to create harmony in a manner similar to certain types of

Renaissance music. Such pieces also tend to lack syncopation, cadential suspensions, and tonal modulations and contain harmonic progressions that rarely follow

European principles.30

English parish-church composers primarily wrote strophic psalm and hymn tunes in this style. Psalters, books that contain the psalms, often contained only unison melodic lines, which would be lined out for the congregation during church services. This practice, which was common in seventeenth-century New England churches but continues in select denominations to this day, consists of a leader singing first individually each line of the psalm and the congregation singing them back. In contrast to ones used in church, some psalters were published in four parts for private, non-liturgical use.31 Over the course of the early 1700s, several developments in the compositional practice were made: a new and livelier type of psalm tune developed; composers included sectional solos and duets; and anthems, which most often contained through-composed scriptural prose, became popular.32

These compositions were published in tunebooks for public use in England and

America in the early- to mid-eighteenth century.33

29 Ibid., xix. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., xx. 32 Ibid., xxv. 33 Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England, 33.

14 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

The early American composers of sacred choral music were informed and influenced by this English style of sacred choral music. Billings, whose only formal musical training came from the singing schools and possibly the private instruction of Boston-musician and tunebook-compiler Josiah Flagg, likely studied the English and American tunebooks that contained pieces in this style.34 With this compositional knowledge, he published his first tunebook, The New-England Psalm-

Singer, in 1770 to great public acclaim. Containing a lengthy introduction on music and its rudiments along with 127 musical pieces (118 psalm-tunes, 5 anthems, and 4 canons), it was the first tunebook published in America that featured tunes exclusively written by an American and has since been called “one of the most important documents in the history of American music.”35 Although Billings has been exalted by composers and historians in the twentieth century for representing

American independence by going against common practice period rules (for which many scholars in the nineteenth century criticized him), it would be misleading to assert that Billings was wholly original in his musical style given the influence of the

English parish-church style. However, we can and should give Billings credit for his own contributions to the genre, for though these tunes were indeed written in the

English parish-church style, they were “separated and distinguished from the

English tradition in spirit, vitality, and flavor,” influenced but not dominated by the developments in English psalmody.36 In fact, in J. Murray Barbour’s exhaustive analysis of the many different musical and textual facets of Billings’ works, he

34 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xvi-xvii. 35 Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England, 33; Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, lviii. 36 The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xlvi, lviii.

15 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter concludes that “Billings was a much better composer than any of the English composers performed in 18th-century America, just as he was superior to his younger contemporaries in the New England School.”37

Billings’ scores as well as the performance practice of his works follow the trends present in the late eighteenth century. Billings wrote the majority of his hymns and anthems in open score for four-part choir. The tradition of psalm tunes in the eighteenth century was to sing any text that fit the meter of the tune and the character of the music, and so in The New-England Psalm-Singer, 81 of the 118 psalm tunes appear without any specific text.38 Even when Billings published tunes with text, he would often include only one verse, the expectation being that singers would know or look up the other verses to sing, as they were published in psalm books of their own.39 Because of this independence from a specific text, the tunes were most often named after locations that were significant in the life of the composer. Billings, for example, named many of his tunes after New England towns and streets.40

Though the music was generally intended for unaccompanied voices, this was mostly a feature of circumstance, as many parish-churches did not have organs or instruments, and there is historical precedent for the occasional use of string instruments and organ to double the bass line or all of the voices.41 Additionally, the

37 Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings, 138. 38 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xlix. Many of the tunes in The New-England Psalm-Singer that are in fact paired with texts contain fuging sections, those where voices enter in successive imitation and incorporate repeated words or phrases. In these instances, without a specific text, it would be difficult to intuit what words to sing. It is also interesting to note that several tunes that appear in The New-England Psalm-Singer without text appear paired with specific texts in later tunebooks of his works. 39 David Phares McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 247-48. 40 Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England, 38. 41 McKay and Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer, 236.

16 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter key of each tune was more of a guideline that kept the melody within the confines of the staff as well as limiting the number of accidentals in the key signature rather than as an expression of absolute pitch, making it common for singers to shift the tonic by several semitones if needed.42 In the introduction to The New-England

Psalm-Singer, Billings describes the ideal voicings for his pieces, writing that “a Man may sing a Treble the Eighth below, and a Woman a tenor the Eighth above, and then they will act upon Principles of Nature, and may make good Music, for every

Eighth or Octave is the same.”43 In other words, in accordance with contemporary performance practice, Billings advocates for several men to sing the treble line and for several women to sing the tenor line, creating a richer six-voice texture.44

However, when there are non-homophonic sections, the tenor should be sung by men and the treble by women only. Dynamic markings are rarely included in

Billings’ hymns, the singers instead being expected to use dynamics that follow the mood of the text.45

Billings made a good living from his life as a composer and singing school instructor, and by the 1780s he was doing quite well financially.46 He and his music were well known and well-liked by the public and scholars in the late eighteenth century, even outside of New England.47 Unfortunately, by the 1790s Billings was in difficult financial straits, and though he continued to teach at singing schools until

42 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xlviii. 43 Ibid., 17. 44 McKay and Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer, 232-33. 45 Ibid., 237-38. 46 Hans Nathan, William Billings, Data and Documents (Detroit: Published for The College Music Society by Information Coordinators, 1976), 31. 47 Ibid., 38, 40.

17 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter the end of his life, he died poor on September 26, 1800, at the age of 54.48 A significant portion of his financial troubles was due to a reform movement that began in the 1790s and took off by 1805 that sought to remove from Boston’s musical culture the four-part sacred choral music that Billings and his contemporaries wrote.49 Musicians more influenced by the European Classical styles along with the Boston clergy viewed Billings’ music as rustic and unrefined and moved to eliminate it from the repertory in favor of hymns written in the European style, such as those by Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings.50 By the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Billings and his contemporaries had all but vanished from New-England tunebooks and were by the 1850s unknown to the people of Boston.51

Despite the significant opposition to Billings’ work in the nineteenth century, his legacy as a composer is long-lasting. The New-England Psalm-Singer “represents a beginning of the American tradition in psalmody and church music,” and his music and the commentaries he wrote about music heavily influenced the singing masters who became composers in the late eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century.52 Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell exactly how much Billings’ first tunebook influenced his contemporaries: “There is no way to tell when they started composing, and while the style of their tunes is similar to Billings, it shows

48 Ibid., 41, 45-46; Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xvi. 49 The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xvi. 50 Will Robin, "Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms," (2013), http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/shape-notes-billings-and-american-modernisms/; Karl Kroeger, "Billings, William," Grove Music Online (2016), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/03082. 51 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, xvi. 52 Ibid., liii, lviii; Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England, 39.

