Timeline of Music in The United States To 1819 - 1778

1778

• William Billings' The Singing Master's Assistant includes songs that link the plight of the Israelites in Egyptian captivity with the lives of Bostonians of the time. This tunebook influentially "treated Scripture not only as a guide to spiritual inspiration and moral improvement, but as a historical epic that, bringing past into present, offered timeless parallels to current events".
• Andrew Law and his brother form a tunebook-printing company in Cheshire, Connecticut, beginning with 1779's Select Harmony, which reveals Law as a "champion of American composers, at a time when the notion that Americans could compose music at all was a new one".
• Thomas Jefferson presents a view common to many of the upper-class elite in North America, in a letter to Giovanni Fabbroni complaining that American music was in a state of "deplorable barbarism".
• Captain Cook's arrival opens Hawaii open to regular outside contact and exposes European to the music of Hawaii.
• A reorganization of the Continental Army establishes pay grades of military musicians and creates staff positions for drum and fife majors.