Research on teaching to read shape notes

[Tim Cook]

Hello, singers,

 

I’ve often heard reference to a 1960 study entitled “An Experiment in Teaching Children To Read Music with Shape Notes,” by George H. Kyme, and am wondering why there hasn’t been any sustained research on this topic since. I’m no scholar of music pedagogy, but if no one else does it, I’m of a mind to just conduct my own experiment. Would anyone have any advice how to go about this?

 

Tim Cook

Iwaki, Japan

[j frankel]

I've read that tons of people in Nashville learn not shape notes but a numbered system (I forget what they call it) where they learn by the # of the note in the scale.  Works fine.

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[Steve Nickolas]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024, j frankel wrote:

> I've read that tons of people in Nashville learn not shape notes but a
> numbered system (I forget what they call it) where they learn by the # of
> the note in the scale. Works fine.

Nashville Numbers?

[Karlin High]

On 2/19/2024 7:29 AM, Tim Cook wrote:
> I’m of a mind to just conduct my own experiment. Would anyone have any advice how to go about this?

Apparently this is the paper with the study:

<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/3344231>

The publisher wants some money for a complete copy, but the first page
is visible. It shows the start of the "Experimental Procedure" section.
I expect following the details described there would allow doing a
replication of the original study. Today's academics in the relevant
fields might be able to say what they'd want to see done for further work.
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA

[Tim Cook]

Karlin, hi,

Yes, I have that paper and am familiar with the problems with it, which I personally think are minor. I don't exactly want to recreate that study because it used a group of students being taught round notes as a control. I couldn't teach round notes if I wanted to, but even if I could, I think doing so could easily be discounted as bias. I don't pretend to be unbiased. I'm thinking there must be general guidelines music teachers follow for when to teach sight-singing, at what frequency, with what kind of materials, etc., and what they could reasonably expect for results. I'm pretty sure that doing the exact same thing, just with shape notes instead of round notes, would produce more impressive results.

And hi, Joan and Steve,

I once communicated with someone who teaches the Nashville number system, but either he or Facebook seems to have deleted our discussion in the FB group where we discussed it. What I got out of it is that the numbers are a crutch and as soon as students can sight-sing without them, the numbers are removed. He thought shape notes were a crutch as well under the assumption that reading round notes is the goal. The problem with round notes is that they give singers more information than they need, that is, the absolute pitch of notes, but not the information that they do need: their relative pitch. Unless you can't hear that "Happy Birthday" in B-flat is the same song as "Happy Birthday" in C, round notes are inappropriate for singing. But in that nearly everything for singers is written in that inappropriate notation, round notes are the de facto goal. I want to see more and more music written in shape notes so music teachers can't use that excuse anymore.

Tim

[Marian Mitchell]

Well,,, That may be true for tunes that stay in the same key all the way through. But for music that changes key as you go along  shapes can get confusing  -- I  remember one song, maybe in The Trumpet? where the tune changes from a La tune to a Fa tune based on the same tonic (say A minor to A major), where the A suddenly switched from a Fa to a La. That was hard to get my head around..

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[Linda Sides]

Greetings Tim et Y'all-

If I may, here are some random thoughts that come to mind from this discussion thus far:

We know that shape notes are perfect for singing, in that an individual can only sing one note at a time. This concept may also apply for instruments on which only one note/pitch can be played at a time. Once you are dealing with instruments that are either chord-based, such as rhythm guitar; or as in the case of solo piano, potentially ten notes/pitches at a time, shape notes would present too much information and would, additionally, clutter the score. [think reading Chopin written in shape notes!] A large print format conductor's score in shape notes might work... and might not.

Accompanied [piano or organ] singing will require someone to read round notes. Back in the day, there were some pianists that actually played Sacred Harp from shape notes, but my guess is that they did not play every note in all parts, instead filling in with an overall understanding of vocal lines and chordal harmonies. 