18 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter no distinctive traits which would lead one to connect their development with The

New-England Psalm-Singer.”53 However, we are sure of Billings’ influence on Daniel

Read (1757-1836), who became a well-known composer of sacred choral music in his own right, “second in popularity only to Billings as an eighteenth-century

American composer of psalmody.”54

Billings’ music also endures in the tradition of shape-note singing that developed in Appalachia and the southern United States. After New England psalmody was pushed from its homeland, it went southward to the rural lands of cotton fields and tobacco and westward to the frontier of America’s settled lands.55

Billings’ music became local tradition in Alabama and Kentucky, where musicians wrote their own tunes influenced by Billings and Read and published them in tunebooks that used shaped note-heads to differentiate the notes of the scale.56 This practice can trace its roots to 1802 when William Little and William Smith published a book called The Easy Instructor that was the first published use of shaped note heads, which gives shape-note music its name.57 The book was created as instructional manual for use in the singing schools and described a new system of musical notation that would aid in the teaching of the music. The system was based on the four-syllable or “fasola” solmization, first used in England and then brought to the colonies where it became standard, where the eight notes of the major scale use the syllables Fa, Sol, La, Fa, Sol, La, Mi, Fa. Each syllable has a corresponding

53 Billings et al., The Complete Works of William Billings, 1, lvi. 54 Ibid., lviii. 55 Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony : A History of Music in New England, 42-43. 56 Robin, "Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms." 57 Buell E. Cobb, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 65.

19 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter shape, a triangle for Fa, a circle for Sol, a square for La, and a diamond for Mi, and each note in the written music that was identified with that syllable used a note- head of that shape (see Example 1). This system of notation, when combined with

the teaching of solmization and

the rudiments of singing at the Example 1: Four-syllable shape-note notation of a C major scale singing schools, made it easier for the singers to identify and sing the notes and intervals. 58 Indeed, “Providing an individual shape for each syllable enables anyone, after a modicum of attention to the matter, to name the proper syllables of any piece of music instantaneously. One of the genuine difficulties in ordinary solmization is that…the student must make continual mental computations. With shape-notes, this is completely avoided.”59

Though seven-syllable shape-note methods were later developed—the first one to be widely used appearing in Jesse B. Aikin’s The Christian Minstrel (1846)—the four- syllable system dominated and remains the most popular system of shape-note notation to this day.60

Immediately after their introduction at the turn of the nineteenth century, shape-note notation became linked with the style of New England psalmody championed by William Billings. New tunebooks quickly adopted shape-note notation, using shaped note heads for new hymns and anthems as well as adding them to older pieces that were written before the popularization of the notation, like those of Billings. Over the next fifty years, many new composers from beyond New

58 Ibid. 59 Irving Lowens and Allen Perdue Britton, The Easy Instructor, 1798-1931; a History and Bibliography of the First Shape Note Tune Book (Ann Arbor, 1953), 31-32. 60 Kroeger, "Billings, William."

20 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

England learned from these tunebooks and wrote in the style Billings embodied. By doing so, they continued the tradition of English parish-church music in the South and on the American frontier after it had been pushed out of New England, publishing many new shape-note tunebooks that featured their own compositions as well as those of their contemporaries and predecessors. At one point, 43 different four-shape tunebooks were in print, though of these only The Sacred Harp (1844) is still reprinted today, with its most recent revision in 1991.61 Even this revision, published almost 200 years after Billings’ death, contains many of his most popular works, preserving his music in the modern era.62

Shape-note music today is performed in churches as part of faith services and at formal “singings” that could last for several hours or an entire day where the music is performed according to a common practice. The singers sit on chairs or benches arranged in a hollow square so that they face inward, each edge of the square assigned to a particular voice part. These twenty-first century singers follow the traditions that were associated with New England psalmody more than 200 years before in that typically only men will sing the bass part and only women will sing the alto while the higher male and female voices divide evenly between the soprano and tenor line, creating octave doublings between those parts. A leader standing in the middle of the square calls out a number of a hymn and then conducts

61 John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith : Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 221. 62 The 1991 revision of The Sacred Harp contains fourteen works by Billings: “Jordan,” “Assurance,” “Phoebus,” “Petersburg,” “Africa,” “Vermont,” “Easter Anthem,” “Rose of Sharon,” “David’s Lamentation,” “Washington” (known as “Bear Creek” in The Sacred Harp), “Majesty,” “Funeral Anthem,” “Chester,” and “Beneficence.” B. F. White et al., The Sacred Harp : 1991 Revision : The Best Collection of Sacred Songs, Hymns, Odes, and Anthems Ever Offered the Singing Public for General Use (Bremen, Georgia: Sacred Harp Publishing Co., 1991).

21 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter it, usually in a very simple manner using only one arm. Everyone starts the song by singing through the piece on the solmization syllables indicated by the note-heads instead of the text, which allows the singers to focus on learning the tune before adding the words. The singers then continue by singing some or all of the verses at their discretion.

Shape-note music today is a uniquely American living tradition that provides a clear link to the music of Billings and his contemporaries. While we know much about how Billings wanted his music to sound from what he wrote in the introductions to his tunebooks, shape-note singing acts as real world example of this style. Time, of course, has passed since the age of New England psalmody and performance practice could have changed intentionally or otherwise in the intervening years, but Billings lives on in the voices and tunebooks of shape-note singers across America.

