I've been singing shape note music for a little over three years now and every time I go to one of our monthly sings I'm taken by it all over again. This is a very old style of music that was largely criticized by the academics that taught music in the universities and such. However it was very popular with the people, especially rural families and along the Appalachian mountain range. The purpose of the shapes were to assist the general congregation in singing by associating each shape with a specific note in turn allowing one to follow the line of musical notes throughout the song. One of the things I love most about this type of singing is that you don't have to have a great voice just sing loud and I love the fact that you can hear individual voices with all their imperfections singing to God's glory!
At the beginning of each song everyone sings the song by the notes only, those being Fa, So, La and Mi. Click on the the picture blow and you can see the different shape in place of the traditional musical notes.
FA= triangle
SO=circle
LA=square
MI=diamond
There is so much more to this historical and beautiful form of music than just what I have posted but I hope this might encourage someone to broaden their horizons a bit and look around to see if there is a local group of folks you could sing with. You may even have as much fun as I did my first time and every time since!!
WATCH and LISTEN ---
3 comments:
This is interesting...I've never heard of it.
They have some real sacred harp singers in the movie "Cold Mountain" (love that movie!) I really love the name too, "sacred harp" the most sacred instrument of all, the human voice.
Yes, that is a great movie! I'm going to have to watch it again and look/listen for the singers.
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