More Sacerd Harp Singing

The clip I put up in the last post was intended to show that the power of this style lies in the singing, not necessarily in the polished sound. But my friend Jean on Facebook took issue with that logic, pointing out that as a writer on classical music, I should be taking pains to show this vital American tradition in its best light.

With that in mind, here's a video clip of a Sacred Harp Singing Convention where the singing is of a little bit better quality. Still it hopefully gives a clear example of the power of what is essentially an amateur, participatory style.

Notice there is no audience apart from the singers themselves! This is no rehearsal. They aren't training for some future goal or opportunity. This is the complete experience. A bunch of people in a room singing together. That's it.



And here is a professional choir singing a tune by early American Sacred Harp composer William Billings. The difference in performance quality is clear and the music is revealed as even more beautiful, if less visceral.



--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Sacred Harp Recording

As promised in Sunday's Music Notes column in the Asbury Park Press, here's an mp3 file of three live versions of the song "Jordan" from the Sacred Harp songbook. The first is a large amateur group singing in solfeggio--also known as the fasola system. The second is the same group singing the same song but with the actual words instead of the "singing school" syllables. The last is a quartet. Pete Brady, a member of the quartet, called the D-Major Singers, created this mp3 and sent it to me. He writes: "The first two are from a tape called 'Showers of Blessings,' from the 1995 Garden State Sacred Harp Singing Convention. The last is from one of the D-Major Singers CDs."

In the quartet especially you can hear how the tenor line--the high male voice--has the melody, while the bass and the upper voices add harmonies.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Opera On Screen at Axelrod

Watch opera performances at Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal beginning 3 p.m. this afternoon. The first showing is a performance from Milan's La Scala of Verdi's Aida, with Chailly conducting, Violeta Umana in the lead and Roberto Alagna as Radames. Tickets are $20. The film will be shown again as a 1 p.m. matinee Wednesday. For more information visit the Axelrod Performances Arts Center website.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Jarvi to Lead Swiss Orchestra

Speaking of the NJSO, conductor laureate Neeme Jarvi has been named to a new post as artistic director of Switzerland's Suisse Romande Orchestra, replacing departing Polish conductor Marek Janowski. Jarvi takes over the Geneva-based ensemble in January and assumes the mantle of chief conductor in 2012. The NJSO posted this article from Reuters regarding the appointment to its Facebook page just an hour ago.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
on Facebook

NJSO Performs Oct. 28-31

The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 28 will begin performing its program "Russian Tales," including Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, with Dudana Mazmanishvili as soloist. Also on the program is a suite from "Black Maskers" by Roger Sessions, the late Princeton University composer and professor.
The Sessions is part of the NJSO's newly initiated "New Jersey Roots" project, exploring the wealth of material by composers connected to the Garden State. The NJ Roots project is one of the most exciting initiatives undertaken by the group's new director, Jacques Lacombe and I'm eager to see and hear how it plays out.

Performances are 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28, and 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 29, at New Jersey Performing Arts Center, One Center Street, Newark, with following performances 8 p.m. Saturday at the State Theater New Brunswick and 3 p.m. Sunday at the Community Theater in Morristown. For more information, visit the group's website, www.njsymphony.org.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Hendrix Anniversary

Writing about the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death for the Asbury Park Press this morning. That article will appear as my Music Notes column in Sunday's Entertainment section.

Meantime, I stumbled on an interesting article that outlines the conspiracy theory around Hendrix's death. The author concludes that, whatever the exact circumstances, it was the system of capitalist marketing and greed that killed Hendrix.

For those who missed the news last week, a BBC article on the house in London where Hendrix once lived next door to the Handel House Museum. The museum currently has a Hendrix exhibit up in his old apartment. The BBC article includes a short video, with some clips of Hendrix in action.

Also, you can read my blog entries on Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner", written last July.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com

More on 'Shape-Note'

Last week's Music Notes column in the Aug. 29, 2010 Asbury Park Press on Sacred Harp singing mentioned that the "singing schools" style went out of fashion in the Northeast in the beginning of the 19th Century, but was preserved in the South and Southwest. The songbook The Sacred Harp from which the style takes its name, was published in Georgia in 1844 and has never gone out of print.

A couple more things need to be added to that history to give a more reasonably complete picture. First, the style died out in the North because it was considered vulgar. Had the more educated elite in the South had their way, it would have died out there too.

The taste of the time presumed that culture of any real value had to come from Europe. Anything made here was cheap imitation. As the economies in northern cities took off, those place shunned the second-fiddle, homemade culture in favor of the imported variety.

Shape-note was built on European traditions, but it was nothing like them. It was rowdy, democratic and required no education--not even an initiation or a profession of faith--to participate. You showed up, you were in. You learned the songs by singing them.

The areas that embraced this music and never let go were, at first, the wilder parts of the U.S., populated by working men and women who necessarily put less emphasis on education and refinement--Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Undoubtedly many of the folks in those parts envied the rich and would have followed them if they could. But as a rule, they were not rich. And to a very real extent, their lives literally depended on their ability to revere far simpler pleasures.

Here I could stretch the point to emphasize the empowerment provided by shape-note singing, the vitality of a congregation that needed no leader and the fear that such unmarshalled power could have aroused in the leaders of America's frail religious, economic and political societies. Probably there is some truth in that.

But maybe we don't need to go there. Maybe it's enough to say that this music, powerful for unlearned, represented the image of the dumb, backwoods hick that the socially elevated and "cultivated" Americans were hoping to banish.

As a side note, this history can't help but remind me of the current suspicions--by Tea Party-ists and others--about the secret society of "elitists" of New York and the Northeast forcing the rest of the country to live according to its standard. While it may be empty rhetoric now, that bad blood goes way back and has some basis in truth. It seems only slightly ironic that the North's great centers of education--New York, Princeton, Boston, Philadelphia--now embrace shape-note singing as a living American tradition. But with great centers of wealth and learning now located in the South and the West and the tracks of commuting paths blackening the continent's vast distances, all such purely geographical distinctions have to be taken as trivial.

And so to the second point: shape-note is a living tradition. Each generation since that of the first New England composers has added to the body of music that congregations perform. While the style is tightly constrained, it is not simply a recreation of the past--not a "living history" of the usual type, not merely a reenactment. The music is ever-changing. Each performance is really alive in the here and now--to which composers respond with even more here and more now.

I would love to see this tradition spread to every community--to hear the sweat and toil, the aggravations and indignities of common life expressed in full-voiced song challenging all the powers that be, to have political anthems and moral arguments composed and sung by opposing congregations in boiling shape-note battles. To have politicians answer the congregations in call and response. And if the candidate can't sing--bring on the hook.

Why not.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com