(b Philadelphia, 21 Sept 1737; d Philadelphia, 9 May 1791). American statesman and musician. A graduate of the College of Philadelphia (1757; later the University of Pennsylvania), Hopkinson was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1761. At the outset of the Revolutionary War he allied himself with the patriot cause as a delegate to the Continental Congress (1776) and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1779 until his death he served as a judge. Hopkinson's interests were varied and his talents many. Besides his musical activities, he wrote essays, poetry and pamphlets; he was skilled at design and drawing, and his inventions included a shaded candlestick and a new method of quilling a harpsichord.
Deeply interested in music from an early age, Hopkinson began to play the harpsichord at 17. Manuscript music he copied in the 1750s shows that his musical preference ran to the Anglo-Italian repertory favoured in mid-18th-century London drawing-rooms: arias, songs and instrumental pieces by composers including Handel, Corelli, Geminiani, Stamitz, Galuppi and Arne. As a performer Hopkinson played an important role in Philadelphia's musical life during the 1760s and early 70s. A gentleman amateur, he occasionally joined with professional musicians to present concerts, a situation that reflects the participatory atmosphere of music-making in colonial Philadelphia. Hopkinson was also active in sacred music, teaching psalmody, compiling tune books for congregational singing and serving for a time as organist in Philadelphia’s Christ Church (c1770).
Although Hopkinson was not the only American of his time to perform in public with immigrant European professionals, he seems to have been the only one to compose the type of music played and sung at these concerts. His song for voice and harpsichord, My Days have been so Wondrous Free (1759), modelled after the British songs he had copied, is the earliest surviving American secular composition. Nearly three decades after composing that song Hopkinson issued Seven Songs (Philadelphia, 1788), for which he wrote both text and music. The dedication sets forth his assertion, ‘I cannot, I believe, be refused the Credit of being the first Native of the United States who has produced a Musical Composition’. Hopkinson’s claim, based on Seven Songs (rather than on his 1759 piece, which he never published), is accurate if one takes ‘musical composition’ to mean secular piece, and if one recognizes that Hopkinson's publication followed by less than six months the ratification of the Federal Constitution, which established the United States as a political entity.
In addition to the music already mentioned Hopkinson composed an anthem, two psalm settings and a number of secular occasional pieces. He also compiled A Collection of Psalm Tunes (Philadelphia, 1763) and The Psalms of David … for the Use of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (New York, 1767), and selected the music for the eight-page tune supplement bound with the American Protestant Episcopal Church's revision of The Book of Common Prayer (Philadelphia, 1786).
DAB (G.E. Hastings)
O.G.T. Sonneck: Francis Hopkinson … and James Lyon (Washington DC, 1905/R)
G.E. Hastings: The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson (Chicago, 1926/R)
O.E. Albrecht: ‘Francis Hopkinson, Musician, Poet and Patriot’, Library Chronicle of the University of Pennsylvania, vi (1938), 3–15
G. Anderson: “‘The Temple of Minerva” and Francis Hopkinson: a Reappraisal of America's First Poet-Composer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxx (1976), 166–77
RICHARD CRAWFORD/NYM COOKE