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The fuging tune is a variety of Anglo-American vernacular choral music. The fuging tune first flourished in the mid 18th century and continues to be composed to the present day.

Description

Fuging tunes are sacred music, specifically, Protestant hymns. They are written for a four-part chorus singing a cappella. George Pullen Jackson has described the fuging tune as follows:

"In the fuging tune all the parts start together and proceed in rhythmic and harmonic unity usually for the space of four measures or one musical sentence. The end of this sentence marks a cessation, a complete melodic close. During the next four measures the four parts set in, one at a time and one measure apart. First the basses take the lead for a phrase a measure long, and as they retire on the second measure to their own proper bass part, the [tenors] take the lead with a sequence that is imitative of, if not identical with, that sung by the basses. The tenors in turn give way to the altos, and they to the trebles, all four parts doing the same passage (though at different pitches) in imitation of the [part in the] preceding measure. ... Following this fuguing passage comes a four-measure phrase, with all the parts rhythmically neck and neck, and this closes the piece; though the last eight measures are often repeated."

A fuging tune that many people are familiar with is "Northfield," written in 1800 by Jeremiah Ingalls. The words are by Isaac Watts:¹

Second verse:

From the third heaven where God resides,

That holy happy place,

The New Jerusalem comes down,

Adorned with shining grace.

Variety in fuging tunes

George Pullen Jackson's description above gives a common form for a fuging tune, but there are variations.

• Jackson describes the entrance order of the four parts as "bottom to top" (Bass-Tenor-Alto-Treble), but this is not the only possible order. Indeed, in the fuging tunes printed in The Sacred Harp, 1991 edition, it is not even the most common one; the most common order is Bass-Tenor-Treble-Alto. There are many other orders possible, particularly if one includes the cases in which composers bring in two parts at once (so that there are just three instead of four entrances). However, it does seem to be a widely valid rule that the basses must at least be included in the first group to enter. This may reflect a wish to support the entrances with a solid bass line, or perhaps just a practical consideration: thanks to the weight of existing tradition, the bass singers have considerable practice in coming in alone at the beginning of a musical phrase, practice which the other sections lack. Thus a fuging tune with a bass-first structure is likely to be more stable in performance.

• The section of the tune that begins with the fuging entrances can vary in length, though it is always as long, and usually longer, than the part coming before the fuging entrances.

• Occasionally a second round of fuging entrances is introduced.

History

The fuging tune arose in England in the mid eighteenth century. The first fuging tunes were generally the work of itinerant singing masters, described by Irving Lowens (see references below) as follows:

"[The singing masters were] often ill-trained by orthodox standards ... [They] wandered from village to village and eked out an existence by teaching the intricacies of psalm-singing and the rudiments of music to all who cared to learn. To supplement his generally meager income, [the singing master] frequently sold self-compiled tune-books in which psalm tunes of his own composition ... were featured as examples of his skill and artistry."

According to Lowens, the fuging tunes created by these singing masters at first involved a separate fuging section appended to the end of a complete psalm tune. Later, the fuging tune became more integrated and the fuguing section evolved to be the longer part of the song.

Fuging tunes proved popular in rural areas of England, but were scorned by urbanites--a pattern quite similar to their reception about 80 years later in the Southern United States. Moreover, their popularity did not endure in England past the end of the century, and the remaining history of the fuging tune is largely American.

