Before jumping into the history of music in Old North, what could we have heard in other Boston churches when this church was founded in 1723? The Congregational churches which dominated New England were the descendants of the Puritans. Singing was an important part of their three-hour-long services, and had been for a century. One of the things Puritans wanted to purify was the music of the church — They would only sing the psalms, and would only sing unaccompanied. A deacon would “line out” a phrase, and the congregation would follow. [It may have sounded something like the Gaelic psalm singing still practiced on Isle of Lewis.] Originally, the congregation would have sung in unison, but over the years singers added their own flourishes and changes accumulated, until by the 1720s the singing was described by some as a cacophony, with everyone singing their own tune, at their own tempo.
Some ministers try to reform the music in their congregations: They want the singing to be “by rule” — There will be one tempo, there will be a written melody, and it will be taught with a solfège system like our “do re mi”. [This develops into the shape note singing tradition.] There are bitter arguments: For some, singing by rule was hardly different than praying by rule, that is, by the Anglican Prayer Book, and these descendants of the Puritans were not going to accept that.
Meanwhile, what would you have heard in Anglican worship in Boston? Well, before Old North there is only one Anglican Church in Boston, King’s Chapel, and it is much smaller than what you see on that corner today: The current stone structure was built around the earlier wooden chapel so they could continue using it during construction. Congregational minister Thomas Brattle’s own organ went to King’s Chapel after his own congregation had refused the donation. (Congregational churches in Boston would only welcome pipe organs after the revolution.)
What music is being played on that organ? In England, Purcell had written some sacred music the late 17th century, and Handel is composing music for the church in the 1720s [for example, the Chandos Anthems], but for both, it is a small part of their output. The psalms also predominate in the singing of Anglican churches at this time, but they would have used different, more poetic translations than the Congregationalists and in the cathedrals would have sung in polyphony. They are also singing a few non-biblical texts, like the Te Deum, a hymn of praise… but that dates to the 300s, so it’s still pretty old! It’s nothing like the Lutheran Church where many original texts were written and sung.
The arguments about organs and the right way to sing should remind us that Congregationalists weren’t monolithic, and that some ministers might have been getting tired of the New England traditions, particularly as ties with England were getting stronger. In New Haven, the Congregational rector of Yale announces that he is not sure about the validity of his ordination. This is a scandal for most New Englanders, but in Boston the men trying to start a new Anglican Church are excited: They begin a correspondence with Timothy Cutler, who accepts their offer, but first he will need to be ordained by a bishop: the right way, in his new way of thinking. This entails a trip across the ocean: There were no bishops in the colonies, and there would be none until after the Revolution.
What would Cutler and his companions have experienced in Christopher Wren’s churches in London, and at Oxford and Cambridge where they receive honorary degrees? In those churches the performances would have been polished, but the countryside is dotted with smaller chapels where the music takes its inspiration from Handel, but the musicians aren’t pros, and the compositions themselves don’t follow all the rules of music composition, with odd chord progressions and crunchy parallel fifths. This develops into west gallery music, and while Cutler brought back his memories, and perhaps the plans, of Wren’s churches, other influences from other parts of society are also crossing the Atlantic and have their influence as well.
When the congregation holds their first service here in December 1723 it wouldn’t have been polished, but by Christmas the next year the chandeliers had been hung. In the 1730s the first organ is installed here, a much smaller instrument than what we see now, but it doesn’t prove entirely satisfactory. After making repairs on the previous instrument Thomas Johnston builds this organ in 1759. (Or at least parts of it: one estimate is that 10% of it dates to the 18th century, but we’ll get back to that.) It’s supposed to be the first organ made from all colonial parts. Let’s think about the economic background to the Revolution — colonies were considered a source of raw materials, and the sophisticated manufacturing happens in England, but that organ is an implicit challenge to the economic model of the British Empire, even though the coat of arms of the king hung on it.
However, that organ isn’t the only instrument in this church. You can see an additional rank of pipes beside the organ case now, but in the 18th century you could slide behind the organ, and you’d find a passage through the three foot thick wall of the steeple. Up a narrow flight of stairs and you’re in a room with eight heavy ropes hanging through holes in the ceiling: Follow those ropes up to the very top of the brick portion of our tower and resting in a frame of massive oak timbers are eight bells, the heaviest weighing 1500 pounds. When they are rung, the bells swing as pendulums, turning all the way over and back. Here in the sanctuary you hardly hear them, but you can see the chandeliers swaying, just slightly.
The bell were cast in Gloucester, England in 1744. Bell casting in Gloucester goes back to the 11th century — It’s an ancient tradition — but at the same time, in the 18th century the Rudhall firm is using metal lathe technology that anticipates the tools and techniques of the Industrial Revolution.
The bells here sound an F-major scale, but they aren’t used to play melodies: instead it’s a tradition called change ringing. The bell-ringers will go around the circle, each pulling their rope in turn to play a descending scale, and then on the next round the order of two bells will change, and then another two, going through a series of permutations until they arrive back at that descending scale. The bells are rung today by the MIT Guild of Bell Ringers: there is some overlap with the MIT Square Dancers — both communities combine music and a kind of collaborative puzzle solving.
