Part One: Our Song Leading Roots
Part Two: What to Sing–Psalms vs. Blasphemy and a Question of Content
Part Three: How to Sing: Chants vs. Hymns and a Question of Form
Part Four: Who Should Sing–Performance versus Participation
Part Five: With What to Sing? Adding Instruments or Going Acapella
How to Sing: Chants vs. Hymns and a Question of Form
To the Hollis Street Society Gentlemen,
The Officers of the Singing Society represent, that at present, they are destitute of a collection of music, containing tunes suitable for public performance, our old books generally contain music of such a kind as the improved tast of the present day will condemn….”
-Hollis Street Church Archives, Feb 25, 1811
New England didn’t create choirs, or hymns, or psalm-chanting. Each of these three traditions had been ebbing and flowing in Christianity for centuries. And each of them, in reverse order, would be re-discovered and reinvented by our congregations. The Hollis Street Church archives are full of letters from the Singing Committee requesting funds for books and singing schools, that exemplify the changing preferences for music in the early 1800s.
The debate of whether to include ‘manmade’ lyrics or stick to psalms went hand in hand with a debate about form. What we sang began to change and how we sang it shifted it as well. New words meant new song forms. Not new to the world, but new to New England. Hymns overtook psalms as the dominant music in protestant churches. We know that culture-shift is hard though, and so it was as congregations fought over the shift from chant to hymn, from rote to note. Eleanor Billings described it this way:
Abitter debate raged over the “old way” versus the “new way” of singing the psalms in churches: people were suspended for singing by rule; deacons took sides against the church, and tried to out-sing the congregation. “Occasionally a deacon retired in tears.” Churches split on the issue, and new churches were built.
You can imagine a group of young adults taking classes together, singing together all the time, and growing increasingly interested in more interesting music. So over the decades, within these groups and certainly over the generations, the singing class participants went from chanting psalms, to singing hymns, to trying more complicated choral anthems. More on the choir later…
Hymns are one of the largest branches on the tree of congregational singing, but they’ve also had their own evolution.
Early hymnody was an outgrowth of plainsong and originally a monastic technique. Musical hymns were melodies that were, at best, associated with the daily offices; they most often were Psalms, but other Scriptural texts were used as well. Their use continued to expand throughout the early centuries of Christianity, and in the hands of Martin Luther (1483–1546) congregational hymnody became a major segment of worship services in the Reformation. -James McCray
Hymnologist Erik Routley lays out four traditions of hymnody in America which, “before 1900 were culturally separate, and which during the 20th century began to influence each other…”
(1) the New England Style
(2) the Southern Folk Hymnody
(3) the Black Spiritual
(4) the Gospel Song
For the congregations transitioning to Unitarianism in the 1800s, the New England style was dominant. And for this style, William Billings was the unrivaled champion. While the opening shots of this hymn battle belonged to Watts, the victory, at least in part, belongs to Billings. Billings was a prolific hymn composer and the most famous of the Singing School teachers. His musical mind was brilliant, his influence enormous, and his timing perfect. His fame and influence grew along with the rising tide of hymn singing and hymn-publishing. He published his first book of original songs in 1770. He’s credited with organizing the first church choir in America and by the late 1880s his music was known across the United States and nearly every songbook published in America had some of his songs.
In a history of the music at First Parish Concord in Massachusetts, Eleanor Billings describes the era this way..
(Billings) was part of a whole generation of singing masters who would travel from town to town holding classes on note-reading. These evenings were especially popular among the young people in the towns, as both young men and young women were welcome, and social events were few. Those who attended the classes came to be called the ‘new way’ singers, who read notes and soon graduated to ‘anthem’ music, rather than hymn or psalm singing, and before long were seated in their own section of the church, to lead the congregational singing in lieu of deacons, and even to sing some special pieces by themselves.
At the same time as the singing schools were growing in popularity, musicians were trying to figure out how to make music more accessible. As soon as Symmes kicked off the call for more music education in the 1720s, singing school books were being published to meet the need.
One new model for teaching music was so successful that it created its own music tradition. The first shape note songbook was published in 1801, and it used a system of giving each note head in the sheet music a different shape, as a sort of shorthand for learning the intervals between the notes.
Shape note was and is a style of community singing in parallel to Sunday morning, influenced by and influencing the hymns of the church period. It’s so rooted in the early movement of singing education, that leading a song at a shape note gathering is still sometimes called a ‘lesson.’ The shape note style of singing and its songbooks became incredibly popular in the mid-1800s. Historian Gavin Campbell writes about the incredible popularity of shape note books:
The Southern Harmony, for instance, sold 600,000 copies between 1835 and 1866, while The Christian Minstrel went through an astonishing 171 editions between 1846 and 1873.
It’s striking that the first shape note booked was published in 1801, when most protestant hymnals didn’t include any notated music at all! Most hymnals only included the text of the hymns. For each hymn, instead of sheet music, it would just list the meter (the phrasing and grouping of syllables), so that one could know which already-familiar tunes would work with each text. Notated music wasn’t common in hymnals until the 1860s.
The fact that music was notated at all in shape note books is a testament to how much shape note was an outgrowth of the singing school movement. The singing schools had used tune books with written music since the 1720s, so the shape note tradition is more like a tune book tradition that in parrallel to hymnals.
As the tradition of shape note grew, its influence came back into the churches. Some shape note songs found their way back into the protestant hymnals, and in some congregations they even replaced those hymnals. Gavin Campbell describes the trajectory of the tradition, saying that although the shape note tradition was born in New England, “shape-notes endured scorn and abuse there, and found more congenial quarters in the South and the area just west of the Appalachians.” So shape notes traveled south from the north and intertwined with the other congregational singing traditions. Their influence is still felt in Singing the Living Tradition, which includes several shape note songs.
The dominance of hymns in our UU worship services was not pre-ordained. Our ancestors fought for them, wrote letters to fund them, went to countless classes to learn them, sought out new inspirations to write them, and reshaped the culture of their communities to sing them. And the values that led to the tectonic shifts that centered the hymn form are the same values that today lead us to go beyond hymns to include other styles as well.
On this great debate of Psalms vs. Hymns, we’ll give the last word to Billings. With these words, he introduced his first tune-book and paid homage to the psalm tradition, even as he perhaps sounded its death knell…
It would be needless in me to attempt to set forth the Usefulness and Importance of Psalm-singing, which is so universally known and acknowledged, and on which depends no inconsiderable Part of the Divine Worship of our Churches. But thus much would I say, That he who finds himself gifted with a tunable Voice, and yet neglects to cultivate it, not only hides in the Earth a Talent of the highest Value, but robs himself of that peculiar Pleasure, of which they only are conscious who exercise that Faculty.
-William Billings, Introduction to “The New-England Psalm-Singer”
For more on How to Sing, check out:
- The New England Psalm-Singer (or the American Chorist), by William Billings (1770?) Link here
- Smithsonian Folkways: Shape Note Singing Lesson. Link here
- American Unitarian Hymn Writers and Hymns, Compiled by Henry Wilder Foote. 1959. Link here
- A Pilgrimage in Song: Unitarian and Universalist Hymnody: A history of Universalist and Unitarian hymn writers, hymns, and hymn books. By Rev. David A Johnson. 2016.
- Letters from the Singing Committee of Hollis Street Church. Link here
