Nason’s Vocal Class Book
Books bring people together. It’s easy to picture a solitary reader, wrapped around an open book, the outside world gone quiet. But, books are also shared experiences. Readers meet each other in the world of the book. They travel through distant places, together but apart, like passengers spread out on a long, long train.
Individual books may be shared, too: checked out by patrons in a modern library or read by several readers in a private library. While Bibles were traditionally the places where women recorded family trees, other kinds of relationships emerge through marginalia. Renaissance scholars labor to identify the many hands that left marginal notations in early modern books. Leah Price, a scholar of Victorian material culture, describes books as “carriers of relationships.”
I am indebted to my friend, the musicologist Jim Steichen, for pointing out to me that this book, Nason’s Vocal Class Book, would have been shared. It drew two singers together physically, while they joined their voices with others in song. The long rectangular shape is easily balanced in one hand and the notes can be read from a distance. Published in Boston in 1856, the Vocal Class Book offered “a choice collection of music, original and selected, adapted to the use of high schools, common schools, the social circle, and juvenile singing schools.”
Nason’s was part of the “singing school movement,” which arose in late eighteenth-century New England. The strict churches of New England didn’t have separate choirs or accompanying instruments. Instead, parishioners followed designated song leaders in a practice called “lining out.” The leader sang a line a cappella, then the congregation was meant to sing it in response. But, as the music historian David W. Music explains: “Without an instrument to set and keep a tune, or a choir to give vocal support the tempo of the psalmody became slower and slower.” Cotton Mather compared the congregation’s singing to “howling.”
In response, parishioners with musical training began providing instruction. They traveled through neighboring towns as itinerant singing masters, giving lessons during two to four-week periods. They divided the singers up into appropriate musical parts from soprano to bass and taught them how to sight-sing using solfège, which Nason’s describes as “the Italian syllables.” (In fact, the solfège sounds are a mnemonic for a tenth-century chant to St. John the Baptist called “Ut queant laxis.”)
While the singing masters first concentrated on music for sacred spaces, they eventually started teaching secular music, too, and set up shop in schools and taverns (which is more like the place where I asked Jim to tell me about this book and also where it acquired two new water stains on the cover. And, just like that, Jim and I joined the community of readers, adding our marks to its roster, though not yet our voices to its song.)
☞A coda to this essay on music books: my own book-sharers, my book club, does not share books, but I read each of their suggestions with their voices in my head. We are also like a train, passing through places and time zones of life. I am forever grateful for the track they put me on eighteen years ago and that they lead the way through the curves with confidence and the bright light of poetry.
