How Sacred Harp music is sung

Transmission of Sacred Harp

The reason why Sacred Harp includes practices not notated in the music (that is, in the various published editions of The Sacred Harp) is that the printed music is not the only way that the music is transmitted among singers and across time—there is an oral channel as well. Many Sacred Harp participants can be described as "traditional" singers. They learned Sacred Harp by being taken to singings as children, and usually are the children of traditional singers of the previous generation. The parents, in turn, also learned the tradition as children. Thus there is often a chain of direct transmission dating back to (or even before) the original appearance (1844) of The Sacred Harp. This chain has evidently developed and transmitted a number of singing practices distinct from what is printed in the book. As Sacred Harp scholar Warren Steel states, "traditional singers use the printed book in learning songs, and refer to it while singing, but the notes in the book are not interpreted literally, but according to a performance practice and style that is learned through oral tradition and varies among different regions and families."

Written and unwritten accidentals

There is a tradition of singing minor-mode tunes with a raised sixth scale degree, resulting in what may be called "unwritten accidentals". (In some recent compositions, such as Wood Street, the raised sixth may actually be printed in the music.)

As often taught to classical musicians, the "natural minor scale" has the following form, corresponding to the Aeolian mode.

Most minor Sacred Harp tunes are notated in the natural minor, as given above. However, in Sacred Harp singing, it is common to sing the sixth degree of the minor scale, wherever it may appear, one semitone higher than it is written. In musical terminology, the minor scale that results is called the Dorian mode. In the following notation, the notes that in Sacred Harp are called “raised sixths” are shown in red.

Singing minor-key songs in the Dorian mode instead of the natural minor is felt by some to give the music greater character and strength. The effect is usually subtle, however, because the sixth degree constitutes only a small minority of the notes in a typical minor-key Sacred Harp song. Indeed, some minor-key Sacred Harp songs use a so-called "gapped" scale, in which the sixth degree does not occur at all.

Some minor tunes, including Windham (below), are printed with a raised seventh scale degree. Such accidentals are ignored by many traditional singers, making all minor tunes diatonic (either Aeolian or Dorian).

Example

"Windham" is a song written by Daniel Read sometime before 1785 and later incorporated into the Sacred Harp tradition. In The Sacred Harp, 1991 edition, it is notated as shown below. (Note that the treble (top) part is generally doubled an octave below by male singers, and the tenor an octave above by women).

On recordings made by traditional singers, the raised sixth in the treble and tenor lines can be fairly plainly heard. The singers sing the song as if it were notated as follows (raised sixths shown in red):

The piano reductions given above demonstrate the contrast between Aeolian and Dorian modes, but give no idea of the sound of "Windham" as it is rendered by Sacred Harp singers. For such a rendition, see External Links below.

How widespread is the raised sixth?

Some authorities assert that, provided that those present at a singing are traditional singers, the sixth degree of a minor tune will be regularly, consistently—perhaps even unconsciously—raised. This claim is made by Buell E. Cobb (see reference below) in his scholarly study of Sacred Harp singing. In addition, the editorial board of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition chose to include a recommendation in the Rudiments section of the book (pp. 18–19) in favor of consistent use of the raised sixth.

The picture is likely to be more complex than this, however. The singer/scholar Karen Willard, a member of the editorial board for the 2000 Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, asserts "Not only does the practice of Sacred Harp singers vary somewhat across the South in the degree to which these notes are altered, but also from song to song" (see External Links below). The Sacred Harp scholar George Pullen Jackson, who observed singers in the first half of the 20th century, once provided a list of songs where the raised-sixth substitution is employed (see The Story of the Sacred Harp; (1944), p. 30); presumably this means he did not consider the substitution to be an across-the-board procedure, but a song-by-song one. Variation in how and where the sixth is raised is also documented by Miller (2004), who reports the testimony of traditional singers.

In sum, although there may be some singers who raise the sixth in all applicable places, the normal situation probably is that singers raise sixths according to whatever pattern they encountered while learning to sing in their own home region.

Editorial practice

Occasionally individual Sacred Harp composers have notated the raised sixth, though toleration of this practice seems to vary. In the 1911 ("James") edition, Geo. B. Daniel rewrote J. T. White's song "Jordan Shore," adding sharp signs to express the raised sixths, apparently reflecting (Cobb, p. 34) the way it was actually sung. This version appeared in 1936 Denson edition, but in the 1966 edition the sharp signs were removed. The song "Wood Street," by the contemporary singer Judy Hauff, was printed in the Denson 1991 revision; it consistently uses natural signs to specify the raised sixth.

