ABSTRACT In Sacred Harp singing, a leader stands in the midst of a roomful of singers and uses gesture to start the singing, set the tempo, navigate time changes, and cue entrances. Every participant is invited to lead a ‘lesson’ of one or two songs during a singing. The leader, however, does not have sole authority over the performance. Musical decisions are often made collectively by the leader and the other singers, with the greatest power resting in the front benches of each section, while the course of a singing session is shaped by arrangers and pitchers. The resulting dynamic system functions effectively when singers occupying a range of roles respond sensitively to one another while making music. Decision-making in all quarters is guided by a principle of mutual beneficence: the leader wants to give the class a good experience, and the class wants to give the leader a good experience. A successful lesson is one in which all parties enjoy themselves. This article details the process of negotiated leadership in shape-note singing, drawing on extensive fieldwork in the US Southeast and interviews with expert leaders.

Vocal Fatigue Experiences and Mitigation Strategies in the Sacred Harp Singing Community

The Sacred Harp community was among the groups most affected by pandemic seclusion. Their multipart singing practice is a cultural heritage that includes both oral and written traditions, and creates a strong interaction between people through formalized music codes and behaviours that emerge, develop, and manifest in highly iconic communal spaces. Since global isolation made live singing impossible, this trans-cultural community tried to preserve the continuity of its multipart singing tradition by developing a set of strategies based on virtual singing and online activities. Although the fundamental elements were drastically affected by the isolation, participants represented missing sound environments using all possible means to recreate the spirit and gestation of social singing. After participating as a singer with a local group during fieldwork, I had to reshape my research methods to the pandemic, focusing on aspects of music dissemination that are less evident during physical gatherings.

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Book Review| April 01 2022 Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah Justina Eyerly Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah JustinaEyerly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. xvi, 269 pp. With companion website Moravian Soundscapes by SarahEyerly, MarkSciuchetti, and AndyNathan, https://moraviansoundscapes.music.fsu.edu/ Stephen A. Marini Stephen A. Marini STEPHEN A. MARINI is Elisabeth Luce Moore Professor of Christian Studies and Professor of Religion in America and Ethics at Wellesley College. He is also the founder and singing master of Norumbega Harmony, a choral ensemble specializing in early American psalmody and the repertoire of the Southern singing-school tunebook The Sacred Harp (1844). His most recent book is The Cashaway Psalmody: Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial Carolina (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which has been awarded the Lloyd Hibbert Endowment by the American Musicological Society. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (1): 200–209. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.200 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephen A. Marini; Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah Justina Eyerly. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2022; 75 (1): 200–209. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.200 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The Moravians of colonial Pennsylvania are enjoying renewed attention today from scholars with diverse interests. The Moravians’ rapid rise, communal institutions, controversial devotional and sexual practices, and sudden financial crisis during the mid-eighteenth century have been explored in important recent studies by Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Katherine Carté Engel, and Paul Peucker, among others.1 Now Sarah Justina Eyerly offers a sweeping new interpretation of their rich music culture and distinctive sound environments in Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. Founded by Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf of Saxony (1700–1760), the Moravians, or Herrnhut Community of Brothers (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), brought together a group of Hussite exiles from Bohemia with followers of the count’s own vision of Lutheran Pietism. In 1722, Zinzendorf welcomed the remnant of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), Jan Hus’s fifteenth-century religious reform movement, to Herrnhut, a town on his... You do not currently have access to this content.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a large number of Sacred Harp singers took their activities online, adopting and adapting various platforms for the purpose of participatory music-making. While many singers found online activity to be meaningful, others did not, and an additional group lacked access altogether. This study, which was conducted by means of an online questionnaire, surveys the experiences of Sacred Harp singers who were unable or unwilling to participate in online singing. It documents the practical concerns and negative experiences that contributed to non-participation and considers the impacts of non-participation on the Sacred Harp community. Although technological barriers denied access to some singers, dissatisfaction with the online singing experience was the most significant factor in non-participation. Even with the improvement of online platforms, however, many singers will remain unable to participate in virtual singing due to lack of access to a private domestic space.

