The Bay Psalm Book tercentenary, 1698-1998.

Krummel, D.W.

In 1698, the Boston printers Bartholomew Green and John Allen brought out a ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book.(1) In it one sees the first music printed in the British colonies. Music had been printed in the New World as early as the 1540s in Mexican service books, nearly a century before even the first Bay Psalm Book of 1640. The music printing in Mexico soon died out, however: the 1698 Bay Psalm Book was to begin a bibliographical lineage that continues to today. We honor it on its three hundredth birthday.

None of the eight earlier editions of the Bay Psalm Book have music. Whose idea was it to include the notes? My candidate is Increase Mather, who was living in London between 1688 and 1691 as a spokesman for the colonists. Here he would have heard of the Playfords, whose name today evokes spicy song texts, but then was identified with music of all kinds, promoted through the printing press. The Playfords' own psalm books were Anglican, however: the music of the ninth Bay Psalm Book understandably resembles that seen in a London book, also issued in 1698, by Mather's fellow dissenter John Patrick.(2)

We may still wonder what the printed music was meant to accomplish. Musical notation was not common in early America: it could be seen in imported printed books, but manuscript copy is rarely found, so as to beg the question of who in the colonies ever used it. Certainly no congregation shivering in January in a poorly lit sanctuary - especially one that for sight-reading would have needed to move between minuscule words on one page and barely legible notes many pages ahead. More likely, the text was meant as authority and aide memoire for respected leaders of the flock who could read solfege and with lusty voices sing to the greater glory of God, if not necessarily to the musical delight of each other. While we today find His ways beyond all human understanding, in mysterious ways God, through His deputies, clearly did bless this Information Transfer Process. But let us leave theology and return to bibliography.

Some landmarks of printing are breathtaking: their historic mission is clear. The Gutenberg Bibles come to mind. This ninth Bay Psalm Book falls at the other end of the spectrum. Like its predecessors and, successors, it is fat and fragile in 12s, signed A-S, with 440 pages.(3) This is a book that bibliographers would kill to tear apart to study many interesting questions.(4) (Rare book curators would murder them if they tried and likely be acquitted.) A six-leaf appendix was added in 1699 and is seen in both surviving copies.(5)

The music was printed from sixty-three wood blocks, each barely three-eighths of an inch high and just under two inches long, for the treble and bass of each of thirteen tunes. These were spread over eleven pages at the end of the last gathering, usually six staves to a page but once five and once seven. The treble and bass for the same music thus sometimes turn up on different pages. Whoever took care of the imposition probably used makeshift furniture and was likely musically illiterate. Sight-reading was probably never intended: after all, the words were on still different pages. Solmization syllables (the letters m, f, s, and l) below the music are set in movable type. All told, analytical bibliographers cannot be very happy describing the book's production.

Nor do we know much about the distribution. It was available from Michael Perry, "under the west-end of the Town House" in Boston. A press run of several hundred copies seems a fair guess.(6) The ninth edition is far less famous than the first, but it is also far scarcer. Two copies survive, both with evidence of their early owners: at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, signed by William Davis in 1712, and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, signed by Benjamin Dolbeare in 1725.(7) Of the early inventories of the Mather personal collections, none of them mention our 1698 book.(8)

The 1698 Bay Psalm Book being a landmark in the history of the printing press in America in the service of music, let us ask: How over the years have music in general, and this book in particular, fit on our country's music shelves? Let us look at the seven intervening fifty-year intervals in reflecting on our country's changing world of music printing.

* 1748. The Bay Psalm Book was still being reissued. The tenth edition (1702) uses the earlier music blocks, but the pages have been reset. An eleventh edition does not survive. In later editions, the music was engraved on copper plates and printed intaglio rather than from the raised surfaces of woodblocks. The later editions further reflect increasingly passionate worries that the Lord would be angry with badly performed music. The depth of His anger, or of the badness of the music, is hard to know. The Bay Psalm Book lineage ends with the historian and collector Thomas Prince, collector of copies of the 1640 edition for which he was later famous. Music did not greatly concern him, however: he may never have owned a ninth edition. Prince's version (the twenty-seventh edition, of 1758) has no music: if you wanted it, you could buy one of several supplementary gatherings and bind it in at the end.

