Robert Kelley

This study proposes an empirical model of harmonic function in American shape-note hymnody, a body of music generally known as Sacred Harp. Using a computer-generated harmonic analysis of chords in the 1991 Sacred Harp tunebook, machine-learning techniques produced hidden Markov models with three states for songs in major and minor that can be interpreted as harmonic functions. While the major-key model looks somewhat similar to widely accepted models of tonal harmony, the minor-key model highlights the peculiar modal characteristics of this music. Further, the major-key model confirms that in this music tonal progression through the three functions is not the norm. Instead, Sacred Harp harmony tends to spend long periods of time on tonic-function chords, with brief forays away from tonic, more often to dominant-function chords than to subdominant-function harmonies. Based on these harmonic-functional models and a statistical study of the types of chords found in The Sacred Harp, I propose an analytical symbology for this music and demonstrate it in examples from several different subgenres of shape-note hymnody.

When asked to list the uniquely American genres of music, most people would include jazz, gospel, rock, and perhaps a few others. There is, however, an older musical tradition than these that is quintessentially American in its origin, philosophy, style, and usage, and that is thriving today all over the country. Although it evolved from a British singing-school tradition, the American tradition of shape-note singing, often referred to as Sacred Harp (after the best-known shape-note tunebook) or
simply fasola, rejected the style of most European music in favor of the rugged unrefined sounds of the composers of the First New-England School led by William Billings. While some musicological and ethnomusicological studies and several composers’ works based on shape-note music have given this music and its singing tradition some exposure among trained musicians, music scholars have still not fully addressed the sound and style of this music. Some scholars, such as Charles Seeger (1940), have described the style by enumerating the part-writing procedures violated by most works in the tradition. Dorothy Horn (1958) has likened this folk-influenced style to Yasser’s (1932) Theory of Evolving Tonality, where pentatonic folk tunes require treatment in quartal harmony. This study addresses the harmonic language of shape-note hymnody from a music theorist’s perspective, culminating in a
general composition procedure for writing in the style of the Sacred Harp.

Many musical compositions from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century retain some elements of functional tonality but abandon others. Most analytical methods are designed to address either tonal music or atonal music, but no single method completely illuminates this body of extended-tonal music. While both tonal and post-tonal theory have been extended in various ways to address this music, the use of tonal theory for analysis of this repertoire has not been completely formalized. The main obstacle for prolongational views of extended tonality is finding sufficient conditions for establishing that certain harmonies are structural in the absence of traditional harmonic function. In this regard, acoustical measures of stability, motivic connections, and chord equivalence all may form a part in determining the structural harmonies. Prolongational analyses of music may be represented by Schenkerian notation or transformational networks based on Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (1987). This study explores a number of specific graphing techniques, including the diatonic lattice (Jones 2002), the just- intonation Tonnetz, and mod-12/mod-7 prolongational networks. After using group theory to explore the relationship of diatonic scale theory and tuning theory to transformational and prolongational analysis, excerpts from Wolf, Wagner, and Ravel are analyzed using mod-7 transformations. In giving support for prolongational analyses of chromatic and neo-tonal music, this study provides a case for tonality-based approaches to post-functional harmony.