Daniel Read

Daniel Read (November 16, 1757 – December 4, 1836) was an American composer of the First New England School, and one of the primary figures in early American classical music.

Read, along with his contemporaries William Billings, Oliver Holden, Supply Belcher, and Justin Morgan, was one of the primary members of a group of American composers known as the First New England School. While the classical music era was in its heyday in Europe, American composers of "serious" music were setting hymn tunes in three- and four-part a cappella style, with simple folklike melodies and little regard for functional harmony. Many of these works were fuguing tunes, which begin with all voices singing together (with a melody usually based on a Protestant hymn), come to a stop, and continue with each voice entering one at a time. Nearly all were hymn tunes, developed for the use of the newly-forming singing societies.

Once a private in the Massachusetts militia, later a comb-maker and owner of a general store in New Haven, Connecticut, Read was only the second American composer to put out a collection of his own music (after William Billings). This work, The American Singing Book (1785), went through five editions in the years immediately following: unusually successful for its day, making him by number of printings the most popular composer in the nation. To that must be added the number of published compilations of tunes that used his works (not always with his permission); "Sherburne", a 1785 tune originally from the American Singing Book, a setting of the Nahum Tate carol "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks," appeared over seventy times in print before 1810.

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