![]() ![]() One of the most common forms of music in colonial American was Psalm singing, both at church services and at community meetings. Indeed, another writer says, “The essential genius…of Billings was recognizing that full independence of Europe would eventually be gained only after we’d formed our own cultural roots.” One writer called his work a “stark, primitive style of vocal composition.” Emerging from the rationalist age, with no trace of classical elegance, it is an artistic declaration of independence. His music was idiosyncratic with a dissonance that foreshadowed Charles Ives and did not seem to have any cultural continuity with anything. He had a tremendous bass voice and seemed uninterested in any easy beauty of A singing class that he organized in 1774 became the Stoughton Musical Society in 1786.Ĭalled by biographers a gargoyle, Billings was rather unkempt and blind in one eye with a short leg and a withered arm. William was a friend of such figures in the American War for Independence as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, and decided that he could make his living as a musician, so he gave up tanning and devoted himself to teaching, conducting, composing, and publishing music, and was teaching choral singing by the age of 22. He possibly received musical instruction from John Barry, a local choirmaster at the New South Church, but for the most part he was largely self-taught, yet he became one of the foremost representatives of early American music. In order to help support his family, young Billings trained as a tanner. ![]() ![]() At the age of 14, the death of his father stopped Billings’s formal schooling. Billings was born on Octo(some sources give the year as 1747) at Boston, MA. William Billings (Octo– September 26, 1800) is regarded as the first American choral composer. ![]()
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