American Harmony Concert in Worcester, 15 May

On Tuesday, 15 May, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester will host a concert titled “‘Slices of Time Past’: Choral Music from Eighteenth-Century America.”

Musical scholar Nym Cooke will direct the performance by the chorus American Harmony and offer commentary on the pieces. The songs will be ”psalm tunes, fuging tunes, and anthems” available in Cooke’s new choral collection American Harmony. The concert will thus recreate the sounds that the first generation of American citizens sang and heard.

Nym Cooke’s publications include an edition of the complete music of the Worcester-born hatter and composer Timothy Swan, a chapter in The Cambridge History of American Music, and two volumes of carols and part-songs, Awake to Joy! He has taught at the College of the Holy Cross and Brandeis University and now teaches at Eagle Hill School in Hardwick.

In connection to this concert, the A.A.S. will exhibit some of the early tune books, both printed and handwritten, in its collection.

This concert will take place in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester. There is on-street parking on Regent Street, and the A.A.S. has a parking lot at 90 Park Avenue. This event is open to the public free of charge. Copies of the American Harmony anthology will be available for purchase.

(The image above shows the music and words for the song “Ally Croker,” as published in London in 1788. It comes courtesy of the A.A.S.’s online collection of early American broadsides because it was a forerunner of this version, published in America in the 1810s. This satiric love song is probably not one of the more serious compositions to be performed on Tuesday evening.)