Month: September 2020

Bay Area Jamulus singings from the Denson book were initially scheduled for the first and third Wednesdays. The BASH Board decided we’d sing from the Shenandoah Harmony on fifth Wednesdays.

Jerry came prepared with a list of tunes he wanted to sing — most of which were by First New England School composers like Abraham Wood , Jeremiah Ingalls, and Billings. I love First New England School music, so I was a happy camper. (Also, while the Shenandoah Harmony, like any collection, contains a fair number of duds, I feel that the editors did their best work with the 18th century music.)

Most of us were seeing all this music for the first time, and sight-singing together on Jamulus was a bit challenging. We finally got into a pattern that worked: whoever was leading the tune would count in two full measures at their preferred tempo. It was a forgiving group, and everyone was ready to start over if started to sound like a train wreck. Singing on Jamulus forces you to really listen to the other parts — you can’t fall back on watching someone keeping tempo, or pointing to you to bring in your part. That there were only seven singers probably helped with our sight-singing; Jamulus can sound a little chaotic until you adjust the volume of each individual singer, and with only seven singers adjusting volume was easy.

I feel that singing on Jamulus revealed something of the “singability” of the compositions. First New England School music can be challenging, but it is eminently singable: the music fits comfortably to singers’ voices; Johann Fux would have approved. Some of the recent compositions, while good as music, feel less singable to me; but this isn’t a hard and fast rule, for when we sang Neely Bruce’s 1990 tune Millbrook, I felt the bass part (at least) was quite singable.

For the last half hour, we switched back to the Denson book, and sang some familiar tunes. It was tiring to sight-sing for an hour and a half, and it was good to end with music we all knew well.

All in all, this was a good singing. There were the usual technical problems: Mark got kicked off the session and couldn’t rejoin; Carla tried to log in and wasn’t able to. But overall, a good two hours of music-making.

My work schedule finally allowed me to join the regular twice-monthly Bay Area Sacred Harp Jamulus singing.

There were about 15 log-ins, and three of those log-ins had more than one person singing. So we may have had twenty total humans singing together. We had one singer log in from Kansas, and his total latency as reported in Jamulus was about 74 ms; I did not notice that he slowed us down. Another singer logged in from San Diego, and I’m not sure what his latency was. But most of us had latencies in the range of 30-50 ms. This tended to keep tempos slower than usual.

Singing using Jamulus is getting easier. I’ve gotten used to the lack of visual cues; it’s still annoying, but it’s no longer disconcerting. I’m better able to judge how to stay on tempo: it’s a fine line to walk because on the one hand you need to have rock-solid time and stick with that time no matter what, but you also have to listen carefully in case the overall group is slowing down, in which case you have to adjust your internal metronome.

However, I still get tripped up by things. For example, this time I thought I was watching my volume level on the Jamulus controls, but at one point when I had to look down at the music, I unconsciously raised my volume enough to push my audio feed into the red zone. Jamulus has no room for error — you go into the red zone, your audio feed sounds horrible, and all the other singers have to mute you. I adjusted my mic volume down, and that solved the problem. And it wasn’t just me — another singer had the same problem.

I also wonder what will happen when we try music we don’t know well. So far, we’ve been sticking to tunes that all of us know well. When we start learning new tunes, for example some of the new music in the Shenandoah Harmony, will it just turn into chaos?

Nevertheless, singing with other people in real time — even in not in person — was enormously uplifting. The pandemic can really get you down, and this singing was a good antidote to that.