Regarding teaching children to read shape notes: one might glean useful information from studying Kodaly materials. That method employs some techniques that I found to be useful in my elementary music classroom, particularly in separating rhythmic- from melodic- aspects of the notation initially. Given the time/frequency limitations with each class, short rhythmic-only passages [anyone recall ta- ta- ti-ti ta?] were doable, followed by quarter note, eighth note, etc. designations. Melodic notation would follow - first with sol-feg [or the numbers as described in earlier comments] later with lines/spaces. I often wondered if the reading of shape notes could be inserted somehow into the process... The accumulated understanding of notational construction takes time: daily- or near-daily- instruction that includes ear-training would be needed. [Consider that no one learns to read books with one 30 minute lesson per week as music instruction usually entails.] 

I would suggest that both systems of notation are needed, as is the understanding and ability to transfer from one to the other; also, that success hinges on frequency of instruction and practice.

[I have to insert this: I grew up in a home where my Daddy would rant every Wednesday night following choir practice about the absence of shape notes in the rehearsal. It was a big deal when our church "modernized" by moving to a round note-only hymnal.]

Linda J. Sides

Fort Payne, AL

"...tune my heart to sing Thy Grace..."

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[Ted Johnson]

It does indeed work fine--used it all my life for writing down tunes. You need to specify the mode though. And put the numbers within narrow vertical lines, to indicate rhythm.

On Monday, February 19, 2024 at 01:38:53 PM CST, j frankel <ghos...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've read that tons of people in Nashville learn not shape notes but a numbered system (I forget what they call it) where they learn by the # of the note in the scale.  Works fine.

On Mon, Feb 19, 2024, 11:33 AM Tim Cook <coo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, singers,

 

I’ve often heard reference to a 1960 study entitled “An Experiment in Teaching Children To Read Music with Shape Notes,” by George H. Kyme, and am wondering why there hasn’t been any sustained research on this topic since. I’m no scholar of music pedagogy, but if no one else does it, I’m of a mind to just conduct my own experiment. Would anyone have any advice how to go about this?

 

Tim Cook

Iwaki, Japan

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[Tim Cook]

Marian, thanks for your comment. The song I’m most familiar with where the key changes is Anthem On The Savior. Key changes are always tricky, and I’ve heard the argument before against shape notes for music with key changes, but for me, the shapes make them easier, not harder. If I look at the last la in the tenor and move my eyes right, I can see that that same pitch is now the tonic fa. If it’s round notes, I have no idea what the heck it is. That would be my argument anyway.

 

Tim Cook

[Tim Cook]

Ta-ta-ti-ti-ta! Yes, I remember that, Linda. Didn’t realize that came from Kodály. I can relate to your daddy’s frustration. It feels downright mean to see hymnals, like Baptist and Mennonite hymnals, where they took out the shapes on purpose when they weren’t hurting anybody just sitting there. I know they don’t give any information to instrumentalists, but they’re laid out clearly enough in hymnals to where the instrumentalists can ignore them. Something on the order of Chopin is different and I wouldn’t try to shove shapes onto that, especially since there isn’t any singing involved, but if there were singing involved—Handel’s Messiah, for example—it would be an awfully helpful extra step to add a shape-note version for the voices. People spend a lot of time guessing in Messiah singalongs.

 

Let’s say a teacher is teaching in the progression you mentioned, with rhythm, then the length designation of notes, etc. At the point where you introduce solfege, could you just add shapes then? It makes a visual reference for solfege. As a child, I never even understood the purpose of doremi other than to make the Doremi song. If children were taught the shapes, the purpose of doremi would become self-evident. At whatever age that should happen, do you think less than daily instruction still be worthwhile? I wonder if the regular teacher teaching children to sing round notes while I was teaching shape notes would just confuse them. Music education in the US is so spotty that I suppose there would be kids who never receive it, is that right? They would probably be the best one to take for teaching shape notes. Here in Japan, education is very uniform, so I don’t think there’s such a thing as a kid who doesn’t go through the same specified music curriculum. And yet hardly anyone can read music well enough to sing it off the page. Heck, their teachers probably can’t either without hearing it on an instrument. Do you if the idea of teaching shape notes would be beyond the pale American schools?

