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The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting,
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Hark! how the organs go! and,
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Mark what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance, and they sold the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the prophecy of Amos,
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I will not hear the melody of thy viols; while, Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse,
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Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs. Disparaging comparisons were made with Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut, and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical knowledge, hurled text after text at the
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Holy Bible;
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Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen. At a similar catastrophe owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command,
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Halt! Take another pitch, Bailey, take another pitch.
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it was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other parishes to
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Lord's fiddles. Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
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Thus did our sanctimonious grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old, wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
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After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be dancing soon. Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet which had been
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brought into meeting a fish-horn, which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly that
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and he had to be bound over to keep the peace before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door stridently
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at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
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We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm. Another complained of the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol player removing his coat and playing
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Others hated the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr. Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that
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granted the singers the sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
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Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol. They voted that a bass-viol was
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then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained
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Leave for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every other Sabbath & to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between meetings & not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play Then, they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the
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but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after thirty years, the choir and the