Secular music, still uncommon in church-minded New England, was more commonly seen elsewhere in the colonies. The will of Cuthbert Ogle, of York County, Virginia (near Williamsburg), dated 1755, identifies instrumental music of Handel and his contemporaries, probably in London editions, although none of it survives.(9) Two music shelves now need to be distinguished, one for what was published to be sold, another for what was acquired in hopes that it would be performed and survive. The acts of printing and publishing say, "Here is the music you need, so buy a copy." The acts of acquiring and saving imply, "Here is music I feel strongly about; I need a copy." Thus begins a classic separation: publishers who bring out music for potential purchasers (all of them are mostly American, whatever this means); potential owners who want published music (and the reason why it is so often seen as European is equally obscure). Publishers, guided by what they have been persuaded will sell, contrast with collectors, guided by a love for what they have come to like: the split - music as commerce versus music as art--is often hard to accept, but it is really not hard to understand. The Bay Psalm Book, as well at its countless successors, may turn up on either the home music shelf, preserved because publishers, mostly American, made it available, or a collector's music shelf, telling of a fascination with composers, most often European or somehow influenced by European music. As for whether the music in the Bay Psalm Book is American or European, bibliographers give thanks for being bibliographers so they can avoid such battles.

* 1798. Religious music was by now finding a distinctive voice in the new nation. As Calvinism declined, the repertory was no longer tied to the psalms. Church music in America may have sounded like that in England, but it was still the work of native composers. This is "You want music? You got music" music of Daniel Bayley, Supply Belcher, William Billings, Andrew Law, and other tunesmiths of the "first New England school," often printed in movable music type imported from the Caslon foundry in London, first by William McCulloch in Philadelphia and Isaiah Thomas in Worcester. Sheet music was also being engraved and published, mostly in cities with theaters and mostly pirated from London editions. (Patrick's psalms in 1698 were copied; show tunes in 1798 were pirated: music, in other words, was now a commodity.)

A few years earlier, Benjamin Dolbeare's copy of the ninth Bay Psalm Book had been presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society by his descendant, John Dolbeare, there to rest for later historians to discover. Other collections were meant for musical use. Working with parts he had assembled in Paris in 1783, Thomas Jefferson was performing as an amateur in the spirit of the neighbor who had died about the time he was born. Cuthbert Ogle's library is lost, but Jefferson's survives in Charlottesville, bound in a style typical of the day, with green-dyed parchment covers, fore-edges in red.(10) He apparently never owned a 1698 Bay Psalm Book, probably never wanted to, and wouldn't have known what to make of it if he had.

* 1848. Sheet-music publishing was now flourishing. The Copyright Act of 1831 specifically protected music, and publishers were now trying to learn what this meant. It did not then mean performance rights, as it does now, but it did tell the merchants that they needed good composers. (They were lucky and soon found Stephen Foster.) With other music books, the era was no less auspicious: Lowell Mason was cleaning up on church, school, and choral editions from movable type. America's musical fates thus came to be tied to the printed page. Depression in the 1850s, then a devastating civil war, later protracted financial and social instability: none of these could halt the progress of America's music-publishing enterprise.

We know that music was collected in 1848. The same Lowell Mason, traveling in Germany, had acquired the collection of Johann Rinck, rich in the theory books out of which the German art-music tradition of the day had arisen. The Bay Psalm Book was soon to figure in the founding of the Boston Public Library, but in its first edition of 1640. George Hood, in his History of Music in New England (1846), had recently mentioned the 1698 edition, but otherwise it was sleeping peacefully.

* 1898. The frontier was disappearing: music at home became all the more worthwhile, a point well appreciated by the entrepreneurs with large visions as collectively they "grew" the nation's "musical economy." In 1900, the market for sheet music was glutted. As the mind is saturated the will becomes unsure; nostalgia creates energy, not commitment. The piano bench was crammed, but regularly updated. Owners no longer bound up their music, so less of it survives. Those who bought it in 1850 cherished it (costly to begin with, binding made it even costlier), and thus became collectors. It was the newly invented phonograph, however, that was meant to conquer the world of music. The nickelodeon was the technological marvel of the day, one of the children that would soon be eaten by the media revolution that it helped to create. Music was slowly becoming less an act of singing the Lord's praises and more one of hearing them sung.

Musical life was also far richer. Libraries were collecting music, even if its popularity made them cautious. Knowing the evils of dime novels, they instinctively anticipated what was to come - Tin Pan Alley, then jazz and rock, Muzak, the charts, the Internet. In 1698, music was clearly on the Lord's side; had Satan now co-opted it? The new moralizing postures probably tell us mostly that the nation was growing up.

The 1640 Bay Psalm Book was by now a Holy Grail to Americana book collectors, but the importance of the 1698 edition was little appreciated. Music was to listen to and perform, not collect: collecting was for history, literature, and art. The Boston copy of the ninth edition had now reemerged: in 1886, Sabin's Dictionary, now up to the letter P, cited it, noting that "the 'tunes' are cut on wood." Evans repeated this in 1903.(11)

* 1948. As recently as fifty years ago, LP recordings were beginning to appear: stereo, quadraphonic, reel-to-reel tapes, eight-tracks, cassettes, and CDs were waiting to be born. Revolutions continued to devour their children: mediums began to eat their messages. Music publishing was flourishing, even if its firms rarely made it to Wall Street. (Nor did most other publishers.) If the 1698 Bay Psalm Book must have a moral for us, could it be that Small is Beautiful?

