Daniel Belknap was a farmer, mechanic, and singing-master in Framingham, Massachusetts, who compiled four sacred and one secular tunebooks. These featured his own sacred compositions as well as those by other New England composers. While Belknap was not as flamboyant, prolific, nor as innovative as his contemporaries, he nevertheless provided fitting and eloquent religious and social music for his own and neighboring communities.
This authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note singing. Where other studies of the Sacred Harp have focused on the sociology of present-day singers and their activities, David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan concentrate on the regional culture that produced the Sacred Harp in the nineteenth century and delve deeply into history of its authors and composers. They trace the sources of every tune and text in the Sacred Harp, from the work of B. F. White, E. J. King, and their west Georgia contemporaries who helped compile the original collection in 1844 to the contributions by various composers to the 1936 to 1991 editions. The Makers of the Sacred Harp also includes analyses of the textual influences on the music--including metrical psalmody, English evangelical poets, American frontier preachers, camp meeting hymnody, and revival choruses--and essays placing the Sacred Harp as a product of the antebellum period with roots in religious revivalism. Drawing on census reports, local histories, family Bibles and other records, rich oral interviews with descendants, and Sacred Harp Publishing Company records, this volume reveals new details and insights about the history of this enduring American musical tradition.
First Published in 1996. This series presents the music of early American composers of sacred music—psalmody, as it was called—in collected critical editions. The purpose of the series is to present the music of important early American composers in accurate editions for both performance and study. This volume presents the music of Elias Mann, a Massachusetts psalmodist active from about 1785 to 1810.
Jacob French, a student of William Billings, was one of the most talented postrevolutionary composers of Protestant sacred music in New England. He compiled most of his music in three printed tunebooks, comprising choral pieces of great rhythmic and contrapuntal variety. He felt many excellently crafted, expressive compositions that should find interest among today's choral directors and singers.
"The shape-note tradition first flourished in the small towns and rural areas of early America. Church-sponsored "singing schools" taught a form of musical notation in which the notes were assigned different shapes to indicate variations in pitch; this method worked well with congregants who had little knowledge of standard musical notation. Today many enthusiasts carry on the shape-note tradition, and The New Harp of Columbia (recently published in a "restored edition" by the University of Tennessee Press) is one of five shape-note singing-manuals still in use."--Jacket.
