A Comparison of the Tune Books of Tufts and Walter

Abstract

Two 1721 Boston tune books, one by Thomas Walter, the other by John Tufts, contain explanatory introductions. Either could be considered the first music education textbook printed in America. The purpose of this study was to compare the musical arrangements of the fifth edition (1726) of Tufts's An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes (the earliest extant Tufts edition with three-part arrangements) with the tune settings of Walter's The Grounds and Rules of Musicke Explained (1721) and the ninth edition (1698) of The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testament, commonly known as the “Bay Psalm Book.” These comparisons demonstrated that Tufts's fifth edition and Walter's first edition are musically identical and are therefore more closely related to each other than to other well-known sources. This and other evidence lends incontrovertible support to Irving Lowens's notion that Walter was Tufts's primary musical source for the fifth and later editions. Thus, Walter deserves primacy as the first American music textbook writer. The author also examined the bibliographic issue of whether there was one 1726 Tufts edition or two and determined the existence of one edition in that year. These tune books represent the earliest American attempts to deal with the instructional issue of using nonstandard notation to teach music reading.

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