Nathaniel Duren Gould was a conductor, teacher of music. He also directed a military band which had wide celebrity in New England.
Background
Nathaniel Duren Gould was born on November 26, 1781, at Bedford, Massachusets. He was a son of Reuben and Mary (Gould) Duren.
His father was a great-grandson of John Durrant who had settled in Billerica, Massachusets, by 1659; his mother came of a Chelmsford family, descended from Thomas Gould who was living in Salem Village, New Hampshire, in 1662.
Reuben Duren was a builder whose high-steepled churches were famous, and who successfully constructed over Pawtucket Falls in the Merrimac River, at the site of the present Lowell, a bridge, including an arch of wide span, generally thought impossible of completion.
Since Reuben and Mary Duren had many children, Nathaniel was sent when he was ten years old to live with his mother’s brother, Nathaniel Gould of New Ipswich, New Hampshire, farmer, constable, surveyor, amateur musician appointed by town meeting to “raise the tune on the Sabbath. ”
His name was legally changed from Nathaniel Gould Duren to Nathaniel Duren Gould.
Education
Gould showed marked proficiency in music and penmanship and good scholarship in other subjects.
Career
At sixteen, Gould taught a district school and began to give music lessons. He had mastered every instrument then customarily played and had convinced himself that anybody, adult or child, could be taught to sing.
When the Middlesex Musical Society, said to have been the second singing society of its kind in America, was formed in 1805 in adjacent Massachusetts towns, Gould was chosen its conductor.
Ten years later, he founded at New Ipswich the Hubbard Society, named after Prof. John Hubbard of Dartmouth College, whose concerts were held, in respect of musical quality, as second only to those of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston.
He represented New Ipswich in the legislature from 1809 to 1812 and again in 1814-16, and was a selectman in 1817, 1818, and 1820.
In 1812, he became a deacon in his church, and from 1817 to 1824, he was a trustee of the New Ipswich Academy.
He removed in 1820 to Boston, where he continued in a larger field to teach and conduct throughout New England. He joined the Handel and Haydn Society October 3, 1820.
For ten years, he made his headquarters in New York where, as in Boston, he was a pioneer “in the field of juvenile instruction even before Mason entered it”. After his return to Boston, he carried on his historic researches which were summarized in his Church Music in America. He continued his useful activities well into old age, dying in Boston in his eighty-third year.
Achievements
Gould is known as a director a military band which had a wide celebrity in New England. In addition to his musical activities, he engaged in trade and took a prominent part in public affairs.
Religion
During his thirty years’ service to music in southern New Hampshire, Deacon Gould “exerted a decided influence in favor of temperance and religion, at a time when musicians, almost without exception, were tipplers and scoffers”.
Connections
On November 15, 1801, Gould had married Sally Prichard. Of their children born at New Ipswich, Augustus Addison attained distinction as a naturalist, and Charles Duren, as a Boston publisher in the firm of Gould & Lincoln.
