West End Festival Music

The West End Festival has been a part of Glasgow for the last several years, but the span is so long — the 12th of June through ’til the 28th — and the West End venues so various that really, unless you’re paying attention, you could kind of miss the whole thing. We’d forgotten that it started, except that we have a friend or two who are musicians in various groups, who sent out insistent emails, so, Tuesday evening we ambled over to the University chapel to attend a Shapenote concert.

Now, shape note is… kind of an acquired taste. It’s early American music, also sometimes called Sacred Harp, and was a means of teaching congregational singing to people who could not read music, nor, in many cases, read. The music is largely sacred (although there are quite a few sea chanteys as well — I guess the sailors were a catholic lot), the tenor usually takes the melody, with the soprano doubling an octave up, and the base and alto providing a rather austere harmony, and it is sung with the enthusiasm and raw power of …an avalanche. People, it is loud. Phil Spector only thinks he came up with the Wall of Sound. Shape note is fierce and unsubtle and sung at a full-voiced, full-bodied …roar. There’s a lot of early Americana in the sound; when you hear it sung, you expect to see a room full of settlers in homespun, an overall-and-bonnet brigade stretching from Alabama to the Appalachians. The old-fashioned lyrics have a pretty strong 1800’s reformation vibe going on, and we can’t figure out quite why it’s so popular here in Godless (kidding!) Scotland, but, it has an apparently very strong following. You can hear members of three of the groups who performed on Shape Note Scotland.

And, because we have moving pictures, we also have sound. D. recorded a few songs, as best he could using T’s camera.

• shapenote1.m4a
• shapenote2.m4a
• shapenote3.m4a
• shapenote4.m4a
• shapenote5.m4a
• shapenote6.m4a
• shapenote7.m4a
• shapenote8.m4a
• shapenote9.m4a

They’re not fabulous recordings, but the groups who performed —Muldoon’s Picnic, Cathures, and Shapenote Scotland — have sound bytes on their blogs as well. Muldoon’s Picnic offers some more (better) streaming audio at their MySpace page.

– D & T

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