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Comment by pastureofplenty | Hacker News Reader

Another thing that makes Sacred Harp sound "weird" is that it eschews traditional voice-leading rules and therefore has no prohibitions on parallel fifths, fourths, or octaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading#Common-practice_...

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I've noticed that some of the original 3-part harmony settings, by self-taught singing masters like Billings, have parallel/empty fourths and fifths, but that these were removed in later 19th-century 4-part settings by "properly educated" musicians. A good example is "Idumea":

https://musescore.com/user/1108766/scores/9410239

(BTW, there are several versions of this song on the Current 93 album _Black Ships Ate the Sky_, of which my favorite is Shirley Collins'.)

Voice crossing is also very common, especially between the tenor and treble parts ("treble" is what shape note singers call the top part on the page, where the soprano part would usually be). Both men and women sing tenor and treble, so there's a lot of overlap leading to a pretty thick sound.

I don't know about Sacred Harp stuff specifically, but generally speaking in classical music "treble" means prepubescent boys and "soprano" means female singers, and since the vocal ranges are roughly the same the choice of word used on sheet music tends to be based on which type (boy vs. any age female) the composer expected to sing it.

So my guess is that if shape note singers call it "treble" it's because historically it started as a male-only thing, with sopranos (women) and female altos joining later while keeping the tradition of calling the top part "treble".

I think it's more likely the old composers took the old part names and adapted them to congregational music. It's not that Shape note singers (we're talking Americans in the late 1700s, early to mid 1800s) didn't accept women in the congregation, it's that folks like Tallis had called the top part the "treble", and the creators of new tunebooks didn't bother to change the name of the part. So IMO shape note music has probably always accepted women on the treble part.

The alto part seems to be a different story though. In fact, in one of the old shape note tune books I've got (a reprint of The Southern Harmony, originally from 1854), the alto part is labeled "counter", suggesting it was adapted from the Reformation-era countertenor parts. It was occasionally sung by boys, or by women, but often left out entirely (most of the tunes in the Southern Harmony are three part, with no alto). Later on, this "second part from the top" reemerged as a standard alto part, labeled as such, and sung by only women and possibly boys (but by this time, certainly not men in falsetto).

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