Monthly Archive for November, 2010

“Colma”

11:08 am, November 29, 2010.

Here’s a revised version of a song that proved less than successful at last week’s singing. The text is by the Puritan Thomas Dudley, who was father of the better-known American Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. The original poem included eight-syllable lines (ll. 1-14, and l. 20) as well as ten-syllable lines (ll.15-19). In the song below, I used only eight-syllable lines for a Long Meter Doubled song (or more properly, Long Meter with refrain). The first verse comprises lines 1-4 of the original; second verse, lines 11-14; chorus, lines 5-6 and 9-10. (You can find the original poem in full in Anne Bradstreet and her time, by Helen Stuart Campbell, chapter XIII, “Chances and Changes,” p. 268.)

Colma. L.M.D.

The title of the music refers to the town of Colma, just south of San Francisco. Because cemeteries are prohibited within the city limits of San Francisco, a great many San Franciscans wound up being buried in one of Colma’s seventeen cemeteries. According to the 2000 U.S. census, the population of Colma is 1,191; around 1.5 million bodies are buried in the town’s cemeteries.

Update: I presented this song again during the “other book” singing on 6 December, and it went well — except for the fact that I led the first verse completely wrong, because I tried to lead it using the rhythm that I had discarded in the earlier version. It’s pretty embarrassing when you wrote the piece, and you can’t even lead it right!

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“Golden Gate”

11:49 pm, November 22, 2010.

This evening, I asked for the indulgence of our local singing, and presented two new tunes even though it was not the monthly “other book” singing. The first tune, “Golden Gate,” sounded fine and a link to a PDF of the sheet music is below; but the second tune needs some revision and is not included here. The text for “Golden Gate” is a metrical rendering of Psalm 107.23 ff. by Isaac Watts. The name of the tune refers both to the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and to our annual all-day singing.

Golden Gate. C.M.

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50

10:46 pm, November 15, 2010.

Tonight’s singing was the one closest to my fiftieth birthday. So of course I had to lead 50 t “Mortality.” It was a particularly strong group of singers tonight (especially the bass section), so even though there were less than twenty singers, it was a real wall of sound standing in that hollow square and listening to Isaac Watts’ powerful poetry:

Death, like an over-flowing stream,
Sweeps us away; our life’s a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Cut down and withered in an hour.

Our age to seventy years is set;
How short the time! How frail the state!
And if to eighty we arrive,
We’d rather sigh and groan than die.

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Dissonances

11:52 pm, November 8, 2010.

Tonight I found myself paying attention to some of the delightful dissonances in Sacred Harp music. For example, we sang “Save, Mighty Lord” (70b), and my ear was caught by the chord at the first cadence in the chorus: F in the bass, A flat in the tenor, and E flat in the treble (there is no alto voice in this song). That’s a perfect fifth over a minor third, which makes a certain kind of harmonic sense, but it results in a seventh between the bass and treble voices (I find this interval particularly noticeable between the bass voices and the male trebles). Then the basses remain on the F, while the tenors move up to C, and the trebles move up to F: that’s an octave and a fifth from the bass, and those perfect intervals seem to make the preceding chord stand out even more. During the second verse, I found myself not singing and just listening to the wild sound.

This made me want to lead “The Prodigal Son” (113), which if sung as written has several tritones in the chorus, where the bass voices sing a G sharp, and the tenors and trebles each sing a D above it (again, this is a three-voice song). For reference, each of the italicized syllables falls on a tritone: “…And starve in a for-eign land, / My fa-ther’s house hath large supplies, And bounteous are his hands.” In the past, I’ve noticed that I and some other basses tend to flat that G sharp to a G natural, but tonight the basses pretty consistently sang the G sharp, and the resulting tritone sounded surprisingly good, especially when the first one of the series is followed almost immediately by a melismatic passage of parallel fourths (on the word “land”).

These dissonances are — for me, anyway — what give Sacred Harp music its characteristic wild, almost rough, sound.

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“Grizzly Peaks” and “Fair Oaks Street”

11:47 pm, November 1, 2010.

Attendance was perhaps a little low tonight — I suspect there were at least a few people who decided to skip singing to watch Game 5 of the World Series. (Halfway through tonight’s singing, we heard people shouting across the street, and Hal checked his iPhone to determine that the Giants had indeed won the World Series.)

I presented two new tunes tonight, both of which were pretty good as is, and need basically no revision. During the break, I talked with Mark, who also has composed some music in the Sacred Harp style. He asked what I thought of my two pieces, and I said that I thought they were fine, even though there were a few places in “Grizzly Peaks” where the singers had some trouble — but that’s just the way it was. He nodded, and said that as a composer this was something he had had to come to terms with — you just have to remember there are plenty of pieces in the Denson book where singers struggle with certain passages.

Below are PDFs of the two tunes I presented tonight. The first uses a text by 17th century hymnodist George Sandys, and is in H.M., or Hallelujah Meter (6.6.6.6.8.8. — sometimes given as 6.6.6.6.4.4.4.4.). The second uses a text by Isaac Watts. Both texts are metrical version of psalms.

Grizzly Peaks. H.M.
(Grizzly Peaks Boulevard is the main road along the ridge above where we sing in Berkeley.)

Fair Oaks Street. L.M.
(The church where the San Francisco quarterly singing takes place is on Fair Oaks Street in San Francisco.)

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