Sacred Harp singers the world over gather weekly to sing out of The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape-note songs first published in 1844. Their tradition is highly ritualized, and it plays an important role in the lives of many participants. Following the implementation of lockdown protocols to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, groups of Sacred Harp singers quickly and independently devised a variety of means by which to sing together online using Zoom (“zinging”), Jamulus (“jamzinging”), and Facebook Live (“stringing”). The rapidity and creativity with which Sacred Harp singers developed ways to sustain their activities attests to the strength and significance of this community of practice, and in this article I describe each modality and provide an account of how it came to be developed and widely used. As a participant-observer, I completed extensive fieldwork across these digital sites and conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 other singers. I found that online singing practices have reshaped the Sacred Harp community. Many singers who did not previously have the opportunity to participate now have access, while others have lost access due to technological barriers or lack of interest in online activities. At the same time, geographical barriers have disintegrated, and singing organizers must make an effort to maintain local identity. A stable community of singers has emerged in the digital realm, but it is by no means identical to the community that predated the pandemic. I also identify the ways in which online singing has proven meaningful to participants by providing continuity in their personal and communal practice. Specifically, online singing allows participants to access and celebrate their collective memories of the Sacred Harp community, carry out significant rituals, and continue to grow as singers. While no single modality replicates the complete Sacred Harp singing experience, together they function “like pieces in a puzzle” (as one singer put it), allowing individual participants to access many of the elements of Sacred Harp singing that are most meaningful to them.

My contribution is a personal account about my experiences with online participatory music-making in the first few months of the pandemic. As an old-time fiddler, I anchored a local Zoom jam and attended a Zoom-based music camp. As a Sacred Harp singer, I participated in regular singings via Facebook Live.

Reviewed by: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack: Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America by Judah M. Cohen Alon Schab Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack: Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America. By Judah M. Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [318 p., 42 b&w illus. ISBN 978-0-253-04021-3. $25] Many topics in music history are strewn with prejudice and received wisdom. Jewish music, especially nineteenth-century Jewish music that lies outside the perceived central-European 'mainstream', is a clear example of such a topic. Judah M. Cohen's new book succeeds in transcending received wisdom and sketches a convincing and, in many ways, pioneering narrative. To test the freshness of the narrative, one needs only to count Cohen's references to Abraham Z. Idelsohn's Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: Holt, 1929)—four fleeting mentions in the main text, (excluding the Introduction and Conclusion). Idelsohn's absence from a book on nineteenth-century Jewish music has been almost inconceivable until recently, and Cohen earned this independence after having critically studied Idelsohn's legacy ('Rewriting the Grand Narrative of Jewish Music: Abraham Z. Idelsohn in the United States', The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 [2010]: 417–453). While the focus of the study is on a chain of pathbreaking tune books that were published along the second half of the nineteenth century, the bulk of primary sources consists of newspaper reports, letters, and contracts. The book is, therefore, useful not only for musicologists, but also to historians, historians of American Jewry, historians of religion, as well as for those who seek to understand some of the undercurrents in contemporary American-Jewish culture. Cohen's book follows seven 'scenes' in the development of Jewish music in America, telling the stories of individuals who, in their careers and published works, demonstrate the various forces that operated on Jewish synagogal music during the formative nineteenth century. Obviously, the main forces that shaped music making in that period were theological and liturgical—the struggle between orthodox and reformed tendencies (which rarely went consistently in one direction, as Cohen convincingly shows). But the picture was, of course, much more complicated and also included the tension between the conflicting ideals of professional and congregational singing; between following revered central-European models and the will to break free from these models; between unity and independence of communities; and issues of prestige (both communal and individual). It is not easy to follow the plethora of synagogue names (and their cities), cantors and rabbis, publication titles, dates of birth, immigrations, installations, publications, and deaths. I found it useful to take notes as I read through the book, listing all those details in a way that allowed me to grasp the chronological and geographical connections between the various scenes. And yet, Cohen makes 'no claims at comprehensive [End Page 188] overview', but 'seeks to create a structure for further correction, critique, and detail' (p. 14). He confesses that the South and the West deserve their own studies, that his narrative begins only in the 1840s, and that women's significant role in the described process cannot be properly assessed based on the primary materials he used. Properly stated at the outset of the study, these limitations do not invalidate the essence of the book's narrative. Cohen's story begins with the shift from British-influenced models for choral singing to central-European approaches to synagogal music. The adoption of German hymn singing (and its wider social and philosophical implications) is discussed through the work of Wilhelm Fischer. Gustav M. Cohen aimed his The Sacred Harp of Judah (1864) 'for the use of Synagogues, Schools, and Home', a Bildung ideal that differed significantly from professionalised tune books like Sulzer's and Naumbourg's. The discussion of the Bildung-influenced tune book is complemented by a review of the works of Gustav S. Ensel and Simon Hecht. The following chapter is short but dramatic, as it can be seen as a real watershed point in which American leaders of synagogue music emerged as a significant branch in the spread of Sulzerian style (and authority). This brings Cohen to discuss the four-volume Zimrath Yah, edited...

