Lapsed Lutheran finds his chin trembling, tongue frozen amid the voices of Sacred Harp.
Sacred Harp Singing
Brooklyn Friends Meeting House
110 Schermerhorn St., Brooklyn
Sept. 17, 2023
Shrouded in greenery and without decoration, the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House is a place easily unnoticed. Quakers, or The Religious Society of Friends, are the single most iconoclastic branch of protestant Christendom — they hold no text or verse as absolute; their walls are bare, no holy icons concretize the congregants’ image of the divine; and worship is held in unguided, meditative silence.
But, walking through the doors this past Sunday, or First-Day as the Friends would have it, rule of quietude is temporarily very broken, as room is made for Sacred Harp singing, an American tradition of group praise. Singers gather, each with a copy of their hymnal (in this case it was The Christian Harmony, published in 1865 as a way of compiling under one print-language edition a musical practice buried in hermetic hill churches and the ruin of reconstruction), and call by page number any of the 500+ tunes therein. Then, they sing.
Really sing.
The building shakes. Chaotic hymnody and close-voiced harmony peel the paint from the walls. March tempos, gracelessly clamoring melodies, and an impossible to imagine counterpoint of hollering voices smash into one great, uncanny sound … If Quakers observe a practice of expectant listening to hear the still, small voice of God, the tradition of Sacred Harp ambitions to amplify that voice.
WNHH Community Radio · Sacred Harp Sessions
And amplify they do: The Harp is loud. In the music, rooted in the Southeastern United States, particularly Appalachia, there are hints of the field holler, the work song, hog calling, and the echo of the hills themselves in the techniques and practices of this poly/cacophonic instrument of many voices. It’s acapella, but the sound is hardly human.
The oft-quoted principle of something being “greater than the sum of its parts” is usually applied to single works, by single authors, composers, auteurs. But the same can be said for Sacred Harp and other traditions, spanning from the blues to classical Hindustani music, ’60s free jazz to Irish drinking song.
What if not everyone knows the tune? Herein lies the genius of the Harp, and the single summary aspect out of which its greatness arises:
The music is written out in what appears to be standard musical notation, but with the seemingly inscrutable addition of geometrical figures replacing the noteheads. The figures, called shape notes, serve to convey to the singer how within the larger harmony their specific pitch functions. The melody is sung without words, replaced with syllables similar to solfege—do, re, me, fa, and so on… Magic happens here with each singer learning the tune, and their place in it, in real time. The piece of music is navigated and made manifest ad hoc and impromptu, some singers jumping registers, others holding down the fort as printed on the page.
Then the words are applied, after the music’s made firm.
The history of shape notation, the reasons for its implementation, and its ultimate collapse out of standardized practice is a fascinating play of post-Civil War American history, capitalist greed, educational altruism, and tradition preservation too baroque to impart up the reader here in any real detail. I encourage anyone interested to research it on their own time.
The performance on Sunday was hardly a performance; it was a gathering. Though attenders were encouraged to listen if they didn’t wish to sing, there was no separation between audience and ensemble.
The singing is done in the round, everyone circled and facing each other. It’s impossible not to want to join in.
I tried. Perhaps it was on account of my Lutheran upbringing, the flood of remembered feeling that comes with the sudden reminder of one’s having lapsed out of a faith. But I couldn’t sing a line without my chin trembling, eyes welling, and tongue freezing.
Perhaps it’s simply the power of music, of being buried by voices, the trebling humanity of open throats and shimmering lung, the primal urge to sing for which words are not enough that rendered me mute.
I certainly wasn’t the only one in attendance who reacted this way. A woman on the other side of the gathering, hymnal open on her knees, gave it a good shot, a whole verse and a half, before her hands rose to hide her tear-glistened cheeks. The music continued, ever inviting, large, and beautiful.
The event was part of an annual, multi-location 24-hour sing-a-thon, as evidenced by the singers’ routine popping of cough drops during deliberation between tunes. However, should one wish to witness or participate in this gathering, the organization, NYC Sacred Harp, hosts weekly events around the city — the tradition is alive and well and open. St. John’s Lutheran (81 Christopher St. in Greenwich Village) hosts a weekly sing on Wednesdays from 6:30 m. to 8:30 m., and St. Paul’s Episcopal (199 Carroll St. in Carroll Gardens, BK) hosts a monthly sing from 2 m. to 5 p.m. every second Sunday.
I’ll certainly be attending again, if only to test the mettle of my emotional fortitude.
Where I’m headed next: Matthew Gasda’s new play One Winged Dove at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.
