Lowell Mason - Assessment of Life

Assessment of Life

The editors of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians condemn Mason for his focus on European classical music as a model for Americans. The famous 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.

The New Grove editors condemn Mason's introduction of European models for American hymnody for choking off a flourishing participatory native tradition of church music which had produced outstanding compositions by such composers as William Billings. Mason and his colleagues (notably his brother Timothy Mason) characterized this music as backwoods material, "unscientific" and unworthy of modern Americans. They taught their views through 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 Presbyterians 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 20th century. With the advent of Contemporary Christian Music in Pentecostal and other Evangelical churches, church music is now making a broad shift back from congregational singing accompanied by only a piano, organ or piano and organ together, to music led by "worship teams" and "praise teams."