I was at a party Saturday night, and over the blaring dance music I struck up a conversation with the girl crammed in next to me in the crowded apartment. At some point she mentioned that she sings, and so we started talking about singing. She informed me that she sings in a style called the Sacred Harp, which I had never heard of. There was another Sacred Harp singer there that night, and so they gave us a small demo in another, quieter room. They also implored me to come try it out, at a “singing” on Sunday.
This demands a bit of explanation. Sacred Harp is a “non-performance” art form; there is no audience, and so there is no distinction between performance and rehearsal. The singing on Sunday was at a church, as they almost always are. It was near my lab, and since I was planning to be in lab anyway it seemed like a convenient enough experiment.
The Sacred Harp is a 550-page book of sheet music for hundreds of songs. The scores are all written in four part harmony, and, unusually, in shape-note form. Shape-note music is a sort of mnemonic device, designed to improve the ability of nonspecialists to learn music quickly. Each note is assigned to one of four geometrical shapes, which are substituted for the standard note-heads. Each shape is also associated with a syllable drawn seemingly arbitrarily from the classic solfege scale. When singing each song, the singers first run through the music singing these syllables, in order to get the melody into short-term memory. The song is then sung again, with the actual lyrics. The system is very interesting, and works quite well, largely because virtually every song is shorter than a minute.
The rehearsal took place in the nave of the church, with perhaps 25 participants, seated by voice part, facing the center. Any singer could choose a song, which they would do by calling out its page number. We would then turn to that page (the books are entirely standardized), and the singer who chose the song would conduct it from the center. Rather than tune the group from a pitch pipe, anyone can call the pitch from memory, and nobody cares if the whole thing is transposed a few steps one way or the other. The rehearsal has a rapid-fire quality; over the course of three hours we must have sung a hundred songs, each one called out by its number.
The music itself has a haunting quality. It is essentially all Southern Christian hymns; the form is particularly associated with the Primitive Baptists of Alabama and Kentucky. The chords are very open, and often minor. The arrangements mostly date from the middle 1800s, with few later than 1930. The style of singing is tremendously loud, with a strident tone, no dynamics, and an absolutely rigid rhythm. The effect is far from any modern style, but it is surprisingly beautiful. Between the chords and the nasalized tone, there is a tendency to generate audible overtones. To my mind, the obvious reference point was the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou.
The lyrics are very … period. We spent the three hours singing that our only embarrassment was that we didn’t love Jesus enough, that we would all soon be dead so earthly pleasures are fruitless, that we wished we were dead already so we could be in Heav’n, etc. There’s little in the way of imagery or rhyme. It’s strong stuff, and would sound just about right coming out of the mouth a stereotypical early-20th-century southern church lady.
For me… by the end of three hours, I felt like I had used up my entire annual quota for church music. Maybe I would be more inclined to do it again if the subject matter were a bit more secular and diversified, maybe if there were a bit more poetry, and a wider (or any!) range of musical styles… and maybe if it didn’t feel quite so much like an art form created by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. For now, let’s say I won’t go out of my way.
The makeup of the group was quite surprising. There were perhaps three people over the age of 50, with southern accents, for whom this could be called part of their culture from childhood. The other 20+ people seemed to be almost entirely in their 20s or early 30s, including plenty of fashionable hipster types and reasonably talented singers. I can only guess at their motivations: some mixture of the social experience, artistic fulfillment (without the stress of performance), anthropological interest, ironic amusement, and maybe, for some, a hint of a Christian connection, without the overt structure of organized religion.