Parallels with early music

The two traditional Sacred Harp practices just noted—unwritten accidentals and unwritten dotting—have parallels in older European music.

The music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was often annotated under the assumption of musica ficta, which were particular raisings and lowerings of notes by the interval of a semitone, not written in the music notation. Authentic performance of such music must rely on the best available musicological scholarship to interpret the difficult and obscure rules governing when musica ficta should be introduced.

Extra dotting was common in the Baroque era, when it was often referred to by the French term notes inégales, "unequal notes". Again, the scholarly issues concerning whether or not to dot are vexed.

Tone quality

Most of the elements of singing noted above could in principle be notated in the printed music. Tone quality, however, is unnotated and is determined by custom in virtually all musical traditions.

One element of the tone quality of traditional Sacred Harp singers that can be clearly asserted is that they never use vibrato. However, this in itself says little about the rather distinctive sound that traditional singers produce. Subjectively, Sacred Harp bass sections (generally all male) tend to sound booming. Male tenors and trebles produce a powerful sound, often slightly nasal or "covered" in tone. Alto sections (generally all female) sound brassy; Marini refers to a "laser-like chest tone quality". The higher-voiced women tend to "float" their voices, blending well into the whole. As a result, Sacred Harp singing tends to be dominated in volume by the male tenors. In this respect its sound is quite different from that of ordinary mixed choruses, which at loud volume tend to be dominated by their sopranos.

All parts are sung loudly. Often, individual singers possess very powerful voices and stand out from the group.

The pronunciation of the note names

When Sacred Harp singers sing a song, they first sing it through "from the shapes"—that is, they read the names of the notes from their shapes, rather than singing the words of the song (for details, see Shape note; Sacred Harp). The note names (which date to Elizabethan times) are: "fa", "sol", "la", and "mi".

In 18th and 19th century American sources, the syllables "fa" and "la" are often spelled "faw" and "law". This almost certainly means that when speakers of the time pronounced them, they used the vowel of American English that is spelled "aw". In most dialects that have this vowel, it is lower mid, back, and made with slight lip rounding. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is /ɔː/.

On the recordings mentioned above, traditional singers can be heard pronouncing "fa" and "la" in two different ways. Some of them use the rounded vowel just noted, while others use a pronunciation closer to the Italian spelling, with a low central unrounded vowel, /ɑː/.

A reasonable surmise for why "faw" and "law" were substituted for "fa" and "la" can be offered, based on the history of the English language. Until the twentieth century, English had no words ending in /ɑː/. Words ending in /ɔː/, however, have always been abundant (paw, caw, thaw, saw, Shaw, maw, law, raw, yaw, claw, draw, craw, McGraw, etc.). It is likely that speakers of pre-20th century English adapted the foreign syllables "fa" and "la" to match their native speech habits, substituting /ɔː/ for /ɑː/.

During the 20th century, various borrowed words with final /ɑː/ came into English: spa, bra, Shah, Zsa-Zsa, cha-cha. Perhaps these paved the way for the pronunciation of la and fa with /ɑː/. Another possibility is that increased foreign language instruction in schools made Americans more comfortable with final /ɑː/, enabling /fɑː/ and /lɑː/ alongside the new loan words.

The syllable spelled sol is normally pronounced so by all singers, as is implied by the colloquial designation of Sacred Harp music, "fasola".

Ensemble issues and the singing community

In recent decades, Sacred Harp has increased in popularity, especially among people who are not traditional singers, but who discover the tradition in adulthood and learn to participate by attending singings. Often, newcomers have some previous musical training and have learned to sight-sing in some other context.

Such singers will naturally tend to sing the music as it is printed. This gives rise to the possibility of misaligned rhythms and clashing pitches whenever traditional singers and newcomer singers sing together. Such shared singings are in fact frequent, since newcomer singers attend singings in traditional Sacred Harp territory and traditional singers also attend singings outside this area.

While there is no consensus on this point, it is certainly a widely held view among newcomer singers that the singing community is best served if newcomers learn to sing in the way that traditional singers do, at least as far as this concerns rhythm, pitch, and the procedures followed at singing.

Sacred Harp scholar Kiri Miller has argued that there is more at stake than just achieving uniformity. Rather, traditional singing practice is often highly prestigious among newcomers: "Orally transmitted elements of Sacred Harp performance practice have a special capacity to [impart a sense of] authenticity, timelessness, and tradition."