1792–1872 · United States · Romantic
Lowell Mason (1792–1872) was an American composer, choirmaster and music educator from Massachusetts. He wrote and reworked more than 1500 church hymns and taught music in the public schools of Boston. On this site his hymns, including Nearer, My God, to Thee, are available as sheet music for four-part choir.
Lowell Mason was born on 8 January 1792 in Medfield, Massachusetts. He grew up there and while still very young became the leader of the church choir of his home town, and later of the town orchestra.
In 2011 the house in which he was born escaped redevelopment and was carried across to Green Street, into a town park. The Lowell Mason House foundation is working to create a museum and a music education centre there.
In 1815 Mason took the posts of organist and choir leader at a Presbyterian church in Savannah, Georgia. His early adult years went by in that city, where he started out in a store selling dry goods and later moved to a bank. Music was a serious passion for him, though he pursued it as an amateur.
His music teacher was a German, Frederick L. Abel, and little by little Mason started composing. At his urging the church he served opened America's earliest Sunday school for black children.
Mason next compiled a hymn collection, modelled on an earlier British one, using melodies by European composers, among them Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. No publisher would take it easily; in the end the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, one of the first American groups dedicated to classical music, issued it in 1822, and it sold very well. At first it appeared without his name, since he saw banking as his main career and did not want to harm his prospects.
Mason settled in Boston in 1827 and went on working at a bank for a while. Between 1829 and 1831 he led the choir and played the organ at Park Street Church. In time he directed the music of three churches, alternating between them every six months; among them the Hanover Street church, led by the well-known abolitionist minister Lyman Beecher.
Mason took a prominent place in the city's musical life: he presided over the Handel and Haydn Society and gave music lessons in state schools. Between 1838 and 1841 he oversaw music teaching across the Boston schools. During the 1830s he wrote a tune for the children's rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb. Political intrigue on the Boston school committee ended his work for the schools in 1845. Much of the credit for bringing music lessons to America's state schools goes to him, and he is counted as the country's first major music educator.
Mason stepped away from Boston's musical life in 1851 and went to live in New York City. He set out for Europe on 20 December 1851. On the 1852 trip he took a keen interest in congregational singing, above all in German churches, for instance Leipzig's Nikolaikirche and Dresden's Kreuzkirche.
In 1853, back in New York, he became music director of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which had just put up a new building on Nineteenth Street. He promptly dismissed the choir and the orchestra and had an organ installed, his son William taking the post of organist. Up to 1860 he built up the singing of the whole congregation, and the church gained a reputation for the best of it in the city. The organist was the only professional musician he retained.
In 1855 the University of New York gave him a doctorate in music, the earliest music degree granted by an American college. In 1859, together with Edwards A. Parks and Austin Phelps, Mason brought out the Sabbath Hymn and Tune Book. This stage of his career probably left the longest-lasting mark on American church music.
Mason withdrew in 1860 to his estate at Orange, New Jersey, and there took part in founding the Valley Congregational Church, which became the Highland Avenue Congregational Church in 1916. He died at Orange on 11 August 1872, and his grave is in Rosedale Cemetery there.
Long after his death people still honoured Mason as a writer of hymns. For the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1942, a plaque was placed at his grave, and the church he had founded at Orange held a memorial service. Choral works by Mason were sung, along with organ preludes on his tunes that T. Tertius Noble and Mason's grandson Daniel Gregory Mason wrote for the day. That evening Union Theological Seminary in New York hosted a second concert of his music.
Mason built his collections on European models. The editors of the Grove dictionary believe that these models pushed out a thriving native tradition of church singing in America, one that had already produced outstanding pieces, for example by William Billings. Mason and his colleagues, among them his brother Timothy Mason, described the songs of that tradition as backwoods and unscientific. They spread their views through a new kind of singing school, set up in place of the old ones that went back to colonial times. James Keene likewise suggests that Mason's work cut people off, to some degree, from their own music.
Many musicians would consider the music that Mason spread to be more even in rhythm and weaker in harmony than the earlier American sacred music. Because the soprano line was stressed, the other choral parts became less interesting to sing. The new music also generally needed an organ to support it, and organs were a Mason family business. The older tradition withdrew to the rural South of the country and survived, for example, as Sacred Harp music. That genre has been gaining in popularity as Americans, and even Europeans, rediscover the American sacred music of the time before Mason.
Mason's son Henry (1831–1890) founded one of the first organ and piano companies in the United States, Mason and Hamlin. Another son, William (1829–1908), became a significant pianist and piano teacher.
Mason's grandson Daniel Gregory (1873–1953) was a composer and music critic, and another grandson, John B. Mason, was a popular stage actor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lowell also had a twin brother, Johnson Mason, whose grandson Mason Maury was an architect in Louisville, Kentucky.
Mason wrote church music, and his instrument was the organ. In his lifetime he created and reworked more than 1500 church hymns, many of which people still sing. Widely known are From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, My Faith Looks Up to Thee and Nearer, My God, to Thee (tune Bethany). Joy to the World also exists in his arrangement, and he wrote the melody of the children's song Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Among his collections are The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music, Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes, Selected and Original, The Modern Psalmist and The National Psalmist. He drew the 1822 hymnal from tunes by European composers, among them Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Grove's editors fault him for treating European classical music as the model for Americans, yet credit him with popularising it in a region where it was rarely heard.
Many musicians judge the pieces of Mason's circle to be more even in rhythm and weaker in harmony than earlier American sacred music, and putting the soprano in front left the remaining voices with duller lines to sing. His tunes also inspired other composers: for the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1942, T. Tertius Noble and Daniel Gregory Mason wrote organ preludes on his hymn tunes.
Mason's work is still debated. Some see in him the first important music educator in the United States, who brought music into American public schools. Others criticise him for helping to push out a rich tradition in which everyone in the congregation took part. His own view in church changed: at first he imagined that congregations did not want to sing, and later he vigorously promoted congregational singing.
Mason worked as an organist, a conductor and a music teacher. William Fiske Sherwin is named among his pupils, and Mason's son William became a significant pianist and piano teacher.
The site has three editions of his hymns for four-part choir. Two of them, Boylston and Olivet, are marked at the beginner-plus level, and Nearer My God to Thee at the intermediate level. You can therefore start with Boylston or Olivet and then move on to Nearer My God to Thee.