BOOK REVIEWS 121 The Hymnal: A Reading History Christopher N. Phillips John Hopkins University Press, 2018. 252 pp. $39.95 hardcover. Within a few pages, I realized two things: first, the author is a very fine writer—one who chooses every word with care; second, he has lived with this topic for many years and produced a scholarly work of the first rank. Christopher N. Phillips is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth transatlantic literatures , literary history, and religion and literature. He brings the skills and knowledge implied by these research areas to bear in The Hymnal. Phillips’s research is organized around the use of the hymnal as a physical artifact for reading and reflection in three venues: church, school, and home. He takes a largely inductive approach that draws the reader into specific narratives. For example, three “Interludes” situate the reader in a specific context, almost like a short story. While there is a cumulative effect in reading The Hymnal from beginning to end, one would benefit from reading just one of the three large sections or, for that matter, even selected chapters. It was tempting to read the text for fascinating anecdotes such as the statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sometimes when I am disinclined to listen to the preacher at church, I turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my eye, I cover the name at the bottom, and guess. It is most invariably Watts and Wesley; after those, there are very few that are good for much” (64). As fascinating as such details are, Phillips’s presentation of the topic provides an account that glues the “facts” of well-known hymn writers and collections into a cohesive narrative. As a hymnologist concerned primarily with the act of singing together in worship and the role of congregational song in shaping faith, Phillips has added a careful analysis of how the hymnal spans the world’s public and private reading of the texts as well as their public singing. While scholars have long been aware of the devotional use of hymnals, less careful thought has been given to how the combination of individual reading of texts and congregational singing coalesce to deepen faith. The author’s distinction between hymnbooks—collections of texts only, often for public or private reading—and hymnals, heavier books containing music usually left at church, clarifies the fluid use of collections between the public and private spheres of activity as well as the sung and spoken realms of experience (8). Among the more intriguing themes, perhaps the most prevalent refrain throughout the book was that all roads lead from Isaac Watts. Long called the “Father of English Hymnody,” the author deepens the understanding of Religion & Literature 122 Watts’s influence in American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures in the three main provinces of learning and formation: church, school, and home. While the American adaptations such as “Joel Barlow’s Watts” (1785), “Timothy Dwight’s Watts” (1797), and “James Winchell’s Watts” (1818) are often referred to, Phillips expands his reach into the realms of devotional experience as well as into children’s educational formation and pre-literacy (140-41). Such a comprehensive discussion of the relationship between the hymn and the poem is rare. Rather than treating them as distinct genres, it was helpful to see how some editors explored the liminal space between the two, for example, Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson’s A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion (1846). Phillips adds considerable context to this often-neglected area. The chapter, “Did Poets Write Hymns?” will become required reading in my hymnology courses. Two chapters that might stand alone, though they do contribute to the broader narrative, are “Singing as Reading, or, A Tale of Two Sacred Harps” and “Emily Dickinson’s Hymnody of Privacy.” The former chapter compares and contrasts the better known The Sacred Harp (1844) by White and King with the earlier The Sacred Harp, or, Eclectic Harmony (1834) by the Mason brothers, Timothy and Lowell. Among the threads that are woven together are the relative use and importance of Watts in each collection and the Masons...

