Musical Offerings ⦁ 2026 ⦁ Volume 17 ⦁ Number 1 15 is heavily influenced by market trends in popular music today. Yet the publications of Day, Este, and Ravenscroft show how the market and politics significantly impacted the distribution of psalmody in early Baroque England. Bond’s idea that the hymnwriter should understand masterful subtleties in literature and be proficient in teaching it before caring about the music is an admirable aspiration,91 yet a reflection of American psalmody shows that the farmer and the tanner with little literary and musical training could derive beautiful works regardless of academic background. In the tunes of the farmer-composer, musical depictions of “the twinkling stars of ‘Newburgh,’...the thirsty pilgrims of ‘Montgomery,’... or the leaping lover of ‘Swanton’” 92 would surely be recognized by someone such as Douglas Bond as being crafted with special care to the text. Even the “bland,” “musical reform and European music” that captivated the middle class of New England, competing with the traditionalists with their psalm tunes and fuging tunes93 prefigures the current debate over repetitious, “so very little to say” CCM, and the “content and structure” of modern hymnody.94 These discussions prove King Solomon’s adage, “What has been is the same as what will be, and what has been done is the same as what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, MEV). The resolve of the people involved with English and American metrical psalmody is clearly shown, whether the early publishers who pioneered aspects of the genre that lasted into the 1700s, the madrigalists and the merchants who wrote tunes that defined musical characteristics, and the common men who received this music into their homes and singing schools, amid political changes in England, an uprising in America, and an ever-evolving cultural taste. Even today, with modern debates over Protestant music and America, we can wonder the same thought as Isaac Watts over our own music, “Strange that a harp of thousand strings / Should keep in tune so long.” 91 Bond, God Sings, 62–63. 92 Steel and Hulan, 44. 93 Steel and Hulan, 45. 94 Bond, God Sings, 60.
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