Finding Their Voices - Amherst College

many, it came to cause a variety of new problems, and eventually developed many of the
same issues it was designed to fix. Ministers used a limited number of tunes in their
sermons (often only up to three or four) and, as time went on, they each organically
developed their own variants. In addition, the minister often began lines without regard
to where the range of the melody lay in the voice, making it difficult for the congregation
to accurately repeat him.
Some believed that this mode of singing was ruining songs in worship.
According to Thomas Walters, an early eighteenth-century music instructor, psalm tunes
had become “miserably tortured, and twisted, and quavered, in some Churches, into a
horrid Medley of confused and disorderly Noises,” the “doubtful Conveyance of Oral
Tradition” had left the music “to the Mercy of every unskillful Throat to chop and alter,
twist and change, according to their infinitely divers and no less odd Humours and
Fancies.” 180 Very often each member of the congregation sang slightly different versions
of the same tune, resulting in “something so hideous and disorderly, as it is beyond
Expression bad.” Conventional performance practice seems to have taken up much time
in “shaking out Turns and Quavers” in a style unique to each singer, resulting in an
overall impression that “Five Hundred different tunes roared out at the same time, whose
perpetual interferings with one another, perplexed Jars, and unmeasured Periods, would
make a Man wonder at the false Pleasure, which they conceive in that which good Judges
of Musick and Sounds, cannot bear to hear.”
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180 Thomas Walters, Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained; or, an Introduction to the Art of Singing by
Note (1721). A “Recommendatory Preface” to the work was signed by fifteen prominent American
ministers, including two of John Cotton’s sons, Cotton Mather and Increase Mather. The following quotes
are from the same source.
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