The Public School Singing Book
I had a song stuck in my head this morning. Thankfully I don’t remember it now. Songs like this come unbidden, related to words or phrases, rarely inspired by melody or rhythm. No one hums a fragment of a jingle because they are seeking beauty or inspiration. Rather, advertisers capitalized on what Lowell Mason, the president of the Boston Academy of Music, called “useful associations.” In his 1834 Manual of the Boston Academy of Music, Mason argued that music was the most effective way to cement these associations: the good feeling of singing with one’s peers would meld with an appreciation for whatever one sang about.
For Mason, the most useful associations were those guided by Christian morality, likely not advertisements for Little Caesar’s pizza (pizza) or Ford trucks. But, Mason also averred that music could inspire love of country, of family, of nature, and even a love of singing school itself.
Singing had other benefits, too. Mason claimed that training in singing made better speakers and even suggested that droning clergymen’s tones would be improved by practice in singing:
It is as necessary to give a pleasing variety to the tones in order to produce good speaking as good singing; and the musical intervals should be as much under the control, in the former case as in the latter. The tones in speaking should have that gradual swell and vanish which give beau ty to singing. If our public speakers had early been taught to sing, and continued the practice, we should not hear their too often drawling tones, particularly those of clergymen. A speaker who cannot sing, is generally monotonous and dull.
Beyond these social benefits, singing was good for the body, according to Mason and the many misters and doctors he cites:
It was the opinion of Dr. Rush, that singing by young ladies whom the customs of society debar from many other kinds of healthy exercise , is to be cultivated , not only as an accomplishment , but as a means of preserving health. […] Besides its salutary operation in soothing the cares of domestic life, it has a still more direct and important effect. ‘I here introduce a fact,’ says the doctor, which has been suggested to me by my profession; that is, the exercise of the organs of the breast by singing, contributes very much to defend them from those diseases, to which the climate and other causes expose them.’
The Public School Singing Book was one of hundreds of similar songbooks published in the transitional period between the rise of the Public School singing movement in the 1830s and its standardization by 1860 in the United States. The Public School Singing Book included many of Mason’s favored genres including seasonal songs, some religious hymns, and patriotic airs, as well as a few English and Scottish ballads, temperance songs, and a few written to celebrate the experience of Public School itself.
On the cover and title page is a pianoforte, the immediate predecessor of the modern piano, which resonates with more associations than just musical ones. According to probate records, fewer than one in one hundred households in the United States owned one of these instruments in the early part of the nineteenth century. The pianoforte was equally a badge of gentility and a musical instrument.
Another Boston music crusader drew a sharp line even among these privileged few, writing in the Music Intelligencer: “the only thing that distinguishes ‘decent people’ from the lower and less distinguished” was whether someone in the household could play this elaborate piece of furniture or not.
It’s possible that the singer who tucked this book in his pocket never heard a pianoforte and certainly never played one. But, he had all the notes on his person, in his ear, and, if Mason is to be believed, their useful associations rang out in the singer’s life, long after he’d closed the book.
Mysteriously, this little copy is missing the few songs listed in the index that ring still in my ears: pages 33 through 48, which include the song “Auld Lang Syne” are gone without a trace. There are other songs in the book that build on the old Scottish melody, though. And it would have been as easy for singers to hear in 1848 as it is for me today. Once made, the old acquaintance of song is rarely forgot.