This narrative essay explores a blind singer's experience with church singing, a cappella competitions, and Sacred Harp singing. In it, Emily K. Michael maps the conflicts between pervasive disability narratives and audience expectations, as well as the evolving challenges of each genre. Michael discovers that audiences carry the alluring myth of a cure across genres and venues. She comes to privilege the cooperative power of Sacred Harp singing, where personal talent and conventional rehearsal give way to immediacy and welcome. Sacred Harp singing helps Michael transform her own destructive beliefs and the problematic stories of blindness she has encountered.

Book Review: David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan, <i>The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Music in American Life)</i>

The Colored Sacred Harp Desire For Piety: Songs from the B.F. White Sacred Harp In Sweetest Union Join

Acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Jean Thompson (The Year We Left Home) guest-edits this issue of prose and poetry. As she writes in her introduction, "The thing that gives me hope for the enterprise of writing is the incredible variety and vigor of the terrain." With poets ranging from Erin Belieu to the Uruguayan Tatiana Orono, and stories that move from the eerie (Peter Rock's dreamlike story of a mysterious stalker, "Go-Between") to the comic (Elizabeth McCracken's story "Hungry," about an overweight young girl) to the tragic (Dan Chaon's "What Happened to Us," about a family transformed by fostering a disturbed child), Thompson's issue celebrates writers as they "grapple or dance with the world we live in, reflect or distort it, embrace or escape it." The issue also features Jesse Lee Kercheval's Plan B essay about learning to play the accordion ("Welcome to Hell"), and an exploration of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by John Domini.

Sacred Harp singing, a common type of shape-note singing, is a centuries-old tradition of American community choral music. It is traditionally a participatory form of music with no distinction between performers and audience, a characteristic that makes for acoustical requirements that differ considerably from those of a concert hall or even a typical worship space. In the spirit of the text Concert Halls and Opera Houses by L. Beranek, we seek to correlate acoustical measurements of spaces used for Sacred Harp singing with subjective evaluations of those spaces made by the singers themselves. To achieve this, measurements of reverberation time and support factor of each space are coupled with participant surveys in 10 different Sacred Harp singing locations. Those measurements are then examined for their applicability as metrics for evaluation of Sacred Harp performance spaces. In addition, various measurement techniques for this type of space are explored and reported.

Book Review| December 01 2012 The Makers of the Sacred Harp The Makers of the Sacred Harp. By David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan. Music in American Life series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-252-03567-8 (Cloth), 978-0-252-07760-9 (Paper). Pp. xv, 4 figures, 10 plates, 321. $70/$25. Ed Duling Ed Duling Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2012) 30 (4): 505–507. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.30.4.0505 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ed Duling; The Makers of the Sacred Harp. American Music 1 December 2012; 30 (4): 505–507. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.30.4.0505 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. By Kiri Miller.The Makers of the Sacred Harp. By David Warren Steel with Richard Hulan. Get access Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. By Kiri Miller. pp. xvi + 245. ( University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2008, $45 hbk, ISBN 978-0-252-03214-1; $25 pbk, ISBN 978-0-252-07757-9.)The Makers of the Sacred Harp. By David Warren Steel with Richard Hulan. pp. xv + 321. ( University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2010, $70 hbk, ISBN 978-0-252-03567-8; $25 pbk, ISBN 978-0-252-07760-9.) Eric Saylor Eric Saylor Drake University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 93, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 280–282, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcs017 Published: 27 June 2012

Jesse P. Karlsberg details how the first Ireland Sacred Harp Convention served as a revelatory experience and a catalyst of reciprocal travel among Sacred Harp singers from across Europe and the United States.

