So the sea shanties thing has been happening and Ethan Hein has discussed Wellerman recently. The ex-choral singer in me can't resist writing a few things that I hope may be of interest about the sea shanty genre.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/wellerman/#more-21976
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Harmony is not the only thing that makes this sound like a folk song. The Longest Johns’ untrained singing style contributes to the folkiness too. Their backing vocals use some “bad” counterpoint and voice leading. For example, at the end of the chorus, on “take our leave and gooo,” the four singers all converge on C in octaves rather than spreading themselves out across C, E-flat and G. If I wrote counterpoint like this in graduate tonal theory, I would have flunked. But this tune would not be improved by “correct” voice leading. Classical-style choral arrangements of folk songs like this can sound smoother and prettier, but without the rough edges, the music loses its soul.
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To this I can add a few first-hand observations about singing a variety of styles of choral music.
Since I was a choral singer for years in my high school and college days I can't help but note that one of my complaints about fellow conservatives when it comes to classical music is how steadily and constantly they move goalposts about what constitutes "good voice-leading", generally depending on what kind of music they're putting down. I mean, I still hate Nirvana but Roger Scruton pointing out bad voice-leading in a Nirvana song is a case in point in The Aesthetics of Music. Even if Palestrina himself harmonized "Smells Like Teen Spirit" I would be sick of "Stairway to Heaven" for the 1990s just for that guitar riff and the melody. North German music critics ripped into Haydn for doubling octaves but Haydn kept on writing melodies where the oboe and bassoon played the same thing in octaves anyway.
There's seemingly this imaginary sixteenth century style Palestrina "perfect" counterpoint when the polemical goal is to say that this or that popular musical idiom has "bad voice-leading" but at other times the idealized standard is the counterpoint of J. S. Bach but the history of tuning systems (cue Kyle Gann's wonderfully readable The Arithmetic of Listening) rarely comes up. Why would folk choral traditions lean so hard on octaves, fourths and fifths? Maybe because those intervals are purest and therefore, for amateur musicians, easiest to tune, maybe?
As Gann succinctly put it somewhere in his book, the intervals you favor as consonant and avoid as dissonant depend entirely on what tuning and temperament systems you have at your disposal. In the medieval period perfect fourths could be consider consonant, even perfect or open fifths a la organum, could be considered pleasing while thirds were regarded as dissonances. We can't imagine that being the case now but we take equal temperament and other tunings that had purer thirds for granted. When Pythagorean tuning systems were in favor perfect fifths were more in tune, when mean-tone systems were prevalent major thirds prevailed and became consonant, which is perhaps too simplistic a way to put it but I mention this as a preliminary to discussing why some folk traditions lean on intervals that are "bad voice leading" for Fuxian or pseudo-Fuxian contrapuntal rules that are, if you are more widely conversant in choral and vocal traditions than the imaginary "perfect" set up by 19th century theorists, perfectly normal options.
Now while I think there's more of a conventional i, iv and v to the Wellerman than Ethan hears that might be because I used to sing and choirs and there's such a thing as a strictly melodic cadence even when there's no supporting harmony. The line that says "Blow my bully, boys, blow" doesn't have a strict 5,4, 3,2 1 descent but the rhythmic-linear pattern still indicates a cadential close in melodic terms whether the melody is backed up by harmony or not. A guitarist could easily accompany the measure with a beat of F minor, a beat of G minor (or major) and two beats of C minor at the end--or that last beat could be B flat major that lets the music emulate a quasi-Andusian cadence into the chorus' A flat.
Something else you could do at that measure, if you're a guitarist, is play D flat major seventh in root position at beat one, play a second inversion G7 at beat 2, and then a first root position C minor 7th chord. It's basically just a variation of the ii-V-I turnaround phrase in jazz but it would harmonize with the fourth measure of the Wellerman tune. These kinds of schemas, as Robert O Gjerdingen might call them, can be heard in galant era instrumental practice but anyone who has sung a lot of choral and solo songs can also hear how these cadential schemas can work in songs, too. It's how and why we can so dramatically vary harmonized realizations of stock melodic phrases. Now for a folk song like Wellerman I would say you don't want to do the D flat peroration I just suggested, but if you wanted to compose a prelude for solo guitar using that melody and wanted to expand that harmonic pallete that would be something to try.
Now as for all those open fifths and octaves and parallelism, that's indicative of a rich folk tradition in the United States known as the shape note tradition. In fact one of the most famous hymns in the shape note tradition, "Wondrous Love" is an old pirate tune that was transformed into a folk hymn.
You can hear a performance of "Wondrous Love" in the old school style here. If you can dig up Southern Harmony, for instance, you can read along. If you haven't, do not fear, I have a PDF of it and I'm going to show you all the "bad voice leading" in the song!
