Scientific Church Music and the Making of the American Middle Class

Andrew Fletcher famously commented that he would not care who wrote the laws of a nation so long as he could control the songs. ¹ The early nineteenth century was marked by a dramatic change in the style of church music, particularly in the moderate evangelical churches. These churches formed the heart of the reform institutions that composed the benevolent empire, and their members formed the vanguard of the transportation and industrial revolutions while simultaneously struggling to make sense of the social and economic transformations that they were creating. Historians of nineteenth-century America have long noted the relationship between the members of the reform organizations that burgeoned after 1820 and the rhetoric of self-control and self-restraint. And recent students of manners, of the interiors of houses and churches, and of the process of personal presentation, have shown that these people defined themselves not by income or wealth, but rather by their habits and activities. ²