Artworks Involving Shape Note Music

Since the spring of 2005, I have integrated Sacred Harp and shape note singing with my practice as a sound artist, creating installations featuring manipulated recordings of original and traditional shape note songs, mixing shape note scores with text, images, and other printed matter in tunebooks, and organizing participatory singings of original shape note music as a medium for storytelling.

The following is a list of my recent art projects involving shape note music.

• Subliminal History of New York State: Route of Progress, a summer-long tour of New York State's Erie Canal, learning about the land, progress, spirituality, and industrialization, writing original shape note tunes telling the stories we learned, teaching singing workshops, and holding participatory presentations before moving on. Material later presented at Eyebeam in NYC and published in a tunebook.
• Tune our Lips to Sing Quartet, a performance for Conflux Festival featuring a quartet of Sacred Harp singers walking an undetermined route around Brooklyn singing songs from the Sacred Harp on pages corresponding with the numbers that members of the quartet see as they walk.
• Subliminal History of New York State, Rosendale Edition, a singing school and performance/assembly featuring storytelling, participatory visual and auditory exercises performed by the audience, and the singing of seven original shape note compositions.
• Azariah: Whom Jehovah Helps, a participatory shape note singing featuring nine shape note songs bound in an editioned, hand-bound tunebook. The songs tell a story set in New York's Burnt-over district in the 1840s, following a young Millerite's disillusionment and discoveries in the wake of the Great Disappointment. Listen to a recording of the Azariah singing at the Old Songs Community Art Center in Voorheesville, NY, and read more about the project.
• Parsons Cove, a duet for tunebook and soprano featuring a score with speakers in its covers that features a fractured shape note song written by Jesse intermixed with still images of a beach in Kennebunkport, ME. Performed by Anne Rhodes in her Masters Thesis concert "Spanking New" at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
• Under Island, a collection of songs telling a story written by Carrie Dashow. Read more about the project and listen to a recording of a singing school from the Under Island tunebook, conducted at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA, 2005. CD featuring 11 Under Island songs printed in 2007.
• Rapture/Rupture, a mixed media installation with four-channel sound and text, featuring the shape note song, "Russia." Solo exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, NY, 2005.
• Lawrence, Shade, complementary mixed media installations featuring Stephen Jenks' "Evening Shade" enmeshed in a five-channel sound piece, and a twelve volume tunebook featuring four original shape note compositions, photographs of the Sacred Harp, and diaristic writing. For the 2005 iEAR Spring Exhibition, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 2005.
• Sound for Pent-Up and Under Gone, five-channel sound installation featuring two shape note songs written with Carrie Dashow and insect sounds by Matt Bua. For "Pent-Up and Under Gone" at Jessica Murray Projects in New York City, NY, 2005.