Billings also survives in twentieth- and twenty-first-century compositions by

American composers. Musicologist and composer Charles Seeger (1886-1979) was one of the first classical composers to rediscover this American tradition of shape- note music and early New England psalmody. In 1940, he praised shape-note tunes, saying

For here is true style! There is a rigorous, spare, disciplined beauty in the choral writing that is all the more to be prized for having been conceived in the "backwoods" for which many professional musicians have such scorn, and in the face of the determined opposition of sophisticated zealots in no small number, from Lowell Mason down to those of this very day. Would it not seem to be a matter of interest, not only to scholars concerned with the study of American culture but also to musicians concerned with the development of the art of music in the New World, to inquire into the origin of this curious musical

22 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

style, how it developed, and what was and is its function in the total field of music in America?63

Seeger’s comments mark a change in attitude towards New England psalmody and shape-note music. Composers in the mid-1900s saw in these musics a rugged

Americanism and disregard for compositional rules that was emblematic of the twentieth-century push into new compositional territory and began to use Billings’ hymns and shape-note tunes as inspiration for new works.64 William Schuman, a contemporary of Seeger, and the later John Cage and William Duckworth, both writing in the years surrounding the American bicentennial, all drew on these traditions in their own ways to write truly American compositions.

63 Charles Seeger, "Contrapuntal Style in the Three-Voice Shape-Note Hymns," The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1940): 488. 64 Robin, "Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms."

23 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

William Schuman

Born on Manhattan in 1910, William Schuman over the course of his lifetime became one of the most influential individuals on classical American musical life.

Though his career, which spanned from 1929 when he began to study with Max

Persin through to his death in 1992, combined his talents as teacher, arts administrator, and reformer of music education, his biggest legacy would be his contributions as a composer to America’s musical culture, that of both the amateur and professional.65 He penned ten symphonies (of those, the first two were later withdrawn), five ballet scores, many concerti, four string quartets, several operas, and copious works for band and for chorus, including “A Free Song,” which won the first Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1943.66 The common thread through his works was

America, in all of its facets: he adapted into choral works both the texts of Walt

Whitman poems and sections of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog; he wrote an opera and then a cantata based on Ernest L. Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat;” and he wrote many programmatic orchestral and band works that feature reference

American themes or places, such as American Festival Overture, George Washington

Bridge, American Hymn, New England Triptych, Symphony no. 10 “American Muse,” and On Freedom’s Ground.67 In the words of scholar Robert Sabin in 1963, “Like

Emerson’s essays, like Whitman’s poetry, Schuman’s music reveals the ideas and

65 Steve Swayne, "Schuman, William," Grove Music Online (2012), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2225534. 66 Bruce Lambert, "William Schuman Is Dead at 81; Noted Composer Headed Juilliard," The New York Times (1992), http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/16/nyregion/william-schuman-is-dead-at-81-noted- composer-headed-juilliard.html. 67 Steve Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14.

24 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter conceptions and visions and experiences that make the United States what it is.”68 In

1985, seven years before his death, he won a second Pulitzer honoring his contributions to American classical music and his work as an educator and administrator and two years later received the National Medal of Arts.69

As Schuman scholar Steve Swayne writes, “Billings’s life and music [became] something of a thread in Schuman’s own life and music.”70 Schuman’s first encounter with the music of William Billings was during his time at Columbia

University’s Teachers College, from which he received a BS in music education in

1935 and a MA in composition in 1937. There, he wrote a paper on the music of the original thirteen American colonies, only a portion of which survives, in which he takes the better part of a paragraph to describe the importance of Billings’ hymn tune “Chester,” a tune that Schuman described at that time as “drab and banal” but would eventually become the basis for several of his most popular compositions.71

During his time teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Schuman had his first experiences actually performing Billings’ music. In December 1942, the Yale Glee

Club and the chorus that Schuman conducted at Sarah Lawrence performed a joint concert wherein the groups performed three pieces by Billings, “Creation,” “When

Jesus Wept,” and “Be Glad Then America,” and the latter two were reprised on a similar concert held a year later. 72 These two, along with “Chester,” would then form the basis for the William Billings Overture, a commission for Artur Rodzinski

68 Arthur Jacobs, Choral Music: A Symposium, Pelican Books (Baltimore,: Penguin Books, 1963), 379. 69 Lambert, "William Schuman Is Dead at 81; Noted Composer Headed Juilliard." 70 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 167. 71 Ibid., 168. 72 Ibid.

25 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter and the New York Philharmonic that premiered February 17, 1944.73 In his program note for the piece, Schuman described his new feelings about Billings and his music:

To an increasing number of musicians and laymen alike, Billings has become more than a mere reference listing in a history book. And for some of us who perform his music he remains, for all his shortcomings, a composer of great strength, with a deep religiosity and rugged individuality.74

Schuman’s change of heart about Billings’ music is particularly interesting and likely due in part to the growing trend among composers in the 1930s and 1940s, such as

Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, to include American folk music in their works.75

Unfortunately for Schuman, the Overture was not particularly well received, and

Schuman’s publisher chose not to publish the work, much to Schuman’s annoyance.76

However, this was not the end for the William Billings Overture or Schuman’s relationship with the early American composer. In February 1954, Schuman received a commission from André Kostelanitz for a possibly-programmatic work

“in a light vein with a ready appeal for many people [that] should run about eight to ten minutes in length” for the Saturday evening concert season with the New York

Philharmonic.77 After suggesting an idea that Kostelanetz turned down for being too similar to a piece by Ferde Grofé that was being promoted at the time, Schuman wrote to him to suggest a set of three pieces based on the same three Billings tunes featured in the William Billings Overture. However, Schuman was careful to say that,

73 Joseph Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (New York: Amadeus Press, 2008), 79. 74 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 168. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 285; Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman, 175.

