SHOUTING: the lost episodes

[Mark A Mandel]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

#in 1989 i began singing in a "shape-note" tradition (there are
#several such traditions), specifically Sacred Harp singing, where
#there are *four* shapes for note heads: triangle, oval, rectangle,
#diamond.  the different shapes indicate relative pitch, with respect
#to the tonic note of the scale.  the shapes have names - fa, sol,
#la, mi, respectively - so that our tradition is sometimes called
#"fasola singing", for the names of the first three notes of the
#major scale.

Actually, the first three notes of the major scale are "do, re, mi", as
made ineluctably famous by Rodgers & Hammerstein + Julie Andrews in the
song of that title from "The Sound of Music", beginning "Do(e): a deer".
If you start a scale with fa you get the Lydian mode.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   not a musicologist, just a filker with some handy trivia
   http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html