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How Sacred Harp Music Is SungThis article concerns how Sacred Harp music is sung, focusing on singing practices that are not expressed in the musical notation. In musicology, the material discussed here would be called "performance practice," but the term is awkward in the context of Sacred Harp music. This music is participatory, not audience-oriented, and thus in a sense is not really "performed". Transmission of Sacred Harp The reason why Sacred Harp includes practices not notated in the music (that is, in the various published editions of The Sacred Harp) is that the printed music is not the only way that the music is transmitted among singers and across time--there is an oral channel as well. Many Sacred Harp participants can be described as traditional singers. They learned Sacred Harp by being taken to singings as children, and usually are the children of traditional singers of the previous generation. The parents, in turn, also learned the tradition as children. Thus there is often a chain of direct transmission dating back to (or even before) the original appearance (1844) of The Sacred Harp. This chain has evidently developed and transmitted a number of singing practices distinct from what is printed in the book. The task of newcomer singers In recent decades, Sacred Harp has increased in popularity, especially among people who are not traditional singers, but who rather discover the tradition in adulthood and learn to participate by attending singings. Often, newcomers have some previous musical training and have learned to sight-sing in some other context. The more serious newcomer singers seek to master the singing practices established by traditional singers, including deviations from the printed page. The task of the newcomer is not straightforward, since some of the traditional practices are variable across the community. As the Sacred Harp scholar Warren Steel has noted, "Traditional singers use the printed book in learning songs, and refer to it while singing, but the notes in the book are not interpreted literally, but according to a performance practice and style that is learned through oral tradition and varies among different regions and families." Moreover, some of the characteristics of traditional singing involve matters like voice quality or other subtle characteristics that could not be recorded in the music notation even if it were considered desirable. Traditional singers have made efforts, such as organizing singing schools and a summer camp, that been helpful in training the newcomers. Sources of evidence Although none of the practices described below are notated in the music, there are several ways that scholars can gather information about them. The most obvious is to attend singings where most of the participants are traditional singers. The disadvantage of this method is that the notes are fleeting, and repeated observation concerning musically subtle questions is not possible. A more stable source of evidence is recordings made by traditional singers. Among these are the recordings made by Alan Lomax under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution during the 1940s; these are commercially available. The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, the publisher of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, produced six albums of recordings in the years 1965-1976, which are also currently obtainable (for both sets, see References below). More recently, recordings of Sacred Harp singings have been posted on the Web (see External Links, below). The more recent of these recordings are unlikely to be reliable as source material on traditional practice, since almost every singing today is likely to be attended by a fair number of newcomer singers. There are also written sources. The Rudiments sections of the currently available editions of The Sacred Harp (see Sacred Harp) include information about how the music is sung. Scholars have also offered written descriptions of the tradition; see References below. The raised sixth in minor tunes The most commonly remarked difference between traditional singing and the notation of the Sacred Harp books occurs in minor-mode tunes, and involves the so-called "raised sixth." Here is the relevant background. As taught to beginning musicians, the minor scale is said to take three basic forms, which are as follows. Natural minor (also called "Aeolian mode") - Click to hear (Ogg format, 103 Kb)
Harmonic minor - Click to hear (Ogg format, 105 Kb)
Melodic minor - Click to hear (Ogg format, 105 Kb)
Most Sacred Harp songs are notated in the natural minor, as given above. However, in Sacred Harp singing, it is common to sing the sixth degree of the minor scale, wherever it may appear, one semitone higher than it is written. In musical terminology, the minor scale that results is called the Dorian mode. In the following notation, the notes that in Sacred Harp are called “raised sixths” are shown in red. - Click to hear (Ogg format, 112 Kb)
Singing minor-key songs in the Dorian mode instead of the natural minor is felt by some to give the music greater character and strength. The effect is usually subtle, however, because the sixth degree constitutes only a small minority of the notes in a typical minor-key Sacred Harp song. Indeed, some minor-key Sacred Harp songs use a so-called "gapped" scale, in which the sixth degree does not occur at all. Example "Windham" is a song written by Daniel Read sometime before 1785 and later incorporated into the Sacred Harp tradition. In The Sacred Harp, 1991 edition, it is notated as shown below. (Note that the treble (top) part is generally doubled an octave below by male singers, and the tenor an octave above by women). - Click to hear piano reduction (Ogg format, 382 Kb)
