Sacred Harp Harmony: A Part-Writing Primer for Shape-Note Hymnody

Abstract

In our undergraduate music theory courses we teach students a set of procedures to emulate the composition style of the European composers who wrote tonal music from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The problem of harmony that we shall explore here involves an alternative repertoire of tonal music that obviously does not follow the procedures that we teach in tonal music theory classes. The body of music to which I refer is the American hymn-writing tradition begun by the “First New-England School ” led by William Billings (1746–1800) and continuing to this day in the shape-note singing community centered around the most popular current singing-school class book, The Sacred Harp. Follow along with Figure 1 as I play a 1968 recording of the hymn tune called “Villulia ” sung by traditional Southern shape-note singers. (Warning: These folks aren’t classically-trained musicians and they don’t sing with any restraint. They also sing in keys of convenience, usually lower than the notated pitch level.)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.