Lowell Mason (January 8, 1792- August 11, 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 largely responsible for
introducing music into American public schools, and is considered to be the first important music educator in the United States. In the last part of his career, as music director of the Fifth
Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, he radically transformed American church music from a practice of having
professional choirs and accompaniment to congregational singing accompanied by organ music.
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 the Independent 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.
A tune from Mason's Handbook for the Boston Academy
In 1827, Mason moved to Boston, where he continued his banking career for some time but also became music director for three
churches including the Hanover Street whose pastor was the famous Lyman Beecher, in a six-month rotation. 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 the 1830s, Mason set to music the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb". In 1845 political machinations in the Boston school committee led to the
termination of his services.
In 1851, at the age of 59, Mason retired from Boston musical activity and moved to New York City where his sons, Daniel and
Lowell, Jr. had a music business. On December 20, 1851 he set sail to Europe. During his tour of Europe in 1852 he developed a
great interest and enthusiasm for congregational singing, especially that in the German churches of Nicolaikirche in Leipzig and
the Kreuzkirche in Dresden.
Following his return to New York City he accepted the position as music director in 1953 for the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian
Church which had just completed construction of a new church edifice on Nineteenth Street. He immediately disbanded its choir and
orchestra and installed an organ with his son, William, serving as organist. During his tenure, which lasted until 1860, he
developed congregational singing to the point where the church was known has having the finest congregational singing in the
city. In 1859 Mason, along with Edwards A. Parks and Austin Phelps published the "Sabbath Hymn and Tune Book".
In 1860 he retired to his estate in Orange, New Jersey, where he remained active in the Congregational Church there. He
remained an important and influential figure throughout his life. He died on his estate he had purchased in 1872 - an old man,
and full of days (Job 41:17).
Lowell Mason
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.
The final part of his career at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church probably had the most enduring impact on American church
music. Mason made the dramatic shift personally from viewing church congregations as utterly devoid of any propensity for singing
to one in which he vigorously promoted congregational singing and eliminated all professional musicians save the organist.
Although Presbyetians were slow in their acceptance of this radical change, congregational singing, in time, became the
accepted standard in all denominations to one extent or another, with the Roman Catholic Church being the last holdout until the
latter decades of the twentieth century. It is only within recent years with the advent of Contemporary Christian Music in
Pentecostal and other Evangelical churches that church music is now making a broad shift back from congregational singing to
music led by "worship teams" and "praise teams."
Relatives
Lowell Mason was the father of Henry Mason (the founder of the Mason and Hamlin firm), as well as composer William
Mason.
Further reading
- 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
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