THE NEW-ENGLAND HARMONY, 1771

MWA owns a title-page for The New-England Harmony (Boston: John Fleeming, 1771) and a tune supplement without a title-page. There are several reasons to suppose that the title-page and the tune supplement belong together:

          1. They are identical in physical size.

          2. Neither can be linked to any other collection in existence.

          3. The tune supplement could not have been printed before 10 Dec. 1770, for it contains BROOKFIELD, first published in William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770), which was announced as published on that date. Thus, the earliest possible date for the music is congruent with the title-page date.

          4. The music in the tune supplement agrees with the title-page description of The New-England Harmony as 'the largest Collection of this kind ever yet published. The supplement contains 75 tunes; its closest competitor is Daniel Bayley's The Essex Harmony (Newburyport, 1770), which contains 73 tunes. Earlier books with more tunes were all oblong in format.

          5. Although there is a possibility that the tune supplement was published later than 1771, it is so similar in content to Bayley's The Essex Harmony that it appears to have been issued to compete directly with it: 68 of its 75 tunes appeared also in Bayley's work. One detail might seem to contradict the foregoing. The New-England Harmony title-page announces a set of psalm-tunes 'in three and four parts,' yet the tune supplement contains two psalm-tunes (ISLE WIGHT, LUTTERWORTH) set for 2 voices. This point does not seem conclusive, however, when one notices that Bayley's Essex Harmony, described by its title-page as a collection of tunes in 'three and four parts,' also contains 2 tunes (HUNTINGTON, LUTTERWORTH) for 2 voices.