図形音符の基礎／Shape Notes: The Basics

Click here to go to the English below.

図形音符とは

図形音符（英語：shape notes）は、音の高さを音符の頭（符頭）の形で表す記譜法です。

一見すると、普通の五線譜とほとんど変わりません。音符には白玉・黒玉があり、符尾や旗が付き、付点も使われます。ト音記号やヘ音記号、拍子記号、調号も通常の楽譜と同じです。違うのは、丸い音符の代わりに、三角形や四角形などさまざまな形の音符が使われることだけです。

そのため、図形音符を知らない人でも、形を気にせず普通の丸い音符だと思って読めば、通常の楽譜として演奏することができます。

なぜ音符の形を変えるのか

普通の五線譜では、音符はすべて丸い形です。丸いこと自体には意味はなく、「これは音符である」ということしか示していません。音の高さは、五線上の位置とシャープ（♯）やフラット（♭）によって決まります。

これは楽器を演奏する人には必要ですが、歌う人にとっては必ずしも最適ではありません。

楽譜を見ただけで、誰にも音を教えてもらわずにその場で正しく歌うことを初見視唱（しょけんししょう）と言います。普通の五線譜で初見視唱ができる人は、音楽教育を受けた人の中でも決して多くありません。しかし、図形音符では、それがごく当たり前に行われています。

その理由は、図形音符が「絶対的な音の高さ」ではなく、「音階の中での位置」を直接表しているからです。

図形は音階の位置を表す

歌うときに必要なのは、「この音はドなのか、レなのか、ミなのか」という情報です。

図形音符では、それぞれの形が音階の中での役割を表します。

ド（主音）・レ・ミ・ファ・ソ・ラ・シ・ド

それぞれに決まった形があります。

大切なのは、図形は五線上の絶対的な位置を示すのではなく、「音階の中で何番目の音か」を示していることです。

そのため、調（キー）が変われば図形は五線の上を上下に移動しますが、図形そのものの意味は変わりません（以下の図1）。

「歌いやすい高さ」で歌う

図形音符の歌い手は、楽譜に書かれた調で歌うとは限りません。むしろ、その場の参加者が最も歌いやすい高さに移調して歌うことが普通です。

絶対音感を持つ人を除けば、歌が変わってしまうわけではありません。全員が同じ高さで歌い、高音が高すぎず、低音が低すぎなければ十分です。

この歌いやすい調は、ユーモアを込めて “the key of convenience”（都合のよい調） と呼ばれています。

普通の楽譜でも分かるのでは？

もちろん、普通の五線譜からも「ド・レ・ミ」を読み取ることはできます。

しかし、そのためには

調号から主音（ド）を割り出し、

そこから各音が何度上か下かを数え、

という作業を一音一音について行わなければなりません。

器楽では問題ありませんが、歌ではそのような計算をしている余裕はありません。図形音符は、この作業をほぼ不要にすることで、初見視唱を大幅に容易にしています。

ドレミとの関係

学校で習う「ド・レ・ミ・ファ・ソ・ラ・シ」は長音階（メジャースケール）の音名です。

一方、短音階（マイナースケール）は

ラ・シ・ド・レ・ミ・ファ・ソ・ラ

として考えることができます（以下の図2）。

この「移動ド」の考え方に慣れると、「ド・ド・ソ・ソ・ラ・ラ・ソ」との音名を聞いただけで、「きらきら星」の旋律だと分かるようになります。

さらに、それぞれの音に対応する図形を覚えれば、初めて見る曲でも歌えるようになります。

そして、そのような人が集まれば、練習なしでも四部合唱が成立します。

四つの図形と七つの図形

図形音符には大きく分けて二つの伝統があります。

一つは四図形方式です。

これは16〜17世紀のイギリスで使われていた音楽教育法に由来し、17世紀に北米へ渡りました。19世紀になると、アメリカで現在のように音符を図形化する仕組みが考案されます。

