Days Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six: Saturday, August 30th - Sunday, August 31th, 2025 – Shape Note Singing on Little Island (NY, NY) led by Sam Amidon
For this series of articles, our writer Ty Maxwell will be documenting his tour of the Northeast, spanning from August 6th to September 8th. Maxwell will be writing reflections and insights into the process of booking and executing a DIY tour as an independent artist, the relationships that enable the whole enterprise, and the general day-to-day experience: the minutiae, difficulties and triumphs involved in touring as a solo musician.
Well, my editor will be pleased to know that I am in fact human and am finally dealing with tour exhaustion, mostly brought on from lack of sleep and the demands of long drives on a holiday weekend. My weariness amazes me! Since I stopped playing shows in order to attend TradMAD (the folk music camp I attended and reviewed here), I’ve indulged in some late nights and partying, which, paired with all the long drives, has knocked me out. Not to mention that I spent a few days off in NYC, which is not the place for kicking back and relaxing. Fresh on the heels of a week of communal singing, folk music and dancing, my appetite for collective energy was still strong, and fortuitously, there was an event on Sunday that perfectly met my desires: a free, unticketed "shape note" singing event, open to the public and lead by the great folk and experimental musician Sam Amidon. Shape note singing refers to the use of distinctive shapes to describe pitches in order to facilitate easier sight-reading among communities — usually congregations — of people without standard musical training. This particular night featured the world premiere of three compositions inspired by the shape note tradition, composed by Cleek Shrey, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, and Darian Donovan Thomas, respectively.
One thing that makes an event like this captivating, to me, is the swirl of energies — thought energies, physical energies, presence — that you get most palpably in scenarios where the music-making is shared and participatory, where the eye and the ear don’t know where to land or settle. Your focus is either intently on your part, if you’re singing, or on the shifting and undulating dynamics of the group as a whole, a living organism. I love when an event can sustain a multiplicity of meanings: when the ground itself is a collision of different ideas and perspectives around what the thing we’re doing even is, or what it’s for. Musical traditions that were once highly localized and regional, that sprang out of a self-contained community, are now encountered between stations, latching onto new hosts; where typical shape note singing happens in an old church or Quaker meeting house, producing massive sound that bounces back at you off the walls, here it was part of the greater sound of life in the city, both background and foreground. On the one hand, this was a curated cultural event on Little Island, and it attracted musicians and artists of the highest order (at one point, Laurie Anderson was singing next to me); on the other hand, Little Island is a public space, with tourists passing by and watching bemusedly, if even noticing our presence; it’s also a communal singing of religious songs, that may or may not be spiritual for its participants, a centuries-old tradition that itself shoots off from even deeper and stranger roots. We sat and sang in this contradictory space. To quote Dylan again: “Art is a disagreement.”
“It’s the case that the best acoustics, the best sound of this whole thing, is in the middle of this square,” Amidon said, addressing the entire seated singing crowd. It was an invitation to go deeper into the sound, into the songs. “Let’s blast this one,” he’d often say, meaning we would not go over the parts by section: just straight into it, all together, whether we could read the shapes or not. Some of us came from singing families and communities, like the Amidons themselves, while just as many had never sang in a group in their lives, or not since they were children. “This one has some of the richest harmonies of any shape note song, so if you’re thinking of coming in and hearing it from the center, I highly recommend it,” Amidon exclaimed at one point, inspiring several to excitedly join the middle. Planes, birds, clouds and light all streaked by at their own speeds above us, while tenors, altos, basses and sopranos faced each other, singing into the shared air, where tradition always comes to life.
