ABSTRACT
In this podcast, my goal is to tell a story about Williamsburg’s musical culture, at least from the perspective of so-called “classical” music (in the western canon). As youth in the 21st-century, music and sound surround us in everything we do. From iTunes to YouTube and TikTok and everything in between, we are certainly at no dearth for sonic entertainment.
Yet in the eighteenth century, this was not the case – as I will explore in the podcast, if you wanted entertainment, you had to make the entertainment. I explore the early days of music in Williamsburg by chronicling the story of Peter Pelham, an eighteenth-century organist at Bruton Parish Church and, simultaneously, the town jailer. In his story, I hope to expose the 18th-century musical traditions that remain constant in Williamsburg up to this day and the instruments and people that make it possible. I also will explore the role of the church in colonial era music-making, both in Virginia and other parts of British North America.
Finally, I turn to today: how does the College of William and Mary play into this musical culture, both past and present? I will highlight Darling’s partnership with numerous students throughout the year, and its antecedents in the colonial period.
TRANSCRIPT
0:00 Opening sequence: Come Thou Font (organ recording)
0:15 Hi, I’m Justin Oei. Welcome to the first episode of Our American Music. Today, we’ll be exploring the musical world of a place that’s really special to me: Williamsburg, Virginia. Williamsburg was the colonial capital of Virginia, just a few miles from Jamestown, where the first permanent English-speaking settlement was established in North America. Over the years, it’s been home to the College of William and Mary – my home away from home – and today is a bustling suburb midway between Richmond and Norfolk. And of course, there’s the namesake reconstructed colonial village.
0:31 Jock: that is an original 1760 instrument. Not to that chapel, obviously, it survived in England. And this organ went into the chapel, and it is an ideal instrument for the period of the 18th century... (37:15-37:34)
0:51 Narr: Today, if you ask someone in Williamsburg about music, you’re bound to hear about Jock Darling. For much of the twentieth century, he was the organist at Bruton Parish Church, right in the middle of Colonial Williamsburg, and the organ instructor at the College of William and Mary. Today, we’ll hear from an oral history of his collected by the Williamsburg Documentary Project at the College of William and Mary. And so, we ask: what was music like in Colonial Williamsburg, and how does it continue today?
1:24 Clarke Trumpet Tune
1:42 Jock: we know that in the 18th century, the 18th century organist...his name was Peter Pelham...actually invited people to come into the church to hear himself and his students play. So, it is something that is going along and has been going along in Bruton Church back into the 18th century.
2:05 Narr: Before the world of iTunes, xbox, and the modern technology we now have, if you wanted entertainment, well, you had to make it yourself. In the colonial era, this meant that if you wanted music, you had to play it yourself. Anecdotally, we’ve learned that Thomas Jefferson practiced the violin for three hours a day while at William & Mary (and was a very accomplished performer in addition to being the author of the Declaration of Independence). Similarly, George Washington was known for being quite the dancer at his Mount Vernon estate. And one of the most famous examples in the history
of western music is that of the King of Prussia who, in 1739, heard Bach was in town and immediately summoned to his palace, demanding a six-part fugal improvisation on his new pianoforte. In fact, what you hear is the “Royal Theme” from that Musical Offering.
3:13 Sopretta Regale from Ricerar a 3 – Musical Offering (fades out under narration)
3:42 In the early days of British colonization, a lot of the music that was sung was a function of the church, both in the Calvinist-Puritan northern colonies like Massachusetts, and the Anglican colonies of New York and Virginia. The Biblical psalms, hymns from the Hebrew Scriptures, were paraphrased into metrical poems that were, in turn, sung by the congregations in churches to well-known hymntunes. These hymns have been a staple of Christian hymn-singing ever since, particularly the ubiquitous Old Hundredth Doxology – [sung] “Praise God from whom all blessings flow...”. And yet, as Jock Darling notes, the way that hymns were sung in church at that time were quite different:
4:34 ...you have very formal things. You have a Wren Chapel one in the beginning, which they outline the music. And the clerk will sing one line, and student body repeats in kind and that sort of “lining out,” as it’s known. It’s the way probably it was sung in all churches, which didn’t have organs. And after all, there weren’t that many organs around. They’re too expensive.
