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Shape notes sheet music old manuscript4/30/2024 ![]() The revival movement was in reaction to nearly everything we associate with eighteenth-century rationalism, and the reaction was extreme. Some of the early southern works were based on tunes from the camp-meeting revivals that began in Kentucky and Tennessee around 1800. The composers there favored a widely spaced harmony, with intervals of fourths and fifths rather than thirds, which one singer likens to "a picket fence with a few of the boards missing." By 1815, the shape-note locus had shifted to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. William Billings prescribed this "conjunction of masculine and feminine voices" as a means of giving extra body to the sound.īut in the South the music became, in many ways, southern. The melody is carried by the tenors rather than the upper voices, and the singers sometimes double the parts: a few tenors might join in on the highest line, but sing it an octave lower sopranos might sing the tenor line an octave higher. Most of the peculiar characteristics of the music date back to the New England composers. Each song is rehearsed by a singing of the syllables, which can be as passionate as the rendition of the text. The singing is a cappella, and the emphasis seems always on the music produced by the singers. The reference may have been to the harp of David, the psalmist, or to the human voice as an instrument. Sacred Harp songs were never accompanied by harps. To supplement the issue, Smithsonian Folkways has put sound clips of three songs on a website.Ī shape-note singing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia Some of the earliest were made by Folkways Records, which the Smithsonian acquired in 1987. There are dozens of shape-note recordings in print. If your students are able to follow the steps of the lesson plan-led by you or a music teacher at your school-they will be the latest inheritors of a long history that they will help keep alive. The appeal of the music cannot be fully understood without singing it, and learning to sing it is still as good a way as any to begin associating the sight of a note with its sound. We intend this issue of Smithsonian in Your Classroom as something like that. Some singings begin with an actual lesson, an introduction to the shapes and a first opportunity to join one's voice to the antique harmonies of the songs. The term "lesson" is a vestige of the singing schools. The singings are sometimes all-day affairs, with a break for a big potluck meal called "dinner on the grounds." The four parts tenor, bass, alto, and treble-face each other to form a "hollow square." Each singer has a chance to "lead a lesson" by standing in the center of the square, selecting a song or set of songs, and beating the tempo with up-and-down strokes of the arm. ![]() The new singers observe the practices of southern Sacred Harp groups. Revised editions are still used today in pockets of the South where "Sacred Harp singings" are an unbroken tradition, and by people across the country who have come to the tradition in the last couple of decades. Before the Civil War, southern publishers sold hundreds of thousands of shapenote songbooks, the most enduring of which was The Sacred Harp, first printed in 1844. It used four syllables for the seven notes of the scale and gave each syllable a distinctive note head: a triangle for fa, an oval for sol, a rectangle for la, and a diamond for mi. The shape-note method of singing from written music first appeared in a book called The Easy Instructor, printed in 1801. In the South, especially, this Yankee music took hold, as did the medium in which it arrived, shape notes. Nature gave way to European refinements in church music reforms early in the nineteenth century, but by then teachers had carried the work of Billings and the other "tunesmiths" to the western and southern frontiers. "Nature is the best Dictator," declared the best known of them, William Billings of Boston, a sometime tanner and municipal stray-hog catcher. They wrote their own choral settings for sacred texts, music that was boldly melodic but often quite inconsistent with rules of harmony. New England, however, had the singing schools of itinerant teachers, some of whom were the first American composers. Music education in eighteenth-century America was, in one respect, like music education today-there was precious little of it.
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