| The Bridgewater Collection throughout its life functioned as a storehouse of the best English psalm and hymn tunes "suited to every sober, sacred and religious purpose, and adapted to the use of public worship among all societies and denominations." In early editions, some American compositions, by the editors and a few others, were included; but after about 1816 almost all of these were deleted--two exceptions being Greenwalk and Pilesgrove, the latter a tune Nahum Mitchell rescued from obscurity, arranged more simply, and included in the collection starting with the 1816 edition. Compare his arrangement with George J. Webb's in the Massachusetts Collection pages, and with Heavenly Flight in the Harmonia Sacra pages. It was a well-liked, long-lived tune indeed: Walker included it in his Christian Harmony,Cayce in The Good Old Songs in 1913. Before Lowell Mason took up the cudgels for "Better Music" in the 1820s, Bartholomew Brown and his fellow editors had been defining what good music was for New England choirs for 20 years. If there was disagreement between the older and younger tunebook compilers, it may have been simply that the elder men selected almost exclusively among English tunes, gradually excluding their own very competent works (Brown's Mount Zion is p.220 in the Sacred Harp), whereas Mason and his new generation of Better Music advocates not only included their own work, but also arranged selections by Continental, mostly German composers like Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, and a sea of lesser early Romantics. |