American shaped notes tune books and the fasola tradition
When William Little and William Smith published The Easy Instructor (Philadelphia 1801), they started a spate of shaped notes tune books over the next half century or so. Perhaps the best known today is The Sacred Harp (1844). The traditional singing style associated with these books is known as the Sacred Harp style. The four shapes correspond to four syllables (fa, sol, la, mi) that form the theoretical underpinnings for the way these tunes have long been taught. Anyone who knows "Do, a deer" from The Sound of Music knows that there are seven syllables. Where did this fasola come from?It's easy to look at the chapters on rudiments of music in any of the shaped-notes tune books and see a primitive, rather naive approach to teaching music, inferior to the seven-syllable method. In fact, until fairly recently, music history textbooks bought into the idea that William Billings and other self-taught tunesmiths in colonial New England developed an entirely new style of singing out of sheer ignorance. That was certainly the opinion of Lowell Mason, whose "better way of singing" rejected fasola and promoted European classical music as a model for proper church music.Actually, the fasola tradition has a long and honorable tradition, in England, anyway, centuries older than William Billings. The whole idea of learning to sing and read music using syllables started with Guido of Arezzo in about 1025, long before anyone figured how to write music down. He used six syllables: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, starting on the notes we call C, F, and G. It was therefore necessary to know how to change "hexachords," as he called these sequences of six notes, in order to sing melodies that used more notes.By the sixteenth century, if not earlier, English teachers found it easier to teach the system if they used ut and re only for the lowest octave of each voice. In what we call a major scale, mi was needed only once, to indicate the half step below what we call the tonic. At about the same time, theorists on the continent were beginning to add a seventh syllable, si or ti, to the top of the standard hexachord. Ut somehow became do. That is simpler still, because it enables singers to sing all the notes in an octave without using the same syllable more than once.But the fasola system became firmly entrenched in England. John Playford's Introduction to the Skill of Musick (1655) became the basis for several important later books and proved especially helpful to parish clergy as they began to establish singing schools later in the century. In the eighteenth century, publishers issued plenty of books written by and for these largely rural clergy. None of them appear on anyone's list of the important music books. The more urbanized English musicians had long since adopted French and Italian ideas. Playford's rules still served as the basis of those promoted by such prolific rural authors as William Tans'ur.The shaped notes system essentially overlaid the traditional fasola theory with staff notation. [MORE]
