The First New England School

The First New England School  (1770 - 1850)  Folk music hymns and early American orchestra music.
 

Thomas Webster The Village Choir, c.1847

The earliest American classical music consists of part-songs used in religious times.  The first music of this type in America were the psalm books, such as the Ainsworth Psalter.  The first music publication in English-speaking North America — indeed the first publication of any kind — was the Bay Psalm Book of 1640.

Many American composers of this period worked exclusively with European models, while others, such as William Billings, Supply Belcher, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, and Justin Morgan, also known as the First New England School, developed a native style almost entirely independent of the most prestigious European models, though it drew on the practice of West Gallery music composers such as William Tans'ur and Aaron Williams. Many of these composers were amateurs, and many were singers: they developed new forms of sacred music, such as the fuguing tune, suitable for performance by amateurs, and often using harmonic methods which would have been considered bizarre by contemporary European standards.  

Some of the most unusual innovators were composers such as Anthony Philip Heinrich, (1781 - 1861), who received some formal instrumental training but were entirely self-taught in composition.  Heinrich was a Bohemian businessman who was trapped in Boston due to financial ruin in the Napoleonic Wars in 1810.  He then decided to become a professional violinist and composer (he was America's first full time composer).  He traveled extensively throughout the interior of the young United States in the early 19th century, recording his experiences with colorful orchestral and chamber music which had almost nothing in common with the music being composed in Europe.  Heinrich was the first American composer to write for symphony orchestra, as well as the first to conduct a Beethoven symphony in the United States (in Lexington, Kentucky in 1817). 

William Henry Fry  (1813 - 1864)  The Macbeth Overture?



        Daniel Reed  (1757 - 1836)  "Windham"  (1785)