 

Tim Cook

[Lucas Cecim]

I am quite a newbie on all this stuff, but as an education researcher I have some thoughts too:

Shape-notes are genious stuff, just as Nashville number are, but both systems are limited to their own objectives. It's clear how shape-notes are the simplest way to achieve musical literacy, because the help of the shapes together with fasola solmization show us how each note has a relationship with another note, and speciffically how notes come and go to Fa - that's what traditional tonality is about. My first point is that Shape-notes are the most perfect system to begin a musical literacy but they can't reach what round notes have become. This is the first place to check on an experiment or even in a Singing School: the marriage between notes and their tonality. Fasola system helps us tonificate, reading sounds and improving the diatonic thinking, Doremi system helps us structurally as notes become different, and it even can be an evolution on "tonal thinking" (the way we identify sounds) from Fasola. But to a major reading and dialoguing on what music can offer as a language is built over a movable system of notes with same shape, which is the rounded and last system.

Please observe that i don't want to put shapes systems on a simpler level, but historically that is what it wanted to reach! Thus, this do not make the system poor or less amazing lol. 

His praise shall sound from shore to shore,

Lucas Cecim.

Guarulhos, SP. Brazil.

SDG.

[Paul Robinson]

Tim Cook wrote:

 

> The problem with round notes is that they give singers more information than they need, that is, the absolute pitch of notes, but not the information that they do need: their relative pitch.

 

The information is there, just not encoded the way you're used to. I appreciate shape notes for straightforward non-chromatic music; but it would get in the way of a whole lot of interesting stuff I've sung over the decades, include Bach and even the Messiah. Think about learning to read: upper-case and lower-case print, ditto cursive, maybe in more than one style. There's a lot of effort put into to that teaching. Learning shapes for music is like learning print but not cursive. You can get by real well that way, but it won't teach you how to read grandma's stash of love letters from grandad.

 

> hardly anyone can read music well enough to sing it off the page. 

 

I'd put that down to poor education more than a flaw in the notation system. Being good at sight-singing was a prerequisite for the small choir I joined in college. (Where I later learned shape notes.)

 

--paulr

 

[Karlin High]

On 2/20/2024 9:01 AM, Tim Cook wrote:
> Do you if the idea of teaching shape notes would be beyond the pale
> American schools?

In the schools run by Mennonites, Amish etc it certainly is not.

In the Mennonite community I am with, and I am sure other ones as well,
there are people who have no idea that anything other than 7-shapes
notation exists.

[Barry Johnston]

Hi Linda Sides and the rest,

• " Back in the day, there were some pianists that actually played Sacred Harp from shape notes, but my guess is that they did not play every note in all parts, instead filling in with an overall understanding of vocal lines and chordal harmonies."

Yes, being a pianist and also a singer, I have tried playing shape note music, and I continue to explore this from time to time. Very often it doesn't work at all. I'm not sure why I keep trying (except for curiosity), because I came to the conclusion several years ago that this was sharply contrary to the intentions and proper use of shape note music, especially in a Sacred Harp context.  In other words, there is a reason why many shape note singers find instruments of any kind anathema to hollow-square group singing; I am leaning that way myself. In addition, it is very difficult to do, since often the parts cross each other, and the parts are meant to have content in themselves as well as together. The fascinating, wonderful art of keying is cancelled when instruments are brought in.  I usually convert to two staffs before trying to play this music, but when I do, the "filling in" becomes a struggle, fighting against my training and experience, which ends up being a frustrating loss of time and effort. 

Most shape note music written before 1890 or so (and some of it later) has very complex harmonies, differing considerably from the "chordal harmonies" in most post-Mason hymnbooks.  There has been a lot written about this by better than I. Wasn't this contest debated in late 18th and early 19th-century America?