四図形方式で最も有名な歌集が『The Sacred Harp』です。

もう一つは七図形方式で、ド・レ・ミ・ファ・ソ・ラ・シの七つすべてに異なる形を与えます。

現在では『The Sacred Harp』が非常に有名なため、「セイクリッド・ハープ・シンギング」という言葉が、四図形・七図形を含めた図形音符歌唱全体を指す意味で使われることも少なくありません。

以下の図3では、同じ曲を四図形方式と七図形方式で比較しています。

どちらにも長所がありますが、この入門では、日本人にもなじみやすい七図形方式を中心に紹介します。

図形音符は文化でもある

図形音符は単なる音楽教育法ではありません。

アメリカ南部の地方のプロテスタント教会を中心に、二百年以上にわたって受け継がれてきた豊かな歌唱文化があります。

20世紀後半以降、この文化はアメリカ各地だけでなく、カナダ、イギリス、アイルランド、欧州大陸、オーストラリア、そして日本へも広がっています。

宗教的な背景を持つ伝統ではありますが、初期の頃から歌会には宗教・国籍・民族・年齢・職業・性的指向・政治的立場などに関係なく、実にさまざまな人々が参加しています。

歌会では、政治など人を分断しやすい話題は避けられます。目的は議論ではなく、共に歌うことだからです。

聴衆のいない音楽

図形音符の歌会には、普通は観客がいません。

歌うのは、誰かに聴かせるためではなく、参加者自身のためです。宗教的な参加者にとっては神に向かって歌うことでもあります。

そのため、

• 指揮者はいません。
• オーディションもありません。
• リハーサルもありません。
• 演奏会もありません。

誰もが対等な立場で歌います。

上手な人も初心者も、一人ひとりが共同体の一員です。

独特の座席配置

図形音符の歌の会でもっとも特徴的なのは座席です。

四つのパートが四角形を作るように向かい合って座り、中央は空けておきます（以下の図4）。

• テナー
• トレブル
• アルト
• ベース

それぞれが向かい合い、歌は中央に立った人がリードします。

参加者全員が順番に好きな曲を選び、中央に立って歌を始める役を務めます。

メロディーはテナー

伝統的な図形音符音楽では、どのパートも独立した旋律を持っています。

一般的な合唱のようにソプラノだけが主旋律を歌い、他の声部が伴奏になるわけではありません。

主旋律は通常、テナーが担当します。

ただし、ここでいうテナーは一般的な合唱でいう「高い男声」ではありません。

男女ともに中音域の人が歌います。

高音域はトレブルと呼ばれ、こちらも男女ともに歌います。

アルトは通常女性が多いですが、高い声域を持つ男性アルトも歓迎されます。

ベースは通常もっとも低い声域で、多くは男性が担当します。

学ぶには

図形音符を身につける最良の方法は、歌会や講習会に参加することです。

近くにそのような機会がない場合でも、現在ではインターネット上に多くの教材や動画があります。

一定数の人が地域で図形音符を学べば、練習を重ねなくても、四部のア・カペラ合唱を楽しめるようになります。

以下に、入門に役立つサイトを紹介します。

• Tokyo Sacred Harp（日英）
  東京で開催されている図形音符歌会の案内。
  
  
• 七図形音符で書かれた101曲の選曲集（日英）
  英語、日本語、そのほかさまざまな言語による図形音符の歌。
  
  
• Christian Harmony（英語）
  アメリカ初期の賛美歌・アンセム集。
  
  
• Solfege With Shape Notes（英語）
  図形音符によるソルフェージュ学習動画。

もう一つの図形音符の伝統

19世紀後半、ゴスペル音楽の発展とともに、もう一つの図形音符文化が生まれました。

これは Convention Book Singing（コンベンション・ブック・シンギング）あるいは New Book Singing（ニュー・ブック・シンギング）と呼ばれています。新しい歌集が定期的に出版されることから、この名前が付きました。

これに対して、『The Sacred Harp』や『The Christian Harmony』などの古い歌集による歌唱は Old Book Singing と呼ばれます。

ニュー・ブック・シンギングでも七図形方式が使われますが、歌の会の進め方や音楽様式、文化はオールド・ブック・シンギングとは大きく異なり、参加者の重なりもあまりありません。

詳しくは次のサイトをご覧ください。

Gospel Singing Conventions（英語）

図法／Figures

図1／Figure 1. さまざまの調の七図形方式（クリックすると再生されます）／Seven-shape shape notes in different keys (click to play)

図2／Figure 2. 長音階と短音階／Major and minor scales

図3／Figure 3. 七図形方式と四図形方式で書かれている歌／A song in seven shapes and four shape

図4／Figure 4. 図形音符の会の座席表／Shape-note singing seating chart

What Are Shape Notes?

