The New York Metropolitan Filk Organization, Inc. Presents

Contata 6 / NEFilk 21

July 1-3, 2011
Hilton Parsippany
One Hilton Court, Parsippany, NJ 1-973-267-7373

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From our Listener GOH, Crystal Paul, some advance info on her shape note singing workshop!

Shape Note Singing Workshop

Shape Notes is a style of music notation used in church hymnals in 18th and early 19th century America. Specific geometric shapes were assigned to the notes of the scale to help people who couldn't read music (and were often illiterate in general) to learn parts. Many of these old shape note hymns survive today, largely because they are tremendous fun to sing. The genre is also a rich source of little-known folk tunes for borrowing. Exhibit A: the tunes we will be using have all been co-opted by Ed Stauff in The Scarèd Harp. (We won't be learning the shapes themselves, but a handout will be provided for historic reference.)

Since we will have only an hour, it would be very helpful for people to check out their parts in advance. Fortunately, Ed has made The Scarèd Harp available for downloading . He has also created 4-part MIDIs of each song. There are also links to download freeware that lets you isolate or emphasize single parts within the arrangements -- very useful for learning parts in advance!

The songs we will be working on are "Who Sings for the Engineer? (page 16)," Hymn to Hubble (page 32)," "Let Insects Specialize (page 38)," and "Babylon Is Fallen (page 46)." In an hour workshop, I don't expect to do more that 3 of them, but this gives us some choices. To download The Scarèd Harp:

  1. Go to http://www.mewsic.com/Ed/music/index.html.
  2. On the navigation bar along the top, go to Other Projects.
  3. Click on the link to the Scarèd Harp at the bottom of the left side navigation bar.
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the Scarèd Harp page to find downloading links. You can download the songbook as a .pdf file. On the same page, you can download 4-part MIDIs of the arrangements, either individually or the entire set. You can also download freeware that lets you control the level of each part in the MIDIs.

Alternatively, just click here to go to the scared harp page directly (but without the frames).

Hope to see you there!
-- Crystal Paul

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Contata runs under the aegis of the Northeast Filk Convention.