In the broad range of American musical historiography, few dissertations, books, recordings, or monographs address the development of a professional musical culture in Federalist America (ca. 1780–1830). The presence of an innate Americanness in much of this music, as well as its worthiness as professional-standard music, has caused numerous debates throughout the history of American-based musicological writings. Nicholas Temperley's Bound for America redresses this comparative paucity in a detailed biography and discussion of significant compositions of three British emigrant composers of this period: William Selby, Rayner Taylor, and Dr. George Knowles Jackson. As Temperley states in his preface (ix), his volume represents an expansion and revision of previous scholarship by Barbara Owen (on Selby), John Cuthbert (on Taylor), and Charles Kaufman (on Jackson), as well as other important studies by Nicholas Tawa and J. Bunker Clark.

Bound for America poses two questions: 1) Why would these composers emigrate and begin new careers in middle age?; and 2) How did their careers unfold in a new country? Temperley begins his investigation by outlining British and American musical society in the late eighteenth century including the social, professional, and musical opportunities of composers in general, and in particular, his three composer subjects. He finishes this chapter with a discussion of Federalist music's significant scholars and scholarly works.

In chapters devoted to each of the three composers, the author presents both their British and American biographies, followed by a discussion of compositional output. The concluding chapter assesses the importance of each composer's accomplishments (and failures) and the benefits offered by the work to American society. Facsimiles of illustrated title pages and relevant illustrations, such as the Magdalen Chapel where Selby performed, as well as complete pieces and excerpts of compositions are reproduced.

The book's main strength lies in the wealth of new information on the lives of the composers. Rarely does a volume of musical biography include so many juicy items pertaining to sexual misconduct and political alliances, along with their repercussions in emigration. Though Arthur Clifton's infidelity and bigamy remain old gossip, new information on Selby and Taylor reads as well as any novel of intrigue. Temperley's discussion of the music generally displays the thoroughness and correctness expected of such a scholar, though the reader should note several problems involving the list of works, but also the nature of works included, and performance practice in Federalist America.

The first issue concerns the description and listing of compositions. As Temperley states, much of this music is unavailable in modern editions, which justifies the number of examples included. However, the list of compositions does not represent a complete catalogue. Although not a problem in and of itself, Temperley does not acknowledge the exclusion of certain known compositions, thus potentially misleading the reader. Rather, the inclusion of specific works pertains more to the author's subjective aesthetic criteria regarding the works he deems important, especially in the case of Rayner Taylor and George K. Jackson.

Regarding factual information, Temperley states that in terms of orchestral composition in its original orchestral form, “[W]e have no surviving examples of these from the selected composers, other than Taylor's opera overtures in piano reduction” (202). A two-movement symphony composed by Taylor is extant.¹

Though only the string parts survive, this work represents Taylor's only known original orchestration. Further, Temperley also excluded another three-movement orchestral reduction for keyboard by Taylor titled “The Bells,” cited in William Treat Upton's revised edition of Sonneck's A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (18th Century).² Other unmentioned works include the prize-winning song and chorus “Freedom and Peace,” with harmonie band accompaniment printed in National Martial Music and Songs (Philadelphia, 1809), as well as the divertimentos for violin and keyboard published in London in the New Universal Magazine. Other works are notably absent in the chapters devoted to Taylor and Jackson. (Selby's list of works remains small enough that Temperley includes all known surviving compositions, thus also misleading the reader about the works of the other two composers.)

A second issue throughout the volume concerns two basic principles: the nature of “scientific” composition in the United States and the subjective choice of music to be discussed. In the first and final chapters, Temperley theorizes the nature of composition and reception theory in the musical culture of the young republic, concluding that composers emigrating to the United States could “continue to write the kinds of music they had written before, but they often had to lower their expectations” (199) and compose music that “must be simple, and must avoid anything too challenging, ‘scientific,’ or unfamiliar” (200). However, “financial need” and outside pressure “often induced composers to lower their ideals and write ‘democratic’ music in which popularity displaced art as the main goal” (201), citing such examples as the review of a composition of Alexander Reinagle while failing to address the aesthetic considerations of “nineteen twentieths of those who fill the house” (200). While these statements remain valid in a discussion of professional Federalist music, Temperley devotes no prose to the “democratic” music of this period. Instead, he devotes all of his discussion to examples of music designed to appeal to the “cognoscenti” of Britain and America. Rather than discuss the differences between these two musical-social spheres of composition, Temperley ignores the one in favor of the other. In his discussion of patriotic music, his only comments detail the hollowness of the music and the odes. He discusses operas, sonatas, Vauxhall songs, cathedral anthems, Anglican chants, and other contrapuntal works, as opposed to psalm tunes, country-dances, and marches. Although he addresses differences in thinking among scholars writing about American music in the twentieth century, his own perspective perpetuates the separation of immigrant composers from their public while striving to show interconnectivity between these two spheres. This same subjective ideology is not unique to the volume, but also pervades Temperley's earlier series, The London Pianoforte School, emphasizing his subjective predilections for “cognoscenti” compositions.

