Fuguing tune

Fuguing tunes form a significant number of the songs found in the American Sacred Harp singing tradition.

Playⓘ The text is by Isaac Watts:[2] George Pullen Jackson's description above gives a common form for a fuguing tune, but there are variations.

The first fuguing tunes were the work of itinerant singing masters, described by Irving Lowens 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.

Among the principal composers of New England fuguing tunes ("Yankee tunesmiths") 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, and Daniel Belknap.

Rather, as Irving Lowens points out, both terms hark back to a still earlier, more general usage (ultimately from Latin fugere "to flee").

[6] He cites the words of Thomas Morley, who wrote (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).