Musical Offerings ⦁ 2026 ⦁ Volume 17 ⦁ Number 1 11 Federalism, essentially the debate between unity in government and regionalism in government. Interestingly, both Belcher’s and Billings’s works were published by the same company, showing how political culture was a key factor in the Christian music scene of the day. By 1799, Amos Pilsbury’s The United States Sacred Harmony showed that this Federalist stability had been won and achieved.70 This is not to say that it was all political. The fuging tune became one of the dominant forms of Enlightenment-era psalmody in America, originally developing in Southern England in the 1730s (though pieces such as “Purge Me, O Lord” may have been prefiguring this form).71 James Lyon in his Urania includes some of these fuging tunes.72 However, American composers developed and ran with the form differently from their English counterparts. An example of this is “Creation,” by William Billings. One difference in this fuging tune is that a full strophic hymn precedes the fuging section. In “Creation,” Billings sets two verses of two different Isaac Watts poems in a poetic collage. Beginning with “When I with pleasing wonder stand,” Billings sets up his main tune in 3/2 time, before transitioning by a 3/4 diminution of the last phrase to the second verse, “Our life contains a thousand springs.” However, Billings does not continue the strophic tune but breaks into free imitation based on a descending minor third interval pattern. Billings demonstrates a remarkable sense of text declamation for an untrained composer in this piece by using melisma (setting a word over multiple notes) in the word “long” in the alto and in the tenor and soprano to a group of three accented, continuous quarter notes with some ornamentation, moving melodically at a steady rate (see Example 3). The overall length of this fuging section also adds to a sense of wonder at the idea that “Strange that a harp of thousand strings / Should keep in tune so long,” with the flowing eighth notes in the phrase’s opening giving some indication as to the harp-like quality of this section.73 This unashamed, creative output again shows the New England desire to appear as modern and progressive in musical expression as possible.74 At this point in metrical psalmody, nothing was out of bounds, for in “adopting fuging tunes…American composers gained rhythmic flexibility and more varied textures…In short, music became once again 70 Pilsbury, The United States Sacred Harmony. 71 Temperley, 3–7. 72 Lyon, 42–43. 73 Billings, The Continental Harmony, 52–54. 74 Turner, 37, 40.
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