Store: Songbooks
Shapenote Music
Endless Light: Spiritual Songs from a New Generation of Composers
1997. Edited by Larry Gordon. Illustrations by Tom Bower. Paperback, 52 pp.
Twenty-six songs in three and four parts for equal and mixed voices by composer-members of Gordon's teenage singing group, Village Harmony. An impressive range of musical styles, largely inspired by traditional New England shape-note music, ranging from lively fuging tunes to plaintive melodies with close-moving and often surprising harmonies. Texts from the hymns and psalms of Isaac Watts and his followers, and the poetry of Longfellow, Henry Vaughan, Rupert Brooke and Christina Rossetti, as well as original lyrics by the composers.
The potional companion CD —otherwise out of print — is comprised of recordings from a fabulous one-time collaboration of over fifty singers and instrumentalists from the Village Harmony year group past and present, featuring some of the most exciting voices we've ever sung with. The Endless Light album is characterized by an impressive range of compositional and singing styles, especially the hard-edged vocals of the New England shape-note tradition
Northern Harmony
Plain Tunes, Hymns and Anthems from the New England Singing School Tradition
1998, Edited by Larry Gordon and Anthony Barrand. Illustrations by Tom Bower. 4th edition. Hardcover, 280 pages.
Northern Harmony has always been a singer's collection. These tunes have been taught to singers of every age, ability, background and musical taste. They work. There is, perhaps, no other easily accessible choral music that is as much fun to sing. The music is stark, rhythmic, frequently modal, and very distinctive, set to the fierce rhymed poetry of Issac Watts and others.
Two-thirds of this volume presents a selection of plain tunes, fuging tunes, and anthems written by American composers during the years 1770-1810, most of them hitherto unavailable in modern editions. The remaining portion is contemporary compositions.