Lowell Mason
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Lowell_mason.jpg
Portrait of Lowell Mason
Lowell Mason (1792-1872) was a leading figure in American church music, the composer of over 1600 hymns, many of which are often sung today. He was also responsible for the first teaching of music in American public schools.
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Life
Mason was born and grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, but spent the first part of his adulthood in Savannah, Georgia, where he worked first in a dry-goods store, then in a bank. He had very strong amateur musical interests, and studied music with the German teacher Frederick L. Abel, eventually starting to write his own music. He also became a leader in the music of his local Presbyterian church, where he served as choir director and organist. Under his initiative, his church also created the first Sunday school for black children in America.
Following an earlier British model, Mason embarked on the task of producing a hymnal whose tunes would be drawn from the work of European classical composers such as Haydn and Mozart. Mason had great difficulty in finding a publisher for this work. Ultimately, it was published (1822) by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, which was one of the earliest American organizations devoted to classical music. Mason's hymnal turned out to be a great success. The work was at first published anonymously--Mason felt that his main career was as a banker, and he hope not to damage his career prospects.
In 1827, Mason moved to Boston, where he continued his banking career for some time but also became music director for several churches. Mason became an important figure on the Boston musical scene: he served as president of the Handel and Haydn Society, taught music in the public schools, was co-founder of the Boston Academy of Music (1833), and in 1838 was appointed music superintendent for the Boston school system.
In later life, Mason continued his work of teaching, writing, publishing, and organizing; he remained an important and influential figure throughout his life. He died on a large estate he had purchased in New Jersey, near New York City.
Assessment
Modern scholars (for example, the editors of the New Grove) give Mason a mixed assessment. Mason was strongly focused on European classical music, and took it to be a model for what Americans should be singing and performing. The famous hymn and Christmas carol "Joy to the World" is a good example: it is debated whether the tune of this hymn is by George Frideric Handel or by Mason himself, but it certainly sounds inspired by European classical music.
Mason is given credit for popularizing European classical music in a region where it was seldom performed, and since his day the United States has been firmly part of the global region in which this form of music is cultivated.
Where scholars sometimes denigrate Mason's work concerns one result of his introduction of European models for American hymnody: it choked off a flourishing and participatory native tradition of church music which was already producing outstanding compositions from composers such as William Billings. Mason and his colleagues (notably his brother Timothy Mason) did their best to characterize this music as backwoods material, "unscientific" and unworthy of the attention of modern Americans, and they propagated their views very effectively with a new form of singing school, set up to replace the old singing schools dating from colonial times.
In comparison with the earlier forms of American sacred music, the music that Mason and his colleagues propagated would be considered by many musicians to be rhythmically more homogeneous and harmonically less forceful. By emphasizing the soprano line, it also made the other choral parts less interesting to sing. Lastly, the new music generally required the support of an organ, which, perhaps only incidentally, was a Mason family business.
The earlier tradition retreated to the inland rural South, where it resisted efforts at conversion, surviving in the form of (for example) Sacred Harp music, a genre that in modern times has actually grown in popularity as Americans in all regions rediscover the vigor of pre-Lowell Mason American sacred music.
Other
Lowell Mason was the father of Henry Mason (1831–90), the founder of the Mason and Hamlin firm. Mason and Hamlin first built organs, but in the late 19th century went on to become a manufacturer of top-quality and technologically innovative pianos. It was run for most of its history by Mason descendants.
Books
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (published in hard copy and available as a fee site on line) provides good coverage of Mason's life and work.
- White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, by George Pullen Jackson (1932), out of print but available in many libraries, offers a vivid account of how Lowell and Timothy Mason won the battle for their own kind of sacred music in the city of Cincinnati.
External links
- A brief biography with portraits (http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/m/a/s/mason_l.htm)
- Mason's 'The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music' (http://www.centre.edu/web/library/sc/special/music/mason_boston.html) Title page and sample hymn, from the Web site of Centre College.
- A vividly worded attack on Mason's career accomplishments can be read at the Web site of Amaranth Publishing (http://www.nationwide.net/~amaranth/ShapeNoteSinging.htm#mason)de:Lowell Mason