Lowell Mason - Life, Assessment, Other, Books

Composer and educator, born in Medfield, Massachusetts, USA. He had been a church organist and choir director when he published a successful hymn collection (1822), some of its melodies adopted from classical composers. In 1832 he co-founded the Boston Academy of Music, which gave instruction to adults and children. A pedagogue of great influence and importance for American music, he remained a prolific arranger and composer of hymns, his familiar tunes including ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ and ‘From Greenland's Icy Mountains’.

Lowell Mason (January 8, 1792- August 11, 1872) was a leading figure in American church music, the composer of over 1600 hymns, many of which are often sung today.

Life

Mason was born and grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, but spent the first part of his adulthood in Savannah, Georgia, where he worked first in a dry-goods store, then in a bank.

Following an earlier British model, Mason embarked on the task of producing a hymnal whose tunes would be drawn from the work of European classical composers such as Haydn and Mozart.

In 1827, Mason moved to Boston, where he continued his banking career for some time but also became music director for several churches. Mason became an important figure on the Boston musical scene: He served as president of the Handel and Haydn Society, taught music in the public schools, was co-founder of the Boston Academy of Music (1833), and in 1838 was appointed music superintendent for the Boston school system.

Assessment

Modern scholars (for example, the editors of the New Grove) give Mason a mixed assessment.

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.

Where scholars sometimes denigrate Mason's work concerns one result of his introduction of European models for American hymnody: it choked off a flourishing and participatory native tradition of church music which was already producing outstanding compositions from composers such as William Billings. Mason and his colleagues (notably his brother Timothy Mason) did their best to characterize this music as backwoods material, "unscientific" and unworthy of the attention of modern Americans, and they propagated their views very effectively with 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.

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.

Other

Lowell Mason was the father of Henry Mason (1831–90), the founder of the Mason and Hamlin firm.

Lowell Mason was also the father of composer William Mason (1829–1908).

Books

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (published in hard copy and available as a fee site on line) provides good coverage of Mason's life and work. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, by George Pullen Jackson (1932), out of print but available in many libraries, offers a vivid account of how Lowell and Timothy Mason won the battle for their own kind of sacred music in the city of Cincinnati.