I’ve been reading how an anti-musical mood entered into the DNA of certain strains of Protestantism.
Paul Henry Lang has noted that the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli not only banned images in Zurich, but also decoration, smells, and music. In fact, during Zwingli’s first four years in the city, few themes featured as prominently as that of “invented external worship.” There was more at stake here than merely Zwingli’s concern to uphold the integrity of the Second Commandment: the root of his antipathy to material paraphernalia and external ceremony was that such practices were physical. Music became a casualty of this quest for disembodied spirituality. This set an anti-musical tone for the Protestants that fell under the shadow of Zwingli quite different from the Lutheran tradition of Northern European states, which put a high premium on music.
The long shadow of both Zwingli and Calvin had a profound impact on music in America. In chapter 2 of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics, I discussed how the Puritans were highly influenced by Zwingli, and his quest for disembodied spirituality. Over time this resulted in music becoming a significant problem. As Paul Henry Lang explains, again in Music in Western Civilization, while the European Calvinists believed they had purified the worship service by singing only Psalms instead of uninspired hymns, the colonial Puritans began to be haunted by a doubt that perhaps the tunes to which the Psalms were set might themselves be uninspired and therefore unfit for worship. The practice of singing Psalms began to fall off by the second generation as increasing numbers of Puritans believed that its prohibition was an act pleasing to God. As George Hood has explained, some Puritans even took the view that the scriptural references to hymn-singing “intended nothing more by the word singing, than thankfulness and joy of heart.”
Towards the middle of the seventeenth-century, the practice of singing somewhat revived after John Cotton published a treatise defending singing in 1647. However, attempts at a Puritan musical reformation were hampered by their belief that musical notation should be avoided, lest it encouraged the playing of instruments. George Hood explains that even the names of the notes were considered “blasphemous” by some, while Paul Henry Lang adds that, “The inevitable, sad consequence of this practice was a complete deterioration of church music and singing; the different Psalms were gradually dropped until only three or four tunes were used for all Psalms.”