At our March singing we reintroduced “lessons”. Some will be about the history of shape note singing, some will be based on rudiments. The goal is to present enjoyable information that can make the group enjoy singing and feel they have a better understanding of the traditions and technics.
When appropriate, we will post lessons on the blog as well, as we have below.
Just like song leading, any singer is welcome to give a lesson, though you need to arrange in advance, as we will only have one lesson per sing. Email us at: baltimoreshapenote@gmail.com with your idea.
The Easy Instructor
Given by Kevin Isaac, March 26th, 2024
In Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear, his antagonist Edmund says “O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! Fa, sol, la, mi.”
These four note sounds from Elizabethan England made their way to America with the Pilgrims and settlers. It was here, in 1721, that John Tufts had the inventive idea to use the initials of each solmization in place of the round note heads on the musical staff. F S L M for Fa Sol La and Mi. He published the short work An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes. It’s credited as being the first musical textbook written in the new world.
The stage was set for a real revolution in musical pedagogy when William Smith and William Little took the idea further and replaced those letters with the symbols we use, the triangle, the circle, the square and the diamond. The tunebook they compiled, titled The Easy Instructor. Or. A New Method of Teaching Sacred Harmony, was the predecessor to our Sacred Harp and Shenandoah Harmony tunebooks, not just in the shapes, but in structure of the book and musical idiom it presented.
We’re going to sing three songs from our tunebooks that were first printed in shape notes in The Easy Instructor. Our voices will join with those who have sung the shapes to these very tunes for 222 years.
We’ll start with page 192 in the red book: Nehemiah Shumway’s fuging tune Schenectady, with poetry by Isaac Watts. Shumway was a living American Composer at the time this was published.
Like many tunebooks, The Easy Instructor was revised and expanded over the course of numerous editions. While the first edition was apparently represented wholly by American composers, the subsequent editors wanted to “keep up with the musical fashion” and slowly removed American composers and replaced them with popular European composers. This reflected the larger reformist movement that ended up suppressing shape notes in the north all together.
If we can turn to page 84 for Amsterdam, a tune not found in the early editions of The Easy Instructor. The poetry was by Englishman Robert Seagraves, who was born in 1693 and was believed to have died around 1759. The melody adapted from a German tune Sei willkommen, and first appeared in a 1754 tunebook.
I want to complete this ternian of tunes with one that made it’s way to our tan book. Open Shenandoah Harmony to 67 for Lewis Edson’s “Greenfield”. Edson was a blacksmith in Woodstock New York that became a Singing Master and one of America’s first composers. You can find his tune Bridgewater in the red book.
Thank you.