At the time, the first pan-tribal cultural elements, such as powwows, were being established, and composers like Edward MacDowell and Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert used Native themes in their compositions.
It was not until the much later work of Arthur Farwell, however, that an informed representation of Native music was brought into the American classical scene, part of the Indianist movement.
Due to complex geologic reasons, the mountains and subranges were difficult to cross and included ridges of uninhabitable quartz mixed with valleys of soil unsuitable for agriculture.
These folk tunes adopted characteristics from multiple sources, including British broadside ballads (which switched their themes from love to a distinctly American preoccupation with masculine work like mining or sensationalistic disasters and murder), African folk tunes (and their lyrical focus on semi-historical events) and minstrel shows and music halls.
It is often claimed that the "Scotch snap" popularized by Niel Gow influenced Appalachian fiddling; however, according to historian Michael Newton, this is not true.
The original Puritan immigrants to New England sang a number of spiritual psalms, but generally disliked secular music, or at least those varieties which they viewed as encouraging immorality and disorder.
Personally owned instruments recorded included the cittern, virginals, soprano clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, fife, flute, viol and violin and fiddle and the Mrs. Healy pipe.
Despite some hostility on the part of ministers like Increase Mather, dance music was popular in the New England colonial era, especially by the early 18th century, as the local population boomed with an influx of more settlers.
Reformers included prominent clergymen like Thomas Walter and Nathaniel Chauncey, many of whom regarded their style of "regular" singing as more sophisticated as well as more devout.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, played a major role in revivalist hymnody after a trip to Georgia in 1735 at the invitation of James Oglethorpe.
After returning to America, Wesley became an important preacher in a rise of fervent Christianity called the Great Awakening, along with George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, among others.
It was in this context that a wave of itinerant singing masters, including William Billings, arose, creating hymns that remain standard across the country.
Following Billings' pioneering footsteps were Supply Belcher, Andrew Law, Daniel Read, Jacob Kimball, Jeremiah Ingalls, John Wyeth, James Lyon, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan and Timothy Swan.
The most characteristic feature was that the voices, male and female respectively, doubled their parts in any octave in order to fill out the harmony; this generated a texture of close-position chords that was unknown in European traditions.
He did not always follow the standard rules of composition in his works, and has thus been called the "first American composer to emphasize strongly a creative independence and to flaunt his personal idiosyncrasies in both his music and (especially) his published writings".
Billings, Belcher and Read were the beginning of a chain of tunebook compilers that grew increasingly secular, as the art of psalmody lost its religious importance.
The rituals that Mother Ann designed, which she claimed to have seen in visions, included passionate dances that represented part of a battle between the holy Shakers and the devil and the flesh.
[citation needed] Though their strange customs and British mannerisms drew some hostility from the colonists, as the American Revolutionary War was brewing, the Shakers grew in number and eventually spread as far south as Kentucky.
Philadelphia, home of the esteemed Alexander Reinagle, John Christopher Moller, Rayner Taylor and Susannah Haswell Rowson, was especially renowned for musical development.
Philip Phile, Johann Friedrich Peter and Alexander Reinagle were prominent composers of the era, though Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Philadelphia, remains the best-known.
This was a group of Seventh Day Baptists led by Peter Miller and Conrad Beissel, who believed in using music as an integral part of worship.
Founded in 1457, the Moravian Church originally spread across Moravia, Poland and Bohemia before persecution forced the remaining faithful to Saxony, where they lived under the protection of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf.
A legend has arisen claiming that a group of Native American warriors approached a Moravian settlement during the French and Indian War, but left after hearing a trombone choir because they believed it to be the voice of their Great Spirit.
Moravians also had a tradition of secular art music that included the famed composer Johann Friedrich Peter, who was a German born in the Netherlands who emigrated to Bethlehem in 1770.
After living in Bethlehem for a time, Peter moved to Salem, where he founded the Collegium Musicum (in 1786) and collected hundreds of symphonies, anthems and oratorios.
The Society lasted until 1906, but their final settlement, Old Economy Village (now Ambridge, Pennsylvania) contains archives with sheet music that is still performed at special community events.
Enslaved individuals brought with them work songs, religious music and dance, and a wide variety of instruments, including kalimba, xylophone, flutes and rattles.
African music is usually polyrhythmic, made by a wide variety of percussion instruments, both pitched and unpitched, using numerous kinds of natural materials.
The banjo and various kinds of drums were the most important instruments, but enslaved Africans also used varieties of panpipes, notched gourds played with a scraper (similar to a güiro) and rattles.
Enslaved Africans in places like Haiti, Brazil and the Dominican Republic retained the use of drums, and their percussion has formed an integral part of Afro-Caribbean and Latin music.