Shape notes are musical notes that represent musical pitch by the shape of noteheads. As in conventional musical notation, shape notes are filled in or left open, with stems attached to the notes or not, flags attached to the stems or not, are dotted or not, and are placed on five-lined staffs with clef symbols and time and key signatures. Anyone who can read conventional notation, but not shape notes, can simply ignore the various shapes and treat them all as regular round notes.

Why the Shapes?

What, then, is the purpose of the shapes? In conventional notation, all notes are round. The roundness itself doesn’t present any information other than that a note is a note. It’s the note’s position on the staff, along with the attendant sharp and flat symbols, that indicates what pitch a note is. While instrumentalists require this information to play notes, very few people can read round notes to sing without someone else playing or singing the notes for them. It’s quite the musical feat, even for a professional musician, to pick up a page of round notes and sight-sing it, that is, sing the notes just by looking at them on first sight. That, however, is what shape-note singers do routinely with a page of shape notes.

Shapes and Scale Degrees

Round notes give the absolute pitch for any given note, but absolute pitch is more information than most singers need. What they need is a note’s position on the musical scale, which is precisely what the shapes of shape notes tell you. One shape tells you that it’s the first note of the scale (musicians call it the “tonic note”), another shape tells you that it’s the second note of the scale, and so on. A shape will move up and down the staff depending on the key of the music because the shape represents a relative position in the scale, not an absolute position on the staff (see Figure 1 above). Shape-note singers may not sing a piece of music in the actual key in which it was written. In fact, they routinely don’t. However, for anyone other than that rare person with an ear for absolute pitch, it doesn’t matter what key singers sing in as long as everyone is singing in the same key, and the key isn’t too high for the high voices or too low for the low voices. Singers wryly refer to this as “the key of convenience.”

A note’s position in the scale can also be gained from its position on the staff, but arriving at that information in that way is ill-suited for singing. It involves counting the sharps and flats in the key signature to find the tonic, and the number of lines and spaces above or below the tonic where each individual note is placed. This kind of mental gymnastics is all but guaranteed to deny most people the gift of sight-singing.

Do-Re-Mi and the Musical Scale

Anyone who has ever watched The Sound of Music or ever sung “Do-Re-Mi” in school knows that the notes of the scale are do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and ti. (Ti was originally called “si,” and many older singers call it that today.) These notes in this order produce the major scale. The exact same notes starting on la instead of do produce the minor scale: la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la (see Figure 2 above).

If you internalize what the notes mean, someone can tell you the note names of a song—do-do-so-so-la-la-so, for example—and you will know what song that is—in this case, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” If you then learn what shape goes with what note, you can sight-sing any piece of tonal music written in shapes. If you get a roomful of people who can do that, you’ve got instant four-part a cappella harmony.

How Many Shapes?

As history would have it, there are two different traditions for attaching shapes to notes. One uses four shapes to represent the four notes of an old Elizabethan-era musical system that emphasized the intervals between notes over the grouping of notes into scales. This system died out in England, but not before the 17th century when English colonists brought their four notes to the American colonies. In the early 19th century, Americans invented the idea of using shapes to represent notes. Since then, the most commonly used four-shape tunebook has been The Sacred Harp. The other common notation system uses seven shapes to represent the seven notes of the scale, but because of the popularity of The Sacred Harp, “Sacred Harp singing” is often used synonymously with shape-note singing in general, either four-shape or seven. To see the difference between the four-shape and seven-shape systems with one song, see Figure 3 above.

