Music of the New American Nation: Sacred Music from 1780 to 1820 – serie

Samuel Babcock was an active Boston-area composer who made a significant contribution to the repertory of American psalmody. Best known for his tunebook, Middlesex Harmony, Babcock composed extended and plain psalm tunes, set pieces, fuging tunes, and anthems, and frequently used three-part vocal textures. He uniquely combined elements of both traditional and newer Methodist styles of psalmody. This edition includes 75 works known to be by Babcock, plus six of unknown attribution.

This volume brings together 79 sacred tunes by two Connecticut composers: Eliakim Doolittle, who wrote psalm and fuging tunes in an unpretentious, familiar idiom, and Timothy Olmsted, who wrote psalm tunes in a more sophisticated, florid musical style. This final edition in the Music of the New American Nation series includes a comprehensive index of tune names and first lines for all fifteen volumes.

This is the first modern edition of the collected works of Supply Belcher, Maine's most celebrated early composer, who was known in his day as the Handel of Maine. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Maine was part of the northeastern frontier, a sparsely settled area that held to the old ways. Thus, its compilers reprinted and singers sang the music of Billings, Read, Swan, Holden, and other Yankee psalmodists long after a reform movement had swept them from the galleries of southern New-England churches. Belcher was a man much honored in the region as a musician, a public servant, and a civic leader. Following military service in the Revolutionary War, he opened Belcher's Tavern, where local musicians frequently gathered for sings. In addition to being a composer, Belcher was also a singer, a violinist, and a prominent member of the Stoughton Musical Society. He published seventy-four works between l788, when his first tune appeared in print, and 1819, when his final contributions to psalmody were issued. As this edition of his collected works reveals, his vigorous and skillful pieces show him to have been an original and creative spirit in psalmody, and even today are worthy of attention and performance.

First Published in 1997. This series presents the music of early American composers of sacred music—psalmody, as it was called—in collected critical editions. Each volume has been prepared by a scholar who has studied the musical history of the period and the stylistic qualities of the composer. The purpose of the series is to present the music of important early American com posers in accurate editions for both performance and study. This volume presents the music of three composers who were active and influential in northwestern Connecticut during the 1780s and 1790s: Oliver Brownson, Alexander Gillet, and Solomon Chandler.

Part of the Music of the NEW AMERICAN NATION Sacred Music From 1780 To 1820 series. The collected works of Lewis Edson (1748-1820) Lewis Edson Jr. (1771-1845) and Nathaniel Billings (fl. 1794-1795

First Published in 1996. This series presents the music of early American composers of sacred music—psalmody, as it was called—in collected critical editions. The purpose of the series is to present the music of important early American composers in accurate editions for both performance and study. This volume comprises the music of one of the most highly regarded and widely published of early American psalmodists: Abraham Wood.