
The Sacred Harp: Let Everybody Sing - bryanrasmussen
http://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing/
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charliepark
For those in the Bay Area interested in this, there are a number of Sacred
Harp "singings", in different cities — Berkeley, Palo Alto, SF, and others.
[https://bayareasacredharp.org/local-
singings/](https://bayareasacredharp.org/local-singings/) for event listings;
[https://www.kalw.org/post/sacred-harp-punk-rock-choral-
music...](https://www.kalw.org/post/sacred-harp-punk-rock-choral-
music#stream/0) for a local NPR piece on it.

~~~
_petronius
Also in Berlin and several other major European cities, for those on this side
of the Atlantic. (In Berlin we sing from both the '91 red book, and the
Shenandoah Harmony on a regular basis.)

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watersb
Wow. My Dad's father was deacon and sometime choir leader of the East Elijay
Baptist Church; Elijay is county seat of Gilmer County, a rural mountain
district in north Georgia that seems to have been home of the author of this
report.

My grandfather passed away suddenly when I was very small, and I never got to
know him. I left Georgia for Silicon Valley after high school, and thought
that I had gone for good. Yet I find the words and images deeply moving; vocal
music has always been a big part of my life. I spent many hours, growing up,
in conferences like these. I can taste that mid-day meal, stew pork and potato
salad, soaking into the cheap paper plate.

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bitwize
I used to sing in the madrigal style in a choral group at my high school
devoted to that style. I hear some of those tight harmonies in this style.
It's amazing how the authors of _The Sacred Harp_ were able to come up with a
hack that allowed even untrained voices to begin singing music this complex,
almost right away. Singing can be a transformative, transcendent experience
but nonmusicians are often afraid to approach it for fear of embarrassment;
fitting, then, that churches would devise ways to encourage everyone to sing
together, as it can really cultivate the feeling of being closer to God.

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war1025
This was basically the neatest thing I've come across in quite a while. What a
pleasant surprise.

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richardhod
As a musician, I enjoy learning about people joyfully singing and the hacks
created to help that. However, since it's a cultural piece, and the author
states in the header: 'Join us on a visit to the Georgia State Sacred Harp
Singing Convention. It might challenge a few of your assumptions about the
South.' then I have an issue.

This challenges no assumptions I might have about the south. This is so
exclusively white that it is immediately notable. Look at the pictures, and
then disagree with me. There may be one nonlilywhite face, and even that might
be an artefact of lighting. I am a white european, but I have heard a lot of
the history of church music in the south, and almost all of that has been
about spiritual and blues and gospel-originating music. Yes, this music
culture perhaps originated mostly in the notoriously segregated Baptist
church, but that's not a reason. My assumotions about the south, and christian
fellowship across race, are intact. I'm glad to hear more music, but I'm very
sad that this has not led to closer relations, equal before whatever deity or
principles you might have.

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billfruit
Kind of reminded me of the Polynesian Choir music, like the ones featured in
Thin Red Line.

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btown
There are a ton of interesting tidbits in this:

\- The simplification of solfege notation from 7 named tones to 4 is
intriguing - while it introduces some ambiguity in that a melody cannot be
perfectly reconstructed from the limited information, it lets someone need to
remember fewer solfege tones when guided by other information - a bit like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undersampling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undersampling)
? Optimization for pedagogy rather than perfection is a technique that we
should keep in the back of our minds when we're designing any types of
systems.

\- In the article's words: "With this dispersed music, each line is a tune
unto itself. It is not written just to harmonize with the lead. It's a tune
unto itself. That's why they call it dispersed harmony." The article goes on
to describe how this can feel to a listener like a single thick "heavy
metal"-like instrument. The technique here, of thinking of harmony as if each
voice is its own melody, rather than just part of a chord, is common in jazz
arrangement, referred to as "soli" or a "thickened line" \- as explained well
in Adam Neely's video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vY3IVxl1fU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vY3IVxl1fU)

But what's curious to me is that there's a tremendous psychological element to
giving each voice the agency to be the melody. You're not just backing up a
higher melodic line; everyone's vocal part has the lead simultaneously. And
that's tremendously empowering...

\- Neely's video and the OP both touch on a further phenomenon: that this type
of polyphonic timbre is very different from the "zeitgeist" of "modern music."
There's a deeper societal component to this; we expect things to be so
polished in modern popular music that there's little emphasis on the
individual contributors (besides a lead singer) to the overall sound.
Personally, I wonder: does this parallel the expectation that social systems
trend towards a "winner-takes-all" mentality, and that one can only have
agency if they strive to be that winner? Does musical taste reflect the
stressors of society? Are we less able to appreciate musical complexity if it
doesn't have a simple narrative of a single melody, a single winner, a Star to
be born?

If any of that is true, things like Sacred Harp, and jazz-fusion
rearrangements of pop music per Neely, and musical genres like progressive
rock... all may be necessary respites from the crushing trend towards
simplicity. At some level, it seems like the people interviewed in the OP are
reacting in a similar manner, and it's amazing that there's a cross-cultural
community in Sacred Harp that is welcoming them with open arms.

~~~
gpvos
One other thing is that Sacred Harp music ignores the harmony rules of western
music to some extent; for example, it has many parallel fifths and octaves. In
some other places, it just has weird harmony that still seems to work. The
effect is that you feel like you're singing "power chords", similar to the
instrumentals in some heavy metal or rock.

The music is designed to be sung, not listened to. There are a few songs in
the book (like 344 Rainbow or even more so 377 Eternal Praise) that can sound
like a jumble of sound when listened to from the outside, but they _feel so
good_ when you're in the middle singing them.

There are also many singings in Europe, especially in England and Germany. In
other countries it's often limited to just one, generally in the capital city.