Both the four-note and seven-note systems have their advantages and trade-offs. This primer is focusing on the seven-note system because of the general familiarity that people already have with the seven-note major scale.

The Culture of Shape-Note Singing

Shape notes are not merely a pedagogical device for reading music. A whole cultural tradition has grown up around shape notes, primarily centered on singings at rural Protestant churches in the American South. This tradition is the richest source of shape-note music today and since the second half of the 20th century, has expanded to the rest of the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, the European continent, Australia, and Japan. Despite its customarily religious setting, it draws people from all backgrounds, be they religious, political, ethnic, age, socioeconomic, sexual orientation, or any other conceivable category by which humans divide themselves. In this deeply communal endeavor, controversial topics like politics are avoided as they serve to divide rather than unite.

While the traditional shape-note repertoire consists of mainly old and oftentimes long forgotten church hymns, there are many shape-note customs that are worth considering even when using the notation outside of that tradition. Because of the communal nature of the singing, there is usually no audience. Singing is for community, not performance. Consequently, there are no directors, auditions, rehearsals, or concerts. The music belongs to the singers, who sing for no one other than themselves, or, in the case of religiously motivated singers, for God. Even the more secular singers often speak of finding the holy in the community of singers. This community is instilled with fierce democratic principles where singers are treated equal regardless of their particular talent.

The Hollow Square

The most conspicuous custom is the seating arrangement. Singers divide into four parts facing each other with a hollow square in the middle. Tenors face the front of the room, altos are across the square from them facing back, trebles are to the tenors’ right, and basses to their left (see Figure 4 above). Each singer gets their turn in choosing a song and leading it from the middle of the square formed by the four parts.

Where’s the Melody?

In traditional shape-note music, no part stands out from the others. Ideally, each part is melodically interesting on its own. The melody, such that it is, is held by the tenor section. The very word “tenor” ultimately comes from the Latin verb tenere, meaning “to hold.” In conventional singing, the tenors are the high male voices, but in traditional shape-note singing, tenor is sung by both men and women with voices in the mid-level range. The high voices, again both male and female, sing treble. This is in contrast to the idea of soprano, from the Latin super, the main part above all the other parts sung in support of the melody which the sopranos carry. The word “treble” is related to “triple” and originally referred to the third part in medieval church singing, above the tenors and altos. Altos are usually all women, although the man with an unusually high male-register voice matching the low female register is a valued alto in any shape-note group. The lowest voices, the basses, are typically all male.

Learning the Shapes

The best way to acquire this skill is to attend shape-note singing schools or just immerse yourself in shape-note singings. For people who don’t have close access to those things, there are online tools that offer a decent second-best choice. When enough people in your immediate vicinity do that, you can come together and enjoy the communal gift of a cappella harmony with rare aplomb. The Internet is brimming over with shape-note singings and instructional videos. Below is a starter list.

• Tokyo Sacred Harp (Japanese/English bilingual website)
  Information on all shape-note singing in Tokyo
  
  
• 101 Random Songs and Hymns in Shape Notes (Japanese/English bilingual website)
  Songs in English, Japanese, and other languages
  
  
• Christian Harmony (English only)
  American hymns and anthems from early America
  
  
• Solfege With Shape Notes (English only)
  Shape-note instructional video series

Another Shape-Note Tradition

There is another shape-note tradition that dates back to the advent of gospel music later in the 19th century. The style is commonly referred to as “convention book singing” or “new book singing,” the latter appellation due to the regular publication of new songbooks in the convention-book style. Singing from the older shape-note books such as The Sacred Harp and The Christian Harmony is referred to in contrast as “old book singing.” While new book singing uses the same seven shapes of The Christian Harmony, the two traditions have very distinct customs with little overlap between them. More on convention book singing is at

Gospel Singing Conventions (English only)

101 Random Songs and Hymns in Shape Notes

Two posts ago in this blog, I mentioned my collection of random songs in shape notes, but once I reached 101 songs, that seemed like an auspicious number to compile into one document, which I’ve made available here as a PDF. All the songs are ones that spoke to my heart in one way or another. Often a flood of emotions would roll over me as I entered the notes and typed up the words. My wife would be in the next room and say, “Don’t cry.” “I’m not,” I would answer as I wiped tears off the keyboard. If you were to sing any of these songs and only a tiny bit of those emotions sprung up as you sang them, I feel our hearts will have understood each other. I’ve avoided songs with copyright problems, so feel free to download and share with as many people as you can get to sing with you.

