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Shape-Note Hymnody
William Little and William Smith's Easy Instructor (1801) introduced a system for teaching music by shapes of notes rather than by lines and spaces. A triangle represented "fa," a circle "sol," a square "la," and a diamond "mi." Many shape-note books followed. As early as John Wyeth's Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (1813) shape-note books included folk hymns transcribed from oral tradition. Eventually a seven-shape system, generally in the form of Jesse B. Aiken's Christian Minstrel (1846), superseded the earlier four-shape system. Northern musicians, such as Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings, influenced by current European music, opposed the "dunce notes" and succeeded in displacing most early American tunes in later nineteenth-century books with tunes in the current European style. Five older shape-note books, however, remain in use in "singings": William Walker's Southern Harmony and B. F. White and E. J. King's Sacred Harp, which are four-shape books, and Joseph Funk's Harmonia Sacra, M. L. Swan's New Harp of Columbia, and William Walker' s Christian Harmony, which are seven-shape books. Appreciation for early American folk hymns has grown in recent decades and newer hymnals have included a number of these tunes. The Hymnal 1982 includes seventeen tunes first published in four-shape shape-note books: Bourbon, Detroit, Dunlap's Creek, Foundation, Holy Manna, Land of Rest, Middlebury, Morning Song, Nettleton, New Britain, Resignation, Restoration, Salvation, Tender Thought, The Church's Desolation, Vernon, and Wondrous Love. It also includes other early American tunes frequently printed in shape-note books: Charleston, Coronation, Kedron, Light, Pleading Savior, and Star in the East.
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Glossary definitions provided courtesy of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY,(All Rights reserved) from "An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, A User Friendly Reference for Episcopalians," Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, editors. |
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