This predilection might spring from the meaning of the word “scientific,” which Temperley describes as “a catchword suggesting the technical competence displayed by ‘European’ composers” (3). Again, this statement is valid, but use of the term differed between Great Britain and the United States. In Britain, the term applied in the context that Temperley maintains in Bound for America, but in the United States it did not pertain only to composers who wrote sonatas, rondos, and theme-and-variations. Instead, it also applied to composers who could correctly harmonize “Old Hundred”—“thus scientific” did not pertain to genre as much as it pertained to style.

This misunderstanding finds expression in statements such as: “[S]elf-taught composers like William Billings, Lewis Edson, and Oliver Shaw could achieve much by combining reading with practical experience and imagination. But they could not fully master the idioms of European art music” (199–200). Unlike Billings and Edson, Oliver Shaw represents the circle of scientific native-born American composers contemporaneous with Holyoke and Holden, who composed and arranged sacred music with orchestral accompaniment, domestic song, chamber music, band music, and piano music. To some extent, William Selby and, more importantly, Hans Gram initiated many of these scientific reforms in New England. A comparison of the instrumental pieces in Joseph Herrick's The Instrumental Preceptor (Exeter, 1807) with Shaw's For The Gentlemen (Dedham, 1807) illustrates the difference between unscientific and scientific democratic music in Federalist America.

The third and final issue involves the presence of figured-bass continuo accompaniment in American publications during the Federalist era. Although William Selby's surviving works, both British and American, do not employ figures for their basses, Taylor's and Jackson's compositions do. In the chapter on Taylor, Temperley discusses the absence of figured bass in his songs as well as in American songs during the Federalist period. Contending with the opinion of Tawa, who believed that Americans were unable to realize figures based upon a lack of training, Temperley found that “whereas English amateur singers were used to filling in accompaniments under the vocal line, Americans, brought up on English songs printed in a largely two-part texture, but unable to make use of the bass figures, had become accustomed to the thin sound that resulted when they were played as written” (96), citing the song “The Faded Lily” as the exception to the rule. Yet he does not mention the absence of figures in the songs of Selby, or the presence of figures in many American songs by Jackson, including “The Sylph” and, within his own text, “Pope's Universal Prayer” (fig. 17, 150) (ex. 47, 173), “Pope's Celebrated Ode. The Dying Christian To His Soul” (fig. 18, 151), and the 1815 edition of “L'Adieu”/“One Kind Kiss” (ex. 53c, 184), among others. Temperley mentions the adaptation that British emigrants made to earlier compositions when republishing songs in the United States, in particular, filling in the harmony in the left hand to counterbalance the absence of figures. Comparing the 1815 edition of Jackson's song with earlier American and British publications as well as with the other works reveals that the texture is still thicker than the earlier works, thus belying Temperley's conclusion.

The presence of figures can also be extended to the realm of sacred music, where the same phenomenon occurs in the works of Taylor and Jackson and other professional Federalist composers. Composers and publishers at this time generally presented a score order of tenor, alto, treble (melody), and bass with three methods for printing keyboard accompaniment to these scores: 1) figured bass beneath the bass part; 2) no figures, thus intending the player to read the score; and 3) the use of printed cue notes in the treble stave, condensing the keyboard accompaniment onto the treble and bass vocal parts within each system. Rarely, a separate keyboard accompaniment would be printed beneath the vocal score. All three methods appear in a work cited in Temperley's text, William Smith's The Churchman's Choral Companion to His Prayer Book 148, 169.³

. This collection includes pieces by Jackson, Taylor, and Benjamin Carr. The pieces by Jackson use the first method, those by Taylor include all three methods, and those by Carr use the third method. From this viewpoint, then, the commissions in Smith's work suggest the personal preference of the composer/arranger instead of the limitations of the public. Other examples of the first and third methods found in Jackson's works are The Choral Companion (n.d.), A Choice Collection of Chants For Four Voices (n.d.), and David's Psalms Set to Music expressly for the use of Churches, Chapels, Meetings, & Private Families (1804). This phenomenon of interchangeable presentation is by no means unique to Jackson, occurring in publications by Nathaniel Duren Gould, who states in the “Preface” to National Church Harmony (1833) that “few have the opportunity to become so versed in the science of Music, as to be able to play in harmony, even of plain psalmody, from figures, it is deemed necessary to devise some method of placing it before the performer on the staff… of introducing harmony on the Base and Treble staff, in small notes”⁴ —even though Gould himself published sacred compositions with figured bass ten years earlier in the Social Harmony (1823).⁵ This topic remains too complicated and speculative to resolve with the simple misleading conclusion Temperley presents.

Despite these unaddressed discrepancies among composers and the subjective and factual issues mentioned, this book stands as a testament to thorough scholarship and entertaining reading on an understudied subject of musical history. A British emigrant himself, Temperley uses a tone that bespeaks a personal identification with the composers presented, as he addresses in the opening section. As a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American music, Nicholas Temperley in Bound for America provides a breadth of scholarly inquiry as well as a personal understanding of the subject matter, offering us an authoritative and engaging perspective into the music and musical culture of Georgian London and Federalist America.