Archive for the ‘Sacred and Shape Note Music’ Category:
On Potlucks
From the Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singers’ guide to potlucks:
If you know that the singing you’re attending will have any southerners present, consider making one of your dishes a meat dish.
So I’ll be driving across the country to Seattle and hanging out there for two weeks. Hooray!
Subscribe to the comments for this postAn Engagement in Reading
Today I went to the second half of the Exeter All Day Sing in the Exeter Friends Meetinghouse near Reading, PA. It was marvelous. For one thing, it was funny seeing all the familiar faces; it’s as if New England moved down to Reading for an afternoon. Towards the end there was a dance-level volume of stomping, but we sang over it anyway. It was also really hot (almost 40 degrees Celsius) but that didn’t really matter.
I led Russia (107). This is good because it’s been exactly one year since I first led a song (Holy Manna, which is 59, I think). That happened at the same all day sing. I’ve gotten noticeably better during the year. For example, I no longer forget where the altos are. Now, I’m sure that all but one or two of the altos there have been doing this much longer than I have and don’t need me to remind them that they come in after the tenors, but it’s just not nice to forget the altos.
The title of this post is only funny if you pronounce Reading correctly as “Redding”.
God Hates The World
A friend recently sent me a link to a YouTube video of God Hates The World, a song about how God hates the world and everything in it. This is not a joke. This is not satire. It is in fact a song about how God hates us all and everything will burn as written and performed by members of the Westboro Baptist Church.
My thoughts about this:
- That soloist is rather bad.
- The flag they are insulting is… Canadian?
- I’m pretty sure they can do better with the arranging.
- Wait a second. There’s already a much, much, much better song about God burning sinners.
- They’re not even using a real piano!!!
Russia (107 in The Sacred Harp)
This afternoon I went to the Third Sunday Charlestown Shapenote Sing in Charlestown, MA. It was a cozy little sing that turned out rather large, with about 25 to 30 singers present at one point. The songs we sung came from the obligatory Sacred Harp, both the Denson and Cooper revisions, Norembega Harmony and Northern Harmony. There were color-coded loaner book bags; the colors of the bags matched the book spines. It was the most wonderful bit of organization I’ve ever seen.
I think I really like Northern Harmony, but in moderation; this was the third time I’ve sung from it. There are some great songs in it (my favorite being Do Not Go Gentle, especially the bass line which contains the word “rage” repeated many, many times) but most of them are pretty hard to sing. It also seems like singing shape note tunes for a year and a half and being in a chorus for a few months made be a better sight reader. But this post is actually not about that.
This post is about Russia, which was the song I led today. It was also the first song I ever led alone; I only forgot to bring the altos in once!
The Singing College
Amherst College and Tufts University both claim the title “The Singing College”. However, since Amherst appears higher on a Google search for “the singing college” and I went to Amherst, Amherst is the singing college as far as I am concerned.
One thing that did not exist in Amherst where I was there (and still doesn’t exist now) is an unauditioned, secular music group. There were plenty of choirs and a capella groups. There is currently a gospel choir that I believe is unauditioned. But discounting the karaoke nights that happen once in a blue moon there weren’t any place where someone can just go and sing.
There was one “communal” secular singing group that almost got started when I was a freshman, though. However, it never got anywhere because the person who started it did it because he did not make the roster of the premier men’s a capella group on campus. So he decided to form his own group (with him in charge). He would take anyone he could and transform it into a group that rivals the best established singing groups; it’s the classic motivational movie plot! It failed miserably. He was rejected from the singing groups he auditioned for less due to skill than due to the fact that he was a jerk.
Anyway, that’s what I think Amherst was missing. Just a place to sit around and sing. It’s not really that much of a singing college if only the best singers are singing. (Insert quote about the forest and the bird that sound the best.)
On The Topic of Billows
From Issac Watts’ The Psalm of David:
Thy words the raging wind control,
And rule the boisterous deep;
Thou mak’st the sleeping billows roll,
The rolling billows sleep.
When I first encountered these lines (singing 184 Smear from Northern Harmony) last Saturday, my first thought was “god is so awesome he can both make sleeping billows roll and reverse it by making rolling billows sleep!”. It seemed somewhat redundant, really. Are both these abilities worth praising? One on each line? That’s kind of a waste of paper, right?
Of course, we have to remember that understanding a function does not mean understanding its inverse. Knowing how to square a number is far from knowing how to take a square root. Less mathematically, knowing how to dirty a house doesn’t mean knowing how to clean it. Understanding logarithms instead of just exponents separates a good math student from an average math student. So being able to both make rolling billows sleep and sleeping billows roll, as opposed to being able to only do one of those things, makes someone a god as opposed to a mere mortal.
If we use this criterium to determine a necessary condition for godhood then we are very far away from it.