He himself was disconcertingly unkempt and crude: he could drown an entire choir with his own raucous voice. As American musical tastes developed through the nineteenth century, Billings's works came to seem primitive compared with imports from Europe.

Broyles compares his position as a successful professional musician with that of Stephen Foster a century later, although both languished financially in their last years. His later volumes went through several editions, and he dominated New England music. He seems to have been the only person in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America to have used such a professional designation, and he was also the first American composer to publish a tune-book entirely of his own compositions, The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770). Although he was a tanner by trade, he was a pioneer within the singing schools set up to raise standards in church music, and listed himself in the Boston Directory as 'Singing Master'. It is about who we are, or more precisely who we think we are.' He goes on to explore what the mavericks reveal of the American sensibility and to consider the position of music in American society.īroyles inevitably starts with William Billings, America's first major composer. At the outset he says: 'This book is about us. Michael Broyles is now trying to brand his collection of mavericks and place them in an important position as nonconformists in relation to the mainstream of American culture. The term 'maverick' crept into general use at the end of the nineteenth century to signify a person who is 'masterless, roving and casual'. Maverick (1802-70) who left the calves of his herd unbranded, without an owner's name. Apparently it was the Texas cattle-owner Samuel A.

Beethoven in America by Michael Broyles