26 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter as he was unhappy with the Overture, he would withdraw it, and that this new piece,

“while employing some of the music I had used in the overture will be entirely new in concept and not an overture at all.”78 Kostelanetz was happy with the idea, and the piece, titled New England Triptych: Three Pieces for Orchestra after William

Billings, premiered in Miami in on October 26, 1956.79 In its program note, Schuman again described the impact Billings had over him as a composer:

William Billings (1746-1800) is a major figure in the history of American music. The works of this dynamic composer capture the spirit of sinewy ruggedness, deep religiosity and patriotic fervor that we associate with the Revolutionary period. Despite the undeniable crudities and technical shortcomings of his music, its appeal, even today, is forceful and moving. I am not alone among American composers who feel an identity with Billings and it is this sense of identity which accounts for my use of his music as a point of departure. These pieces do not constitute a “fantasy” on themes of Billings, nor “variations” on his themes, but rather a fusion of styles and musical language.80

The piece immediately received popular and critical acclaim. The San Francisco

Chronicle praised Schuman’s blending of old and new styles, writing, “Schuman’s handling of Billings’ material is, of course, dynamic, positive and creative rather than merely reflective, affirming the unity of American musical culture,” and the Los

Angeles Times described it as “a work of so much substance and vitality that it will very likely find its way into the permanent repertoire.”81 Indeed it did, New England

Triptych becoming a staple of the orchestral repertoire in less than three years.82

78 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 294. 79 Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman, 178. 80 Ibid., 392. 81 Ibid., 178. 82 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 297.

27 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

The piece, easy to play by amateur as well as professional orchestras, brought

Schuman new celebrity among the public.83

The success of Schuman’s foray into Billings in New England Triptych continued to influence his life and his compositions until his death. Within the next twenty years, he adapted each movement of the Triptych into a piece for concert band. The first of which, Chester: Overture for Band (1946) was roughly twice the length of its corresponding movement in the Triptych and differed in how Schuman developed the material.84 In 1988, Schuman received a commission for a piano piece for the Eighth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and transcribed Chester for piano, titled Chester: Variations for Piano, Based on William Billings' Hymn and

Marching Song of The American Revolution.85 At the end of his life, Schuman even seemed to be thinking of creating “a version for mixed chorus and snare drum of

‘When Jesus Wept’ and ‘Chester,’ using the ‘New England Triptych’ as a basis and employing both words and sounds,” but unfortunately no sketches or manuscripts have been found. 86

Each of Schuman’s uses of Billings as source material (The William Billings

Overture, New England Triptych, and their various derivations for concert band) can be described as a fantasia on a tune (or tunes) by Billings. The term fantasia was originally used to refer to an improvisatory piece that lacked a clear form, though now it more often refers to a piece in which the composer quotes preexisting works

83 Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman, 178. 84 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 299. 85 William Schuman, Chester: Variations for Piano, Based on William Billings' Hymn and Marching Song of the American Revolution (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Merion Music : T. Presser Co. sole representative, 1989). 86 Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, 439.

28 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter in an improvisatory fashion while including new transition material. The first examples of this were the German chorale fantasias of the mid- and late-eighteenth centuries, which were pieces that freely develop a chorale melody, treating it as motivic material over the course of the piece.87 Modern examples of fantasias include Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs (1905) and several pieces by

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910), Fantasia on

Christmas Carols (1912), and Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934).

Similar to these works, in his Billings pieces Schuman quotes the full melodies of the original tunes in addition to fragmenting the melody and using it as motivic material. For example, in the movement of New England Triptych based on

“When Jesus Wept,” the entire melody is first stated by bassoon and oboe accompanied by snare drum (see Example 2 for the first four bars of Billings’ melody). However, this is followed with new material in the strings that is evocative of the melody but is much less harmonically stable (see Example 3). Schuman repeatedly uses the dotted figure of the melody on the first beat of the bar in this

Example 2: Billings, “When Jesus Wept,” mm. 1-4 passage, which serves as a very clear aural connection to Billings in an otherwise rhythmically simple passage. In both the band version of “Chester” and its movement in New England Triptych, Schuman begins with a fully harmonized statement of the hymn that brings to mind its original form as a four part choral

87 Christopher D.S. Field, E. Eugene Helm, and William Drabkin, "Fantasia," Grove Music Online (2016), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40048.

29 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Example 3: Schuman, “When Jesus Wept,” mm. 28-37. The first violin line in m. 29 and m. 30 uses Billing’s dotted rhythm.

piece. In the movement of New England Triptych, this is immediately followed by another statement of the melody in the winds over pulsing cluster chords in the brass and strings that dissolves into repetitions and diminutions of the final phrase that are passed between the winds (see Example 4).

Example 4: Schuman, New England Triptych, “Chester,” mm. 57-46. The four eighth note figure in the oboes, English, and bassoons in m. 37, which is the penultimate measure of Billings’ melody, repeated at full value and then as sixteenth-notes before dissolving at the end of the passage.

However, in his transformations of Billings’ original tunes, Schuman’s fantasias do more than act as orchestrations of his hymns. Schuman brings infinitely more vitality to Billings’ melodies, expanding on the tone and character of the

30 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter original pieces as he dissects his source material. The plaintive oboe and bassoon lines in “When Jesus Wept” as well as the strings with their tormented chromatic passages capture the intense grief that is present in the text of the original and

Billings’ setting of it. Likewise, in “Chester,” whose militaristic text proclaims “New

England’s God forever reigns,” the triumphant brass and percussion convey the patriotism in Billings’ original. In creating these fantasias on Billings’ hymns,

Schuman is able to more fully capture, with the help of the orchestra, the true character and unbridled emotion that is present in so many of Billings’ works.

31 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

John Cage

John Cage was without a doubt the most influential composer of the twentieth century. Over the course of his compositional career, which began in 1934 after several encounters with Arnold Schoenberg, Cage challenged the world to reconsider its concepts of music.88 In his early years, Cage invented the prepared piano, for which he wrote his famous Sonatas and Interludes (1946–8), which infinitely expanded the expressive and musical capabilities of the traditional piano.

In 1952, pianist David Tudor premiered Cage’s most famous work, 4’33”, in which the performer makes no intentional sounds for four minutes and thirty three seconds, which elevated to the status of music the ambient and unintentional sounds of life that are otherwise ignored. Cage also pioneered the use of chance procedures in his works, relying on books like the ancient Chinese oracle text, the I

Ching, along with other methods to randomly make decisions about pitches, rhythms, durations, and dynamics. This practice attracted much criticism, as it “flies in the face of the European conception of art, wherein the supreme mark of the artist is his ability to make artistically meaningful choices.”89 Cage pushed against this conception, requiring listeners and critics to reexamine their own preconceived notions about music and art while expanding the horizons of music at the same time.

