itative movement, coming out together triumphantly at the
close. They abounded in forbidden progressions and empty chords, but
were often characterized by fervor of feeling and by strong melodies. A
few of them, as "Lenox" and "Northfield," still linger in use; and the
productions of this school in general, which amount to a considerable
volume, are entitled to respectful remembrance as the first untutored
utterance of music in America. The use of them became a passionate
delight to our grandparents; and the traditions are fresh and vivid of
the great choirs filling the church galleries on three sides, and
tossing the theme about from part to part.

The use of these rudely artificial tunes involved a gravely important
change in the course of public worship. In congregations that accepted
them the singing necessarily became an exclusive privilege of the choir.
To a lamentable extent, where there was neither the irregular and
spontaneous ejaculation of the Methodist nor the rubrical response of
the Episcopalian, the people came to be shut out from audible
participation in the acts of public worship.

A movement of musical reform in the direction of greater simplicity and
dignity began early in this century, when Lowell Mason in Boston and
Thomas Hastings in New York began their multitudinous publications of
psalmody. Between them not less than seventy volumes of music were
published in a period of half as many years. Their immense and
successful fecundity was imitated with less success by others, until the
land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books. A thin
diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the
pen of Dr. Mason, that have taken permanent place as American chorals.
Such pieces as "Boylston," "Hebron," "Rockingham," "Missionary Hymn,"
and the adaptations of Gregorian melodies, "Olmutz" and "Hamburg," are
not likely to be displaced from their hold on the American church by
more skilled and exquisite compositions of later schools. But the
fertile labors of the church musicians of this period were affected by
the market demand for new material for the singing-school, the large
church choir, and the musical convention. The music thus introduced into
the churches consisted not so much of hymn-tunes and anthems as of
"sacred glees."[392:1]

Before the middle of the century the Episcopal Church had arrived at a
point at which it was much looked to to set the fashions in such mat