Lowell Mason

In business and banking in Savannah through his early adult years, Lowell Mason kept music as a parallel occupation intense enough to produce a collection of church tunes, which the Handel and Haydn Society published in 1822 without his name on it. Its success helped bring him to Boston, where he combined musical work with banking. There he helped found the Boston Academy of Music and promoted singing in public education; in 1838 Boston adopted and funded music teaching in its grammar schools. Some 1,600 hymn tunes and arrangements are attached to his name, Bethany among them. He was born in Medfield, Massachusetts, in 1792, and died in 1872. In Savannah he had been organist of the Independent Presbyterian Church, and he returned to Massachusetts in 1827; George James Webb was his partner in founding the Boston Academy, in 1833. He supplied tunes for My Faith Looks Up to Thee and Nearer, My God, to Thee, and his papers are kept at Yale.