In 1976, Cage received a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to write a piece for the U.S.

88 James Pritchett, Laura Kuhn, and Charles Hiroshi Garrett, "Cage, John," ibid. (2012), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2223954. 89 Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, 136.

32 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Bicentennial.90 Cage’s first use of the music of William Billings would be in this work, which he titled Apartment House 1776.91 The piece is founded on Cage’s idea of a “musicircus,” where each musician or group of musicians plays their own set of music at their own pace, resulting in “a number of independent, non-coordinated, overlapping pieces presented simultaneously, each piece occupying its own center.”92 For the music, Cage used chance procedures to select sixty-four pre- existing works from the time of American Revolution, which included forty-four early American hymns, several lines based on Moravian church music, four marches for solo drums, and various songs from the Protestant, Sephardic, Native American, and African American musical traditions to be sung by four singers from those traditions.93 These pieces are performed, unconducted, by any variety of instruments according to the schedules created by the performers, resulting in a unique version of the piece at every performance.94

Of the forty-four hymns Cage selected (again, by chance), fifteen are by

Billings, more by him than by any other composer.95 However, Cage altered them all substantially before including them in Apartment House 1776. Cage said in an

90 The National Endowment in fact gave grants to six orchestra (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia) for each one to commission a work from a contemporary composer for the Bicentennial. Stephen Drury, liner notes to Orchestral Works I, New England Conservatory Philharmonia, Mode, 41, 1994. 91 Apartment House 1776 is designed to be played alone or with the orchestral piece Renga, which was also composed for the occasion. Renga is named after a Japanese form of poetry and uses drawings from the notebooks of Henry David Thoreau as musical notation, each “placed by means of chance operations in spaces comparable to this poetic structure.” Ibid.; Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 30. 92 Drury, liner notes to Orchestral Works I. 93 Ibid.; Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 30. 94 Drury, liner notes to Orchestral Works I. 95 The other 29 are all composed by other hymn-writers of the late eighteenth century: thirteen are by Andrew Law (1749-1821), nine are by James Lyon (1735-1794), four are by Jacob French (1754-1817), and three are by Supply Belcher (1751-1836). John Cage, 44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 (New York, N.Y.: Edition Peters, 2008).

33 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter interview, “I had to face what I hadn't faced previously in my work: the question of harmony, and I found a way finally of writing harmony that interested me, which was, actually, to subtract from the original pieces, so that the music consisted of silences-sound-silences.”96 This process of subtraction, which Cage pioneered in this work, consists of selecting pitches from each of the vocal lines of the hymn or anthem and then lengthening those pitches an arbitrary amount. These new extended notes would replace the pitches that follow in the original lines from

Billings’ hymn. Each such note is followed by an arbitrarily long silence that similarly replaces the pitches that would be sung in the original line.97 This process of subtraction accomplished Cage’s goal of “wanting to do something with early

American music that would let it keep its flavor at the same time that it would lose what was so obnoxious to me: its harmonic tonality.”98

Cage repeated this process of subtraction in his 1979 work Hymns and

Variations. Scored for twelve amplified singers (three of each voice part), it consists of two hymns and ten variations, five variations for each hymn. The hymns are “Old

North” and “Heath” by William Billings, and in both the statement of the hymns and their variations Cage uses subtraction to modify the vocal lines. Additionally, each of the four original vocal lines is split between the three singers of that voice part, creating a spatial effect as the subtracted line travels between each singer on that part (see Example 5). Cage also uses chance processes to indicate subtle dynamic

96 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 30. 97 David Nicholls, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137. 98 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 30.

34 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter markings, from ppp to mf, along with crescendos and diminuendos.99 Additionally, the text Cage uses is itself a subtraction of the original text of each hymn, the singers only singing the vowels and occasional ending consonants of the original words.

Similar to the results in Apartment House 1776, the process of subtraction in Hymns and Variations alters the harmonies of the original hymns in often substantial ways through the extension of the notes and replaces Billings’ melodies with new melodies that flow between the various vocal lines.100 This process results in a new piece that aims to evoke the feeling of Billings, while also acting as an aural metaphor for the passing of time, Billings’ original melodies having been eroded away in the almost three hundred years since his death.

Example 5: Cage, Hymns and Variations, “Hymn (subtraction from Old North by W.M. Billings,” mm. 1-13

99 William Brooks, "John Cage and History: Hymns and Variations," Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 2 (1993): 87. 100 Ibid., 98.

35 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

In adapting Billings’ music in both Apartment House 1776 and Hymns and

Variations, Cage creates a musical palimpsest of Billings’ work, resulting in pieces where Billings’ original melodies are still present but are obscured by Cage’s methods of subtraction. By removing certain notes while extending others, Cage preserves the form of Billings’ hymns, but alters their harmonic sense. Cage himself viewed his adaptations of the hymns as taking away from them their harmonic logic and reframing them in a new, modern light, saying, “You can recognize it as eighteenth century music; but it's suddenly brilliant in a new way.”101 This approach differs completely from that of Schuman. Schuman embraces Billings’ melodies, quoting them in full and treating them as motivic material while doing away with the original form of Billings’ hymns. Cage does the opposite, actively eliminating

Billings’ melodies from his adaptations, in the process creating new musical lines between parts through his method of subtraction. The form of Billings’ hymns is the only element that is preserved in Cage’s adaptations, specifically the length of the pieces and sections including the repeats that Billings writes. That however, in combination with traces of the Billings’ harmony, is enough for them to be recognizable as eighteenth-century hymn tunes. Though Cage did much to obscure

Billings in Apartment House 1776 and Hymns and Variations, Billings is still there, peeking out from under the layers of Cage’s musical palimpsest.

101 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 31.

36 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

William Duckworth

William Duckworth, born in North Carolina in 1943, is regarded by many as the founder of postminimalism, a reaction to the minimalist movement that emerged in the 1960s and embraced the minimalist ideas of repetition and limited harmonic material but was less strict and more subtle with their execution.

