Musical Offerings ⦁ 2026 ⦁ Volume 17 ⦁ Number 1 13 culture would slowly fade away. These quick, stylistic changes were due to the prevailing cultural ideas. Turner noted that the middle-class reformers of psalmody “associated the new style with a new cultural mosaic that made material dominance (time) the arbiter of taste.”81 In other words, trends (whether American or European) determined the sound that psalmody would take. These developments in the “worship wars” near the turn of the century led American composers to innovate to keep their particular form of church music alive. The result was more harmonic experimentation and chromaticism.82 This can be seen in the works of Daniel Belknap, Amos Pilsbury, and others, who added chromaticism to intensify the word painting of various texts sung. In The Harmonist’s Companion (1797), Belknap introduces augmented harmony in his tune “Pine-Hill,” as a way to emphasize the phrases “In the full choir a broken string” in measure 3 and “The rest in silence mourn their King” in m. 10.83 In m. 3, we also see an example of a false relation between the A and the A-sharp, reminiscent of English psalmody since the time of Ravenscroft (see Example 4). Amos Pilsbury introduces more chromaticism and dissonance in his tune “Kedron,” a setting of the hymn “Thou man of griefs, remember me,” with the incorporation of the Phrygian flat-2 scale degree in m. 5, a false relation between C and C-sharp in m. 6, and a dominant chord with a substitute sixth in the final measure (see Example 5). These stark musical examples show how far these composers were willing to go to keep their music in vogue with the people amid the shifting musical opinions that would become mainstream and represent the final stretch of development that Anglo-American Psalmody took before it migrated to regions such as the Miami Valley and Antebellum South the 1800s.84 81 Turner, 30. 82 Macdougall, 86. 83 Belknap, “Pine-Hill.” 84 Steel and Hulan, 45.
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