On recordings made by traditional singers, the raised sixth in the treble and tenor lines can be fairly plainly heard. The singers sing the song as if it were notated as follows (raised sixths shown in red): - Click to hear piano reduction (Ogg format, 386 Kb)
The piano reductions given above demonstrate the contrast between Aeolian and Dorian modes, but give no idea of the sound of "Windham" as it is rendered by Sacred Harp singers. For such a rendition, see External Links below. How widespread is the raised sixth? Some authorities assert that, provided that those present at a singing are traditional singers, the sixth degree of a minor tune will be regularly, consistently--perhaps even unconsciously--raised. This claim is made by Buell J. Cobb (see reference below) in his scholarly study of Sacred Harp singing. It is also given as a normative practice in the Rudiments section (prepared by John Garst) of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition (often called the "Denson book"). In correspondence later posted on the Web, Dr. Garst quotes two prominent modern Sacred Harp singing masters, Hugh McGraw and Richard DeLong, who both state that the sixth is always raised. On the other hand, the singer/scholar Karen Willard, a member of the editorial board for the 2000 Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, asserts "Not only does the practice of Sacred Harp singers vary somewhat across the South in the degree to which these notes are altered, but also from song to song" (source: see External Links below). The Sacred Harp scholar George Pullen Jackson, who observed singers in the first half of the 20th century, once provided a list of songs where the raised-sixth substitution is employed (see The Story of the Sacred Harp; (1944), p. 30); presumably this means he did not consider the substitution to be an across-the-board procedure, but a song-by-song one. The future of the raised sixth A difficulty for retaining the raised sixth as a Sacred Harp tradition is the influx of newcomer singers. Unlike traditional singers, newcomers lack any intuitive sense of raising the sixth, and if they are to carry out the change at all, they must do so as a consciously trained skill, one which may go directly against their earlier experience in reading music. Not surprisingly, the presence of newcomers at singings often results in the group singing the dissonant interval of a minor second, when some but not all of those present raise the sixth. The effect is perhaps less unpleasant than may seem at first, since the notes involved tend to be inconspicuous, and the overall powerful sonority of Sacred Harp singing helps to mask errors of detail. This link, an exhortatory essay from one newcomer singer addressed to other newcomers, urges them to respect the raised sixths of traditional singers. It is a matter of speculation whether the increasing number of newcomer singers might lead compilers of future editions of The Sacred Harp actually to spell out the raised sixth in the notation. A model for this practice is seen in the work of Judy Hauff, a prominent newcomer singer, four of whose compositions appear in the current Denson edition. In her popular minor-key song "Wood Street," Hauff simply wrote out all the raised sixths with a sharp sign to ensure they would be sung raised. Dotted notes A "dotted note" in music is generally one that is about three times as long as the following short note. It is so called because musical notation uses a dot to express this durational ratio. Traditional Sacred Harp singers often "add dots" to their music, in the sense that they will make the notes falling on the strong musical beat about one and a half times as long as written, with the following note shortened to half of its written duration in compensation. The great majority of the cases seem to involve substitution of the sequence dotted eighth + sixteenth for what is written as two eighth notes. An example can be found in the following passage from the "Easter Anthem" of William Billings. Billings wrote the passage in even musical rhythm, and this is reflected in how it is printed in The Sacred Harp: On a recording issued by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company (#3 in the list below), the same passage is performed with "dotting", as if it were written as follows: In addition to the dotting of eighth note sequences, the sequence dotted quarter + eighth often realized with "double dotting". Thus, a few measures later in the same Billings work, the following passage in the alto part: is sung as follows: Elsewhere in this series of recordings, this group of singers adds dotting quite liberally, essentially in any song that is in lively tempo and duple rhythm. The same appears to be true in the other traditional-singer recordings mentioned above. Singers who attend traditional singings in the South have attested to the prevalence of dotting, among them the author of this page. Occasionally singers suppress dotting in passages where the composer has written out a particular distinction between dotted and even-rhythm passages; for example, in the opening of Billings's "Rose of Sharon": - Click to hear piano reduction (Ogg format, 63 Kb)