First, though, let me quote from hymnary.org on how the ballad of Captain Kidd turned into "What Wondrous Love is This"
https://hymnary.org/tune/wondrous_love_southern_harmony
WONDROUS LOVE was first set to this text in William Walker's (PsH 44) second edition of Southern Harmony (1840). Publication of the hymn in B. F. White's The Sacred Harp (1844) further promoted the combination of text and tune. The meter of "What Wondrous Love" derives from an old English ballad about the infamous pirate Captain Kidd:
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I sailed;
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed;
My name was Robert Kidd, God's laws I did forbid,
So wickedly I did when I sailed, when I sailed
So wickedly I did when I sailed.Described by Erik Routley (PHH 31) as "incomparably beautiful," the tune is in ABA form and in Dorian or Aeolian mode (depending on which version is used or which "authentic" performance is heard). The setting is by Emily R. Brink (PHH 158). The Hymnal 1982 (439) includes the original three-part setting with the melody in the tenor; that setting could be useful for choirs alternating with the congregation on the hymnal setting. Sing unaccompanied, or use light accompaniment for stanzas 1 and 2, gradually becoming more forceful through stanza 3, and use full organ (or piano) for stanza 4.
--Psalter Hymnal Handbook, 1987
I'm gonna say "no" to Aeolian mode. I've never heard a natural minor version of the tune, only the dorian. If anything the dorian version has a more probable claim ito antiquity since natural minor scales seem to show up later in Western music than dorian. The other more practical reason dorian seems more likely is because of the antiquity of the mode in Western music via liturgical and Renaissance era practices but also because the symmetrical nature of the dorian mode makes it easier to using one you've internalized the mode.
As for bad voice-leading, Ethan Hein has alluded to it but I think showing you just how "bad" the voice-leading can be now that you've heard a performance via the Alan Lomax Archive (see above) will make things clearer. There's something you need to know about the shape-note traditions first.
The earliest forms of shape note hymnody were three-voiced rather than four-voiced. The soprano/alto/tenor/bass form of arranging didn't show up until later. We don't know exactly why the three-voiced approach was favored, as far as I know, but what we do know is that within that three-voiced arranging approach it was customary for anyone to take any of the three parts. In other words, if you're looking at a vocal score of a shape note hymn you need to know that if you're a soprano you could choose to sing the bass part; if you're a tenor you could choose to sing the soprano part; if you're a bass you might sing the tenor part because you know the melody but don't feel comfortable singing the supporting external parts.
In the earliest shape-note traditions the tenor, the middle voice, had the melody, and the outer voices were the accompaniment. This is a reason why outer voices in shape note arrangements often lean on pentatonic lines and eschew the diatonic scale degrees that have the tune, especially when the tune uses the third and sixth degrees of the scale in question. There an be exceptions, like Wondrous Love, where there ARE NO THIRDS in the melody.
Don't believe me? Well, I should finally show you the score, right? This is in G minor but what that won't necessarily tell you is that in the performance tradition all the E's here are more likely to be natural than flat. You can hear that the Wootten family performs the tune in dorian rather than aeolian. This is a wonderful example of a case where if you don't know the oral history and performance traditions associated with a song and just "read the notes on the score" you will completely butcher the actual song tradition! So when you read this score and consider that "bad voice leading notes" I've added, keep the following points in mind.
1. Never mind the key signature telling you there's an E flat in the score. it's not there in the performance tradition in the case of this song! Trust me, I've song thousands of times.
2. The melody is always in the tenor in shape note hymnody, either the middle voice or the third voice down in four-voice scores
3. Despite the indications of S, T and B for "soprano", "tenor", and "bass" in the score anyone can take any line during performance which
4. leads to a pile of octave doublings that amplifies rather than diminishes the "bad voice leading" I'm about to outline.
5. It's customary in the shape note tradition to intone a solfeggio prelude to the hymn itself. This sets the tone of the hymn and also, not incidentally, gives everyone a chance to decide before the official hymn performance which of the voices they're going to take if they haven't already.
So ... lots of bad voice-leading in there in terms of parallel fifths, parallel twelfths (compound parallel fifths), parallel octaves, and also direct fifths (i.e. arrived at by similar movement between voices). Now the reason you may get told to avoid bad voice-leading in a theory or harmony course is that parallelism diminishes the independence of the voices. That is a problem if you're trying to write a Mass for Three Voices and you want all the lines to be perceptibly independent in terms of melody or harmonic role. I can't think of a better example of Renaissance era choral writing in three voices as a contrast to "Wondrous Love" than William Byrd's Mass for Three Voices. That Byrd starts on an E flat triad and yet ends on a G major triad in the "Kyrie" would be a topic for another time, or for a specialist in Renaissance music, but it's worth pointing out that as immaculate as Byrd's voice-leading is within the style of his time this was an era in which major key and minor key tonality as we've probably been taught it in music theory courses was a century or two away from being codified.