Some people reading this will be familiar with shape notes and some won’t. If you’re in the latter category, there are lots of sources that explain shape notes. I’ll just mention my own explanation under the heading “The logic of shape notes” in an article I published here. If you’re in the former category, you may have such a strong association between the notation and the particular repertoire written in that notation that using shape notes to sing anything outside of that repertoire might feel odd, even scandalous. But shape notes themselves are just a device, a technology that works just as well for any tonal music as it does for 200-year-old Protestant hymns. Fortunately, history saw fit to see that certain tiny churches in remote reaches of the rural American South would preserve that technology from the early American period to the present. One thing important to me which I kept from the old-book shape-note tradition is putting the melody in the tenor line for most of the songs. I think it brings out the harmony better that way, but beyond that, I’m steeped in the old-book democratic ethos of no one part standing above the others, which is literally what “soprano” means. There are, however, a few songs that come out a non-Western tradition or are originally Western songs but so heavily influenced by their native culture that I didn’t want to mess with them other than to put them into shape notes. I did feel comfortable putting the melody in the tenor for most of the Japanese songs and the one Korean song because they’re both influenced by Western music, or in some cases of the Japanese songs, are actual European or American songs that Japanese sing in Japanese.

I know it sounds grandiose and self-important, but I’ll risk it anyway to say that I’m on a mission to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, that is, in impassioned a cappella group harmony. In my opinion, the greatest failing of the field of public music education is that it consciously banished shape notes from its curriculum from the start, leaving to atrophy the public’s general aptitude and appreciation for singing. Society is all the poorer for it. After I dispel all the banal arguments music educators present against shape notes, I’m left with one argument that I can’t dispel: Short of religious music, there’s nothing written in shape notes to teach. While this collection has a portion dedicated to religious music, it also has a sizable chunk of secular music from which to start. From there, I intend to transpose more secular music into shape notes and would encourage others to do the same. The more that people start to sing music in shape notes, the more that music might become available in it, converting a vicious cycle of shape-note poverty into a virtual cycle of shape-note abundance.

As will be apparent from the table of contents, I arranged the songs in loose chronological order by the categories of traditional songs, songs of peace and solidarity, religious music, Japanese songs (including non-Japanese songs currently or once popular in Japan and with Japanese lyrics), and songs in other languages. The last category has one song each in Croatian, Hawaiian, Korean, Russian, and Solomons Pidgin (dialect of the Pidgin spoken throughout Melanesia). Some songs overlap two or more categories. The category just for Japanese songs owes to the fact that my mother was Japanese, that I now live in Japan, and that I have loved Japanese songs since my teenage years. The songs in non-roman script—Japanese, Korean, and Russian—have roman letters appended to their respective scripts. Of course each language, whether it uses roman letters or not, has its own sound system, but a minimum amount of research will tell the determined singer how to pronounce the words passably enough to sing them. It should be reassuring to know that all of the other languages are far more regular in their orthography than the notoriously convoluted English spelling. Under the non-English songs, I have also included English translations, rough as some of them may be.

As a last note to shape-note singers more comfortable in the four-shape system of the Sacred Harp, I put everything in the Aikin system of seven shapes, first, because it’s a little easier for me than four shapes, but second, because most people are already familiar with the seven note names and the idea of octaves if from nothing other than the Doremi Song. Regardless of the relative merits of four shapes versus seven, I think the jump to shape notes would be less high for people if it could incorporate what they already know. However, if four shapes are more comfortable with whatever singing community you’d like to try this with, the software I used to create this sheet music can also transpose everything into four shapes as well (or, for that matter, into round notes). It is called MuseScore and is freely available at the MuseScore website. To convert any song into four shapes, you would need to download its MuseScore file and open it in that program. The conversion process isn’t quite self-evident, but if anyone is interested, leave a message and I can walk you through it.

