"Before His Head was Cold": Puritan Piety and the Pipe Organ

Abstract

It is well known that musical activity in colonial New England was quite low; this was in no small part caused by the Puritan emphasis on the unaccompanied singing of psalms in their churches. What is often neglected when discussing Puritan musical activity is how Calvinism’s grip on Puritan theology loosened throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving room for changes to worship traditions. The same Puritans who destroyed pipe organs across England in the seventeenth century started building these instruments in their New England meeting houses towards the end of the eighteenth century. This paper uses primary sources to compare the Puritan theology of the Westminster Confession to statements of belief from Boston’s most progressive Congregationalist churches in the late eighteenth century. Such comparisons, when paired with a timeline of rhetoric surrounding instruments in worship music, connect doctrines of separation to the destruction of organs and doctrines of unity to the reinstatement of organs.

Keywords

• Puritans
• worship music
• organ
• theology
• Colonial America