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Friends of White Water Shaker Village, Inc.
11813 Oxford Rd.
Harrison, OH 45030
Email: friendsofwwsv@gmail.com
Website: www.whitewatervillage.org
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March
America 250 - Ohio's March theme is Ohio Entertains: Music, Entertainment & Movies. (Part 2)
Carol Medlicott graciously shared this explanation of the Shakers’ unique music notation system – called “letteral notation”.
“Shakers have always created their own music and song. In the early years of the movement, oral tradition was sufficient for transmitting tunes of the many hymns and songs. As Shaker communities multiplied, oral tradition became insufficient. Many early Shakers possessed musical knowledge from their pre-Shaker lives. In New England of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, shape-note notation was widely used in choral singing. A very old tradition with roots in medieval Europe, it involved the use of four shaped noteheads on a five-line staff — a triangle, an oval, a rectangle, and a diamond — representing the intervals of the scale. Use of shape-note notation was popular among a wide array of religious denominations, as well as in secular singing. Many early Shaker converts were familiar with it. Consequently, many early Shakers used shape-notes to write down their own original tunes in manuscripts. Early Shakers sometimes used conventional round-note notation, too. But by the 1820s, Shakers began to innovate their own original music notation system. This reflected the general Shaker impulse to reject mainstream cultural practices in favor of their own unique alternatives. The Shaker notation system was called "letteral notation," and it used lowercase cursive letters to represent the corresponding notes of the scale — c, d, e, f, g, a, b. Once letteral notation was invented, it dominated Shaker music production for about fifty years. Its use finally diminished in the 1880s. But many early Shaker music manuscripts show a mixture of notation systems — with round-note, shape-note, and letteral notations often in the same manuscript, or even on the same page. Visually, on the page, Shaker letteral notation differs sharply from both shape-note and round-note notation.”
(Dr. Carol Medlicott is Emeritus Professor of geography at Northern Kentucky University. Her research and publishing have focused on the Shaker West for over twenty years. Carol is a longtime FWWSV member and former board member. She welcomes any questions at medlicottc1@nku.edu.)
America 250 - Ohio's March theme is Ohio Entertains: Music, Entertainment & Movies.
Singing and dancing were vital components of Shaker worship and everyday life. The Shakers wrote over 10,000 songs, including hymns, anthems, dance tunes, and gift, occasional and laboring songs. The well-known “Simple Gifts”, written in 1848, was written as a dancing song. Gift songs were inspired by spiritual visions. Occasional songs were songs written to mark a special occasion. Laboring songs were traditionally sung during manual labor, often having simple melodies and repetitive lyrics.
“Blessed Home”, pictured here, is one of the songs written at White Water.
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