But who were the first bell ringers? We actually have their signatures here, and you might recognize one of the names: That’s Paul Revere. Although he doesn’t worship at this church as an adult, he had a job here as a teenager. I imagine him climbing up the steeple to the very top and looking out, and I imagine him returning to those memories in middle age when he’s thinking about how to send a signal across the the Charles River.
We can’t talk about the sounds of Old North without mentioning The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. What strikes me when I re-read it is the silence — Describing Revere’s crossing of the river, Longfellow writes that Revere “With muffled oar / silently rowed to the Charlestown shore”, or he describes Copp’s Hill like this: “[there] lay the dead / In their night-encampment on the hill / wrapped in silence so deep and still” — It almost sounds like a ghost story. It also paints a picture of Paul Revere as a man absolutely alone, and that is one of the liberties Longfellow takes with the facts — We see the historical Paul Revere always joining and organizing groups: The Sons of Liberty and the North-End Caucus, and we might see it starting here as a bell ringer learning his part.
However, we shouldn’t imagine that the bells have been rung exactly this way for three hundred years. When fire sprinklers were added in the tower, they ran the piping right between the bells so they couldn’t rock back and forth: For most of their history the bells were rung with just a rope attached to the clapper. Today, even if the whole bell swings as it originally did, the axel now has ball bearings, instead of just resting in a greased channel.
We can think about other ways the music in this church has changed over the years. The American Revolution is a challenge for this church: It had closed for some years after the evacuation. The first minister after the Revolution is a British chaplain, Stephen Lewis, who had been captured and imprisoned as a prisoner of war, but he saw a community here which needed his service. As the new Episcopal Church comes together in the United States they decide the service could be shorter — They obviously don’t need to pray for the king, but they also cut out other redundancies: Before the revolution, the service called for saying the Our Father five times over the course of the Sunday service.
Besides changing the spoken words, there’s also an openness to new hymn texts at this time. This trend had begun outside the Anglican Church: Isaac Watts is the first prominent author of new hymns in English. He starts with the psalms but translates them very freely, making connections to the life of Jesus. Besides writing hymns like “Joy to the World” in 1719, he also writes a textbook on logic that is used into the 19th century.
A couple hymn writers have preached at this church: Charles Wesley passes through Boston in 1736 on his way back to London. He and his brother and worked for a year near Savannah, Georgia, but it did not go well. He is not well, and a member of the vestry here is a doctor. Although I’m not sure being bled is good for him, Charles is grateful and preaches here before continuing back to England. In 1738 he will write the lyrics of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. His hymns point towards a more personal, more emotional experience of religion.
William Croswell isn’t a name I’d expect you to know, and I don’t think any of his hymns are still sung, but he is the minister here in the 1830s, and he does write many hymns for the congregation. At one point he’s excited by a new Christmas carol he’s composed: the whole congregation will be able to sing it, and the organ won’t have anything to do. He sincerely wants the church to more welcoming, and after leaving Old North, he is the first minister at Church of the Advent, the first free Episcopal church in Boston. Until then, you would have needed to purchase a pew to worship in an Episcopal church.
We shouldn’t take from this anecdote that Croswell had anything against organs: to the contrary, he marries the church organist, Amanda Tarbell. It’s interesting that throughout the 18th century the organists are all men, but something changes in the 19th century. Viewed from one perspective, it looks like new opportunities are being opened to women, but there is another way of looking at it: The increasing prominence of church organs in both America and England in the early 19th century displaced older forms where the congregations had more independence, the Shape Note and West Gallery traditions mentioned earlier. We might see the singing of the congregation subordinated to the pipe organ, and a female organist subordinated to a male minister.
Parts of this organ would be familiar to Amanda Tarbell, but much is new. In 1990 the entire organ was disassembled and taken to the farm and workshop of David A Moore in Pomfret Vermont. Just as it was assembled from local materials in the 1759, Moore used many materials from his own farm. If old maple trees are no longer used for sugaring, they can be cut and planed and used to make new cabinets, and from old dairy cows comes leather to line the wind chest. There’s now an air pump that replaces manual bellows: it fills the passage in the wall that John Pulling and Robert Newman would have passed through with the lanterns. Apart from that, the mechanisms of this organ are similar to those that might have been part of the original construction in 1759. It’s now a tracker organ — There are rods physically connecting the keys to air supply for each pipe, and when you have all the stops pulled out you can feel it in the keys. One big difference is the pipes at the back. English organs of the 18th century did not have a pedal register, and so the original organ case didn’t have room for those huge base pipes either. However, they are a requirement for German organ music, so Moore decided to set them unobtrusively against the wall.
David A Moore is part of a larger resurgence of interest in historic organ building methods. He apprenticed with Charles Fisk who had pioneered the reintroduction of tracker organs: After WWII Fisk had studied the historic instruments in Europe, but during the war he had been at Los Alamos. He later wrote to his parents: “Divided evenly over the number of people on the project, each member is responsible for the death of four Japanese… if you feel like offering a prayer for the human race, now is a good time.”
We can end on that note: Music everywhere and in every period has been a way of expressing feelings that can’t fit into words. In this church, music is one way of hearing 300 years of history, and every Sunday it still helps people to join in worship and fellowship.