Reviewed by: The Makers of the Sacred Harp Drew Beisswenger The Makers of the Sacred Harp. By David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. [xv, 321 p. 9780252035678 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780252077609 (paperback), $25.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In the twentieth century, The Sacred Harp emerged as the preeminent nineteenth-century shape-note sacred tunebook in the South. In fact, in my experience, many people today believe shape-note singing and Sacred Harp singing are synonymous; for them there is no other shape-note music. The library world reinforces this understanding slightly in the way it places the heading "Sacred Harp singing," but no other tunebook-specific heading, within the syndetic structure of the "Shape note singing" subject heading. David Warren Steel's book fills an important gap in the scholarship about The Sacred Harp by focusing to a large degree on the individual people and songs associated with the early years. Before I comment specifically on the importance of Steel's book, I would like to place The Sacred Harp within the broader field of shape-note music as a whole. When The Sacred Harp was first published in 1844, many similar oblong-style tune-books already had been published (more than 100, according to the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association's Web site: http://fasola.org/shmha/, accessed 6 July 2011). The compilers of The Sacred Harp copied liberally from existing tunebooks that utilized a four-shape-notation system—a system that was most popular in the South—including the Southern Harmony, published in 1835. Such tunebooks, which [End Page 381] typically contained a few hundred religious songs notated in three- or four-part harmony, were widely sung in a congregational style at community singing events outside of formal church services. In the decades that followed, several other oblong-style tunebooks, many of which incorporated a newer seven-shape system such as the Christian Harmony and the Harp of Columbia, enjoyed substantial success. In the twentieth century, over thirty Southern publishers, most notably James D. Vaughan and Stamps-Baxter, published hundreds of smaller shape-note gospel songbook titles that typically featured newer songs. Shape-note hymnbooks such as Heavenly Highway Hymns and Favorite Songs and Hymns, both published by Stamps-Baxter, became very popular and are still found in many Southern church pews. The history and variety of shape-note music traditions are complex and rich, and stretch far beyond The Sacred Harp. That being said, the extraordinary popularity of The Sacred Harp music is undeniable, and for reasons that will perhaps never be fully understood, the singing traditions associated with most other shape-note tunebooks have diminished or ended (although singings and singing conventions can still be found that use The Southern Harmony, The Christian Harmony, The Missouri Harmony, The New Harp of Columbia, and various newer shape-note gospel song-books). The Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association Web site lists over 375 locations where Sacred Harp singers gather regularly, mainly in Georgia and Alabama but also throughout the world. The tunebook, which has gone through numerous revisions, has become the primary song book used at informal singing events not only in rural churches and community buildings in the Deep South, but also at college campuses, music-related conferences, and informal house gatherings on a national scale. Typically, the songs are sung by everyone in attendance at a Sacred Harp singing, and the singers, who are organized by vocal part, sit in a square facing a song leader. The Sacred Harp has been the subjects of several books and recordings, innumerable articles, and a feature-length documentary titled Awake, My Soul (the movie's trailer is, in and of itself, a striking piece). The tunebook clearly deserves the attention of researchers of American music traditions. With his book The Makers of the Sacred Harp, David Warren Steel makes an important contribution to the scholarship on The Sacred Harp, in large part because he includes biographical sketches of over 250 composers and poets whose songs are contained in its early editions. He also includes data on over 550 Sacred Harp songs, including source information. Most of this information is...

Timothy Eriksen reviews David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan's The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).