1871‒1877

By now widely recognized as England’s leading composer, Arthur Sullivan devoted the first half of the 1870s to sacred works, including a massive Te Deum to celebrate the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid fever (1872), his most significant oratorio, The Light of the World (1873), forty-two original hymn tunes and seventy-five hymn tune arrangements and numerous sacred songs and ballads. The Light of the World broke significant new ground by dispensing with a narrator and for the first time in English oratorio making Jesus a real character who appeared and sang and interacted with other characters. As well as acting as editor for a major Anglican hymnal, Church Hymns and Tunes (1874), Sullivan wrote numerous hymn tunes, including the ever-popular ST GERTRUDE for ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’ and NOEL for ‘It came upon the midnight clear’. He may also have had a hand in ST CLEMENT for ‘The day, Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’. In 1877, sitting at the bedside of his dying brother, he wrote the tune for his sacred ballad, ‘The Lost Chord’ which became the best-selling song of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Sullivan

Arthur Sullivan is almost certainly the best loved and most widely performed British composer in history. Although best known for his comic opera collaborations with W.S. Gilbert, it was his substantial corpus of sacred music which meant most to him and for which he wanted to be remembered. Both his upbringing and training in church music and his own religious beliefs substantially affected both his compositions for the theatre and his more serious work, which included oratorios, cantatas, sacred ballads, liturgical pieces, and hymn tunes. Focusing on the spiritual aspects of Sullivan’s life, which included several years as a church organist, involvement in Freemasonry, and an undying attachment to Anglican church music, Ian Bradley uses hitherto undiscovered or un-noticed letters, diary entries, and other sources to reveal the important influences on his faith and his work. No saint and certainly no ascetic, Sullivan was a lover of life and enjoyed its pleasures to the full. At the same time he had a rare spiritual sensitivity, a simple and sincere Christian faith, an unusually generous disposition, and a unique ability to uplift, soften, and assure through both his character and his music that can best be described as a quality of divine emollient.

An Immigrant’s Musical Memoir

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.

Institutional Certification

The 1822 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music contains 21 psalm and hymn tunes drawn from the work of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, all based closely on adaptations already circulating in London. The volume represented a novel conceptual convergence of the stylistically Europeanized sacred tune books of the earlier “Ancient Music” movement and the Handel and Haydn Society’s own existing compilations of (non-psalmodic) classical music abstracts. With sales reaching around 50,000, this astonishingly popular volume provided thousands of Americans their first exposure to such adaptations. It also launched the career of its compiler Lowell Mason, who would emerge as the era’s most influential American musical figure, active as compiler, teacher, administrator, and conductor. Central as psalmodic adaptations of classical music were to this landmark 1822 volume, however, such adaptations did not immediately catch on, making only sporadic appearances in American tune books over the following fifteen years.

Antebellum Psalmody in Its Cultural Context

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.”

Gems of Exquisite Beauty

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, many Americans first encountered European classical music through excerpts captured in the form of psalm and hymn tunes. Psalmody was the United States’ best-selling form of popular music through the early 19th century, sales of tune books reaching in some instances into the hundreds of thousands. Tunes lifted from Haydn, Mozart, and other major European composers first found a regular place in this market in the early 1820s, hundreds appearing by the early 1850s. This book explores the place of this repertoire in 19th-century American life, surveying its historical rise and fall. The tradition’s foremost pioneer was Arthur Clifton, an accomplished London musician who emigrated to Baltimore in 1817. Clifton’s 1819 Original Collection—which included 21 psalmodic adaptations of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven’s work—was a commercial failure, but a pathbreaking harbinger of things to come. Lowell Mason’s 1822 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection—a runaway best-seller that launched Mason’s career as the era’s most influential American musician—also included 21 such adaptations, bringing the practice into broad public view. Only in the early 1840s, however, did the tradition catch fire, hundreds of such tunes appearing across a decade of feverish activity. This book’s final chapter steps back for a broad-ranging engagement with this repertoire in creative terms. Far beyond simple excerpts, the most ambitious of these adaptations represent inventive, resourcefully crafted conduits through which numerous dimensions of Europe’s musical practices were brought within reach of the American masses.

Towards an Authentic Nigeria Hymnody: The Study of Yoruba Hymnody

The indigenous hymnology has experienced a lot of tonality distortion in Nigeria due to the direct translation of Western hymn tunes to the indigenous hymns. Different scholars have identified this act of perversion, but little or no documentation can be found on the method(s) that can be used in correcting this perverse act. The focus of this paper is on Yoruba hymnody. In this light, the paper examines and discuss the abnormality found in Yoruba indigenous hymns, through an analytical content of three selected indigenous Yoruba hymns and propounds methods and implementation strategies towards correcting the aforementioned act of perversion. Findings revealed that most of the indigenous hymns had been distorted in meaning due to the deformation of the indispensable Yoruba tone language. The paper discusses and draws out specific lessons that would serve as channels and even methods for consideration during composition, especially by Nigerian art composers. Tackling this challenge from a unanimous perspective, the effort will address the articulation and use of tonal inflexions in Yoruba Nigerian hymns.

The First Piano Sonata

Ives’s First Piano Sonata (1901-1917, written concurrently with the Concord) is analyzed here to show differences between its formal design and the Concord’s. Particularly evident is its greater reliance on ragtime and quoted hymn tunes, including its jazzy rendition of “Bringing in the Sheaves.”