Resurrecting America's Colonial Music

Readers of musical journalism will be aware that it is filled with a constant wailing and lamenting about how the contemporary American composer is ignored by opera companies, orchestras, soloists, and itinerant hummers. The complaint is based on a certain measure of truth, for which, given the nature of much self-proclaimed avant garde music, there may just be a reason. But a cursory tour of the Schwann Catalog will, I think, quickly convince one that the contemporary American composer is well represented on records. True, the records are not apt to emanate from Philips and EMI, nor do they exactly hold center stage at RCA--or even Columbia--these days. But "small" labels like CRI or Opus One or Desto seem quite happy to preserve the output of almost any American who can manage to apply penpoint to manuscript paper--or however composing is done now.

Our "classic" composers--those honest, capable, sometimes inspired, and usually derivative craftsmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have fared less well, though the need for novelty seems at last to be leading desperate publishers their way. (Whoever would have dreamed that there'd ever be a Mrs. H.H.A. Beach boom, except maybe from her grandchildren, the Beach Boys?) But, with the exception of William Billings, our pioneers of the Colonial era have, up until recently, gotten pretty short shrift.

Viewed from one angle--the usual one--there are obvious reasons for this neglect. First of all, most of our earliest composers were neither very ambitious nor, apparently, terribly gifted (by the measure of such of their contemporaries as Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, at any rate). Mostly they wrote music to be used in worship by musically unsophisticated Protestant congregations. Music for pleasure in the household was a late arrival (see the material on Francis Hopkinson elsewhere in this issue), and music for the theater and concert-hall was hardly worth the effort, there being very few theaters and/or concert-halls.

But recordings serve other purposes than to make available the creations of geniuses. They may, for example, provide insights into the past such as have been available to no other generation in all of human history. We have known all along what the "art" music of the eighteenth century sounded like. But it is only recently that we have had the opportunity to examine the taste, the musical ambience (if I may use that fashionable word), of our ordinary, everyday, common-man forefathers--to hear what constituted their hit parade, their oldies-but-goodies. No doubt we have the late Bicentennial to thank for this phenomenon in part, but it also seems to emanate from a growing awareness of this role of the phonograph. Such efforts as Neely Bruce's exploration of popular nineteenth century piano music, Gregg Smith's ongoing survey of American song, Nonesuch's efforts on behalf of early ''pop'' composers, and even Hans Kann's "111 Favorite Piano Pieces" have all served to evoke lost worlds for me.

The chief focus on this record, Daniel Bayley's A New Royal Harmony, brings to life what one might have heard in one of the more sophisticated New England churches in Revolutionary times. Most of the music is (not unexpectably) English and there are (not unsurprisingly) examples from such "serious" composers as Handel (or so it is claimed), Byrd, and Crofts. There are also several lesser lights of the time, and there are two pieces by James Lyon, one of our first important native writers. The record is filled out with such a set of keyboard variations as well-to-do householders might have a­mused themselves with--this one on a pop song (or actually two pop songs) set to a Handel tune which the annotator maddeningly fails to identify. The recording is under the direction of Gillian Anderson, an adventurous specialist in such matters. One of the soloists is John Vroom, who, for some reason, I imagine to be a motorcyclist.