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...