William Billings (1746-1800); USA

William Billings (1746–1800) was an American composer, singing master, and one of the most distinctive musical figures of the Revolutionary era. Born in Boston and largely self-taught, he worked for a time as a tanner and had little of the formal education available to European composers of his day. He became a traveling teacher of singing schools, where communities learned to read music and perform psalm tunes and anthems. In 1770 he published The New-England Psalm-Singer, the first collection of music devoted entirely to works by a single American composer; its frontispiece was engraved by Paul Revere. Billings went on to publish several further collections, including The Singing Master’s Assistant and The Continental Harmony. Although widely known during the Revolutionary period, he struggled financially in later life and died in Boston in poverty.

Billings wrote principally unaccompanied sacred choral music in a vigorous, direct style shaped by the practical world of New England singing schools rather than by European academic convention. His music is characterized by strong rhythms, open harmonies, independent vocal lines, and an expressive roughness that gives it a recognizably American character. Among his best-known pieces are Chester, whose patriotic text and memorable tune made it an unofficial anthem of the American Revolution, and the expansive anthem When Jesus Wept. He was also an important practitioner of the fuging tune, in which voices enter successively in lively imitation before reuniting. Billings helped establish a native American tradition of composed choral music, and his work became an important ancestor of the shape-note and singing-school traditions that flourished in the United States during the nineteenth century.

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Read biography at allmusic.com.