Where did william billings compose

Today, we meet America's first significant composer. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Anyone who's done much choral singing has sung William Billings's music. Ask what music came out of Colonial America: we get Billings and little more. Few sophisticated musicians think much of him -- I love his stuff. Historians have made little effort to know Billings. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians runs to almost 20,000 pages and it gives Billings only a page and a half.

Billings was born in Boston in 1747. He was poor and uneducated -- he supported himself much of the time as a tanner. But he also took up music when he was young and was teaching choral singing by the age of 22.

Biographers call him a gargoyle. He was blind in one eye with a short leg and a withered arm. But that's only the beginning. He practiced what a contemporary called "an uncommon negligence of person," and he was hopelessly addicted to tobacco -- constantly

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