Duckworth received his doctorate in 1972 from the University of Illinois, where he studied with microtonal composer Ben Johnston, and became recognized in 1978 with the publication of Time Curve Preludes, a set of twenty-four preludes for piano that “is regarded as one of the first scores in the post-Minimalist [sic] style.”102 Like many pieces in the postminimalist style, they use a steady rhythmic drive, diatonic tonalities, and additive and subtractive processes but differed in that they incorporate occasional sharp dissonances and “didn't wear their structure on the outside” so “you couldn't completely figure out what was going on just from listening.”103 Duckworth taught at Bucknell University from 1973 to 2011, wrote several books, won awards for teaching and composition, and pioneered internet music with Cathedral, an ongoing work he created with his wife Nora Farrell that went online in 1997. He died in 2012 due to pancreatic cancer at the age of 69.

In 1980-81, Duckworth composed his choral masterpiece, Southern Harmony, a multi-movement work that adapts twenty hymns from William Walker’s shape- note tunebook, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1835). In contrast to

102 Allan Kozinn, "William Duckworth, Internet Composer, Dies at 69," The New York Times (2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/arts/music/william-duckworth-internet-composer-dies-at- 69.html?_r=0. 103 Kyle Gann, "A Forest from the Seeds of Minimalism: An Essay on Postminimal and Totalist Music," (1998), http://www.kylegann.com/postminimalism.html.

37 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter the works by William Schuman and John Cage described in this paper, Duckworth’s

Southern Harmony does not have a direct link to William Billings through quotation of his works, but we can still draw lines of influence between the two composers.

For one hymn, “Windham” by Daniel Read, that line is quite clear, since as previously stated, there is a clear record of the influence Billings had on Read as a composer. For the rest of the hymns, the connection exists through the tradition of shape-note singing and the influence Billings had on contemporary composers and those that wrote later in the English parish-church style.

Duckworth first encountered shape-note singing as a child. He writes, “Until I was five or six years old, my family went to a rural Methodist church where they did shaped-note singing. My grandfather was one of the leaders, a big bullfrog bass.”104

When he was a student at the University of Illinois, his friend and composer Neely

Bruce reintroduced him to the music, specifically William Walker’s tunebook, and would later commission a work from Duckworth for the Wesleyan Singers at

Wesleyan University, which Bruce directed in the 1980s .105 However, as Duckworth says, “He asked for a 15-minute piece, but I got carried away and gave him a 60- minute one.”106 For that commission, Duckworth wrote Southern Harmony, dividing the twenty hymns into four “Books” that each premiered at different times.107 In preparation for writing the work, Duckworth spent a year with Walker’s Southern

Harmony, every day devoting attention to his source material in a process that

104 Gann, liner notes to William Duckworth: Southern Harmony, The Gregg Smith Singers, Monroe Street Music, LCD 2033, CD, 1994. 105 Joanna Ruth Smolko, "Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth- Century Composers" (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), 172. 106 Ibid., 250. 107 Ibid., 248.

38 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter would eventually become “more of a meditation”: “Every day, before I started writing, I would put myself in the right frame of mind by singing through (the original) Southern Harmony for at least an hour, soprano, then alto, tenor, bass. In the course of the year I sang through the book several hundred times.”108 Each movement of Duckworth’s piece is inspired by one hymn from Walker’s tunebook.

Duckworth writes, “In using each hymn tune, I focused on only one aspect of it; sometimes it was the harmony or the rhythm—less frequently, the words.”109 What resulted was a work that spans many choral styles, combining the eighteenth century hymns with Duckworth’s postminimalist tendencies. Doublings between voice parts and the use of the solmization syllables as text echo elements of shape- note performance practice while repetition and methodical construction reflect minimalist practices that Duckworth used in Time Curve Preludes.

Together, all twenty pieces in Southern Harmony come together to form an hour-long work that Duckworth himself believes defines, along with his Time Curve

Preludes, “the postminimalist style.”110 However, even though Duckworth views as them as representing one musical style, no two movements from Southern Harmony use their source hymn in the same way. Because of this, it is useful to examine several in order to better grasp the nature of Duckworth’s approach to the shape- note hymns. Several movements use a process Adam B. Silverman calls

melodic abstraction in which a tune, once stripped of its rhythms and its context as a line in counterpoint with others, is manipulated with typically “minimalist” procedures: cycling notes, subtracting or

108 Ibid., 250; Gann, liner notes to William Duckworth: Southern Harmony. 109 Preface to William Duckworth, Consolation: From Southern Harmony (New York: C.F. Peters, 2000). 110 Smolko, "Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth-Century Composers," 251.

39 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

adding them in successive repetitions, and phasing a melody in canon against itself. [Duckworth] then used the result as his basic material for new choral songs which are, in turn, constructed methodically.111 Silverman performs an analysis on three movements where Duckworth uses these processes: “Consolation,” “Cheerful,” and “War Department.” In “Cheerful,”

Duckworth reduces the melody of the original hymn (present in the tenor line) to a series of eleven pitches that he sets as eighth notes, removing the metrical stresses of the original melody. This abstraction of the melody forms the basis of the A and A’ sections of the ABA’ form, where Duckworth applies to it the process of subtraction:

Example 6: Duckworth, “Cheerful,” mm. 1-15. The eighth notes in the soprano and alto in mm. 1-12 show the melodic subtraction process.

111 Adam B. Silverman, "Stylistic Combination and Methodical Construction in William Duckworth's Southern Harmony," Contemporary Music Review 20, no. 4 (2001): 46.

40 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

“The melodic series is presented ten times (mm. 1-12), each progressively abbreviated by subtracting a note from its beginning. First notes 1-11 are sung, then

2-11, then 3-11 and so forth” (see Example 6).112 The B section contains a full statement of the original tune, interrupted at phrase endings with material from the

A section, which is followed by an A’ section that presents Duckworth’s melodic series in much the same way. Duckworth also references the performance practice of the original hymns by eschewing the original text of the hymn and instead writing out the appropriate solmization syllables for the singers to sing.

