Something for Reformation Day

I wish I could provide a more exciting update, but unfortunately I have not had a lot of time to devote to the compilation over the past few weeks, as the number of my professional demands has been exceptionally high. Furthermore, we’re holding steady at three tunes to go, as I’ve been mostly concentrating on boring things like indices, and so I don't have anything new and exciting to post.

As a result, I’ve instead decided to share a seasonally appropriate update from repertoire that I had previous typeset. While the vast majority of 19^th century shape note activity was English language based, there were a handful of four-shape tunebooks published with text entirely in German, or as bilingual German-English collections, including Choral-Harmonie (Gerhart & Eyer, 1818), Die Neue Choral Harmonie (Musselmann, 1844), and Die Pennsylvanishe Choral Harmonie, compiled by T.R. Weber, which ran for at least fifteen editions.

Below is a tune excerpted from one such collection, Die Union Choral Harmonie (Henry C. Eyer, printed by Francis Wyeth: Harrisburg, PA, 1836). In honor of Reformation Day, I hope you’ll enjoy Asylum, one of the entries for the 46^th Psalm – I suspect many of you will recognize the tune, even if Herr Eyer names it something unfamiliar. Give it a sing if you have an opportunity this weekend – or some other time – and if you’re feeling up to it, give the German a shot. Viel Spaß!

An Update/Some words (and shapes) on a new tune, 111 WAREH

UPDATE: We’re getting close now: each psalm has a text, each text has a tune, and all but three of those have been typeset! That said, there is still a significant amount of revising and editing to do before the volume is ready for printing, but I’m still clinging to my goal of having a book in hand by Christmas. Onward!

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I’d like to share another of the new tunes that will appear in the collection, this one written in honor of a singer many of you know, Tarik Wareh. Tarik had made a comment on a Facebook group or another electronic medium wondering about the use of organum-derived compositional techniques in fasola music.* This was something that I had also wondered about in the past, but had not devoted the time or energy to exploring. I took the occasion as an opportunity to tinker a little bit, and the tune below is what I came up with.

I had originally intended to write a three-voice tune, treating the tenor as the cantus firmus and the treble as the organal voice. However, I had a difficult time wrangling the ranges of the voice parts in that approach, and decided to shelve it in favor of a slightly more manageable (if somewhat watered down) technique in which the bass, tenor, and alto voices are freely composed, and the treble voice acts as a sort of organal voice to the alto. To facilitate harmony more idiomatic to the fasola tradition, a further liberty has been taken in somewhat freely vacillating between parallel fourth and parallel fifth organum, with the changes happening at the four primary structural points in the tune’s phrasing.

Although the final product turned out significantly differently from the original intent, I think it serves as a(n unsurprising) proof of concept that organal techniques can indeed be used to convincing effect in fasola composing. Tarik took the tune to the weekly Schenectady, NY Sacred Harp singing and they were kind enough to sing through the tune. Below are a couple of recordings Tarik managed to grab of the tune...what do you think?

*I’m pretty sure George Jackson uses the term “folk organum” in White Spirituals but the thesis is still too raw to consult my notes or the book and confirm it.

New Facebook page! Plus an update & new tune

While I intend to continue posting the bulk of the project's updates to this medium, I am excited to announce a new Facebook page! I'll try to duplicate most of the content found here over there, but I figured it would probably be more convenient for many of you to be able to follow updates in your newsfeed compared to on an independent website.
Check it out and like the page here: https://www.facebook.com/ThePsalmistsHarp

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On to the update....

As of yesterday, the current count stands at:

-2 texts awaiting to be paired with tunes
-9 texts paired with tunes awaiting typesetting
-186 entries (out of a total 198 to be included in the first edition) completed!

The most recent of these is the tune included below. The end of the book will offer three newly composed tunes -- one short meter, one common meter, and one long meter -- affixed with paraphrases of the doxology in the appropriate meter. The thought behind this is that many ancient Christian practices involve the singing of the doxology at the end of psalm singing; in this way, singers will have texts in each of the three most popular hymn meters, and would be able to insert one of the three as a last verse of one of the psalms in the book. Or, for the more adventurous, a leader could also attempt an "at-will" text-tune pairing by drawing a familiar text from the book and pairing those words with the new tunes.

Give MAGNOLIA, the short meter tune, a shot -- we tried it out at our weekly Citadel shape note singing last evening and thought it was alright! (By the way, in case you were wondering, all three of the doxology tunes do share an arboreal theme.)