Now if you haven't caught on to this yet, I regard both Byrd's Mass for Three Voices and Wondrous Love as magnificent works of choral music. Any choral director or choral singer should be able to tell you that both these works are impeccable within their styles. Byrd's part-writing is immaculate within the scholastic liturgical style (but that was also underground, since the time within which Byrd was writing his Masses Catholic liturgical music wasn't legal in the English kingdom, if memory serves), but the free-wheeling handling of what we would now call "harmony" would be impossible for shape-note singers to track.
Conversely, while the shape-note part-writing conventions favor pentatonic activity in the outer voices to reinforce the central melodic line in ways that amount to terrible voice-leading by Renaissance or Baroque liturgical conventions (i.e. all those parallel fifths and octaves) what they accomplish within the performance tradition, is amplifying the melody's role within the performance. What "Wondrous Love" does for the musically illiterate person who wants to sing along is to be able to identify the tune after some attentive listening. If you just showed up for church one day and didn't know anyone there but you know the shape note hymnody tradition then after a few attentive listens you can pick up the tune and sing along. If you are musically literate you can pick whichever line works best to flesh out a performance of the hymn and suits your vocal range or how your voice feels that day.
The other thing, considering how all the parallel and similar motion does tend to break down linear independence in shape note arranging, is a point that I want to hammer a bit--the survivability of a shape note tune depends on the tune being a good enough of a tune that it will be heard amidst the parallel octaves, parallel fifths and other "bad voice leading" practices. In blunt terms, if you can't pick out the tune in all that voice-crossing and parallel part-writing then how good was the tune? On the other hand, the melodies that have been handed down to us from within the shape note tradition, whether "Amazing Grace", "How Firm a Foundation" or "Wondrous Love" are melodies that are so good they can be heard within all that "bad voice leading", they can survive the presentation of what by Renaissance liturgical practices for choral music would be considered really, really bad voice-leading.
Formulating this in social terms, the performance traditions and post hoc theories associated with them worked to establish a performance culture conducive either to mass participation (shape note tradition) or a base line of compositional competency among practicing musicians (there's a decent chance that, as underground music) Byrd's Masses were participatory music sung by recusants since Catholic music wasn't legal in Elizabethan England. Clearly the kind of musical literacy at work in shape note music and Byrd's mass was different but in both cases we're clearly seeing musical literacy since we can hear performances of the music and consult scores.
Apropos both the shape note tradition and Renaissance choral music, there's a final point I want to propose. This is all, if you've tracked with me so far, fairly Anglo musical stuff I've been talking about. I want to set that off to the side to make a point about the shape note and Renaissance traditions of sacred music. There's more than one way to develop a canon. There's the academic approach to canon but there is also the populist approach, i.e. enough people keep singing the songs that the songs survive. What goes on in both cases, whether folk hymnody or the persistence of older eras of sacred choral music can introduce a potent (and obviously post hoc!) survivorship bias in both the canons of classical music and in folk music, even if the survivorship biases show up in very different ways. There's a whole lot of crappy music from both traditions we'll never hear because the tunes weren't good enough to get remembered or the part-writing, however impeccable in itself in some long-lost Renaissance work, lacked what we would colloquially regard as any good tunes.
Some sea shanties have clearly had the survivorship bias in their favor if we can talk about them on the internet in 2021. :) At least one popular old pirate song has survived into American folk music traditions as one of the most deservedly famous hymns in the shape note tradition.
POSTSCRIPT 6:15pm
I think it might have been Alan Lomax, or someone comparably immersed in shape note tradition studies, who said that shape note hymnody is music for singing rather than music for listening. Having sung both shape note music and William Byrd's liturgical music and loving both styles both styles are fun to sing but the latter style requires familiarity with Latin and the confessional/dogmatic considerations of Byrd's Catholic music (which, Presbyterian though I am I am not "completely" aligned with in every respect, Protestant that I am, but Christ is risen, so whether it's high Catholic church music from England or low Protestant shape note hymnody I get what both traditions are aspiring to in extra-musical terms). If there's an especially bad faith set of claims about "aesthetic autonomy" or "absolute music" that has nestled into academic music theory and musicology it is ignoring, as if it didn't exist, whatever non-musical or extra-musical social bonds are necessarily foundations to getting into this or that music tradition, assessing the quality of works within those traditions, and the like.
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