In “Consolation,” the first movement of the entire piece, Duckworth opens with a “chorale of sharp dissonances” that uses the text of the first verse of the original hymn.113 This opening shares many musical characteristics with the hymn, yet omits its melody.114 The second half features “canonic merging,” whereby “A basic melody is established and repeated in unison canon against itself at a distance which increases incrementally by a beat.”115 This process is carried out on the solmization syllables in bars of 7/4 that each repeat between three to five times (see

Example 7). Duckworth’s treatment of “War Department” combines both repetition of text and melody through abstraction of the original line.116 The finished piece is evocative of primitive war chanting, an aural connection to the “war-whoops” and

“tomahawks” mentioned in the text.

112 Ibid., 49. 113 Gann, liner notes to William Duckworth: Southern Harmony. 114 Silverman, "Stylistic Combination and Methodical Construction in William Duckworth's Southern Harmony," 51. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 56.

41 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Example 7: Duckworth, “Consolation,” mm. 24-35. Measure 24 marks the beginning of the second half of the piece, which consists of these repeated 7/4 bars.

In contrast to the rhythmic drive of those movements that use methodical construction, several other movements become almost static in rhythm and often harmony as well. Both “Primrose” and “Solemn Thought” are influenced by Arnold

Schoenberg’s method of Klangfarbenmelodie, though in slightly different ways. Both pieces are quite slow in tempo, with Duckworth writing in “Primrose,” “Unhurried, quiet, suspended in time.” In that same piece, the melody, sung on the solmization syllables, is divided with some variation between different voice parts at different registers with parts entering and fading gradually.117 In “Solemn Thought,” however,

Duckworth divides the text between the voices, selecting the notes from all of the individual vocal parts.118 In each piece the individual notes are extended to create

117 Smolko, "Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth-Century Composers," 189. 118 Gann, liner notes to William Duckworth: Southern Harmony.

42 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter harmonies with those that follow in a manner similar to Cage’s Hymns and

Variations. “Sardina” is another such static piece. Though it does not feature

Klangfarbenmelodie, over the course of its almost four-minute length, it hovers between only a handful of “mysterious, nocturnal cluster chords, resolving each time into the emptiness of an open fifth” (see Example 8).119 These chords however

Example 8: Duckworth, “Sardina,” mm. 1-11. After layering the voices in the opening of the piece, Duckworth resolves to an open D chord in measure 10. This open fifth, sometimes with an added Bb, is the chord with which Duckworth ends each phrase. do not at all reflect the original melody of the hymn, only the tune’s repeated use of the open D chord. Duckworth’s use of text also differs substantially in “Sardina,” as the two lines of text he uses in the piece actually come from an entirely different hymn, “Evening Shade.” It’s not clear why Duckworth makes this choice, but the

119 Ibid.

43 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter musical similarities between Duckworth’s “Sardina” and the original (both its homophonic form and its D minor key) explain why he chose not to title his piece

“Evening Shade” instead.

Example 9: “Southern Harmony,” from Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. The melody, which Duckworth alters in his version of the tune, is present in the middle (tenor) line.

Duckworth’s take on “Wondrous Love,” a tune that has become popular in the twentieth century for composers to adapt, is especially intriguing. Duckworth’s version is in a rough ternary form, beginning and ending with a soprano solo singing the melody. However, Duckworth altered much of the melody for his reworking of the tune, changing its meter from 4/4 to 3/4 and only roughly paraphrasing the outline of the original melody (see Examples 9 and 10). Additionally, Duckworth alters the syllabic text placement of the original, instead setting the text melismatically. After the solo at the beginning of the piece, the first sopranos join the soloist in the second verse while the second sopranos extend and hold certain

44 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Example 10: Duckworth, “Wondrous Love,” mm. 1-21 notes of the melody on the syllable “loo.” The middle section of the piece becomes more choral; the choir, in six parts, sings the third verse homorhythmically.

Duckworth’s harmonic language here becomes quite dense, involving quintal harmonies and diatonic clusters. The choir then holds their final chord, creating a drone over which the soprano solo sings the fourth verse and ends the piece.

Perhaps most interesting, Duckworth chooses to replace the original hymn text of

45 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

“Wondrous Love” with text from the shape-note hymn “Idumea.” Regarding this decision he remarked, “There were many different (and widely varying) texts set to the Wondrous Love hymn tune over the years. I’m not sure if Idumea was ever used this way, but under the circumstances I felt it was suitable to use it.”120 These decisions to alter both the original melody and the text obscure the original hymn, making it difficult for the audience to identify the piece as being based on

“Wondrous Love” without the use of a program.

By highlighting certain parts of his source material and ignoring others,

Duckworth’s pieces serve as reincarnations of the original shape-note hymns, each reflecting in some way the hymn on which it was based though to significantly different degrees. In discussing Southern Harmony, Duckworth wrote that “When I decided to write a choral work based on this material, I wanted, first, to maintain the integrity of the hymns—their strength, vitality and emotion.”121 For him, the integrity of the shape-note pieces he chose lies not in their melodies, harmonies, or texts but instead in some essential aspect he was able to distill from them after spending a year singing each of them every day. Often this element was the melody or a subsection of it, as seen in several pieces including “War Department” and

“Cheerful,” but other times the melody is not present in Duckworth’s versions, as in

“Sardina” and “Solemn Thought,” or is so altered as to be unrecognizable, as in

“Consolation,” “Wondrous Love,” and “Primrose.” Less frequently, this element was the text, though Duckworth also felt free to use the text from other hymns he chose

120 Smolko, "Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth-Century Composers," 251. 121 Duckworth, Consolation: From Southern Harmony.

46 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter not to adapt, as in “Sardina” and “Wondrous Love.” Duckworth used whatever spoke to him after his repeated readings of a hymn as the germ for his new composition, resulting in pieces that are often radically different from the hymns after which they are named.

This approach is drastically different from how Cage and Schuman adapt

Billings. Schuman is interested in preserving the melody, that which represents the tune itself, and so he presents the original tunes intact within his works before he deconstructs them and uses them as motivic material. Cage wants to let the eighteenth-century music “keep its flavor” while presenting it in a new modern light, which he accomplishes through his process of subtraction.122 In doing so he leaves the form of the hymns intact while altering the harmonies and melodic lines.

