and follows this up with the perplexing injunction:
'Be silent, but speak out.'
Owing to the efforts of John Cotton and other cultured clergymen the people as a whole soon came to accept singing as proper to divine service, but many decades passed before they could be persuaded that the cultivation of the voice or the use of any outward means to acquire skillfulness in singing was decent or godly. Not to the outward voice, they argued, but to the voice of the heart did God lend ear; and, though their singing was verily as the bellowing of the bulls of Bashan, it mattered not except to the ears of their neighbors, who, in truth, must have been sufficiently calloused to the discord of harsh sounds. This peculiar attitude lasted until well into the eighteenth century. Even as late as 1723 the 'Cases of Conscience,' to which we have referred, contained such questions as:
'Whether you do believe that singing in the worship of God ought to be done skillfully?' and 'whether you do believe that skillfulness in singing may ordinarily be gained in the use of outward means by the blessing of God?' By the efforts of enlightened clergymen like Mather, Symmes, Dwight, Eliot, Walter, and Stoddard the people of New England were finally brought to a realization of the fact that their praise would be just as acceptable to God if offered on the key; but their conversion was a slow and painful process. Two decades of the eighteenth century had passed before they began to pay any attention to the cultivation of church music, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, this awakening interest coincided with the first faint stirrings of a general musical life in the Puritan colonies.
W. D. D.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The sentence quoted opens Frederic Louis Ritter's 'Music in America.' In the next sentence the author admits the prior arrival of the Cavaliers on these shores, but hastens to add that they exercised very little influence on American musical development. 'It is a curious historical fact,' he says, 'that earnest interest in musical matters was first taken by the psalm-singing Puritans.' It is curious. We quote further: 'From the crude form of a barbarously sung, simple psalmody there rose a musical culture in the United States which now excites the admiration of the art-lover, and at the same time justifies the expectation and hope of a realization, at some future epoch, of an American school of music.' Quantum sufficit. Louis C. Elson, in his 'History of American Music,' also tells us that 'the true beginnings of American music ... must be sought in ... the rigid, narrow, and often commonplace psalm-singing of New England.' If these things be so, well may the American composer exclaim in the words of the immortal Sly 'Now, Lord be thanked for my good amends!'
[2] We are leaving out of consideration the Spanish settlement of Florida as well as the French settlement of Quebec, and have in mind only those early colonies which formed the nucleus of the United States.
[3] See Max Seiffert in Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1891.
[4] Thomas Morley, 'A Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke,' 1597.