Singing Schools

This week, we’ll start a journey that will take us in, around, and through some particularly American expressions of music, with a particular look at shape note singing and the Sacred Harp tradition.

Over the past year, we’ve looked at a variety of different kinds of music and touched on some of the different perspectives of what constitutes appropriate music for church?

• In your opinion, what kind of music should be sung during a church service?
• From our previous discussions, and your own experience, what kinds of perspectives have there been about what constitutes music appropriate for worship services?

The controversy over what constitutes appropriate music is hardly a new one. Consider the following[1]:

1. It is a new way, an unknown tongue.
2. It is not so melodious as the usual way.
3. There are so many tunes we shall never have done learning them.
4. The practice creates disturbances and causes people to behave indecently and disorderly.
5. It is Quakerish and Popish and introductive on instrumental music.
6. The names given to the notes are bawdy, yea blasphemous (i.e., fa-sol-la-mi, etc.)
7. It is a needless way, since our fathers got to heaven without it.
8. It is a contrivance to get money.
9. People spend too much time learning it, they tarry out nights disorderly.
10. They are a company of young upstarts that fall in with this way, and some of them are lewd and loose persons.

This is from a 1722 pamphlet, describing the work of the so-called Singing Schools, which were an attempt by Harvard trained ministers to improve what they saw as the appalling quality of music in their congregations. The bulk of the congregational music at that time was just melody, done in line-out (call and repeat) format. The key idea of the music schools, which were patterned after similar efforts in the late 17th century rural England, was to teach people (everyone) the rudiments of music theory, reading music, and leading music. In one sense, this can be viewed as an extension of the push to literacy. For Protestants, in particular, a key factor in the push to literacy was to enable people to read the Bible. A key factor in the singing school movement was to teach people to read music and sing, thereby increasing the quality of music and bringing an improved offering to God.

Some relevant articles and links:

• Wikipedia article on Sining Schools. Note the comments from Laura Ingalls Wilder.
• FaSoLa article. Note the rather scathing comments about Lowell Mason.
• SmithCreekMusic.com article

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1. Leonard Ellenwood, The History of American Church Music, p. 20, as quoted on smithcreekmusic.com  ↩