The Norumbega Harmony: Historic and Contemporary Hymn Tunes and Anthems

University Press of Mississippi

“Norumbega Harmony is a Boston-area musical community that has been a leading force in the revival of the American singing-school tradition. The Norumbega Harmony, a songbook of the community, collects 135 early American tunes and 30 new tunes. Represented are works by America's earliest composers, the itinerant New England singing masters whose schools were the principal form of music education in the Early Republic.

This music is vigorous and strikingly original. From four-part hymns called "plain tunes" and lively "fuging tunes" with independent lines for each part, it ranges to complex and inventive anthems that achieve the highest expression of the New England singing-school style. These historic compositions, written for worship and for educational purposes, provided musical settings for Biblical texts and for the metrical psalms and hymns of the great Evangelical poets Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley.

The Norumbega Harmony includes 51 plain tunes, 49 fuging tunes, and 5 anthems, in addition to 30 new tunes written by members and friends of Norumbega Harmony."