形音符 Shape Notes to Japan

One more mission as a cultural ambassador and recipient of an Alabama State Council on the Arts grant to share traditional Alabama culture in Japan was to teach shape notes, an American pedagogical device invented in the early 1800s to aid in teaching people to sing in unaccompanied four-part harmony. While mostly used in churches to sing church hymns and mostly preserved in tiny rural churches in the American South, the shapes themselves are helpful for teaching any songs with notes, i.e., any songs. That's what I did on four separate occasions in Japan last month, beginning with the singing below in Hitachi, Birmingham's Japanese sister city.

More on this, with video clips, at my blog http://shapenote-japan.blogspot.com/