For the Joy of It: Teaching English With Shape Notes

Don’t know why I didn’t post the link to this article when I wrote it, which as nearly five years ago already, but it’s not like yesterday’s newspaper. There’s nothing about shape-note singing that is out of date.

For the Joy of It: Teaching English With Shape Notes

Random Songs in Shape Notes

Go here for my collection of random songs in shape notes.

Despite the sheer brilliance of shape notes as a musical notation, teachers don’t teach them because nothing is written in them. Nothing is written in them because teachers don’t teach them. There’s quite a bit of Christian church hymns written in shape notes, and quite a bit of what I'm linking to here are more hymns I found in round notes and transcribed to shape notes. It’s not out of any religious conviction that I posted more church hymns, but they are beautiful and rather easy to sing. If you sing all the parts in four-part a cappella, you get a big bang for your little buck of effort. However, to make this something that those outside of certain obscure religious groups can benefit from, I’m looking for more secular songs to transcribe and add to a shape-note collection at the MuseScore website. I’m particular to songs from the era when most shape-note music was written, that is, the 1800s and early 1900s, mainly because they lend themselves so well to communal singing. But if anyone has anything else they’d like to see in shape notes, please let me know.

Old Japanese Songs in Shape Notes

Someone in a Japanese teachers’ Facebook group had asked if anyone had Japanese songs to share. I wrote this in response, but I think I wrote too much because not that many people had any response. I should have put it in this blog and let people decide for themselves if they want to come here and jump in. If you just want the songs, scroll down.

Secular Music in Shape Notes, by David Warren Steel

As anyone can tell from my first post, I think shape notes are a gift to humanity and shouldn’t be limited to just tunebooks of niche communities and hymnals of small denominations. So when I read on the fasola-discussions email listserv that Warren Steel had a chapter called “Secular Music in Shape Notes” in a new book called Rethinking American Music, I naturally wanted to read it. Not patient enough to wait for it to come by interlibrary loan or even just regular shipping, I just went ahead and bought the electronic version and read it. Warren is a shape-note singer, which is how I know him, but he’s also an academic on the subject, professor emeritus of music at Ole Miss, which basically means he figured out how to get paid for doing what he would be doing anyway. If there’s anyone who would know about shape notes, it would be him. I think I laid undue expectations on him and this chapter because I was imagining a shape-note version of all the great songs of the 19th and early 20th century in unaccompanied four-part harmony, the type of songs people used to sing together before they started letting professional entertainers sing in their stead. What he found was indeed fascinating, but a lot more modest, and not even entirely secular.

Actually, a lot of the great songs of the 19th and early 20th century are religious songs, great because they were written for groups to sing, and the one place people would find themselves in a group was at church. But there was a lot of other music then that was also moving, you could even say spiritual, at least in a group setting, but not intended for church. Take for example Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” with its profound empathy for the poor, or “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” to the words of the Irish poet Thomas Moore, about love living beyond youthful beauty: “As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets, The same look which she turn’d when he rose!” The beauty and the poignancy of those songs are multiplied when sung in parts. Was anything like that ever written in shape notes? I was interested in any such music I could get my hands on.

Out of the secular sources Warren cited, two are available online. One is Amos Sutton Hayden’s The Sacred Melodeon (1849). In fact I came across this one some time ago and downloaded it then. As Warren explains, Hayden was a Disciples preacher who had this idea that if you invoke God (“the Author of his being” and “the Most High” as Hayden says) while you’re learning to sing, you’re taking “his sacred name in vain” because you don’t know how to sing the song right yet when you’re just learning it. Or something like that. So this collection, and another of Hayden’s tunebooks called Introduction to Sacred Music, despite the word “sacred” in the titles, usually avoided saying “God” and “Jesus” outright. A lot of the songs are ones familiar to Sacred Harp and Christian Harmony singers, which too use a lot of language like “Author” and “the Most High,” but Hayden did so even more. So, for example, where “Exhortation (First)” in The Sacred Harp says “Up to the hills where Christ is gone To plead for all His saints,” the same song in The Sacred Melodeon goes “The world, at each returning day, Awakes again to light.”

