The Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXV, no. 1 (Spring 1999)
True American Miscellany
Orly Krasner reports that the following excerpt was brought to her attention by a graduate student,
Richard Spicer, in her American Music seminar last semester. The orthography of the 17th-century
quote is that way in the original.
"A letter which Leonard Hoar, later president of Harvard College, wrote from London on March 27, 1661,
to his freshman nephew Josiah Flynt, perfectly illustrates the Puritan attitude. Josiah had written
asking his uncle to send him a fiddle. Hoar replies with a very lengthy epistle of sensible
advice about his studies and his conduct, which had been none too satisfactory. Near the end
he says,
Musick I had almost forgot. I suspect you seek it both too soon, and to much. This be assured
of that if you be not excellent at it Its worth nothing at all. And if you be excellent it will
take up so much of your mind and time that you will be worth little else; And when all that excellence
is attained your acquest will prove little or nothing of real propfit to you unlesse you intend
to take upon you the trade of fiddling. Howbeit hearing your mother's desires were for it for
your sisters for whom tis more proper and they also have more leisure to look after it: For them
I say I had provided the Instruments desired, but I cannot now attend the sending them being
hurrying away from London.1
Evidently Howar had no objection to music for the girls, who would not have to go out and earn a
living, but foresaw that a fiddle would only tempt Josiah to wast his time over an amusement from which he
could not hope to gain a livelihood."
1. Foote, Henry Wilder. "Musical Life in Boston in the Eighteenth Century," in Proceedings
of the American Antiquarian Society. Vol XLIX, Oct. 1939, pp. 293-313. Original from S.E.
Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth-Century, Vol. II, p. 643.
Updated 6/1/99