Music collecting was flourishing in odd settings. Refugees from the Holocaust often brought with them masterpieces of European music, and thus many musical treasures from a war-ravaged continent ended up in American universities and libraries. Sheet music was also catching the eye of enterprising counterparts to the great London antiquarians of 1698: the successors to Samuel Pepys, John Bagford, and Narcissus Luttrell are named Harry Dichter, J. Francis Driscoll, and Lester Levy. The extant copies of the Bay Psalm Book were now mostly in institutional libraries.

A second copy of the ninth edition was turned up by the Hollingsworths, a family of Boston bibliophiles. In 1922, P. K. Foley sold it (for $275) to William Gwynn Mather, a wealthy Cleveland industrialist who was also a descendant of Increase and Cotton Mather. (His rich mines on Lake Superior enabled him to call on his librarian, Thomas James Holmes, to compile the three great Mather bibliographies as well.) Hit badly during the depression, however, Mather sold his collection - including two copies of the tenth edition (1702) and the sole surviving copy of the twelfth (1705) - to Tracy McGregor, whose books are now at the University of Virginia.(12)

* 1998. Tempting pronouncements are always tempting, so they ought to be avoided. The trends seem to be continuing (revolutionary children are always hungry children, but happy children after they have eaten): as media change every few years, old publishers disappear into new electronic black holes, and we worry about paper-based collections lasting, now digital ones as well. Music collectors are still at work, and if they are quiet about it, one can see why. The 1698 Bay Psalm Book, should a third copy appear at auction today, would likely fetch more than any music printed in America, with one exception.(13) Its story is thus neither Paradise Lost nor Paradise Regained. Its Platonic ideal is of music as a statement, acceptable to God. We today instead see music mostly in Aristotelian terms: as a thing, to be analyzed as physical event, as commercial commodity, even as bibliographical object. Thus, while we now have music incredibly more beautiful than anything the Mathers heard, along with incredible noise, we also have responsibilities, to our consciences and to our society, to live with this abundance.

Nor in 1698 would anyone likely have been concerned with the evidence of this book and its settings (what analytical and historical bibliographers study and we now celebrate): it was to be used, in pristine imminence. Still, this offspring of the marriage between the art of music and the art of the book (or is it the craft of the one or the other, or the crafts of both, or what difference does it make?), as self-destructing texts go, is surely no match for William Gibson's Agrippa. Its progeny have been changing our country's musical history for three hundred years, and mostly in ways that nobody in 1698 could ever possibly have imagined.

1. The book is cited in major general bibliographies as follows: Charles Evans, American Bibliography, 14 vols. (Chicago: for the author by the Blakely Press, 1903-59), entry 817; Joseph Sabin, A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to the Present Time, 29 vols. (New York: Sabin, 1868-92; Bibliographical Society of America, 1928-36), entry 66440; Donald Goddard Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America... 1641-1700, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945-51), entry B-2612. The major studies are Hamilton C. MacDougall, Early New England Psalmody: An Historical Appreciation, 1620-1820 (Brattleboro: Stephen Daye Press, 1940); Irving Lowens, "The Bay Psalm Book in 17th-Century New England," Journal of the American Musicological Society 8 (1955): 22-29, reprinted with alterations in his Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 25-38; and Richard G. Appel, The Music of the Bay Psalm Book, 9th Edition (1698), I.S.A.M. Monographs, 5 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1975). MacDougall includes facsimiles of the music pages, printed white on black; Appel reproduces the music, too, black on white, rearranged, and enlarged. Appel's correspondence, preserved at the Boston Public Library (especially the letters from Stephen Riley, Bradford Swan, and John Cook Wyllie) has also been very useful.

2. See his Psalms of David in Metre (London, 1698): Wing B-2608. I owe this lead to Nicholas Temperley, in whose Hymn-Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) it is cited on page 145. The Bay Psalm Book is cited on page 144. In this bibliographical survey, the question of the sources for the Bay Psalm Book can be deferred: happily, since the Hymn-Tune Index, painstaking and vast, will likely revise the earlier attributions - some of them brilliant, but all of them now needing to be reevaluated in the light of evidence that has so far not been so conveniently available.

