A belated salute to the ‘old way’ of ‘snaking’ the voice on its (ca) 345th birthday

Abstract

When Joe S. James, a southern singing school teacher, brought out his edition of the long-lived shape-note hymnal The Sacred Harp in 1911, he stated rather forcefully that his readers would find ‘but few of the twisted rills and trills of the unnatural snaking of the voice’ which he had heard while in the company of those yet untutored in the art of singing by note – or ‘regular singing’, as it had been called (James 1911, p. iii). It was not the first time the ‘old way’ of singing and its ‘rills and trills’ had found a critic among champions of some form of the Western European music system, nor would it be the last. Indeed, the history of the quarrel has shown that if there is anything more intransigent than the old way of singing, it is the accompanying opprobrium spread by a musical élite convinced of the superiority of the diatonic system and all that is extrapolated from it.