{"id":12252,"date":"2016-05-24T06:57:34","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T12:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=12252"},"modified":"2016-05-25T06:48:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T12:48:15","slug":"sacred-harp-singing-purely-for-the-joy-of-singing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/05\/sacred-harp-singing-purely-for-the-joy-of-singing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sacred Harp: Singing purely for the joy of singing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t<div id=\"slides-12252\" class=\"navis-slideshow\">\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slide-nav\">\n\n\t\t\t<a href=\"#\" class=\"prev\"><\/a>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"#\" class=\"next\"><\/a>\n\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slides_container\"><div id=\"12252-slide1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SAcred-add-1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SAcred-add-1-771x482.jpg\" \/><\/a><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>Ryan Young leads a song at a recent gathering of Sacred Harp Singing, which meets monthly at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Billings. Click on the arrow at top right for more photos.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"12252-slide2\"><a href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-Gayla-1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-Gayla-1.jpg\" \/><\/a><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>Gayla Bradberry, a classically trained violinist, founded Sacred Harp Singing a couple of years ago.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"12252-slide3\" data-src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-group-1.jpg*720*480\" data-href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-group-1.jpg\" \/><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>The leader of each song stands in the middle of a hollow square, with singers grouped in four parts around the leader. The leader pictured above was Amy Letson.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"12252-slide4\" data-src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-notes-1.jpg*720*480\" data-href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-notes-1.jpg\" \/><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>Sacred Harp uses four \"shape notes\"\u2014a triangle, oval, rectangle and diamond,<\/p><\/div><div id=\"12252-slide5\" data-src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-couple-1.jpg*720*480\" data-href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-couple-1.jpg\" \/><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>Young and his wife, Julie Beicken, jointly lead a song.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"12252-slide6\"><a href=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-toe-tap-1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-toe-tap-1.jpg\" \/><\/a><h6>Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News <a href=\"#\" class=\"slide-permalink\">permalink<\/a><\/h6><p>A singer taps time with his foot during a recent gathering of Sacred Harp Singing.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><script>jQuery( document ).ready( function() { loadSlideshow( 12252, 'https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/05\/sacred-harp-singing-purely-for-the-joy-of-singing\/', 6 ) } );<\/script>\n<p>Sacred Harp singers who gather one Sunday a month at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Billings are resolutely informal.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo auditions required,\u201d says a flier inviting all comers to the gatherings. \u201cNo musical experience required. No rehearsals or performances required. Just singing!\u201d<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>That outlook matches the style of Sacred Harp singing itself. It is based on a simplified system of musical notation that uses \u201cshape\u201d notes instead of the traditional round notes, and there are just four shapes. Its origins are in the colonial American South, where churches with no pianos or organs relied on their congregants to provide music.<\/p>\n<p>The sound produced by Sacred Harp singing\u2014the name comes from \u201cThe Sacred Harp,\u201d a tunebook printed in shape notes and published in 1844\u2014is not easy to describe.<\/p>\n<p>Gayla Bradberry, who founded Sacred Harp Singing, the group that meets at St. Andrew, said one of her favorite descriptions is, \u201cWhere Gregorian chant meets bluegrass.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"callout\">\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12254\" src=\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-Book-1.jpg\" alt=\"SacredHarp-Book-1\" width=\"235\" height=\"157\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h5>All singers welcome<\/h5>\n<p>Sacred Harp Singing meets on the third Sunday of each month at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, 180 24th St. W. Use the south door of the church.<\/p>\n<p>For more information, call Gayla Bradberry at 259-0701 or write to her at gbradber@gmail.com. To watch a short clip of the Billings group singing, click <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y1P6r9VGn0M\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>And as a classically trained violinist who could never get the hang of playing fiddle music, Bradberry said, \u201cSacred Harp is as close as I can get to true folk music.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She and Ryan Young, an experienced Sacred Harp singer who moved to Billings with his wife, Julie Beicken, last year, said other characteristics of Sacred Harp include a lack of vibrato, no rounded vowels and no real attempt by the singers\u2014grouped into altos, trebles, tenors and basses\u2014to blend together.<\/p>\n<p>But the voices do come together, in a powerful, emotional way.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s what you get when you ask people who are not natural singers to sing,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n<p>At the May gathering, the 13 people who showed up to sing took turns describing how they came to Sacred Harp singing, or what it means to them.<\/p>\n<p>Young said that he discovered it when he was living in Texas, working as a DJ at a college radio station.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s weird and it\u2019s beautiful,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat else do you need to know?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kim Hodges said her family comes from Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, and she inherited shape-note hymnals from the 1800s.