Lowell Mason Accomplishments

From these schools there emerge many more benefits than just singing lessons, but rather a whole push in musical advancements. For example, because of the demand for tunebooks or anthologies of sacred music that was geared towards instruction in singing-schools caused an increase in the publication of music . Also, because of the demand for music, composers were allowed to flourish, such psalmodists included Billings, Read, Holden, French, Kimball, and Holyoke, who also worked as singing masters at singing-schools . As a result of more composing and printing, a unique system arose, the shape note system. This system is formally defined as musical notation in which a note head of a certain shape is assigned to each solfege syllable fa, sol,

He was born January 8th, 1792 in Medfield, Massachusetts as the firstborn of an established and middle-class family . Very early in his life he was an accomplished musician, attending singing schools and then teaching first singing school at the age of 15, an instrumentalist who at 16 got to direct the town band . Despite his achievements however, he wanted to go into business like his father and spent 15 years in Savannah, Georgia before returning to Boston in 1827 at the age of 35 . In Boston he worked as a banker, directed church choirs, and led the Handel and Haydn Society there in Boston . Around his 40’s, his time is now spent as a fulltime musician, in churches, schools, as church organist, choir director, academy choral director, administrator, publicist, and editor of textbooks, hymnals, and choral music anthologies

Here, during 1837-1838, he set out to prove that children could learn music in the public school system . With a successful outcome, it influenced the Boston School Committee to approve vocal music as part of the school curriculum, thus establishing the formal music education we know now . After this, from 1838-1851, he taught and assisted other teachers in the Boston school system and ten-day training sessions he called “conventions”, which drew great numbers of teachers from all over America and helped establish more training style events such as the New York Normal Musical Institute by George F. Root and the Horace Mann Institutes for Teachers. He had also amassed a great music library, which he allowed others to use as well upon request . At 61, he retired in Silver Spring estate in Orange, New Jersey and died August 11, 1872 . His ideology of music being a gift from God and to take a broad approach to music teaching have made him the music educator all can look up