4:54 Old Hundredth begins – gradually gets louder and then fades out
5:49 So, as you might imagine, being able to get an organ would’ve been a big deal back at that time. In 1755, Peter Pelham was unanimously appointed as the organist of Bruton Parish Church here in Williamsburg, which at the point came with a salary from the colonial government (given that the Church of England was the state church, and indeed the only legal one in Virginia). Pelham’s training was remarkable – the son of noted German composer, Johann Pachelbel, Charles, had moved to the Americas and taught in New York and Charleston, and Pelham became one of his students. Pelham also held the prestigious organist post at Kings Chapel, Boston.
When the organ arrived, Peter Pelham was the one who built, tuned, and maintained it – and doing that is no small feat. Unlike a piano, an organ produces sound by blowing air through pipes that are voiced with a number of different sounds. Each stop on the organ allows wind to flow to a set of pipes that corresponds to a certain sound; this means that many modern church organs have thousands of pipes. And just one pipe being slightly out of alignment can wreak havoc on the entire instrument. But Pelham’s instrument at Bruton remained in faithful service for over fifty years, a testament to his skill as a builder as well as a performer
7:37 (Pelham Minuet)
8:07 We just heard one of Peter Pelham’s original compositions for harpsichord. One of his copybooks survives, in which there is a record of his teaching schedule for 1744 and a number of musical pieces. While some of these are transcriptions (copies) of other composers’ works, particularly Georg Frederic Handel, other pieces are thought to be original compositions and are not found elsewhere.
This tells us about what was popular in the American colonies at the time: it is similar to its British contemporaries, including the works of George Frederic Handel (who composed The Messiah just a few years prior), French operatic composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Thomas Arne, a composer of vocal music in the 1730s and 1740s. So, in spite of the fact that they were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, we can infer that Americans were keeping abreast of music developments in Europe to the extent possible. Musicologists also know that Antonio Vivaldi, composer of the famous Four Seasons, was popular in North America at the time, which makes this hypothesis more believable.
10:00 Handel – Arrival of the Queen of Sheba
10:33 We’ve been talking a lot about Williamsburg’s music in the past. Let’s fast forward a couple hundred years, to the mid-twentieth century. As John D. Rockefeller and the Rev. William Arthur Rutherford Goodwin began their quest to reconstruct Williamsburg to what it used to be, there was a revived interest in the performance practices of colonial-era music as well. Mr Rockefeller brought the Wren organ to Williamsburg from Britain. Yet the Wren organ didn’t begin its tenure in Williamsburg as a performance instrument. It sat silent in storage for a while in England, and then in Williamsburg as a piece of furniture, first at the Governor’s Palace and later at the Williamsburg Lodge, according to Beckie Davy, current organist and director of music at Bruton Parish, who also oversees the Wren Organ series at William and Mary.
One of the reasons I came to the College is because of Williamsburg’s musical activity. From the cramped confines of Ewell Hall to thrice-weekly organ recitals at Bruton and the Williamsburg Music Club, there’s always something to listen to. Here’s Jock again, talking about the partnership between William and Mary, Bruton, and Colonial Williamsburg, and how that makes Williamsburg a great place to make music:
10:57 in the great world, there’s a common joke that if one or two are gathered together, there’s enough for an organ recital. But here, you do that, you might very well have a couple hundred people show up to hear you. And this also meant there was...had a special relationship with organ students at the college.
for years, we only had an organ. Then about 15 years ago, a harpsichord became available, and this was one in the church. And so we would bring...harpsichord students would be
incorporated in. And then subsequently acquired...after Mr. Marshall came to the college, he acquired a harpsichord, so the college has its own harpsichord now that’s kept in Ewell Hall.
14:00 And so, I think it’s safe to say that classical music – especially music popular in the 18th century is alive and well in Williamsburg, Virginia. And this only happened because, town, crown, church, and gown worked hand-in-hand to make it so.
14:15 – W&M Alma Mater
Over Alma Mater – Acknowledgements
This podcast was produced as a requirement for American Studies 100, Hear Here: The Oral History of Williamsburg at the College of William and Mary; Dr. Michelle Lelievre, instructor. The oral history used in this podcast was conducted by the Williamsburg Documentary Project of the American Studies Department at William & Mary. Finally, I’m also grateful to Swem Library and the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Library, which were invaluable resources for me as I researched and garnered archival materials for this project.
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