Sylvanus Billings Pond

Sylvanus Billings Pond was born in Milford, Vermont, in 1792 and died in Brooklyn in 1871. An American composer, conductor, piano maker, and music publisher, he established a piano workshop in Albany and by 1820 was a partner in Meacham and Pond. In 1832 he joined the New York firm that became Firth, Hall & Pond and later Firth, Pond & Company, an important nineteenth-century publisher of sheet music. He retired from the business in 1850, when his son William A. Pond succeeded him.

Pond conducted the New York Sacred Musical Society and the New York Academy of Sacred Music. He edited or published collections including Union Melodies, The U.S. Psalmody, and The Book of Praise for the Reformed Dutch Church in America. Available biographical sources do not establish his personal denomination, so none should be assigned.

His common-meter tune ARMENIA appeared in the New York Musical Miscellany in 1836. The melody was not written for Charles Wesley's 1747 hymn, although later American hymnals paired them. Pond supplied the public-domain tune; Austin C. Lovelace supplied the copyrighted twentieth-century harmonization represented in the United Methodist setting.