Dotted Notes
A "dotted note" in music is generally one that is about three times as long as the following short note. It is so called because musical notation uses a dot to express this durational ratio.
Traditional Sacred Harp singers often "add dots" to their music, in the sense that they will make the notes falling on the strong musical beat about one and a half times as long as written, with the following note shortened to half of its written duration in compensation. The great majority of the cases seem to involve substitution of the sequence dotted eighth + sixteenth for what is written as two eighth notes.
An example can be found in the following passage from the "Easter Anthem" of William Billings. Billings wrote the passage in even musical rhythm, and this is reflected in how it is printed in The Sacred Harp:
On a recording issued by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company (#3 in the list below), the same passage is performed with "dotting", as if it were written as follows:
In addition to the dotting of eighth note sequences, the sequence dotted quarter + sixteenth often realized with "double dotting". Thus, a few measures later in the same Billings work, the following passage in the alto part:
is sung as follows:
Elsewhere in this series of recordings, this group of singers adds dotting quite liberally, essentially in any song that is in lively tempo and duple rhythm. The same appears to be true in the other traditional-singer recordings mentioned above. Singers who attend traditional singings in the South have attested to the prevalence of dotting, among them the author of this page.
Occasionally singers suppress dotting in passages where the composer has written out a particular distinction between dotted and even-rhythm passages; for example, in the opening of Billings's "Rose of Sharon":
Finally, even the dotted notation given above does not necessarily do justice to what is sung. The actual durational ratio between the longer notes is not necessarily an exact 3:1, but can vary over a range, from just a mild durational difference to a difference that actually exceeds the written 3:1 ratio.
Read more about this topic: Performance Practice Of Sacred Harp Music
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“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)