Missouri Harmony - New Fangled Replaces Old Fashioned

New Fangled Replaces Old Fashioned

Over time, musical taste changed. By the mid-19th century, the minor-key melodies and dark, untamed folk harmonies of the old shape-note repertory seemed quaint and unschooled alongside the Victorian hymns coming into vogue. Some, like Michael See, tried to stem the tide, said Russell Nye, a Methodist minister whose grandparents shared stories of pioneer days near the Sauk-Fox Indian agency and Wapello County, Iowa. A century later, folks still liked to tell the story of the time See, a circuit riding preacher, found a new reed organ in one of his churches near Iowa City: “He rolled the organ out to the woodshed and broke it up with an ax,” said Nye. “When the people came to the service that evening, no mention was made of the organ.” In time, trained choirs, organs, and the newer, more genteel music won out.

Ironically, books like The Missouri Harmony helped get the changes started by teaching people to sing three- and four-part harmony by note instead of merely following a lined-out hymn in unison. But further changes were coming. By the 1830s, educators such as Lowell Mason, who designed the first music curriculum for the public schools in Boston and wrote Victorian chestnuts like “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” were calling for a scientific approach to harmony grounded in English, German and Italian theories of the day.

One of Mason’s innovations was an insistence that open harmonies be completed by adding the third, thus making what he perceived as a fuller, sweeter-sounding chord. Another effectively did away with dispersed harmony by adding a soprano part to carry the melody and simplifying the harmony parts so that they supported the soprano. As a perhaps unintended consequence, church music lost the melodic variety that had such great appeal to singers in the old tradition.

Not everyone agreed that the new style of music was an improvement. The local historian who spoke of singing schools in White County, Illinois, also recalled that Mason’s Carmina Sacra replaced The Missouri Harmony in the 1850s: “The Carmina Sacra was the pioneer round-note book in which the tunes partook more of the German or Puritan character, and were generally regarded by the old folks as being far more spiritless than the old ‘Pisgah,’ ‘Fiducia,’ ‘Tender Thought,’ ‘New Durham,’ ‘Windsor,’ ‘Mount Sion,’ ‘Devotion,’ etc., of the old Missouri Harmony and tradition.” The tunes he missed, like most in The Missouri Harmony, were native grown. “Pisgah,” for example, is related to the English ballad “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,” and “Fiducia” is a variant of the Appalachian carol “Star in the East.”

To cater to popular tastes, the old songs were replaced largely by Victorian ditties that shape-note singers now find to be artistically inferior. In the mid-20th century, when musicologist Dorothy Horn visited rural Indiana, she was disappointed to learn that a “more elegant” songbook had replaced The Missouri Harmony during the 1880s. “What heard was the most unmitigated musical tripe: songs celebrating the beautiful spring, true love, or whatever, and tearjerkers relating the death of a loved one, all set to the tritest of tunes.”

Shape note singing always remained a living tradition in the rural South. In the 20th century it moved north again, this time as an urban phenomenon kept alive by trained musicians who recognized its place in musical history and found in it something more challenging than Mason’s labored chord progressions or sentimental ditties about death in the spring.

In 1926 Sandburg included tunes from The Missouri Harmony in The American Songbag, as did Alan Lomax in a similar collection several years later. Classical 20th-century composers like Charles Ives and Virgil Thomson, as well as choral arrangers like Alice Parker, also helped spark a renaissance from the 1930s onward. By the 1980s, folk music buffs in midwestern cities such as Chicago and St. Louis discovered the old music and with it The Missouri Harmony.