Author Description

Composer, singing master, and merchant, Daniel Read is today considered second in importance only to William Billings among early American psalmodists. If the number of contemporaneous reprints of his music can gauge public acceptance, then Read stood as the most popular American psalmodist of his day. This edition collects Read's 95 published compositions from 1785 to 1810. It also includes an appendix comprising pieces from the 1770s that were later published and pieces from a manuscript collection of the 1830s in which Read repudiated the style of his earlier works. (Also listed as Volume 24 in Recent Researches in American Music.)