The music was of an exceedingly indifferent character from an artistic point of view and was not always edifying and whole hearted on the part of the congregation. In New England, musical instruments were only introduced after a storm of bitter opposition and general repugnance to the “boxes of whistles,” as organs were contemptuously called. Even in the Middle and Southern Colonies, where a prejudice against instruments did not exist, the music must often have been of a distressing nature. Referring once more to Christ Church we read that “the singer then called the Clerk, was Joseph Fry--a small man with a great voice, who, standing in the organ gallery, was wont to make the whole church resound with his strong, deep and grave tones.” When there was a ripple of improvement in the general musical situation, after the Revolution, “the efforts of church musicians to raise the standard were apparently not looked upon with favour. Joseph Fry, or his successors, did not ‘make a cheerful noise before the Lord’ to the taste of the congregation, for in 1785 the vestry passed a resolution ‘that the clerks be desired to sing such tunes only as are plain and familiar to the congregation; the singing of other tunes, and frequent changing of tunes, being to the certain knowledge of this vestry, generally disagreeable and inconvenient.’” Although early New England settlers were at first summoned to meeting “by drum, horn and shell,” bells were soon introduced and in the Middle and Southern Colonies great store was set by them and more than one fine peal was brought hither from England. The bells of Christ Church, Philadelphia, were particularly famous and were always being pealed so that the German traveller, Dr. Schoepf, said that you would think you were in a papal or imperial city--there was always something to be rung. “From the time that ‘the ring of bells’--the first in the Colonies--was first hung, their metal throats were busy proclaiming all sorts of things from the anniversaries of King Charles’s Restoration, Guy Fawkes’s Day, and the King’s Birthday, down to semi-weekly markets or the arrival in the Delaware of the ‘Myrtilla,’ Captain Budden’s ship, in which the peal had been brought out from London.”