Legacies of Lowell Mason, Medfield’s Master Musician, Monday, Oct 3rd!

Legacies of Lowell Mason, Medfield’s Master Musician

Don't miss this! Monday, Oct 3rd at 7:30pm at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, 26 North Street. The presentation is free and open to the public, of course. Please join us!

The Medfield Historical Society will present what promises to be a fun program entitled “Legacies of Lowell Mason, Medfield’s Master Musician” on Monday, October 3, at 7:30 pm at the old meetinghouse, aka First Parish Unitarian Church, 26 North Street. The program will include a talk and music, including one or two audience sing-alongs.

The featured speaker will be Stephen Marini, who has taught at Wellesley College since 1976. Prof. Marini, who is also a pianist and choral conductor, made a very significant donation of Lowell Mason papers, music, and memorabilia to the historical society last spring.

Lowell Mason (1792-1872), Medfield’s most famous and accomplished native son, was music director at First Parish in his youth. He went on to write some 2,000 hymns and establish the curriculum for public school music education in the United States. Today, one of the highest honors for a music teacher is to be selected as a Lowell Mason Fellow by the 130,000-member National Association for Music Education.

Prof. Marini will be assisted by Eva Kendrick, who is the current music director at First Parish. She has just discovered that she is a fifth cousin, several times removed, of Lowell Mason!

About the October 3 program, Prof. Marini says “I plan to present a number of Mason’s legacies – spiritual (his Savannah materials), educational (public music education), performance (Handel and Haydn, etc.), compositional (the hymns), and commercial (publishing and more) – to interpret him as a quintessential 19th-century Bostonian.”