#TradSongTues 11th September - Shape Songs

This is a series of posts about the #TradSongTues project, run by various people at the University of Sheffield. Every week I've been recording a song for the theme, sharing it and talking about it. Come and play on Twitter!

For this, I chose Idumea:

I chose this, because the theme was apparently chosen as a reference to the Sacred Harp tradition. This song comes from the Sacred Harp tradition, which was basically hymn music that had special notation that didn't require you to be able to read music. It had different shapes so you knew which note of the scale to sing, hence Shape Note singing. I learned it from the Young Tradition.

The Young Tradition sing it in 4/4 but the sacred harp recordings I've heard are in 3/4. I prefer it like that, so I opted for that. I also anticipate the beginning of 2 verses, because I liked the sound of doing that as well. That's how arrangements work.