An Anglo-American psalm tune or hymn tune, designed for strophic repetition, which contains one or more groups of contrapuntal entries involving textual overlap. The spelling adopted here conforms to 18th-century American practice and helps to differentiate the form from the fugue.
The fuging tune originated in Britain in Anglican parish churches as a way of elaborating metrical psalmody, taking hold among country choirs in the period 1745–65. During the 1770s, as dissenting congregations eased their opposition to choir singing, fuging tunes began to appear in collections intended for Calvinist use. In the American colonies, James Lyon’s Urania (Philadelphia, 1761) was the first tunebook to contain fuging tunes, all of them taken from British publications. Beginning in the 1770s colonial composers took up the form, and by the mid-1780s it was flourishing in Congregational meeting-houses in New England in the hands of native psalmodists including William Billings, Lewis Edson, Daniel Read and Timothy Swan.
Many favourite fuging tunes during the form’s American heyday (1783–1800), including Edson’s ‘Bridgewater’ and Read’s ‘Sherburne’, were settings of a four-line stanza for four-part chorus with the melody in the tenor. The first two lines proceed in block chords to a cadence; the third begins with overlapping voice entries, each part singing the same text if not precisely the same contrapuntal subject; chordal texture is restored for the repeat of the fourth line; and the second section is repeated to create an ABB form. Although reformers after 1800 attacked the fuging tune as irreverent and crude, it persisted in print and performance in rural areas and the southern USA, retaining popularity well into the 20th century.
I. Lowens: ‘The Origins of the American Fuging Tune’, JAMS, vi (1953), 43–52; repr. in idem: Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964)
N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), 171
N. Temperley: ‘The Origins of the Fuging Tune’, RMARC, no.17 (1981), 1–32
N. Temperley and C.G. Manns: Fuging Tunes in the Eighteenth Century (Detroit, 1983)
K. Kroeger: American Fuging-Tunes, 1770–1820: a Descriptive Catalog (Westport, CT, 1994)
N. Temperley: The Hymn Tune Index (Oxford, 1998)
RICHARD CRAWFORD