Shape Note
The sacred music of The First New England School of composers quickly spread south, facilitated by the invention of shape notes, a system in which four different note heads corresponded to the four syllables (fa, sol, la and mi) then used in musical instruction. In 1801, William Smith and William Little published The Easy Instructor, a sacred tunebook introducing this system. While the shape-note system itself never took root in New England, The Easy Instructor and similar collections were instrumental in spreading the music of New England composers to the western and southern states, where tunebook compilers added settings of folk and popular melodies (including "folk hymns" and revival choruses) to the popular New England repertory. Popular collections included Ananias Davisson's Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, Virginia, 1817), Allen Carden's Missouri Harmony (Cincinnati, 1820), William Walker's Southern Harmony (1835) and B.F. White and E.J. King's Sacred Harp (1844).
As the popularity of seven-syllable (doremi) solmization increased in the antebellum period, some teachers and publishers experimented with seven-character shape notes as well; the system of Jesse B. Aikin in The Christian Minstrel (Philadelphia, 1846) eventually won out in the years after the Civil War.
Read more about this topic: Music History Of The United States To The Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words shape and/or note:
“The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“A note as from a single place,
A slender tinkling fall that made
Now drops that floated on the pool
Like pearls, and now a silver blade.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)