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Born in Boston in 1746, William Billings flourished as America's first major composer despite an environment that was not friendly to music. A product of the American Revolution, Billings fully supported the revolutionary side during the war for independence, even composing a song, “Chester,” that strongly justified the patriotic cause. Billings's affinity with nature, which he viewed as benign and a source of inspiration, influenced all aspects of his creativity, but also created a conflict with Puritanism, which considered nature as a hostile, savage wilderness to be reclaimed. During the period, singing schools, attended mostly by young people, were more social than religious and met almost as often in a tavern as in a church. This chapter documents Billings's rise to prominence in the world of music, his publication of original church music including tunebooks, and his contribution to New England sacred music. It also looks at the decline in his fortunes in the 1790s. Billings died on September 27, 1800, and was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Boston.

Historical moments in which music consciously identifies American religious experience provide the historical framework of this introductory chapter, which stretches from William Billings's “America” to “Amazing Grace” as a historical text to the ethnographic present in Pentecostal worship in a Chicago Romanian church. The theoretical concepts that connect the book's chapters are introduced, including concepts of genealogy, individualism, and the metaphors of American religion in sacred music-making. Charles Ives and Thomas A. Dorsey Jr, the great American modernist composer and the inventor of the gospel blues, provide case studies. The interdisciplinarity of the book's diverse contributors is introduced and connected to the chapters that follow. The importance of music as ritual, sacred language, and the performance of sacred space generates further links and shared notions of religious experience for the book's chapters.

Schuman's decision to leave Schirmer and to join Theodore Presser meant that his new publisher had very little of his music. Schuman set out to correct this situation by writing a number of shorter choral works that he thought would sell well. In fact, the major success of this period was a reworking of the William Billings Overture, a work that Schirmer had declined to publish. The new version, New England Triptych, quickly became Schuman's best-known composition. And while the more popular-oriented choral works he wrote at this time did not sell particularly well, the more serious Carols of Death was hailed as one of Schuman's best choral compositions. Schuman's other major film score (The Earth Is Born) is also examined in this chapter. This period in Schuman's life finds him trying to write works for the marketplace.

The introduction outlines the scope and methodology of this book, with particular reference to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); William Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); and Benjamin Franklin's ‘The Ephemera’ (1778). It situates the book in relation to recent work in the fields of transatlantic literary studies, Atlantic history, musicology, and literature and music.

During World War II, both the discourse about music and composers’ idiomatic choices engaged anew with the historical and national underpinning of American music. Three strategies shaped this contextualization of musical practice and composition. The first consisted of the debate about a “usable past,” which could include the appropriation of European repertoire from Johann Sebastian Bach to Richard Wagner, as well as the resuscitation of earlier American music, especially that of William Billings. The second instrumentalized folk music for both musical practice—in particular in Sing Out, Sweet Land!, a Broadway production by Walter Kerr and Elie Siegmeister—and composition. A well-known example of the latter is Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. The third approach led to a number of strategies for Americanizing European opera and for employing it for “racial uplift” in the activities of the National Negro Opera Company. These were not new issues in the history of American music, but the war intensified and crystallized the debates because of the country’s heightened need for national delineation.

This book focuses on America's maverick composers, those who lived unusual lives or flaunted norms and wrote works that were considered incomprehensible and even unplayable. It examines the role of the maverick in American music and culture. It looks at a number of mavericks, most of whom are composers of art music, including William Billings, John Cage, Anthony Philip Heinrich, Frank Zappa, Charles Ives, Leo Ornstein, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Meredith Monk. The book shows that the maverick tradition lies at the center of the myth about rugged individualism. In tracing the history of the maverick tradition, the book considers the role of nature, both physically and metaphorically, in opposition to notions of science and progress. Moreover, it discusses the forces both in the musical community and in American culture that account for the rise of the maverick. It considers the fundamental question raised by the maverick tradition—communalism versus individualism—and looks at the important themes of Puritanism, nature, and democracy found in the work of both Billings and Heinrich.

From William Billings’s self-published scores in the 1770s to Carla Bley and Michael Mantler’s New Music Distribution Service (NMDS) in the 1970s and beyond, composer-driven publishing and distribution efforts have aided the survival of independent and experimental music in the United States since the very first volumes of original music came into being. In her short history of these composer-driven enterprises in the United States, Beal expounds on the entrepreneurial spirit of American composers, demonstrating how publication series, composer collectives, and distribution services have proved critical to the dissemination of music that often lives in the uncharted territory beyond institutional walls, ultimately beyond the whole idea of imprimatur.