Especially this is true of shape note music from the Shenandoah Valley and its derivatives, with continual fourths and fifths within parts and between parts as well. An example is James Carrell's Sunbury (1821). I love this kind of music, and would not want to dilute or change it, though adaptations to formats other than the hollow square or addition of instruments are sometimes entertaining, even pleasing.

Barry Johnston

Gunnison, Colorado

[Tim Cook]

Lorie and Paul, thanks for your reactions.

 

Lorie, I would just wonder the circumstances of the South American and Chinese students learning fixed Do. Might they have already had a rigorous musical training in their home countries before coming to you? I can’t imagine anyone understanding fixed Do without really rigorous training. If choral teachers debate whether fixed or moveable Do is better, I think movable Do and shape notes would be more attainable by a lot more people in less time than movable or fixed Do with round notes. However, even if that’s true, it’s sort of a moot point when so little music is written in shapes, especially secular music. It’s sort of a circular argument against shape notes: Teachers don’t want to teach them because nothing’s written in them; nothing’s written in them because teachers don’t want to teach them.

 

As for minor mode, it doesn’t break down at all for me in minor mode. I’ve only ever sung minor with shapes starting on La, but I’m sure I’d get it on Re at least as fast as I got it on La.

 

I had never heard of Takadimi before you mentioned it, but I watched some online videos about it and it seems like a great way to teach rhythm.

 

Paul, I know all the information is there in conventional notation, but there’s just a lot of calculation involved to find out what a shape tells you instantly. After you figure out where Do is, you have to count lines and spaces to figure out what the first note is, then the next, etc. The few times I ever sung Bach or the Messiah, I felt like I was being purposely handicapped by round notes. Just tell me what the damn note is, I want to say. I know that with a lot of effort and practice, some people get it, but why make them exert so much effort for something so difficult? If sight-singing round notes was a prerequisite for joining your small choir, might round notes be the reason your choir was small? Even many professional musicians would be hard-pressed if you gave them a page of notes and said “Here, sing this.” If it’s in shapes, I as a shape-note singer with no formal training in sight-singing, can just start singing it, sharps, flats, key changes and all. And if I actually was formally taught this, particularly at a young age, I assume I’d be even better.

 

Sorry, y’all, to sound so contentious about all this, but I often think what a musical world we’d live in if kids in school were given even minimal instruction in shape notes and every piece of music meant to be sung was available in them. It’s so sad to me that something so easy is made so hard.

 

Tim Cook

 

From: Wacaster, Lorie <LWac...@htes.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2024 1:41 AM
To: fasola-di...@googlegroups.com; coo...@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] Research on teaching to read shape notes

 

Hi Tim,

 

    As a middle school/high school chorus and orchestra teacher, my chorus students coming from South America and China learn "fixed Do" solfege system, where C is always Do, D is always Re, etc.  They sight sing beautifully and have a much better grasp of the process than my local students, who lean so much on their ear they can't sight sing.  I learned scale degree sight singing in college and it is the system I am most comfortable with, but it breaks down in any mode other than major.  However, it is imperative to understand when studying music at the AP level for many reasons that will bore most people reading this email.  I teach "moveable Do" in my chorus classes where Do is the first scale degree of the key we're using.  As choral teachers, we often debate what system is best. The answer: whichever one you do daily. 

 

   I have taught shapes to chorus classes that are interested, but honestly, if I understand correctly, it was a way to quickly teach folks how to sing hymns. I find it very interesting as a piece of American music history, but I think long term it, scale degrees, round note solfege and Takadimi methods are systems designed to support students is learning to read music and not the end goal. Other systems, get us to that goal easier than shape notes, in my opinion.

 

   If you are interested in a "unified theory" of teaching music reading to students, you might like looking at Dr. Carol Krieger's works. You can find her online. She does great work in trying to bring it all together rather than what is typical here in the US, all of us teaching the way we were taught. You are not mistaken; we could do better here in the US teaching these skills. We ARE "spotty" in our music education. Music education for EVERY student is sadly not happening here om the USA.