There is good evidence that by 1760, English tune books including fuging tunes were circulating in the American colonies; the first English fuging tune printed in America appeared in the hymnbook Urania by James Lyon. Soon, fuging tunes were being written by American composers--especially those of New England--in great profusion. Karl Kroeger (see reference below) has documented the publication of almost 1300 fuging tunes during the period 1750-1820. Among the principal composers of New England fuging tunes Irving Lowens lists the following:

• William Billings
• Daniel Read
• Jacob French
• Timothy Swan
• Stephen Jenks
• Supply Belcher
• Abraham Maxim
• Lewis Edson
• Joseph Stone
• Elisha West
• Justin Morgan
• Daniel Belknap

The New England fuging tune tradition ultimately failed to endure in New England itself, as it was gradually extirpated by the advent of a "better music" movement, headed by Lowell Mason. This movement emphasized hymns with homophonic texture, sung with the support of an organ. The new music was grossly incompatible with the polyphonic fuging tune, which emphasized the ability of each section to sing on its own. Despite the lesser complexity of the new music, "better music" advocates succeeded in spreading the view that the earlier sacred music with its fuging tunes was the work of yokels, and in New England, as well as much of the rest of the country, "better music" won the day.

In the rural South, however, the older music survived, thanks in part to the inherent conservatism of local tastes, and in part to the widespread popularity there of shape note hymnals, which often included old fuging tunes reset in shape notes.

The 19th century Southern singers evidently sang the old fuging tunes with enthusiasm, but did not create a great number of them themselves. Instead, their composers brought new resources to the tradition, for example from folk melody and camp meeting songs. Mid-century composers who did write fuging tunes included Elisha J. King and J. P. Reese.

With the dawn of the twentieth century, a new development resulted in the revival of fuging tune composition. The community of singers who used the The Sacred Harp (whose shape note tradition is the one the most widely followed today) came to adopt a highly traditionalist stance to their art, treating the music in their book as a valued heirloom. With this veneration of the past, it is not surprising that the composition of fuging tunes was revived among Sacred Harp singers. This revival has been persistent, and new fuging tunes have added to The Sacred Harp, in its various editions, throughout the past century.

The general trends discussed above can be seen in the following chart, which is based on the songs of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition. The songs were sorted according to the date assigned them in this book (this is often the date of first publication, not composition), then grouped more or less arbitrarily into historical periods. The vertical axis plots the fraction of the total tunes from the given era that were fuging tunes.

The particular popularity of fuging tunes in both late 18th and the 20th centuries can be clearly seen.

Fuging tunes and fugues

The terms "fugue" and "fuging tune" have lead to confusion. A fuging tune certainly is not some kind of failed attempt to write a fugue, as a ill-informed musicologist once asserted. This is plain from the different structures of the two genres: in a fugue, the voices take turns coming in at the very beginning of the piece, whereas in a fuging tune that moment comes about a third of the way through. Moreover, in a fugue the musical material used at each entrance (the so-called "subject") is repeated many times throughout the piece, whereas in a fuging tune it normally appears just in the one location of sequenced entries, and the rest of the work is somewhat more homophonic in texture.

Indeed, "fuging tune" does not derive etymologically from "fugue", at least as the word is used today. Rather, as Irving Lowens points out, both terms hark back to a still earlier, more general usage (ultimately from Latin fugere "to flee"). He cites the words of Thomas Morley, writing in 1597 in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke:

"We call that a Fuge, when one part beginneth and the other singeth the same, for some number of Notes (which the first did sing)."

Evidently, both "fugue" and "fuging tune" are specialized adaptations of Morley's general sense.

Performance

Most gatherings of shape note singers (currently the principal singers of fuging tunes) find these tunes to be not particularly more difficult to sing than shape note music in general; the regular spacing of the entries makes it usually fairly clear when a section should come in.

Footnote

¹ They are the sixth (last) and third verses of Book 1, Hymn 21 of Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (1701).

See also

• West gallery music

Books

• Jackson, George Pullen (1933) White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. University of North Carolina Press. ASIN 0486214257
• Kroeger, Karl (1993) American Fuging-Tunes, 1770-1820: A Descriptive Catalog . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29000-8.
• Lowens, Irving (1964) Music and Musicians in Early America. New York: Norton.

External link

• The original printed version of Northfield (http://www.centre.edu/web/library/sc/special/music/ingalls.html), from the Web site of Centre College, Danville, Kentucky. Ingalls's alterations of Isaac Watts's words, generally ignored today, can be seen.