Nym Cooke's American Harmony is a welcome, if limited, contribution to the growing list of new collections of historical sacred vocal music featuring the four-shape notation system first introduced in The Easy Instructor (1801), and known today thanks to the continued popularity of The Sacred Harp (1844).Footnote ¹ Long in the making, Cooke's collection is at once a tunebook, an anthological edition, and a reference resource; a source of historically significant and delightfully singable music from late eighteenth-century New England and beyond with detailed information on its composers and their world. American Harmony will prove indispensable to those interested in the histories of New England psalmodists and useful to those looking for enjoyable selections from this repertoire.

The contents and organization of American Harmony illustrate its strengths, unusual form, and indebtedness to its compiler's tastes. Comprised of two oversize paperback oblong volumes held in a slipcase, the collection includes 176 musical selections, along with illustrations, notes, biographical entries, and indices. When Cooke embarked on this project more than three decades ago, he imagined titling the work Lexington Harmony, after his hometown in eastern Massachusetts, and later considered New England Harmony as a title. Volume 1 represents the promise of this earlier conception of the project as an exploration of New England psalmody and its legacy. It features 124 pieces composed between 1770 and 1815. Here, Cooke is at his best, deploying his personal taste, which is informed by a comprehensive knowledge of this repertoire and its history. Volume 1 includes an excellent selection of historically popular tunes, most of which are already accessible in other tunebooks and editions. It also contains some surprising lesser-known arrangements, such as the original setting of Connecticut tunesmith Bartholomew Brown's Mount-Sion that features an alto-bass duet at the start of the song's fuging section (1:176–77).

Cooke's tastes and knowledge are particularly evident in his inclusion of little-known gems by underappreciated composers alongside well-worn tunes by William Billings, Daniel Read, and Oliver Holden. Several of these obscure composers were active between 1800 and 1810, when the style was in decline in New England and a change in copyright law dissuaded the kind of repeated republication that made earlier tunes “hits,” leading to the underrepresentation of this music in other anthologies. For instance, Cooke's inclusion of songs by Massachusetts composer Walter Janes—such as his Exaltation (1:98–99)—exemplify his aesthetic. Janes's tunes are formally clever and rhythmically inventive, with fluid and engaging melodic lines that use features less common in this repertoire, such as dynamic markings and difficult melodic leaps. Other lesser known, but nonetheless well-represented tunesmiths in volume 1 include Nathaniel Billings (see his gorgeous Fragility, 1:106–07), Barnabas McKeys, Charles Robbins, and Uri K. Hill.

Volume 2 represents Cooke's expansion of the project to include what he reductively styles the “progeny” (1:xiv) of the New England repertoire. The volume includes just fifty-two songs: three- and four-part tunes from 1813 through 1959 that span the southern and western geography associated with nineteenth-century shape-note hymnody, as well as more recent shape-note songs by contemporary New Englanders inspired by early U.S. styles. Unlike volume 1, the selection of music in volume 2 is slim and predictable. American Harmony includes just three songs from the twentieth-century southern shape-note repertoire—all of which are among the most popular tunes featured in the prominent Denson revisions of The Sacred Harp. Given the wide array of sources that inform Cooke's eighteenth-century selections, it is disappointing that he neglects other twentieth-century tunebooks and hymnals influenced by New Englanders, such as The Colored Sacred Harp, the mid-century Alabama editions of The Christian Harmony, the Cooper and White editions of The Sacred Harp, and the many Primitive Baptist hymnals with original compositions.Footnote ² Cooke's nineteenth-century selections also rely on a thin selection of historical sources. Indeed, he reprints several songs from editions of The Sacred Harp, but none from William Hauser's excellent Hesperian Harp (1848), and just one from John G. McCurry's Social Harp (1855).Footnote ³ Among the Sacred Harp contributors, Cooke favors songs by Leonard P. Breedlove but includes few by other prolific and talented nineteenth-century contributors, such as Edmund Dumas or the twin brothers John Palmer Rees and Henry Smith Rees. Despite some engaging selections and delightful contemporary tunes, including Cooke's idiomatic minor fuging tune Northfield (2:311), and Jeffrey Quick's pointedly titled Watergate (2:342–43), volume 2 simply contains too few songs from too few sources.