3. Some of the seventeenth-century editions are known or suspected to have been printed in England. Dozens of later ones were issued in both countries, also in Scotland, through the 1750s. Editions after 1650, with the revisions by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon, are often distinguished as the "New-England Psalm Book." The fullest bibliographical record is entry 53 in Thomas James Holmes, The Minor Mothers: A List of their Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 81-103. The later Boston editions are listed in American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography, by Allen Perdue Britton and trying Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1990), 107-15, where the ninth edition is entry 35. Locations are reported in the online databases of the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) and the counterpart North-American Imprints Project (NAIP), but differences in the formulation of uniform titles in the two catalogs make finding them difficult.

The literature on the 1640 Bay Psalm Book is vast. Zoltan Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) is among the major studies. Haraszti does not acknowledge Richard Appel's studies of the book under discussion here, curiously, since the two were then working next door to each other at the Boston Public Library.

4. One question would be whether this is truly a duodecimo, printed on uncommonly small sheets, or a 24mo in 12s, printed from uncommonly large ones. Terry Belanger tends to favor the former. I have no intention of arguing.

5. The addendum is mentioned in a note by Cotton Mather dated 2 March 1699: "There is printing a New Edition of the Psalm Book. In every former edition ... the 26th chapter of Isaiah was in such a metre, that few ... could sing. Whereupon I this day, took a few minutes to turn it into another metre, with perhaps a smoother and sweeter version. So 'tis published in the psalm book.... "Should one now believe the imprint date of 1698 as specified, or Mather's implication that the book was not completed until the next year? I tend to favor the former, since the gathering is signed "A," so as to suggest that it was not part of the original book. See Thomas James Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 1:53, which however describes not the pages added to the ninth edition, but the tenth edition of 1702.

6. This is far fewer than the 1,700 for the 1640 edition. The 1698 edition was followed by no fewer than ten Boston editions over the next twenty years, at least three of them with several variant imprint statements. One suspects that the economics of publishing - the stability of both materials and demand at the end of the century--may have called for smaller and more frequent editions of the book.

7. Neither conforms to ideal copy. The one in Charlottesville lacks many pages, but it includes a leaf that is not in the one in Boston. American Sacred Music Imprints (pp. 107-8) reports a British Museum copy but not the one at Virginia, and I am at a loss to know why. The British Library does not locate it in their collections. I vaguely recall the late Irving Lowens mentioning an English copy to me sometime in the late 1950s, and as a fastidious scholar. he was unexcelled. But it was also he who first called my attention to the Charlottesville copy. A microfilm from a British Museum copy is reported in the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints (London: Mansell, 1968-81), 54:444. The New York Public Library copy of this film, however, has the Dolbeare signature that identifies the Massachusetts Historical Society book.

8. See Julius Herbert Tuttle, "The Libraries of the Mathers." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s., 20 (1909-10): 269-356.

9. The will is transcribed in "Libraries in Colonial Virginia," William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 3 (1895): 251-53, and further discussed in Maurer Maurer, "The Library of a Colonial Musician, 1755," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 7 (1950): 39-52; also John Molnar, "A Collection of Music in Colonial Virginia: The Ogle Inventory," Musical Quarterly 49 (1963): 150-62.

10. The collection is discussed in Helen Cripe, Thomas Jefferson and Music (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), and the titles are listed in the appendix.

11. See note I above.

12. Holmes's Education of a Bibliographer (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1957) discusses the collection and its sale to McGregor. McGregor deserves to be remembered not only for his collection but also for the plan set forth in his American Historical Association pamphlet The McGregor Plan for the Encouragement of Book Collecting in American College Libraries' (Ann Arbor, 1937).

13. The first edition of The Star-Spangled Banner, the Streeter copy of which fetched $23,000 at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York on 20 April 1967. What other titles might come close? John Tufts's Introduction to the Art of Singing of Psalm Tunes (Boston: T. Fleet, 1723) or Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Musick (Boston: J, Franklin, 1721)? Or William Billings's New. England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770) with its Paul Revere title page? Or Francis Hopkinson's Seven Songs (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1788); or Micah Hawkins' landmark of minstrelsy, Massa Georgee Washington and General LaFayette (New York: E. Riley, 1824); or Stephen Foster's very first song, Open Thy Lattice, Love (Philadelphia: George Willig, 1844); or Irving Berlin's very scarce first edition of Alexander's Ragtime Band (New York: Ted Snyder Co.. 1911); or Charles Ives's privately printed songs? Or now forgotten works. still to be discovered? Why has printed music never been pricey? Remember that condition is everything and performers usually wear out their music in proving that it is worth listening to.

D. W. Krummel is professor emeritus of library and information science and of music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Rare Book School of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on 29 July 1998. The author is most grateful for comments from Mary Wallace Davidson and for much assistance from Linnea Martin in Urbana and John Buchtel in Charlottesville in particular.