A number of singers were so familiar with the songs that they hardly looked at the book. Some song leaders seemed hesitant, while others led with polished, graceful movements. Everyone was offered a chance to choose a song and stand in the middle. This went on for about an hour, and, after a break, another hour, for about thirty songs. The person who chose the song stood in the middle of the square to lead the group and moved their arm up and down with the beat, a gesture that was mirrored by many of the seated singers. ![]() Everyone sang through the song using the syllables fa, sol, la, and mi, followed by a verse or two with words. A designated person sounded the starting chord. Their singing followed this sequence: a page number was announced and pages were shuffled. They sat in four ranks facing toward a center square. About twenty singers crowded into the narrow tin-ceilinged room. Arriving late in a rainstorm, I found myself a book and a rickety chair. We’re not a choir or a club (or a cult!), but we are part of a growing, global population of singers-many of them young, singing in this same manner from the same book. The 300-year-old lyrics are powerful, rather than quaint. ![]() The music is loud, raw, rhythmic, and sometimes discordant. There is no choir director, no audience, and no instrumental accompaniment. We sing Christian hymns in a vocal style better fitting a frontier camp meeting in the early 1800s-or a punk show-than a mainline church today. 2007 The group hosted a symposium on David Lewin’s contribution to mathematics and music analysis, with speakers Stephen Soderberg, Steven Rings, Robert Cook, and Dmitri Tymoczko.Shape-note singers have been gathering at A-Space every fourth Thursday evening for the past nine years. We heard papers from Guerino Mazzola, Emmanuel Amiot, David Clampitt, and Rachel Hall on emerging topics in music theory and analysis that draw on modern mathematics. We joined with the Music and Philosophy Interest Group to discuss Aspect Perception, Quine, Wittgenstein, and mathematics in music theory with position statements by Dmitri Tymoczko. The group discussed the history of mathematics in music theory with Catherine Nolan. The group hosted a workshop on Computational Approaches to Music Theory and Analysis with workshop leaders Christopher Ariza, Michael Cuthbert, Morwaread Farbood, Panayotis Mavromatis, Richard Plotkin, and Kris Shaffer and also hosted as session with papers read by Marek Žabka ("Hierarchy and Maximal Evenness in Two Dimensions"), Jonathan Wild ("Commensurability of Tone-System Generators"), and Norman Carey ("Rich Words and Musical Palindrome"). The discussion focused on Chapters 6 and 8 of the book. The group also sponsored a noontime meeting featuring a discussion with Richard Cohn of his recently published Audacious Euphony. The group sponsored a special session on Methodology in Mathematical Music Theory, with presentations by Rachel Wells Hall, Guerino Mazzola, Steven Rings, and Dmitri Tymoczko. We discussed experiences with and ideas for incorporating mathematics into music theory teaching and vice versa, as well as future goals for expanding the role of mathematical music theory in the classroom. The discussion featured three scholars in the field of mathematical music theory who have brought their interdisciplinary expertise to their teaching: Timothy Johnson (Ithaca College), Jonathan Kochavi (Swarthmore College), and Mariana Montiel (Georgia State University). The Mathematics of Music Analysis Interest Group hosted a discussion of Mathematics in Music Theory Pedagogy/Music in Mathematics Pedagogy at our Friday evening meeting, 5:30–7:30 PM.
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