| The Choir |
| The Choir: or, Union Collection of Church Music. Consisting of a great variety of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, Anthems, &c. Original and Selected. Including Many Beautiful Subjects from the Works of Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Nauman, Marcello, Mehul, Himmel, Winter, Weber, Rossini and other eminent composers, harmonized and arranged expressly for this work. By Lowell Mason, Professor in the Boston Academy of Music; Editor of Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, Choral Harmony, Lyra Sacra, &c. Second Edition. Boston: Carter, Hendee and Co. 131 Washington Street. 1833. |
| It's hard not to have extremely mixed feelings about Lowell Mason. On the one hand, he looms large in Sacred Harp folklore as the evil urban Northerner who helped engineer the demise of shape-note and "old way" singing everywhere except for isolated portions of the deep South and Texas. On the other hand, he wrote and arranged around 1,200 psalm and hymn tunes by one estimate I've seen, and alone and with assistance edited an impressive number of sacred and secular songbooks that brought an ocean of usually simple, occasionally interesting music to singers, both of round and shaped notes, that survive in at least some canons. Boylston appeared first in The Choir, and I can't count the number of times I've sung it at Sacred Harp conventions. |
| Altogether, Mason included more than 470 plain tunes in The Choir. Many were composed/arranged as the title page indicates specifically for the new book; a certain number are carried over from earlier Mason books (Hebron, for instance;) and scattered throughout, often without attribution, are new or standard arrangements of English or American psalm tunes familiar to every congregation and choir. I have transcribed a pleasant arrangement of Samuel Holyoke's Arnheim; Daniel Read's Windham is present; Colchester, St. Ann's, St. Martin's, St. Thomas, Dundee, Burford, Silver Street, Park Street, Scotland: Mason still has a place for these gradually superannuating tunes in his new book, although in most cases I have not transcribed them for this online sampling. |
| In my attempt to direct your attention to especially good or interesting music, let me suggest two in the Rs--Rindge, set to "Let every mortal ear attend," and Riceborough, set to "From the cross uplifted high, Where the Saviour deigns to die." Another more curious production is Mount Auburn, the last tune in the book, a setting of "Cease ye mourners, cease to languish" by M.J.C. "a young lady, a pupil of the editor, who died on the 13th of July, 1833, aged 16 years. A short time before her death, and while yet in good health, she selected these words...and composed the music for them. The family of the deceased, at the request of the editor, have kindly consented to its publication in The Choir." Mason handles "On Jordan's stormy banks" with tunes like Topsham; "Let Zion and her sons rejoice" with Tarsus. Because so many of these tunes are psalm tunes, there's a built-in monotony with listening to 20 of them at a time: but Mason seems to have striven, even using the same compositional commonplaces dozens of times in the book, to bestow some uniqueness on each tune. |
| In addition to those already mentioned, try Hopkinton, Belknap, Bucksport, Mandell, Finland, Cedron, Tiber and Peru--and don't stop there, if you have time. After a while, profusion makes remembering individual gems more difficult. |