model for Americans. On the other hand, Mason is given credit for popularizing European classical music in a region where it was seldom performed. Since his day, the United States has been part of the global region in which this form of music is cultivated and appreciated. The New Grove editors believe that Mason's introduction of European models for American hymnody choked off a flourishing participatory native tradition of church music, which had already produced outstanding compositions by such composers as William Billings. During the early 19th century, shape note music was used as part of evangelizing in the Second Great Awakening. Mason and his colleagues (notably his brother Timothy Mason) characterized this music as backwoods material, "unscientific", and unworthy of modern Americans. They taught their views through a new form of singing school, set up to replace the old singing schools dating from colonial times. In comparison with the earlier forms of American sacred music, the music that Mason and his colleagues propagated would be considered by many musicians to be rhythmically more homogeneous and harmonically less forceful. By emphasizing the soprano line, it also made the other choral parts less interesting to sing. Lastly, the new music generally required the support of an organ, which was a Mason family business. James Keene also addresses the shift in church music that Mason led, putting forth the idea that to some degree Mason's work cut off the people from their music: As so often happens in America, the so-called arbiters of good taste looked across the Atlantic for their models and scorned that which was home-grown. And such was their influence, then as now, that an uncertain population, striving for cultural respectability, embraced the common practice of European art music. Those who studied in Europe or in the European model cultivated a social superiority. ... These arbiters of taste did not represent the mean of the population. Their influence left the many congregations without a music to which they could identify. An interest in church singing waned, giving way to the quartet choir. New England would not hear again the stimulating strains of the fuge-tune coming from all parts of the sanctuary. The noted early music specialist Joel Cohen, whose ensemble has performed much early American music, offers the following assessment of Mason: The tradition that Mason largely succeed in defeating retreated to the inland rural South, where it resisted