 

Lorie

 

 

Mrs. Lorie Wacaster  Chorus, Strings and Mindfulness Teacher Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy  321-723-8323, Ext. #330 LWac...@htes.org www.htacademy.org Start Here. Go Anywhere.

 

---

From: fasola-di...@googlegroups.com <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tim Cook <coo...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2024 10:01 AM
To: fasola-di...@googlegroups.com <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [fasola-discussions] Research on teaching to read shape notes

 

Ta-ta-ti-ti-ta! Yes, I remember that, Linda. Didn’t realize that came from Kodály. I can relate to your daddy’s frustration. It feels downright mean to see hymnals, like Baptist and Mennonite hymnals, where they took out the shapes on purpose when they weren’t hurting anybody just sitting there. I know they don’t give any information to instrumentalists, but they’re laid out clearly enough in hymnals to where the instrumentalists can ignore them. Something on the order of Chopin is different and I wouldn’t try to shove shapes onto that, especially since there isn’t any singing involved, but if there were singing involved—Handel’s Messiah, for example—it would be an awfully helpful extra step to add a shape-note version for the voices. People spend a lot of time guessing in Messiah singalongs.

 

Let’s say a teacher is teaching in the progression you mentioned, with rhythm, then the length designation of notes, etc. At the point where you introduce solfege, could you just add shapes then? It makes a visual reference for solfege. As a child, I never even understood the purpose of doremi other than to make the Doremi song. If children were taught the shapes, the purpose of doremi would become self-evident. At whatever age that should happen, do you think less than daily instruction still be worthwhile? I wonder if the regular teacher teaching children to sing round notes while I was teaching shape notes would just confuse them. Music education in the US is so spotty that I suppose there would be kids who never receive it, is that right? They would probably be the best one to take for teaching shape notes. Here in Japan, education is very uniform, so I don’t think there’s such a thing as a kid who doesn’t go through the same specified music curriculum. And yet hardly anyone can read music well enough to sing it off the page. Heck, their teachers probably can’t either without hearing it on an instrument. Do you if the idea of teaching shape notes would be beyond the pale American schools?

 

Tim Cook

 

From: Paul Robinson ptr....@comcast.net
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2024 8:56 AM
To: coo...@gmail.com; fasola-di...@googlegroups.com

Subject: RE: [fasola-discussions] Research on teaching to read shape notes

 

Tim Cook wrote:

 

> The problem with round notes is that they give singers more information than they need, that is, the absolute pitch of notes, but not the information that they do need: their relative pitch.

 

The information is there, just not encoded the way you're used to. I appreciate shape notes for straightforward non-chromatic music; but it would get in the way of a whole lot of interesting stuff I've sung over the decades, include Bach and even the Messiah. Think about learning to read: upper-case and lower-case print, ditto cursive, maybe in more than one style. There's a lot of effort put into to that teaching. Learning shapes for music is like learning print but not cursive. You can get by real well that way, but it won't teach you how to read grandma's stash of love letters from grandad.

 

> hardly anyone can read music well enough to sing it off the page. 

 

I'd put that down to poor education more than a flaw in the notation system. Being good at sight-singing was a prerequisite for the small choir I joined in college. (Where I later learned shape notes.)

 

--paulr

 

 

[Karlin High]

On 2/23/2024 8:44 AM, Tim Cook wrote:
> I often think what a musical world we’d live in if kids in school were
> given even minimal instruction in shape notes and every piece of music
> meant to be sung was available in them. It’s so sad to me that something
> so easy is made so hard.

Well, that IS the musical world I live in.

And even in a society where anything other then moveable-Do 7-shapes is
considered a defective aberration, still not everyone learns to
sight-read music.

[Paul Robinson]

> The few times I ever sung Bach

 

It's hard to imagine Bach in shapes. Most die-hard shape-note singers say they ignore the accidentals, which kind of ruins Bach. Never mind Stravinski or more modern stuff.