Changes like that let you sing Sacred Harp in a secular setting, but Sacred Harp itself is often sung in secular settings with people of various religious commitments or lack thereof joining in. I don’t imagine there would be many people that say they would really want to sing the music were it not for all the references to “God” or “Jesus” (although we once had an interested Jewish student show up at a singing where someone called for Stafford to be sung, with its line “in spite of env’ous Jews.” In good faith he asked me what that meant and I didn’t really have a good excuse. He never came back. Kind of broke my heart.) A lot of the other music that Warren found was also this kind of secularizing of religious shape-note songs, some of which were written to secular texts in the first place, but not texts that were put back into the resecularized versions. And some of the music, written for Freemasons, had a lofty spiritual tone appropriate for Masonic ceremonies, but not overtly religious.

The other work Warren mentioned that’s available online is The Juvenile Harmony (1852), compiled and published by Thomas R. Weber. Neither is this one really secular, it’s just that there are a lot of secular songs in it. A weird feature of this book that Warren mentioned (he didn’t say “weird” though) is that while the songs are written in four shapes, the same four we know, some of the songs—and just some—have the seven solfège syllables printed where the words go, with the words themselves placed under the song. I wonder if Mr. Weber didn’t know about seven shapes. Or perhaps he thought his audience didn’t know them, but if they had both a feel for doremi and the concept of shape notes, you’d think they would’ve known doremi shape notes. Maybe a testament to the power of fasola at the time. Some of the songs are nice, but they’re mostly, well, juvenile. They would have been great for teaching kids, though, if the publisher could have decided which shapes to use.

It’s still a mystery to me why shape notes didn’t catch on, in the whole wide world, but especially in America where they were invented. A long time ago, Warren kindly picked me from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to go singing in Alpharetta, Georgia, so I had about four privileged hours to pick his brain. I asked him why they don’t teach shape notes in public school and he basically said that in the early 1800s, there was a war between shape notes and round notes and round notes won. I later read up a little about all that and it seems that the main culprit was the father of music education himself, Lowell Mason. Apparently his camp was opposed specifically to four-shape shape notes, which not only did he totally not get, he wanted to elevate Americans out of the backwoods culture from which shape notes came. I think seven shapes would have been compatible with his teaching philosophy if he wouldn’t have been so prejudiced. The legacy of all that is that, no matter how much pedagogical sense shape notes make, music teachers won’t teach them because there isn’t any music written in them and there isn’t any music written in shape notes because music teachers won’t teach them.

None of the books that Warren talked about ever attained the popularity of religious shape-note books. As he says, when people in the 1800s sang secular songs from books, they preferred books without any notes at all. Maybe the whole idea of any musical notation reminded them of church, the image of which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to sing a drinking song. The harmony may have reminded them of church too. (I’m making all this up, it isn’t Warren.) But then at church, pianos and organs eventually started becoming more attractive than the harmony of unaccompanied singing. In any case, wherever churches dropped shape notes, there the whole ingenious idea died.

Singing without notes lives on today in the community singing movement where people gather to sing folk songs. There’s such a group in Birmingham, Alabama, and when I lived there, I went a few times, but it proved to be too frustrating. They use the popular Rise Up Singing group singing songbook, in which the only notation is guitar chords, as if the guitarist is the only one who actually needs to know the song. Most people just sang along with the melody, with some trying to wing an alto or bass line, but all I could think was “Show me the damn notes.” Even so, if singing can help random people become a community, that’s pretty much always a good thing. As The New York Times quoted Pete Seeger, “...I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’” I call that holy.

Have you ever been in some mundane situation when suddenly you hear a cappella harmony coming from somewhere, maybe from the radio, maybe from a choir rehearsing, maybe just a pick-up singing in another room? Everyone freezes like a spirit wafted in or something. “That’s lovely,” people will say. But then they’ll just go right back to their mundane pursuits. My problem is I can’t just go back. It’s like I’ve heard the Sirens and jumped into the water, except that the water’s exquisite. “Jump!” I want to say to everyone else, whether we’re in church, on the street, in a stadium, on a bus, wherever there are people, because I can’t make harmony by myself. If we had more secular songs in shape notes, I think more people would jump. Scenes from Heaven on Earth, which I am trying to foster with secular music in shape notes.

