Homegrown Harmony: Early American Music on Main Street
A Public Talk by Tim Eriksen, Musician and Ethnomusicologist
The Bridge Street Northampton print shop of Daniel and Andrew Wright was one of only three in New England to have moveable music type, a technology that made Northampton a center for music publishing.
Date
Saturday, February 22, 2020 at 7 pm
Admission:
$5 members, donors and students; $10 all others
Location:
The Northampton Community Arts Trust Building
at 33 Hawley Street, Northampton, Massachusetts
Sponsored by Messrs. Czelnusniak et Dugal, Inc.
Organ Builders: Restoration, Rebuilding & Maintenance
On Saturday, February 22nd, ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen will discuss early American music in Northampton and the enduring appeal of this local traditional music.

Nearly every Tuesday night for over twenty years, Helen Hills Hills Chapel on Elm Street has resonated with the sound of “shape-note” singing from the Sacred Harp tunebook.  At the heart of the book are songs with very local history.  During an explosion of musical creativity in the 1790s, Northampton became a destination for local and regional composers and tunebook compilers.  The Bridge Street print shop of Daniel and Andrew Wright was one of only three in New England to have moveable music type, a technology that made music printing cheaper and more reliable and made Northampton a center for music publishing.
Notable among the Wrights’ output are the American Musical Magazine (1800-1803), only the third music periodical in the nation’s history and Northampton Collection of Sacred Harmony (1797) by Elias Mann.  Mann (1750-1825) was a composer and house carpenter who came to Northampton around 1796 to teach singing schools for the town and direct singing at the First Congregational Church.  (He was also Daniel Wright’s brother-in-law).

Vibrant, often bracing, the harmony of composers included in these works - like Timothy Swan of Northfield and Justin Morgan of West Springfield – constituted the nation’s first youth music and remains a popular part of the Sacred Harp repertoire.
This harmony did not die out.  A tunebook belonging to Amelia Clarke found at a flea market opened a door to a world of music on Main Street that became the springboard for Tim Eriksen’s PhD dissertation on a mid-nineteenth century revival of this music in the form of “Old Folks’ Concerts.”  Local senior citizens gave public performances of the sacred music of their youth, starting the nation’s only musical craze started by seniors.

After searching Historic Northampton’s collection for evidence of old folks’ concerts led by Edwards Church choir leader Daniel Russell Clarke, Eriksen found a copy of the 1848 American Vocalist that Daniel Clarke himself had given to his daughter Amelia.  According to a handwritten note in the back, Amelia Clarke, a local historian at the Northampton Historical Society, was still singing the old songs in 1944, aged 94, “over and over!”
In the mid-19th century, local senior citizens gave public performances of the sacred music of their youth, starting
the nation’s only musical craze started by seniors.
Some of the tunes printed in Northampton in the 1790s, later revived in the old folks’ concerts, and still popular in the shape-note tradition, were named for area towns  - Amherst, Northampton, Montgomery, Huntington, Greenfield.  Timothy Swan’s tune China became popular enough to have a town in Maine named after it.

Eriksen’s talk will include singing to illustrate the enduring appeal of this remarkable local music.
Picture
Photograph by Joanna Chattman
Tim Eriksen is a musician, ethnomusicologist and instructor.

He was a consultant and performer for the soundtrack of the film Cold Mountain and was enlisted to teach Sacred Harp singing to the cast.

His PhD dissertation Old Folks' Concerts: The Meaning and Mushrooming of an Antiquarian Music Craze, 1853-1856, was inspired by the annotated music book of Northampton resident Amelia Clark (1850-1944).  His essay, "Old Folk's Singing and Utopia: How Abolitionist Musical Antiquarianism and Calvinist Eschatology Gave Birth to Science Fiction on the banks of the Connecticut River" was published in the Massachusetts Review in 2016.

Eriksen has taught college courses including American Balladry, Global Sounds, Film Music from Hollywood to Bollywood, American Music, and Songwriting at Smith College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Dartmouth College, The University of Minnesota and Wesleyan University. He has also taught in Poland and The Czech Republic and has conducted extensive research on traditional Yugoslavian music.  This semester, Eriksen is teaching Topics in Popular Music: The Sacred Harp: A 19th Century American “Shapenote” Tunebook at Smith College.
The former frontman of the prophetic groups Cordelia's Dad (folk-noise), Northampton Harmony (shape-note quartet) and Žabe i Babe (Bosnian folk and pop), Tim Eriksen is the only musician to have shared the stage with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson, and his media appearances have ranged from Prairie Home Companion to the Academy Awards. Having graduated from early shows at punk mecca CBGB, Tim's performances have included his Carnegie Hall debut as a soloist in Even Chambers' symphonic work "The Old Burying Ground" and two week-long stints at the Blue Note Jazz Club with Omar Sosa. In the studio, he has worked with legendary producers and engineers including Joe Boyd, T-Bone Burnett and Steve Albini. 
Sponsored by Messrs. Czelusniak et Dugal Inc. Organ Builders: Restoration, Rebuilding & Maintenance