Notes on the Program

Our program features music composed by Sawney Freeman (1760s-1828) as well music that Freeman may have heard or played in early nineteenth-century Connecticut. Freeman’s musical world (including his own compositions, which circulated in print and manuscript) remains almost completely unknown to modern audiences. We are excited and humbled to present this lost repertory, which captures some of the themes and sounds of a new country eager to celebrate its vision of itself as free and democratic while wrestling with the recent traumas of revolution, contested ties to European culture, and the manifest failures of American ideals to benefit all its inhabitants.

Sawney Freeman first appears in the historical record in 1777, where probate documents in the town of Essex, CT record an enslaved child named Sawney. In 1790 Sawney was mentioned in a local newspaper advertisement as having escaped with his fiddle, and by 1801 a collection of compositions by “Sawney Freeman, a free black man in the state of Connecticut” was advertised in a New Haven newspaper. No surviving copy of Freeman’s published collection, the Musician’s Pocket Companion, are known to survive, but a manuscript dated 1817 in the Trinity College (Hartford, CT) library contains fourteen pieces ascribed to a Sawney Freeman. A number of clues in the archival record suggest that the “variety of tunes, in four and five parts” mentioned in the New Haven advertisement are the same ones preserved in the 1817 Trinity College manuscript.

Our program features eight pieces by Sawney Freeman interspersed with works from the New England musical culture in which Freeman participated as a musician and composer. In fact, several of the solos you will hear tonight survive in manuscripts linked to Freeman based on their appearance alongside previously unrecognized versions of Freeman’s compositions. Did Freeman perform (or even compose) these virtuoso solos? Research continues, though a definitive answer may be lost to history. Of note is how these pieces suggest a certain antiquarian streak among New England musicians c.1800. Variations on La Folia and Greensleeves, as well as other favorite Renaissance tunes, appear in numerous versions and locations in New England sources. One wonders whether their antiquity was known to players and listeners, or whether these variation sets simply evoked English, Scottish, and Irish fiddle tunes that partake of similar formulae.

The instruments for which Freeman composed were known as “viols,” instruments built and played in New England starting in the 1770s or 80s that typically had four or five strings tuned in fifths. The New England bass viol was usually tuned like a violoncello but often had a shorter neck and larger body, qualities that suited its use accompanying congregational singing in New England meetinghouses. The bass viol (also referred to with by the anachronistic term “church bass”) was the lowest member of a “consort” of New England viols that included tenor and alto viols as well as violins/fiddles (and/or flutes and “clarionets”). In this performance, I am playing an anonymous New England tenor viol c.1840 (perhaps from the Hudson Valley) and Adam is playing a New England alto viol made by Myron Kidder of Northampton, MA. Rather than the more traditional New England bass viol, Pat is playing a viola da gamba, an instrument that nevertheless serves admirably.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the age-old Puritan proscription of musical instruments in worship was softening but still had fervent (and verbose!) defenders. A surviving account from Massachusetts from later in the nineteenth century recalled that “the violin was admitted [to the meetinghouse] on the condition that it should be played upside down, for then it would be a viol, and by no means a fiddle.” Since we are among friends, Claire and Vita hold their fiddles in the traditional (Devilish) manner.

The eight pieces by Freeman on our program reveal the composer’s distinctive engagement with a range of musical idioms that were emerging in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. Marches in four or five parts (often for winds or evoking winds) were very popular following decades of military conflict and the ubiquitous presence of a ‘martial’ culture of mustering in town squares, fifes and drums, tricorne hats and worn and patched uniforms. Freeman’s New Death March is a funeral march that may reference Handel’s Dead March in Saul, from the oratorio Saul (1738), which circulated widely in New England after the Revolutionary War. While not a march, Freeman’s Mount Vernon may have been composed as an elegy for Washington, whose death in December 1799 brought the young country to a standstill.

Dancing to tunes played on a fiddle or flute, or in more formal or better resourced circumstances a small dance band, remained a beloved pastime across the early Republic. Dance tunes represent a sizable fraction of surviving music, and numerous collections of dances like Freeman’s gig, The Union of All Parties, were published in New England in the early nineteenth century. Among the pieces for dancing were often interspersed “incidental” music in the form of short works by European composers like Handel, Pleyel, and Kotzwara; three and four-part settings of songs or arias from the London stage; and programmatic pieces with titles like Echo, the Cuckoo, Serenade, etc. Several of Freeman’s pieces fall into this category–The Rays of Liberty and The Musician, for example, seem intended to capture an impression or feeling.

Finally, psalmody in three and four parts was composed, published, and sung in great quantities throughout the period. New England born composers and music teachers would publish and print over seven thousand compositions between about 1770 and 1811. The influence of psalmody, which also likely served as the vehicle through which Freeman learned to read and write music, is evident in many of his works. Psalmody is music for singing and for creating community in the intimate act of entraining voices together in affirmation or prayer or lament. New England psalmody is forthright and accessible, constructed in clear phrases of open harmony designed to ring out in a wooden meetinghouse. Cosmopolitan visitors to New England were struck (and often embarrassed) by how old fashioned and rustic psalmody sounded, with the tune still in the tenor voice and a casual and utilitarian approach to voice leading. All of Freeman’s compositions as they appear in the Trinity College manuscript feature the melody in the tenor and are laid out as one often finds in psalmody. I strongly suspect that Freeman composed psalmody (he certainly would have sung it–it was ubiquitous in Connecticut), though none is currently known. Were lyrics added to several of Freeman’s compositions they would fit right in among the psalmody.