All in all, Warren’s chapter was for me very educational, a little depressing, and helpful for understanding my task ahead. For anyone who needs the full citation, here it is:

Steel, David Warren. “Secular Music in Shape Notes.” Rethinking American Music, edited by Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis, University of Illinois Press, 2019, pp. 50-67.

Rebirth for Dead Letter

The longer I sing shape-note music, which is going on 23 years now, the firmer is my conviction that shape notes, those curious symbols of early America, can help instigate a cultural transformation. I have said so all over letters to the editor, email listservs, Facebook group pages, private correspondences, and other people’s blogs, but all to no avail. In fact, a member of one music educators’ Facebook group I joined apparently took so much affront to the idea of shape notes that he deleted my post.

Below is a 2018 letter to the editor I wrote to The Christian Chronicle, the newspaper of the Churches of Christ, trying to make the case for the cultural treasure they’re sitting on with their shape-note heritage and what good they could do the world if they would promote shape-note singing in the culture at large. No response. So, I thought I would just start a blog and publish it myself. Here it is:

Shape Notes for the Rest of Us

Hiding in the pews of the Churches of Christ is a cultural treasure of early America with which vast swaths of society were once familiar. It is those curious shapes in their hymnals and they hold the key to no less than a possible cultural shift, a singing renaissance with multiple benefits for a fractured and dissonant society. Easy to learn with much less training compared to conventional round notes, shape notes can facilitate an experience of which the great masses are unaware: the utter joy of communal a cappella harmony.

I am not a member of the Church of Christ and can probably count on one hand the number of times I have attended a Church of Christ worship service. I am, in fact, one of your renegade cousins in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). After our split at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the things our side lost was a strong tradition of congregational singing which shape notes greatly aided. Church of Christ congregations, being one of the greatest repositories of shape-note music in the world, are important heirs to that ingenious musical pedagogy and in a position to spread it.

Growing up in Disciples churches where the organist overpowered any thoughts the congregation may have had of its congregational voice, I never knew the power of joining in mass harmony until, for job-related reasons, I moved to the American South. In mostly tiny, mostly rural churches from the Carolinas to Texas, congregations are outnumbered by visitors who come together for the sole purpose of all-day singing. The most common of these singings uses The Sacred Harp, an oblong book of sacred songs that most hymnals purged long ago. These singings combine people for whom singing is worship, fellowship, heritage, culture, catharsis, fun, or any combination thereof, no questions asked.

The musical notation in The Sacred Harp predates today’s seven-note scale, relying instead on just four notes: mi, fa, so, and la. It has its own internal logic which makes total sense to the people who sing it, but is unlikely to win over your average music teacher. What could win said teacher over is the seven-shape shape-note system in Church of Christ hymnals, as well as in several other denominations and traditions, as it follows the do-re-mi relative scale which everyone learns in school (or at least from The Sound of Music!). With shape notes, people of pedestrian musical abilities or less can do what musicians train for years to do, and still many professionals cannot, that is, pick up music and just start singing it. No counting sharps and flats, lines and spaces just to calculate what the next note is—the shape kindly tells you.

Every music teacher, every chorus and chorus director, every community organizer no less should be on to this. All music written with notes can be rewritten with shape notes. If musicians could overcome their prejudice against what early in American history unfairly grew into a symbol of backwoods crudeness, they would amaze themselves with what they could accomplish. They would also help cure the pernicious lack of self-confidence to sing pervasive among Americans. The Churches of Christ, through their musicians, universities, publishers, and the very example of their members’ facility with this notation, can serve as the instigators for sharing the gift of shape notes with the rest of us. If people could join voices in song, then from experience they would want to join voices in song. People of seemingly irreconcilable differences would seek each other out just to sing and the world would be a little closer to that heavenly kingdom.