Postscript on Billings

A short postscript to Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s performance of three works by William Billings last July in the Festival of Chichester. Performances of his music are rare in the UK – in sixty-five years of singing I’ve only had the pleasure twice and didn’t even know about Billings for forty of those years! On the page, his music looks unusual, even naïve or amateurish compared to a polished chorale by Bach, but those qualities render a certain convivial ruggedness to the music that is appealing to modern tastes. Its unusualness translates to the sound even when performed in a manner more suited to an Anglican hymn or Bach chorale. Billings was writing within a tradition of singing and writing that had its roots in Puritan England, a tradition that was suppressed for most of the two centuries after Billings died in both the England and America. We can assume that tradition was similar to the West End tradition of singing in Anglican churches, as described in Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, in which the old choir’s familiar instruments are discarded in favour of the mechanised sound of an organ, their robust singing rooted in their history and surroundings re-shaped into uniformity by a musically trained outsider.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir set aside such issues in rehearsal, and deliberately refrained from attempting an “authentic” sound. That makes sense especially in view of the evidence provided by Michael Broyles ¹ about how a Billings piece involving the composer himself in the choir, might have sounded:

“An idea of the power of Billings’s voice is found in his own comments in The New-England Psalm-Singer. He wanted his choirs heavily weighted toward the bass…. The Reverend John Pierce describes in his memoirs what it was like to stand next to Billings singing: “I have sung with him, agreeably to the fashion of the times, with all my might, without being conscious, that I enunciated a sound, so completely was my utterance drowned by his overpowering screams.” Pierce’s reference to Billings’s “screams” requires explanation. Pierce undoubtedly meant it as critical, but only in the context of a style change that occurred in the early nineteenth century (Pierce was writing in century, who sought to bring church music into line with standard European practice). The two were intimately tied; the open harmonic intervals of the older style gave the more nasal sounds a special resonance. Take the eighteenth-century sound away and the harmony becomes “cloying,” and so on, as the reformers argued. It is ironic but understandable that in this day of historical awareness in performance few choirs are willing to risk imitating eighteenth-century sounds when performing Billings’s pieces.”

William Billings (?) leading a New England singing school ca. 1770. There are no authenticated portraits of William Billings but some believe that the figure seated on the left of the frontispiece to the The New England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770) is meant to represent Billings leading a singing school session.

The Billings style survived ‘underground’ in the Sacred Harp tradition, which for a time flourished only in the southern American states but which now extends across the globe, with conventions and meetings enthusiastically attended and supported, attesting to the power of convivial singing harnessed to deeply-felt texts. Youtube offers a number of fine examples, such as the Billings Christmas carol Shiloh performed in 2014 at 29th Annual Missouri State Sacred Harp Convention in Pinckney, Missouri. For Portsmouth Baroque Choir to have attempted to emulate sounds like these would have been absurd, the performance excruciating for its audience taken out of the context of communal participation. Not that we refrained from attempting to recreate such a context with the final item on our programme, the Billings round Wake every breath. in which the audience was invited to join in ad lib. I am not sure that many did, audibly, but it would be worth another attempt on some other occasion.