Pub Date : 2020-12-17DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0003
P. Mercer-Taylor
This chapter centers on the 1819 Original Collection compiled by Arthur Clifton, an English musician who had emigrated to Baltimore in 1817 (changing his name, from Antony Corri, in the process). Though not a commercial success, this pathbreaking volume was the first American publication to present a substantial body of material drawn from European classical music in psalmodic form, containing 21 psalm and hymn tunes culled variously from the work of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Such adaptations had been enjoying a modest vogue in England since around the turn of the century, but only half a dozen or so had appeared in the United States. Clifton relied on existing London publications for inspiration—many of the European melodies he includes had already been adapted by English compilers. But he returns to the classical music sources themselves in almost every case, developing his own meticulously crafted body of adaptations.
{"title":"An Immigrant’s Musical Memoir","authors":"P. Mercer-Taylor","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter centers on the 1819 Original Collection compiled by Arthur Clifton, an English musician who had emigrated to Baltimore in 1817 (changing his name, from Antony Corri, in the process). Though not a commercial success, this pathbreaking volume was the first American publication to present a substantial body of material drawn from European classical music in psalmodic form, containing 21 psalm and hymn tunes culled variously from the work of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Such adaptations had been enjoying a modest vogue in England since around the turn of the century, but only half a dozen or so had appeared in the United States. Clifton relied on existing London publications for inspiration—many of the European melodies he includes had already been adapted by English compilers. But he returns to the classical music sources themselves in almost every case, developing his own meticulously crafted body of adaptations.","PeriodicalId":202403,"journal":{"name":"Gems of Exquisite Beauty","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129044283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-17DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0002
P. Mercer-Taylor
Christian worship factored centrally in the American circulation of psalm and hymn tunes in the 19th century, but the repertoire traveled far and wide beyond actual church services. Musical societies, conventions, singing schools, social gatherings of a religious nature, and domestic settings all provided venues for the singing of psalmody. This chapter undertakes a broad exploration of the place of psalm and hymn tunes in pre–Civil War American culture. In its closing stretch, however, it pivots toward those vibrant registers of American sacred music-making that lay beyond the Europeanized psalmodic practices that form this book’s focus. Psalmodic adaptations of classical music would never have been encountered by most of the nation’s enslaved, nor by most Native Americans. They also had little impact on the lives of many in the country’s southern and western regions who preferred the markedly different psalmodic tradition associated with “shape notes.”
{"title":"Antebellum Psalmody in Its Cultural Context","authors":"P. Mercer-Taylor","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Christian worship factored centrally in the American circulation of psalm and hymn tunes in the 19th century, but the repertoire traveled far and wide beyond actual church services. Musical societies, conventions, singing schools, social gatherings of a religious nature, and domestic settings all provided venues for the singing of psalmody. This chapter undertakes a broad exploration of the place of psalm and hymn tunes in pre–Civil War American culture. In its closing stretch, however, it pivots toward those vibrant registers of American sacred music-making that lay beyond the Europeanized psalmodic practices that form this book’s focus. Psalmodic adaptations of classical music would never have been encountered by most of the nation’s enslaved, nor by most Native Americans. They also had little impact on the lives of many in the country’s southern and western regions who preferred the markedly different psalmodic tradition associated with “shape notes.”","PeriodicalId":202403,"journal":{"name":"Gems of Exquisite Beauty","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121788104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-17DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190842796.003.0006
P. Mercer-Taylor
The psalmodic adaptation of classical music constitutes a distinctive creative act in instances in which we find adapters not simply importing excerpts essentially unchanged (a chiefly curatorial service), but making substantive musical decisions to bridge the gap dividing art music from psalmody. This chapter explores such “translational actions,” unfolding in four phases. The first concerns low-level decisions, involving rhythm, ornamentation, and texture. The second centers on syntactic challenges that arise in drawing brief excerpts from larger works (negotiating European passages that begin and end in different keys, for instance). The third focuses on “purposeful substitution”: the replacement of musical effects inappropriate to psalmody with wholly different effects calculated to achieve comparable goals. The fourth explores adaptations that challenge the very notion of a one-to-one correspondence between “excerpt” and “psalm tune”: tunes that draw on more than one European movement, say, or adjacent pairs of tunes drawn from a common source.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190842796.003.0007
P. Mercer-Taylor
IN THE DECADES leading up to the Civil War, the realms of classical music, Protestant Christian song, and mass-market popular music vibrantly converged in a single American repertoire. That convergence, the topic of this book, was temporary. Few of the cultural conditions that brought this repertoire into being persist to the present day. The notion that the United States is a normatively Christian nation is far from extinct, but its ultimate extinction seems likely. And most of Protestantism’s cultural trappings have thankfully lost whatever veneer they once enjoyed of unselfconscious universality. Choral music, meanwhile, is still performed in professional, ecclesiastical, convivial, and domestic settings alike. But most music enjoyed by Americans in daily life is recorded music, and when they make music themselves, it is mostly other kinds of music they make. Perhaps most important, that gulf that separated antebellum Americans’ nascent awareness of European classical music as a thing of value from opportunities for the actual experience of that music—the gap whose bridging comprised a core justification for this repertoire of psalmodic adaptations—has closed. For the great majority of Americans who care to seek them out, almost any of the European works tabulated in ...
{"title":"Epilogue","authors":"P. Mercer-Taylor","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190842796.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190842796.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"IN THE DECADES leading up to the Civil War, the realms of classical music, Protestant Christian song, and mass-market popular music vibrantly converged in a single American repertoire. That convergence, the topic of this book, was temporary.\u0000 Few of the cultural conditions that brought this repertoire into being persist to the present day. The notion that the United States is a normatively Christian nation is far from extinct, but its ultimate extinction seems likely. And most of Protestantism’s cultural trappings have thankfully lost whatever veneer they once enjoyed of unselfconscious universality. Choral music, meanwhile, is still performed in professional, ecclesiastical, convivial, and domestic settings alike. But most music enjoyed by Americans in daily life is recorded music, and when they make music themselves, it is mostly other kinds of music they make. Perhaps most important, that gulf that separated antebellum Americans’ nascent awareness of European classical music as a thing of value from opportunities for the actual experience of that music—the gap whose bridging comprised a core justification for this repertoire of psalmodic adaptations—has closed. For the great majority of Americans who care to seek them out, almost any of the European works tabulated in ...","PeriodicalId":202403,"journal":{"name":"Gems of Exquisite Beauty","volume":"7 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132068544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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