 

> After you figure out where Do is, you have to count lines and spaces to figure out what the first note is, then the next

 

That's not how I do it. Maybe that's one reason you have trouble with round notes? Notes aren't independently related to Do, they are related to each other. 

 

> If sight-singing round notes was a prerequisite for joining your small choir, might round notes be the reason your choir was small?

 

Nope. A small choir has a degree of precision you can't get with a large choir. It was small on purpose. We did a lot of odd modernistic stuff you'd never be able to put into shapes, as well as some older stuff that could have been done in shapes.

 

I've been using shape notes for 45 years and round notes for 60. My opinions are pretty settled on this.

 

--paulr

[Linda Sides]

Sorry to be so slow with my response, Tim:

“At the point where you introduce solfege, could you just add shapes then? It makes a visual reference for solfege.”

Yes, I would think that would work. You might even color code them initially. (Matching the shape colors to corresponding boomwhackers would be fun- ear training backup- plus you’d have even more multi-sensory engagement) And here I think that the learning to ride a bike process applies: you might start off with training wheels, but you as the teacher would remove them at the appropriate time. And the student’s sense of accomplishment would motivate their moving forward…with fewer props.

Referring again to Kodaly, you’d want to use the solfege in short phrases found in songs they already know, such as (Japanese equivalent to) Twinkle twinkle little star. Then adding the next phrases… now you’re building relevancy with them seeing what the shapes are for.

Re: your frequency of instruction question- seeing students twice a week is certainly more desirable than once a week. Two 30 minute sessions is preferable to one hour-long session for young children- pesky little attention spans! 

Hope this helps!

Linda J. Sides

“...tune my heart to Sing Thy Grace!”

[Tim Cook]

Barry, hi,

 

I pressed the link you provided for Sunbury and boy, was I blown away, not just by all the work you obviously put into that one song, but everything else you have at that website. When I took a look at all the composers whose work you transposed and uploaded, Rachmaninoff jumped off the page at me, so I dived in and was amazed at all the work you have there, in Russian no less! You might be interested in a Russian hymn I really like, Hymn of the Cherubim, by Grigorii Lvovskii, which I recently transposed into seven shapes and uploaded to the MuseScore website here. I hope to scare up some people to try singing it with me.

 

Regarding shape notes, I think they’re inappropriate for instruments just as I think round notes are inappropriate for singing. However, I don’t necessarily think the two have to be separate. Old Baptist and Mennonite hymnals, and current Primitive Baptist hymnals, are a sort of compromise in which the music has a conventional layout for the convenience of the keyboardist, but the noteheads are shapes, which the keyboardist can just ignore. I wish all music meant to be sung to a keyboard was laid out that way. And if it’s meant to be sung a cappella, our old-book fashion in the oblong Sacred Harp, Christian Harmony, and others I think works the best. I’ve put the above Russian song into a collection of 100 other songs which I’m just about ready to introduce on this listserv and other places. That will be my first contribution at creating a new shape-note repertoire beyond its current one.

 

Tim Cook

Iwaki, Japan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fasola-discussions/c01588c6-ad5a-43cf-b7a1-82433cef7e26n%40googlegroups.com.

[Tim Cook]

There’s a tradition in the Sacred Harp of ignoring the accidentals, so much that when you add them back in, a song can sound strange because it’s not what we’re used to. However, in the seven-shape traditions, we always sing the accidentals. Di-ri-fi-si-li or ra-me-se-le-te, no problem. It’s limited to tonal music, but that’s what most people sing. If you told ordinary people you had an easy way to learn to sight-sing, but they can’t use it for atonal music, most of them would say “What’s atonal music?”

 

If I could have you indulge me some more, could you explain to me how you sight-sing round notes? How do you know where a note is without counting lines and spaces? Hope that’s not too tall an order to explain.

 

Thanks,

Tim Cook

 

From: Paul Robinson <ptr....@comcast.net>
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2024 10:11 AM
To: coo...@gmail.com; fasola-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [fasola-discussions] Research on teaching to read shape notes

 

> The few times I ever sung Bach