Music
Version of 1778.
- Click to hear piano reduction (Ogg format, 250K)
Musically, the work is notable for the parallel descending thirds and sixths that shift from part to part. Some renditions of this hymn (for example, the practice of Sacred Harp singer) follow a practice recommended by Billings himself and include male singers on the treble, singing an octave down, as well as female singers on the tenor part, singing an octave higher.
Read more about this topic: Africa (William Billings)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle, dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.”
—Richard Shuckburg (1756–1818)
“I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—that were a bath and a medicine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)