Despite its lack of engaging repertoire, volume 2 does contain a wealth of useful reference material. Detailed biographical entries on each composer showcase impressive knowledge and deep research, include plenty of compelling detail, and sketch the most complete picture available of New England psalmodists’ careers and contexts. American Harmony is worth purchasing for these entries alone—even though Cooke's biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures comparatively lack the heft and context of his eighteenth-century tunesmith entries. Cooke also draws on his experience as a choir director to share performance notes for each song. Extensive and thoughtful indices provide entry points into the collection and, again, showcase Cooke's intimate familiarity and idiosyncratic relationship with the corpus. Alongside the more standard indices such as first line, composer/arranger, text author, and poetic meter, he provides a detailed index to textual subjects, as well as a fascinating and at times humorous “musical features” index, which includes entries like, “bass note, inhumanly long” (2:438)!

These indices, as well as the biographical entries on, and selection of music by, late eighteenth-century New Englanders are among American Harmony's strengths. The work's limitations stem from Cooke's choice of songs from other places and periods in the history of the choral miniature. Indeed, Cooke's relatively shallow knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century shape-note music and its social contexts leads him to downplay the role of religion and omit the considerable influence of Black music making on its repertoire and style in the historical essay in volume 1. Furthermore, Cooke's editorial policy frustratingly distinguishes sources by time period, echoing outdated practices that associated individual creativity with New England tunesmiths but anonymous folk processes with southern composer-compilers. As a result, although volume 1 benefits from Cooke's detailed examination of many sources, he “frequently” consulted only the “best-known tunebook” for volume 2 (1:xvii), rather than comparing the earliest printing with any others that better suggest their composers’ or arrangers’ intentions.

The unique form of American Harmony signals the influence of several compilation and editing traditions, a kind of equivocation that may limit its audience. In its reflection of the compiler's interests and focus on the New England repertoire, American Harmony most closely resembles Northern Harmony (2012) and Norumbega Harmony (2003)—anthologies also published with the oblong formatting and four-shape notation system characteristic of the shape-note tunebook. Northeastern youth, church, and community choirs sing from these works and shape-note singers in the region occasionally employ them as a supplement to the popular Sacred Harp.Footnote ⁴ American Harmony may likewise serve choral ensembles, but its format—oversize dimensions, a two-volume presentation, paperback binding, numerous illustrations with relatively few songs—make it unlikely to find purchase at shape-note singings, where durability, portability, and a wide selection of songs are key. Moreover, as a kind of personal anthology, American Harmony differs from rigorous and methodical editions like The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody (1984) in its reliance on Cooke's musical tastes, making its contents less useful for comprehensive research on U.S. sacred music.Footnote ⁵

However, it is Cooke's biographical entries of New England composers that make American Harmony an essential reference for scholars and singers interested in psalmody in the United States. Indeed, although they are limited to those whose songs he chooses to include, the biographical entries that lie deep in volume 2 serve as a valuable reference resource and as a kind of tunebook companion to American Harmony itself. In their coverage and detail, these entries resemble those in Warren Steel's Makers of the Sacred Harp (2010), a companion to The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition that was published as a separate volume.Footnote ⁶ The Northern Harmony (2012) similarly features a section of composer biographies, although Cooke's are longer and more scholarly. American Harmony may also be of interest to community, church, or university choir directors who will undoubtedly find inspiration in Cooke's thoughtful selection of New England psalmody. Like the composer-compilers he studies, Nym Cooke has honed a unique sense of what makes early New England sacred music interesting and enjoyable to sing. American Harmony is a rewarding compendium for the same reason the work is limited, as an expression of Cooke's deeply informed and idiosyncratic perspective.