An Update, an Announcement, and a protip for Fasola Typesetting in Lilypond

Below, I'm going to spend some time detailing the technical steps to getting the typesetting program Lilypond to output typeset music in fasola notation. But first, a quick update and an announcement:

-All psalms have been assigned a text
-8 texts are still awaiting to be paired with a tune
-174 tunes have been typeset

As you can see, the first edition is rapidly approaching completion! Accordingly, the printing stage of preparation is coming soon, as well. To help defray the costs involved with this, I'll be launching a Kickstarter for the project within the next several weeks. There will be equitable rewards for those who are willing to pledge funding for the project -- more details and a link to the campaign will be posted within the next week.

On to the technical stuff of even more limited interest:

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For a long time, I was a devotee of one of the expensive name-brand music notation software programs, but several years ago when I began to do more composing in the fasola idiom, I could not figure out how to get the program I was accustomed to to output shaped notation. I do believe that it can be done, and I know that the other major expensive name-brand music notation software program can be made to do it, but I didn't want to spend the time or money to learn a new program.

So, I made the leap to Lilypond, and because of my modest computer skills, elected to use the WYSIWYG front-end client Denemo. It has most of functionalities of the expensive name-brand guys, and is actually even more flexible in many ways (albeit a bit buggier than others). Most of all, it is very easy to make it to output typeset music in fasola shapes -- or, at least it is once you know what you're doing. While I'm guessing this won't be of immediate interest to many of the readers who came to this place organically, I'm hoping maybe it will spare some soul searching Google for "HOW TO PUT FASOLA SHAPES INTO LILYPOND OR DENEMO" a bit of head-scratching and hair-pulling. So, if you found your way here in that way, fret no more and read on.

Steps (if you're using denemo):

1. Typeset your music, either using raw Lilypond input or a client like Denemo. A note if you're using Denemo: be sure that if you're typesetting a minor tune that you input the key as that key's relative major. In other words, if you're working with a tune in e minor (one sharp), tell Denemo that it's in G major (also one sharp) -- otherwise, the shapes will not be appended to the correct pitches. Note that this is only for minor tunes; major tunes should be input as expected.

2. Export your tune as a Lilypond file. If you use the  "quick export" function in Denemo, it outputs it to the same file location with the same file name, except as a .ly file

3.Navigate to the new .ly file and open it in a text editor (e.g., notepad on Windows). Scroll down until you see "MvmntIVoiceI = {", as shown below:

-After that bit of text and before the music itself, insert the following:

\sacredHarpHeads \set shapeNoteStyles = ##(fa #f la fa #f la mi)

-The result should look like this:



Note that you'll need to copy the line above into each section that says "MvmntIVoiceX" -- there will be one such section for each voice part in the tune. Lilypond will only typeset shapes for the voices that have the line above copied into them.

That's it -- save the .ly file, run it in lilypond, and if you've done everything correctly, you should have a new typeset fasola tune!

Let me know in the comments below if you're having any trouble with the above, and I'll try to help(??)!

31 (or so) left to typeset

As of this morning, there are 31 more tunes (or so) left to typeset before the completion of the project. The fuzziness owes to the fact that I am yet unsure of how many tunes will be left for a later edition (for various reasons, a number of the tunes which were originally intended to be included have been postponed for future versions of the book).

As of right now:

• 9 texts are still waiting to be paired with tunes
• 1 text/tune pair is  awaiting typesetting
• 1 newly composed tune is awaiting editing
• A number of small issues still need to be addressed with a handful of tunes, but otherwise,
• 170 entries have been typeset! 

To keep with the theme of "psalm-X-in-honor-of-X-to-go" (gonna need to come up with a new schtick soon), I'd like to share with you the entry for Psalm 31, a newly composed tune. The tune is in honor of a singer many of you have probably encountered in a hollow square someplace, Jonathon Smith! We had the chance to give it a shot together when Jonathon stopped by our Wednesday evening Southern Harmony singing some weeks back. I incorporated a few atypical compositional techniques with this one, so hope I've done right by him with this tune...y'all let me know what you think!

In honor of "42 to go..."

In honor of reaching the "42 more psalms to typeset" mark, I'd like to offer you all to take a look at the entry for the 42nd Psalm: GENEVAN 42

There have been a couple of secondary and tertiary aims to this project. One of these has been to make "fasola-friendly" music from repertories outside the historic/traditional shape-note repertoire (including denominational hymnody) available to shape-note singers.

Another one of these has been to re-pair tunes titled for a given text with the text for which they were originally intended. Readily apparent examples of these include "Ninety-Fifth" and "Old Hundredth" -- two well known tunes to fasola singers, but which are not commonly paired with paraphrases of the 95th or 100th psalms. In this collection, an effort has been made to restore these historical pairings, to allow modern singers to sing these psalms in a way not entirely dissimilar from how protestants would have sung from the Genevan Psalter nearly 500 years ago.

