James Hewitt

James Hewitt was a conductor, composer and music publisher of English origin who spent most of his career in the United States during the first decades of the nineteenth century. His birthplace and date, according to family records, are placed at Dartmoor in 1770, although no independent documentation confirms them. His documented presence begins in London, where he occupied a house in Bloomsbury between 1791 and 1792.

He arrived in New York in September 1792. There he advertised himself as a musician with concert experience in London, under the names of Haydn, Pleyel and others, although no evidence of this has been found. Between 1792 and March 1808 he led the orchestra of the Park Street Theatre, where he arranged and composed music for numerous ballad operas and other stage productions. At the same time he ran a music business in which he gave lessons and sold instruments and sheet music. In 1811 he moved with his family to Boston, where he conducted the orchestra of the Federal Street Theatre, served as organist of Trinity Church and again combined teaching with composition and publishing. After a period in New York from 1816, he travelled frequently in the South, especially to Charleston and Augusta, Georgia. He died in Boston in August 1827, following an unsuccessful surgical operation performed in New York; the location of his burial is not known with certainty.

As a publisher, he issued at least 639 compositions, mostly by British authors such as William Shield, Michael Kelly and James Hook, though also works by Handel, Haydn and Mozart. Some 160 were his own, among them numerous stage pieces and songs that incorporated American patriotic and popular melodies. He also wrote three pedagogical treatises.

His importance lies chiefly in the musical life of New York in the first decade of the nineteenth century, where his role as conductor and concert organiser gave him a central position. His children also left their mark: Sophia Henrietta Emma Hewitt was a distinguished concert pianist, James Lang Hewitt a successful publisher, and George Washington Hewitt a teacher and composer.