Finally, it should be noted that even the dotted notation given above does not necessarily do justice to what is sung. The actual durational ratio between the longer notes is not necessarily an exact 3:1, but can vary over a range, from just a mild durational difference to a difference that actually exceeds the written 3:1 ratio. Parallels with early music The two traditional Sacred Harp practices just noted--unwritten accidentals a and unwritten dotting--have parallels in older European music. The music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was often annotated under the assumption of musica ficta, which were particular raisings and lowerings of notes by the interval of a semitone, not written in the music notation. Authentic performance of such music must rely on the best available musicological scholarship to interpret the difficult and obscure rules governing when musica ficta should be introduced. Extra dotting was common in the Baroque era, when it was often referred to by the French term notes ingales, "unequal notes". Again, the scholarly issues concerning whether or not to dot are vexed. The raised third in minor songs The idea of raising the pitch of the third degree of a minor-key song sounds like a contradiction in terms, since the use of a minor rather than a major third is what defines all minor scales in distinction to major. Yet some Sacred Harp singers do indeed raise the third, and the effect is not one of "singing a minor tune as major". Rather, the raised third is realized as a kind of gliding pitch, so that the notes in question start out on the minor third and end up on the major. For example, the singers on the Sacred Harp Publishing Company's recording of A. M. Cagle's "Soar Away" sing this passage: more like this, with a glissando from the minor to the major third: The extent of this practice is unknown. The pronunciation of the note names When Sacred Harp singers sing a song, they first sing it through "from the shapes"--that is, they read the names of the notes from their shapes, rather than singing the words of the song (for details, see Shape note; Sacred Harp). The note names (which are said to date back to Elizabethan times) are: "fa", "sol", "la", and "mi". In 18th and 19th century American sources, the syllables "fa" and "la" are often spelled "faw" and "law". This almost certainly means that when speakers of the time pronounced them, they used the vowel of American English that is spelled "aw". In most dialects that have this vowel, it is lower mid, back, and made with slight lip rounding. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is: On the recordings mentioned above, traditional singers can be heard pronouncing "fa" and "la" in two different ways. Some of them use the rounded vowel just noted, while others use a pronunciation closer to the Italian spelling, with an low central unrounded vowel, IPA a. A reasonable surmise for why "faw" and "law" were substituted for "fa" and "la" can be offered, based on the history of the English language. Until the twentieth century, English had no words ending in a. Words ending in “aw”, however, have always been abundant (paw, caw, thaw, saw, Shaw, maw, law, raw, yaw, claw, draw, craw, McGraw, etc.). It is likely that speakers of pre-20th century English adapted the foreign syllables "fa" and "la" to match their native speech habits, substituting "aw" for a. During the 20th century, various borrowed words with final a came into English: spa, bra, Shah, Zsa-Zsa, cha-cha. Perhaps these paved the way for the pronunciation of la and fa with a. Another possibility is that increased foreign language instruction in schools made Americans more comfortable with final a, enabling la and fa as well as all the new words just mentioned. Since traditional singers widely use a, there seems to be no particular need for newcomer singers to adapt by using "aw". Indeed, singing master Hugh McGraw, who would certainly qualify as an accepted role model for beginners, evidently uses both pronunciations, as heard in this link. For many Americans, the entire question is moot, since it is a widespread phonological innovation in American English to eliminate "aw" entirely, pronouncing all of the old "aw" words with a instead (see reference by Wells below). The syllable spelled sol is normally pronounced so by all singers, as is implied by the colloquial designation of Sacred Harp music, "fasola". Tone quality Although the above characteristics of traditional singing can be described fairly straightforwardly in musical or phonetic notation, newcomer singers, even if they faithfully imitate them all, are still unlikely to sound like traditional singers, because there are also differences in tone quality. Newcomers often achieve a full, loud, enthusiastic sound, but not the same sound as traditional singers. To the knowledge of this encyclopedia's editors, no research has yet been carried out by phoneticians or speech scientists to determine what it is that produces the distinctive character of traditional Sacred Harp singing. Footnotes For instance, singing master Richard DeLong has said "I was born into it. Grandmother carried me to my first singing." British nomenclature: dotted quaver + semiquaver substituted for two quavers. References Books - Cobb, Buell E. (2001) The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0820323713
- Jackson, George Pullen (1944) ‘’The Story of the Sacred Harp, 1844-1944’’. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
- Wells, John (1982) Accents of English, Vol. 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recordings consulted - Original Sacred Harp (1965) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album #101. Remastered 1998 by Morning Trumpet Recordings.
- Presenting Another Fasola Music Album (1965) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album #102. Remastered 1998 by Morning Trumpet Recordings.
- Sacred Harp Singing at the Old Country Church (1968) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album 103. Remastered 1997 by Morning Trumpet Recordings, tape 9702.
- Sacred Harp Singing with Dinner on the Ground (1970) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album 104. Remastered 1997 by Morning Trumpet Recordings, tape 9702.
- Fasola is Here to Stay (1973, 1974) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album #105. Remastered 1997 by Morning Trumpet Recordings, tape 9702.
- Sacred Harp Bicentennial Celebation (1975, 1976) Sacred Harp Publishing Company, album #106. Remastered 1997 by Morning Trumpet Recordings, tape 9702.
External links
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