User:Opus33/Sacred Harp: music structure

Sacred Harp: music structure

Sacred Harp music is a tradition of a capella tradition of sacred choral music, rooted in the American South and now sung widely in America and the English-speaking world. Scholars have repeatedly noted a number of important traits of musical structure in this body of music, which are summarized here.

A caveat is needed concerning the observations made here: the music itself is not homogeneous. The earlier portion of the Sacred Harp canon represents 18th-century composers of the "First New England School", who wrote in four-part harmony and were the musical mainstream in their place and time. Later work, from the early to mid 19th century, was the product of the more rural culture in the South, inhabited by B. F. White and Elisha J. King, the compilers of the first edition of The Sacred Harp. These composers knew the New England material from the hymnbooks they owned and used, but when composing they pursued a different path, writing in just three parts (the alto parts sung today were added around the turn of the 20th century), and drawing on new resources, notably folk tunes and camp meeting songs. Later songs, from the second half of the 19th century, represented a further evolution in taste, and in the "Cooper" edition of The Sacred Harp, a layer of songs influenced by gospel music is included. Nevertheless, the entire corpus can in some sense be considered as a single tradition, since each new generation adding to it was familiar with, and strongly influenced by, the styles of the previous ones.

--prevalence of minor tunes: Cobb 34-35

The emphasis on fourths and fifths

In a Sacred Harp song, often the set notes sung at a given moment are separated by the interval of a fourth, a fifth, an octave, or some combination thereof. Thirds and sixths do occur frequently, but they are rarer than in other traditions.

--example, "Amazing Grace" = "New Britain", which could shorten the main Sacred Harp article

--last chord of a minor tune: virtually always leaves out the third

--The Rudiments of Music section of The Sacred Harp: "quartal" harmony; cite and quote

--there are almost no secondary dominants; part of the reason that few accidental signs are needed (cf. Ananias Davison's view). Someone (Marini?) talks about this in describing why gospel music sounded strange to Sacred Harpers, when it was new.

• Lowell Mason's "Shawmut," (Denson book 535) which is not in the idiom, has a secondary dominant, i.e. a V/VI.
• Isaac Smith's "Silver Street" (Denson 311) has a secondary dominant (5th measure, last beat) that was present in the original version but is removed in the Sacred Harp version.

Violations of the traditional laws of voice leading

--Seeger (1940) and his "blue pencil"

Rhythm and music notation

The musicologist Dorothy Horn asserted that a number of songs in The Sacred Harp (as well as in the similar hymnals Southern Harmony and the New Harp of Columbia) are misbarred'. By this she evidently means that a trained musician, listening to a song to detect the strong musical beat, would place the bar lines in different locations than the printed version, in order to respect the general law of music notation that the strongest beat of a measure is the first one.

As an example Horn cites the song "Jackson" (Denson edition, p. 317 on the bottom; xx get Cooper page), whose tenor part is printed thus:

xxx

Horn's preferred barring is thus:

xxx

In support of this barring, Horn notes that it avoids the counterintuitive placement of weak syllables in the verse in the strong positions of the meter. Compare:

Printed version:

 I am a stranger here below
 And what I am is hard to know,
 I am so vile, so prone to sin,
 I fear that I'm not born again.

Horn's rebarred version:

 I am a stranger here below
 And what I am is hard to know,
 I am so vile, so prone to sin,
 I fear that I'm not born again.

[ xxx and there's more: cases of misbarring that to barred correctly would have to mix time signatures, as Cecil Sharp did when transcribing the related Appalachian folk songs ]

References

• Graham, Fred Kimball (2004) "With One Heart and One Voice: A Core Repertory of Hymn Tunes Published for Use in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, 1808-1878. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
• Horn, Dorothy (1970) Sing to me of Heaven. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
• Seeger, Charles (1940) "Contrapuntal style in the three-voice shape note hymns," The Musical Quarterly XXVI(4):483-493.

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JSTOR has:

The Alto Parts in the "True Dispersed Harmony" of "The Sacred Harp" Revisions, Wallace McKenzie The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 2. (1989), pp. 153-171.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-4631%281989%2973%3A2%3C153%3ATAPIT%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

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The Tunebook That Roars: The Sound and Style of Sacred Harp Singing James Scholten Music Educators Journal > Vol. 66, No. 6 (Feb., 1980), pp. 32-37+74-75+77

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Sing to me of heaven, by Dorothy Horn (cited)

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