Whether the variations and divisions on Renaissance tunes like Greensleeves and La Folia were heard as “old” by New England musicians is hard to know. The repertoire of tunes and variations that circulated in print and manuscript in New England makes visible the close (if somewhat mysterious) relationship between fiddle tunes from the British Isles and much earlier Renaissance ground basses like passemezzi and folias. The fiddle tune Joy to Great Caesar (or The King’s Health) as played by Irish, Scottish, and English fiddlers over the last couple centuries is none other than a couple variations of La Folia, a tune and ground bass the first proliferated in sixteenth-century Italy and Spain. The setting of Greensleeves on tonight’s program is found in a manuscript from Connecticut dated 1798 that contains a wonderful mélange of the different idioms mentioned above. This manuscript is also the origin of the unaccompanied folia-esque piece by Uri K. Hill, The Parting Minstrelsy, that I play as a prelude to the set of variations on la folia (the Follies of Spain) in a different manuscript from Litchfield, CT, dated 1803 (and which contains several otherwise unknown works by Freeman). The Minuet with Variations by from Herrick’s Instrumental Preceptor (Exeter, NH 1807) is one of various variation sets by Herrick that show the persistence of Renaissance style divisions in Early Republic New England.

Tweed Side refers to the River Tweed that marks the boundary between England and Scotland. The tune is known from the Blaikie MS (1692), familiar to viola da gamba players as an important source of Scottish music for lyra viol. We present two versions of this sweet tune, one from Ezekiel Goodale’s Instrumental Director (Hallowell, ME 1819) and a variation set published in London in 1743 by Burk Thumoth. Sellinger’s Round is another English Country Dance tune with a long history. It would have been known and danced in the eighteenth-century British colonies, where copies of John Playford’s Dancing Master circulated. But a century before, a set of divisions for keyboard by William Byrd appeared in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. An arrangement for strings of Byrd’s setting appears on tonight’s program.

A handful of tunes in eighteenth-century North American sources bear the title “Congo.” These tunes, often similar to jigs in 3/8 or 6/8, seem to have been understood as originating in (or being somehow associated with) Africa or the African diaspora of enslaved and free African Americans. The Congo on our program is found in a manuscript from Buckingham County, VA dated 1790. It is paired with William Billings’ famous hymn tune Africa, first published in the New England Psalm Singer (Boston, MA 1777). These pieces gesture towards some of the diverse ways that Africa appeared in the American imaginary and how Freeman might have navigated the complexities of identity and music. The advertisement for his one known publication proudly proclaimed that he was “A Free Black Man in the State of Connecticut,” and it’s likely that he was able to purchase his own freedom using money earned as a musician. Freeman’s evident skill as a fiddle player invites consideration of a slew of contemporaneous Black fiddle players and composers who are (still) emerging from the historical record. Snowden’s Jig is a tune recently made famous by the Carolina Chocolate Drops (Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson), as “the Genuine Negro Jig,” the title track of their third album. The Snowdens were a family of African American musicians from Virginia who performed widely during the early-mid nineteenth century as the Snowden Family Band. In addition to being a great tune, Snowden’s Jig has become a sort of anthem of the recent rediscovery and revival of Black folk and country music in the US.

Ode on Science, first published during the final decade of the eighteenth century and widely anthologized (both Billings’ Africa and Ode on Science appear in the Sacred Harp), became something of an anthem of the Abolitionist Movement in mid-nineteenth century New England. Singer and historian Tim Eriksen has written about how Ode on Science was sung by groups of Black singers in Middletown and Hartford, CT, its text evoking the energy and idealism of the American Revolution. The text is worth quoting in full:

The morning sun shines from the east,

And spreads her [(Science’s)] glories to the west,

All nations with her beams are blest,

Where’er his radiant light appears.

So science spreads her lighted ray,

O’er lands which long in darkness lay,

She visits fair Columbia,

Ands sets her sons among the stars.

Fair freedom her attendant,

waits to bless the portals of her gates,

To crown the young & rising states,

With laurels of immortal day.

The British yoke, the Gallic chain,

Was urg’d upon our sons in vain,

All haughty tyrants we disdain,

and shout long live America

Ode on Science also circulated as a fiddle tune and as an instrumental trio, as we perform it tonight. Though not by Freeman, it exemplifies features evident in Freeman’s works that testify to the close relationships between psalmody, fiddle and dance music, and incidental music for the enjoyment of the players and auditors. In its various forms Ode on Science also became strongly associated with Abolition and a critique of the failure of the country to live up to Revolutionary ideals of liberty and democracy for all. One wonders whether the final piece on our program, Freeman’s St. Albans, had a similar subtext. St. Albans, a town in Vermont on Lake Champlain, was of strategic importance during the Revolutionary War by virtue of its location on a major waterway near the Canadian border. For these same reasons it also became a stop on the Underground Railroad and may have been the site of earlier cooperation between fugitive African Americans and Abenaki and other Indigenous groups fighting British and, later, American hegemony. Little biographical information on Sawney Freeman survives—we can know (or imagine) this fascinating figure only through his few surviving compositions.

~Loren Ludwig