The tune below is an intersection of both of these intents. GENEVAN 42 is a tune found in a number of denominational hymnals, generally paired with the text "Comfort, comfort, ye my people" -- a metrical paraphrase of the 40th chapter of Isaiah. In accordance with the above, I elected to adopt the tune, and outfit it with a paraphrase of the 42nd Psalm, as the tune appeared in Bourgeois' tunebook. The principal issue was that no paraphrase of Psalm 42 was readily available in the uncommon meter of the tune, 8.7.8.7.7.7.8.8.

Well, needs must, and foolhardiness allowed me to try my hand at a metrical paraphrase of the psalm in this strange meter. Let me know what you think, or if you can foresee any manner of improving either tune or text!

About the Psalmist's Harp

There's some information (that is supposed to be) on the sidebar giving a general overview about this project. However, in case you missed it (or in case it's still not showing up, as was the case earlier!), I've replicated it below for your reading pleasure.

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The Psalmist’s Harp is a new fasola compilation, containing the entirety of the 150 Psalms set to both historical and contemporary shape-note tunes. The project is multifaceted; primarily and most practically, the collection is intended for those who wish to have a complete psalter at hand that provides a source of accessible a cappella psalmody. To this end, the collection – when completed – will be available for purchase in a traditional printed format, or for download as a PDF free of charge (for personal use), for those who may wish to print a copy themselves or to sing from an electrionic device.  

The compilation is also a celebration of historic American music and the rich tradition of Western protestant psalmody. Contributions from well-known Singing School composers such as Timothy Swan (65) and William Billings (139) are represented in the work alongside later folk-idiom melodies by influential composer-compilers John Wyeth, William Walker, and Ananias Davisson, among many others. A handful of tunes in comparable idioms from related traditions, such as as well as later 19^th century sources like the New Harp of Columbia are included, as are more than thirty newly-composed/newly-adapted tunes from the pens of living composers.

Following the precedent of the old masters and their compilations, the book is a pastiche. In the diversity of the collections from which the sources were drawn, the collection testifies to the richness of the historical diversity underpinning this unique American hymnody. Alongside the highly prolific figures mentioned above, lesser-known figures and collections provide a significant amount of the compilation’s musical material as well: the tunes found in the book have been drawn from almost two dozen distinct historical sources; some tunes of early American folk or shape-note provenance that have fallen out of use have been “[re-]fasola-fied”; some music from mainstream hymnody and compatible historical idioms outside the shape-note tradition have been drawn in and adapted for use.

The focus on historical notability extends to the sources of the compilation’s texts, as well. Commemorating the nearly four-hundred year old traditions of Anglo-American hymnody, the texts of the Bay Psalm Book (the first book published in British North America) appear throughout the book, including in the entry for Ps. 116, which is paired to WINDSOR – the tune to which the text is paired in the Bay Psalm Book itself. Tunes found in historic protestant psalters have been adapted or re-paired to match up with their originally intended texts; some examples include GENEVAN 42^ND, NINTEY-FIFTH, and OLD HUNDRED. While deeply respecting and paying homage to the collections of psalm paraphrases and the hymn writers that have formed the backbone of protestant worship for centuries – to include Sternhold & Hopkins’ Whole Booke of Psalmes, Brady & Tate’s New Version of the Psalms of David, version of The Psalter of the United Presbyterian Church, and the venerable and several versions of The Scottish Psalter, alongside individuals like Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts – the book also features texts from unexpected historical contributors, including John Milton and John Quincy Adams, the second president of the United States.

This compilation is intended as a contribution to the longstanding and vibrant tradition of shape note psalmody, and conforms to historical conventions in many ways, but is unique in presenting – for apparently the first time in history – the entire psalter, in order, all set in the style and notation of the fasola tradition.  As a contemporary entry into an old tradition, this collection is intended a living document. If singers have feedback or questions about the work, have identified errata be corrected, or would like to submit music to be considered for inclusion in future editions of the tunebook, they are heartily encouraged to make use of the contact section of this blog.

59 more...

With the completion of psalms 140-144, we're now up to a total of 150 psalms!

You must be thinking, "Is that math right? How many psalms does this guy's bible have in it...?" 

Well, The Psalmist's Harp is going to offer multiple text/tune pairings for some of the psalms -- for instance, Psalm 137 will be offered in three distinct versions. Additionally, one must account for the 23 individual parts of Psalm 119, each of which is given its own tune in the book. All told, there will be a total of (as of this stage of planning and execution) 209 discrete entries in the book. 

Check out one of the tunes from today's crop, a pairing of an old version of BOURBON, also drawn from Freeman Lewis' Beauties of Harmony (1814). While the tune is probably known to many who have a familiarity with modern mainline protestant hymnody, Lewis provides a variant slightly different from the versions most commonly found in hymnals. Take a look below!