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I sit here and sing this,\u201d she told the others, \u201cit\u2019s like I\u2019m singing the songs my family sung, in the way they sang them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Karen Willard, a co-editor of the \u201cCooper Book,\u201d a revised edition of \u201cThe Sacred Heart\u201d songbook, was passing through Billings with her husband, Willard, and joined the group at its May meeting. She told of attending a Sacred Harp convention and being overwhelmed by the music and the lyrics.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe words were just making me weep or shout out loud,\u201d she said. A bit later she added, \u201cI will cross the ocean to sing with somebody. I won\u2019t cross the street to listen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s another key aspect of Sacred Harp singing. It is an intensely social activity. All the singers are invited to lead a song whenever the spirit moves them, and they lead by standing in the middle of a hollow square, with the four voice parts sitting in groups around them.<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"well\"><div class=\"dfad dfad_pos_1 dfad_first\" id=\"_ad_652\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/mjhWkW\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/201703_capeair_variable.jpg\" alt=\"CapreAir_Variable\" width=\"510\" height=\"180\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-18069\" \/><\/a><\/div><\/div>The singers are positioned so that they hear and experience the songs in all their power. If you sit and listen outside the square, it sounds good, but to really experience it, you have to be part of the gathering. And the position of song leader is passed around partly because of the informal, democratic nature of the singing, but also, they say, because the best place to hear Sacred Harp singing is right there, in the center of all those voices.<\/p>\n<p>Bradberry said some singers take up Sacred Harp for reasons of faith and spirituality. The songs, like the old Protestant hymns, are full of stately proclamations of belief and wonder and worship, of lamentations, paeans and religious poetry.<\/p>\n<p>But there is no proselytizing, Bradberry said, and the gatherings are open to men and women of all faiths and no faith. She also wants people to know that Sacred Harp singing is not some kind of quaint reenactment activity, but a living tradition, one that in recent years has grown in popularity around the country.<\/p>\n<p>Bradberry\u2019s family has roots in the South and she grew up singing a cappella four-part songs at her church in New Mexico. They used shape notes, she said, but there were seven notes, not four.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe could hold our own without a piano or organ or anything,\u201d she said. \u201cIt develops this fine musicality.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_12256\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 336px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"addboard wp-image-12256 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/SacredHarp-Book2-1.jpg\" alt=\"Sing\" width=\"336\" height=\"224\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sacred Harp singers during a recent gathering at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The music all came back to her when she watched \u201cCold Mountain,\u201d the Civil War-era movie that came out in 2003 and featured some Sacred Harp singing. Five or six years ago, she and a childhood friend, who sang with her in that church in New Mexico, attended a Sacred Harp convention in Boulder, Colo.<\/p>\n<p>It was a moving experience. \u201cI would sit and weep sometimes,\u201d she said, and a couple of years ago she formed Sacred Harp Singing in Billings. Last year she attended another convention in Seattle, where she was able to sing with 200 other voices.<\/p>\n<p>That is the apex of the Sacred Harp experience, Young said\u2014attending conventions and singing with very large groups of people. He went to conventions in Texas when he lived there, and to many others on the East Coast when he lived in New York for a time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s hard to avoid clich\u00e9s,\u201d he said, \u201cbut there\u2019s an earnestness and\u2014do I want to say passion?\u2014there\u2019s just a powerful earnestness,\u201d both to the music and to the culture around it. \u201cIt\u2019s like going to a rock concert but you are also on stage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The simplified musical notation assigns a different shape to four syllables\u2014 a triangle for <em>fa<\/em>, and oval for <em>sol<\/em>, a rectangle for <em>la<\/em>, and a diamond for <em>mi<\/em>. There is no absolute pitch. The leader on each song chooses what seems like a suitable pitch and each group of singers runs through the syllables in its part of the song, to learn the tune or refresh their memories of it, before launching into the song proper.<\/p>\n<p>At the gathering earlier in May, Bradberry explained to a visitor before beginning the first song, \u201cWe sing the different syllables. That\u2019s why it sounds like gibberish.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But the gibberish is soon over and all the voices are singing their parts, some enthusiastically and quite loudly, some a bit more quietly and timidly. Some singers just sing. Others\u2014and the leader always\u2014keep time with their right hand and forearm, pivoting from the elbow, up and down like a semaphore, or down from the shoulder and then sweeping across the torso to the waist.<\/p>\n<p>Even outside the square the effect is often quite powerful, elemental and emotional but never showy. There are no solos and there is no attempt by anyone to shine or to stand out. The effect is produced by the cumulative power of all the voices.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s democratic,\u201d Bradberry said later. \u201cThat\u2019s what I love so much about the history of it. It\u2019s America.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sacred Harp singers who gather one Sunday a month at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Billings are resolutely informal. \u201cNo auditions required,\u201d says a flier inviting all comers to the gatherings. \u201cNo musical experience required. No rehearsals or performances required. Just singing!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18],"tags":[4409,4410,4408,4412,4411],"class_list":["post-12252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-diversions","tag-gayla-bradberry","tag-ryan-young","tag-sacred-harp","tag-shape-note-singing","tag-st-andrew-presbyterian","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}