Golden oldies
Peter Golden, the pleasant and unceasingly reassuring organizer of Waterville's monthly singing, explains Sacred Harp to the new singers. (There's no "audience" or "crowd" here; everyone participates.) Sacred Harp music unofficially began in rural England in the 1700s; the first hymnal of what was called "country parish music" used in America was published in 1764. American composers of the new form, mostly based in New England, also led singing schools for parishioners and children. In the process, they composed many of the hundreds of songs comprising the predominant shape note text, called the Sacred Harp. (Apart from the Bible, it was the most popular book in America until the Civil War.) Shape notes, the Sacred Harp's stock in trade, were created to make the process of learning to sing easier.
Sight reading a Sacred Harp song isn't easy for an untrained singer, but after one or two relatively simple songs you get the gist of it. (The elaborate melodies and harmonies of fugueing songs are more challenging, but also a lot more fun.) Moreover, there's no expectation among your peers that you'll get it right the first time. Sacred Harp singings are, by design, still referred to as "lessons." And, as Golden noted, "If you don't want to learn the shapes, just sing la. You'll be right a quarter of the time."
Before the first song begins, Chris Holley, a bass singer seated in front of me, interjects. "There's just one more thing, before people get surprised. We sing loud."
Indeed. Golden leads the first song, standing in the middle of our seated group, facing the tenor contingent, the dominant group of any Sacred Harp singing. He called out "49 bottom," the song "Mear," written by Isaac Watts in 1719. (Sacred Harp songs are commonly referred to by their page number; many pages contain two compact songs.) A couple tenors begin quietly singing the first note — fa for all four sections, in this case —to establish a relative pitch all of the singers could agree on.
Despite being an easy shape note song, "Mear" is still chaotic to the unfamiliar ear: Golden keeps time with an up-and-down chop of his arm; various people tap their feet on the floor or chop along; fas, sos, and las are tossed out in very different pitches by each section of singers, seemingly without discrimination; the harmonies are discordant. Everyone's singing gibberish, in mostly flat, Kermit the Frog tones, at a loud volume.
Immediately after running through the song by singing shapes once, everyone sings through it once again with the lyrics:
Will God forever cast us off?/His wrath forever smoke/Against the people of His love./His little chosen flock?
And so on. These tunes may be explicitly devotional, but from the very first song, the experience of singing en masse without instruments (save your voice, the titular Sacred Harp) and with abandon is intense and exciting. Indisputably, you become a part of something larger than yourself; any spiritual context for that is, it seems, in the eye of the beholder. Or the soul of the singer.
