Shaped Notes (Shape Notes)
This site may turn out to cover much more than I had originally expected. So far, I’ve got two posts about me. That’s NOT what I plan to do, but I wanted to go ahead and give a general picture of who I am and what my interests are and another that was more specific to my music background. Anyway, this post isn’t exactly something I expected to be coming soon, but my rule with the other sites is that if it interests me then I’ll write about it. This one may be a bit more detailed than some others that come along, but it’s about Shaped Notes… or Shape Notes.
Many of you have probably never seen “shaped note” music before. I’ve seen it all my life. Our Church uses a hymnal during the Sunday School hour (we always open with a few hymns) that uses Shaped Notes. The idea is that each shape stands for the degree of the scale. For those of you that remember the Do-Re-Mi song from The Sound of Music you’ve heard the degrees of the scale.
Each pitch has a shape. In music terminology the Do-Re-Mi… is called Solfeggio and the syllables stand for pitches in the major scale. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do (this last Do is the same pitch only an octave higher than the first.) You can see a sample of shape notes here that gives some history as well. The system I’m used to seeing is the 7 shape system. There is apparently also a 4-shape system that re-uses some of the shapes (and solfegg).. (Which looked somewhat more complicated to me.)
I’ve seen this all my life, and never really “learned” the shapes. In fact, it’s easy to play songs notated in shaped note notation if you already know the lines and spaces. The notes are the same, but instead of an oval note-head you’ll see a triangle with the point up, or a diamond and so on. I started thinking though that learning the shapes might not be a bad thing though and recently have started seeing how well I can do at that. A couple generations ago “singing schools” were very common and would use these shape notes to teach reading music. Many pianists and other instrumentalists would learn to play based on the shapes.
For many, this made it very easy to transpose. Let me see if I can explain. If I read the notes of a song in the key of C major. I see a C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C…. the C, F and G chords are “primary” chords. If I want to transpose to the key of F… I either have to think “I’m moving everything down by a 5th” or “C is the 1st degree of the scale, I need to play the 1st… F is the fourth of the scale, I need to play the 4th”. In other words there is some “translation” involved that takes an extra thought. On the other hand, IF, with shaped notes, we have information “overlayed” on the notes that tells you immediately which degree of the scale the note is… the process is short circuited by a step. The triangle note is the first degree of the scale. It doesn’t matter what key, it’s always the first degree of the scale. The oval note (exactly like the note head we EXPECT to see notes written with) is the 5th of the scale. It’s ALWAYS the fifth (SOL) and again we have one less thing to think through.
Wikipedia has a good overview on shape notes. (However, I would quibble a bit over which Churches still use shaped notes - it’s much more widespread than just Primitive Baptist and Church of Christ Denominations…)
There are some advantages to this (now fading in memory) style of notation. I think the benefit can be measured by how many pianists out here in the country when my Mom was growing up could actually transpose songs at the piano compared to how many today are able to do the same with traditional notation. (Of course, then and now you still have to KNOW a scale (key) in order to play in it.) For that matter, if you only knew one key you could still play just about anything out of a shaped note hymnal. I wouldn’t give up knowing the notes on the staff for anything, BUT… I think I’m going to enjoy going back and learning the shapes.
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