Duckworth, however, gives himself significantly more liberty with each of the pieces he chose to recompose, liberty to change every musical element that makes the tunes recognizable as shape-note music. He even specifically wanted to avoid writing pieces that were just new reharmonizations of old tunes; of “Wondrous

Love,” he writes, “What I didn’t want to do was an “arrangement”; the words [the original “Wondrous Love” lyrics] are too well known for that.”123 Compared to the compositional processes of Cage and Schuman, Duckworth’s method and ideas demonstrate a method of musical reincarnation, wherein only small elements are of the original are preserved in its new form. For Duckworth, each hymn serves as a starting point from which to create something new, but in doing so he does not

122 Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 30. 123 Smolko, "Reshaping American Music: The Quotation of Shape-Note Hymns by Twentieth-Century Composers," 251.

47 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter replicate or simply arrange the original hymn—the ways in which he obscures and sometimes omits the hymn melodies and alters their forms in each of the reincarnations described here demonstrate this idea. Instead, by picking and choosing elements of the original hymns to include in his adaptations, he recomposes each hymn into something completely new.

48 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

Postlude: Billings’ Legacy Today

This paper has explored three significantly different ways of approaching and adapting Billings’ music and, in turn, shape-note music. William Schuman, John

Cage, and William Duckworth each created very different pieces using music from the same tradition and all for very different reasons: Schuman was inspired by a sense of connection to William Billings in writing the William Billings Overture and

New England Triptych; Cage sought to evoke the period of the American revolution when he used the music of Billings’ and his contemporaries in Apartment House

1776 and Hymns and Variations; and Duckworth used shape-note music as the inspiration for Southern Harmony in part because of his deep connection with music itself.

However, these are by no means the only composers who have been inspired by William Billings and shape-note music. In the late twentieth century, Robert

Shaw and Alice Parker collaborated on many arrangements of shape-note tunes, such as “When Jesus Wept” based on the eponymous tune by Billings; “Broad is the

Road,” an arrangement of “Windham” by Daniel Read (1757-1836); and “Wondrous

Love,” the same tune that Duckworth adapted from Walker’s The Southern Harmony.

Parker went on to write several adaptations of shape-note tunes on her own, including “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal,” an arrangement of the shape-note tune

“Invitation.” The arrangements of Shaw and Parker are most similar to Schuman’s fantasias on Billings’ hymns: while they vary form and voicing, they stay true in their

49 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter presentation of the original melodies and harmonies, altering them comparatively little.

Similar to Schuman’s treatment of Billings in New England Triptych, many composers have continued to adapt shape-note tunes for other instruments. In

1958, Samuel Barber composed his extensive variations on “Wondrous Love” for organ, and composers such as Daniel Pinkham have done similarly. Neely Bruce, who commissioned Duckworth’s Southern Harmony, included shape-note music in several of his works. For example, in Convergences: Some Parades for Charlie’s Dad

(2000), which he describes as “a series of three composed parades with auxiliary musical events of a stationary nature” and “is scored for multiple marching bands, multiple choruses, three or more organs, fife and drum corps, bagpipes, two orchestras, jazz band, West African drumming ensemble, Native American ensemble, Javanese gamelan, West Indian steel drums, and two solo trumpets,” he includes ten pieces by Billings that first appeared in The Continental Harmony.124

Band composer Donald Grantham has also adapted shape-note tunes into his medium in a manner quite similar to Schuman’s; his own Southern Harmony (1998) is a four movement piece for concert band based on the shape-note tunes “The

Midnight Cry,” “Wondrous Love,” “Exhilaration,” and “The Soldier’s Return,” and his follow-up piece Spangled Heavens (2010) is based on the hymns “Holy Manna,”

“Restoration,” “Sweet Canaan,” and “Saints Bound for Heaven.”

Many other composers have continued to transform Billings’ music and shape-note tunes in ways that reflect their own harmonic and melodic style. In

124 Neely Bruce, "About Neely Bruce," http://neelybrucemusic.com/about-neely.htm.

50 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

2001, composer Joshua Shank published his own adaptation of Billings’ hymn

“David’s Lamentation,” in which he preserves Billings’ form, but adjusts the voicings, adds non-triadic harmonies, and extends note values in ways that transform

Billings’ eighteenth-century language into Shank’s twenty-first-century musical vocabulary. Brooklyn violinist and composer Sam Amidon has reworked many shape-note tunes in his own musical language, altering their harmony and rhythm and rearranging them for other instrumentations. On his album All is Well, published in 2008, the title track is based on the tune “All is Well” that appeared, harmonized by J.T. White, in the original publication of The Sacred Harp in 1844.125 In his version, Amidon reharmonized the original melody to include unresolved dissonances and non-triadic chords. He also greatly reduced the tempo, lengthened pauses between phrases, and added an accompaniment of guitar, piano, strings, and other instruments that builds over the course of the track as he calmly sings the melody. In 2011, Sam’s father, Peter Amidon, continued the tradition of adaptation by arranging Sam’s version for choir, thus returning the piece to its original instrumentation.

Other composers have followed Duckworth’s model of reincarnation. In particular, David T. Little exemplified this method of adaptation in his extensive 32 minute-long cantata, Am I Born, which uses the shape-note tune “Idumea” as its inspiration. Premiered in 2012 by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Brooklyn

Philharmonic for a concert celebrating nineteenth-century Brooklyn, the piece

125 David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan, The Makers of the Sacred Harp, Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 195.

51 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter features Little’s postminimalist language applied to the fragmentation of the original tune and to a new libretto by Royce Vavrek.126

Billings and his legacy have inspired countless composers over the past hundred years and continue to do so today. The unique harmonies and pioneer spirit that persevere in this music has touched a chord in many composers, an unsurprising fact for anyone who has had the chance to hear it. Billings and his legacy will live on in these pieces and many more that have yet to be composed in the years to come.

126 Robin, "Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms."

52 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter

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