Program Notes by Walter Brassert, from the CpM concert of May 19, 1974.
Born in Boston in 1746 of humble parents, as a young man Billings was apprenticed to a tanner. He soon began scribbling music on hides with chalk, and before long he hung out his shingle “Billings Music.” A picturesque figure, blind in one eye, with a withered arm, legs of uneven length, and a rasping voice that in singing became a bellow, Billings had an energy and enthusiasm that soon made him a great influence as a teacher and composer, a man whose work provided the spark that set America’s dormant musical life going.
In 1770, the year of Beethoven’s birth, Billings produced what has been called a “musical declaration of independence”, a volume engraved in Boston by Paul Revere entitled “The New England Psalm Singer.” Naive, full of vitality and gusto, this collection broke with the traditional English psalm books used in America since the publication of the “Bay Psalm Book” in 1640, and presented a fresh style that was Billings’ own. Eight years later, he published “The Singing Master’s Assistant,” introducing his unique creation.. .the first “fuguing music,” a new kind of hymn tune containing sections in free fugal form, where the voices enter one at a time in polyphonic imitation.
With his fuguing music, Billings brought home the pleasures of polyphonic contest to simple folks who would otherwise not have dared to venture so far afield in either singing or listening to music. To a man used to singing hymns in unison, Billings’ fuguing settings of familiar hymns must truly have seemed revolutionary. They were sung fast and with great enthusiasm by church choirs and Revolutionary soldiers alike. The fuguing tune became one of the most popular forms of the period, and survived for seventy-five years, until superceded about 1850 by the more solemn and sentimental hymns of the Victorian period.
Although he studied a few treatises on music, Billings had no formal training. He readily declared that he was not “confined to any Rules for Composition by any that went before” him and that “Nature is the Best Dictator for all the hard, dry rules will not enable any Person to form an Air without Genius. Nature must inspire the thought.” He relished octaves and consecutive fifths, and combinations of dissonance that were ahead of his time.
Several of Billings’ tunes were intimately connected with the Revolution. Chester, first published in 1770 at about the time of the infamous Boston Massacre, became one of the most rousing Revolutionary tunes, sung both in the churches and by the soldiers. During the siege of Boston, Billings was a mere nine miles away in Watertown, the Whigs’ temporary capitol. Here he “sat down and wept” as he poured out his Lamentation Over Boston. Despite their crudities of structure, these anthems represent high points in the growth of an American vernacular art.
Billings’ “Singing Master’s Assistant” contained not only patriotic anthems but also his chorus called “Jargon”, the most dissonant bit of music before the advent of Charles Ives. Regarding its performance, Billings says:
In order to do this piece ample justice, the concert must be made of vocal and instrumental music. Let it be performed in the following manner, viz. Let an Ass bray the bass, let the fileing of a saw carry the Tenor, let a hog who is extream hungry squeel the counter, and let a cart-wheel, which is heavy loaded, and that has been long without grease, sqeek the treble; and if the concert should appear to be too feeble you may add the cracking of a crow, the howling of a dog, the squalling of a cat; and what would grace the concert yet more, would be the rubbing of a wet finger upon a window glass. This last mentioned instrument no sooner salutes the drum of the ear, but it instantly conveys the sensation to the teeth; and if all these in conjunction should not reach the cause, you may add this most inharmonical of all sounds, ‘Pay me that thou owest.’
On September 10, 1800, Billings died in poverty and was buried in the Boston Common.