The First American Born Composer

I don't know whether Francis Hopkinson is in the Guinness Book of Records (block that pun!), but he ought to be, because, unless there have been recent discoveries of which I am unaware, he stands as the first native-born American composer to turn out a piece of secular "art" music. Of course there had been psalm and hymn tunes for home consump­tion from the beginning, and fifty miles to the north of Hopkinson's Philadelphia birthplace the refugee Moravian Brethren (spiritual descendents of John Hus and the first established Protestants) were enthusiastically keeping up in Bethlehem the musico-religious traditions of their German homeland. But Hopkinson was first in his field. Nor does it take anything away from him that Wilfrid Mellers (Music in a New Found Land) sneeringly relegates him to the European-imitative "genteel" tradition (which later produced figures like Heinrich and Foster) rather than to the rough-hewn and revolutionary "primitive" (ergo True American) tradition (which produced Billings and Ives.)

Hopkinson (or Frankie the Hop, as he was known on Market St.) is an interesting figure. Born in 1737, he became a successful lawyer, and a well-known writer and satirist. He was the first student ever enrolled in what is now the University of Pennsylvania. He was an ardent patriot, a member of the Constitutional Convention, and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. An enthusiastic amateur musician, he played the harpsichord quite well, invented a new method for quilling that instrument, supplied his friend Ben Franklin's glass harmonica with a keyboard, and anticipated Maelzel's time-keeping ticker. Four of his songs were once recorded by Margaret Truman, but more recently the whole set has been made available by the Gregg Smith Singers in their survey of American song for Vox.

The "Oratorial Entertainment" America Independent has been called our first opera, though it is more cantata or pageant than music-drama. The text has long been extant (it is Hopkinson's) but the music vanished in the distant past. Gillian Anderson, the conductor of this performance, recently discovered that, in the pastiche tradition of the times, Hopkinson had not actually written the music, but had borrowed it from Handel, Jommelli, Arne and others. She was thus able to approximate what the first audience heard that March evening in 1781, when the Revolution was up for grabs. The plot is rather allegorically simple-minded. A priest and the genii of France and America stand at the door of Minerva's temple and implore her to tell them of America's future. Eventually she appears and informs them that things will be hunky-dory. Nevertheless Franklin's daughter, a placid lady come to hear her husband sing the priest's role, could not hold back the tears. Another auditor noted that Miss Bond, the Minerva, "sings very smartly for a Philadelphian.'' The present performance comes as close to recreating this event as we shall probably ever hear.

I might note that the Hopkinson musical tradition continues. Francis' son Thomas wrote "Hail! Columbia." The most recent Hopkinson while a student at the University where I earn my bread, back when it was a last holdout of American Maleness, had the guts to sing a lieder recital, unbidden. He'd had no training other than the privilege of living in a musical family, though he has a good bass voice. He could not find the texts for his Mussorgsky group in Russian, so transliterated them from recordings and had a Russian faculty-wife coach him. All things considered, the recital was a triumph and a credit to his ancestor.