OttawaShapeNote

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Ottawa Shape Note Welcome (Scroll for more...)

The Ottawa Shape Note Chorus is an informal choir that has met since 1984 to sing early and contemporary four-part hymns from a book called The Sacred Harp. In The Sacred Harp, the music is printed on the regular musical staff, but the bodies of the notes appear in different shapes--triangle, oval, diamond, square--corresponding to the syllables of the 18th century scale, Fa, Sol, La, and Mi.

This system was designed to teach music reading skills to novices, and it works! The music is beautifully arranged, harmonized in the old style with many open fifths and in some songs a kind of fuguing counterpoint. The singing is vigorous and full throated, and the songs are majestic, gloomy, exhuberant, and melancholy by turns.

The founding chapter of the Ottawa Shape Note Chorus meets monthly, on a Tuesday evening, autumn, winter, and spring, in a member's living room. Singing is from 8:00 until about 9:30 PM, followed by tea, goodies and conversation. The group is mostly pretty small: the usual complement is about a dozen singers. We are a secular group: no prayers, no testimonies. We meet to sing Sacred Harp songs and enjoy each other's company. There's a lot of laughing and fooling around, but we sing the music pretty straight. We sit in the traditional hollow square so the sound we produce is enjoyed by all. One person is designated pitch- and tempo-setter, but the songs are chosen by each singer in turn.

A second chapter was founded as a result of Shelley Posen's 2 years of Sunday evening classes at the Ottawa Folklore Centre in the mid 1990's. This chapter meets in a member's living room once a month, usually on the 1st or 2nd Sunday afternoon, 3:00-5:00 PM, fall, winter and spring. We don't indulge in goodies, and tend to pitch non-traditionally (i.e. with a pitch-pipe), but are otherwise much the same as the Tuesday crowd. Once in a while we go out for dinner after singing.

There is a fair amount of cross-over between the 2 chapters, and we have joined forces on several occasions, both for group sings on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, and to enter the 2000 CBC Choral Competition.

Anyone is welcome to join the Ottawa Shape Note Chorus. We don't audition newcomers, though we ask that new members be able to carry a tune. We are a recreational singing group that makes music for its own amusement and seldom perform in public.

In December, many members of our group also sing English Victorian carols traditionally sung in pubs in Yorkshire and other parts of England, along with a few extras from Canada and the USA. Our music is transcribed--in regular round notes!--from several collections. In 1995, we actually got to sing the carols in an English pub--the Swan at Carp-- to the delight of singers and patrons alike. For a number of years now we have sung at Patty's Pub in Ottawa South.

History

Canada is no newcomer to shape note music. Dorothy H. Farquharson, in her invaluable, self published "O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing: A History of Singing Schools in Early Canada" (R.R. #2, Waterdown, Ontario, Canada L0R 2H0), 1983, says that rural 18th and 19th century Canadians sang out of oblong books of sacred music notated in Lancashire sol-fa, ziffern (numerical) or round notes, and buckwheat or patent (shaped) notes. In 1838, the Methodist Church in Upper Canada (Ontario) announced that its newly published collection, Sacred Harmony, came in "two impressions ... one in round, and the other in patent notes--so that persons ordering can consult their respective tastes in this particular."

The Sacred Harp was first printed in Philadelphia in 1844 and has been revised regularly since. The Ottawa Shape Note Chorus sings from the latest, 1991 edition.